An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

Would anyone pay $300 for a catered dinner at a civic center way out in the suburbs of Houston where there is a chance you could socialise with some sporting stars when the dinner isn’t to benefit any particular charity? That is what Cricket World International would like you to do…

Well after yesterday’s disaster I have successfully moved my Wordpress installation over to be managed by SVN, meaning I can upgrade with a simple command and not worry about updating anything or moving anything, which is going to be great and it is going to allow me to get into some Wordpress ahcking and hopefully eventually some real development work.

Also for this to work I had to get with the times and create a new theme to hold my modifications instead of just piggybacking on the default theme and I also had to create a plugin to enable the code changes for the CSS Dropdown menu, I need to refine that plugin just a little more and when I have you will be able to insert the menu where you like by installing the plugin and some supporting files in your theme directory then inserting a call to jbcssmenu_wp_list_pages() in your template where yoiu would like the menu to appear.

Please let me know if you notice any breakage after this change.

So this evening while catching up on Lost prior to this week’s finale I get a phone call from Time Warner Cable offering me a 30 day trial of 16 digital channels of HBO so my first response was “Uhm did you even bother looking at my account before you called?” and they stalled for a few moments so I added “because I already” have HBO, Starz, Showtime and whatever the other one is, “Well sir you are in our database as being eligible for this free trial, so again I replied “but I already have it, goodbye”, then they chimed in with “So would you like me to go ahead and add this option to your account” and I replied “NO! I told you I already have it, GOODBYE!” and hung up…

Can you please remind me not to get any hair brained ideas before I have had an adequate supply of coffee in the mornings again?

I thought I would trash my current hodge podge under www and replace it with an svn checkout of Wordpress so I could update it easier and participate in development but instead of copying the public_html directory I copied the www symlink, then after a rm -rf * in public_html I discovered that Subversion wasn’t even installed on the server so I shrugged and thought I’d restore from the “backup” and raise a support ticket to get SVN installed.

Then I realized my error and had to raise another support ticket to install my home directory from a backup, which gratefully Tim just completed for me and everything seems to be back up fine.

Now next time I am going to plan that move just a little bit better!

Oh what a great weekend! If only I hadn’t gotten a little sun burnt on my shoulders it would have been a fantastic one, it was almost as good as taking a vacation so now I feel nice & refreshed, ready to take on the week!

For once justice prevailed on a reality TV show and Kendra was hired as Donald Trump’s apprentice and it was quite clear throughout the whole judging episode that Trump had already made his mind up as the whole thing was padded with advertisements and the actual show was more like 30 minutes where earlier juding shows have gone for like 2 hours (at least the last one seemed that long don’t know how long it was exactly).

I can’t believe he was so annoyed about Kendra’s tears of joy in the final boardroom though, she was touched by how much her team appreciated her and that combined with her jer joy about nailing the final task (heck she was even offered a job by EA, the major sponsor!) just made her emotional, no biggie… It wasn’t like she was crying over spilt milk or anything and plus when Chris got fired he cried and instead of frowning upon it, Trump comforted him and all but man hugged him (you could see he wanted too…) so why the double standard? I especially liked her response though when quizzed if she thought it was a sign of weakness she responded with something like: “No I don’t think it is I see 300lb linebackers break into tears as they hold up the Superbowl trophy”, that was just classic!

I still fail to see how Tana thought she was a good leader in the final task, even if they heavily edited the footage and the rest of the day was fantastic she still did pretty poorly in my opinion. I also can’t believe how Kristin (the one that bleached her hair blonde, what was that about?) was praising her as being such a good leader. To me it seemed like Tana was trying her best to play in the corporate world and was doing a fairly good job of it up until crunch time when she started to feel the pressure, for example when Craig and her left to goto bed on the Pontiac task, that was very unprofessional, when did they expect to complete the task? It wasn’t like they had time in the morning to do everything and plus all nighters are an unfortunate part of corporate life, yes they suck and shouldn’t really be necessary but taking a personal stand against them isn’t going to get you anywhere.

Related to the Pontiac task, what was Tana’s ranting of “Who came up with the idea for the shape of the brochure? That’s right, me! That is why Pontiac liked it Mr Trump, all because of the idea I came up with! Me! Me Me!” (not verbatim but close enough) all about? That made her sound SO childish, try acting like that in the middle of some corporate negotiations and see how far that gets you.

I think Tana is much more suited to the business environments she currently is in, now that isn’t a slight at all but just the truth, she excels at what she does as that is what she is suited for, the corporate world is a lot different to the real world, it is almost like a parallel universe. An example would be the rhinestones for the designer t-shirts, wasn’t the selling point the artist and not cheap rhinestones that were just glued on? Another example is when she took that phone call when she was first meeting with the marketing executives in the final task, you just don’t do that sort of thing.

When it came down to it Kendra had 4 wins & no losses as a Project Manager where Tana had 2 wins & 2 losses and guess who the 2 losses were to? Kendra also played a key role in some of the tasks where she wasn’t project manager as well that were seemed to be overlooked during the judging when they were criticising her about not stepping up to the plate until late in the game, which I think was unfair, it was a competition with a goal of coming out on top and Kendra did just that finishing heads & shoulders above everyone else.

So in conclusion good job Kendra!

Well if you haven’t heard yet, Star Wars: Episode III kicks mjaor booty and may well end up being my favourite out of the two trilogies, it is THAT good despite a few cheesy love/emotional scenes but even the original trilogy had those the move is fantastic.

My favourite parts though would have to involve R2D2, that little droid is so lovable in this episode and gets to kick some ass of his own much to the joy of everyone in the theater!

Okay so I’m guilty of watching America’s Next Top Model alongside my addicted girlfriend and can I please ask what the heck was Keenyah doing in the final three? In fact I think all three of them didn’t belong there, Naima was just dull the whole season, yeah she looks edgy and all but she certainly didn’t show any spunk until the final episode. The only one that vaguely had a reason to be there was Kahlen, sure she was timid but at the same time was able to turn it on when she needed to.

Thankfully Keenyah got eliminated early on but when it came down with it, guess what UPN the channel that is tailored towards a certain demographic chose to be America’s Next Top Model? Of course it was Naima and I’ll just leave it at that…

In my opinion it was Brittany that deserved to win but hey we’ll just go with what those pompous judges say….

Well after seeing how Tiger didn’t include any features to enable scrolling or shortcuts via the Powerbook’s trackpad I finally laid down some cold hard for Sidetrack, an amzing replacement driver for trackpads in OS X, that allows you to do all kinds of nifty things like horizontal & vertical scrolling along with setting up hot corners, for example tapping the top left of my trackpad shows all my apps under Expose and the bottom left reveals my desktop using Expose, it really is quite handy and I highly recommend you pay the bargain basement $15 for the enhanced productivity the software will bring you!

Well even though I’m not quite running the latest 1.5.1 beta and am currently on a nightly build from a little over a week ago with a patch applied to fix the RSS problems I am currently getting into the spirit of getting more involved and hence this post is tracking back to another about the latest 1.5.1 beta. I really don’t feel like getting my hands dirty tonight but later in the week I’ll start the patch and pray routine.