David Lowry

So after three days of constant rain storms and some sparse but big and fun lightning this afternoon the sky cleared and things heated up for the evening once again.

Air conditioning is a beautiful thing. Wired claim that it’s more efficient to use air-con in summer than to heat a house in the winter (because of the relative temperature difference required to provide ‘comfort’), and I don’t appear to be overly ‘allergic’ to it any more either which is pleasant. Ask me some time about the Portuguese swimming pool: head-first at 7am with a head full of eucalyptus vapours (from gum) and air con. Felt like a punch in the face.

It’s been a while since I wrote/caused Google to update my search ranking, so I thought today I should as I’m sitting in a hall waiting for something to happen (not this).

So, like I said it’s been a long time since the last meaningful entry on here, and as I promised I would write (to real people, not necessarily ‘you’, Dear Diary) to keep updated on my travails and travels (Like that, Pete?) at camp and thereabouts.

I will do that. But just not right now, as my video has just finished capturing. Now it is time to start editing.

Have a safe and blessed summer. I will.

p.s. It turns out that after three weeks of owning and wearing a new watch I do indeed have a noticable watch tan.

MY MACBOOK PRO IS TOO HOT!

Always has been, probably always will be, but this seems nice: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23049

Forces your fans to spin at a higher minimum speed reducing the temperature significantly. Good stuff.

Check out http://www.healingtheland.net/ for information about the mission going on in Newtownabbey this week starting Sunday evening and continuing til Wednesday. (Follows in Magherafelt).

There’s two videos on the right hand side of that page which I put together for those in charge. Hope they go well!

All is set now for me to go off to the States on Monday, as I had my visa interview this morning, providing my passport gets returned before Saturday! Last year I think it returned overnight, so all should be fine.

This year at camp my job title is two-fold: Worship Leader and Videographer, so I’ll spend my mornings and Friday afternoons preparing and leading the musical elements at camp and a big chunk of the rest of my time capturing, editing and producing video of the camp activities for the parents’ service on the Friday afternoons. Ironically I think it might be less of a chore to prepare these videos than it would be to do what I did last year and compile photo slideshows, I don’t know what it was about that but it always took forever and never quite worked first time.

Five days…

Handily, as I clicked the Pages icon on my Dock this evening, the little ink pot bounced as normal, but whenever I tried to open any saved documents the application hung and the beach ball came and never went.

Handily, by the power of google I found this article which helps explain how to fix the problem, which exists in the OS X Tiger and Leopard (10.4, 10.5).

The basic point here is ‘you have a broken font somewhere.’ I’m not sure what it’s caused by, but I’ll just blame MS Word for Mac 2004, makes me happy so-to-do:
- Go look in your Font Book and whack the duplicate entries (Font Book.app -> Edit -> Resolve Duplicates).
- Next grab a (free) copy of Font Nuke and blast those caches. NB: You’ll magically be restarted, despite the onscreen warning just saying to save documents.

Productive day.

I got told recently i was Eidetic. Actually I was told I was ‘ediatic’ but either way.
I looked up the definition:

–adjective
1. of, pertaining to, or constituting visual imagery vividly experienced and readily reproducible with great accuracy and in great detail.
2. of or pertaining to eidos.

Neither quite true, but quite a talent, lol.

When the question is “How Do I Make My Really Rubbish ADSL Modem Work Better” the obvious answer is the tenuous, similarly answer requiring “Have you tried upgrading your firmware?”

Response? It depends. Especially whenever your modem-router is made by a company that doesn’t advertise it anywhere. Don’t ask me why this modem lives in our house, it just was the only thing available on the day, at the time. Some people just give the impression of being shysters too.

When you make peripherals which are actually that colour, you really should be aware…

What’s my point - the modem/router might be a piece of junk which refuses to answer 1/20 http requests (that is, web surfing) while a single torrent (lets say, BBC iPlayer downloading) with five connections is running. Explaination? No idea, but it’s next to useless.

And you can get a firmware upgrade for your Addon GS8100 AKA ARM8200 AKA Pegasus/Vulcan ART25GSU here.

Rubbish peripherals are nearly as bad as bad websites.

Okay, rant over, and in much better news they’re talking about bringing down some of the peace walls. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7396762.stm

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Edit: twenty minutes into using this new firmware while using a LAN connection is seems to be performing quite nicely. Will jack up the active connections later and report back on whether it nails the beige brick again or not.

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Update: one day on, speeds are better, stability is better, good stuff.

I definitely think you check this out Zattoo, streaming UK television.
(I can now watch Neighbours while at home…) Amusing that the person who is streaming BBC One at the moment has his MacBook Pro (I assume so, given the constant hum in the audio) microphone input turned on as you can hear walking about in the background!!

Meanwhile freesat has been launched today. Think we need that in Dromore. Living in a town that you have to go uphill (unless you float down the river) to get out of (implication: it’s a ‘hole’) that should be very useful.

The to do list can now be tackled, this blog can be styled once again and working out what’s going to occupy my time come September is back on the agenda.

For me it’s now summer time and today’s weather approves that, it’s the most sun I’ve seen since last summer in the States!! Plenty of time to chill out, soak up some heat, read some bits of paper and write a 20 point to do list and four pages of notes on the matter. Tonight I’m meeting a client to discuss some pre-America work, which I’ll of course mention when it’s done.

Realiging face-lifts are due and some updating, building a fine web design company and indeed a certain fine Northern Irish Event Management and Audio Visual Solutions company.

Anyway, eating time, hoping to make a decent blog diary this summer in the states, where I intend to have time to *think*.

Four weeks to go!

If you’re uploading a WML file to a web server to test its validity, etc., there’s a few ways to test. The WMLBrowser for Mozilla based browsers does the job, for testing on a PC/Mac. If you wish to use the server live to see that WML file and how it treats the whole ‘card’ thing for sure, you can do one of two things:

You can alter your apache httpd config file (/etc/httpd/httpd.conf)
# MIME Types for WAP
AddType text/vnd.wap.wml .wml
AddType image/vnd.wap.wbmp .wbmp
AddType application/vnd.wap.wmlc .wmlc
AddType text/vnd.wap.wmlscript .wmls
AddType application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc .wmlsc
AddType application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml .xhtml

Alternatively create or edit the .htaccess file in the directory to include this:
DirectoryIndex index.wml
addtype text/vnd.wap.wml wml
addtype application/vnd.wap.wmlc wmlc
addtype text/vnd.wap.wmlscript wmls
addtype application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc wmlsc
addtype image/vnd.wap.wbmp wbmp
AddType application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml .xhtml

Note in both cases the entire list is *not* required, you can see some are for Scripting/Indexing and so on, but you can test it out.
Bits and pieces resourced from here