Geek Stuff

It’s actually unbelievably tricky to set up a web site anonymously. From all accounts the “anonymous” registrars will roll over and divulge your details at the drop of a telephone, and the only truly anonymous dns service that everyone seems to recommend has possibly the worst interface in the entire history of terrible things.

I ended up registering myself a brand new and somewhat anonymous domain through Namecheap.com, as recommended by Micheil who is incidentally working on music journal OnTheTune.com. The domain was cheaper than Godaddy and came with the privacy service for free, so basically when the rest of my domains come up for renewal I’m quite possibly going to transfer them to Namecheap as well.

So while I have no doubt that the whois privacy feature is a flimsy facade, all I really want to do is obfuscate my details. It’s not like I’m going to be breaking the law or anything, I’m just paranoid and want to keep this my new site under wraps. A tantalising secret.

The week’s been good so far. I finally went to the doctor about my coughy phlegmy thing on Monday and he gave me antibiotics which I’m not sure have actually done anything. I’m feeling better, but I also haven’t been able to shake this thing for the last month so feeling better isn’t necessarily synonymous with being better. I’m musing over the possibility of riding to work tomorrow regardless, but considering how late it is now, I’m not sure I’ll even wake up in time.

Tate also clued me in on the Bike Week festivities held over the weekend, and I was kind of keen to head on the ride through the new tunnel. A culmination of factors got in my way though; the registration web site is ugly, it’s asking me for way too much information, I need to get out of bed to get my credit card to pay the $40 or so bike toll. Apparently there’s an arbitrary registration deadline of today, and right now I can’t be arsed moving so I’ll go to Jeremy’s evening of board games on Saturday instead.

I kid you not, board games. It’s going to be so rad grown men will weep.

I’ve been trying out a few new ISPs for my web hosting needs. I desperately want to get myself a VPS (or Virtual Private Server) because it will allow me to do all kinds of things I can’t do at the moment. The credit card’s the limit.

It’s a really geeky task, but I’ve spent the last couple of days getting myself acquainted with real system administration. Over the next few days I’m going to migrate my sites across and see whether the package I’ve chosen can handle the load.

So what I thought were mosquito bites are looking more like sandfly bites now. I don’t react to mosquitoes like this, and three days after my fateful trudge through the wetlands I’ve still got painfully itchy red welts all up and down my legs.

I’m pretty good with these sorts of things so I’ve decided to take care of the problem myself. I’ve put myself on a course of ibuprofen and something called methylprednisolone aceponate which sounds like a highly reputable and presumably effective drug, so I hope my skin doesn’t fall off.

I did another surprising thing tonight and took some initiative. That’s a slightly deceiving statement; I took some preliminary initiative with the intention of following through with a profound deed of self-betterment later on; but it’s a start and that’s what counts.

I went back over my details and worked out when my mobile phone contract expired, and that was the start of this month. So basically I’m now going to have to find out a way to transfer my number to a more reasonable service, because so far this month I’ve used one cent on top of my twenty-five dollar plan. That’s a really silly waste of money.

I remember quite well that I knew it was a bad idea at the time. I didn’t really have the need for the contract, but my old phone was dying and I really wanted the new toy. It was the most reasonable value in its class as well, but a year on it’s completely stuffed and my old phone (which was handed down to my father) is still fired up and producing reasonable thrust, even if it is driven by steam.

So now my contract is finally over I have the freedom to change things around a bit, and hopefully reduce my monthly telecom bill by some arbitrary figure that will make me happy.

It’s been a long time coming, and I’ve been working on various incarnations of this since last year, but it’s finally here. I finally have a new blog theme.

It’s a new site, really. I’ve integrated a couple of sites into the one back-end which will make editing and keeping track of all my resources a whole heap easier. It’s also completely widget based whereas my old site was mainly just a bunch of ugly hacks overlaid on each other. I’m impressed with what I’ve got so far, though I’m planning a few more things.

• Namely I need to go through and revise my stylesheet. I’ve put this site on-line because otherwise it will sit there unfinished for the rest of time. I particularly want to take care of the typography, small screen rendering <=640px (Although as is my personal specialty, making the font smaller will fit it in 800*600.) I’d also like to go through and optimise a bunch of currently awkward things.
• I’m going to extend my blog and make proper use of categories, tags, and search. At the moment it’s a bit straightforward (although so was my old one, so this point isn’t so urgent.)
• I’m going to resume my Buddycloud geolocation project. I’ve got a working prototype although it need some serious love before it’s production ready.
• I’m also planning of mashing up last.fm with my music blog. I don’t have a music blog right now, I have a music “category”, but a girl can dream.
• Skip links are missing.
• Twitter is broken because I’m lazy, and Twitter is smarty.

Phwoar, it’s been a pretty hectic afternoon getting this all ready, and now it’s all working with very minimal fuss it’s kind of anticlimactic. I’ll wait to make sure it doesn’t fall apart before the morning until I claim it a success.

Until then, you’re welcome and indeed I encourage you to go through and find as many problems with the site as you can. No issue too small; leave a comment, a bunch of comments, or send me an email with bug reports! I expect there’s probably still one or two or three or four lurking around, but if you can’t find any then give me your toughest critique. I want to be crying uncontrollably by this time tomorrow.