well it would seem that the acts of laziness around the virtual office have been caught out by the boss, so here goes my excuse;
read back a few posts ago and you will learn of the events of january past. in the weeks following a bit of revisiting was undertaken by myself, and a few changes made to my way of business resulted to reflect required changes. basically reading back, the majority of my splurges read like a whos who of tramps and crushes that never worked out, or resulted with negative tangents. the following learnings i will impart on thee…
#1. when plans A,B,C,D and E fail, there is always a plan X
I havent always wanted to be an engineer, in fact it went; millitary pilot, loadmaster, communications op, then engineer. Dreams often fail, and plans can and should change.
#2. Your only in too deep when the’re filling in the hole
I should have got out of the mess of a “relationship” i was in last year much earlier. I knew it wasnt right for me, and well running with the concept that i was in too deep to get out just made it messier when i wanted out. point is if it doesnt fit, do something about it.
#3. plaster will only hide the cracks, not remove them
nothing is ever the same when its been tarred, sometimes its better to get new gib.
#4. Mum is always right.
Dad once told me that the secret to a happy life is just accept that the woman is always right. my experiance has shown me that most females around my age with out kids consider themselves “tropie wives” and make crap decisions and dont add anything useful to the argument. mums on the other hand are more realistic and have simpler more achivable wants. the only bit that gets interesting is to decide which mum i should listen to, my girlfriend, or my mum.
#5. sometimes the only way to save face is to shut your mouth in the first place
upon looking at my public declarations, and the eventual kicking in the teeth, i have decided that some stuff should stay within my head. thats right, i have learnt the value of shutting my mouth/fingers…bet its hard to belive, but yes it is possible.
#6. speaking your mind should be a last ditch effort.
apparently refering to a work mate as being “a man hating girl loving ditch” is’nt acceptable by todays standards.
#7. when it goes down the poohole, dont be afraid to change everything.
new job, new living arrangments, new mrs, new car, new happier slink.
but enough for now,
regards,
New Slink (kinda like white stig is to black stig)
oh and p.s. i have an interveiw in 3 weeks for an engineering job, any advice? might be something in it for you if your advice lands me the job and expendable income attached 
Posted in Journal
3 comments
With the new upgrade I’m thinking about tweaking the site a wee bit. As always the rule of “I pay the bills here so I make the final decision” stands, but I’m open to suggestion.
I’ve looked back over old posts in the last couple of weeks and discovered that a couple of years back we had FORTY posts in one month! Now we’re lucky to get 1. So I want to know why that is? What’s taken the edge off the site? Are you guys just not that into it anymore? Has Facebook stolen our thunder? Are we all just THAT busy? Is the site missing something?
This is your opportunity to have your say!
Thus far I’m thinking about the following:
- Tidying up the front page so we see snippets of posts, not whole posts and present them in an entertaining manner (think interactive sliders)
- Utilising the post thumbnails from WordPress 2.9+
- Tidying up the archives so it’s easy to skip back to older months (like the old site)
- Adding a bit more “non-post” content for me – coz it’s my site so :Þ
But I’m open to suggestion! So throw your ideas at me. Authors… what do you want the site to do? Readers, what do you want to see?
Posted in Site News
5 commentsWe’ve just upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. Expect upgraded goodness and features soon!!
Posted in Site News
2 commentsSpent a large part of this afternoon with no serious billable stuff to do… which is great becuase it’s given me a chance to do some serious coding research. And I’ve found WordPress gold! Highly customised custom fields!
I’m not going to get seriously into it, as it’ll bore the pants off most of you… but I found some GREAT code (and discussion) on how to edit Custom Fields in WordPress, allowing you to style up custom fields as combo boxes (or drop down select/option boxes) and in fact this code could easily extend to radio buttons or other field input types. I shared this new found knowledge with the boss man who responded with “can you do attachments?”
Not one to ignore a geek challenge I set to and used the built in WordPress media manager in combination with the code I had found (link above). My new code looks up all attachments of the current post.
If this interests you at all you can read it/steal it from www.pastie.org here: http://pastie.org/1056485
Geeking Ends.
Posted in Journal and tagged , custom fields, geek, wordpress
No commentsWell that didn’t take long before I broke my promise to blog weekly. Again.
In hindsight the idea of blogging weekly while running 13SQN (Kirsty is on leave so I’m the acting Unit Commander!) and having a new baby in the house was a bit of a stretch.
Anyhoo… on a professional front – I’ve just started working on building WordPress plugins and widgets! Probably sounds really dull to everyone else, but this is a very important skill if I’m to speed up my development time on jobs. I’ve also become familiar with jQuery which is a fantastic Javascript library to enable… well… ALL SORTS! And jobs… I’m pretty proud of the stuff we’ve been doing too. Majors in the past couple of months have been:
- Need A Nerd – a national geeks-on-wheels type of operation. Those sliders on the homepage are all me thanks to the wonders of jQuery Cycle, same goes for the Nerd Nation map.
- The Boat House Vanuatu (maps page) - made a multi-point Google Map for an existing client – easy when you know how!! (Another one of my jQuery Cycle examples in the cross fader at the top of the page.
There’s all sorts of others which you can see on our work blog
Personally – well life’s been pretty full with the new little guy – although being that he’s breast fed, I’m only really good for the occasional nappy change and bath. That’s all good though!!
We’ve also just invested in a new entertainment unit thanks to Harvey Normans 50 months interest free. It’s a Panasonic BluRay player which has surround sound and plays DivX/Xvid formatted AVI movies via USB. This means I can archive all my DVDs to Xvid format and play them straight from my external hard drive!! Got quite the archiving process going on right now!
So far we’ve also watched Avatar and Underworld – Rise of the Lycans – both visually stunning (especially on BluRay) but both with fairly weak story lines; Avatar because it was written more than 10 years ago so seems very dated (think Pocahontas in space) and Rise of the Lycans probably because we KNEW the story anyway because most of it had been told in the previous movies.
Anyhoo… stopping now so as not to bore you all – will work on my blogging schedule!!!!
Posted in Journal
No commentsOkay so I’ve been using this new fangled toy for ten days now, so what’s the verdict? Well, it’s not been without it’s headaches to be fair – however I can now share with anyone who’s interested the major pitfall I faced was…
External Harddrives.
So back up the bus a little. I’ve been playing with Ubuntu on and off for about 5 years I guess – never very seriously though and I could never see it being a complete replacement for Windows. Truth be told I still don’t think I can… yet… but it’s showing some serious promise! Back up a little further you say? Okay…
So Ubuntu is a FREE (yes that’s right FREE) operating system based on Linux. It is now without a doubt the most user friendly and fully featured Linux distro (distribution / version / flavour) out there. When I installed it I did the basic system set up (date, time, location) and Ubuntu did the rest. Out of the box I had an OS, browser, games… it even worked with my wireless device in my laptop (always been an issue in the past). Using the integrated package manager I installed a handful of extras – Skype, Chrome and the open source flight sim, Flight Gear. Whammo! Awesome end user experience… until…
Time for homemade pizza. So I whip out my favourite recipe for pizza bases from bestrecipes.com, whip out my external hard drive, unplug the power and move to the kitchen. So now I have a browser still up on the screen but no OS. Um….??? Turns out when I installed Ubuntu, it went for the biggest space it could find – my external hard drive. D’oh. Problem two? It installed it’s boot loader (the bit that allows me to chose between Windows or Linux) on the external hard drive – so when I boot without my system crashes.
So lesson to the wise – don’t install it with a (large) hard drive plugged in.
Lesson learnt, I reinstalled to my laptop hard drive, so now I’m happily using it as my main OS. And when I need Windows? Let’s not shut down and restart, let’s fire up Virtual Box – which allows me to run Windows XP inside Linux. Hell yes! If I really need some of my old apps I can always reboot into Virus… I mean… Vista.
Oh and… another one to watch out for – you may need to disable IPV6 support in Firefox to get your web browsing working. Had all sorts of DNS issues when I first started FF. So how do we do that? Start Firefox, browse to about:config (ignore the warranty warning) and set your filter to IPV6. You should end up seeing a preference called network.dns.disableIPv6. Double click to set this to true, restart Firefox and you’re away.
Happy camper? You bet.
Posted in Journal and tagged , opensource, ubuntu
3 commentsFor those of you that completely missed the Facebook update, I’ve lost my bike. GRRRRRR.
I walked out of the office on Thursday night to find it was no longer there. Talk about spoil my day. As I keep telling people, the worst bit isn’t the bike – I can probably afford a new one and I’d rather fancy a decent road bike anyways… it’s the fact that the bike has the trailer bracket on it, rendering Connor’s bike trailer COMPLETELY useless.
So as a message to the thief… I hope yer bloody happy with you new bike, f***er. You’ve just totally spoiled a well oiled transportation machine for a young family. And just so you know, Karma is most definitely a bitch.
Posted in Journal
2 commentsGot up pretty early this morning and made an attempt to make up for the failed bacon and eggs for breakfast last week.
Because I’ve omitted that story so far – picture last weekend, Sunday morning to be precise. Queen of the sleep ins is in bed but awake at about 8am. I’d been up for a while cooking bacon and eggs for everyone. I grab hers with her cup of tea and head for the bedroom to present brekkie in bed, only to be confronted by her coming the other way in the hallway, hand on baby bump, shaking her head and saying “not right now… things are happening”. Needless to say, the b&e was still sitting on her bedside drawers by the time I got home about 9pm.
So anyways… this weekend it was pancakes. Connor got up to the bench to help me out too, which was pretty cool. Part way through the ongoing cooking/eating the dogs starting barking. I stuck my head out the window to tell them to shut the firetruck up just in time to hear a big wooshing/roaring noise coming from the sky. Suddenly realised that the dogs were barking at the hot air balloon cruising past about 1/2 a block away from our house. Connor and I rushed out for a closer look and snapped a couple of photos.
Once Kirsty got up and ate her pancake stack (first time I’ve ever seen them stacked in real-life, normally they’re chowed down as soon as they get out of the pan!), I rocked out to some Guitar Hero Greatest Hits then we got dressed and went for a walk to see the diggers and rollers on our street. MAJOR roadworks going on at the mo which Connor just LOVES! This wouldn’t be worth much of a mention, except that it’s his first trip on his wheelie board. And what’s a wheelie board? I think the pics say it all!
Posted in Journal
No commentsGreetings, firstly, congrats to bren and kirsty, secondly, nothings really changed here since my last input…
kids are still great, job is still epic, study is, well still there. life is pretty sweet. really getting into the whole domestic bliss thing now, even brought a new fridge freezer for some reason… heading toward exams in 4 or so weeks, might even study for them if i can dig my way out of the mountain of assignments being thrown down, anyone want to swap a shovel for the teaspoon it feels like im using? starting to look at jobs and houses this week to, trying to put some form of post study plan in place for november, both scary and exciting i guess.
so thats me, ill leave you with this legend;
slink
Posted in Journal
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