Random Madness Blog

This morning I woke to find that during the night my San Pedro had fallen off the shelf it lives on and snapped:-(

So I had to re-pot both parts in an attempt to sustain the life of my cacti.

Given 2 weeks everything should be OK. Fingers crossed for the life of my cacti:-)

On the road again. And it’s another day when I really do not want to have to work. It’s not that I don’t like work. More that I don’t want to be working but have no choice.

That’s a lie. I have a choice, I am my own boss. But sometimes the money is more useful than the time off.

I haven’t missed a Glastonbury festival since I was very young, I’m lucky enough to live within 3 miles of the site so every year we make the 5 minute journey and find ourselves in the same fields that have suddenly become a city.

The festival (or Pilton as it should be known) is a very special place and holds nearly 16 years of memories for me, but something that has really made me think over the last few years is the Left Field stage. The people who run the Left Field really have their heads screwed on the right way round. Have a look at http://www.leftfield.coop/

You may be wondering why I am writing about this now, there is no festival this year and it’s been nearly 12 months since the last. I was talking to someone last night about Billy Bragg and said to them I once saw Billy Bragg and Bill Bailey sing Unisex Chip Shop at the Left Field. Needless to say they had no idea what I was talking about. After doing a quick search for Unisex Chip Shop I found the recording on that exact song in the multimedia section of the Left Field website http://www.leftfield.coop/Media/

It just made me smile, and some days that is all any of us have.

I thank you, Billy Bragg, Bill Bailey and the people who made it happen. Out of all the memories I have of some enormous bands playing legendary sets, Billy Bragg and Bill Bailey sit right up there with the likes of Roger Waters, The Levellers (in 1993), Rage Against The Machine and many more.

Thanks to these people I will never again buy my chips from an oppressive chip shop regime.

So I’ve been listening to a lot of Rory Gallagher recently. He was recommended to me after one of my friends had the good fortune of listening to “Walk on Hot Coals”.

I got the Irish Tour album, which has to be said is fantastic, but one song above all reminds me of where I am at the moment. (A Million Miles Away).

If you get the chance, listen to it.
A Million Miles Away - Rory Gallagher

This hotel bar is full of people,
The piano man is really laying it down,
The old bartender is as high as a steeple,
So why tonight should I wear a frown?
The joint is jumpin’ all around me,
And my mood is really not in style,
Right now the blues flock to surround me,
But I’ll break out after a while.

Yes I’m a million miles away,
I’m a million miles away,
I’m sailing like a driftwood,
On a windy bay,
On a windy bay.

I’m a million miles away,
I’m a million miles away,
But I’m sailing like a driftwood,
On a windy bay,
On a windy bay.

Why ask how I feel,
Well, how does it look to you?
I fell hook, line and sinker,
Lost my captain and my crew.

I’m standing on the landing,
There’s no one there but me,
That’s where you’ll find me,
Looking out on the deep blue sea.

There’s a song on the lips of everybody,
There’s a smile all around the room,
There’s conversation overflowing,
But I sit here with the blues.

This hotel bar has lost all its people,
The piano man has caught the last bus home,
The old bartender just collapsed in the corner,
Why I’m still here, I just don’t know,
I don’t know.

I’m a million miles away,
A million miles away,
I’m sailing like a driftwood on a windy bay,
On a windy bay.

I’m a million miles away,
A million miles away,
I’m sailing like a driftwood on a windy bay,
Send me away

It makes me wonder, why do all the great people die and all the evil ones get to run amuck?

Ah well, I guess that’s a thought for another day.

On another note, it’s my birthday tomorrow, so I’ll probably go somewhere nice and take it easy, but who knows?

Levellers were great on Tuesday night at the Cheese and Grain
Here is my ticket.

What a fantastic night, I went to see the Mighty Boosh last night in Cardiff.

Really what do I need to say? If you know who the boosh are then you can understand why I am so happy to have seen them. If you don’t know who the boosh are then you have missed out.

Truly legendary is all that I can say. We were in hysterics from start to end. And for a good few hours after.

If you get the opportunity to see the Boosh take it while you can .

I’ve really outdone myself over the last couple of days. Apparently I wasn’t happy with just breaking my gallery. I felt the need to break all of the fonts on my laptop as well.

I got a pack of 5008 fonts today. I made the stupid presumption that windows would be able to cope with this many fonts and just installed them all at the same time. This had the marvelous results of grinding any program that needed to access a font list to an absolute halt. In a moment of blind haste I deleted all of the fonts including the standard Windows fonts and then copied them accross from another XP install. This looked as if it had fixed the problem until i ran some software and it felt the need to display the font in some enormous size that pushes the entire program far outside the boundries of my screen.

I now know how to fix it, but I need my XP cd. So I will have to go home and fix it.

On another note, I couldn’t reinstall Gallery2 on my web server (by which I mean the virtual server that is my host, I’m certain that if it were my server and I had root access I could fix it). The RC4 (I think it’s 4) release just won’t get past the installation steps without throwing me into a loop of constant authentication. It seems to have something to do with cookie headers and php, but to be honest I haven’t got the time or interest to fix it. So I opted to rewrite my template to work in coppermine and migrate once again to another product.

Do you ever get the feeling I should have just stuck with a simple html gallery. It would have been a nightmare to maintain, but much more difficult to break.

Yesterday I outdid myself and managed to break my entire gallery and wordpress install.

But that’s what you get for changing a bunch of settings at 2am. It was easier at that point to just start again than it was to recover all of my old data.

The worst things about it is I now have to reintergrate all of my css and edited templates. I’ve managed to reinstall and reintergrate wordpress without any hassle (although I did loose my previous posts) but now I have to fix Gallery2 which could take slightly longer than hoped. It’s going to be much easier than last time as I actually know what I am doing this time.

So today the title “Master Of Muppetry” goes to me:-)

Should I opt for a simple HTML Gallery with thumbnails etc? To which the answer can only be NO. I have too many photos to want to edit HTML every time I try to upload an image.I could opt for a flash gallery but I don’t really like the thought of having to launch a plugin purely to be able to view some photos. Flash video on the other hand I Agree with.

So that leaves me with something PHP driven. I looked at Gallery last night, but only Gallery 1 as I am am not running MySQL. But after looking at Gallery 1 I think that I will be purchasing SQL support and moving to Gallery 2 or Coppermine or something similar.

PHP and SQL driven Galleries just seem to be more robust, more configurable and I can tailor them to fit within my existing site. Also I can upload images with minimal hassle, just write a description and away we go.

So I guess I will be spending more money and buying myself some MySQL. I wonder how long it will take them to set it up?

The beginings of a new dawn and things once more seem to be on the up.After smashing my knee in a car accident last year, I haven’t been able to ride my unicycle or juggle or any of those other things that make my life fun. But now for the first time in a long time my mind is in the right place to move forward. My knee isn’t better but instead of focusing on the negative effects I now feel like I should focus on the positive parts of things that I can still do. Such as the development of the Random Madness Domain and all that it entails.

I was using Pivot as a blog system and if you haven’t got SQL then I would suggest this as a fast sensible solution. But I’ve moved over to Wordpress as everyone seems to rave about it. It works, it’s easy to install and if you have more patience than me you can probably integrate it with Gallery2.