Matt's Blog

Or perhaps even that is an exaggeration. I am over at my Aunt's place and she and my mother are watching and listening to a Roy Orbison concert on a huge plasma TV with surround sound. It really is quite impressive, although they seem to be chatting through it depsite the spectacle.

My sister came home from a two month stint in Cambodia. Wow.

I've been scanning some of my Dad's photos into the computer and putting them on the web at tom.draisey.ca.

Felix gave a DVD copy of a home movie he had made at a garden party my parents attended many years ago. It had only a few indirect shots of my dad and snatches of conversation. It was odd. I don't know how to feel about it. Pleased, I suppose, but it was odd.

I've spent most of the day experimenting with Google Apps and I am disappointed to say that it doesn't live up to its potential. Basically it is a branded version of the mainline gmail, google calendar, and google docs and spreadsheets together with a simple and graphical web page editor. Unfortunately, none of these versions seem to work quite as well as the ones that work through google's own domains. Further the expected integration with these bundled apps just doesn't exist. It does allow you to set up several email addresses in your own domain and have them handled by the gmail client; that seems to be its only real benefit. The web page editor is far too limited to be of any use --- it doesn't integrate with any of the other services and has no content management features at all.

This isn't what I was expecting at all --- I was expecting to be wowed. The new google groups has real potential and I thought this would be a realization of some of that potential --- it isn't.

My email is a pain. I run my own draisey.ca domain so I have a nice cusom email address but the server gets pounded by vast amounts of spam attempts. To keep my server load down I just reject out of hand any server whose domain name entries are malformed or generated from a purely dynamic ip address. This used to work fine but, with increasing frequency, valid sources of email are misconfiguring their domains and my mail isn't coming in. I'm down to about a 75% success rate, which really isn't very good.

I might have to start more complex filtering.

I've started updating my drupal sites from 4.7 to 5 and am very pleased with the results. The upgrade process itself was somewhat problematic, however; the database upgrade script kept stalling half-way through for an unknown reason. I eventually kicked it a couple of times and eventually it did something, though how or why I don't know. The multiple overriding upgrades didn't seem to hurt the final results despite the hideous looking error logs afterwards. I just wish there were log entries from when it just sat there stalled doing nothing.

The site I upgraded was spsc.sailclub.ca which is just a mule and not a real working site --- I never could get the club to use it. I may try it next on the art site. I will have to back up the database just in case, but that's easily done (and those automatic daily off-site back-ups help keep my blood pressure down). Hmm. I should probably migrate Gary's scuba club site first, then the art site.

Yep, burning time but I'm not at my computer doing it; I'm at my friend Gary's computer while he is off preparing his dinner I type away at his fast computer. Well, his machine is three years old so obsolete in computer time, but that still beats my six year old machine. We were bashing away at his scuba club's web site, adding a bit of content to the drupal site I have set up for them.

I was at my Aunt's house today and helped her turn on her TV. Technology has become vastly too complex when it takes a manual and tech support to turn on your tube. It isn't a tube, which is the basic problem, it a great big enormous flat panel plasma which looks wonderful when its on. But, being so big and expensive, the remote control is the size of the television it replaced, studded with buttons and pop out panels, has universal remote facilities to control the separate satellite tuner and surround sound boxes, and is utterly incomprehensible. Wouldn't it be nice if the big expensive stuff had the small truly elegent controls that we all want and nobody delivers!

Another boring day, although I am significantly wealthier today than I was yesterday. My mother transferred a big lump of cash (well actually 4%pa daily GIC) to me with very little fuss. I don't feel wealthier; it's just a little to abstract for my unimaginative brain. It's just going to sit there and generate interest, which isn't so bad.

I started this blog as a technical exercise, and then I thought it would be good for me to extend myself and start writing about something just for the sake of writing. But somehow I seem to have missed the point of blogging. I know of nothing interesting to write about --- like those terrible modern novels by the literary illuminati which end up being about nothing other than the lives of literary illuminati. My own interests aren't even interesting to me so it isn't likely to engage others either, and blogging is a social enterprise (even though I know no-one reads this other than myself) so that is one major topic that won't supply any material. Now, I do find myself in interesting situations that I can blog about as a reporter, yet that talent seems to require speed in deliver before the event fades from memory and my terrible procrastination scuppers those attempts too. I am left talking about the mechanics of blogging --- how dull can you get.