Go Me!

... erm, I mean Canticum!

You are feeling sleepy. You are under my power. You wish to buy CDs.

Really, they're very good. Buying a CD from Canticum will give your a warm inner glow as a bonus.

Zoom

Since I left That Company, I don't fly much. In fact, the last flight I did was to Japan and back for the World Choral Symposium in Kyoto, upon which I might later reflect further.

After the Symposium, and our tour around Kytoto/Nagoya ("if this is Tuesday, this must be Gifu") we took the Shinkansen to Tokyo from Nagoya. I like trains, hence there's an unnatural proportion of trainish pictures from that trip. One of them you see above.

Vale Australian Airlines Mk II.

Tweaking my funnel

Playing with Google Analytics is curiously compelling. I thought I didn't care about the exit-analysis of my websites, but I was wrong!

Must drive visitors to site! Make pretty graph go up! Shiny, pretty graphs! Drive visitors to site! Nnngggg! How to drive visitors to site!

Revelation!

BOOBS!

Ooh, fat controller

< Holocaine> Someone hit my quote file ages ago looking for homoerotic James Bond fan fic.
< Holocaine> Probably because it had the words "homoerotic" and "James Bond" in there.

Ooh, yeah, I want me some of those hits.

Homoerotic Smurf diesels! Thomas the Tank Engine the Gimp!

Pimpin'

Atlassian Jira 3.6 is out, and has some nice new features. I'm liking the speed improvements due to cache tweaks, and especially the ability to ignore incoming mail with Precedence: Bulk headers. Given the hideous mail-loops we've endured, that'd be handy.

Confluence 2.2 will be out soon, the Personal Space gadget will be a good way to organise my personal cribsheet.

The weather continues clement. The pen of my aunt is in the garden. Support my disgraceful beer addiction by clicking an ad. I'm Milton, your brand new sooooonnn!

Blargh.

Argle Wargle Bargle. Meetings and reports and ninety-day plans.

I don't presume to tell other departments how to do their job. It's always surprising to hear that they think they can do mine better than I. Well, fair enough, but they break it, they can keep the pieces.

That went well

The concert went very well - looked liked a near sell-out to me. There were people openly weeping during the performance; I didn't think we were that bad (fnarr! yuck yuck! etc).

Apparently the state Governor was there too, along with the various grand potentates of the Anglican church. I hope I didn't pick my nose or anything.

Yes, it's sentence-fragment Saturday!

About time.

This is an interesting (and overdue and not unexpected) development. Nearly there.

It's about time for a Subaru turbodiesel. To be honest, I still don't know why they've gone to the trouble and expense of designing a modular flat six, but are sill using the older EJ series of engines elsewhere. They're good, solid engines, but they seem to be at the limit of their development now.

Please don't laugh, but the VW Caddy DSG TDi Caddy Camper seems eerily attractive, given our like of ambling driving holidays and non-hairshirt-style camping.

Panelvan

Interesting phone call, that one. I am reminded that traceroute is not ping, but who can blame me when ping is only of any real use in the local intranet these days? Sneaky ambiguous trick questions.

Tentative plans were to go sailing upon the briney bay and crink bold dreer on Saturday, but I'm kind of knackered and there are other things that must be attended to. Hanging out with the better half is looking like the go.

I reckon a turbodiesel AWD Impreza panelvan would be really groovy.

Wurble Wurble Sclup

Well, this is fun.

Main nameserver goes down. Secondary nameserver ... oh dear, it's the same as the primary nameserver. Therefore, all our websites gradually fall off air as DNS records fall out of caches. I get my first page at midnight or so, when I'm at home. Tucked in bed, a long way away from my password files in the folder in the cupboard at work, and also a long way away from my RoboForm USB key. Also at work.

Ring service provider in the US (Hooray for NodePhone!). Can't do nothing, sir, without you lodging a trouble ticket. OK, let's try to log in then - whoops, no login info here. How about the handy reset password button? Success! Except ... with no nameservers reachable, there's no MX record, so the password-reset mail is probably still sitting in the mail queue of the service provider in question. Can they reset my password manually? Sure! All I need is the last four digits of the boss' credit card number. The big, big, boss.

I've got that joy, joy, joy, joy, down in my heart.

La!

So as I mentioned below, I'm singin' again on Friday night. While I'm not a religious person, I can't help but appreciate sincerity of expression, and perception of art is mutable - you can create an internal discourse which maps expressive art to your personal experience.

Ahem.

Anyway, here's the description from the Canticum website.

Good Friday Musical Meditation

Friday, 14th April 6pm

St John's Anglican Cathedral, Ann Street, Brisbane

Seven Last Words from the Cross by acclaimed Scottish composer James Macmillan will be the focus of Canticum's 2006 Good Friday Musical Meditation. It is a compelling and deeply spiritual work marked by contrasting moods – anguish, tenderness, unrest, peace, to name a few. Composed in 1993 and scored for choir and string orchestra, Seven Last Words from the Cross has been dubbed by critics to be Macmillan's finest, most inspired choral writing. The text utilizes words from all four Gospels to create a sequence of contrasting and powerful movements leading to Christ's death on the cross.

It's sounding pretty good. Go see it!

Ah, drat

Well, lighttpd + fcgi + php5 works very nicely indeed. A definite subjective improvement, and the Firefox Page Load Timer extension agrees with me by around half a second for my basic pages. The big catch is that mod_security is not available for lighttpd, and mod_security is really a Killer App for me, and running Apache as a proxy for lighttpd seems ... silly.

Tinkering with incidentalia

lighttpd looks like it might be worth a run on a 512MB BSD 6.x box - it's not like I'm doing anything exciting with apache 2.2 as it is, and I've never gotten mod_proxy_ajp even close to working anyway. Might as well save the ram for a bigger java heap for Confluence. Atlassian was kind enough to grant my choir a non-profit license, and I have Plans. The FreeBSD Tomcat doesn't come with Apache Portable Runtime finagled in, but I found a fix. Seems a bit snappier to start and stop, and there's less nagging in the logs.

Woops+Meh

... and it seems my high school's 20th anniversary reunion was on a couple of weeks ago, and I completely forgot about it. I wasn't particularly keen on going, not being a fan of the whole wargle-high-school-was-the-best-time-of-my-life! revisionary mindset that these things tend to accrete around themselves, but I didn't intend to blow it off as such. Still, guilt level is low - I have a life to live now that's fun enough as it is.

What, no gravy?

Hrm. Blogger doesn't seem to have a native categories functionality, except via some round-about hacks. Oh well. In other news, Canticum, the choir I perform with in Brisbane, Australia, is having our annual Easter Concert this Friday at St John's Cathedral at 8PM. If you get in now there may be some A reserve seats left.

Yeah, well

OK, so until I can work out a nice way of using a Confluence space as a traditional blog, I'll probably move back to that. Until then let's try Google's Blogger service. Seems OK from a brief look-over.