perfecting mediocrity

As I just found out, it seems that Worpdress and its Automated Upgrade feature may still have some kinks in it to work out.

As a part of the upgrade process, WordPress drops a .maintenance in order to signify that the Blog is undergoing some changes, and presumably to stop access to the database and files while changes are being carried out in the background. The unfortunate thing is, that if the Tools -> Upgrade page only half completes, the file is not removed thus rendering your fantastic blog unusable. Not exactly the best outcome, given that the admin control panel is also disabled.

Worry not, the fix to this is to simply remove this file:

[user@host] ~$ rm ~/path/to/wordpress/installation/.maintenance

Voila! Your site is back on its feet. I’d highly suggest giving the upgrade a second bash, to ensure the upgrade completes successfully, or to start the beginnings of tracing what the source of your upgrade woes may be. Plugins are at the top of my shoot-to-kill list.

Went to see the band Sash is involved with, Midnight Drive, last Saturday at the Curtain Hotel. It was their second gig, so she was quite excited to have landed a spot supporting the headlining act – Skarlet Blue. The second out of 4 supporting acts, they were pretty pumped to land a supporting role for a well known local band. Given my interest in photography, Sash had asked me to grab some photos for her – just so the band had some photos to use for the various kinds of media they’d need to advertise gigs etc – Myspace, fliers and the like.

Doing a big favor for me, I passed on the invite onto my mate Ian who is a photographer by trade. He welcomed the opportunity to practice his skills and came along with his own camera and flash. Organized for him to cover the wide shots, whilst I shot from a bit further away with some portrait shots with my zoom.

All in all, the entire show was very very enjoyable. All 5 acts did a great job and all performances were well worth the effort to go see. I’ve uploaded my pics of the event onto my flickr page, so feel free to have a squiz.

There sometimes comes a time in a blog’s online life when it needs to find a new home.

Photo: oxyfocalis – CC

Whether it be changing to or from a personal blog to a professional blog, outgrowing a domain’s original purpose, or simply a face-lift – there are a number of common obstacles that you can encounter when attempting to lift and shift a blog and other common software packages.
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So. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and all that kinda jazz.

Obligatory summation of the year that has now passed. Not that I blog particularly often these days – though with enough inspiration I may choose to start jotting down a few random tidbits here and there. It’s been a little bit of a sleepy year, but as always there have been some notable highlights and lowlights of this year.

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Okay, so I’ve finally made the decision to not host my own stuff.

For the most part during the years, I’ve had a Freebsd catchall machine that served as most of what i needed. WWW/SMTP (antispam/antivirus) and various other things I’ve hosted such as subversion back when i was at Uni. Now that I’m really looking at something more stable and hassle-free, I’ve got the spare cashola to get something half decent and move it all off my home link. I’ve also decided to start slaving better connected primary/secondary DNS hosts to further decrease the reliance on my current single connection. So, for now – I have far less to worry about when I start moving machines around, and out. With luck I’ll have a flexible infrastructure in the end that i can manipulate as per situation demands it.

Okay, so now I have the majority of what is around for Mew. A little emo-ish at times, but still I’ve played through 3 albums this night and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve heard. And I like them. Which is a very snap decision but after hearing a sample at Mark’s housewarming on the weekend I figured I’d do a bit of a hunt and get what I can.

Enough to put into my stacker in the car. Which means at least a 3 or 4 week rotation till I find some more. Speaking of, I’m always after suggestions.

PS: I hate it when you’re right, Steph. *shake fist*

This post is almost directly inspired by Neil’s post about those lovely devices that enable us to bring our photographic subjects much closer to us, and give us a much greater level of detail that we would normally think possible.

Along with my lovely new camera and lenses, I’ve acquired a set of auto extension tubes. These differ from the normal extension tubes such that they include the contacts and electronics to feed back lens information, and control data thus allowing for the camera to have a degree of auto focus – in the case of my Kenko auto extension tubes, when the aperture is f/5.6 or brighter. And of course by bringing our focus much closer to our lens, we’re able to effectively magnify our subjects without the use of a dedicated macro lens.

So, what real use do they have?

I found that the extension tubes worked wonderfully – auto focus was not a particularly handy thing, given I had a complete lighting setup available and thus was shooting with an aperture of around f/22. The lens and shooting information that the circuits carry are still very handy though. Sending back the aperture and lens information to store in the image EXIF data is great.

The lenses I have seem to be unable to focus with all 3 rings on – that’s a full 68mm extension. Even with the 70-200 f/2.8, I could not seem to achieve focus. Other than that, I found the tubes to be a whole lot of fun – bringing a new dimension to how I see things.

So, by now most people will know ( quite likely due to my constant and unrelenting badgering for money and attempts to raise money through every possible source I can bring to bear ) that I’ve made the big decision of cutting off my hair. I made the decision roughly 3 or 4 months ago and mulled it around in my mind for a bit before finally deciding to do something about it early January. Those who attended that night would possibly recall my statement of putting an official price on my hair to be chopped of – that figure, 1500$ – formed the basis of how much I aim to raise for the Worlds Greatest Shave. I figure that someone who is going to chop off 3+ feet of hair ought to do it with style, and raising money for the Leukemia Foundation is one hell of a good way to do it.

It’s kind of scary – not due to the fact my hair is going; its been a pain to keep maintained for quite some time – its more due to the fact that other than my mother who can’t remember me with short hair anyway, I can only seem to find two people I still know that would have even around when I had short hair and out of those two, only one can actually remember.

I think the most often asked question is “How long has it been long?”. I’ve had it cut once since growing it long – and that was 9+ inches cut off around 2 years ago. Other than that – my hair has been growing since I was around 18 or so. That’s a good 9 or 10 years, folks. For an idea of how long the hair is – check out here. Yes, its really that long.

As it stands, I’ve currently raised a touch over 1000$. Given that I only really started making a noise about it last Wednesday afternoon, I consider that an impressive tally so far. 3 days, 1000$. If i keep this up i could raise maybe 2000$ or even 2500$ if I’m really lucky!

On another matter – I’ve started getting more active with my strobist photography, with the help of Neil. I’ve got a flickr account and everything, which you can visit here, and I encourage all constructive criticisms and suggestions that can help me hone my techniques down. I’m really enjoying learning more details aspects of what I already do, and I think I’m catching on quickly.

I’m of course still awaiting my gear to come from MPEX – I’ve ordered two Strobist Wireless kits plus a few more goodies ( cactus wireless transmitters and a couple of white shoot through umbrellas ). Until that all arrives, I’m somewhat restricted to borrowing Neil’s gear, but given its almost a tutorial by him anyhow it’s somewhat fitting.

So, here ends an update. One of .. not many. I’ll try and update it a little more often to parade pictures around, but I’ll see how lazy I get.

End note: If you’re wishing to donate, please feel free to visit my profile page on the WGS website: here.

Every morning, there’s a certain ritual that I go through to break the new day in. I sit down – check my email for any major catastrophe thats happened overnight, delete spam, check my voicemail. I’m sure that this is all very familiar to just about everyone. Recently however, I’ve begun to make

these for myself. This is probably the step of the day that actually is a ritual – of course, I’m not entirely sure that I could function skipping this! The morning coffee is the bit that I actually end up waking up to.

Now, I’ve never been trained as a barista, nor has any of the guys here. But for the most part, I think we all do a fair job at making coffees for ourselves. But where exactly would you go to learn these skills, short of working for a coffee shop. It’s a skill i’d like to be better at – but for the life of me I couldn’t think of where you could do it. Surely, the Internets has some answers, yes?

Okay, so most of you know by now that there was a Lunar Eclipse. Mainly due to laziness, I haven’t bothered to update till now, and even then it’ll be a short and sweet one.

Okay, so I just found the images i took with Neil, which I had forgotten about. I’m bad I know. Long story short, spent a few hours waiting for the moon to come out from behind the clouds so i could take a photo with my tripod-mounted camera. My lenses weren’t able to zoom in enough to get the moon at a decent detail, but a quick borrowing of Neil’s 400mm zoom snarfed me the photo attached.

Enjoy. And maybe I’ll update again later.