Well, all the best intentions in the world never always get fulfilled… In many respects, being busy at work as a Web Dev has taken it’s toll. All the pressures of life seem to have weighed against me. I will continue the Joomla documentation at some point. I’ve been taking advantage of the system in the latest site build, reducing the chances of the end user borking it and making it so simple it will make people wonder why they paid us in the first place. Also, got the go-ahead on the first e-commerce site! Yay!

My babe’s ill at the mo, so that’s been pretty tough, just learning to deal with all the stuff around caring for someone else, even though you’re not physically there. I feel good in the respect of the information passed between us, but I still have that feeling I could have done more.

I’ve ordered a new PC case, plus a luxury of a fan controller. The case is an Antec 900, and the fan controller is a Zalman MFC-2. Both are awesome bits of kit, and I can’t wait to get them. I did receive some Akasa SATA cables, and also an Akasa cable management kit. That’ll take care of the 3 hard drives I have in my PC.

Now, to fix the recurrent boot issue…

Well, finally, the weekend is here. I’m sitting here in front of my PC, listening to some mixes by Jonah and Gabriel, you can check em out at http://stickybeatz.com/wordpress/ for the awesome funky/tech/house mixes they post online. My favourite at the moment is Stickybeatz Volume four, about 37 minutes in. There’s an awesome tune that still gives me goosepimples!
Anyway, the babe came over tonight, we watched some Simpsons, had dinner together, and just talked about a few things I’m not going to type here. That was cool, great even. Got to go and photograph some hedgehogs tomorrow afternoon, but before that, my favourite weekend activity (church excepted) - Mountain Biking!! There should be a group of us, so that will be good. It’ll be good for me if this blooming headache goes away!
The nervous thing is that I’m meeting the girlfriend’s parents this weekend. That could be interesting, and we’ll see what happens. My parents seem to have taken to my babe, and they ask after her, how she’s doing. They’ll probably get her something for her birthday no doubt. It’s something of an occasion for me to have a girlfriend, so I’m sure they’ll do something. No worries if they don’t, but that’s my personal hunch. If my parents are reading this, don’t stress about that last part!!
Today in work was cool, just trying to figure out some custom code to do dynamic dropdown searches on specific table entries in MySQL. What do you mean that’s easy? Try that with someone who’s had to do a ‘Teach Yourself PHP in 24Hours!” in order to figure this out. One day I’m sure I’ll be figured out for a sham. I’m not a trained Web Developer, but I’ve self-taught myself what I needed to know. It’ll be interesting meeting one of our clients soon - he’s a Linux user! Hurrah! My first real contact with another human who uses Linux. Although he was surprised that I use it for a desktop environment - he asked me if I did everything on the command line!! I said I do a fair bit there, but also a fair proportion graphically. That’s the beauty of Linux, especially Ubuntu - you can choose to do things the graphical way, or dive into the machine and command line it all the way.
Anyway, my beer’s finished, and I’m going to bed.

I’ve got Compiz working on my PC. It’s great. I can flick between desktops as easily as alt-tab in windows, and guess what? - it’s free, and it’s cool. Way better than Vista.

Anyway, took my babe out for dinner to a local Indian restaurant, cost me more than I expected, but it was a great afternoon/evening. Talked about loads of stuff, and that was cool too.

Spent too much time looking at geek stuff on the net until way past my bedtime. Red Vs Blue rocks!

I got up late this morning. I missed church. I know my girlfriend will be worried, but she is coming over afterwards anyway. I’m sorry in some ways that I’ve missed church, but in others, I’ve had so little personal time, and now the flat is empty except me, I can potter around, clean up a few things, sort out my little domestic chores that get left by the wayside because of the pressures of modern life.

Ah, modern life, where wold we be without our computers, our pda’s, mobile phones etc? I would be a little happier, doing some physical work, probably retail for a small family outlet. Modern life was meant to make things easier - I’m supposed to be washing dishes, but I’m stressing over the possibility that I’ve lost all my email backups on our work backup disk… Argh!

It’s a lovely evening out there. I’m sat in front of my laptop at home, with a curtain stopping me from being blinded by the sunlight. Crazy.

I’m planning a couple of changes to my PC at work, a new case, restructure some of the internals and I’ve been looking up PC cases. Now I’m planning on leaving the laptop and doing some writing, possibly some poetry, as my girlfriend loves that kind of thing, and I haven’t written anything noteworthy for a while. Maybe this is the creative thing I need. I’ve discovered fountain pens, a great tool for writing, far better than a rollerball, ballpoint or even a pencil, and there’s a feeling of quality that comes to a piece of written word in fountain pen ink.

So that’ll be my evening, unless my parents call by and want me to fix their pc. Hope not. It didn’t boot, so it may still not be booting up. Ahh.. The life of an ubergeek.

So here’s something I wrote about 8 years ago…

‘Without You’

I can do without this.
Tension, gripping me like a vice,
Consuming what I am, who I am,
I’m dazed. Confused, I don’t know which way to turn.
So I turn to You.

I know I’ve done it wrong again,
I’ve been there before.
You’ve found me there, filled with the tension,
of being hurt, lost, lonely, but still lovely,
In Your loving sight.

You’ve seen it all before, many times in my past,
So why do I hide in shame?
I know You knew me from the start,
And will until the very end,
Also through all the times between.

Where do I go in times of trouble,
To You, my true friend, companion and saviour,
You lift me from the hassle and tension,
Show me a different way through it all,
And Your love shines my way.

Yes, at last, the weekend has landed. The weather was ok, so me and a friend went out mountain biking for the first time in a couple of months. We rode a trail that skirts round the edge of one of the local mountains, but goes up high enough so there’s a decent downhill the other side of it.
After recovery from that, I popped into town and spotted my girlfriend. She had been to the library to get some books. Reading is helping her to relax quite a lot so it’s good she had a few more books to get through.
Now I am waiting for my father to ring so I can go up and visit them. I also have an ulterior motive in that a training course I have written needs to be proof-read and tested for clarity. So it’s vital that is done this weekend, as I can then make revisions next week and have it all ready for the following week.
I’m enjoying using Wordpress, it’s a good system, fairly extensible, but my only issue is the whole tag thing. Categories cannot be accessed from a cloud, it’s a checkbox list that is more annoying the larger amount of Categories you have. As this is a new blog, it’s not going to have much, but I know over time it will have many many more.

What should be my involvement in Joomla as regards to it’s development over the coming months?

Professionally, I develop CMS sites using the software as a platform, and our hosting package makes all this an attractive in-house deal. So that’s great for our business. But what of the free system that gave us the big lift up in the first place?

I have offered to help with writing/updating the manuals etc. for Joomla 1.0.12, as many of my sites and insights are from that release. I am quite active on the forum, and have once or twice taken time out of work to help solve another person’s problem. Now our company finds itself trying to migrate to Joomla 1.5RC, and that has proven difficult. Problems with the migration component make that change awkward for many of our existing sites. New sites can’t be developed on it yet as the third party developers haven’t updated their components, or they don’t work in 1.5rc even with Legacy mode on.

A note on 1.5’s legacy mode - I have yet to notice any system slowdown on my local dev machine, or even our remote test servers.

Anyway, all this adds up to time. I have a girlfriend who demands my time, a bike that needs riding down some local mountains, beer to be quaffed with friends, and parents to help re-do their kitchen. How can I help Joomla? Only with the time I can afford on the forums. And hopefully that’s enough.

Also, it would be nice if there was a decent integrated tool to develop templates on Dreamweaver. The tool’s I tried led to Dreamweaver crashing all the time in split code/wysiwyg mode.

You can find me on the Joomla forums under my name ‘richrock’ at forums.joomla.org

EOL

Let slip that I had mentioned my blog to my babe. Still, I assured her she is anonymous, as am I, a mysterious blogger in the sea of the internet…BTW, when you read this - I love you.Later, because it’s really late…

Spoke to the babe earlier today. She popped into work to give me some luxury brazil nut chocolate covered cookies. Which were fantastic!
I showed her a pic of the CBR 400 which she liked. Realistically for moment, I may have to settle for a Honda CB500 or a Suzuki GS500, as these could be obtained fairly cheaply, and even had mutterings of approval from the significant other. Now, where to book a Direct Access course?
The pic is of a Honda CB500, taken from Bikepics.

This look seems to be the flavour of the month. Might keep this for a while….

Anyway, I purchased Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, ‘The Fountain’ today. I gave it a run through, but for me the difference between speech and whisper was quite extraordinary, so I may have to watch with subtitles. That said, it was an awesome, profound film, with themes that may yet come to light. In some respects, it’s a shame the film never achieved what the director intended.
I tucked into a little bible tonight too. I read a passage that has been on my mind for the last few days, and I am wondering whether to share with my babe. It’s Philippians 4:8 - and it’s all about the whatever is good, whatever is funky, meditate on these things. Just with my movie selection, and general considerations of another person in my life, do these things now have a rightful place? The bible doesn’t have anything to say on movies, because if it did, I’d be very impressed.
That said, it does have a lot to say about what we are to think on, and the above passage is a powerful reminder of that. There are other passages, but I’ll see what happens there.
Also, a bit of news in the pipeline. I’m hoping to get a motorbike soon. The babe in my life allowed me to get one. Practically said it would be the best thing for the relationship in terms of getting some private time by going off somewhere. Not to mention I prefer bikes over cars any day. I’ll keep you all posted on the developments about this. First step is to arrange either a CBT or DAS course. I’ll have to find one first. Already I have my dream bike planned - a Honda CBR400F, if the girlfriend likes it…