Mick The Glass

I'm doing my usual pub wander on St. Pat's

Anyone's welcome to join this seasonal migration, and I'm open to suggestions for venues - but my plan so far is to start in the East and head West for a big finish.


11-ish Durty Nellys, Paddingtion

12-ish PJ O'Brien's (I think) on King St., CBD

13-sh Hero of Waterloo, The Rocks

(option: Australian. not an option: The Orient)

15-ish Porterhouse, Surry Hills (food stop?)

17-ish Trinity Bar, Surry Hills

19-ish Scruffy Murphys or Bridie O'Reilly's (or whatever it's called now)
Might give this a miss or just not stay long - both will be manky with bastards

20-ish The Rose, Cleveland St.

22-ish The Union, Newtown


Options: Kitty O'Sheas, Paddingtion; Kelly's (I think), Newtown;

Happy Birthday, dude. :)

Yet another blogging tool.
Drivel has more features than the other two, so I think this will be the winner. A big bonus for this program is the ability to use keyboard shortcuts; I won't have to take my fingers off the keyboard much while I'm creating a post. Drivel uses the Atom API (I think), and LJ's support for it seems to be more feature-rich.

Test of another desktop blogging tool: gnome-blog.

This one allows me to enter a title, but I can only use bold and italics on text, and add links. Simple and quick, though.

I have discovered BloGTK. This allows me to blog to LJ from my Linux (FC6) desktop, instead of having to go through the web-client. The added convenience has made me think about blogging to LJ again. The technical stuff is still at bitwise, but I'd like to put personal stuff here still.

Agata says, "Due to the awesomeness of my iBook, the desktop of love is no longer needed.".
Price: $800 o.n.o.

Specs as follows:
Antec Sonata II case (black)
AMD64 CPU (socket 754) 3000+
Dual-layer DVD burner (Pioneer DVR109 16x DVD-R/+R, 6x DVD-R/+R DL)
Creative Extigy with Dolby 5.1 & remote
Giga-byte K8VT800-R2 motherboard
512 MB RAM
15" LCD monitor (black)

HDD 80GB SATA (Maxtor 6Y080M0)
Video Card Leadtek Winfast A340 Nvidia FX 5200 128MB (not sure what specific model yet)

Black keyboard + mouse

Contact me through the usual channels, or leave a reply if you're interested.

EDIT: Updated the specs for CPU, video card, DVD-burner, HDD

Off to Ireland for a month. See you when I get back.
As per usual, orders for "authentic" Irish stuff will be accepted along with all major credit cards.

Stay well. See you soon :)

(BTW. For WoW'ers: Juna just hit 60. *Now* what do I do?!)

Appropriated from Mike Elgan's "Mike's List" newsletter - a gallery of "When Things Go Wrong At Mines"

http://psychogoat.com/gallery/miningpics?page=1

Mostly the same kind of pictures over and over, but some interesting ones like "Coalfire", "Big Rock in Truck", and "Oxy Bottle Safety"

There I was, playing with an alt on my server. He's a lowly level 12 undead warlock that I'm using to get to know the class and also farm leather and metal for my main Horde character. I was hanging around the outskirts of Brill, trying to decide what to do, when a huge level 60 Tauren warrior bounds over the hill to where I am. I notice his name "Yanghua", and I think "uh oh". There's been a bit of chat recently about Chinese Gold Farmers. Slashdot had a post about it, and although there were some interesting points from both sides, I was feeling a bit apprehensive.

Keeping an open mind, I say "ni shi zhong guo ren ma?" <are you chinese?> He replies "shi a" <yep!>

He then invites me to join him in a party. I think "what the?", but accept the invitation. He then proceeds to absolutely murder everything around us. Then he starts jogging north east, all the while he continues to hammer out a trail of death in his wake. He keeps beckoning "zou a" <come!>

( Follow the huge Chinese Tauren? Yes/No )

I dunno why this guy did all that for a complete stranger that wasn't in his guild. I suspect it might have something to do with all the bad publicity that the Chinese WoW players have received of late. When I checked out what his name meant, I thought it might have been a clue, but I'm not sure. Yanghua, means "Westernised".

I've formally resigned from Telstra, and should be finishing up in four weeks time.

have a good one!

Just a quick note to say thanks to everyone that turned up for the party. I know it was pretty much red_kat's gig, but I feel the need to thank people too.

A very special thanks to anothertwilight and red_kat for the effort they put into preparations for the party. The house hasn't looked as good in the five odd years that I've been living there. I helped, of course, but I don't think I did quite as much as those two.

Other special thanks go to amaterasu_sama for helping me with the cleaning-up in the morning after :) You rock.

Just in case anybody didn't realise, amaterasu_sama rocks for many reasons. Some of these include making my birthday very happy indeed from very early on (I got an incredible breakfast made for me!), and buying me an awesome birthday gift.

Further amazement will come in the form of dinner at Atelier in Glebe, and a viewing of Goblet of Fire afterwards. :)

Edited to fix Atelier's name.

Firefox 1.5 has been released. There's not a lot to see in terms of changes, but it's technically better.
I grabbed my installer from here.
The mirrors for Australia don't seem to have updated yet.

Firefox usage is only 8-10% according to some sources. It should be higher. Get it and remain Free.

Just received my iAudio 5 Digital Audio Player. It's no longer PC to say MP3 player ;P
The nice people at mp3direct.com.au delivered my unit the day after I ordered it from them. Sweet!

( Warning: some Linux-zealot content )

Gwendo the cat has a really bad habit of tearing around the house and bashing into things. Unfortunately, this includes the network infrastructure I've setup in at home. I was logged into one of the servers remotely from work and wondering why I was getting really crap response. When I got home, the wireless access point was on the ground and upside-down. :)

For those who've yet to hear of it (this is only seconds old for me), I inveigled this from /.

BBC Announces Adult Doctor Who Spin-Off
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/10/18/189211.shtml?tid=129&tid=214

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200510/s1485373.htm

( 2.6.13 kernel & AGP tech. note )

With the new kernel in place, I'm getting upto 90-odd FPS on World of Warcraft using Cedega 4.4.2 on top of Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux. I should compare with the unchanged kernel, I don't think there's that much difference. I'm still quite amazed that this game works so well when convinced to run on GNU/Linux.

http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/09/01/1312233.shtml?tid=220&tid=218