Gosh it’s been mad busy around here. Top tip: never try to move and go on holiday all at once. Didn’t help stress levels. And, of course, work has been crazy-busy – more so than normal. But there’s still fun to be had and I should be back posting here in a week or so (until I lose my broadband), full of beans and with lots of new energy. Lots of ideas, that’s for sure.

Must go now. Seville calls me. Flickr photoset, writing, sketches-maybe, will follow.

So I recently acquired a new mobile phone (a Samsung D500) and in general I’m very pleased with it. It doesn’t iSync, but it does talk Bluetooth, which is better than nothing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t accept a bulk vCard with more than one name – it only sees the first entry in any vCard. So to back up my phonebook, I have to export each card individually from Address Book, send them all, and accept them individually on the phone.

This sounds like a hassle but it’s really not so bad – I’m only doing it for my whole phonebook once, after all.

However, there’s a problem: though it exports vCards correctly, it displays names as Surname Firstname – this is the order they appear in a standard vCard. My old Sony Ericsson T610 also used the vCard format correctly, but displayed names as Firstname Lastname, which is how I prefer to search. So: there’s got to be an easier way than editing each name on the phone, or completely messing up my Apple Addressbook (which also displays Firstname Lastname).

There is. Enter BBEdit.

So I survived. Just. Got to work at 4pm yesterday; got home at 11am this morning. There was an hour and a half of sleep in between, but you know, that’s not so much. Still, it all went pretty well; the magazine was up about 10am as predicted, and the weblog is chock-full of posts from authors all over the globe. Fun to maintain, too.

Anyhow, I went to bed when I got in and woke up about 5pm today. Which means I need to sort out some dinner before the girl gets home. I’ve got some photos of quite what it looks like to have been working all night having been awake the day before. Not pretty, that’s the answer.

So it’s the evening of the general election, and I’m still at work. Well, to be honest, I only arrived about two hours ago; I’ll be working through the night as a result of our extended print deadline.

What’s more interesting than my working hours, though, is that the New Statesman will be publishing to its general election weblog throughout the night; there’s a wide variety of perspective that it’ll cover, from foreign perspectives to updates from inside the office. Should be quite exciting – subscribe to its RSS feed to stay up-to-date!

Phew. That was an interesting day or so.

So I installed Tiger, and yes, it was very whizz-bang, but it also jammed the fan of my laptop on. The reason for this is basically Spotlight – even though it said it was done, it was then trying to index my Firewire drive (which has lots of backups and bazillions of files) and this makes it hot-hot-hot. The fact the fan took its time to turn off again is probably an OS issue that will be resolved; as it stands, it’s doing a lot better a bit into the install.

Next problem: every time I close it, it forgets my wireless network. I solved this problem by removing my wireless network from the list of “preferred networks” stored in Network settings; once I re-entered it once, it has found it every time. Not so obvious, but hey, it’s solved.

Final thing (that I was most proud of): enabling PHP support. It’s disabled by default on the OS, but editing /etc/httpd/httpd.conf I found I just had to uncomment two lines referring to mod_php4 and it all work swimmingly.

It’s dang nippy; a little shot of air into an old-ish laptop. Hopefully the fan issues will disappear once I let it finish indexing the Firewire drive. Tom Coates has a nice write-up of what actually using all the new technologies is like; in particular, a nice example of using Automator for fun and profit.

So I installed Tiger this morning. Lots of backup, and then Archive & Install.

It’s pretty nifty. Unfortunately, because my Hard Disk is “full of crap” Spotlight is taking ages to index it. And lots of processor cycles. To the point that when I tried to copy my “Previous Systems” folder off my main disk to my big fat external Firewire disk (at 4gb, should take ~ 4 minutes, right?) it offered me an approximate time of 12 hours.

Also, my fan is permanently on. I’m currently blaming Spotlight for this, too – even if I put the machine to sleep, the fan comes back on the moment I open it. Only about 40 minutes left, apparently, for Spotlight, so there is hope yet.

What I do know is this: it’s better than 10.2.8, that’s for sure. And Mail.app is lots better, though it may not look much nicer.

That’s my Mac Tax paid for the year, anyways.

Update: well, problems are arising. Not many, but they’re darn annoying. First: every time I sleep or restart the machine, it forgets what the wireless network is called. I have to type it in by hand – even though it’s in the list of favourites! Secondly, lots of fan action; turns off eventually, but it’s really inconvenient. I blame Spotlight. Hoping these things will be fixed by a point release ASAP. If anyone finds this via Google and has any suggestions… comment away!

Whilst digging around at work today, I chanced upon this New Statesman piece on weblogs written in October 1999. A little ahead of the bell-curve, then. And what a last paragraph:

“Blogs are never going to be big business and they’re not the future of the web, either. But I find that I visit them more and more because in the blogs you can still find that educated, anarchic spirit – rather as I imagine medieval universities to have been, full of wandering scholars – which once seemed the natural atmosphere of the whole World Wide Web.“

Tom Coates has redesigned Plasticbag. He’s worried about people not liking it; I say don’t worry. It’s a design that will support the longer blocks of text that Tom’s moving towards. It’s also a very pleasant site to read text on – too many people design sites badly for longer blocks of text, partly because they assume that everyone reads in RSS now. It reminds me a lot of Interconnected, another site that I love reading posts on (as opposed to merely from).

I’m also a big fan of the archives; perhaps the date-based stuff could be laid out better, but I do like the simple breakdown of each category.

I’m now a bit worried about the current look of Infovore; I’m still working out how to use the site, what sort of material will be posted on it, and how best to present that. It’s not even that I like redesigning; I just feel the content could be better presented. Tweaking, I think, could be the way forward.

I’ve been meaning to write up some of my WordPress-fu since I started playing with it. This is partly because the WordPress support forums are staggeringly unhelpful at times, especially to medium-skill users. (Note: this is not a flame or a troll; it is an issue I will return to at a later date. Whilst I like the product, I have several worries and issues with the community around it).

This is about the first big chunk of fiddling I did with WordPress, and makes it very useful as a more general purpose CMS, as well as if you have many categories on your site and want to display them all, at once, differently. So, without further ado: how to display multiple loops in WordPress 1.5.

A lovely weekend there, then; very quiet, very calm. No big surprises, but lots of lies-in (I think that’s how you’re meant to pluralise it), reading, and tidying stuff up. House looking a lot better now. Also, as the picture to the left testifies: we made meatloaf.

It was awesome. Not only did we make it (and eat it), but there’s still tons left over to make sandwiches with. So, I hear you ask, how do you make meatloaf?

It’s simple.