Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

netdiver finally has an RSS feed I say finally, but they may have had it for months, but I stopped reading it because … err.. they didn’t have an RSS feed

so the @media 2005 conference came and went without me. I’ve read some write-ups and looked at the pictures on flickr, and although it looked good, I didn’t get the missing out feeling I got about SxSWi. I have to admit that this has little or nothing to do with the content of the conference, but more that the appeal to me is really the geek socialising and - hate to say the word - networking that goes with them, and the idea of doing that in the various bars and restuarants of downtown Austin, Texas appeals more than doing the same in London. Because i’ve been to London loads of times, there’s just no novelty involved.

there seems to be a sort of "standards geek" celebrity occuring for the main bloggers/authors/designers involved in these events. some of them giving talks, some of them just hanging out, blogging and taking photographs…

I haven’t posted on this page for some time, in fact i’d forgotten that it existed at all! The laptop now has a dead screen and no battery, and I really only keep it as a backup. Last week I installed ubuntu linux "hoary hedgehog" and it went on fine - I think it even recognised the sound card, but i’ll get back to you on that, as I didn’t have any sound files to test it with.

as expected it didn’t recognise the pcmcia network card, but as i’ve got that working before on other linux distro’s i’m confident that it I can get it to work.

I took an export of a plone 2.0.5 site from a win xp pro machine and tried to import it into a fresh plone 2.0.5 on a win 2k machine. it failed with following error:-

com_error: (-2147221005, ‘Invalid class string’, None, None)

I then tried copying data.fs over instead and this worked but on viewing the site certain plone help center items that used word document file upload for the content failed with the same error.

googling around I found references to win32 and com and general office related references. so I tried installing office on the windows 2000 machine, and now it works.

i’m no windows/ com expert but I guess it is related to office upgrading the com "stuff"

I decided to sign up at flickr and have a bit of an experiment. I’m going under discipleofsketch (a reference to my old "skate crew" back in the daze). I’ve hardly put any photos up, as I was just seeing with how it works really - trying out an iphoto plugin. so anyway I uploaded a few skate ones and had the idea of starting a middle age shred tag. I then went onto the forum and encouraged other people to do the same, as a central place for people to upload stuff. I love the way flickr creates friendly urls for views on specific tags and members, e.g photos tagged with the middle age shred tag (middleageshred) can be viewed at http://flickr.com/photos/tags/middleageshred/.

Another cool feature is that it generates an RSS feed for each tag and person too

I nearly spat out my coffee… as usual went to the "usual suspects" tab, selected "Bloglines" and instead of my usual alladins cave of new information that I don’t need to know, gathered from websites I wouldn’t ususally bother to look at, I get this messge:-

Hi,

I’m the Bloglines Plumber. Bloglines is down for a little fixer upper. We’ll now be back at 3 Am Pacific Time. Bloglines will be all better when I’m done with it.

Thanks,
The Bloglines Plumber

why you…… well that’s all very well mr bloglines plumber, seeing as you provide the service for free, but where just where am I going to get my surplus information fix from until then? Do you expect me to actually visit all those websites? do you expect me to even remember which websites I read on a daily basis? Do you expect me to put up with proactively visiting websites on the off-chance that they might have updated since I last looked, rather than sitting back and letting you check them for me and feed me all that lovely information? How am I going to manage until 3am pacific time (whatever that translates to in GMT)?

I’ve been seeing loads of media hype about E3 (the games expo, not the bristol digital media agency of the same name, where I used to work a few years ago, coincidentally), and I feel completely indifferent to it - i’m just not into games. This goes back to childhood really, I was never into ballsports preferring "action-sports" such as riding my Raleigh Strika over old car tyres, and although i’ve spent a few hours over the years playing computer games on various devices ranging from an early atari console to a zx spectrum, I currently can’t get excited about them, which is just as well really, given that I don’t actually have enough spare time to do the things I am enthusiastic about…

So I decided to treat myself to a coffee in Rocatillos, and am taking the opportunity to try out StreetNet <- I would post a link to their homepage, but oddly can’t find it! I’ve only just got reception as i’m a bit up the hill from the official zone, but after being diverted to a questionnaire it let me on the web.

The questionnaire was quite amusing as I had to tick "other" for nearly everything as it didn’t include checkboxes for "blogging geek" or "blogging skateboarder celebrating one year of skating to work"

I suppose I should also be celebrating one year at netsight, seeing as it wasn’t a coincidence about the skating work starting at the same time as the new job. I should also get myself into work (about 1 minute round the corner).

tomorrow it will be exactly one year since I first skateboarded to work - I may celebrate with a veggie breakfast (or at least a coffee) at rocatillos, like the first time. I think i’ve only actually had breakfast there about 3 times in total, which is just as well, because at about £5 a pop, I would have spent somewhere in the region of a grand over the year if I had been in every time I commuted to work atop my boardskate…