Yesterday, I made a post about backing up. A few hours later, Peppery, the server admin decided to upgrade my Wordpress blog to 2.5.1. Well what happened was instead of upgrading, he ended up deleting my blog off the server. He fucked up. To make it worse, he didn’t have a backup to restore my blog. Ironic how a couple of hours after I write a post about backing up, something goes wrong with my blog and there is NO backup!

At least all my posts and settings were in tack in the mysql database. He managed to restore my blog and theme and some of the plugins. I don’t have a clue what plugins are still missing but they can’t be important or else I would remember them. After he mucked around for a while, everything seems to be as good as rain. The only thing I am missing are PSP themes that were on the server. Lucky that I moved the pictures saved on the server to another host so they will be fine if anything was to happen, like this. Now I just need to restore the themes.

As you may not have noticed, my blog was updated to Wordpress 2.5 last week, thanks to Peppery. The only noticeable change is in the admin panel where is has been redone to be easier to use and look much nicer. It is taking a little bit of getting use to but after a while, I’m sure I will remember where they have moved things. For a new Wordpress user, the admin panel will definitely be easier to use but for an old user like me, I’m going to have to get fully use to it.

You may have noticed the lack of update in the past week or so. The reason for my absence in blogging is because I have been overloaded with assessments that were due. I had 5 different bits of schoolwork to do. One was a report for geography on the processes of building the new Carisbrook Stadium in Dunedin, which was really hard to do. I’d be lucky to pass because I had no bloody idea what I was rambling about. I also had a Statistics project to complete which was straightforward, just took a little bit of thinking and time to complete and write up. There was also some small bits of homework such as 2 pages of physics questions, some Computing tasks and also an electronics research project on transducers to be completed.

I have finished doing all assignments and hopefully my plate stays relitively clean for a while, especially during the holidays, so I can do what I normally do and not be tied down with homework and assignments to get done. Hopefully there is no homework for me to do over the holidays so I can have a relaxing break without having to even think about school or school work. I guess we will just have to wait and see.

Well it seems about time to write something in this blog. Last year, in my opinion, was a good year for my blog. 85 posts between October till the end of 2007, consisting of a total of 31,157 words. No I didn’t count them, I have a plugin. My fifth attempt seemed to be more successful than my previous ones, but in saying that, there are some people (Peppery) that have gone through many more without success. You might define success by the amount of readers you have, or even the amount of hits you get per month, but to be honest, success for me is keeping something alive, something which I managed to achieve with this blog last year.

Now that I know I can keep it alive, it is time to get some readers. A blog isn’t a blog without readers, but then again, is this a blog? Its really the rants and discussions of a seventeen year old New Zealander. I’m sure the 2 regular readers would agree that this blog is pointless and I should kill it, because there is no way on earth anyone would read my stupid writing. I am not going to kill this blog. It is not going into the pile of the other dead blogs that I and many others (TheSkorm) have. This is going to survive, even if I am my only reader.

What is in store for 2008 for this blog then. There is going to be a few changes, nothing big and noticeable. One of them is the less frequent posts. Last year, I felt that it was compulsory to post, just to keep this thing alive. I don’t really need to do that anymore because this is alive and the fire is strong. I will still post, but less frequently, and when I feel like it. This blog started to feel more like a chore than something to do for enjoyment. Blogging when I feel like it will put the fun back into it and make it seem less like a job and more like a leisurely activity. Also I felt that last year, the blogs were written in a systematic way. Everyday, every two days, six days a week. That is not going to happen because of less frequent posting, it will be when I want to do it and not at a set time or period.

Other than that, this year is going to be the same, except the unobtrusive advertisement at the bottom of my blog and tumblelog. If you have any suggestions or anything you want to me talk/rant about, do contact me. Peppery, you suggested more images. I hope you are happy with what I deliver. Lets see how this goes, also feel free to use the comments system to leave your opinions and criticism (be nice please.) To another successful year, cheers!

As you may have realized, my blog has been down for about a fortnight, on and off. Well I promise (well Peppery promises) that it won’t happen again anytime soon. Now I shall return to posting on a regular  schedule knowing that the blog will be up for me to do so. I am going to try for a daily post because I have the time to do that now that I am on holiday.

Well now exams are over and from Monday at 10:30am, I am officially on holiday, although my body and mind have been on holiday for a good two and a half weeks already. I managed to struggle though my exams without studying and we can see the results (or lack of) from this exercise. Lets hope I managed to fluke everything again like last year.

At the end of March this year, I left a service called Twitter. Today marks the day I return to the service because a lot of my online contacts use it and I have been following them for some time now. I feel it is time for me to participate with them on the website so tweeting commences on my original Twitter profile. I hope that this time I can stay a little longer, just long enough for the service to capture me in its net and not let me leave. We will see how this turns out.

And this is the first week of term four over. I though I wouldn’t be able to fit everything into my week but somehow I managed, even with the many obsticles. I have two more tv shows to watch and one more podcast to listen to for the week that that all my media consumed, for this week at least. Having no laptop and having a lot of other events, such at my other commitments as well as my grandmothers 80th birthday,  have been some distractions of the week and I will easily fit everything into a regular week. Because of the week, the posts here have been a bit weak. I promise a couple of post with more in them next week.

Onto another subject, I want to remind you all that this is a personal blog. No news here, just me and my life. If you are not interested in this, please do yourself a favor and unsubscribe from the feed. It sounds odd that someone is asking for people to subscribe, normally people are harping on for people to subscribe and such. To be honest, I don’t care about how many people read this, how many people subscribe here or how many people comment here. If you want to, you are most welcome. I don’t need people to criticize my posts , especially about spelling and grammar. If it bothers you that much, refer to what I said a few sentences back, I don’t need you commenting on grammar errors. If you don’t want to get over it and really must say something that is irrelevant to the topic of the post, email me.

With that out of my system, I will continue to do what I normally do. I hope to get my laptop back before Heroes, Prison Break and Chuck on Tuesday. I hate watching these widescreen shows on a standard monitor. Its amazing how much I miss my laptop. You don’t really realize how useful something, or someone is and how much they mean to you until you do not have them. This is how I feel about my laptop and I hope that she never has to part from me ever again. I miss you lappy!

Ten days ago, I posted complaining about VLC and one of the point mentioned was the bad quality of the video, more specifically, HD video.

I watched a H.264 HD video. I was disappointed with the quality becuase it was not as good as the quality Quicktime offered. It was extremely apparent when the podcast, Diggnation, displayed websites which were crystal clear and readable in Quicktime, but were slightly pixelated and harder to read in VLC.

I now retract hat I have said. The reason the quality didn’t look as good as it did in Quicktime is due to the fact that Quicktime opens the video in its original size whereas VLC Player scales the video down so all the controls and everything fits on the screen.

Quicktime makes the player adjust to the size of the video, in this case, HD Diggnation is 720p (1280×720). The resolution of my monitor is 1280×800 and what ends up happening is the player controls get chopped off. For me to control it, I have to move the player so the topbar goes offscreen. If I want to exit the video, I have to then drag it down. I can always put it in fullscreen and not worry about it but sometimes I want to do other things or want to be notified of events in the taskbar.

VLC doesn’t let it happen. It scales the video down so the player controls fit on the screen. The disadvantage is that you get loss of quality and a little pixelation due to it scaling the video down. This thing was, I didn’t realize thing until I accidentally put it into fullscreen and found that the quality was perfect and the pixelation gone. This is great, but I am a little disappointed in it. VLC didn’t tell me that it had scaled it down so everything would fit on the screen. When opening a video that is bigger than the real estate it has to work with, it should either prompt me and ask what to do, scale down or go fullscreen or otherwise alert me on what it is doing. Another thing is that 1:1 original size isn’t the original size, it has scaled it down and hasn’t told me. 1:1 original should mean that, the original size, and it should do that regardless of the space or at least give some sort of message.

I don’t think VLC is perfect but I have to admit, it’s pretty darn close. I suppose I am just a fussy person that wants things perfect and other people wouldn’t have issues with it. I will give VLC the award for best alternative player, especially for Quicktime, I have given up on that.

If you don’t already know, I have a Tumblelog hosted by Tumblr. I follow other peoples good tumblelogs, and people who have similar interests to me. I have recently been so annoyed and frustrated by two people I follow that it has resulted in me unfollowing them.

The first person I unfollowed annoyed me by spamming his twitter posts in his tumblelog. This results in about 20 post a day that consist of short messages taken from his twitter RSS feed. It is annoying because now my Tumblr dashboard is full of spam. Why would someone put spam in their tumblelog. If someone wanted to see your twitter posts, they would follow you there. There is no reason to move that into your tumblelog.

The second person annoyed me because I would see posts that they have reblogged off my tumblelog but they never sourced me. Everyone who has any kind of blog, whether its a full weblog, a tumblelog or even a microblog, they all source where they get things from. Its etiquette as well as common sense, well so I though. Unfollowing them isn’t going to stop them from not sourcing the people he gets content from but it mean I don’t have to see it, therefore can’t be that bothered by it.

So if anyone does these things, I am going to stop following them, whether it is on Tumblr, Twitter, a Blog or any other place online for that matter. Its annoying and frustrating! Don’t Spam and Source your posts! These things are so obvious but yet there are people that do it. I wonder how they would react if they were the one reading spam or the one that was having something they found or wrote and have that content used without sourcing!