Skip The Budgie

I had to share this:

like a spider and vanishing in the darkness there.
Then I got thudded and had a nice darkness of my own.
Feeling any better, Jim?
a distant voice said and I felt something

Just files for new Choke forum...

Attachment 1: Lensmans's brown-and-blue style (for classic)

Attachment 2: Dash's grey style for classic theme on Choke

I am moving, or at least trying to. That's why it's quiet.

...

...

*tumbleweed*

In technical news, I have this fantastic idea for Skip the Budgie but restrictions in Roller prevent me from doing it, so I finally decide to take the plunge and buy skipthebudgie.org through Joker.com and get an account with OpenSourceHost.com. My other site, which will be slowly demolished is written using Drupal, an open source CMS that I really like. Building that site taught me a hell of a lot about PHP and web sites in general, as has Skip The Budgie, so I'm confident that I can get my new site to look almost exactly the same as this, but with some considerable improvements.

This is why I've been so quiet lately - busy coding! I am especially pleased with the Audio Module that streams music with a funky play button. So expect ALL my tunes, both badly recorded and incomplete to be available very soon, you lucky people!

The big problem will be how to move all my content over into the new database, which I'm working on... Don't get me wrong, Jroller has been good to me, I just want more from my web site than this. More control, more flexibility. With Drupal (or similar), you can do anything. I don't intend to do quite as much as I attempted over at Slave to the Music - it'll still be *just* a blog - only much, much better.

So watch this space...

Where is my post? huh? huh? Where is it? I can see it but it's not there! There on the front page! That music one. Where is it? HUh? Huh? Stupid stupid stupid stupid PUNK! (when I'm trippin). Further inspection reveals that for some reason the publish time seems to have gone FUBAR so I'll put it back in. Don't know how that happened... ho hum...

OK, so I've been hacking my template to pieces again, you will see some changes soon, but importantly for now, thanks to Matt Raible I have made the titles of each story their own permalink, as well as the little '#' down in the comments bar, which seemed to have disappeared at some point. Because I know next to nothing about javascript even though this blog is entirely powered by it, I have to do a lot of searching to find what I'm looking for. Also in the works is a better rss feed (with comments!) thanks to Osbaldblog, which you'll notice appearing somewhere in the page...

I am most happy with a slideshow of my favourite photos wot I made by me, which you can see by clicking photos in the nav bar underneath Skip up the top there. Hit F11 on your browser, sit back and enjoy. (Thanks to Blogger Templates for the code).

I might even have a go at styling my entries according to category, especially when I begin to stick my reviews on here.

I don't know if you've noticed, or even care, but over the last few days there's been a consistent string of hits via Google from a search for 'Hijacker.Hostsfile'. This in itself isn't unusual, I'm sure I've talked about hijackers and trojans before, in fact I know I have - it's just that if you look at the search, Skip The Budgie is all down the page! I must have been pretty specific, but no - Google is indexing the searches and people are following the links, only to find that the only mention of 'Hijacker.Hostsfile' on my site, is down in the referrers list, because of the search they've just done. The bizarre thing is that none of these links actually lead to an article about 'Hijacker.Hostsfile'! So where did this insane loop start? *cue Twilight Zone music*

I just can't believe that me and that German site are the only ones who mention it at all, in the whole of the internet. Of course, now I'm writing this, it's going to annoy even more people because here is a story about it, which neither recognises what it actually is, or whether it is bad for your PC! Sounds bad, anyway. I'd try searching for 'hosts file hijacker' mate, you're more likely to find an answer!

If you use Firefox, I am sorry. I don't know why the layout is buggered. I have checked every single line of code and have validated the page a thousand times. There are no open div's, no extra closing tags - perhaps one of my clever javascripts is broken.

I only hope the problem will go away as mysteriously as it appeared.

Until then, you can still read this, so stop complaining.

Upgrade season is upon us! Well for me anyway. Currently I have:

• P4 1.6Ghz 400Mhz FSB
• 768Mb 266Mhz DDR SDRAM
• 2x 40Gb Hard Disks
• Liteon CD-RW 32x
• Maudio Delta 66 with I/O box
• MSI Nvidia Geforce FX5200 128mb

Now my Motherboard is quite old (QDI Platinix 2D) and the 400Mhz Front Side Bus is pretty slow. These days CPU's have 800Mhz, which means they can talk to the other bits of the 'puter quicker. There's things on the mobo (tech-speak for motherboard, ooh get me) for changing the FSB, but it's old and no-one really explains on the web whether I can use a higher FSB CPU or not. So the best CPU I can get that my motherboard can handle is 2.8 Ghz, which is pretty good anyway and shouldn't cost too much. Then of course, there's overclocking, but for now I am adding to and upgrading this setup with:

• Arctic Freezer4 CPU cooler + silent fan (review)
• Gigabyte Geforce 6800 GT 256mb (the one without a fan - silent, see?)
• Another 1Gb of RAM (so I'll have 1.5 Gb!)
• DVD Dual Layer RW+/-
• better, bigger hard disks (3 years is quite a long time to work for a hard disk)
• ...and hopefully a 2.8Ghz p4!

If you don't know what any of this means, it means GOOD, Very, Very good. Excellent, in fact. Of course I should upgrade my Motherboard too, but that's getting a bit too expensive... But at least I'll be able to play Battlefield 2!

Oh, and my music recording program - Sonar 4 - shouldn't get so upset when playing lots of tracks and effects all at once. It's not just about the game honest, this upgrade is well overdue!