Jason Oakley : The life of an Aussie geek!

I didn’t sleep much last night. Felt sick all night.
I took a Valerian before going to bed and two hours later I was still awake. I took some Panadiene to see if that’d help and slept for about half an hour.
I lay awake for another hour and went back to sleep for an hour then woke up again and had more Valerian.
Spent the rest of the night mostly awake with spots of unconsciousness. It was horrible.
Eventually, I woke again around 7am and got up. I called in sick at work around 8:40am and tried several times to go back to sleep but it didn’t work.
I watched lots of cartoons to try and cheer myself up (still not totally over the incident from Saturday). Re-watched so much Futurama and some South Park and tonight, Shrek. I also watched Mythbusters tonight. That’s a great, fun show.

I went back to bed about 1pm and at some stage fell asleep for a while. I was awake around 2:35pm. Not sure if that’s because Sienna came knocking on the door or if I just woke up.

I didn’t feel like eating much today. At about 10:30am I had some plain toast with Philadelphia cream cheese on it. Didn’t eat much the rest of the day until about 5pm when I had a couple of reheated pork ribs with some coleslaw.

If I get some more sleep tonight, I’ll head in tomorrow. I think I will probably be right by then.

Blake was very well behaved tonight, so I let him stay up until 8:40pm. He didn’t even know it was that late

I think some of my Palm friends are cranky with me. Oh well, so be it. I couldn’t get what I wanted from Palm or any other Palm device manufacturers. I do see a bunch of other people heading to Pocket PC these days, though. Even one of my beta-testers said she’s getting rid of hers as she’s lost interest.

Speaking of beta-testers.. I’m considering redoing my ZigZag.Soft website COMPLETELY as soon as I find a good CMS. There’s so many around in various stages of complete-ness (is that a word?). Mambo is nice, but it seems all of the plugins are in alpha or beta status. e107 is nice, but the new version 0.7 has been In Progress for quite some time and has no ETA on completion. PostNuke and PHPNuke have more security holes in them than a er Swiss Cheese CMS (?) and Xoops/eXoops aka RunCMS doesn’t do it for me either. I don’t really like Drupal, so I’m still looking around.
I’d have liked to have replaced all of the AusPUG website with e107 0.7 if it will ever get completed! I could convert the Database to e107 and then more people would have more access and ability to post news and add links, etc. One day…

I have SO much to learn about Pocket PC programming. A friend of mine says it’s really crud to program, but so many people have managed it, so I think I will persevere.
Let’s see just how long before I get sick of this project, right? Huh? Huh? Everyone knows I change projects more times a year than there are weeks, but my interests change fast. Even I have trouble keeping up with myself

It turns out there are some people going to my Bangrocks Shop site and even a couple have registered accounts on there! Woah! I better get it updated at some stage. When I have time and CBF. Oh well.

I gave up on that freeware PHP editor called Syntext. It kept locking up when I tried closing files on a shared directory from my FreeBSD server. It’d take about 30 seconds or so to close. Now I’m using PSPad. It seems to handle the situation much better.

I also uninstalled SmartFTP. It kept asking me to register even though it was the free version. Pissed me off, so now I’m using FileZilla. Tomcat suggested that one to me a while ago. Looks like I had it installed for a while as when I ran it, it already had some settings for my old webhosts from long ago.

I’ve downloaded the free Microsoft Embedded Visual C++ IDE and compiler. I should be able to use this to program some PPC games. I had already started designing graphics for a new game for Palms, but they are designed for 320×320 and Pocket PC uses 240×320 for the standard devices and 640×480 for the VGA ones. I’ll have to redo some of it. I might start with something else first. Something simple so I can get used to programming PPC before I go onto somewhat more complex applications.

I just finished writing a huge post and when I hit PUBLISH I got a 403 Unauthorized error
Crap!

I’ve added lots of links from the original site, including a link to the original Bangrocks.com blog.

I think this is going to work well. I quite like the way this blog program works. Makes things a lot easier to see and use.

Hey! I also got rid of all that advertising! You gotta be happy with that! Nobody ever clicked on the links anyway. I get more clicks on my Google Adwords than I ever did on my Amazon links. I might take my Amazon links off all my websites. Well, that’s if I cbf…

Or is it “A new hope” ?

Time for something different. The Bangrocks blog I wrote myself needs a lot more features and I don’t have time to code them all, particularly when there are so many blog applications out there already. So, after much searching I’ve decided on this one. It is the first one I found which supports Podcasts which you know I use.
Once I get my new PocketPC I should be able to use it to do some good Podcasting. The problem with my Motorola A1000 is it saves files in it’s own compressed format, then I have to convert it to WAV and reconvert it to mp3 for Podcasting. This loses some quality, but the A1000 also has little skip bits where it doesn’t record while it’s saving the current bit to memory. This is the thing that annoys me the most.

We’ve just been resting today. Haven’t even felt like taking the kids to swimming. We will take them another time to do catch-ups. I will be taking some time off work soon and we can do it then. Hopefully before Blake goes to Sydney again.

Well, lots of things to update and configure on this blog. I’ll have to link to the old one so you can see the old entries.