milliAmp

I am incredibly and hopelessly addicted to the Panic! At The Disco album A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out.

I’ve had the album for a good month or so now and have been listening to it constantly. Apart from the totally upbeat dance rhythms, I like the fact that words like “yeah”, “nigga” and “my bitches” aren’t all that common in their lyrics unlike the great majority of songs on C4 (New Zealand free-to-air music television channel).

One thing that I like that gives Panic! an edge over Fall Out Boy for me is the vocal talent and dynamics of the songs. Damn he can actually sing; does anyone know if he was singing broadway style before joining the band?

My only [minor] gripe is that the lyrics are sometimes hard to distinguish from simply listening to the songs. This comes about as the use of not-so-frequently used words and puns in their lyrics make some word choices not so obvious. Alas, the lyrics are included in the cover of the album. Since I compared to Fall Out Boy up there, I’ll also say that Fall Out Boy’s lyrics don’t seem to have the same vocal clarity that Panic!’s do.

Anyway, I don’t really have a favourite or worst song, I love them all, they don’t seem to be getting old yet either. My most-played playlist at the moment is sitting with 28 songs, Panic!’s album, Broken Dreams compilation and the Fall Out Boy album From Under the Cork Tree.

Hi everyone, my name is Alex and… I am emo.
Y’all knew it, now I’ve said it.

Panic! At The Disco on the web:

• Official Homepage
• MySpace page
• Wikipedia Article

I have yet to see the movie “Click” but either way, I want his remote. Now. kthx.
I do believe I am almost at saturation point as to hours per day vs hours of work to be done in said day.

I’m also dreading the size of the power bill for next month, I have this feeling it will be at least double our normal. Damn cold weather and stupid crawling bugs.

Grain mites increased power-usage in three ways:
* Vacuuming the pantry 5 times
* More lights on in the kitchen looking for them
* Dehumidifier on to get humidity levels down too low for them to breeeeeeeeed.

Ooooo, also, I got my new uniform for work yesterday. It is all bright and fresh and has random vertical yellow lines on the sides. The fleece jacket we were given looks warm, we shall see if it is so on Sunday, when I work next.

It does appear that yesterday I purchased a small laser printer. They retail for about $178 so we’re talking small, low-end laser printer. Its the Brother HL-2040. According to the reviews, photo printing quality is sketchy at best (even for a black and white laser). I just printed a high resolution photo on it and the only thing I noticed was the shadows just out of focus are blotchy, the actual foreground quality I thought was pretty damn awesome. This is of course from someone who has never printed a high resolution photo on a black and white laser before.

Either way though, I didn’t buy it for photo printing, that’s what my Epson Photo R210 is for. It is really nice to be able to print text faster than I can get up and walk to the printer (save warm-up time if it is in standby mode), I pumps out pages at about 22ppm and damn the text is crisp.

Aimee’s Canon which we’ve used for printed text up until now has some blocked nozzle which the printer can’t clean by itself and if it is the heads that need replacing it may not be worth it considering new printer prices at the moment, anyway, the laser was affordable and it is mine and fits on a desk and is better at printing text than my Photo printer by a long shot.

I’m happy with my purchase. Setting it up was a breeze as well, unplugged Aimee’s Canon from the Airport Express, plugged in the Brother, installed the MacOS X drivers from the supplied CD and that was it, Bonjour really is that great, up pops the printer under Bonjour printers in seconds.

As an aside, I pumped up the resolution to print the photo and maxed out the RAM on the beast, unlike other lasers I’ve seen (albeit much older) instead of failing to print and flashing random lights it printed the document fine and then printed a page telling me the printer had run out of memory on the job and had to downgrade the resolution to get it out, I thought it still looked ok so I can’t wait to print something at 1200dpi instead of having it pushed back down to 600dpi.

Recently Aimee and I have had a bug problem, or ‘mite’ problem. Grain Mites is seems. The problem with these things is their size. They are infinitesimally small, like a piece of moving dust.

They were only detected when the dust I thought was on a porridge box in the pantry appeared to be moving on second look. I decided to set up my digital camera and take a few frames to see if I was just going batty or if the dust was actually moving. It was. Anyway, after much intarnetting, I decided to clean out everything, I vacuumed the pantry and all items in the pantry 4 times and the 5th time I decided to go the whole hog and use soapy water as well, getting all the crevices and everything. Meh, anyway, long story short, they’re still around (that was 3 weeks ago) and our pantry is in two piles of boxes in the lounge [one possibly still infested pile and one 'newly purchased goods' pile].

They grow best in high humidity so I bought a dehumidifier and have been using it a lot lately, ’tis good for other reasons including easier to heat rooms and no condensation on the windows in the morning.

Anyway, I finally got around to compiling a few pictures of the buggers using macro-mode on my camera. These particular ones were on a wine bottle, I don’t exactly what they like about the wine bottle but whatever.

I also made 3 gif animations of the buggers, here is the first. Unfortunately it is only a few frames long:

The others are larger in file size:
* bugs2.gif [249kB]
* bugs1.gif [979kB]

This is an ongoing saga. 

Wow, massive thunderstorm this morning, had rolling thunder crashes which lasted for about 15 seconds a time. ‘Twas awesome, lots of rain too. I’m finally back in the black after being in the red for 2 years, which is always good, now I just have to keep it that way >_>.

Haven’t listened to it yet but the cover of the new Nelly Furtardo album looks pretty striking, it arrived a couple of days ago at work and it caught my eye straight away, we’ll see if it hits number one next week.

Aimee and I decided to catch up on films so we rented out 6 movies from the video store. So far we’ve watched “The World’s Fastest Indian”, “Chicken Little” and “Walk the Line”, still have “Flight Plan” and “Corpse Bride” to watch. We some how managed to miss all of the above at the movies, too many good ones in too short of a time with too many other things going on I guess. Anyway, I still need to see “Poseidon”, I was gutted when it disappeared from the movies faster than I could find time to go and see it, I shall wait for the DVD instead :’(.

Anyway, food time! Then lecture, then work. Meh, at least one of those will be fun.

So, my domain has been updated and has obviously propagated and everything is set to go, I’m having the same trouble with emails as Tom, can’t get my new domain to be picked up, I’ll give it another go after my lecture this morning.

Anyway, time to get ready!

So it is back to Uni this week, fun fun. This semester its “Advanced Graphics and Multimedia”, “Digital Libraries” and “Software Design”. All level-4 papers, which means if I pass all of these I’ll only have papers of a lower level left for next semester.

Strangely, our front door won’t unlock from the outside any more, it is a ranch slider and the lock turns easy enough it just doesn’t unlock the door. The landlord came around today to check it out (he works with locks as his job) and he’s sending a locksmith around soon to get it sorted.

I bought a new domain, “milliamp.org” it appears my hosting company doesn’t respond to “non-urgent” tickets in the weekend or something as its been 20 hours since I sent the email to get the domain added to their name servers. Other than that, it is set up at the registrar and propagated from that side and my virtual host is set up and ready to receive traffic. I’ll be removing this alias in the next couple of days, so this address will be a redirect instead.

Also 3.5Mbps intarwebs speed is better then 2Mbps, noticable. Apple Software updates download at around 440kB/s (which [awesomely,] is very close to 3.5Mbps).

Anyway, back to work. I have a website to make (for work). The client has just asked for us to add in more than the original specification so that means more money and more time. YAY!

First lecture tomorrow >_>. Fun times.

I installed WordPress 2 last week and decided to have a play around with the capabilities and see whether it would be a feasible alternative to my custom CMS which is missing a few features (mainly any blogging capability).

I decided to see if I could port my current site’s visual style to a WordPress theme and instead of starting from scratch, I decided play around with K2. It turned out to be surprisingly easy. The fact is, K2’s DOM Tree was almost exactly the same as the DOM tree for my site. The differences were mainly around the fact that I’d used ID attributes for my main content divs and K2 used classes, simply fixed, took about 10 minutes to complete and now I have WordPress in my original theme.

I’ll probably go back through later today and reinstall the K2 theme and just change the stylesheet instead of what I did which was edit all the files to change the classes/ids around.

I’ve seen a couple of issues so far, one is that the comment box stretches right out past my container div. The other is that I’m not using any styles from K2 so there aren’t any nice things happening with quotes and lists etc that K2 had.

Something I noticed about Themes in WP is that you can almost totally forget about the page content when you’re messing around with the ordering of divs and each file is quite independant, finally being brought together in the template files. Nice.

Anyway, I intend to actually blog to my site, I’ve found a WordPress-integrated wiki which may serve as a replacement for my ‘Resources’ module, the search is a little better than I had mine.