Dan Makovec’s blog

Arnie’s Answers

Matthew recorded some highlights of an interview with Arnold Schwartzenegger here. What a fascinating insight into the type of personality that it takes to run for politics in California!

Now it’s the UK’s turn

It seems this country is determined to keep up with the US in terms of everything. Tonight, right in the middle of rush hour, the London power grid failed. The tubes stopped running, traffic lights stopped working and everybody tried to get home.

We had one further complication to add to the problem: today it rained. I mean, it *really* rained. It was the first time it had rained in over a month, and it seriously made up for lost time.

I live 10 minutes by tube from work, but it took me nearly 2 hours to get home tonight, the result of two buses and a lot of walking. I would have walked the whole way, but it was so wet and windy, and I’m still recovering from my cold last week. By the time I got home, I had started coughing so heavily that I skipped the gym. It’s times like these when I really miss home, and I think about pulling up stumps and getting on the next plane out of here.

Bon Voyage guys!

Two of my best friends, Bron and Adrian, set off from Adelaide on Saturday, on their European holiday. I look forward to hearing all about their adventures in parts of the world that I can still only dream of visiting! Have a great trip guys - can’t wait to see you over here on November 2!

Locally, another good friend, Dana is leaving us after one and a half years in London and returning to Germany to study. I’ve known her for about 8 months since moving here and will miss her dearly. Still, it gives me a great excuse to go to Germany now!

My chair is missing

OK, I *was* in a good mood, until I got into the office. I’ve discovered that some f***wit has stolen my chair. I mean seriously, who does that? If I find them I’m going to kick them in the nuts.

Long weekend

I love four day weeks. In fact, I try to get as many as I can. This is my second one in a row. After being sick last week, we had a public holiday yesterday for whatever reason (nobody seems to know), so I’m staring down the barrel of another short one this week.

Not a bad weekend either! Friday night was Dana’s birthdy bash down at TGI Fridays in Covent Garden. In true American tradition, the food was served in enormous portions. But damn, it was good! I ordered a steak and shrimp fajita, which got delivered to me on a 3-storey platter - tortillas on the bottom in a little tortilla box with a lid, steak, shrimp and fried onions in the middle, and tomato, sour cream and guacamole on top. *yum* After dinner we went around the corner to the Porterhouse where a band were doing decent covers of a mixture of songs from Elvis to Coldplay - all with a unique style that I really liked.

Everybody kept staring at me and asking if I was ok - the smoke was making me cough a little, but they had good airconditioning in there that cleared most of it up. I was just at the end of my brief cold and coughing up the leftovers, so I probably looked/sounded worse than I was. Then again, maybe they thought I was particularly ill because while they were chugging back pints and rums, I was sipping ice water the whole night. Apparently an Australian without a glass of something alcoholic is just not right! It was pretty hot in there, and soon everybody was dropping ice down everybody else’s shirts and having a great time. We went home about 11.

Saturday, Brian and I hung out and did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Yep, I’m serious - NOTHING! Not a peep! No shops, no clubs, no movies, no parks, no walks, no books - no nothing! It’s the weirdest thing - I don’t think I’ve ever done nothing before. I’m the type of guy that is always on the move, or planning his next move. Brian made a comment about the fact that I seemed eager to do something and yet could not name it. I think I might be addicted to doing stuff. Nothing in particular, I just need my fix of “doing something” to keep me happy. Doing nothing was like going cold-turkey from a drug addiction or something - a really weird phenomenon.. I’ll have to try it again some time, when I haven’t got anything on. Saturday night I sat on the laptop until about 3am and taught myself how to use cascading stylesheets and nested PHP. I made really good progress too - not very long to go now for my site!

Sunday I went to Ed’s at Raynes Park for a barbecue. It was a great afternoon, just Ed, Marissa, Dom, Brett, Ed’s two kids and myself. We took the couch outside into the garden (hmm garden’s not really the word - try quarter acre of unkempt 5 foot high grass and nettles with occasional rusting car-body and/or old tire thrown in for character), sat around, ate and chat.

Then we decided to go throw a frisbee - until somebody remembered that we didnt’ actually have one. We settled for cricket… but didnt’ have a bat or ball. But we managed to find an old worn out raquet ball that didn’t bounce too much, and Ed ripped a slat off of one of the flatmates’ beds to use as a bat. We went down to the local oval, stole a “men at work” road sign to use as a wicket, and played for a few hours. I started off pretty badly, but after a few ducks managed to whack a few 6s so was happy. My shoulder’s still too weak to throw a ball hard, but I manage some successful spin bowling and even caught one or two lobs. Brett ended up driving some of us home around 11.

Yesterday I went to the Notting Hill Carnival. Basically it is (or was until this month) Europe’s largest street carnival, with just over a million attendees. There were lots of floats and dancers, a lot of loud music and an insane number of people just filling the streets. It’s basically a huge Caribbean festival with heaps of reggae and rap, and more than the usual amount of grass smoking. Pretty full on and very colorful. I just dropped in for a few hours with Nick, hung around at his friend’s place for an hour to watch the floats pass by, then went home. Though it took me well over an hour and a half to get home. It’s held in a place that’s normally 15 minutes by tube up the road, but in true English tradition, London Transport closed all the nearby tube stations in the name of crowd control, so I had to walk all the way up to Paddington station and tube back home from there. Not really my cup of tea, but entertaining none the less!

Overall, a bit of a fun weekend. Now to try and figure out this bug I’ve been hacking at for a week…

New site on the way

After getting home from the doc’s last night and being given a completely clean bill of health apart from my cold (just as well, considering invasive tests and the amount of blood-letting they subjected me to last week), I started playing with my old friend, Movable Type.

I’ve installed it on my new web server, and when I’ve finished setting up the site I’ll be moving my blog over there and hopefully auto-mirroring it onto LJ. I’ve installed a bunch of plugins and made a few hacks to the MT source code to add a bunch of new features, including auto-emoticons, smart text, mood/music fields (a la Live Journal) and various other bits and pieces.

Once you actually figure out how CSS’s work (I’d been putting it off for years, but once I actually sat down and looked at it it only took 20 minutes to get it licked), and jump around MT’s admin system, you actually see how powerful the combination really is. I’m going to use it for complete site content managment, which means no more dicking around with HTML just to add a new paragraph to my CV page for example. I just have to squeeze maybe an hour a night into working on it for the next week or so and all will be ready, and if the Dreamweaver mockups are anything to go by, pretty cool looking! With all the disk space I’ve got, I’ll be putting a lot more photos online now. PHP is also going to save me a lot of effort. This is the most fun I’ve had playing with computers in years! (I know, don’t say it - geek)

Feeling a bit better today after working from home yesterday. Still got a bit of a cough though. Another of Ing’s friends, Christina, arrived last night for a couple of days stay. She’s pretty cool and we get along well. Living in Barons Court, you certainly get to meet a lot of interesting people!

Dana’s got a birthday party on tonight at TGI Friday’s. She’s only here another week before returning to Germany to study. I’m going to miss her a lot Still, at least that’ll give me another reason to visit Germany!

Good bye obese bird

After 4 years, I’m saying goodbye to an old friend. My domain, fatcanary.com.au, will cease to be any more than a DNS record after this Friday. We had some good times, but we’ve decided to go our separate ways.

I’ve finally got the domain i’ve been wanting to get for years - makovec.net - for $10.95 US and got a really good deal with TCH. For just over $50 US a year I get all the web space I need (500MB), unlimited mailboxes, mail aliasing, external forwarding and SpamAssassin control, Webmail *and* IMAP, full Perl and PHP for my up and coming new site, and as many MySQL databases as I like. Plus there’s lots of other free goodies which I’ll probably never use (e.g. message boards and shopping carts, anonymous/secure FTP servers), but it’s nice to know they’re available.

From the time I ordered everything to the time the domain had propagated back as far as my BTOnline account the total duration was 14 hours. So far so good. Thanks to Prashant for putting me onto them!

Hanson bombshell

Wow! Pauline Hanson and David Ettridge have just been jailed! Hopefully this puts a sorry chapter in Australia’s history behind us.

First Segway sting!

I got a chuckle out of this Register article about the first Segway theft to be prosecuted by police in the states. Don’t forget to click on the link for the video of the cops arresting the thief for the offence outside Starbucks - complete with Bad Boys soundtrack

I’m going down

Here we go again.

First it was the coughing, then the sore throat, now it’s the runny nose and congestion. What the hell is it with me and London? We’ve been out of our heatwave for approximately 4 days (it’s only 21 now), and I’m back feeling miserable again.

This happens every time I have one of those life changing moments - like moving house, or getting a new job, or falling in love…