I’ve got a podcast in the works (or, as I’m calling it, a podClast – just to stick with the geology puns). I’ve also got a few articles I’ve been working on for this site, getting closer to a state where I can post them on goodSchist.

So, if you’re interested in geology or science in general, take a look at goodSchist. It’s good shit.

Sourced from Boing Boing. The manufacturer is the French company Smarin Design.

I mean, fair enough, it’s their content and they own the copyright. But it’s a daily news show of which you can’t buy DVDs. it’s not like they’d be losing much business, if any. But hey, if Comedy Central want to be a bunch of cunts, no worries. I’ll just have to “pirate” the show in another manner.

I hate spam.

Hey, bro, what the fuck crawled under your floor and died?

I’d be speaking with marvellous wit, tempting your mind’s eye with a poetic play of prose and that sexy deep voice of mine. But no. I’m speaking literally here. Something, I am guessing a rat, crawled under my floor boards and proceeded to shuffle off its tiny mortal coil, leaving behind a haunting odour which could only be eloquently described as “a mixture of jockstrap, compost pale and shit”.

That’s what my room smells like.

You’d imagine living on a floor directly above a butcher, I would have been positively accepting of the smell of decaying flesh. Alas, for all the nights of being awoken by the glittering sounds of knives being sharpened and meat hooks being hung, I have only grown accustomed to the smell of the meat-smoking facility “out back”. And as I sit here at 2am, following a previous night’s sleep totalling 3 hours, finishing a website that has to be done right now, I can only imagine how peaceful it would be to be snuggled up, listening to the rain fall gently outside as I laid rotting under the floorboards.

So, since Opera make a free, ad-free version of their browser for OS X, and since I’ve had it insalled for the past few months owing to various web development, I’m going to give Opera a full “go” as it were.

I found a neat page of Firefox extension equivalents in Opera, and it turns out most of my needs are filled in Opera by default. There’s even a user stylesheet for hiding and selectively playing flash, which is a biggy for me, what with all the Youtubing I do. The only thing lacking is a true equivalent of the web developer extension, which is essential for my various tom-dickery in the web design and layout sphere. But to be honest, I don’t hate Firefox, so a flick back to it for any web development is no problem with me (especially with QuickSilver making launching so quick).

As for daily browsing, i welcome my faster, less bloated web browser to the forefront of my web experience, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

This is the music video for Weird Al Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy”, and it’s the funniest and coolest thing I’ve seen in a very long time. I’ve been a Weird Al fan since I was about 8 years old, so it’s great to see he’s still kicking some wicked parodies and keeping up with the current culture of nerdcore and the internet.

I should probably pimp my YouTube favourites page at this point, since I keep a lot of videos I like in there, so if you’ve got a few hours to waste, have a browse through there.

You can browse around Mars in elevation, infrared and visible light modes and see how our tiny neighbour and last of our solar system’s terrestrial planets, looks. Keep an eye out for roads, spaceports and scientific stations popping up over the next 1,000 years.

I’ll be making more changes and adding a few things here and there over the next day or two, but overall, this is it. Feedback would be appreciated : )

The only reason I do it is as a job is to make cash, and because I’m reluctantly good at it. As I make my way towards my MSc in Geology, I keep dreaming of a day where I won’t have anything to do with making web pages, cutting new CSS layouts or having someone saying:

I want this site to be a bleeding edge tour de force of the best the net can offer – here’s a jpeg of what I want it to look like, and I’ll pay you $100 – the deadline is tomorrow

And being so desperate for cash, that I’ll take it.

Granted, I have a few projects from people I have the utmost respect for, and I’ll gladly work for them while the going’s good, but in the end, I’m moving on from this life of margin and padding problems and one day I’ll make my money using my brain, studying meteorites.

Even though WordPress is awesome, it does feature some rather frustrating limitations on displaying things in certain ways, so I took it upon myself to fix the date format and this is what’s involved;

1. Edit your wp-includes/templates-functions-general.php file, and look for the get_archives function (line 298 in WP 2.0).
2. At the top of the function change the the line “global $month, $wpdb;” to “global $month, $month_abbrev, $wpdb;”
3. In the same function, find and change the second line that reads “$text = sprintf(‘%s %d’, $month[zeroise($arcresult->month,2)], $arcresult->year);” to “$text = sprintf(‘%s %d’, $month_abbrev[$month[zeroise($arcresult->month,2)]], $arcresult->year);” (line 343 in WP 2.0)

And you’ll be left with smaller, nicer looking archive month names in the menu while keeping the longer names when the archives are called for within the page’s content.

Yay! : )

As a person who was more concerned with things working exactly as I wanted them to, I installed Gentoo Linux – a distribution you download and compile specifically for your machine. Gentoo has a lot of packages in it’s online catalouge. Tens of thousands of programs. Basically, if it compiles on Linux, you can install it in Gentoo from the commandline.

Over the past year, I’ve been using Macs at school and work, and Linux at home. I like OS X. It Just works. And it’s because things just work in most computer situations for me, that I’ve become annoyed and irritated with the shear amount of time I have to spend making my Gentoo box run. I’m sick of writing conf files, having old conf files not work with newer version of programs, or caring which driver is in charge of outputting sound to my headphones. Seriously, I have more important things to do these days.

So, today I’ve decided to ditch Gentoo and give Ubuntu Linux a try. I hear it’s good, and they seem to have built the system on a good philosophy;

Ubuntu is a free, open source operating system that starts with the breadth of Debian and adds regular releases (every six months), a clear focus on the user and usability (it should “Just Work”, TM) and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of support for every release.

So it’s built on Debian (which is hardcore), has a good professional backup crew making sure things keep ticking, and it just works. Let’s see how this works out.

Fare thee well Gentoo. You were good while I cared.

Given the opportunity, I simply had to inscribe some of my favourite NIN lyrics;