Owens L'ill Slice of the Web

Wonderful! A crystal red shrimp carrying eggs in my 10L tank; look for the little ‘berries’ under her belly. I’m really rather pleased to see this happen in such a small tank. Now I need to think of how to get rid of the juveniles, at 3-7 euros each it may be worth feeding them up and selling them.

Click on the image for a better view, she will carry the eggs for a month or more before they hatch as minute versions of the parents.

Hectic weekend, 10 Miles running on Friday night in the Midzomernachtcross (Midsummer Night Race, not strictly held on the shortest night, but rather the Friday closest to it). It was a really good run held in near perfect conditions. I posted a good time: 1 hour 43 minutes and 43 seconds. Within seconds of my personal best time at this distance
Then on Saturday I had a dragonboat racing afternoon in Amlere; with the EHDC, I’m shattered! We managed to avoid the wooden spoon in the 2km race, which is quite satisfying.

Coppelia being lifted

I lifted Coppelia  yesterday and removed the keel. A hundred kilos of cast iron, pretty awkward to handle but lifting the boat was actually quite easy once I’d worked out the correct way of securing her.

The keel will now be renovated, it’s the last really big job before I can sail her for the first time in many years.

More photos in my gallery; here.

I’m so proud… I finally managed to add a block of random images from my gallery to the right-hand side of my homepage (You can probably see them now). I wasted loads of time playing with the wrong plugins to Wordpress for this. Finally I just created a new RSS feed on my gallery set to dynamically provide random imagesfrom the whole gallery site. Then I used the Photo Sidebar Widget to display the first three images off the feed. This plugin does exactly what I want with no additional baggage, all the other solutions I found were vastly overcomplex (WPG2) or buggy (External Gallery2 Image Block Plugin).

But! I had to modify it to work with Gallery2.3 on my system like so:

Edit file: (you can do this via the Wordpress inbuilt plugin editor if your system is setup to permit it.)

.../wp-content/plugins/photo-sidebar-widget/photo_sb.php

Find the following line:

case "Gallery 2 RSS Module, version 1.1.0":

And add a new line below it:

case "Gallery 2 RSS Module, version 1.1.0":
case "Gallery 2 RSS Module, version 1.1.7":

This allows it to grab a RSS feed from gallery 2.3 (the original line is for Gallery2.2). It totally failed to display any images for me until I worked this out, adding the above made it instantly spring into life.

The bandwidth is terrible, but it’s free, and the view of the coast of France is good.. though not deeply exciting.
Looks like they only open a few ports though, no SSH session to my server, and Instant Messenger (MSN) protocols are blocked too.. which is not so good.  Google came back in Swedish/Danish by default, but this is a Scandinavian owned ferry, and Google is no doubt detecting that the request comes from Maersk’s IT department.

Still, full cludos to Norfolkline for giving some access anyway.. and for not charging me when Belgian stupidity forced me to miss my booked crossing, they just smiled and put me on the next one.

Edit: On the way home I noticed another passenger using MSN (Windows live) quite happily (I didn’t peer too closely over their shoulder, but it was definately working for them) so maybe I caught them on a off day.. or aMSN on linux has particular issues.. I also had a meal in the restaurant and it was not exactly great value for money, SeaFrance is much better for food.

Off to the UK  for a few days, a good break for me and some family stuff to do too. Pretty happy with my Ferry ticket, 56 Euros all-in from Norfolkline, Dunkirk to Dover and back. I used them earlier this year too and it was a good crossing, I even had internet access on board

So, I just had a sudden message from an infrequent MSN contact.. It went like this:

Danger.. Phishermen at work.

Looks like a phishing attempt… no reputable site would ever ask for your MSN username and password.. The alarm bells went off for me immediately. I’m sure http://ImageStoriez.com/ is a scam.. Now who do I notify? :-S

My other concern is that this probably means that one or the other of us has had their MSN account or system compromised in order to send the initial IM to me in the first place. So who has the infected machine.. is it their end or mine.. or is it somewhere in between? Irritating stuff.. and all just because the world is stuffed full of antisocial greedy people and ruled by a profit at any cost motive.

Hummm.. Tomorrow I have the Fundarun. 10K, then another 10K on Saturday, wat leuk! . I hope I survive this.

Edit: Day later… Well, I survived the first (under an hour, not bad for minimum preparation). But my knee gave me some pains so I abandoned the AMC loop on Saturday and had a bath instead

In a moment of weakness I brought a 10L Dennerle nano cube today, it’s to house freshwater shrimps, and some micro rasboras.

Should be interesting, I think it will live in my bedroom, nicer to look at than my alarm clock in the morning

I’m really keen to see how the shrimp work out, they are totally fascinating, I spent far too long checking them out in the shop. It will be a few weeks before it’s set up properly, getting it stable with some plants, rocks and decoration comes first, then shrimp. The fish will follow later, once I’m happy with the shrimp.

What fun, started with Cava and ended late. I watched a friend playing his guitar on the corner of Nes and Grimburgwal, and things decended from there.

I’ve put a few choice pictures in my gallery;

Playing to the crowd...

Lots of Theme customisation has been done, but it’s not totally visible since the overall style has not changed yet, all the improvements so far are ‘peripheral’. There is a lot more to come.

I’ve been trying (and failing) to import my old weblog from Blogger.. Problems with Wordpresses import function driving me nuts.
Yippeee! my old blog is now restored!

Please drop by again

Probably my last posting via Blogger.com, No updates in over a year probably gave the game away. Lost some interest, but mostly just busy with stuff.

However.. I have a new website done now (well.. nearly, it needs a load of themeing) which is built around wordpress so I’ll be able to keep the weblog going. I hope to import this blog into it as a ’starting point’, and then flesh the site out a bit, but not too much .