Please take a second (because you rock so hard!) and update your link to my RSS Feed and if you're reading this site for the first time (you also rock!) take a second and subscribe. The good folks at feedburner rock as well!

As I've mentioned before I'm a proud, yet sometimes frustrated (see outages) VC2 account holder with TextDrive. Proud because of the company’s focus on open source projects, their flexibility, and overall transparency in the way they operate. To understand the full extent of TextDrive's (now a Joyent Company) transparency and free flowing casual conversation with it's customers one must spend time reading the forums, and in doing so you might run into little gems like this part of a reply from TextDrive and Joyent President Dean Allen regarding an upcoming specs sheet for VC members. Mmmm... artery blockage, and for the musically declined here's the ukulele tabs for Stairway.

Please note that external links below may have expired since the original posting of this article. If after repeated clicks a link will not open, what you are clicking on may not be a link to begin with, so stop clicking it. The author does not guarantee that jokes, pop culture references, limericks or biblical interpretation through dance will make any sense whatsoever. By no fault of the author, posted recipes may no longer taste like advertised, once frequent posts regarding an American President may disappear altogether, and margarine may turn out to be better for you than butter. The author also accepts no responsibility for readers who just don't get it, are not hip to, or those whom talk the talk but do not walk the walk. And anyone named Jerry, or who might look like or make a good Jerry.

This weblog may make reference to evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered. This weblog is not intended for medical purposes and should be kept out of the reach of children. If accidentally ingested seek immediate psychiatric help. If you are hungry have a sandwich, but this weblog does not recommend Subway's Chicken Parmesan as the chicken seems to be made up of a reconstituted animal substance that wouldn't make it into McNuggets. I'm all about their fresh toasted subs, but trust me on the mystery chicken meat.

By reading this you have agreed to laugh hysterically for 2 to 4 minutes slowly winding down into bursts of slightly delayed chuckles, catch your breath, wipe the tears from your eyes and move on with you day bookmarking this page for later reference.

My installation of Movable Type, recently upgraded to 3.2, has been a real pain in the ass the last few weeks, not allowing page rebuilds or allowing comments on posts. Everything is up and running now, thanks to the savy troubleshooting skills of my host, minus the offending SmartyPants plugin. If you've left a comment and it didn't show up feel free to post again, or just email me directly if you were asking a question.

As much as I love using del.icio.us, I have to admit I get a warm fuzzy feeling when my links are stored on my own server, and if something happens to them then well that's my own damn fault. My sorts weblog will basically be the same sort of content I posted using del.icio.us, interesting stuff that doesn't warrant extended commentary, but will allow me to add more description and alternate links. You can subscribe to the RSS feed here.

Looks like the move is complete, and everyone's browser (firefox right?) should now be pointing to my new server at Textdrive. I jumped on their VCII (hosting for life) plan so as long as they (and I) live longer than a few years it'll be worth it. Textdrive's defiantly not for the technically weak, no hand holding but you'd be pressed not to find quick help on their active community forum. I'm moving from a host that answered EVERY support ticket within 10 minutes, so I was a bit surprised to have a textdrive ticket go unanswered for more than two days, but realizing I had shell access last night made me feel a bit better. One thing's for sure -- they understand the problems people who publish on the web face and are working together with their customers on things like comment and referral spam. For example, on my old host the first day of the month there would be 300 plus bogus referral links listed in my statistics thus making it next to impossible to see who is sending legitimate traffic to my site. The first day's stats on textdrive show zero spam referrals. It all makes sense now, handle this crap at the server/host level not the account/installation level.

I've upgraded to the most current version (3.16) of Movable Type, and newer versions of Gallery, PhotoStack, and a few other plugins like MT-Blacklist 2.04 and Brad Choate's MTIfEmpty which helped in creating my cruft-free URL's. Which brings me to my next point. All previous individual entry links have been broken. Google hates me, and I'm beginning to believe there's a special ring of hell reserved for people like me.

Oh well, life goes on (read: google will recrawl soon). I'm still finding files I didn't copy across, in some cases entire folders, so any feedback would be appreciated.

I'm making the move to a new server so things might look a little fugly until everything is complete. Any new comments during this time may be lost, but if you make the effort I'll try my best to import them to the new server.

Update: Seems my registrar has locked my domain so I'll have to wait for them to free it up. I deserve a beer.
(nodding head in approval listening to the new Weezer album).

Update 2: dns servers have been changed, but it'll still take some time for everyone to be pointing to the new server. Beer has grown warm and flat and Make Believe ain't no Blue Album, Pinkerton or even Maladroit for that matter. It all goes down hill from Beverly Hills (which rocks (do people still say that? rocks?)). Maybe it just needs a few more listens.

Update 3: Bob's your uncle.

I've always disliked how my photos load in the browser, too choppy and it bugs me when the text gets shifted down the page. Looks darn unprofessional. Flash is cool, but a little out of my reach. The alternative, javascript. I'm getting ready to change servers (and hosts) so I'm having to go through and reinstall all the applications I use here, one being an updated version of Noel Jackson's slick PhotoStack. The current version (2.1b7 at the time of this writing) uses a script that gives a cool flash-like fade-in of your photos that I was able edit and use in MT. More info from the code author here.

(note to people reading via RSS reader, I can't get this to work in the feed so you need to open the post in a browser to see the magic.)

The above photo care of Philip Dyer (John Sypal and myself) was taken at the end of our photo shoot/trek from Kitasenju to Nippori on Wednesday. My film's sitting on the bookshelf, and will be getting on that real soon. John and Guy (1 and 2) have theirs up, with more to come.

And on another note, it almost killed me but this site finally validates (for now). Valid XHTML 1.0 transitional baby!

The average consumer is bombarded with something like 3000 advertisements a day, so I've always wondered why people would want to add to the noise and tag their own personal space (this case websites) with more advertising. I don't care if google allows you to customize the text and border colours of their ads, it still looks crappy, and the financial gain just can't be worth it. And I've also thought it kind of lame when people use paypal links on their sites asking readers to help pay for hosting costs and whatnot. I mean, I could think of a million other places to donate money other than someone's hobby of maintaining a personal website. That goes double for websites that just plain suck.

But on the other hand...

If you're absolutely bent on sending some of your hard earned funds my way I'll only say no once. After that I'll just have to recommend you buying me one of these (in silver please). And if you can pony up another $300 we'd also accept the larger Francis! Francis! X1 model. I'll even throw in the honour of my presence for an espresso beverage of your choice, though you must promptly finish your drink and leave, no chit chat. I'm a busy man, and I we couldn't possibly have much to talk about.

I used to check my site statistics faithfully every morning, that was until all the referral spamming started to hit. Until there's a simple way to compare actual site referrals to domains matched in MT-Blacklist I'm not going to bother shuffling thought all the junk.

For a little stats fix today I've been playing with MyBlogLog which provides realtime tracking of all outgoing links. All you have to do is add one line of Javascript to your code and it's up and tracking where all your visitors are clicking. [via 43 Folders]

If I knew switching style sheets was so simple I would have done it long ago. Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets (A List Apart).

If you're not, I suggest you take a seat and hold on to something solid. Pink, green and blue. Impressed are we? That's what I thought. Like I needed proof my web skills are years behind high school kids.

I spend a lot of time messing with this site, playing with this, adjusting that. Purely cosmetic mind you, the content is always the same old dribble, just different wrapper. I also understand many readers don't care about how a website looks, and that it can be inconvenient to open the site in a browser every-time to read comments that are not included in my regular full post feed.

Enter the whole enchilada feed. That comes with a hungry-man helping of full post with two new side dishes, comments and trackback. All in one convenient RSS feed the whole family can enjoy. (template from fortysomething.ca)

Update: It has come to my attention that I have neither eaten an enchilada nor would I know what one would look like. If anyone in the enchilada community was offended by my use of the word enchilada in a posting that had absolutely nothing to do with enchiladas or the enchilada consuming public, then please accept my sincere apologies. If it's any consolation enchilada does sound tastier than a 'ball of wax'.

I've been working on this redesign bits at a time for a few weeks, and would probably be doing it for a few more if I didn't force myself to just go with it and publish. I've tried to strip all non-essential text, graphic clutter and what not off the pages. I've also switched to justified text alignment, which gives it that chunky newspaper look and is bound to generate some odd looking spaced out lines. Both the about and links page need more time, but I wanted to get something up before we went away on holidays. Feel free to let me know about any broken links or odd behavior. Next up, validation. I think I found my New Year's resolution.

I sought out a gmail account a few months ago but never bothered using it. I use a paid email service called fastmail.fm which, in large part because of the attention gmail has gained, will now be providing 2GB storage space. Mind you this is for paying users but their feature rich webmail interface, ability to send mail from multiple "personalities" and IMAP is well worth the cost.

Anyway, if you're one of the five people in the developed world that wants, but doesn't yet have a gmail account I've got five invites I'd like to give away to readers of my site. So if you leave your name and a working email address you can be the last kid on the block with gmail. Takes three clicks to put an email in the trash, they keep your deleted messages for an "indefinite period of time�, massive potential for abuse, what's not to love?

Seems I've been living the double life without knowing it. I am Mark's smirking revenge. Either that or my evil twin Skippy has emerged yet again ---but on the internet this time, in the form of a blogger. *screenshot (36K png)

Update: Another one. I am Mark's complete lack of surprise.
*screenshot (100K jpg)

Last night I really did a number on my MT configuration, accidentally stripping my main user account of editing permissions on all but one weblog. Fortuantly I found a neat little tool called MT-Medic. A slick CGI application that allows emergency tasks on MT such as my issue. Defiantly one to bookmark.

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

No this isn't another one of those "Man I really hate Spam" posts but simply a note for family, friends, acquaintances and the occasional internet stalker that sends me email. I'm getting sick of having to sort through my Junk email folder everyday (oops) so I've decided to heighten the level of spam filtering and automatically delete detected spam or even have it just bounce back to the sender. If I have not replied to a message and either the message has been bounced back to you or you feel it might have been detected as spam simply resend the mail but try to make it well, less spammy.

For example; If you want to tell me about this great herbal alternative to Viagra that you've been using don't call it "viagra" as this usually results in a flag going up. Instead spice it up a bit. You know, call it V-i-A-g-R-a or mix in some numbers or something. Don't be lazy, There are 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell viagra people!

If you want to fill me in on a surefire investment you learned about try to refrain from using ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. I can't stress this enough people, it looks like your YELLING AT ME, and that tends to frighten the unsure investor.

Forget about all the whole "cheap online Canadian prescriptions" thing. I'm Canadian and I live in Japan so you�re really wasting your time on me. And puh-leeze just let me say the term "online" is so 1990's and makes you look a little desperate for adjectives.

That's all I can think of right now. So know this, just because I don't reply or your message is bounced doesn't mean I don't love you.

okay, I've imported all the entries and comments from my last weblog into this one. Why the hell didn't I do that to begin with you ask? I'm not sure why. I always wondered what that import/export button was for... actually I did once try to import a really old weblog of mine that used blogger and it went terribly wrong. very sad story indeed.

get my new feed (RSS 2.0) will full posts here.

http://www.vudeja.com/ is where it�s at!

Dear vudeja.com viewers (Mom, Julie, various stalkers, google traffic, and that guy in zimbabwe),

I have decided to bring an end to my current photoblog http://www.vudeja.com/blog and start up a new photo project by the same name �vudeja�. Instead of just changing the design for my current site I though it would be better to archive all my postings and photographs from the last 11 months http://www.vudeja.com/blog/archives.html in the original format and start from scratch.

But Why Mark? Why Why Why!?? Well for a few reasons.

1. Design. I felt that my current template was distracting attention away from my photographs, well at least for me it was. And the fact that many photographs were on each page distracted a lot more. Too many links, buttons, and I wanted everything to be viewable in one window without having to scroll down. simple and clean.

2. Time. I still want to post semi-regularly but the fact that I have recently switched completely over analog cameras means I need a lot more time to do this. Sure you may argue that digital is more efficient but I don�t believe efficiently has anything to do with it. Since when has efficiently been a factor in art? I mean going out on the lake with fishing rod, hook and bait is really inefficient if you just want to eat fish right? But that�s the thing, you don�t really want to simply eat the fish, you want to enjoy the process of waiting, hooking, landing and cleaning the fish. Hence the URL of the new site �enjoi�

3. Disk Space. One thing that my host will not let me upgrade is the disk space. So posting multiple photographs every few days tends to add up. I�m not interested in buying a new domain name just to acquire more disk space so the next best thing would be to post smaller photos. Of course the full sized photos are available for anyone that is interested.

4. Bandwidth. My host sets me up with plenty of bandwidth but if current trends continue my monthly bandwidth quota will be gone soon. This is mostly due to google images recent crawl of my site. I don�t like the idea of putting a paypal link on my site to collect funds for my personal website, but if you want to donate money send me an email and I�ll fill you in on my favourite charities.

Thanks again to everyone who checked my site periodically and commented on photos or items I wrote about. I�m not going anywhere, same email address, still in Japan just new URL. http://www.vudeja.com/

Mark

of the webcam. just thought it looked cool.

Just heard Masako got center seats for Matrix reloaded at Virgin Cinemas in Ebina for Saturday afternoon. Kick ass! I've been waiting too long for this. Wow Saturday is going to be a great day! I get to see an ultrasound of our baby in the morning and Matrix in the afternoon!

another side note, I am now in the process of moving about a years worth of postings across from my other server. I tried the MT importing function but did not work to my liking so insted of risking vudeja.com I thought I would manually re-enter all my other posts and edit the dates. So every time you visit my site you might see my archives getting larger going further into the past.