ElePHPant Haven

I turn 19 in this many weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds. Currently, I couldn't care less. Why should that state of mind change? Why should I care, at all, about entering some new inconsistent period of time?

I took a hiatus from church at the start of the year for a couple of months (until midway through April if I remember correctly). Reflecting on that period, it actually resulted in a higher proportion of Sundays that I actually enjoyed.

Now, I don't really see a point in going to church. As I'm on sound most of the time (rostered on every second week, plus the cover/filler guy and I get special events too), I can't really get into the praise and enjoy it. I have to try and restrain myself from being moved too much by the sermon, so I'm not incapacitated for the praise after the sermon.

I can partake in personal praise from my bedroom (in fact, I do that must of the time. iTunes is great) and get sermons I can take the time to enjoy and think over from podcasts.

Next, people will probably mention the social aspect, and coming together to be part of the community.

Let's see how that falls apart. In a normal service, I arrive sometime between 1630 and 1800. I pick a seat and wait for the service to start. If I'm lucky, a couple of people will have greeted me, with a potential conversation with Byrce before the service starts. If I'm not, I'll get a few waved greetings and nothing else.

During the service, I sit alone. I'm usually sitting before anyone else is, so it's their choice.

After the service, I used to try hanging around until the end so that people I would like to talk to weren't otherwise engaged. This got interpreted as me wanting a ride home. Go figure. So Matthew and Christian chat for a bit, with maybe one or two others, then I go home. Community fail.

These means the main reason I continue going to church is to do sound. Mainly because there's no one else willing. Seriously, this is the roster for June->September. Weeks I'm rostered on are green. Positions I'm rostered on or covered for are red.

I have a new shiny. It is called Shiny. That is all.

Making facebook better is really easy. Edit your hosts file with your favourite editor with root access (like sudo pico! (start the holy war!)) and add:

60.234.72.4	www.facebook.com
60.234.72.4	api.facebook.com
60.234.72.4	facebook.com

For non-windows computers, your hosts file is /etc/hosts. For windows computers, you're screwed anyway, so too bad. Try this though.

I've finally gotten around to making my URL shortener database driven, rather than mod_rewrite and mod_php driven. Next thing I need to do is add some stat whoring, but that can wait.

It's such a basic implementation, that I used cat and echo to open source the code and one SHOW CREATE TABLE query for the schema. Complete source code, including the database schema, is available here.

Thanks to this article, I will be upgrading this box to PHP 5.3.2 from 5.2.6, about nowish. This means things might break. Fun times!

See? Totally stoled from her.

Rules

1. Shuffle it up with your music
2. For each question, press the next button, and the title of that song is your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS
4. Put any comments in [brackets] after the song name

Yay for graph theory :)

I'm currently working on a site that you don't know about. Well, maybe you do. (Hi people that paid for my laptop?) But it's shiny. So you can have a screenshot, which some things removed so you can't see them. LIke the logo, which gives it all away.

I've finally stuck my blog under a licence other than the "this is all mine, don't use it" copyright that NZ law sticks it under. I've picked a CC-BY-SA licence, which means you can use my content wherever you want, including for commercial purposes, so long as you attribute it to me and any changes are also released under a CC-BY-SA licence. There's a link to the legal stuffs in the footer if you want to read the actual licence.

You can get a waiver from the licence if I grant one to you specifically. All that legal disclaimer stuff.

So, yeah, Italy came bottom of our group.

A comic from Cyanide & Happiness this time. Possibly explaining why I'm by myself most of the time.

So, New Zealand just drew with Italy. So current rankings in our group are:

#PAR: 4

#ITA, #NZL: 2

#SVK: 1

So, I went to the IOI last year, and took some photos while I was there. Well, those photos are finally available for public viewing on Flickr. I didn't want to have to name + describe everything twice, so waited until I had something that could upload them, maintaining that information.

I may get around to uploading Robert's photos sometime as well, but they're not mine, so I'll have to ask him if I'm allowed to. As they're currently not in iPhoto, and it was so long ago, they wont have descriptions, even if they do end up somewhere on the internet.

Something weird happened today. Now you can guess what it was. It was rather weird.