Saturday, March 22, 2008

I was about to slightly repremand a friend for not updating their blog recently, but realised that would really be far to hypocritical from me.

So. OK. Now I've updated mine, I can go winge at them....

Maybe not.

I've kind of given up on those wretched photos for now. I'll try again sometime. Maybe. Seriously, I uploaded them about 4 times. Those photos just *dont* want to go online. Weird.

We've been out sailing a few times. It's cool. I love it!

I have some photos of that too.

I re-installed my comptuer. Again. I took it apart, and put a new hard-drive in. Replacing HDs on iBooks is a *seriously* over-the-top procedure. about 45 screws came out, and it took me 2 HOURS just to ge the old HD out of the box! OK, admittedly, we did have to go buy a new set of screwdrivers and a mini-mini torque wrench.

You know, big water valves are a lot easier and less fiddly than computers, when it comes to overhauling. With computers, if a bit get's stuck, you can't hit it with a hammer until it comes loose. Well, you can. but it tends to STOP it working, rather than make it work better. The engine-room motto is something along the lines of "The bigger the problem, the bigger the hammer". Doesn't work with computers. If I get tired of A/V, maybe I'll go work in the Engine room.

I'm enjoying Cyprus. But I really feel like I'll be ready when I can go back to work. I got an email saying I'll be working with the UK office doing media and getting A/V training for 3 months, not 1 month, so still 4 months until I get to see my beautiful ship again.

Old rust bucket that it is.

*sigh*

I'll post soon about life in Cyprus. I have a few stories about kind of reverse-cultureshock coming back here.

But right now, just to add some tofu to this post, I'll talk about Opera Web-browser. I decided to try it out, about 2 weeks ago, and so have been using it since then, as my web browser, and also email client.

do I like it?

Well, some of it. It's quite fast, most of the time. And has a lot of features. And integrating web and email is alright. Some things I just don't like though.

It doesn't seem to cope with more complex web stuff so well. Like now, on this blog typing page, for some reason it's not put the images in for "insert link" and so on. It just has the alt text. It usually shows them.

It sometimes goes *very* slowly. Like, almost freezes, but not quite.

I like that it nicely links up my RSS feeds, email, and webpages though. And for most things, it's really fine.

It's really slow when trying to switch tabs which show video in. Especially if they are both *playing* video at the same time. That could be pushing it a bit with any browser, I suppose.

Anyway, it's doing an OK job, and I'll probably stick with it until I go back to Doulos. Then I'll go back to the simpler Safari/Mail.app combo. Mail.app deals with the on-board exchange email system better than opera. The reason I won't go to that now, is I can't get Mail.app to work properly with the secure email system I have back to the ship now... and I tried the opera mail client, and it just worked. So.

So. It's late. I have to get up early tomorrow to play music for the Western Easter sunday service down at the salt-lake. 6:45am pickup. Sometimes I let my mouth run away with itself, which is how I got into that one.

Happy easter, western world.

Thursday, March 06, 2008

The Austrailians have a great phrase. Actually, they have lots of really great phrases. But this one is obscure to the point of being silly, and yet apparently universely understood by Aussies.

"Not Happy, Jan"

This phrase is generally used when something stupid happens and the person is, in fact, not happy. It came from a TV ad a few years ago they had.  Bridget, this video is for you.



ok. so now, you're probably wondering "Why did Daniel post this?"

Well, firstly, it's because I've been having Aussies telling me "Not Happy, Jan" for the last 2 years, and finally I've got a chance to go looking such things up online. Now I know.

Secondly:

I took a bunch of photos of work on Dad's boat, got them all colour corrected and so on, and uploaded them into blogger to post. Whereupon, I must have pressed the wrong buttons, and it'sjumped me into the address bar or something, and took me to a different page, lost the pictures somehow from the Auto-save/draft thingy, and I could find no way to bring them back.

Not Happy, Jan.

So. Here are some more pictures of Dad's boat.

No. Here are not more pictures of Dad's boat. I just tried to upload them again, and after uploading 1.3 meg, it then told me "failed!".

Not Happy, Jan.

See how useful the phrase is?

I'll post the photos tomorrow. Or later. Or something.