What am I driving at with a revamp of a blog that I once killed? Well… I always wanted an area of the net I can call my own. I’d registered skinofstars.com some time ago but I’d never really got round to sorting it out. In the end I just annoyed myself, this is my bit so I really should have a little ‘me time’. So here we have it, a revamped skinofstars.com. As I’m sure you can tell, the blog is now the front page and I intend to update regularly. When I say regularly, I mean every Monday by noon. What I’ll be saying I’m not sure, but I think some consistency is very important right now so I’m going to stick with that regardless. If you want to follow without the need for a visit then subscribe to this page’s RSS using http://www.skinofstars.com/rss.xml http://skinofstars.com/feed
This Drupal install has been replaced with Wordpress
I’ve just added some more sections to the site.
Social - covers various social networking sites.
Net Work - this section is like a portfolio of my work on the internet (job please!).
Geekness - a section where I can while away time on my more general interests in computing, expect lots of open source zealotism.
Further - bit like a misc section, but I feel a little funny about filing the rest of my life under miscellaneous, so I called it Further
This was a framework that I came up with a month or two back and I think best sums up the point of having a site dedicated to myself (bar ego, of course). It should make it easy for me to add to the site with notes and information I have written for myself and others. I hope this is now to be the encompassing personal site I’d always wanted.
UPDATE Blog has now been imported to this site - now found here, on the front page!
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New site as the old one bothered me for being so bad. The (currently inactive) blog can still be found at /blog but will be integrated in time. Updates will probably be coming thick and fast, as is my want with new projects.
I was shocked to see a recent article by the Daily Mail which they claim finds that councils are abusing anti-terrorist powers to check up on average citizens emails and phone calls. It’s like 1984 all over. At the end of the summer I plan to move all my email correspondence to encrypted formats. I’ll post between now and then with advice for all others who would like to keep a little bit of privacy in their lives before we are all routinely monitored.
I write this through blurry vision having just had an injection into my eyeball. It seems I’ve been unlucky enough to be one of the few young people to have developed Macular Degeneration in my left eye. Seeing as I’m still reasonably young at 28 I decided to go for one of the fancy new unlicenced injections, my drug of choice in this instance is called Lutein. I’m happy to say that the eye hospital in Oxford is excellent and the doctor treating me is one of the best in the country. This still doesn’t take away the sting of the possible impact on a career in web-app design (I can’t see the screen so well these days), or the sting of the cost at £1500 an injection (no NHS for this treatment). Still, I hope to recover a bit of vision and perhaps in time I won’t even notice it. I just hope the already visible signs of it developing in the other eye don’t progress any further.
I saw this comment on slashdot by http://slashdot.org/~Sancho and it made me chuckle. Please bear in mind that this is a very geeky joke.
Linux is ok on the desktop, but for servers, I really prefer FreeBSD.
Sometimes I get tired of that, and use NetBSD for a while. A short stint with NetBSD, Apache, Postgresql, and PHP usually refreshes me long enough so that I can FreeBSD, Apache, Postgresql, and PHP again.
Just thought I’d mention the small feeling of sorrow that I have for the loss of Arthur C Clarke, a childhood hero of mine. I’ll append an image from xkcd which I think shows this feeling a little.
I’m very excited today after winning an auction last night on eBay. I’d decided that I needed a computer as doing graphic work and generally pouring through code is hard work on this little laptop. What I needed was a mighty box, which is what I’ve now just bought.
The specs on this beast are as follows; intel core2 quad with a combined speed of 9.6ghz, 2gb of ram (I will certainly upgrade that to 4gb), 500gb esata (quick access thingy) hard drive and an nvidia 8500gt graphics card which can do HiDef… which means I need a HiDef monitor, which I get that tomorrow, 22” widescreen.
Yes, these are very geeky boys toys but I am now very excited. My next question is what operating system I’m going to put on it.
It’s taken me some time and a little soul searching if ones being honest, but I have finally decided to leave blogger behind me. Blogspot has served me well enough but struggled with the resrictions I always feel when someone else is hosting my webbyness, so I felt it was time we parted ways. Now I get the freedom to improve or make a mess of my own site. Though I’m sure I’ll lose a bit of traffic like this, I don’t think it really matters much these days.
Thankfully, and to make life extra easy, it is stupidly simple to transfer all your posts and comments over.
