As part of my therapy i have to visit public places and try to engage in random conversations.

Well a few weeks ago I went to a nearby pub, and I took my iBook, at first I plonked the bag on a solitary table and went to grab some ale.  On returning some old guy had appeared at the adjacent table and mumbled to me that he was concerned because there was a bag left on its own and he thought it might be a bomb, hoping he was joking I just went “oh, haha yeah.”  So I sat down and fudged around with the iBook, trying to connect to the cloud network that was supposed to be available at the establishment.  Then the old guy started mumbling at me again, not only did he mumble incoherently but he also liked to randomly insert “fuck”, which I find quite offensive when from ppl I’m not acquainted with, (make a note of that.) So he clocked the laptop and started sounding off, educating me about W3C web standards.  Turned out he was some retired teacher or lecturer in the area of I.T.  ‘Cept his brain had obviously gone to pot.

He went all weird on me and said he was gonna do a big favour, despite the fact that my contribution to his life have been zero and that I was trying to ignore him because he smelt rotten.  He continued being vague about this pearl of wisdom or whatever it was he was going to bestow upon me.  He then brought out of a pocket a flash drive and gave it to me, whilst shuffling around nervously, mumbling some more about how the contents of this thing was going to help me on my journey of self-fulfilment.  He continued this for some time, telling me his name was “Toe-Knee”, which I know because he pointed to his toes, and then his knee.

Finally, he departed the pub so I stuck the flash drive in the iBook to have a butches and it was full of warez.  It wasn’t even good warez, it had Photoshop 7 and some old version of office and some crappy anti-virus apps.  What struck me though however was that it was all Windows stuff. despite the fact that I had been sitting there with a Mac.  I was supposed to return this to him once I had gleened all I need from it, despite not knowing who he was or where he lived.  I just left it on the table and left he pub.

And you see, this is why I don’t like “people”.  The general public if you will.  Because, even though this guy was harmlessly dumb and senile, I was shaking throughout the encounter.

Discovered a pretty nifty online backup service courtasy of macbreak weekly.

The service is called Mozy, and I do think they should check they’re safe using the Orange logo so blatantly.

Well despite that it’s a fantastic service.  I already make backups onto a usb hard drive but it’s kept in the house which means that if there’s a fire, or the house implodes or possibly more likely for Sheffield, the house is flooded then I’ll lose everything.

The great pain is doing the initial backup because if you’re internet service is anything like mine then your upload speed sucks big time.

But after a week or so of having to leave yer comp on all the time to upload you’ll have yer stuff all snug and safe and further backups are minimal because of a smart little app they have which not only skips files that haven’t changed but compares the difference block by block on files larger than 1MB.

The app also gets on with it in the background and keeps a low profile, it’s never nagged me about losing connections or sticking the mac to sleep without telling it.  It just logs the problem and gets on with it.

Haven’t tried the windows app but I wager it will be fine too.

You get 2GB for free, but paid membership for 2 years is 100 dollars and it’s unlimited (I don’t know exactly what unlimited is but it’s more than your HD will be.)  That’s only the price of a typical backup drive plus you get an app and the safety of it being off-site.

If you subscribed to my websites feed prior to this month please resubscribe, the feed is now located at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ItchAndBeMerry or http://feeds.feedburner.com/thatkidweekly for the podcast.

For the past week or so my feed has been all arsed up and I have only just now spotted it (tweerp).  It was due to a buggy version of one of my wordpress plugin called “Ultimate Tag Warrior”.  Updated the plugin and it seems all is well now.

I’ve been playing with Native Instruments Reaktor and have come up with a tastey little number.  Reakter lets you create instruments from scratch by sticking modules and then connecting them together, a bit like connecting chips on a circuit board.  It’s great fun, you can really mess things up like noones business.

I’ve come up with Scented +LFO, you stick a sample it and it plays it so that speed doesn’t affect pitch, and pitch doesn’t affect speed.  You can play notes whilst you move the play position up and down.  Or, toggle the LFO on and have that bend the sample up and down.  It sounds silliest with voices.

Above is the structure of it.  I feel like such a circuit bender!  Download and have a play with it.  But you do need reaktor 5.

Oh gosh, it’s happened again.

I haven’t used my boot camp install of windows for months so I decided to let OS X reclaim the space.

I did it the proper way, loaded boot camp assistant and choose to restore to a single volume.

It only took a second, so that seemed pretty neat.  Until I rebooted only for it to dump me to a terminal half way through the grey apple logo sequence.

It was exactly the same as what happened here so now I’m hoping that both these occurrences were related to my partitioned HD… and that now it’s a single partition it won’t happen again?

Who knows but it sucks either way.  Handily, I still had Leopard on my external HD, so I could boot up into that and copy my files.

I didn’t bother to type “please boot OS X, thank you” this time.

Installed the developer preview of leopard onto an external drive yesterday.

Bullet points shall convey my thoughts…

• It feels faster than tiger, which is surprising because my iMac is a 32bit core duo and leopard is stuffed full of 64bit stuff.  It might feel faster because I hadn’t had a chance to stuff the drive full of crap.  But still, peeps with 32bit mac’s need not worry about a speed hit.
•  I was underwhelmed by the features.  I’m hoping i’ll be pleasantly surprised by hidden nuggets, but right now i’m not holding my breath.
• Finder is hugely disappointing.  Quickview is good, but despite the iTunes-esq appearance the rest of finder still just feels like finder.  It just isn’t a shell you expect in 2007.  There’s no paradigm shift.  No breadcrumb bar.  No tagging.  No editable extended attributes support.
• Yeah quickview is pretty nifty, it opens files incredibly quickly, even things like spreadsheets open in a flash, and I was impressed that it showed tabs for the different sheets in an excel spreadsheet I tried.
• Spaces is going to come in useful for those times that I leave an app on my TV and don’t fancy turning it back on just to drag it back to the main desktop.
• Time machine is so so easy to set up and it works well.  However, I choose a network location.  Then went back to leopard today and tried Time machine and it complained that it hasn’t been set up.  Reason was that I hadn’t yet in that session visited/mounted the network location.  So you still need to be careful of that, and create automounts for network locations.  Which I might add finder still offers up no help for.
• So yeah, I get the feeling network support ain’t going to be any better in leopard.
• The new dock looks nice and flashy at first, but it didn’t take long for my eyes to grow tired of it, it looks a tad cluttered.
• Still no way to turn off display outputs at will.
• Apple seem to be moving away from having pop-out sidebars for setting attributes.  Such as in iCal.  Now when you create a new event you double click it and a nice looking floating palette emanates from the event.
• The menu bar doesn’t look any better in real life than it does in the screenshots.  Even worse, when you click an item the drop down menu is more opaque than the menu bar and looks completely out of place.
• And that’s all the weather.

Woohoo, I’m now seeing itchmerry.com on the bluehost tip so it’s finally all done and dusted.  Now just need to check I’ve set my site up on bluehost correctly and that all is as it should be.

Received an email from the losing registrar this morning with a link to agree and fast-track the process.  So did that.  Went back to the domain manger at bluehost and clicked some link which finished off the whole thing.

So now I think it’s just a matter of waiting for DNS servers around the world to update.

After circlehosting failed to get back to enom after the 48 hours they didn’t hesitate to email me the code I needed.  So that’s good!

Done what I needed to do, now I just need to wait the 398 million years it takes to complete the transfer.

Sent this to info@enom.com but surprise surprise no reply….

I have a domain with one of your resellers circlehosting.net who have not responded to any of my support requests for over 2 months.
The last time I contacted enom.com you told me to contact circlehosting.  I’m trying to stress that this cannot be done.  My further emails to you were then ignored.

Their website is horribly broken.  You cannot submit a ticket because it fails with php errors.

I need to get an EPP auth code to transfer my domain “itchmerry.com” to bluehosts.

I have contacted bluehosts about it and they responded with this…

“Unfortunately there is nothing that we can do to obtain the auth code for you but I would recommend being persistent with enom as they can give you the information that you need. If you continue to not be able to get the auth code you may want to file a complaint with ICANN since they are the registrar ac creditor”

Also, may I quote from your “eNom Registration Agreement”…

“If your Primary Service Provider is unresponsive, you may contact us to have your domain name(s) locked or unlocked or to obtain the EPP “AuthCode” though we may first contact your Primary Service Provider to request that the Primary Service Provider address the request. Only the registrant and the administrative contacts listed in the WHOIS information may approve or deny a transfer request.”

Therefore, it seems that you SHOULD do something in this situation.