Live Writer is easy to use/setup, and (I believe) lets me produce better blog posts by cutting out the hassle of wrestling with formatting, picture placement, picture effects, uploading, and so on that is often associated with web-based editors. As good as TinyMCE is, it just doesn't cut it compared to a 'fat/rich' desktop client (particularly when you start throwing plugins in!)
That being said, there was one feature that was making me lean towards heading all online - saving drafts to my blog so that I can edit posts no matter where I am, with either Live Writer or with Wordpress' Editor. As it turns out, however, the clever Live Writer team have already included that functionality, I was just too engrossed in producing wonderful blog posts (I'll use that as my excuse instead of just saying "because I was too stupid to look"), but Will was kind enough to point it out to me.
To save online, hit "Post Draft…"
And to retrieve blogs stored online to edit, hit Open, navigate to your Blog and pick whichever post/draft you want to edit
Today I upgraded to Wordpress 2.3.x, as well as making it registered in Dreamhosts OneClickInstaller. The downside to that is that things got moved around, so a few plugins are broken, but more importantly content is broken.
I'll work at fixing up content, but you may have to bear with me for a few days/weeks.
Update: Adding plugins back in, added a 'close posts after 14 days' to stop the spam I've been getting.
ANZGW started off as the ANZAC Guild's forum, hosted by me. Others had delusions of grandeur, and started making ANZGW. I was 'called in' to help out and for the most part, supervise. We had a reasonable level of success, with most guilds at the time at least knowing the ANZAC or ANZGW name.
Following a hacking of our forums twice in one week, we moved to our own software I was developing with one of the other admins. It was about this stage that the admins associated with the site started to drop, for reasons unknown to me. Maybe I'm horrible to work with, maybe they bit off more than they can chew (anybody noticed this with a lot of PHP 'programmers'?), but one by one all the volunteers we had stopped frequenting the site and stopped talking to the rest of us.
Sadly, this had very little impact on the progress of the site - after the hacking when we ran phpBB2, the site's code was about 90% mine. I should correct that last statement, it had a lot of impact on the progress of the site. Seeing everybody else lose interest certainly didn't help my interest, and I started to second guess anything I did.
ANZGW's been through more code changes, and now it is safe to say its 100% mine (code-wise). Since I haven't played Guild Wars for so many years, it has stopped growing in numbers, which reflects the feature I've been adding (or, more to the point, have not been adding)
Present
The idea of ANZGW wasn't mine, but it became mine as I was the last standing. I've been thinking more and more, contemplating what could get me into the site more, as well as what sort of service/site there is a need for. From that the idea of ANZGN, or the Aus/New Zealand Gaming Network, was born. It would be somewhat like an Aus/NZ based "myspace/facebook" site, but focusing on gaming. Add that to some decent forum software, a (again, game focused) wiki, ladder/tournament system, gaming news written using words containing a multitude of syllables, etc, and you've got my idea in a nutshell. There is more to it, of course, but I don't really feel like explaining it all, as its not the point of this post so much.
Future
Is there any point to me developing such a site? Competition-wise, Ausgamers has in recent months ramped up the news it covers, as well as starting to add their own review section, while all the others have not only several contributing members but seemingly money to back them, and pre-established relationships with publishers/developers. Certainly, this is a bummer, but I enjoy a challenge.
The real issue comes from other people, not other sites/services.
While many people have said my idea is good, there is a general lack of interest. Any support for contributors has resulted in some offering content, but no designers (during ANZGW's days, the few designers we've had offer services, apart from Sev, have been hopeless) or developers popping up their hand. I don't think I want to be stuck in this cycle of sole development, design, and management of a website that could get out of hand. Without others to discuss ideas with, to criticize my code, etc, there is no desire to continue.
This gets me to the real point of my post. Do I get over myself and create ANZGN anyway, or give it all up and let somebody take ANZGN/ANZFury/ANZGW.com domains?
The problem with the latter is I need something to do. Thanks to these sites, I've learnt a lot…I'm fairly comfortable with PHP/MySQL, and ASP.NET(C#)/MSSQL, AJAX (framework/less), and my CSS-fu is enough to defeat the Web1/2/3 teachers at Monash to say the least. I guess if I was capable of going out and working, it wouldn't be such a need to do something, as (hopefully) I'd feel the creativity through coding need satisfied by commercial work.
Any ideas/suggestions (or heck, job offers where I can code from home) of what I should?
A design project (ugh, I guess I'm becoming a devigner), Uni commencing this week, as well as more wedding preperations, I have very little time to be blogging (hence why two(…well…three now) posts were pushed out s'morning).
The earth is made of cake and chocolate And Id be icing if I could Live in a dream In your stream Live in a dream
I like cake
I like cake
I like cake
I like cake
Okay, so that wasn't too good, unlike the cake at my engagement party.
Due to chickz0r's mother being unwell recently, it came upon chickz0r and I to construct it. Now, as a few of you know, I actually enjoy decorating cakes. For chickz0rs 19th birthday, I baked a Skull cake (no photos, they got lost :(), and for 20th, I baked a Stargate cake (that was interesting to do, I had very little time to do it before the guests arrived! Photo sucks by the way).
For Christmas', I tend to make FauxChristmas Puddings. I happened to once make a gingerbread house for the neighbours, but photos of that are MIA.
Thats really about the limit of my baking/decorating, I'm still very much in the learning stage.
Keeping with the theme of general funness with the engagement party, we decided we wanted a castle cake.
Recipe's
Cake
Ingredients
1 1/3 cups self raising flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
125g butter, softened
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups caster sugar
2 eggs
2/3 cup water
Method
Preheat oven to moderate.
Grease (and line) pan.
Sift flour and cocoa into medium bowl, add remaining ingredients
Mix until all smoth and a lightish colour
Spread into prepared pan.
Bake in moderate oven until cake is cooked.
Stand cake in pan 5 to 10 minutes; turn onto wire rack to cool.
This is a really easy cake to make, but it tastes rather good (and is fairly hard to mess up!) - its not too 'light' but not too 'gluggy' for a chocolate cake. It has become my 'defacto' for chocolate cakes that I make.
Caramel Filling
We had planned to go with a slight modification of the Caramel Sauce Recipe on SimpleRecipes', just swap plain/white/whatever sugar for raw/brown sugar. It didn't work out. Twice. So we ended up just using four cans of Caramel Top'N'Fill
Icing
Butter Icing and Fondant icing - ye standard recipes, you can find them yourself. I was told a lot of icing was made. Butter icing first layer, fondant the second layer.
Unfortunately, the noise made by the bridesmaids when they invaded the kitchen drove me out, so it was left to Ryan (best man) and chickz0r to ice the cake while I went and finished our costumes.
Ryan isn't exactly a cake-friendly person. He eats cake, and thats about it. That being said, he did a fantastic job of icing it, and even enjoyed himself to boot!
I came in at various times, and it was a mammoth effort of icing. I think they went through four packets of icing sugar, and it took about three or four hours to get done.
Each tower is sponge log (scroll? You get them from the supermarket). Parapets are icing squares.
The most surprising thing about this was that the towers stayed attached overnight. That alone was a feat in itself.
Overall
The cake tasted and looked fantastic.
Super proud of Chickz0r/Ryan, and super happy with how the thing turned out
Yay, exams are over for at the very least another semester.
Should be blogging more in about a week once Remix and the engagement party are out of the way :)
I'll never have to deal with Javan Beans again, yay!
(This post is about the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Digital Channels. It may not effect analogue TV)
As some of you know, I suffer from New Daily Persistant Headaches, which leaves me fairly sensative to high pitched noises.
ABC's (and to a lesser extent Ten) self producted material - that is things like News, The Chaser, The Glasshouse (while it was on) seem to be recorded and broadcast with a very high frequency noise in the background.
For normal people, this isn't an issue. For me, however, it makes it impossible to watch the ABC - in particular, the Chaser's War On Everything.
Info
It effects all SD and HD broadcasts - on TV's and TV Tuner cards
I know several other people (other states) who can also hear it
SD/HDTV rips (XVid/DivX) of it also contain the noise
It does not effect the Vodcast. Mind you, the vodcast has horrible sound as it is ;)
Solution
I had a few people suggest playing with the equaliser (EQ). Thats great for reducing the volume that its produced…but thats about it. The noise is still being produced, and is still very painful to me.
The solution I've settled on (for now) involved FFDShow.
FFDShow comes with a FIR Filter (Finite impulse response filter), which lets you cut off (as in "set to zero") everything above a certain frequency.
The settings I'm using are: Number of taps: 8 Type: Lowpass Frequency: 10000 Window: Box
Now, there is a downside to this - cutting off frequencies reduces the quality of output. The settings I'm using reduces it very minimally (I'm happy to leave it on), but cuts the noise out completely, so for me, its a no-brainer. For others, this may not be the case.
