I have recently arranged to acquire an awesome tote (shopping) bag from DiscountASP.Net.  They’re my hosting company for this site.  The PDC is happening in Los Angeles at the moment, and DiscountASP.Net have some representatives there.  Takeshi Eto who is their VP of Marketing and Business Development mentioned that their staff would be going around the conference with tote bags, and I’m ashamed to say that I blagged one from him.  Very kindly he agreed to send one, which is nice for me.  Since moving here I’ve actually started to use these bags a lot.  Unlike London or Dublin you get charged here for bags in a shop.  Therefore I have an extensive collection of fabric shopping bags I’ve had to buy, as a result of having gone to the shop too many times without remembering to bring a bag with me.  Recently I’ve found a favourite bag – one that is large enough for all my typical shopping, and heavy enough to handle the loads I put in it.  I’ll post some pictures as soon as I get the actual bag.  Props to Takeshi Eto for organising this!

Updated: I forgot to add that DiscountASP.Net have a blog here.

DiscountASP.NET Blog: Any Customers Going to the PDC 2008?

A couple of weeks ago I won some business cards on a blog I read called Janko at Warp Speed.  Janko is a developer with a BlogEngine.Net installation that he blogs from, typically on the subject of web design. The cards I won are professionally printed and to my own specifications.  Naturally, I had James do the design work, and he has come back with some intriguing design work for the back of the card.  The front is still a mystery to me, though I should be getting the results soon :-)  I’ll post the design here and then maybe a couple of photos of the finished product when they arrive.

UPrinting Contest Winners

This one is mostly for me.  Kurt Shintaku put some instructions on the net some time about installing Vista from a USB Key.  I’ve reproduced them here as I just got an error when loading his website, and I use these with some regularity.  These instructions have been tested only on Windows XP and Vista.  You will need a large fast USB key and the original Vista (or Vista plus SP1) installation DVD.

Open a command prompt, in elevated mode if you’re using Vista.  Go through the following :

1. diskpart
2. list disk (Look to see which disk is your USB key.  Make sure you get this right, or you’ll end up wiping something else.)
3. select disk x (where x is your USB key).
4. clean
5. create partition primary
6. active
7. format fs=fat32
8. assign
9. exit
10. xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f h:\ OR robocopy d:\ h:\ /MIR (where d:\ is your Vista DVD and h:\ is the newly formatted USB Key. xcopy for Windows XP, robocopy for Vista)

That’s basically it.  You now have a USB Key that installs Vista.

Kurt Shintaku's Blog: HOWTO: Install Windows Vista from a high speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive

Dave recently posted that he was shocked at me going to see Coldplay in concert.  I’ve left that hanging for a few days while stewing over the correct response.  The truth is actually very simple, and really shouldn’t need to be said.  I went to see them in concert because I like their music.  There.  Happy now?  It is of course a bit more complicated than that, but the core of it is that I enjoy their music and wanted to see them play live.  I haven’t been to a large concert in a long time, and to be honest I know I’ve missed out on some incredible moments.  I had also never been to the Olympiahalle in Munich and wanted to see it.

I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan as you know, and have been for a very very long time.  It goes back to Niamh I think, an old friend from Dublin who turned me on to them first.  I think at the time I was pretty into Jean-Michael Jarre, which gives you an understanding of the root of my tastes.  I’ve always been more into rock than pop, though that’s a generalisation as opposed to a rule.  I have seen Michael Jackson in concert and it ranks up there as one of the best concerts I have ever seen. Likewise U2, who blew my mind with their Zoo Tour.  Music is a selfish thing: It touches you in ways that it can’t and won’t ever touch other people.  Coldplay’s music pushes the same buttons in me that the Floyd and U2 push, and that shouldn’t be too hard for anyone to see.  They’re simply a great rock band who have released some brilliant music.  How could I not go to see them in concert?

Chris Martin seems to be a polarising character in the world of music.  I have to say that I really don’t have an opinion on him either way.  I don’t tend to pay that much attention to what bands do when they’re not performing (excepting Bono and St. Bob perhaps).  In concert he came across as someone who was humbled by the adoration of the crowd on the floor.  I don’t know how real or fake that was, though if I had to bet, I’d say that it was a slight enhancement of what may actually be a natural shyness.  How could you not find it appealing to have the frontman of a group be incredulous at your response to their performance.  Whatever it was, and whether he pulled it off or not, is something that only someone who has been to many of his concerts can say.  Nicely enough, the entire concert was taped for Absolute Radio (formerly Virgin) and can be view online here. To quote him after the show, “I think the concert was the least shit Coldplay concert at the moment that you could have possibly ever seen.  Do you see what I mean?”.

I’ve missed the concert scene for so long that this getting tickets for them was a “now or never” kind of thing.  I’m glad I did too, as otherwise I would have missed out on a great gig.  When I last saw U2, they screwed up my concert-going experience for the rest of my life.  They played “Running to Stand Still” and ran it into “Where The Streets Have No Name” and it was perhaps the best thing I have ever heard live.  Actually there’s no perhaps… it was the best thing I have ever seen live.  While Coldplay didn’t come close to that, in part because I had a fucker of a cold and in part because their show was a little smaller, they were pretty close.  If I was feeling better I would have left my seat and moved towards the front, but I wasn’t.  I would have preferred to be right in the middle of the crowd, as opposed to sitting beside someone who really didn’t seem to want to be there. I just wasn’t feeling up to it though.

So ultimately it comes down to this: Why Coldplay?  Well, why the fuck not?

The lights go out and I can’t be saved at dave bushe dot net

A couple of weeks ago I lost my coffee machine. It was a wedding present from Scally and Max and it served me faithfully for something in the order of 4,800 coffees over the last eight years.  That seems to be par for the course I think, and coupled with the hardness of the water in London it finally made its last coffee.  It died and I took it to the manufacturers to be repaired.  They came back to me a last week and said that it could be fixed, but it was going to be very expensive and it would need further repair again in the future. So I decided to retire it and get a new one.  It is a Saeco Odea Giro Plus in a special edition copper colour.  It is a bean to cup machine which means that all I have to do is push a button with a cup under the spout and espresso comes out.  No grinding of beans, no measuring of coffee, no tamping it into the outlet.  Just push a button folks, and it grinds the beans to your specified granularity, filters water through them at the right temperature and then disposes of the used grounds into a hopper.  Its awesome, and it actually makes wonderful wonderful coffee.  To put that in perspective, I had two choices of machine I could get.  One was just under two thousand Euros, and one was this one for three hundred and fifty.  The espresso from both machines tastes exactly the same.  The only difference is that this one doesn’t actually froth the milk for you and dispense it – you have to froth your own milk!  That isn’t as bad as it sounds actually.  With my old Gaggia the milk frothing for cappuccino took a few boring minutes in a jug.  The Odea milk frothing wand is way faster, easier to clean and makes better froth anyway.  Much better froth actually.  The bubbles are denser and smaller than the Gaggia made bubbles.  All in all its a dream to use.

Now, if I was going to have quibbles about it then it would probably be about the size of the machine.  It is very small, which means that the water container only holds about litre, and the outlet water container needs to be emptied every day.  I think I can live with that though ;-)  It also comes with a build-in Brita filter in the water reservoir so it will automatically soften the water for me which is pretty cool.  It also has dosage and quantity controls on it, so I can specify a) the amount of coffee that gets dispensed and b) the strength of the coffee.

The Gaggia is dead :-( Long live the Saeco!

Carrying on from last night, I was going to tell you about Wave 3 of Windows Live Writer.  Microsoft has recently released a whole slew of their Live apps.  Writer and Photo Gallery are both programs that I use on a regular basis, and I’ll give you a quick overview of Writer here.  Writer is a cut-down word processing package that is used only to create and edit blog posts.  It does this with a range of different user interface styles, and it works with your blog’s theme to handle styles.

There are three different modes of editing and writing posts – one each with and without your blog’s theme, and one raw mode.  Editing and composing with your theme applied is as close as you can get to WYSIWYG composition as I have ever seen.  The fonts are rendered as you would see them on your web page, and the HTML elements are mostly perfect.  I say mostly only because some of the options aren’t completely compatible with my theme.  For example if you right align a paragraph then you end up with a perfectly normal html <p align=”right”> tag at the start of the paragraph.  However, that doesn’t work properly with XHTML where all of the decorative layout is done using CSS.  I could potentially change the mark-up to transitional XHTML 1.0, but that seems a little excessive just to me.  In all fairness I don’t ever actually align my paragraphs to the right anyway, so it really makes no difference. 

Where there is a slight issue that does make a difference though is in how images are posted.  You can insert pictures into your blog posts and they work perfectly.  Writer however doesn’t allow easy justification of those images.  For example if I want to align an image to the right then it automatically adds align=”right” to the image tag and that isn’t XHTML 1.1 compatible.  So I have to manually edit the mark-up before posting to use my method of getting an image to align on the right – I add class=”photoright” to the tag and strip out the alignment before posting.  Its clumsy but it works.  Writer also uploads a couple of different versions of the images to your blog.  So, if you click on the image to the right of this paragraph, you will see a larger version of the same image.  That one will be the original sized screen capture that I took, while you only see a small thumbnail on this page.  It saves bandwidth and makes it easier for the author as you don’t need to resize images manually before posting them to your blog. That one feature was enough to get me to switch in the first place, and it has only gotten better over the subsequent versions.

One of the neater functions of Writer is the Preview Mode.  This mode takes your post and puts it into the context of the rest of your blog as you would see it if you had browsed to it.  I’d do a screenshot but there’s no point really.  If you’re reading this post through a web browser as opposed to an RSS reader then you’d see exactly what I see when looking at this post in Preview Mode. There’s a bunch of other fun things in there too, such as an on-screen word-counter for those who get paid by the word, and the ability to save drafts either locally or straight to a blog (if that’s supported).  Naturally enough you can also embed a variety of objects in a blog post. Writer makes it easy to embed images, maps, Technorati tags and videos of many different formats.  It is also extensible with plug ins that can be downloaded or written from scratch should you have the desire.

All in all I have to say that its well worth taking a look at.  The newest version, in addition to being slightly faster and looking better in Windows, is also much more robust. Despite my previous reports about having technical problems getting it setup correctly with BlogEngine.Net, once I had it up and running the issues evaporated.  I have also been in contact with someone from Microsoft who has assured me that they have the problem fixed and will post a hot fix soon.

This is to be another round up of things that are happening now, rather than a post about a specific topic.  Despite my promises, I just haven’t been on the ball recently with regards to the frequency of my posting.  In my defence, I’ve spent the last ten days with a fucker of a cold, and now I may be getting tonsillitis.  Despite feeling crap I did go to see Coldplay last week. This was the first large (i.e. more than 20,000 people) concert I have been to since I saw U2 back in Ireland for the Zoo tour.  That makes it a fuck of a long time since I’ve been in a crowd that big, and I didn’t realise how awesome it all was.  I also didn’t realise how much I had missed big stadium concerts like that, so I’m going to keep an eye out for more I think.  REM are playing here soon, but I’m not into them enough that I would spend 60€ to see them. We’ll see what comes around.

My sister was over to stay with us last week.  We had a pretty cool time while she was here, doing things like taking in the Wiesn (Oktoberfest), climbing down Wendelstein and just hanging out.  Wendelstein is a an 1838m (about 5500’) mountain about an hour outside of Munich.  It is the next mountain down from the place where we usually go skiing / snowboarding, and also relatively close to Anna’s grandmother’s house. There’s a cable car that we took up and from which I managed to get some great photographs.  There was a lot of cloud at ground level about half way up the ride, and it made for some interesting photos.  I’ll post some when I get the photo gallery sorted out again.  Anyway, we went up there by the cable car, had some food and the obligatory beer and walked back down instead of taking the car.  In retrospect I should have done a couple of things different.  I should have tied my shoes tighter around the arch and toe area, as my toes hurt a lot from walking constantly downhill for a few hours.  I should have taken the compact camera and not my SLR complete with large bag and tripod.  It was fucking heavy by the time we got back down.  Finally, really I should have just gotten the damn cable car ;-)  Nah, it was actually better than I’m making it out to be… but a very tiring experience.  Oh, and there was snow up there.

We took her to see the Oktoberfest too.  We went during the day and early enough to get four seats in the Hippodrome tent, as Andreas was with us.  It was a bit early to be drinking a Mass of beer at midday, but we endeavoured to rise to the challenge.  We also had the obligatory half a chicken (each) that you get in Bavaria with your beer and this one was awesome.  The Hippodrome tent (its called a tent but it seats 3,200 people, with room for another thousand outside and its one of the SMALLER tents at the Wiesn) had a chicken roasted in an awesome baste.  It is made by a famous local chef called Schubeck and can conveniently enough be bought in his spice shop in Munich.  There’s some in the kitchen now waiting for a chicken to come along and roll itself in it.

Okay, so its later than I thought, and I have to get some sleep.  I still have this damn cold and my throat is pretty damn sore at the moment.  Tomorrow I’ll post about the new build of Windows Live Writer, the analytics of DaveWhite.Net, a new social networking site called SocialMedian and how I finally managed to sort out my passwords.