Marco at The Woolpack, Surry Hills

Marco, marco, marco… Where for art though Marco?

This is an old photo, taken back when he was cool and performing at The Woolpack, Chalmers Street, Surry Hills (aka Redfern). Those were the days. Poker, Karaoke, Trivia, Disco… OH, hang on, you didn’t do the karaoke there.

He was cool back then, but he’s way more cooler now ;-)

An entertainer, karaoke master, DJ, poker TD, MC (weddings, parties, anything), jack of most trades and master of everything. Go visit him on facebook: Marco

I’ve jumped online to find a few old stories I’d written and found that I have got over 20 drafts sitting in my queue, waiting for photos, or for me to get my act together and finish writing them up.

Last year as a whole was great, we made the move to Thailand, we got married (again) and I had many friends and family come over for it. It was really a great time. I had friends come and visit me throughout the year, and I even made the occasional trip to other countries to see friends of mine.

But what really rounded out the year was a month we spent in Bangkok (while doing Fah’s migration paperwork), and the road trip we undertook to get back to Phuket. What is a long day trip to drive from Bangkok to Phuket, took us a week to complete. No mishaps, no misadventures. Just all round great fun and good times. I WILL post up some photos about Kanchanaburi (the bridge over the river Kwai, Hell fire pass, and others), The floating markets at Damnoen Saduak, Hua Hin, and Ranong.

Then, in October, a good friend asked us onto a charter yacht. It was me, him and our better halves. Ten days on the ocean, sailing the Phang Nga Bay, and the Anderman Sea. Those days have become etched in my mind forever, as one of the best holidays I’d ever had, and rounded out a solid year to living in the Land of Smiles.

The motion of the ocean turned out to be better than what we’d thought. During that time, Fah has fallen pregnant and we’re now expecting our very own little Dave or Fah running around in the coming year. Certainly has given us something to think about over the last few months.

Fah got her temporary resident visa, and is now allowed to live, work and play here. We’ve even got the new baby and mother-to-be all sorted with Medicare.

In between all this, I managed to break my leg Paragliding, and that really has taken a lot of fun out of the new year. It’s still on the mend, and as we speak I’m still hobbling around. I have been totally out of action for five weeks and it’s killing me. This has forced me into finding another passion to take my mind off the absence of flight…

…and what do I get into? Remote Controlled aircraft! Hell, if I can’t be in the air, I’ll be controlling something that IS! It finally arrived just yesterday, I haven’t taken it out yet, I can’t walk well enough to go fetch it. Besides, I’m spending A LOT of time on the flight simulator with the controller in an effort to learn what it is you have to do! I should get it up in the air in the next day or two and hopefully I’ll be able to report back that I haven’t crashed it just yet!

Hopefully within a month or so, I can be physically back in the air myself! Try and get some flying in BEFORE I have all my free time taken away from me.

In the coming weeks you’ll see some stories up here of the things I’ve done, and am currently doing. Some of the dribbles you should read about will include:

• The bridge over the river Kwai
• Hell fire pass
• Erawan National Park
• Floating markets at Damnoen Saduak
• Sailing around Thailand
• Paragliding
• Leg breaking (and recovery)
• Remote control toys, and eventually (further down the track)
• Baby stories and ultra sounds!

Yeah, last year flew by, and somehow, I think this year is going to be just as quick.

My head hurts! ;^D

I am passing this on to you because it definitely worked for me today, and we all could probably use more calm in our lives. Some doctor on tv this morning said the way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you have started.

I looked around my house to see things I’d started and hadn’t finished.

So I have managed to finish off a bottle of Merlot…
a bottle of Chardonnay…
a bodle of Baileys… a butle of wum………..
a pockage of Prungles.. tha mainder of bot Prozic and Valiuminun scriptins…
the res of the chesescke an a box a chocletz.

Yu haf no idr how bludy fablus I feel rite now. Plaese sned dhis orn to dem yu fee ar in ned ov iennr pisss. An telum,u blody luvum.!! Xxx

Hmmm… very delicious indeedy!

originally drafted (but remained unpublished—until now) on: Aug 25, 2011 @ 17:13

I have opened up a mydomain.com web hosting account, mainly because the second ever domain (and every other–bar one–domain purchase has been through them). As a Domain Name Service, I haven’t had much to gripe about. In fact, the only thing I would like to see is a way to have a permanent number of domains show in the backend for administration. The default is 20 and I have more than that many domains, so to see all my domains I must reload the page with a higher number of domains to show… Nit picky, but it all takes times…

I have digressed…

I recently installed a wordpress installation on a mydomainwebhost. Whilst it was reasonably painless (it wasn’t without pain), it worked. I needed a call to customer support for a PHP4/5 support query, but otherwise, the install went ok. Until it came time to put in the MySQL server name.

Have you ever tried searching google for things involving “mydomain”? You get 1000′s, 100,000′s search results where people are asking questions about their domain and when they quote it, what do they use as an example domain name? “mydomain.com”. Which essentially makes it impossibly hard to find suitable and proper answers to your problem.

What did I find? mydomain.com doesn’t use the default “localhost” name for their mysql database server. It uses a lesser known (and hard to find) name of: “mysql3341int.mydomainwebhost.com“. That is the name I found elsehwere on the net, and it worked for me. It SHOULD work for you.

It’s been out for half hour and I have reset the modem twice, to no avail.

And, in September, 2011, it still hasn’t changed.

Do you like the new ticker? I have to admit, it’s cool for some things, but for everything you see someone do, they can see the same things you do–unless you have your privacy settings set correctly.

What is correctly?

Who knows. Only facebook knows what is truly behind their settings, and where they’re even hidden. But what I’ve found so far is that regardless of what privacy you had set before, now you have to do MORE to keep what little privacy you have left, safe!

So how do you do it?

Well, I’ve pretty much kept my (facebook) online presence reasonably quiet. But now it is screaming to everyone, briefly (and succinctly) all I can say is, change your settings again!

Ok, from what I’ve witnessed so far (and I’ll add to this post later), but for now:

click on the down arrow (top right screen), and
click on Privacy Settings
now you have to go down to “Apps and Websites” and click on “edit settings”.

At this point, you should see a “Apps you use” section. click on “edit settings” (again)…

Now, for EACH AND EVERY…. I’ll say that again… FOR EACH AND EVERY app you have installed in facebook, you MUST (I repeat) “MUST” go into each applications settings by clicking on the “Edit” button.

This time you are taken to an options screen and it is here the damage is done. Down on the bottom of the main area is a title: “App activity privacy”. Under this section there is an option that dictates who can see what from this application.

CHANGE THIS SETTING TO “ME ONLY”

Prior to the ticker, people only found this info if the “app” posted to your wall. NOW, that is not the case. Now, if you want to keep anything “private” on facebook, you have to hide it from everyone.

What is the problem here?

The problem is that, IF you choose Friends of Friends (or even just friends) for any setting, then anything your friends do (in relation to YOUR action) will be visible to everyone else. This includes the simple act of playing a facebook game. (Do you really want your boss to know you play poker when you didn’t want him to know? Well, if he is a friend of a friend of yours, he will…

UNLESS YOU CHANGE THIS SETTING!!!!

What you HAVE to do is change APP ACTIVITY PRIVACY to ME ONLY…

BUT to do that, you must first check the option to “CUSTOMISE” and then, in the next window, you should check “ME ONLY”

This is only going to half protect you from me, but really, you should do it…

Facebook security should really be called Facebook INSECURITY, because, really, there isn’t any!

But what you can do is create header rows and header columns (the default grey ones) that ARE frozen.

In Numbers:
>> open the document inspector
>> table inspector (3rd option for me, looks like a yellow table)

There are three “headers” and “footers” drop downs. At the bottom of the first two is an option to FREEZE that element. This only applies to header and footer rows/columns, but that should about solve the problem. It’s not as nice as excel’s approach (which in my opinion is a little ‘cleaner’), but it works.

For example I want to print 5 main types of accents, being:

à á ā â ǎ

another example

x̀ x́ x̄ x̂ x̌

I’m using a macbook pro and pages in OSX, although this applies to any application, this is how I did it:

Open up System Preferences >> Personal >> Language and Text >> Input Sources

Once there, add a new keyboard, in this case I added “US Extended”.

Now to add some accents, I need to type the accent first, and then the character, but this only works for some letters (I suppose those that can be normally accented), but as you can see above, I have accented the letter ‘x’. So achieve this you must type the letter first and then [option]+[shift]+[code]. Not too hard, the five I need are:

• a bar over the letter - ā - [option]+a then type the letter
• a 'v' over the letter - ǎ - [option]+v then the letter
• a '^' over the letter - â - [option]+^ then the letter
• a '`' over the letter - à - [option]+` then the letter, and finally
• a ' ́' over the letter - á - [option]+e then the letter

^ <-- is [shift]+6
` <-- is the back tick, or key with the tilde (~) on it
  ́ <-- is the quote mark key with single and double quotes [',"]

It was that simple :-)

note: I am learning the thai language and it is a very tonal language and inflections on letters are necessary to determine the tone of the word, hence I need this ability. These 5 marks above fit the bill perfectly, although the bar one really isn't needed, but at least now I have the option of including it, or not including it.

Originally found here: http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/...