new skin for the old ceremony

Those of you out there who are keen Leonard Cohen fans will appreciate the super-clever pun in today’s title. Before you ask: there are Leonard Cohen fans out there, plenty of them. He’s doing a concert at Rod Laver Arena!

Anyway, not only do I have a rather excellent album from the mid 70s, I’ve also managed to give this blog a new template.

It’s stark, chic, and devilishly attractive. Kinda like me.

Also, I can’t figure out how to make it work properly. That also is a lot like me.

Running
If you happened to have been up and about before the dawn in Ringwood East this morning, you might have seen me sweating up a storm. What was meant to be a recovery session turned into 12.85km of hill reps. Fun.

dangerous blogging legal precedent

I don’t know whether you saw this story today:

Blogger arrested over Guns N’ Roses

27-year-old Kevin Cogill allegedly played unreleased GNR tracks on his blog a while ago. Shortly afterwards, FBI agents descended on his home, muttering dark threats under their bullet-proofed vests and, with any luck, calling him “punk!”.

He’s in trouble now, old Kevin. Within days he could be in the slammer, being forced to listen to Poison’s 80’s power ballad “Every Rose Has its Thorn” over and over.

Let that be a lesson to you, bloggers out there. If you’re going to put pirated music on your blog, don’t get caught.

I think that was the lesson.

Running
Some half hearted 12km runs over the past few days. Nothing spectacular.

possibly related

If, recently, you have read or, god help you, written a blog on wordpress.com recently, you will have noticed an “improvement”.

The boffins at WordPress headquarters have come up with some sort of system that inserts links to related posts at the bottom of every blog. V helpful, those boffins. In fact, if you’re a blogger, you don’t even have to do anything – it just appears!

I’m not too happy about it, actually. If I think there’s a related post somewhere, I will link to it via the magic of the hyperlink.

To paraphrase some long lost political figure, “I will decide the possibly related posts, and the way they come here.”

So, I’ve turned the “new feature” off. If you would like to turn yours off too, see the instructions below:

Definitely related post:
How do I disable “possibly related posts”?

Running
None. I’ve been too busy kid-wrangling and all that sort of stuff. I can’t think when I’ll have the chance in the immediate future. Dang.

feel connected?

I was going to call today’s post “up before the dawn yet again” but, after three days, frankly it’s getting boring. Anyway, it doesn’t really describe the full magnitude of the situation: I’ve been up since 6am yesterday. That’s a lot of hours. I’d tell you exactly how many but my brain no longer stretches to such amazing feats of arithmetic. (Strangely, blogging is okay).

Despite the sleep sitch, I thought I should post as, according to the Age, blogging makes you feel “more connected’:

Psychologist James Baker said this suggested that blogging could actually be good for people – helping them to feel part of a community.

“It makes people feel closer and more connected,” Mr Baker said.

I suppose no-one’s thought to actually join a community, or go out and “connect” with those flesh and blood sorts cluttering up the houses and streets around us. God forbid.

Running
None, this morning. I have a tentative plan for a bit of a leg turn-over session tonight, but that’s contingent on factors beyond my control: my ability to remain vertical.

technical difficulties

I did a run this morning and at the time I thought it was pretty gosh-darn impressive. Clearly, not as impressive as my Anderson Street escapade earlier in the week, but pretty good nonetheless.

So I mapped it all out on mapmyrun.com, as you do. I then thought I’d have a stab at inserting the map in my blog, as per the instructions. I copied the little bit of code, pasted it into a blog entry and hit “publish”.

What happened? Nothing, for a long time. Then, grudgingly, WordPress loaded the post, but not before stripping out all the interesting bits of code, the bits that make it work (mainly the iframe tags). Bastard.

Any ideas how I can get around this? Steve, you’re a bit of a clever-clogs… help me out here.

Running
The run itself was 13.02kms in 55 minutes. I started at work, headed down St Kilda Road, then right along Albert Road down to the bay. Right again into Beaconsfield road and then back to the city through Port Melbourne. It was all done more-or-less at marathon pace, with minimal stops for traffic lights, and I was pretty happy all-up.

Port Melbourne, by the way, has changed a bit since last I visited. It’s becoming progressively more “developed”, which typically means bland, soul-less, full of ugly great apartment blocks and restaurants with expensive fit-outs. Yuck.

what do you think of this?

I’m still stuffing around with wordpress, still getting used to the peculiar interface. I would have much rather had either a proper WYSIWYG interface or basic html, rather than the wordpress approach. Oh well, I’ll get used to it eventually, I suppose.

My question was around what wordpress calls “snap shots”. Basically, whenever you put a link in, wordpress helpfully pops up a little picture of the link location.

Like this.

What do you think? Personally, I don’t like it, but I’d be interested to see what others think.

new blog

Hello to those of you who have managed to discover this new blog, via the link from my blogspot blog. I salute you and your implacable determination, not to say muleheadishness.

I trust you will enjoy the new improved version. Have a look around, feel the quality, test the features. Knock yourselves out. Yes, a lot of the content will seem familiar to you, but that’s because it was all gold, and simply couldn’t be discarded. If you notice any errors, it’s all the fault of wordpress, who don’t yet fully understand the depth and breadth of my blogging genius.

If, on the other hand, you’ve managed to crawl or stagger upon this journal via other means, (hi there), any errors or other deficiencies are completely and utterly the fault of blogger. I can’t take responsibility, I’m afraid.

So, a new blog. I’ve spent today clicking around the new software/site/whatever you call it. It seems a bit better – a nice search function “out of the box” and some more flexibility with tags and categories. WordPress does have an alarming tendency to have text saying “hey there” all over the place which makes me want to vomit, punch the screen then have a lie down. I guess I’ll have to get used to it.

daredevil

Rest easy dear reader: this isn’t about Daredevil, the movie with Ben “Mr Charisma” Affleck. Not at all, it’s all about Robbie Maddison. Robbie, if you didn’t know, is the guy who just set the world record for longest motorbike jump in, naturally, Las Vegas:

Aussie jumps for joy at record bike leap

I’m all for this particular form of stupidity. If people want to launch themselves 100 metres up in the air on a motorbike, I say go for it. Why not? Just let know in advance so I’m not standing underneath.

Robbie’s going to give it another go in a few weeks, this time at Calder park, which strikes me as an ideal place to plunge to a fiery death. That being said, I must say this quote concerned me a bit:

“There is no doubt in my mind that if this next jump doesn’t work out it will be death.”

Death for who? Does he have a temper? If he falls short by a metre or so, will he strangle the cat? The article doesn’t elaborate.

Suffice to say, the whole event should be fraught with interest. It could be almost as messy as the Guns n Roses concert.

Running
I’m back at work, life is returning to normality, and all is good. A few laps of the tan were in order, and duly delivered. I took the long way there and back and ended up with 13.75km in 55 minutes. Not bad.

Schadenfreude
A few people who shall remain nameless have very helpfully pointed out some errors in recent posts. Some people, for example jojo and Jaykay, might argue along the lines of “don’t dish it out if you can’t take it” or words to that effect.

That clearly doesn’t apply in this case. Just like the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, this blog cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters but it does make the reassuring claim that where it is inaccurate, it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it is always reality that’s got it wrong.

So there.

Altona
I note our Acting Prime Minister, Ms Gillard has moved the seat of power from Canberra to Altona. Canberra one day, Altona the next, our country gets to visit the most interesting places….

Tip of the week
From Viz.co.uk:

WHEN cooking spaghetti, tie all the ends together. That way you can eat it in one long suck, eliminating the drudgery of washing up knives and forks.
Johnny Schott, Hackney

Why didn’t I think of that?