pffft.

Welcome back to the wonderful world of Apple, now coupled with some stupid EU ruling ( vive la France). I went out for a walk on Saturday and brought my iPhone and a pair of Sennheiser CX 500 for the purpose of listening to some tunes I selected from the last two “A State of Trance” online radio shows DJ-ed by Armin Van Buuren (recorded at 256 kbps). Long story short, the quality of them ain’t that bad when you listen using the mp3 player in the car or Winamp on the computer, but as soon as I plugged my earphones into the iPhone I realized something was so very wrong, I could barely hear the song in some situations ( like cars passing by, tourists making noise etc etc). After checking to see if I had Sound Check and Volume Limit options turned off in the iPod menu , I started thinking that maybe the earphones don’t go so well with the iPhone so meh, no problem, however made a note to still dig a bit around the net on Monday for some insight.

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I found a short poem today while reading through a blog, a poem that made me wonder … how many of us are in the same position ? How many of us actually had the guts to go out there and just do what makes them feel alive ? How many of us had the courage to step on the golden path, not even knowing where that leads, never looking back for the shore ? And how many of us just stepped away from it only to ask ourselves again and again and again … “What if ?” Anyway, here goes.

George Gray
By Edgar Lee Masters

I have studied many times
The marble which was chiseled for me—
A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor.
In truth it pictures not my destination
But my life.
For love was offered me, and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life
And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire—
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

Quick update : Installed Google Chrome on my laptop and tried to access Gmail, Chrome crashed 3 times in a row. Digging into it, maybe there’s a problem with the data imported from Firefox … or maybe my hard-drive is dying on me.

Ok, I love Firefox, I really do. But lately, this browser has started to annoy the shit outta me. I had some problems with it crashing every god damned time I used to logoff from Gmail, but that was fine, I was using it on Windows 7 beta, so kind of expected it to do that. Then I upgraded 7 to RC version, installed Firefox again, everything is fine. Or .. WAS !

Firefox v 3.5 comes out, all still good, browser is fast, stable, no problem there. Then the  first vulnerability hits the JIT compiler, but that was fixed easily, you download a No Script add-on, disable JavaScripts on every site and you’re protected. Hell, 99% of the Ajax using sites won’t work at all, but what the hell, at least you’re secure. OR … are you ?!

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Or how I would put it, short update.

I moved, both physically and electronically. First I found a decent apartment not far from the old place I used to live in, kind of nice, shall put some pictures one day or another.

Secondly, I moved stargazer back from Slicehost to Eleven2.com. While totally pleased with Slicehost and the way it runs, I gotta say that for I while I lost interest in the photoblog all together and when it started to come back to me the Debian running on the Slicehost virtual machine was badly outdated ( new version out apparently).  To hell with that, I thought, considering some other problems I had with the host (not Slicehost related, it’s a bit more complicated) and the fact that I didn’t want to spend my time dist-upgrading, I decided to move the blogs back to eleven2.com .

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Seeing that lately pretty much 80 to 90% of the apps I use or want to use demand having iPhoneOS 2.2.1 installed, I decided to upgrade my iPhone to that version. Easier said than done, apparently iTunes doesn’t go well along with Windows 7  in regard to upgrading the iPhone which is pretty weird considering I use iTunes to install programs and so on on the device and everything works just fine.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, I instructed iTunes to upgrade my phone, so it downloaded the new firmware and upgraded the drivers needed for the said operation to start. 10 seconds later ? Horror ! “Your iPhone cannot be upgraded due to an unknown error” ! What the …?! Confident that the 3G is pretty much unbrickable, I impatiently tap the restore button on the iTunes interface, and what do you know ? HORROR AGAIN ! “Your iPhone cannot be restored due to an unknown error/problem”. Panic mode on haha.

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This is why you should think for two seconds before going Pro with Flickr and publishing all your pictures there. For more details follow the link to Thomas Hawk’s blog.

I switched the template of my Stargazer photoblog to Simplicious, which is a hybrid between Delicious and Delicious Lite. While a nice theme, Simplicious does have some shortcomings, like the navigation buttons not being transparent on IE6, styleswitcher not working on the same browser etc. While some can be fixed -  for example, you can easily – kinda – fix the transparence of the buttons for IE6 alone – the styleswitcher problem resolve still eludes me today, and even though I am not a webcoding guy, it’s obvious to me that a site working perfectly nice and smooth in Firefox and Safari for example should work perfectly in other browsers as well. Bleah, try and tell that to Microsoft, they aparently seem to belive that everything they produce is working “as intended”, which is probably the truth, if you indend your browser to be crippled, archaic and not compatible with anything else on the web. That being said, still trying to fix the styleswitcher, but I don’t think I’ll devote it too much time, if people are using IE6 to browse the internet, they will soon be having way more problems than my site not being able to switch to full white background hehe.

On a side note, I’ve removed the thumbnail row from the template, and also integrated a SEO plugin, which seems to work at the moment, even though I didn’t yet modify the sitemap with the new info.

Today I changed hosting from Eleven2.com to Slicehost.com, and until now I have to say I love it, even though it’s more expensive, but on the other hand you get to do everything by yourself, kinda like a DIY project, but an electronic DIY while at that.

Everything seems to run smooth for the moment, even though I’ve got the cheapest slice available (hehe), which only has like 256 RAM available, didn’t run in any problems thus far, wordpress runs smoothly, pixelpost runs smoothly as well, I suppose it’s wait and see anyway.

Oook, having to browse through thousands of spam comments every day ain’t that fun for me, personally. I’ve been trying all kind of things to prevent it, but unfortunately PixelPost is not that easily customizable in regard to that, and I don’t really like the “Captcha” like things asking you to type all kind of answers to all kinds of questions inside a box. On the other hand, since nearly nobody ever comments on the image themselfs, I’ll disable comments for my photo blog alltogether until I can find a solution.

Soooo, here I am. Just finished installing WordPress 2.6, after I installed WP 2.5, after I installed WP 1.whatever, after putting nothing interesting on it, just for the sake of installing, and having something to do. Thinking of that reminded me that photography, something I picked up along the way, something that used to put me back on the track ain’t that much fun either lately, dunno why. Maybe the lack of likeminded people to go out with in Limassol, maybe the lack of what I deem to be interesting events to shoot, maybe the lack of someone to share my stuff with joyfully, dunno, your guess is as good as mine.

And then, what else is there to do ? Hang out with your friends maybe ? Even when they are way more boring than what you expect them to be ? Thinking of it, maybe I should just understand that what I deem to be gods in existance are just human beings, like you and me, at times tired or bored, at times full of joy of living, and at times just sad and sorrow. Maybe I should understand once and for all that the universe doesn’t revolve around me, and maybe, at times you have to try and understand, and help, instead of just demanding people to be the way you like them to be, or dream them to be.

I was thinking, why is it so hard to find words, and thank someone for just being there, even if they are not like you want them to be ? Why is it so hard to enjoy what you have, especially when no matter how much you have it always seems to be nothing ? Why is it so hard to just enjoy a pat on the back, instead of demanding more and more ?

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