smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Once apon a time, using a 17″ flat panel display (indeed, owning any kind of TFT display) was considered pretty darn geeky and cool. Having received a good year or two out of my no-name 17″ Chinese knock-off it became increasingly clear I needed more desktop real-estate.. enter, stage left the ASUS VW192T, a 19″ DVI widescreen display sporting a maximum of 1440×900dpi with a trifle five millisecond refresh rate.

It’s been a little quiet here of late, namely due to two events back-to back.

As of Friday 17 October I left EDS, after 5 years of blood, sweat and the occasional tear ((having a 25kg server land on one’s foot, in an effort to save, *hurts*. )), to pursue a new job, in the IT industry.

Kath and I have also just returned from visiting Victor Harbour, a sleepy coastal town some hour and a half’s drive from Adelaide, South Australia.

You can view the rest of the (short) Victor Harbour set over at flickr.

You know that feeling where you don’t know if you’re awake, or still dreaming?

‘Babylon 5: The Lost Tales’ is a direct-to-DVD project based on the popular series from the mid-1990s. Lost Tales first DVD, titled ‘Voices of the Dark’ has now begun production. As usual, J. Michael Straczynski and Doug Netter will be running the show with Straczynski directing.

I remember the very first episode of series one. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Babylon 5, despite the slightly corny dialogue and initially ‘low budget’ SFX might, just might turn into something special. And it did. Admit it, how many of you, who watched B5, ever got a ‘chill’ as the build up to the exposure of the ’shadows’ progressed?

Due to an unscheduled fault, the smackfoo mySQL db decided to reject connections for the last couple of hours or so.

We are currently experiencing periodic and intermittent issues involving connectivity from customer applicatoins to MySQL. (mt) Media Temple engineers are aware of this issue and are actively working on a resolution.

However, as the (mt) guys rock, we’re back in action. This would be the first unscheduled outage in, err, 5 months? Having come from dreamhost where outages are an almost daily occurrence, this whole not crashing, always available thing (mt) have going, quite frankly rocks!

I’ve been battling with the previous theme, this_is for a few weeks now.

Due to a few design flaws it’s proving a challenge to get some of the content ((.. particularly topic sensitive sidebar related data.)) to display correctly. This comes down to a combination of limitations in the template structure I used and a small number of foibles in the 2.0.x wordpress family ((.. specifically, is_page() detection flaws.. although there are others.)).

I’m also more fond of the ’split’ layout option — that is, where the sidebar has migrated to the ‘bottom’ of pages.

Having cut my teeth converting a basic XHTML template into a wordpress theme, it’s time to up the anti and look at developing ‘the look’ from scratch.

I came to the conclusion, many years ago, that at any given moment, the universe will purposefully do something unusual, as it appears to truly enjoy a good joke.

Take this morning for example.

I had been listening to ‘Principles of Lust’, by Enigma, from the MCMXC a.d. album, via my slightly battered yet faithful iPod and indeed had spent much of the morning trip listening to a wide selection of Enigma tracks.. having become quite disassociated with my environment as I fell deeper into the music, it was almost as though time itself had slowed down.. as though people were walking more slowly.

The experience one gets during moments of extreme stress when the brain artificially slows down the construct we call ‘time’ in order to get a better grip on a specific experience.

And it was at that moment, the universe spoke — to remind me of a certain truth.

A dark black BMW raced past, obviously in a hurry to make work, on time. Number plate HELL666. A small smile broke across my face.. which vanished briefly when the next vehicle shot past, one of those faceless minivans that all look the same, number plate LORD00. The smile was replaced with a sheepish grin as the irony of Good versus Evil crossed my mind.

The universe, however had one last sleeved card. The third vehicle to race past? A Paramedic.