After many months of coming back to them, doing a little more, running away, and eventually coming back to them, we’ve finally finished off pages upon pages of legal speak with regard to the Pixelapes web hosting packages.

We’re really delighted with the way our hosting is going, and on the strength of things over the past year we’re planning some major upgrades to our service, including a brand new server to be added to the family.

It definitely seems that there is a need out there for well a well managed hosting service. Something we’re very well able to provide. I’m also thrilled to finally have all the proper documentation sorted, as this gives both us and our clients peace of mind in knowing that everything is properly set out.

Still, legal speak is a brain melter.

I was just put on to this fantastic film by George Méliès by Shirley from Stitch Films. I highly recommend watching the whole thing – it’s a really wonderful adventure and I can’t quite believe it was originally made in 1902.

Le Voyage dans la Lune

It’s a damn sight better than a lot of shit put out these days.

If you’d like to find out more, check out the Wikipedia article on George Méliès.

He was very innovative in the use of special effects. He accidentally discovered the stop trick, or substitution, in 1896, and was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color in his films. Because of his ability to seemingly manipulate and transform reality with the cinematography, Méliès is sometimes referred to as the “Cinemagician.”

I’ve just started an occupational first-aid course run by the Irish Red Cross in Mullingar. The first day was a little bit overwhelming, but sitting at home and doing my “homework”, I’m realising that I have actually taken in a decent amount of information. I’m still feeling that my brain can’t take in that much more information at the moment, but I think it’s going to be a really good qualification to have (assuming I pass the exam that is).

Today we learnt a lot about assessing a situation, the proper procedure in a variety of situations, how to recognise different conditions, how to treat bleeding, burns, fractures and more.

It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a few years – ever since someone fell off a cliff up at Rathlin Island (foolish drunks and crumbly cliffs do not mix) I realised that I really should know the basics of what to do in a situation like that.

Anyway, back to my homework.

Huge huzzah for any improvement on WordPress plugin search – it’s always baffled me how it can be so random at times.

It was so bad that I ended up creating my own Google Custom Search, which I just use instead of the one on WordPress.org.

One of the biggest problems and most frequent complaints we’ve had with the WordPress.org Plugins Directory is the horrible, horrible search results.

via WordPress Blog

Great to see things going well so far for Pirate Bay

There has been high drama on the second day of the Pirate Bay trial. Due to serious shortcomings in the prosecution evidence, around 50% of the charges in the case are going to have to be withdrawn. The defense describes it as a ’sensation’, seeing half of the charges being dropped on the second day.

via 50% of Charges Against Pirate Bay Dropped | TorrentFreak.

I’m facing a crash in Illustrator at the moment. I’m going to leave it for a little while to see if it gets its head together, but it’s not looking promising.

I know, I should remember to save things on a regular basis, and I’m usually pretty good at it, but any application in which you spend long amounts of time doing detailed work, whether it be something like Cubase (music production), or OpenOffice (word processing, spreadsheets etc) offers the option to automatically save your work to a temporary file which, after a catasrophic crash, allows you to recover the most recently auto-saved version.

Adobe Creative Suite is the leading collection of creative design tools, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, After Effects, Dreamweaver, and others.

As far as I’m aware, the only auto-save feature comes in either Dreamweaver or Contribute (not sure which), but none of the other applications offer it.

So please, Adobe, I’m sure I’m not the only one clamouring for this addition – bring auto-save to Creative Suite. Save us from tearing our hair out.

Gnome Do, my favoured linux alternative to Launchy, has just updated to 0.8 and the new version includes a “Dock” style theme. I’ve tried a couple of dock type apps on Windows in the past and I never really liked them. I’m more of a keyboard person if I can be when it comes to launching apps.

Still, I’ll probably check this out, seeing as it’s essentially a theme for Gnome Do, and sounds like it might be done reasonably well. I’ll report back if it looks interesting.

Docky is a frontend for GNOME Do (Do) that introduces an entirely new way to interact with Do. Docky helps Do become more directly involved with your desktop by providing a persistent mouse based Dock interface while remaining true to Do’s keyboard only interaction. Being tied directly into Do allows Docky to be adaptive and dynamic. As your usage patterns change, so too does Docky. For everything Do can do, Docky can too.

via Docky – GNOME Do Wiki.

(Some might say – just get a mac, and to them I would say “shove it”)

De monsters is a fun little concept with a load of strange videos of cartoon characters imposed on live action situations. Each clip is pretty short and comprise of day to day situations like large monster sitting at bus stop interacting with a little old lady, or a monster buying a pair of shoes.

What I love most about it is the live interactions – it’s very well done and I can only assume that there was a real person in a giant blue suit that prompted the incredibly apt reactions from people

Reading that title again, it occurs to me that it could be interpreted a couple of ways. I only wish I could say that my own productions from my pseudonym Ebauche had been played that many times, unforutnately that’s not the case.

No, I’m talking about all the music that I’ve tracked through Last.fm’s scrobbling system. I’ve been scrobbling for just over 2 years and 2 months now. That’s approximately 790 days of keeping track of things, and whilst I did track stuff played on my Mp3 player for a little while, I got bored with transferring the information and haven’t done it in a very long time.

So, that comes out at about 37 tracks a day on average. Which, when I think about it, is quite a lot really.

For the sake of, well, perhaps no one other than myself, here’s my top artists over the past 30,007 plays. If I remember, I’ll post these up at various intervals so that I can track my own listening habits over time.

My overall leaderboard at 30,000 plays!

Not exactly a very exciting post this one, but in case you are a user of Profilactic, a social networking aggregation tool, it appears to be offline at the moment.

This means that my “Elsewhere” section is currently dead in the water, as it runs off a plugin which integrates profilactic updates onto a page on your WordPress blog.

I’ll keep an eye on it and see if it comes back online. In the meantime I might need to take a look at other ‘lifestream’ tools. Or, of course, just dump the idea altogether.