After 24+ hours travel, I’ve just ticked off a full twenty four hours in Munich. So far so good.

The flights over were reasonable thanks mainly to the various Qantas and BA lounges I was lucky enough to gain entry into. During the flight to Singapore I kept myself amused by figuring out a Desktop Publishing application. After re-boarding and settling in for the cruise to London I caught a decent nights sleep before watching Casablanca in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

I also happened made friends with a German bloke, Wolfgang, who had the seat next to me. He had a few interesting stories to tell and was on his way home to wrap up a few things before making a more permanent relocation to Canberra later in the year. I’m sure we’ll keep in touch.

Munich and Germany in general is such a great place to start the trip. There’s a really good vibe from the other backpackers and the impending Oktoberfest action. The thing is that it has just the right amount of culture-shift on offer. Everything is just a bit more challenging than at home while at the same time it’s very easy to just relax and enjoy. Highly recommended.

After leaving the airport by train and arriving at the Central Station, I vaguely recalled the street our hostel is on from my last trip here in 2006. I walked a bit of a circle and eventually found the street and the hostel. With even more luck found Brad and Kate already milling around waiting for the 2pm check-in time to roll around. It was great to see a couple of familiar faces.

We got settled and went out to find a late lunch. As one might imagine, this turned out to be a sausage and beer at the Hofbrau beer hall. Magic. Afterwards we cruised back to the hostel to wait for Matt and Wes to call me and announce their arrival The call never came but the boys did show up, much to my surprise. After exchanging the standard pleasantries, it was off the Augustiner beer hall for dinner and beers. A great night was had by all!

No doubt there are plenty more great days and nights to reflect on in future posts.

I just got home with my new toy, a 120GB iPod classic. It’s the first iPod I’ve owned so this is something of a new experience.

I plugged it into my laptop (an eeePC, running Hardy Heron) and RhythmBox started up automatically. It looked good as the new device appeared in the side-panel and there seemed to be a synchronisation check.

When it came to pushing the music library from laptop down onto the iPod, things got a little tricky. First I tried to drag and drop the ‘All Artists’ listing from the music library to the iPod item. This caused RhythmBox to shutdown; there was no error dialog to point out what was going on.

I started googling and discovered that one of the first things that happens when you plug an iPod into a Mac/Windows PC with iTunes is that it’ll format and create a basic directory structure for the music. I’d assume this is somewhere below (or hidden) from the standard top-level folders which were already present: Calendars, Contacts, iPod_Control, Notes, Photos, Recordings.

There were a few old forum threads where people had difficulty using RhythmBox to sync their iPods. The best suggestion I could see was to use gtkPod.

So, the simplest thing that can possibly work (but no simpler):

• Eject the iPod and physically disconnect;
• Install gtkPod using Synaptic;
• Re-connect the iPod and it should auto-mount;
• Close RhythmBox if it’s already open or it opens automatically;
• Open up gtkPod. It will more than likely detect the iPod and ask you to confirm the mount location. It then launches the wizard to create the necessary default folder structure. Alternatively, use the File > `Create iPod’s directories` menu item.
• Choose the model and it should make the updates. Then just use the toolbar icon to Save the changes to the iPod. Once this is set, you can close gtkPod.
• Open up RhythmBox and you should be able to drag the ‘All Artists’ listing that contains all your music onto the IPOD device in the side-bar.

And from there you should be laughing. I’ve even found that the Last.fm plug-in will scrobble the tracks played on the iPod since the last time it was connected. Very neat.

One other thing. My iPod model wasn’t on the list available in gtkPod. It’s one of the newer 120GB classics. I just gave the 160GB Silver option a crack and it worked fine. I guess your mileage may vary though.

I had a laptop hard-drive go on me a few weeks back. After starting over, here’s what I currently have installed. The list is in no particular order:

• Putty
• WinSCP
• GIMP
• XAMPP
• SharpReader
• Firefox 3 beta
• Nokia PC Suite
• Google Earth
• Polar WebLink (for my heartrate monitor)
• TortoiseSVN
• Beyond Compare

I’d expect that as soon as I get my MP3s back on this machine I’ll have WinAMP and the Last.FM scrobbler installed. I can’t be too far off needing an IDE either…. it may be time to try NetBEANS.

[update 28th June]

• FireFox 3 (with firebug, ietab, twitterfox, del.icio.us)
• Opera 9.5
• Internet Explorer 7 (side by side with IE6 thanks to MultipleIEs)
• Winamp & the Last.fm Scrobbler
• Eclipse (plus subclipse, php, pydev)
• MultipleIEs
• NetBeans

[update 10th July]

• CDex
• MusicBrainz PiccardTagger
• Juice Podcast Receiver

Blarg… almost six months since a post.

Last night I upgraded the blog software from 2.5.0 to 2.5.1. This supposedly locks down a few security issues and patches miscellaneous bugs.

After momentarily thinking I’d hosed the database and would need to revert to a daily backup, I realised I had incorrectly configured the table prefix variable. This was because the head revision in subversion differed from the deployed wordpress instance. Bad Dwight.

Another side effect of this blunder was some general weirdness with Feedburner. After some investigation, fooling around with the plug-in, and an eventual version upgrade, things should have returned to normal.

I definitely need to write myself a process guide for future upgrades!

I’m lying around listening to a couple CDs I bought yesterday (Pixies and She Wants Revenge). I just had a flashback to new year’s day when I stumbled into a second hand record store and found The Answer To Both Your Questions by Something For Kate.

I usually check the SFK spot in a vein attempt to find Intermission which is rare.

I couldn’t remember whether the tracks are on Q&A With Dean Martin, which I own. I didn’t make the purchase. It turns out the vague memory was correct - Q&A includes The Answer… and the tracks released with their first single Dean Martin.

While googling and ended up on a tangent when I noticed the Prickly re-mix (of Prick) was by Eli Janney. He played bass/keyboards for Girls Against Boys. Cool band in mind, mainly for the track ‘Kill the Sex Player’ from the Kevin Smith film Clerks.

Kill that noise,
Kill the noise.
Make it alright,
Kill the drummer.
Kill the bass player,
Kill both bass players.
This song is so hip right now,
I’m going deaf, I wanna kill the singer.

Anyway, I think I’m going to buy The Answer to Both Your Questions.

I couldn’t sleep when I saw this in my Last.fm rss feed.

I’ve been hooked ever since I gave Antics a serious listen on a mates iPod while deep in powder country. I went straight out and bought it from Tower Records in Shibuya a few days later.

While speaking of getting hooked, I’m severly engrossed in The Mess Hall’s Devils Elbow. It’s strong and punchy up load but smooth enough for background music.

And finally I’ve just stumbled upon evidence that She Wants Revenge put out a second album, This is Forever, late last year. I’ll have to get hold of this and then get amongst the Hottest 100 voting.

I’ve had it up to ‘here’ with Dope Wars and Fun Wall invitations on FaceBook. Some of us have work to do!

So I googled and found a simple guide on how to block those annoying invitations.

This update comes in a little late since I’ve been side tracked with family (and general laziness) the past few days.

The fourth weekend in December turned out to be a pretty interesting affair. I knocked off from work for the year on Friday and was extremely happy to make it home. The only thing I’ve taken with me is a 34 page form for some security access that I’ll need in the new year. Oh, how much of a joy that’s been to complete.

Anywho, Friday night was a fairly low key event. I managed to get myself down to The Back Page for a few quiet beers with a mate. Toohey’s Old was the beverage of choice; a long time favourite of mine from the cheaper/mass produced market.

Saturday morning was quiet also, in the most part due to a solid sleep in that I desperately needed. I got my act together close to midday and had the best intentions of shooting the basketball before heading around to a christmas party being held by trio of friends who are sharehousing.

I’d was about fired up the car when a call from mum threw plans into disarray. Being the good son, I offered my services to sort out a radiator issue down at the fruit and veg store. This was close to the bottle shop I had planned to visit so the distance/location wasn’t such a problem for me. After 45 minutes in the sun working on the car and a recently purchased bottle of Malibu in hand, I gave up on the basketball and went straight to the party. It turned out to be a great afternoon by the pool and evening on the deck.

Sunday morning I hit the shops early to purchase one last christmas present. This was wrapped by about 11:30 so I chilled out and played through the ‘best of The Cure’ album I’d bought myself earlier in the day. The afternoon drifted away to the sounds of the stereo and thoughts of the upcoming celebrations.

Last week was the start of a new role in Canberra. There were more airports, taxis and airplane food then generally desirable. I need to get used it quick because it’s shaping up to be a standard part of my week for the next six months.

Friday night was Brisbane and I took a CityCat around to the University of Queensland to see my sister Dana’s graduation ceremony. This was my first time at such an event since I elected not to attend my own. Although the main attraction, Dana crossing the stage, took all of 5 seconds, the rest of the event was reasonably interesting and went quickly.

Later in the evening I made my way through a couple bars in Brisbane and the Surfers Paradise.

Saturday and Sunday were fairly identical: a decent sleep-in, beach, shopping for Christmas presents at Pacific Fair and catching up with friends in the evening. The difference being the all-grain home brewed beer on Saturday and the Boost Juice on Sunday. Good times.

Download this podcast. It’s an interesting talk given by William McDonough about ecologically intelligent design and the ‘cradle to cradle’ philosophy.

The idea is to put an end to waste by by designing and producing things that are infinitely reusable/recyclable. He calls out businesses and governments for focussing on how they’re doing less bad (e.g. reducing emissions by 15%), rather than saying what good things they’ve done well.

The way this inverts the typical social perspective is really neat.

If you like, I’d suggest you check out and subscribe to the Conversations Network. After grabbing bits and pieces from them for the last few years, I’ve just started pulling down their podcasts pretty heavily for the past month or so. It’s all good.