Errr, so it’s like Christmas, again. Yeah I don’t get any time off work either, just public holidays and weekends. I’m doing the whole family thing right now at my cousins place, we’re having a few drinks so it’s all good. Not a whole lot is new in the last few days. Been spending a bit of time playing one of my friend’s Nintendo Wii, and doing the odd Christmas shopping.

We have a new TV now, well actually it’s just a 19″ widescreen PC monitor, but because it’s in the longue room and our Home Theatre PC drives everything, it’s a television. I’m really starting to dislike the fact that the tuner card in the HTPC lacks composite inputs, especially since the PC monitor only accepts VGA and DVI.

My cousin just got a brand new 22″ widescreen for his PC, it’s a BenQ with 5ms response, FEAR looks nice. I wanted to burn a whole bunch of new games to bring down with me however it seems my main machine (server) is full of filesystem errors. My 200GB hard drive is now no longer showing up in Windows, it looks like I’m going to need to rebuild the partition table. To rub salt in the wound we lost our ADSL Modem/Router yesterday, so we have no wireless now. A huge storm came through and a nasty surge took it out, as well as our 8 port switch, so we’re running a skeleton network with a backup modem and no wireless, which is frustrating to say the least.

I’ll have a crack at returning the modem to Belkin for warranty but if it doesn’t work out then I’m out of pocket about $300, since this router has support for two VOIP lines plus PSTN fallover. Note to self, buy a better surge board!

After much fucking around, I finally managed to port over all of my posts from Rojax (previous cms) into WordPress. Initially I was hoping to simply import the tables (after modifying the column names) into the new database, unfortunately with WordPress – this is not as simple as it sounds. After screwing around in Excel with CSVs and so on, and even trying to structure raw queries to input the data, I finally gave up. Looking through the import options for WP, I noticed that it can import RSS feeds as posts. I thought I was home and hosed until I realised my old RSS feed didn’t output post content, just titles and links. So I had to rewrite my RSS generator to include a new query to grab the post content, and the post date, and then had to look up the specs sheet for RSS 2.0 to get the correct syntax for output.

After all that screwing around, I finally managed to import the entries into WP, you can find them under the category ‘Old site’ – unfortunately it was not possible to import comments using the method I used, not that there was much that was useful or insightful in the comments anyway 😛 I was expecting the big task to be designing a new template for this, and I was looking forward to putting my effort in to that, however I really can’t be arsed at this point. So you’re all going to be looking at Kubrick for the next few days until I get some time again to sit down and develop a new template. If you can think of anything I need to enable or disable, or whatever, let me know.