Chris Garrett’s Personal Blog

Ouch ouch ouch, originally uploaded by chrisgarrett.

This is the second time a contact lens has split in my eye but this time it was even more irritating as we were out for a curry with friends at the time. While trying to fish the shards out of my eye in the mens washroom a couple [...]

I am so foolishly trusting. It turns out migrating feed subscribers from wordpress defaults over to feedburner wasn’t just a case of installing the feedburner wordpress plugin. That is only half the job, there is a bug in the classes.php (found in wp-includes). Right at the bottom you will see:
function handle_404()
Remove the lines [...]

It turns out that I have been told a couple of lies about Macs. The first is that they don’t crash. Don’t believe it, I had to figure out how to “force quit” and use that facility quite a lot. And no, not on Microsoft software. Apparently they even do a Mac equivalent of the [...]

OK so I did it, originally uploaded by chrisgarrett.

For the first time in my IT career I finally used a mac for longer than an hour. Today we bought a Macbook.
It’s a strange new world. I really don’t have a clue what I am doing.
So far I have got web (downloaded Firefox), MSNIM, [...]

I haven´t quite given up yet but I am getting close to calling it a day. My friend Tony spent hours with me today on GAIM (with my laptop tethered with a network cable). Everything that I tried wouldn´t work while in that time he got two machines working on Ubuntu fine.

This operating system [...]

While I am avoiding doing anything promotional with this blog seeing as it is mainly for friends and family I did think it was about time I started using feedburner for my RSS feeds. I have changed platform many times and lost subscribers each time. It hasn’t been that big a deal before because I [...]

This is an old but interesting article about the abusive (and should be downright illegal) business practices of DeBeers. I had picked up bits of this story but it’s nice to read the whole thing in chronological order. Bottom line; Diamonds == Worthless. It’s like bottled water, marketing artificially inflates the price. Daft thing is [...]

My usual email account is actually a forwarded domain pointing at Fastmail. I have used Fastmail under a paid account for years just because they have been mostly pretty stable and I have tons of stored messages. It’s a bit daft really as I can get IMAP now on several of my hosting accounts but [...]

Just shows how many evil gits are out there willing to prey on peoples greed, naivete or generosity. The top scams of 2006.

I read the article at the bbc news site about the huge amount of people emigrating out of the UK and thought it was interesting enough, especially as it was relevant to my own situation. Then I read the Digg comment thread and found it more so. Usually Digg comments are pretty infantile but for [...]