David Morris – brassedoff.net

When I convinced Mrs Woolforbrains to set up a blog, I registered woolforbrains.net for her with FreeParking. One of the (simple) services they offer is ‘URL masking’ for web sites. Basically, they use a frameset for the main site URL and hide the destination in an embedded frame. Whilst it works well for tehy amjority of applications (I’ve been running the Band web site like that for years), some of the stuff that Caroline is now after wth her blog (Bloglines, RSS feeds) and the fact that the site was hidden under brassedoff.net was starting to cause problems. I knew there had to be a way out if it seeing as I’m running my own server, and sure enough, Apache2 comes to the rescue with named virtual servers. Everything will be fine as long as only HTTP1.1 compliant browsers which should account for most of the civilised world now.

Things may take a day or so to settle down because I’ve had to repoint the domain name direct to the IP address of our server, but once the propogation has finished, we should be OK. Once that’s done and I know everythiong is OK, I might just do the same with the band web site and the Killamarsh forum. The band web site is less of an issue, but the forum may be.

We’ll see.

if you are looking for Mrs Woolforbrains‘ blog and it’s disappeared, please let me know by way of a comment here because no-one will be able to let us know via her blog.

Ok, Mrs Woolforbrains is half expecting some images of Dusseldorf. The little non-scarey camera spent the trip in the car in the airport carpark and she won’t use the scarey Canon EOS :)

So, I didn’t get to see the penguins because I had to go to work (someone has to earn an honest crust). Consequently, you only get to see my images of Dusseldorf, not hers and Dans.

Steigenberger Parkhotel by day. Our room was around the right as you look at it.
Steigenberger Parkhotel by night.

Steiff Bears window displays in the Galeria Kaufhof store.

Can you spot the knitting monkey?

Small boy looks on in wonder!

Open-air ice rink outside across from the hotel

Part of the markets by day. This is heaving come dusk.

Mark has a feuerzangenbowle, but it isn’t as big as this guys, and he’s got three of them!

Dusseldorf Christmas Markets? Highly recommended. Go for the night. BA flights are around £150 return from Manchester. It’s a €20 taxi ride from the airport to the city centre. You can fly from Manchester direct to Dusseldorf on BA Connect from under £80 at the time of writing, although what happens when FlyBE take over BA Connect remains to be seen.

..in Dusseldorf to be precise. No sockenwolle yet for Mrs Woolforbrains!

We had a stroll around the Christmas market(s) last nighth. It’s fantastic. There are, I think, six different themed market areas including the Vodaphone ice rink which is right next to out hotel. There’s one thing for certain: the Germans certainly do a better job of Christmas markets than we do.

As we were loading the car yesterday morning for the trip to Manchester airport, we were chatting to our neighbour. It turns out they’d just come back from visiting her brother… guess where? Yep. Dusseldorf! Small world!

Daniel’s eyes were out on stalks last night as we went past the Galeria Kaufhof (?). The window displays were like you’d expect to see on an American movie. Steiff bears in all sorts of different scenarios. Expensive though, although I fully expect to get back to the hotel tonight and see something from the Steiff range in his clutches.

By virtue of the fact I’m writing this, my job in Dusseldorf is progressing well. I’m here to help get the networking sorted out in the new offices, and already (it’s 10:30), I’ve got the new switches in and the fibre hooked up and got a connection to my blog to update.

Tonight we’re probably going to explore more of the markets. I can’t provide any pictures until I get home because I haven’t got a card reader with me (although I did bring the Canon).

Ah well… back to work…

Many places have traditional carols for this time of year, and although I’m a south Sheffield lad, my connections with the band mean I get to play all the local north Sheffield carols. One of my favourites is a tune called Old Foster which is used for the well-known carol While Shepherds Watched.

The thing is with these old carols is that if someone doesn’t make an effort to keep them going by singing them, they’ll die out in favour of the more ‘commercially popular’ and well-known ones which would be a pity. Our part books are in hand-written manuscript from years ago and falling apart at the seams.

So, by way of keeping an old tune going, I’ve dug out a five part arrangement of Old Foster I did last year. It’s not perfect – there’s one particular progression I’m not happy with, but you’ll get teh drift. If you’ve got an application that you can use to edit the midi file, you can also get the first verse in so far as I reckon it fits. It all goes a bit pair-shaped towards the end, but you will get the drift.

So, here it is: Old Foster midi file

I’ll apologise now. This one’s going to be a long post with pictures…

We’ve just got back from the Christmas trip to Center Parcs (CP) Sherwood Forest. As usual, it was a very pleasant time, more so because we go to see Santa. Santa’s grotto is lovely – they do a really good job setting it all up and it’s a great experience for the kids (we went with my sister and her two so including Daniel there were three of them).

No prizes for identifying the guy with the beard.

Santa is a very jolly chap and even let on that he’d been learning to use a computer although his typing wasn’t up to much at the moment.

Decorations in the village square were tasteful. The centrepiece was a beautiful white wire-frame tree fully lit with blue LEDs.

I’m not sure what we did before blue LEDs – they seem to get everywhere! (For the record, EOS350D, 1/8second f7.1, ISO200, camera balanced on a handrail).

We were in a different part of the village this time – further out than we usually go and not somewhere we’ve stopped before. The view from the back door was rather pleasant on Saturday morning…

…with the early morning mist just rising.

Whilst I’m in photo uploading mood, here’s another couple. Firstly, Christmas dinner…

…just kidding! It was wandering around the Butterfly House last weekend and I couldn’t resist it.

Finally for now, you’ve seen the CP tree… here’s a little bit of our tree at home…

… 4 seconds exposure at f22, this time on a tripod!

I’ve put a couple of mods into my blog that I’ve been working on over the last couple days. If you look on the silver bar under the image at the top of the page, I’ve included the server load statistics and, in brackets at the end of the line, an indication of how many times the main blog page has been accessed. Seeing as the blog is running on my own server (I’m hosting it myself), I’ve got quite a lot of flexibility what I do with it, and it’s nice to play a bit!

On the right underneath ‘blog stats’ is something Mrs Woolforbrains has been asking for, namely a brief analysis of who’s been visiting us on a daily basis. It’s a pull from the web server log files plus a bit of PERL to do some counting and output formatting. It runs on a cron job just before midnight local time and tells us, for each blog, which IP addresses have been accessing it. Basically, we’re nosey!

I may get around to enhancing it to show domain names. then again, I’ve got a great track record of generating UFO’s as Mrs Woolforbrains calls them!

I had a meeting with Paul Harding from Killamarsh Parish Council tonight. Unfortunately, the two Council members were unable to attend, but Paul wanted us to get together anyway. After months of banging on about the poor state of the top-ranked site if you google for Killamarsh, I feel that progress has been made.

I outlined my concerns which Paul took on board and threw a few suggestions on to the table in terms of ways I could envisage the thing moving forward. I left Paul with a few pointers to some of the projects I’ve been involved with over the years (including this and Mrs Woolforbrains’ blog!) which will hopefully establish that I do know something about the subject.

We’ve got another meeting scheduled for Monday at which hopefully the Councillors will be in attendance. I would hope that from that, I’ll be able to get a better idea what their plans are for moving killamarsh.com forward (or at least doing something positive with it).

Of course, as I’ve left Paul with a list of web sites that have my name all over them, it’s entirely possible that you, dear reader, are one of those very councillors or even Paul himself.

If you are, please leave your mark here and comment. It’s easy and painless and will go some way to convincing me that someone outside my circle of family and close friends actually reads this drivel. It’s sad that Mrs Woolforbrains gets more readers and commenters that I do. Heck, I might even post something wool related… I’ve got the germ of an idea, and at some point it’s going to bear fruit. Or is that because I’ve been spending too much time playing Viva Pinata on the XB360 lately? (It’s all about planting seeds – don’t worry if you don’t get the link).

Driving has taken a turn for the worse in the difficulty stakes for me since last night. I can’t see behind me so well any more. All thanks to some unidentified little (or big) toerag in the High Green area that decided to seperate my car from its offside door mirror. This is where the mirror used to fit. A bunch of wires come out from the door to attach to the mirror orientation motor and the heater element.

It happened some time between around 9pm and 10:20pm because one of the local bobbies was around the area and saw nothing untoward when he went down Packhorse Lane.

When I came out of Band rehearsal, I noticed nothing amiss myself until I looked in the mirror prior to manouevering. Then, I realised something was missing. Well, not actually missing… more like hanging off.Mrs WoolForBrains thinks it could have been knocked off by a car… I’m not convinced. Either way, some ‘orrible individual did damage to my property and hadn’t got the guts or good grace to own up to it, or just went out to commit a senseless act of destruction.

Not only that, but they’ve also landed me with a £180 repair bill – £110 + VAT for the mirror assembly, £45 for the painting and fitting, not to mention the personal inconvenience of having to take the car in to the garage… that will be another 2 hours or so of my time down the pan.

I really want to get hold of something valuable of theirs (iPod, mobile phone or similar) and grind it in to little bits under their noses to see how they like it. Will I ever get chance? I doubt it.

On a slightly lighter note, if you’ve ever wanted to see what goes into a Peugeot 206CC door mirror, here you go…

City Motors (my local dealer) never batted an eyelid when I rang for a quote for the repair (can you bat an eyelid over the phone?). I suspect it may be a common occurence.

We’ve just bought a couple of new HP laptops for work. Unfortunately, they came with XP home on them – not good in a corporate environment. No problem – just slap our corporate install disc in.

No. These machines have SATA drives and XP doesn’t have the drivers. They don’t have floppies either, and our USB floppy is ignored during the second part of the install process. Enter nLite. It’s a tool which allows you to easily integrate non-standard drivers in to a XP build disc to avoid these sorts of problems. It also allows you to tune many of the other XP settings. Highly recommended, and it’s free.

…to the lure of the new games console. We’ve had an XBox for a while now, and last Christmas I was going to get a new XBox360, but supplies were so bad I gave up on the idea. My XBox had a lease of life after I chipped it and got XBox Media Cent{er|re} installed on it and it’s done sterling service this year.

I was looking at spashing out on a new sound system for the car, but prices of over £500 installed (I wanted a subwoofer as well which pushed up the price) made that idea look increasingly unattractive, so I decided to pour money money into Unlce Bill’s coffers and splash out on a shiney XBox 360.

Loathe as I am to say this (it really sticks in the throat), but it’s not bad. It’s aesthetically a lot nicer than the original console, and plugged in to our HD TV running at 720i and 5.1 surround system via optical cable, it looks and sounds great. Gameplay is good for what I’ve got so far, and last night I set up an XBox Live gamertag (I had one on the old system but it got banned from XBLive when I chipped it) and spent a few hours downloading XBox Live Arcade content (for Daniel – yeah, really!).

Surprisingly, the content is cheaper than I expected. Feeding Frenzy for instance is cheaper on Arcade than from PopCap or Real. Ditto Zuma… and the games again look awesome in HD.

Just before I retired for the night, I poked the media scan option and surprisingly, it found TwonkyMedia on my Linux server. Surprising because I thought I’d shut it down. I did mange then to stream a few album tracks from the Linux box to the XB360 before something went wrong and the XB360 locked up. There’s promise there though.

Now I’m annoyed though, because it’s lunchtime and I’ve just realised my lunch is in the fridge at home. That’s what you get for being organised and making your lunch the night before.

Finally, did anyone see Mythbusters last night on Discovery? The one with the diet Coke and soft mints? What a party trick… roll on New Years Eve. Be afraid for your paintwork, Kelly! Funnily enough, Mrs WoolForBrains and I were speculating what would happen if you drank a litre or so of Diet Coke and had a mouthful of mints. I suppose someone had to have tried it…