Well, I’ve just completed the upgrade to WordPress 2.6 – there certainly seem to be a lot of extra features in this release.

Check out the video for more info!!

Ok – well after a FAAAAAAR too long stay in the darkness known as “being without internet whilst moving house” I make my triumphant return!

As I’m sure you can imagine, I’m a tad busy right at the moment to elaborate further, but, after I’ve caught up on my 100+ emails (at least the ones that aren’t spam) I’ll plop a new and more verbose post

Before I go, however, a quick shoutout to those people who helped me move – Anthony, Vinny, Tim and Luke – Thanks!

There is something on the horizon

Something dark, elusive

It has a shape and form, but it’s not clear

It knows my name

Its calling for me, beconing me closer

I can’t see what it is

I don’t know what it wants

I’m scared

As many of you who I chat with on MSN from time to time will know, I have been a stern supporter and promoter of the instant messaging client Trillian.

I have been using Trillian for a VERY long time – something in the order of 8+ years.

Its has its limitations and problems, for example, it hasn’t supported audio and video chats (not that I use these all that often) and for some reason its always had issues when trying to send or receive files.

I have also had the honor of being an Alpha Tester of the yet-to-be-released Trillian Astra (which does support audio, video etc. as well as a grand list of other features – most of which I don’t use)

About a week ago, my PC had a ‘hiccup’ (well, someone accidentally kicked over the external SATA drive attached to the PC and pulled out the cable) which required a restart.  On returning from the restart, Trillian opened with no contacts in the list, and none of my settings.

Ordinarily, this isn’t much of an issue.  Trillian uses INI files for its configuration rather than add too many entries into the windows registry, and simply overwriting the INI files with backed-up versions usually resolves any problems.

I was fortunate enough to have made a backup of the entire Trillian data and program folders just the day before, so I restored these to their original locations.  But alas, still nothing in the contacts list, and my account configuration was marked as ‘inactive’.  No matter how much fiddling about I did, I just couldn’t get it working again – at one stage I managed to get all my contacts back up, but every one of them was marked as ‘Orphaned’ (meaning it wasn’t attached to an account.

So – after all these years of loyalty, I have decided I am now finished with it.  The new Trillian Astra has been in Alpha Testing phase for over 2 years now, and shows no sign of even going Beta any time soon.

After a little looking about, I have decided to give Pidgin a try.

Pidgin is a much the same as Trillian – a multi-flavour IM client.  Its also Open Source, which is an extra bonus point for it too.

I have been playing around with it now for a few hours, and I have found a few good and bad points about it so far:

First thing to go was the sounds – Not so much a criticism, but with the amount of people I have in my contacts list, the constant coming-and-going led to a continual soundtrack

The interface is very…Bland – I’m sure its just that I’m used to Trillian’s interface, but Pidgin’s interface is very lacklustre with no prettyness at all – I’m sure its something I’ll get used to.

It doesn’t have System Tray pop-up notifications – This may be an option somewhere I’m missing, but I would like the little pop-ups when people come online the same as Windows Live Messenger does.

The chat window favicons are the buddy icons of the contact – I LOVE this feature, it helps to identify who you’re chatting to in the task bar without having to hover, or open the chat window

Anyways – I’m sure there’s a lot more for me to learn about the new member of my application family, and I shall endeavour to keep you all posted.

For now, I have a big task ahead of me – I have to now go through all of the old Trillian logs, and update all of my contacts names to be what I had them set to in Trillian – this is going to be an epic task…

<sigh>

First of all, I’d like to say thanks to all the well-wishers out there who sent their comments on Twitter etc. over the last week whilst I was in, what I can only describe as the worst pain I have ever had.

Its nearing 3 years I’ve had my braces on, and NEVER in all that time have I experienced mind-numbing pain like I have in the past week.

Due to the length of time I’ve had them on, the Orthodontist decided to try an experimental wire, hideously expensive as I understand, but supposed to be extremely flexible and almost unbreakable.  I’m well known for breaking the wires in my braces on a more-than-regular basis, so anything that can resist my iron jaw is welcome.

However, my teeth are/were in a ‘transitional’ state, where a massive amount of movement was required before my bite would align again.  For some reason, it was just the right combination of pulling and pushing that made my head feel like it was about to cave in.

But anyways – that’s all over now, and I’m back to my cheery self again!

Ok – its really been an unacceptably long time since my last post.

But I do have an excuse

I’m now working full-time – the past couple of weeks have been extremely busy with interviews and what not, as well as getting myself up-to-speed in the new job.

For those of you scratching your heads going “What?  He never told me!” (and you know who you are) It wouldn’t hurt you to pick up the phone and call once in a while and rather than asking for something YOU want, ask about how *I* am going in general.  I have now come to the realisation that most of the people who call me are only looking for something they want, only only call when they want something – I *NEVER* get phone calls out of the blue from people just asking “How are you?  What have you been up to?”  It really is quite a sad state of affairs.

Anyway – I *PROMISE* (and I don’t have my fingers crossed behind my back – honest!) I will do another blog update over the weekend.

Until then – make sure you’re tuning in to Tech Wired Australia live on Saturday night 7:30 Eastern Australian Time for another exciting episode   Also make sure you check out the latest Aussie Tech Head podcast which should be out sometime later today, as I was part of the live broadcast of that after Tech Wired Australia on Wednesday night.  Another famous podcast due out over the weekend will be TechAU with Jason Cartwright – be sure to check his out with his High Definition video and all!

Well, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights this past week certainly had me up way past my bedtime!

Ben and I have been doing live video podcasts on uStream of a rather ‘extended’ version of our Tech Wired Australia show.

Thursday night, we were joined live by Jason Cartwright of TechAU.tv fame, and discussed a lot of the technical aspects of podcasting.  I highly recommend checking his High-Definition podcast out, if you haven’t already – his production quality rivals some of the studio created shows out there.  We also had around 50 viewers watching us at one point!

Last night (Saturday) was the longest, at around 8 hours with a 45 minute break in the middle.  We managed to cover a huge number of topics in great depth which is a slight departure from the normal 30 minute show on Wednesday and Saturday nights.

Also last night, we had some great viewers in the chat room, asking us some tech-related questions.  We were helping a guy in Yorkshire, England to install FreeNAS on an old PC he had, and connect to it with his Mac.

Unfortunately, it got to around 3:00am, I was getting very sleepy and in turn started to get snappy (telling Ben to shut up several times – I must apologise for that!).  I think we managed to get the caller ALMOST sorted, but had given him a lot to go on to get himself to the point where he could start playing around with the FreeNAS system to get it to work just the way he wanted.

We’ve certainly had a lot of fun doing the extended broadcasts, and Im sure we will be doing a lot more of them.  However I fear it will be an early night for me tonight as I have anotehr busy week ahead of me – but we shall see what happens

Today marks my second episode of the Tech Wired Australia podcast.  We had to record a little earlier today, as Ben had other commitments he had to attend to during our normal broadcasting time.

The podcast should be available as an audio download a little later on, but not sure about the video stream, as Ben’s upload speed is rather restrictive and uStream was having troubles catching up – but we’ll see.

On other ‘online media’ news, I happened across an email I received from Joost.  Now, I downloaded and installed Joost on my main PC around 6 months ago, and played around a bit with it then, but basically, its never been run since.  With the email, and a spot of free time on my hands, I thought I’d have another look at it.

I went to the website and downloaded the latest version, and while it was installing had a look around on their forums.  Ideally, I’d prefer a Media Centre version of it so I could run it on my Media PC that’s connected to the television.  However, this is not to be.  The only have 2 versions – one for PC and the other for Mac – and both of them are stand alone applications.  I can’t even navigate the software using the media centre remote control.

Basically, Joost is a rival to TV Tonic.  However, in my opinion, TV Tonic is the far superior product.  It has a stand alone application (although it only works with Internet Explorer – a browser independent version would be good) but more importantly, has a Media Centre plugin.

The Joost interface is clumsy and not very intuitive – it can only be navigated with a mouse, the channel icons are very oversized (they could better use the window real-estate to describe the channels in more detail) and the sorting and grouping of the channels is very haphazard.

The most annoying feature of Joost, is that it ONLY streams video live from their servers.  With TV Tonic, you select the channels you want, and it downloads them for you to watch whenever you like.  The TV Tonic service application also allows you to set time restrictions on when it can download as well as throttling the bandwidth it uses.  This is especially handy for people who havepeak and off-peak download restrictions where they can set the service to only download in off-peak hours.

All in all, I think until Joost offers a Media Centre plugin, and allows downloading/caching of its content, its a big ‘uninstall’ from me.

In other online media news – check out this Microsoft advert – it was made around 12 months ago, and I appear in it twice – look for my beady eyes peering out from on top of my monitor LOL!

Oh – and dont forget to have a look at the new page I’ve added – TV Shows I Watch

Well, the last few days have been rather full-on to say the least!

With my daylight hours being packed with interviews, and my evenings catching up on blogs, podcasts and my regular tv shows, its barely given me a chance to catch my breath!

Last night marked my debut in the podcasting community with me teaming up with Ben produce Tech Wired Australia.

We broadcast live video over uStream, and then an edited audio version put up on the Tech Wired Australia website.

Here are the links:
Recordeded Live on uStream
Downloadable edited Audio

I really enjoyed doing the podcast, and look forward to the next one on Saturday.  I’ll hopefully soon get into a good rhythm and not babble on so much LOL

I hope you all check out the podcast, and the other ones associated with The Secret Hub – and tune in again on Saturday for the next episode! Leave some comments and feedback too!

I know its been a little while since my last post, and this one is only a short one for the moment, but a bigger update shall be coming either later tonight, or tomorrow.

The big news, however, is that starting tonight I’ll be joining with Tech Wired Australia doing a live podcast.

Come and watch live:
Tech Wired Australia – Live every Wednesday and Saturday at 7:00pm (Australian Eastern Standard Time)

Hope you can make it!