These are not two things that you would normally associate with each other, however they came together last weekend. As part of a Team Leader course, we had an exercise where we had to make a truck from Lego that would carry a piece of cement for 5 metres, and convince the judges to purchase our truck using a 2 minute commercial. We decide to go high tech and make a real commercial, and of course the most successful commercials are those with a song. Since it was about the SES, what better tune to use than SOS by ABBA.

The result is now on You-Tube.

If you are wondering about the start, the orange Rhino was our team mascot. His name was Neil.

If you are reading this on 27 January you should stop immediately and un-plug your modem, for today is World No Internet Day. So instead of staying inside and playing a computer game, go outside and play a real game, have a real face to face chat with a real person in a real room, and let the emails wait for 24 hours.

It is my sad duty to inform the world that after travelling 27,740km around the globe, the furry travel bug called “Robeart Actually” is officially missing in action. The bear began its journey in New South Wales on 26 February 2003 with the destination of Switzerland. It has since travelled to New Zealand, Queensland, Singapore, California, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee.

The highlight of the trip was being photographed outside Graceland, but this would be one of the last times we would hear from Robeart. He was picked up alongside a highway in Tennessee in July 2006 and has not been seen or heard from since. The map below shows the bear’s journey.

On a happier note, my other travel bug, “Horse with No Name”, continues its journey around the world.

It is currently in Denmark having traveled 22,973km.

No, I’m not talking about the yahoos and yobbos that run up and down my street, I’m talking about Yahoo the software company.

I used to use a great music player called Musicmatch JukeBox. Although occasionally a little memory hungry it used to do everything I wanted. About a month ago I had to rebuild my computer from scratch and went to download the program again. To my surprise I found the company had been bought out by Yahoo, but according to them it was business as usual and users would be able to migrate to the new program.

Since the old program was not installed anymore, I wasn’t able to migrate, so had to reinstall. The install program from Yahoo didn’t work and kept sending error reports to Micro$oft. The program needs Windows Media Format Runtime to run and although the installation for this was part of the install program, it was failing to install. I found a separate instance of the program, installed that and then was able to install the Yahoo Jukebox. (But of course the program installs an annoying Yahoo toolbar as well).

Now, I had also been using a new browser based player called Songbird, which is still in development, but needed some functionality that the old Musicmatch Jukebox had. Specifically it was the ability to rename music files according to their MP3 tags and vice versa. Well guess what, in the “upgrade” to Yahoo Jukebox this functionality has been removed. F@#k you very much Yahoo. I am just spent an hour getting your stupid program to load and you have stripped it of the great functionality it once had. Time to find another player. Any suggestions?

Oh, as a PS. I just went to uninstall the offending programs. The Yahoo Jukebox was 30MB and the Yahoo Toolbar was 43MB. What? 43MB for a toolbar? What sort of bloated crapware are they writing here? Grrrr.

(Oh, I was not being prudish with the F-word, it’s just that the filter at work won’t let me get to my homepage if that word is intact.)

Geocaching is a high-tech version of high and seek using a GPS. “Caches”, which could be anything from a film contained to a 40 litre drum are filled with goodies (mostly stuff from the $2 shop) and hidden around the world. The GPS co-ordinates of the location are posted on the internet and anyone with a GPS can try to find it. When you find the cache, you sign the log book, take an item, leave an item and register your find on the web site.

Bookcrossing is a pastime whereby books are left lying around anywhere (in pubs, on the bus etc) for people to pick them up and read them. In the book is a unique code number and instructions on how to register that you have found the book. The idea is that someone will read the book, note it on the web site and then leave the book somewhere else. Ideally, you should be able to track the book as it travels around your city or even the world.

Last weekend I set up a Bookcrossing Geocache. To find it, you need to search through the bush with a GPS, but instead of the usual $2-shop junk, the cache is full of books which people can take and release. As I write this, two books have already been released and I hope to be able to track them soon.

The local cafe has also gotten in on the act and has a bookshelf where you can release books.

I recently added the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form to this blog, but couldn’t get it to work. I kept getting an error in the configuration page saying “Cannot access empty property”. The general consensus was that the error involved a clash with the Utimate Tag Warrior (UTW) plugin, and, since the contact form was only misbehaving on the blog with UTW installed I figured there was a connection.

However even after removing UTW, the problem persisted. Obviously UTW had made some changes that were not reversed when the plugin is removed. Like many other plugins, UTW adds records to the wp_options table and it looks as if it adds a record without filling in the option_name field.

By going into the wp_options table through PHP admin, I was able to edit the table and give this record a value in the option_name field. I am sure deleting the record would have worked as well, but I was erring on the side of caution.

Once I did that, the error went away.

This is a fairly technical post for this blog, but since it had me so puzzled, I thought it only right to share the solution. I have only done this once, so I would be keen to hear from others with the same problem to see if this solution works for them.