I went downtown today to catch the Christmas parade and was blown away by how incredibly commercialised the whole thing is. I know it's just a shopping holiday, but this was so unashamedly obvious. There was a dancing Snickers bar, not to mention the big Pump bottle and the M&M's float. The list goes on and one. I should make a checklist of things not to buy.

the other thing that really stuck out was that there were more Hallowe'en style costumes out there than Christmas costumes. I'd like to think that it's a tribute to The Nightmare Before Christmas but I have a hard time really believing it. Some of the costumes were good, but they just didn't happen to be related to the season.

Of course, I really liked the stilt-walkers. Good job with going uphill like that...

Over the course of the last week, a good night's sleep has constituted anything approaching 5 hours. I think it's happened twice now. After getting back to the house at about 2:30am, I managed to be back at the gym at 8am. My body can't take much more of this, and I need to stop and rest.

Starting now.

I was talking to Kerry down at the YMCA about recreational massage classes. I've done some classes back when I was still living in Calgary, and I'd love to do it again. Kerry recommended that I talk to the trainer who teaches the Body Balance class on Saturday mornings. It sounded like a good idea to me.

The Body Balance class was different compared to any other I've been involved with. It's a blend of core conditioning, stretching, massage and relaxation. I was surprised how much the instructor fit into an hour. The result was incredible, though. Given the unrelenting pressure that I've placed on my body for the last week, the class was both invigorating and relaxing.

Afterwards, I was speaking to Anthony about massage classes. He mentioned two likely candidates: New Zealand College of Massage and Auckland University of Technology, who offers a couple short courses in sports massage.

The college of massage starts much sooner, and is probably more what I'm looking for in the short term. It's nice to have options, however.

I didn't pay a lot of attention to the first few, but they seem to be growing in numbers. Things like this:
-> 32 N 11/22 mikechinwuba@tt (2.8K) STAND AS NEXT OF KIN TO LATE MR JIM CUMMING

It is just another variation of the Nigerian plea spam, but I'm really wondering if this tactic works any better than the others.

The plugin is well into the third iteration already, and for the most part, it works. I've been submitting quite a few songs before a bug will sneak up and throw an exception that doesn't get handled.

For instance:

Changing state from Setup to Handshake
-->Handshaking
(url == http://post.audioscrobbler.com/?hs=true&c=tst&v=0.1&u=sapheron&p=1.1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./mpdscrobbler.py", line 62, in ?
    s.state_machine.run()
  File "/home/greg/source/python/libscrobbler/state.py", line 67, in run
    self[self.current_state].run()
  File "/home/greg/source/python/libscrobbler/state.py", line 39, in run
    self.run_fn()
  File "/home/greg/source/python/libscrobbler/libscrobbler.py", line 253, in handshake
    result = urllib2.urlopen(url).readlines()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/urllib2.py", line 129, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/urllib2.py", line 326, in open
    '_open', req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/urllib2.py", line 306, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/urllib2.py", line 901, in http_open
    return self.do_open(httplib.HTTP, req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/urllib2.py", line 895, in do_open
    return self.parent.error('http', req, fp, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/urllib2.py", line 352, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/urllib2.py", line 306, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/urllib2.py", line 412, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 503: Service Unavailable

In that case, the server went down, presumably for service or something out of my control. But I'm not handling it properly. I also just noticed that mpd can spit out track numbers as a ratio, which I should have realised. I'll have to parse the string before ripping out an integer value.

Not only am I finding bugs in my code, though, I found one on the server side, too. Time was showing up as NZST instead of NZDT. That might be the source of the current outage. I wonder if they're fixing it now.

After watching Garden State last night, I had some family issues on my mind and I took some time to call home today. As it turns out, my dad is going in for hip replacement surgery this week. At least I found out before hand.

I shouldn't be surprised that information doesn't flow to me that well. Most of my family isn't well connected to the internet and don't really care to be. Since I'm an ocean away, contact is relatively sparse.

I certainly hope that everything goes well. All surgery, no matter how common, is scary to me. All invasive medicine is scary.

I've been meaning to get a new volleyball for a while. The one that I had was painful to work with. In the store, it seemed fine, but I couldn't handle hitting it for more than half an hour on end. So I finally got myself down to Sports Distributors and picked up a Tachikara. I remember a few of the club teams using them down in Christchurch, and having spent a bit of time with one down at the YMCA over the last week, I'm more than happy with the feel of them.

Now to find people who want to spend as much time with the ball as I do.

I wasn't even out that long. I had my heartrate monitor on for the trip and I recorded the time that I was out there. 1:36:40. Of course, I'd be stupid to think that it would take longer than that for the sun to get to me. But now, I've got a bit of heat coming off of my forehead, and I'm going to be applying aloe at regular intervals for the next while. I was hoping that I would have learned after the last one. Actually, I think I hope I would have learned after each last one.

On the other hand, I have something to look forward to now. I was talking with a friend of mine and had mentioned City To Surf down in Christchurch. She's keen to do the running part and suggested that we head down for that. I'd love to. It will give me a target for training and it would be nice to try to beat my time last year (but I can't remember what it was). There hasn't been any announcement for when it will be run this year, but I'm expecting it to be in the first couple weekends of March.

I think this is the first time that I've still been in bed at 8am since moving to Auckland. At least, I don't remember having to worry about getting a suntan in bed. What's worse is that it's a narrow window and I'd end up with a stripe of red across my head.

It's not just phone lines that need line filters when you move to a DSL connection. Satellite receivers will definitely screw up the carrier detect.

But it's all good now.

My body has a long history of damage that I'm trying to correct. And I'm a bit obsessive about it. I find the whole fitness mentality fits me nicely and I'm happy to stick with it.

Last week, I was talking to Jackie down at the YMCA, discussing shoulder movement and how sometimes things go badly. We spent a little bit of time going over options to help strengthen the stablisers, to make sure that the only motion I get is the motion I intend.

I refreshed her memory today about that conversation and before I was heading out, I was going to collect a few ideas to incorporate into my workout plan. She did better than that, though. She called on Peter, who runs the YMCA chain in Auckland and happened to be there that day. He knows a hell of a lot about fitness and physiology. When we started talking, I was about 6 minutes into my 15 minute run. When the treadmill shut down at 20 minutes, we were just arranging to get together and look at strategies to help me out. Now that's personal training.

I think the coolest thing he said to me was that my poster was quite good. I tend to think otherwise. My chest is often too tight and pulls my shoulders forward. I'd tend to think that my recent sting of rowing has been doing something to balance my back and chest. No complaints there.

There's something intensely pleasant about the sound of rainfall through an open window. It sounds gentle, with a lot of drips and drops, rather than the thunder of a downpour.

Of course, until I walked out onto the balcony, I had forgotten that it was not covered.

Update

Due to an unfortunate change of wind, I had to close the balcony door to stop the rain from coming into the house. And it's a shame, because Counting Crows - Millar's Angels is a great song for the rainy night.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been playing around with AudioScrobbler. I like the idea of being able to correlate my music habits with other people in order to generate my shopping list.

At work, my music player is going to be tied to Windows, either WMP or Winamp, most likely. The plugins for those are written by the same person, and look exactly the same, as far as I can tell. Except I can't seem to get the Winamp version to connect...

At home, my music is run through mpd. It's a client/server player, so I can use whatever interface I want. And a quick search popped up a python based mpd client that would shuffle data to the AudioScrobbler server. However, it didn't check for song lengths and it didn't wait the appropriate time before submitting. Admittedly, watching for a couple minutes for seeks is hard with mpd. I'm eagerly awaiting the listener protocol to handle this.

As a result of all my displeasure with mpdscrobbler, I decided to put something of my own together. It's not a complex protocol to follow. In fact, I decided to put together a library to handle the AudioScrobbler work and a client that hooked mpd and libscrobbler together.

As of right now, it works. I just checked out my user page, and songs are being updated. However, I can guarantee there are bugs in there. In fact, there will probably be minor design changes before the end of the week. I'm already planning to change the cache file format.

When things evolve into a more stable state, I'll release both the client and library for public consumption. I'm hoping it won't be too long before that happens.

I mentioned previously that playing 2 nights a week barely constitutes maintenance mode for sports training. To try to remedy the situation, I stopped off at the gym and spent some time with a volleyball and a wall.

Solo training isn't easy. Motivation is harder and a lot of drills really depend on two or more people. I'll have to grab a book and do some research on solo drills. Or find some people who want to practice up. In the meantime, I had a chance to run a few serving drills (a feeble attempt to work on my ugly jump serve), some hitting drills and a spattering of setting and passing.

It was hard enough work that I built up a pretty good sweat, so it must have been useful...

If you drove a car at 100 km/h, it would take 10 hours to go that distance.

There's a club at my gym whose goal is to reach that distance on a rowing machine. I met someone the other day who's past that mark, and he mentioned another who is nearing their 4th time around. That's a lot of rowing. As of this afternoon I've clocked on 19000 meters. I'm almost 2% of the way there. At this rate (about 6000m/week), I'll be there in just over 3 years.

That rate is pretty far from accurate, though. I've just been learning what a decent pace for me is, and I've had a couple slow weeks at the gym for whatever reason. In fact, of that 19000m, 8000 has been in the last two days. I have a feeling that I'll settle out to about 12-15000m/week, which should put me in around a year and a half.

You might not want to give up your car just yet.

The games last night became a bit of an effort in frustration. We had 5 people on court, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and we were playing some high school players who were playing fairly well. The frustrating part was that we'd slide back a few points in the middle of the game and not be able to recover.

On the plus side, I got in a couple good hits. However, my passing was a bit off and my setting tended to be too far off the net for the guys to really get into it. It was nice for the girls, though.

And I think it's official. Nikola (I think that's her name) is distractingly hot. But it's okay, because she plays well anyway. Her jump serve puts mine to shame (if you can jump serve, it probably puts mine to shame) and she's as anxious for a good set as I am. Casually thinking about this now, I'll have to try to keep her on my right. She'd be my onside setter and I'll be her offside setter. With her boyfriend being so tall, he reaches for anything near him, often stealing the sets I'll give her. It's easier to just keep them on opposite sides of me.

Matches at AUT are best of 3, up to an hour long. We lost 2-0 (25-18, 25-19) and spent the remainder of the hour without a ref. That just slid into stupidity, though, and wasn't a lot of fun. I tried to find a pickup game for the second hour, but AUT actually makes it hard for people to play more than 1 hour. That is a bit of a pain, too. I'm not playing enough to actually keep up any basic skills. Maintenance for sports needs more than 2-3 hours of training/playing each week.

To end on an upnote, the prices for decent volleyballs from Sports Distributers have actually gone down compared to the catalogue I was looking it. I'm going to try to pick up a decent game ball today, if I can.

The Covert Theatre is hosting a championship week of improv. I was supposed to go last sunday, but it was cancelled.

I have high hopes for this. I've seen some shows at this theatre already, and I was pleased. This should be a good warmup for the Improv Bandits birthday coming up.

I finished reading another novel by Gregory Maguire this morning. Having finished Mirror, Mirror, I am caught up with his adult novels. At least, I'm caught up with the first reading. I'm sure I'll be coming back to these.

The short description:
What do you get when you cross Snow White with Lucretia Borgia?

It's well worth the read.

Never one to settle for letting things work smoothly and easily, I had to create a little tension in my life. I came back to the house for lunch, as usual, and got the driveway when I realised that I didn't grab my house key from my backpack. So I went back down to the office, grabbed the key and went back to the house for lunch.

I got back to the driveway a few hours later, thinking about what to make for dinner, and I once again found myself without a key. My first thought was that I had dropped it somewhere, but after some thinking, I realised that I just didn't grab it from the kitchen counter before I left for work after lunch.

I needed to get ahold of Annikki before I needed to run off for volleyball, and she didn't seem to be home. I tried calling the house from work, and left a message. If I could get to my email from work, I could have grabbed her mobile number, but work is useless in that regard. So I found a net café and paid a dollar for 2 minutes of text-only bandwidth usage. As I was writing down the number, I realised that I already had it written down in a book that was in my backpack at the time. (Where's my dumbass shirt when I need it?) I tracked her down at a pub down the street and was saved from missing volleyball. I had 13 glorious minutes to get to Waitakere.

That's when I saw the traffic jam...

In the end, I was only 5 minutes late, and there was still no ref at the time, so I wasn't really late after all. But I did learn a lesson. Teleportation is the right way to go.

Update

Sorry about the spelling. I'm hoping to not have to edit entries again after initial submission.

I currently play volleyball on Tuesday nights at Waitakere and on Friday on the North Shore. I was a bit bummed at first because the teams that I'm playing with are playing at a lower level than I want to be playing at. But I was glad to be playing.

On Friday, things seemed to be looking up a bit. A few different people were there, and the quality of the game was a bit higher. There are always things that I would do differently, but that will always be the case. And tonight, we had an honest sporty guy filling in. He never played volleyball before, but he took to it quite well. I gave him a few pointers and he just absorbed it all, and his game kept improving. Of course, I was thrilled when he set me a ball nice and tight to the net. It was the best hit I've had for a while.

I don't remember the totals for the games, but we played well in the first set and swept the second set.

So with that base, I head off towards friday again, full of hope and vigor.

Around noon yesterday, I saw an email come in from a friend of mine that I rarely hear from. Truth told, I don't know her all that well, but she's fun every time we run into each other. Pipi is a dancer/acrobat/clown, all kinda rolled into this cute little shape, with a nice sense for the odd and the interesting. And she's in town for a couple days. We caught up for a bit of dinner and to get lost driving around Ponsonby and then Henderson.

I wish I could actually have a chance to get to know her better. I was looking forward to seeing her all day, but when we went off for dinner, I just didn't really come into the same playfulness as the last couple times. It's a bit of a shame, though, cause I think that we'd work well together if I was able to really open up.

I guess there's always next time.

Dammit! When I want a muffin, I mean it.

After spending an hour catching up with Steph online, I decided to grab my current read (Gregory Maguire's Mirror Mirror) and head over to a cafe just up the street for a tea and a muffin. When I got there, I was informed that they have muffins every day except for Sunday. Yay you!

I probably would have settled for a decent scone, but that option was limited, too. In the end, I finished the chapter and came back to the house to make some muffins. I will have my muffin yet...

1 3/4 cups flour
2 tbsp sugar
3/4 tsp salt
3 tsp baking powder
1 egg, beaten
1 cup milk
2 tbsp vegetable oil

Preheat oven to 400°F. Combine dry ingredients in one bowl. Combine liquid ingredients in another bowl. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients. Add the liquid ingredients and mix together quickly with a few strokes of a big spoon. Spray a muffin tin with a non-stick spray. Divide batter evenly into the muffin pan. Bake for 12-15 minutes until golden on top. Remove from muffin tin and cool on paper towels.

Deviations:

• Added chocolate chunks to dry ingredients
• Added squire of lime juice to liquid ingredients
• Didn't have non-stick spray. Used basting brush and oil. Muffins stuck to pan anyway. But not badly.

And now I have to wait for the muffins to cool down. This is why I wanted to just buy one.

Update

Muffins are yummy. I like the lime juice, and could have gotten away with more yet.

Good Night. Good morning. I guess I'm about half way through right now. This is the time of day when the eyelids get heavy, conveniently shielding the mind from the things that go bump in the night. It's probably for the best.

I've spent a few hours getting PyBlosxom running on this server. That wasn't hard. The hard part was configuring apache and named to point to the right places. By morning things should have propogated. While I'm okay being at mudshark:8004, I'd rather have that pointed properly to sapheron:80.

I guess a few comments are in order regarding the weblog itself. I doubt I'll have comments available. I'm not sure if I want this hassle. Besides, this thing is more of a diary for me than a means of communication to others. I don't mind sharing, but that's not my priority for this.

I'm finding myself more interested in social networks lately. I know that it's been and done for a while, but I like the idea of being able to find useful content easily. That will happen through two mechanisms: Publish/Subscribe models of transmission and relatable knowledge catagorisation.

There are much smarter people discussing this, so I'll leave my mostly-uninformed comments out of this for now. In the meantime, I'll go around collecing my information and see if I can spread it in some meaningful way.

In the meantime, there's a beach volleyball tournament tomorrow that I'm supposed to be entered in. Time for some sleep.

Good Morning. Good night.

I had a lot of hope put into this tournament. I'm still quite new in Auckland and I don't know very many people, so getting into this tournament should have helped to meet some people who have similar interests. There were two people who signed up as individuals for the social competition. Teams are 4 people.

Craig, who was organising the event, asked some people if they wouldn't mind having me on. They accepted, so I was set. The first game was a bit rough, but we won by 10 points or so. Just before the second game, one of the guys from the team I was added to asked me to stay off, and gave me back my entry fee.

I can understand why. They already had 4 and I was taking up space for them, and someone had to sit off while I was on. Of course, I was also pretty pissed off. I just wanted to get on the beach again. At least I had a decent 10 minutes of game time.

Afterward, I was talking to Craig again. I was hoping to get some information about a social beach league or when the next tournament was. As it turns out, there is nothing in Auckland. Nice big city, several times the population of Christchurch, and can't put together a social league. Christchurch has 2 nights of beach league. After the pro season winds up, there might be something. That would be February.

Not one to accept this sorry situation, I asked around with the other social teams to guage interest. Everyone wants a league, but nothing is there. When I finally got around to talking with Feline, she mentioned the league that is supposed to start in February, and had this attitude that anything I wanted to start up would be just getting in the way of that. I don't want to wait most of the summer for something that might happen. I don't think I'd care if I stepped on her toes. There are a half dozen teams that I talked to who want to play.

So when I finally bladed back into town, I came away with a lot of renewed disappointment about moving to Auckland. So far, the good things about moving here are negligible compared to the disappointments. Lost in the noise floor, actually. Now to turn that around and make something interesting happen.

Where is Lee Harvey Oswald when you need him?

I'm going to try to catch up on a few things for a while. Since I don't have the vanity website completely useful (at all?), I'm going to try to tuck a few things into weblog entries.

I didn't leave a lot of preparation time for Hallowe'en this year. Less than usual, in fact. Three days before the party I went to, I bought a flight to go to it. Just after I bought the flight, I found out about the party. Life's a bit funny that way. I flew down to Christchurch after work on Friday, caught up with Jo and Derek for a bit, made a costume (with a lot of help from Jo), went to the party, caught up with a few more people and flew back to Auckland. It was a lot of fun, but I wish I had more time to spend with people. But that's my own fault for bad planning.

As usual, Derek had his camera handy while we were working on the costume. He passed on a few of the pictures before I left again, and I'm hoping to collect a few more from other people as well. Have a look: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]