After 10 years of owning the domain footsteps.co.nz I am providing it to someone else. About a month ago they approached me asking if I would sell/transfer the domain to them. The email was very pleasant and I replied that I would only consider transfering the domain name to a really good cause as I’m rather attached to the name.
Well, the organisations footsteps.org.nz replied back with a really great cause. They wanted the domain name as they the work they do is educating children in NZ and who am I to stand in the way of such a great cause. After they asked me I checked the site and they even use they same logo I had. There goal is to provide early learning discovery and learning services, and work in early childhood education.
I placed very stong conditions to them on reasons I might just let footsteps transfer and I’m delighted to say they didnt just meet those conditions they exceeeded them.
Footsteps under my control will change soon, and the domain will be transferred. My site now works (almost and for the main stuff) as www.tonto.co.nz
For me its actually an nice change. I have loved footsteps.co.nz and its been with me for all my travels around the world, but now its time for changes and ths one works well for me. Going forward please change your browser to www.tonto.co.nz my email address will work on the old address and well as the new one, its still david@tonto (fill in the rest).
Please bear with me on the change over. I was for a very good cause.
Its been a few weeks since I last wrote. Many things have been going on. Some very hard to deal with and others really positive. Something I haven’t written about is that I’ve been thinking about getting a pet.
Its actually been on my mind for about 5 months now. I looked into having a cat, but my building management do not allow that. Full stop period, end of converstation. Go figure.
What my building do allow is small dogs. So I looked into that. Even then its been a mountian of paperwork. And you have no idea of the paperwork that can be generated here.
Any first story cut short, my new family member is joining me on Friday. His name is Tonto and he is a rescue dog that needed someone to love him. I hope I can do that.
Its is with totally mixed feelings I say goodbye to a wonderful friend. Its never easy having someone leave you and my heart goes out to his wife and family. There is also a release as well as the last month has not been easy for him and family as the process of dying took far longer than the docters gave him. I guess that would also be a tribute to his spirit of never giving up. I had the deeply privileged honour of being able to talk to him almost daily via email. Given that I live in Japan and he was in New Zealand and going through so much every email was a treasure to keep.
Ted also had a wonderful website which contained photo’s of the things he loved. You can find his site at the address below.
I’m also so wonderfully touched that at album he has is from the Western Coromandel. Ted was not only my friend, but also of my families. I grew up with his voice on the end of coast guard radio! And the voice of calm during some interesting rescue’s. It wasn’t until many years later through odd circumstances which I’ve covered before that I meet him finally via his wife. Its one of the most amazing things about New Zealand, the connections between us all or only a few firends away! He and Lynn ended up spending alot of time in the western Coromandel with my family after I left to travel and it is his departure is a big gap for alll of us.
Ted, we will you
May you find, wind in your sails, good following sea’s, and fantatic fishing.
Well firstly that I’m totally stupid and that just because a program is in the directory you are looking at doesn’t actually mean that typing the name of the program is going to make it run.
Apparently you have to do ./programname. I’ll dig the entry that I found on this and share. I’m thinking a new sub blog might be coming up. I think I might call it ‘Linux for Beagles’ or something! I am winning with this linux thing thou.
Or would be if I could get the sound to work. I had this problem with Ubuntu a previous try. The sound card is integrated into the ABIT AN8 SLI motherboard which is no big issue for me as it bypasses everything via SPDIF directly to the Logitech DTS/THX 5.1 decoder etc.
Theory being have a good amp and bypass the sound card. Worked well in XP, passingly in Vista, and dodo dead in Ubuntu. Now when then first came up I also tried Suse and had pure sound raining down upon me, so what the frak was Ubuntu up to.
Well it seems since then not a lot! And the resources on sound in Linux are appalling thin on the ground. This document gave me some good starting points and I’ll tell you how I did it in the next post.
So my new project and blogging interest is going to be the switch of my Vista PC to Ubuntu and the issues/solutions I come up with.
Boring, well bear in mind that I’ve worked with Windows since version 2.1, yes that far back. I won’t say I love it, and many times it drives me freaking nuts, but I do know it. and also all the little things that make it work better/easier.
My needs are modest and I think the same as most people so lets see if an IT Engineer can do this, cos if I can’t there is little hope of Joe Daily doing it. (and while I don’t officically have an IT title I’ve been at the front end of desktops, servers, mid-range and enterprise wide systems for almost my entire working career. (just to set the stage).
So read along, i’ll try and make sure I document all the frustrations and lessons etc.
Maybe it was having the big brother version of Gastric bug that’s going around Tokyo, cos I’m totally sick of Vista crashing on me and acting all bloated when it shouldn’t be. (which was exactly how I was feeling as well).
My install of Vista is not heavily loaded and not asked to do a lot yet it seems to feel it needs 5 mins to start up and still crash. So I did some serious thinking and research.
A few weekends ago my laptop decided to not start up. As I use it daily this was rather highly annoying and only made slightly less so by the fact that it chose Friday morning to do it and I had the weekend to put it back together again.
I have a bit of a love hate relationship with Microsoft. Having worked on Microsoft products for over 18 years I know my way around them and the knowledge of them provides me with a fairly good living.
The hate bit is that some of the products are just crap. Vista being one of my current hates with Office 2007 not all that far behind, oh and the only reason I have IE7 is for Sharepoint (which is a cool product).
But Microsoft do cool things, and this set of video’s I found by accident demonstrate that.
