Blog

The thoughts, opinions, happenings, and just plain ramblings of a seemingly boring person.

Why I Have Always Hosted My Own Blog

Categories Geekery, Internet, Rants, Technology

I started this blog in 2004. Since that time, there have been a lot of changes in writing and publishing your own online content.

To give a bit of perspective, back in January 2004, WordPress had only (by a matter of days) hit 1.0, and still wasn't really a thing yet. Back then, it was really only Blogger (newly acquired by Google), or older services like LiveJournal that allowed you to have a blog. To give even more perspective, even MySpace wasn't really a thing yet.

So, in the 16 years that I have maintained this blog, I have … Read more →

2019: Year in Review

Categories Life

So, nothing much happened in this past year, ey? 😆

Of course, this year can only be seen through the lens of the massive event in my life that was my liver transplant.

Now that we are also at the end of the decade, you could say that this whole decade has also been largely defined by my illness (diagnosed in 2010) and it's now hopefully-permanent solution (the transplant).

So, 2019 has been a massive rollercoaster of a year. I started a new job right at the beginning of the year, and only a few months into … Read more →

Tweets for 2019

Categories Geekery, Internet, Life

These are my tweets for 2019 (sans replies and retweets). All the URLs are still Twitter's 't.co' ones, as the Twitter API doesn't spit out the original URL text.

… Read more →

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (spoilers!)

Categories Life, Movies, Rants
Rise of Skywalker banner

Here we are, at the end of the Disney 'sequel trilogy'. The whole thing has been a bit of a weird and unexpected experience. A bit of history first:

I first watched the original trilogy as a child, mainly on VHS tapes. I did not see the movies in a cinema until 1997 at the age of 14, when the Special Editions were released theatrically on the 20th anniversary of the original movie.

The prequel trilogy marked my coming of age. I was 16 when Episode I came out, and 22 when Revenge of the Sith was released.

So for … Read more →

Recovery Road

Categories Life
aerial view of road in the middle of trees

I used the title of this post as the subject line for an email I recently sent to a group of friends. It was to update them on my post-transplant recovery, and it's such an apt description of it that I'm reusing for the same purpose here.

The recovery from my transplant has been exactly that: a road that I'm going down which has had its periods of nice straight driving, but also some unexpected turns, speed-bumps, and obstacles mixed in.

Things have largely settled down, but the recovery hasn't been totally smooth. In August I was admitted to hospital … Read more →

Working on a MacBook Pro

Categories Geekery, Rants, Technology, Work

Regular readers could be forgiven for thinking that I have an anti-Apple bias. Although I'm definitely not a fan of the company, I'd like to think that I am mostly objective when it comes to my views.

I've been pretty consistent in my position that I would never buy an Apple computer for my own personal use. The price-to-value return for my own circumstances isn't justifiable. I like the flexibility and customisation of Windows/Linux PCs, not to mention things that are practically impossible on a Mac, such as high-end gaming.

The one area where I use what I'm given (although, … Read more →

Migrating to Zsh

Categories Geekery, Technology, Work

A few years back, I posted on open-sourcing my .bashrc file on GitHub. Up until very recently, I'd been using the same configuration (with some additions and updates) ever since.

Now that I work on a MacBook Pro (btw, I've been meaning to write a blog post on that), and Apple recently announced that they will be changing the default shell in the next version of MacOS from bash to zsh, I decided to make the change myself.

I've always been tempted by the increased friendliness that Zsh has to offer. However, I couldn't really justify … Read more →

Yoshi’s Crafted World

Categories Gaming
Yoshi's Crafted World logo

One of the things that committed me to buying a Nintendo Switch was the promise of a new Yoshi game for the console. It's hard to believe that it's now been almost two years since I bought the Switch, but earlier this year (pre all the transplant dramas), Yoshi's Crafted World came out.

Although I finished the main story a while ago, it's only now that I had the time and steady hands to actually finish it 100%.

Crafted World is a decent Yoshi game, but it didn't live up to the expectations that the excellent Woolly World set 4 … Read more →

Getting on the NBN

Categories Internet, Technology

Since having my transplant, I've been doing a lot of things around the house that I've put off for a while: cleaning out my wardrobe, comms cabinets, rewiring smoke alarm connections, to name a few.

Around the same time that I went into hospital, the NBN was made ready for connections in our area. I've posted on the NBN a few times over the years, but after originally expecting a FTTP (i.e. fibre) connection to be ready sometime around 2015, the Coalition government was elected in 2013, and it took until now to get a HFC connection (i.e. … Read more →

Getting the Call & Post-Transplant

Categories Life

I promised in the post on receiving my liver transplant (please read that post first before continuing on with this one) that I would elaborate on the circumstances of getting the call for the transplant, as well as the hospital stay after the surgery. I'm a man of my word, so here it is!

The Call

Receiving the call was a bit of an unexpected experience. I was already in hospital when the news came through. I had been admitted into hospital the week before the transplant for an infection in my liver, and had already spent 4 nights there … Read more →