Later on tonight I’m writing the text for said tutorial on hand planes (again using WordPress I might add) when I do a routine “save”. All of a sudden I get a stupid 404 error when everything should’ve been fine. I remembered that I’d had some trouble on this very blog with that sort of thing a while back. Fortunately I was able to hit the back button and all of my newly written paragraphs appeared again. I then spent the next five minutes or so cutting and pasting text to try and ascertain just what it was that was giving me all the hassle. I finally tracked it down to one word and one word only – curl. Yup, I remembered that was the word that had given me all that trouble on a Speckled Band post. Can’t remember what I changed it to back then but I did know that “curl” is a php command (I think) which, obviously, causes some distress to the program. The sucky thing is that I wanted to use the word curl, not “spiral” or “curve” or what have you — curl dammit!

So then I wanted to find out exactly why curl would cause me so much grief. Not finding anything at the main WordPress site — their search engine is hellishly annoying and inefficient — I decided to Google. I found a whole heap of useful stuff. Actually, that’s a lie….. I found stuff, some of it was useful; but mostly I realized that I wasn’t the only one who was having trouble with that particular word. The solution was that there would always be a problem if the program tried to parse (I think thats the term) the word. One way around it though was to write the word in such a way that the program would be savvy to – as html code. Hence & #99;url (lose the space) becomes curl.

Simple! Problem solved!

p.s. Can you tell that nothing really much happened today? That’s the problem when you decide to post every day – or try to at least!

Hopefully something mildly amusing or remotely interesting will happen tomorrow. Otherwise too bad!

Of course it could also be argued that the main website I run, The REG Temple has been relatively quiet the past three months or so, with only a few “events” happening over that time.

The REG Temple is the official website of popular British actor Richard E. Grant – star of Withnail & I, Spice World, Hudson Hawk and about 50 other films. You might not be familiar with the name but you most certainly would have seen his face – especially if you’re into Scorsese or Robert Altman (REG has been in four of Altman’s films to date). REG was also one of Daphne’s brothers in the last episode of Frasier and has played Doctor Who twice.

The Temple first started off as a fan site in 1998. My ex, Dominique, used to do music and movie reviews for a fanzine here and one time she went to review a REG film (not sure which one) and wanted to get some background info on him. To her surprise she found that there was very little about him on the web, so she decided to start up her own web site dedicated to him – hence The REG Temple.

Dominique then got in touch with Richard through his publisher (he’s also written two books) and struck up an online professional relationship with him where he would send her updates on what he was working on at any given time. Dominique also got a ton of stuff – articles, interviews, fan artwork etc. – from many of Richard’s fans from around the world, which she would add to the site.

In 2000 Dominique flew to England to meet REG and help out with a charity event over there, Withnail For Waterford. The event was very successful and Dominique got to meet many of the fans that had helped out with the website. A month or two after the event I suggested to Dominique to see if REG would mind making The REG Temple his official site. He agreed wholeheartedly and the fan site became the official site.

Later on that year the workload of keeping everything updated with the site became too much for Dominique so I offered to help out – eventually taking over the complete control of the site not long after that. Since I took over the running of The REG Temple it has grown dramatically in size – about 20 times the size it was when I first took over. It has been an integral part of my life for the past five years now. At first there was a lot of work involved to organize it the way I wanted it, but nowadays it’s just plugging in bits and pieces here and there which doesn’t take too much time at all, really. All the work I do on the site is voluntary, but I did manage to get a wonderful Clamshell iBook laptop sent to me from REG when Amy and I spent three months in the U.S. in late 2003. That Clamshell follows me everywhere nowadays as it’s just so cool and convenient to use – especially now that I’ve put a wireless card in it.

Which kinda brings me to THIS….

WTF ?????

The FIRST lifestyle notebook? Worlds FIRST designer laptop??? As we say in this country “PIGS ARSE!!!” Apple was doing this sort of thing SIX FUGGING YEARS BACK!!! Not saying that these computers aren’t good – all the specs look good to me and the designs ARE cool – but still. The peeps who wrote the copy line to these really need an injection of COMPUTER FRIGGIN HISTORY 101!

Sheese!

Still, if I had the cash…..actually make that IF I had PLENTY of cash to SPARE then I’d prolly pick up one of these just on looks alone. Hell, why not get a set, huh? I could see Carrie from “Sex In The City” tote one of these babies around if she didn’t already have a Mac – As long as it went with her shoes, of course.

Anyhow, that’s my rant for the day.

Cameron Miller – Apple user since 1990.