Belly Dancers

For a friend's birthday, went to a nice middle-eastern restaurant in Richmond. Food was great, and so was the belly dancer :-). Still recovering from being stuck over the head several times from her sash while doing some crazy spins in a packed place. Looks like i'll have to go to a few more middle eastern restaurants!
 

ANZAC Holiday

Nice to have another holiday. It's going to be hard to get used to a 5 day working week again, the last 3 having one public holiday in each of them.
Nothing terribly interesting happening- went to the local ANZAC march on Sunday, found out a person I went to school with is a housemate on Big Brother and after viewing the logs for this site, found that someone came across my blog by searching for "waterwheel painting" in Google. What the hell?? Turns out it linked to this post.



On another note, on my quest for a good deal on my banking, I have written to my bank telling them just how bad a deal they are giving me and others. If I don't receive a response by the end of the week, I'll be closing the accounts. I may even post the letter here. 

New host and domain for blog

I have moved this blog to a new server and domain blog.nimos.net, here's why

• The previous site only allowed 10mb of space, and it hit the limit many times with all the photos posted etc. now I have 2000 times that space, so I don't think it should be too much of a problem.
• Previous host was with my ISP - what if I change or move and don't use them? Call this a pre-emptive strike, the old site will redirect to here while the account is still active. This site has no association with my ISP, and the domain name is mine as long as I continue to fork out a minimal amount for it each year. I can also host it elsewhere and still keep the name.
• My full name isn't revealed in the URL as it was previously. With the power of search engines, I'd rather my posts here are not associated easily to my name through a simple search. Although many readers of this blog know my name anyway. Oh and don't bother with a whois query on the domain name, that wont help either.
• I can track the amount of traffic this site gets and from where.
  

To answer some queries from friends:

Why don't I use the blogspot host?

• Here I can upload what I like and link to it and have full control over the files.
• I can delete my photos I upload through Picasa, can't see how you can do it in blogspot - they stay on the web permanently! Wouldn't want to accidently upload the wrong photo and have it indexed!
• Should blogspot changes what service they provide, this blog remains intact.

Why don't I use my own blogging software?

• It's slow if it's database driven. The HTML push method is very fast and effective.
• It's a pain to get working and is reliant on the host providing the tools. If you change host, you have to make sure it's all compatible, yuk.
• Not worth it, blogger provides everything I need at the moment.
• An option if Blogger change their service.

V for Vendetta

Saw V for Vendetta yesterday. This movie although a bit comical at times it has some serious underlying messages. As one of my friends pointed out, 6 years ago you would have related it to Russia or other dictatorships, but now perhaps we should look at ourselves and question what is happening. Is fear being used as a tool of our governments to gain power? A movie well worth seeing.