Doctor Who according to a 4 year old

Maddie asked me today whether Doctor Who was an owl, who the Garlics were (Daleks) and why they were the baddies. Surely there's a satirical comic strip in there somewhere.

Comment Grief

Arrggggg. Due to YouTube recently bringing in support for wide-screen clips I've changed my template. Previously the clips would spill over into the right nav and looked pretty wonkey. However having just made the changes I've discovered that many of my previous posts have been set to disable commenting, which is not what I want.

It's not the template's fault that comments have been disabled mind you (nor Blogger's for that matter). I was using a 3rd party commenting tool known as Disqus for a while, and they required the native Blogger setting be set to disabled in order to implement the tool properly. Having switched templates though I had to reset the HTML, which removed all the customisation I'd done and reimplemented the comment's disabled option that I'd set. Got that?

Unfortunately the only way to resolve this seems to be going back through each post one-by-one and changing the settings at the post level, which at this point is too tedious to consider.

All posts from here on out should be ok, but this may not be the case for the older posts. Apologies for any inconvenience - not that I get many comments anyway ;)

Beach Safety

This is a great video that carries an important message regarding beach safety.

I grew up in the beach community in Southern California and spent many, many summers body surfing, boogie boarding, surfing and just playing around in the water. So I'm quite comfortable around the ocean. And yet when I first came to Australia many years ago I made a very important discovery about the ocean - beaches are not all the same.

Different regional, geographic, oceanographic, geologic, and meteorological conditions yield different beach conditions. So just because you grew up in the oceans around Southen California - or elsewhere - doesn't mean you know anything about the beaches in Australia.

My first time out in Aussie waters I was amazed at how chaotic the currents were under the surface. In Southern California the currents tend to flow one direction, but in Aussie waters - at least insofar as I've experienced them so far - these rules don't necessarily apply, and in fact a single column of water can experience currents flowing from many different directions at different depths. Aussie waters are a much different beast.

Initially it seemed silly to resign yourself to only a certain section of beach when there were miles to choose from, but then after venturing out into the water the first time, the concept of "stay between the flags" made perfect sense to me.

Now having children, the significance of beach saftey is even more pronouced. It's critical to respect the waters we swim in, because things are not always as they appear on the surface.

Physical Caffeine Addiction

Hmmm, interesting epiphany. I go a day and a half without coffee and find myself overcome by migraines and vomiting out the door of our stationwagon in Katoomba carpark. I drink a coffee, migraine disappears.

What to do, what to do...

Sick Fynn

Sick Fynn
Originally uploaded by acousticdad

Greetings from the realm of phlegm and snot.

Snow

Brilliant!

Via the SMH: "Saying they were tired of YouTubers "ripping us off", British comedy troupe Monty Python have struck back, launching their own channel on the video-sharing site."

Go there now, quickly: http://youtube.com/MontyPython.

I love you guys - rock on!

Gitmo goes, vows Obama - World - smh.com.au

This just read:

Gitmo goes, vows Obama - World - smh.com.au: "US President-elect Barack Obama says he will shut down the 'war on terror' internment camp at Guantanamo Bay and rebuild 'America's moral stature in the world' during a major interview aired on Sunday."

About bloody time.

Panic averted

Just went to my primary blog and to my horror found a large grey page with "under maintenance" in big bold letters.

Problem is, I didn't take down the site for maintenance. So I grew concerned.

So I tried to log into the admin area, and I got the same message. I grew more concerned.

I tried one of my other sites. Same message. Another one of my sites. Same message.

I started to panic.

Then I contacted my Host and was told in a very blunt, unappreciative I-have-to-meet-my-KPI sort of terseness:

"Your server is being updated this process will take another 45 minutes to an hour and then this issue will clear. "

Thanks for the advanced notice chumps.

Hamster Dance

Maddie's made me watch this 4 times in a row so far and I couldn't let the clip go unshared - or the experience unendured elsewhere...not sure which