¹For those not as hip as me it is the 80's rocker Meatloaf I'm talking about not singing ground beef.

Yep that's the real me.

The majority of Real World, Peter Gabriel and WOMAD web services are currently off-line. Our servers were stolen from our ISP's data centre on Sunday night - Monday morning. We are working to restore normal service as soon as possible.

Our first move has been to get our store up and running, so if you want WOMAD Charlton Park tickets or Music from Real World Records, we are back in business.

If you have a server fail, it is pretty easy to get it back up and running, as long as it is still in the building. There is a reason the phone company office look like bank vaults. Isn't time for you to check on how secure the server farm where your websites are located?

I may have been spoiled by using the .net environment and Visual Studio with all the bells and whistles. I just haven't found the enviroment for really making it easy for building web applications using the LAMP technologies.

I've been writing C# web apps as well as C# windows apps for a number of years now. I may have purchased two books on C# to get started. I must now have a least a dozen PHP books. Every single one of which requires the installation of a third part module just to get stuff done. I'm not a happy camper.

After the rain today I made a last minute dash down to the river just as the sun was setting. I would love to try to get to the other side of the river someday but I think it is private property. Nice piece of last it is. One of the few places around here that is not knee deep in zero lot line housing.

During an appearance before lawmakers, US Secretary of State Condi Rice lamented that she was grappling with "a rather embarrassing matter" - that Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) are logged in the US government database as terrorists banned from travelling to the US!

How many times has Mandela and the top brass of the ANC landed on American soil? Countless, but as Rice explained, she has to waive the ban each time they traveled! [Link]

This story from the 16th of April just made the morning news on WXRT radio (as a side story) on May 1st. According to the story this morning Congress will vote on a resolution to have his name removed from the list.

So Homeland Security or the State Department or somebody can put anybody on the No Fly list but it takes an act of Congress to get someone off the list. There is something really really wrong with this logic.

Guilt by association is not a good thing. As it is we should all be on the no fly list because at one time we were all teenagers and you know how irrational teenagers and their raging hormones are.

Here is the video I made yesterday. Trying out the Vimeo Video Site. It took quite a while to have the movie converted at the website. Not quite sure how long as I went to bed before it was done last night. The movie is not the greatest as I just recorded off the screen. Could not get to the video outputs on my 300 pound famliy room TV. I can wait to replace the behemoth with an LCD.

Update: Just on the MIB II website. They have a game MIB Crossfire. It is only available on-lne. It also shows as being out of stock. How can an a downloadable game binary be out of stock?