It’s time to learn a new language. ColdFusion. And the whole world of Macromedia – oops, Adobe.

At least the developer version of CF is free. But I really should have read the installation guide before launching into it. Otherwise I would be finished by now, instead of being halfway through the installation, without having decided how I was going to run it online.

I read one comment which suggested setting up a local test environment based on Apache, instead of IIS, to allow more than one application at a time. Then realised I had an old version of Apache, (set up as part of the WAMP environment for testing PHP), that needed updating.

But after Googling “coldfusion mx7 apache windows xp” , I found a great site by Stephen Collins, at StephenCollins – a fellow Aussie. He has written a whole PDF on how to install my preferred environment.

Pity I got sidetracked reading his blog. And learnt from him (about a decade late (blame the kids)) about the Geekcode.

So here is mine:
Version: 3.1
GCS s++:- !a C+++ P– W+++ N+++ ps+ pe pgp+ X+ R* DI+++ b+++ e++ h- z++++ G-

Feel welcome to go to http://www.joereiss.net/geek/ungeek.html to decode it. Based on the original geekcode.com.

Dang I wish I’d had a PC between 1994 and 1999. I missed out on so much of the internet in the fun stages.

I don’t really blame the kids. If I’d had a PC, I probably wouldn’t have spent so much fun time with them doing craft, going to parks, and general mum stuff. It’s all good.

Brrreeeport is the new blog word-of-the-week. From Microsoft’s blogger Scoble, it’s an attempt to let unpopular blogs become popular by getting listed on Technorati for the word Brrreeeport. So the word doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s embarrassing to get caught using it – it means I’ve read Scoble’s blog. Eek. I’ll try not to do it again, even for a new word.

Like ‘Festy’. My oldest has just started high school and bumped into the word Festy. He doesn’t actually know what it means, but everyone uses it, so he wants to. And in my attempt to become hip, I looked it up, naturally on Google. And according to Urban Dictionary, it’s just the latest word for ‘Gross’.

In my latest attempt to beat the mid-life crisis, I just bought my first pair of hipster jeans. Even tho they’re on the way out, I still feel extra hip. Yuk yuk.

The other things I got from Scoble were blogcode and storycode.com. Skip the first, and go to StoryCode only. I started browsing alphabetically, and got lost hopping from book to book review. All these books I’d love to read. That others have recommended. A good idea.

Óne day, when my landline and ISP work on the same day, I’ll finish updating this blog. Until then……

I just finished reading Time Magazine’s top inventions of 2005 – a little late, as it gets passed to me from my father-in-law in a pile a few weeks after he’s finished with them.

The magazine’s top nomination was for the cloning of a dog. Woof.

At Time.com, there is a list of the top inventions as voted by online readers, with the Fukuda Automatic Door coming first, followed by the stunning Lifestraw, a personal water purification straw. You can check it out at lifestraw.com.

The ones with the most practical use for me were:
- Roomba – a robot vacuum cleaner
- Sony’s Ebook Reader

The roomba is apparently available already in Australia, that can sense stairs and basically do all your vacuuming for you. And apparently it happily copes with dog hair, which is the bane of my existence. My beautiful gold labrador just has to walk through the room for it to be absolutely covered with dog hairs. It doesn’t look so bad on the cream carpet (apart from the footmarks and the red dye from where he peed on the red leather pouf), but on the kitchen floor, it constantly looks hairy. Not good, Jan. So I’m definitely saving up for a Roomba this year. Along with everything else.

Sony’s Reader was apparently a hit, because the screen is made from an electronic paper that makes it look almost as clear as paper. Not being backlit, it reduces glare, which can strain the eyes. It’s about the size of a paperback, and shows one page at a time.

Personally, I’d almost kill for an electronic music display device. Currently when I play the piano, my old much-loved music books are propped open with a diary on each side, to stop the pages from flipping open as I play. And then when I try to change pages I have to quickly rebalance the diaries, usually dropping them, and half the time the whole book falls on the floor.

As I write this, I did a search on Google for electronic sheet music display, and found the Music Pad Pro Plus.

It sounds like heaven. An electronic touch screen (or you can use foot pedals) to turn pages that can store 1000s of pieces of sheet music.

The only downsides I can see are price ($1200US), weight (around 4 lbs), and my preference to have two pages open at a time. Although it says you can use landscape mode to have two sheets displayed, I wonder how easy they would be to read.

Oh well. Maybe one day I’ll win the lottery, and have every gadget I could ever want.

And a new kitchen.

cheers.

I know I haven’t got many items in this blog yet, but I’ve already started another blog.

But it’s a completely different topic, so that’s ok. It’s about dogs, and it’s at www.dogs-only.com.au/dogblog/.

I only mention it because I used a different technology than for this Geekmum blog. This one uses WordPress – an extremely popular blog, but it does require an SQL database. The problem being that my hosting account gives me three databases, and I’ve already used up two, and have plans for the third. So I had to find a non-database blog. I searched on Google, and found Pivot.net.

It was a beautiful install. Downloaded it to my PC. Followed the install instructions (I used FileZilla – a free and also beautiful FTP program), and it worked perfectly first time.

As far as I could tell, you did need to know the basics of PHP to modify the blog layout, but if you don’t want to do that, and are happy with the default layout, then it would be a perfect solution for someone whose host didn’t give them a database.

Again, I only have one post over there, but these days with the delay to get into Google, I like to define things early, and get the content in later.

Pivot.net. It’s free. A non-database blog that works.