The Bus Book w/c 3rd March – On Walden Pond

One of the long term running gags in our family is that given half a chance I would either run off to live in the woods or become a hermit in a Monastery.  Well, I spotted this story recently that made me seriously consider it…

Here’s a guy who did it for almost 2 years – Henry David Thoreau, in the mid 1840s, spent time alone at Walden Pond, a couple of miles outside Concorde, Massachusetts, in a house he built himself.  There he studied his surrounding, wrote and further formulated the philosophies that eventually became part of the American Transcendentalist movement later in the century.

Part natural history study, part philosophy, the book has become a rallying point and source of inspiration for generations of American environmentalists.  For further information, see the entry on Wiki.

Last week was spent more at home than recently – so my bus based reading took a hit.  For that reason I’m only half way through the book.  The writing style is occasionally difficult – especially for those of us not well versed in the slang and culture of the mid-19th Century USA – but it is a passionately written and insightful book.

I’m enjoying it – I’m not able to read it in long chunks, but read a little, chew it over, savour it – think on it and then move on.  Perhaps that’s the way this book should be read.

It’s a fine book, thought provoking and empowering.  It’s also set me thinking about Bill McKibben’s ‘the End of Nature’ – perhaps I should dig that out soon.

WordPress Template Pages

I use WordPress to run a few other websites, such as my CommunityHost site, and wanted to add a form to support a mailing list.  My hosting company, Servage, supports mailing lists and I’ve used them with some success, so I didn’t need to re-invent the wheel and decided that the best bet would be to somehow get the HTML form that Servage supply on to a WordPress page.

I did try the obvious – just paste the HTML source code in to a page – and that was about as effective as the proverbial cat flap in an elephant house.  So I then decided to create a new template page containing the code.  And for all who’re interested, here’s what I did in Version 2.3.x.

Continue reading

Jeff Healey – Like a Hurricane

Canadian guitarist Jeff Healey died this week, losing a battle against cancer.  I have to say that he’s a musician that I’ve heard occasionally and really enjoyed.  He was younger than me when he died – something that always brings me up short.

Tonight on the Bob Harris show (http://www.bobharris.org/pages/playlist.asp?progcode=s08032008 Jeff’s version of Neil Young’s ‘Like a Hurricane’ – quite a brilliant version of a classic song.  Thanks Jeff!

I have a definite weakness for this particular Neil Young song. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_Hurricane_(Neil_Young_song)  It goes back to my student days when I was introduced to Neil Young by a housemate, who referred to the heavy electric version on ‘Live Rust’ as ‘Like a Steamroller’ – a phrase that I remember and occasionally use to this day, almost 30 years later.

Like a Hurricane is definitely one of my favourite love songs – I think I’ve found a new favourite version tonight!

http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourview/2008/03/memories_of_jeff_healey_1.html

The sorry saga of varchar(Max) and ODBC in PHP

A project I’m currently working on uses SQL Server 2005 with PHP, the database being accessed via PHP’s ODBC library.

I have to admit that I love my Stored Procedures, and rather than use ‘inline’ SQL SELECT statements in my data classes I’ve usually used Stored Proceduers when talking to SQL databases in the past.

However….believe it or not this is the first PHP / SQL Server project I’ve ever done that used ODBC and also featured VARCHAR(Max) or Text fields….

Continue reading

Web’n’Walk to the Rescue

Well, BT decided to throw some sort of unholy wobbly on me this evening and I ended up being unable to contact numerous sites I regularly use (including this Blog) and also experienced extremely slow performance on other sites and mail servers.

The irony was that I couldn’t actually get to BT’s ‘Service Status’ page – it kept timing out – which I guess gave some indication of where the problem lay.

Continue reading

The Bus Book – w/c 25th February – The Master and Margarita

This week’s book was a very old favourite of mine – Mikhail Bulgakhov’s ‘The Master and Margarita’.  If you haven’t read it – all I can say is get a copy.  It’s a lovely, funny, sad, enchanting book which details the visit of the Devil and his entourage to Moscow, a novelist known only as ‘The Master’ who is incarcerated in a lunatic asylum after writing a novel about Pontius Pilate, and Margarita, the woman who loves him.

Continue reading