this blog is girtby.net

Last Post!

On the 18th of September 2004, I unveiled the first post on girtby.net.

And today, exactly 5 years later, I’m posting the last.

Archiving Tweets

If you’ve run Damon Cortesi’s handy curl command to download all (or the last 3200) tweets from your twitter account, you’ll have a directory full of files with names like user_timeline.xml?count=100&page=1. Not only that but they include a large amount of redundant profile stuff in the <user> element. And not only that, but twitter sometimes [...]

Sleeping Bloggy

It should be apparent to prettymuch anyone who reads this blog that I have lost the impetus to publish regularly. Although I still have many things to say to the internet, it seems to be getting harder and harder to find the time to put these things in a blog form that I’m happy with.

But [...]

Bye Bye eMusic

Well, it was good while it lasted, but I’ve just downloaded my last album from eMusic.

I was once quite enamoured with this service, so what changed?

Well basically they changed their prices. And by that I mean they increased their prices. And by that I mean their prices went through the roof.

Up until this month [...]

At The End Of One’s Tether

Many carriers, most notably AT&T, but also others such as Optus, are getting a lot of bad press for charging their subscribers extra for “tethering” their iPhones to their laptops.

This does seem to be blatant gouging on their part, given that bytes are bytes, and regardless of whether they are destined for a phone or [...]

Easiest $100 I’ll Ever Make

Recently, before boarding a flight up to Hamilton Island for a $WORK junket conference, I purchased a puzzle book. On the flight, I shared the puzzles amongst colleagues, and fun was had. One particularly tricky puzzle confounded us all, although I recognised it as a variant of the Monty Hall problem. Alarm bells should be [...]

I Fought The Gorm

There’s a kind of internally-generated tension that builds up when you haven’t blogged for a while. It’s not as bad as that other kind of tension which builds up over time, but it’s still there in the back of your mind. And after a while you need to do something, anything, to release the tension.

So [...]

Headphone Update

So you might remember reading the previous article about headphones. At the time you might have wondered to yourself whether I could get any more crazy-ass obsessed and drop even more ridiculous quantities of cash on these things.

If you have, I’m happy to say yes. Yes, I can.

The two headphones described below are about as [...]

Precisely Wrong

Dan reminds me of a story I heard on an ancient Media Watch episode. It’s Stuart Littlemore-era Media Watch, and is sadly not in the otherwise extensive ABC online archives. hence you’ll have to rely on my somewhat hazy recollection. Don’t worry though, I may have forgotten some of the details, but I remember the [...]

Staging Wordpress With Bazaar

Version Control Systems, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention.

Keen observers will have noted that I have tended to blog each time I try out a new version control system, and this really isn’t an exception. Except that, well I’m not just trying it out, I actually use Bazaar daily at [...]