California, next stop Burning Man

I arrived yesterday in LA, was an early start after a nice dinner in NY with my Noel and Jenny, Jack and my Brother and his girlfriend.

Headed down to Venice Beach with Steve (whom i met thru Wolfgang at the Vuuv) and his girlfriend Topanga.

It's amazing how much of this town is familiar from TV and movies.

I had a mission to find some google for Burning Man which was easily solved, plus a pair of aviator glasses, i had tried in NY but wasn't so lucky.... So i got shoes and sunnies now... my 'bowling shoes' finally died in Ozora, Hungary...

Venice beach was really nice, i even saw the canal out back behind the beach hence the name. No one was swimming or even on the beach, except for the drumming circle on the sand. Not many photos taken coz I left my camera at Steve's.

My mission now is to find a way to get to Burning Man, my original plan to join Alex (Berlin) fell thru, so i'm chasing down options at the moment.

Just changed my flight to leave LA on the 9th, so i'm back in Melbourne, Australia on morning of the Tuesday 11th September.

I have a few thousand photo's on my laptop to sort thru before i post them and some retro-spective blog entries as well.. all in good time, probably after the 11th!

ORA-01003: no statement parsed

I hit this error whilst playing round with some major dynamically generated sql with Oracle on CFMX 7.

googling around wasn't much help, i didn't find much useful stuff on metalink, but i did find this on the cf-talk archives

Getting ORA-01003 error while executing a query from coldfusion

i did see something about JDBC or CFMX caching the sql metadata or something with prepared statements, but i can't find the link now...

My solution: i just added a static column with a random value which cleared up the problem.. no exactly sexy, but i could keep on mucking around.. not good for a high volume site, but it did solve the problem

UPDATED: keep this in mind

The Age Website redesign sucks

The Age has just recently redesigned their website.

Personally I find there is too much white on the page and I find it very uncomfortable to look at. The previous design had a nice blue page header and naturally guided the eye towards the content.

The content pages aren't quite so bad, but front page for one of the top websites in Australia is a joke

The new design feels like a 13 year pubescent boy walking backstage at a fashion parade for lingerie, you just don't know were to look!

Some of the font sizes are too small and i always get the feeling I am going to miss some interesting story.

I watched Media Watch on the ABC website last night, (which incidentally I find to be a really nice Web 2.0 ish (sic) style site) and they were talking about the amount of fluff stories being run instead of news.... Who cares if a dwarf got his penis stuck in a vacuum cleaner??? (I'm not going to justify it with a link either) and article was badly written too...

The ABC site is a good contrast to The Age, my eye falls nicely on the content and they make good use of tags and inline video content.

Why on earth the Age persists with spanning stories over mulitple pages I will never know... I would like to see the stats on how many people click on the single page link.... it's just so 1990's!!!!

ok, enuff ranting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What is your light switch like?

One of the interesting things about travelling is the subtle little differences.

In Germany, light switches are big fat buttons which cover the whole panel.

In Australia, the are usually little buttons like 18mm sq.

Here in NY in my brothers flat, the switches are the reverse of Australia, flicking the swtich up is turning it on, whereas in Oz here you switch it down to turn on the light..

New York!

So after a bit over two months in Europe, I arrived last night in New York. My brother Jono met me at the airport and we headed straight to the Eight Mile Creek pub. So nice to have a Coopers, Boags and some nice Aussie white wine!



Of course there are no photos of my brother or his fiancée Chithra, I did ask if i could take one nice shot for our folks, but alas no, They are planning on being back in Oz for Christmas, so Mum and Dad that's your chance then to see what they look like.

It's been about 3 years since i last saw them, I'm back on my travel weight, aka very slim and tanned. SO much that as Jono is much stockier than me, that people thought i was taller!!

Here's a view on the NY Skyline from Brooklyn, this is about five minutes from their house. I'll probably have another stab at these photos as i was awake for about 30 hours by this point and had just a few drinks under my belt. I only really realised how knackered and drunk I was when I tried to download the photos last night and my laptop didn't recognise my camera for some reason....

Just had eggs and bacon for breakfast, which i have been craving for a long time!

I got lots of photos to post from Fullmoon, Vuuv and the Ozorafest but that will take a while for me to sort thru the 2000+ photos....

My time in Europe was amazing, great to catch up with nearly everyone I wanted to, alas, Katja was working the whole time and my spur of the moment decision to go to Hungary meant I missed my one chance to see her, which really sucks.. ah well...

Had a nice going away in Kreuzburg at Marienplatz... Nice to see Oli, Nicole, Diana, Anke, Kyra, Fish, Andy, Julia and Mischa all at the same timwe...