Space Shuttle Atlantis eventually made it in on Friday 22nd when I was out so I was unable to watch the landing live.

Atlantis landed on runway 22 at Edwards Air Force Base in California due to continued bad weather at Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

This, of course, means that Atlantis will need to be airlifted by the specially converted Boeing 747 SCA across the country so it can be delivered to the Space Shuttle Processing facility.

In passing I found a picture of one of the mount points on the SCA for the shuttle with a little note to the technicians:

I somehow stumbled across this video at Youtube while watching some D1 videos.

This is Greenpeace at the G8 Summit held earlier this month in Heiligendamm Germany.

Greenpeace apparently turn up in some fast RIBs on the sea-facing coast of the summit venue and go up against some equally fast RIBs of the German Police and a larger fast  police vessel resembling  a gun-boat.

The German police tactic appears to be ramming/swamping and the guys in the last Greenpeace boat gets another RIB on their heads after they surrender.

As far as I can tell there were no fatalities / serious injuries but it wasn’t for want of trying!

I hope whatever Greenpeace’s argument was this year that it was worth it for them.

I always feel I’m a bit late to the party but I just discovered Last.fm.

Last.fm is internet radio with a bit of a difference. Unlike ‘traditional’ internet radio, Last.fm tailors a radio stream to your preferences by studying what you like and do not like (via it’s player software). It also allows for ‘music socialising’. Sharing your taste in music with your friends or finding strangers with similar taste in music to yourself.

To start a radio stream, you can suggest an artist which you like, Last.fm will then stream tunes of the same genre back to you. The player allows you three controls. The ‘love it’ button marks the tune as one of your favourites, presumably this means it is more likely to be played again and also serve as a marker for your tastes. The ’skip’ button moves on to the next track and the ‘ban’ button hopfully makes damn sure a tune never returns (early-on  it served me a Hanson tune - Banned!)

If you register, you can maintain your preferences and get access to such niceties as the RSS feed of your recent plays as found on the delusionofgrandeur homepage in the sidebar.

The Last.fm player running on Ubuntu Edgy

I’ve finally managed to migrate not only delusionofgrandeur between two servers but also from the NucleusCMS to Wordpress software. I have to say that I’m very impressed with Wordpress’ “Web 2.0″ backend features. Especially the autosave feature which is just tremendous. I almost feel like I’m having a “lifestyle moment” (long story) every time I use it.

One minor disaster I had during the installation was when I turned on the FURL style permalinks. Wordpress wrote a .htaccess file to the webroot which then had an argument with the overly-paranoid Apache configuration and decided to display no pages at all. It really was a case of trial and error until I had it fixed.

Hopefully delusionofgrandeur will be moving shop in the next few days to a new server with up to date platform software so we can run an new CMS and have some new features like an integrated gallery.

(Plus I might actually be able to post from my Nokia N800!)

I thought I’d just outline some things that I will mostly be doing in 2007 (assuming it doesn’t get any closer to midnight)

Fixing the MythTV system.

A year ago I built and installed a fairly comprehensive MythTV system for my parents (I don’t personally watch TV) The system has been gradually added to and now consists of a backend with 3 Nova-T and 1 Nova-S card and a mainfrontend running on a Biostar Ideq under the TV. (other linux boxes in the house can perform as frontends)

What needs fixing is the slow tuning of one of the Nova-T cards and a remote with more buttons is needed (currently using a StreamZap). Also, the frontend needs to be able to shutdown from the remote.

Build a MAME cabinet.

I’ve been meaning to build a MAME cabinet for a few years now, I’m still torn between building a ‘full-size’ couter-top or a miniature upright. Either way, it has to have authentic buttons It will also probably run wah!cade as a front end.

Making more money

Despite working full time, I earn barely half the UK average salary and inflation is running away from me (3% my a$$). So I will mostly be looking for ways to hike my income

Getting the hell out of here

You know it makes sense…