Aquila Online

Eish Traffic

// January 31st, 2007 // 12 Comments » // General

As far as the eye can see

Scott Sigler Rocks

// January 30th, 2007 // 4 Comments » // Celebrities, Podcasting

Man what a blast. Just had a quick chat with the master of sci-fi gore, a damn good novellist, podcaster and celebrity, Scott Sigler.

Some of my friends here in South Africa and pretty much all over the world, will agree with me that Scott is one seriously cool dude. It still baffles that he still makes time for the little people – dude you rock, again.

Okay, with that out the way on to business. If you haven’t listened to The Rookie, Infection, Ancestor or Earthcore you probably should get out more*. Once you get listening, words like earthcrack, junkies, Rocktopi, Krakens, Sklorno, Quyth, triangles and xenotransplantation in cows will become part of your daily vocabulary.

Things are heating up in the latest podcast novel, The Rookie and I can’t wait till this download of Episode 17 finishes – a full 55 minutes of story, which is just enough to get me through my morning commute which took me little over an hour and 15 minutes today.

Take my word for it – it’s all good stuff. So, what I want you to do is pop over to Scott Sigler’s site, subscribe to the podcast, send a vote for him on Podcastalley (or via his site) and join the Yahoo group and go buy all the merchandise you can.

If you don’t, well let’s just say I know people who know people who are connected to some really bad people. You don’t want anything bad to happen now do you?

You still here?

* Or the reason why you haven’t listened is that you don’t have an internet connection, in which case, let me know and I’ll hook you up with the good stuff (Scott’s audio that is).

27dinner

// January 28th, 2007 // 15 Comments » // Geek Dinners

As mentioned earlier, the 27dinner held in Jozi last night was a rip roaring success. So much so that the last people partied up a storm till the wee hours of the morning.

For more of mine and other bloggers’ photographs head over to the flickr Geek Dinner pool.

To Mike, Dave, Carl and the rest of the organisation team – well done. The next one will rock Cape Town for sure.

PS: Thanks also to Stormhoek for the sponsored wine. Naaiiicccee.

FreeUndelete Saved My Life

// January 28th, 2007 // 5 Comments » // Blog Stuff

What a blast. The 27dinner rocked Jozi last night. On returning home just after 02:00, I promptly downloaded the pictures to my home laptop to upload later on for your viewing pleasure. Little did I know what was to follow when I woke up after a bit of a nap.

During the quick post to chat about Creative Commons licenses my machine started hanging every few minutes, until it finally gave up the ghost. I finished the last few lines of that post from the TyTN – It actually works.

Anyhow, since I was quite used to recoveries and backups etc, I tried to reboot and restore to the last known good configuration, but to no avail. Getting a bit anxious at the prospect of actually loosing data, emails and shock-horror, last night’s 27dinner photographs I resorted to removing the hard-drive, plugging it into an external cradle and booting from the other laptop.

Nada, nothing, zip. She’s dead. My hard-drive died.

**At this point I could utter a couple of very choice words, but I’ll keep this post PG rated instead.

As I also suspected, and triple-checked, I moved the photographs directly off the camera’s compact flash card, therefore no “backup” of the pictures.

**At this point some more choice words could be uttered.

As a last ditch resort I dusted off a copy of FreeUndelete 2.0, a freeware data recovery program for deleted files.

I nervously pointed it at the camera’s flash drive and pressed the scan button. A couple of seconds later, which felt like an eternity, “Et voilà? Je te domine” it worked!! Data found and recovered. All pictures intact. Yay!

FreeUndelete didn’t exactly save my life, but it did save last night’s pictures. I can definitely recommend this program for eventualities like this.

They will be up soon.

Now to figure out how to get all the other data back from that busted hard-drive.

Reading The Fine Print

// January 28th, 2007 // 5 Comments » // Blog Stuff

When last did you read the fine print on pretty much anything?

I guess for the average Joe, reading (and understanding) something like fine print gets in the way of upgrading a cellphone contract, buying a car or just simply distributing and sharing content on a blog or website of your choice. More often than not, people either skim through it or don’t pay attention to it at all.

Luckily new media evangelist, legal eagle and blogger of note, Paul Jacobson, actually pays attention to things like this and pointed out that I had contradicting copyright notices on this blog.

Since starting this blog back in 2004, I’ve had a Creative Commons license, but with the move from the old Blogspot address to this new domain built on WordPress, I inadvertently neglected to remove the full copyright notice in the new template. So for the last year (almost) I’ve had contradicting licenses on the site.

Thanks for the heads-up Paul.

Read more of his insightfull thoughts on “Why bloggers should blog under Creative Commons license”. A must-read for bloggers and content providers who want to share their work under certain legal conditions

PS: While we’re on the topic – if you haven’t updated the address link for this site in your blogrolls yet, please could you change the old http://aquilaonline.blogspot.com to the new http://www.aquilaonline.co.za – I’d hate to loose other potential visitors and subscribers.