Enticing…
Uploaded to Flickr by skitrussell.

lolwtf?

Go home, IE6!

Yesterday I attended a LAN party some of the youth group kids from church were holding.  They planned to play Starcraft, a famous real-time-strategy game (Zerg Rush!).  Now if you’ve spent any significant time around me you’ll know I suck at RTS games.  The only RTS I actually enjoyed was Total Annihilation.

So I attended, but not to play, but to spend time hacking on some stuff I wanted to.

Pity there was no internet access.
So instead, I started playing some tunes from my laptop.  I have a very esoteric music collection, so I started playing some music on my headphones.

But then I thought that hey, I know one of the guys here liked some tracks that I gave him a while back, so I hooked up some speakers that were laying around and, I started out playing music that was more accessible to people — Jose Gonzales, Beastie Boys, Flash Harry.  At first I just had it on shuffle, but then I took a bit more proactive approach and started using iTunes Party Shuffle feature, with a couple of tenets in my head, keep it funky, keep it relaxed and high energy, and mix it up with both familiar and weird.

So I started mixing in a bit more of the stranger tunes I had — 8bit chiptunes and OC Remix tracks! I knew this music would be weird at first, so I kept mixing in more popular music, like DJ Shadow, The Clash, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Gorillaz and some old school house that everyone knows.

One of the young guys there said something about me having a more awesome collection than him… and I felt pretty good about that — I have always thought my collection, while awesome for me, would be completely random for a lot of others.

A lot of the kids were nodding their heads to the tracks that they had only heard for the first time, and one or two were singing along with some of the geeky choruses on occasion too.  I think I got the feeling that they liked what I was playing.

So as the night progressed, I started to get even more esoteric than just 8bit beats and video game remix tracks. I cracked out some Jonathan Coulton, a whole lot of Nerdcore: ytcracker, MC Frontalot, MC Hawking, 1337 g33k b34t, Ultraklystron, some random YTMND Soundtrack tracks (I got a good response to Kassius’ Poland Tool Kit o_O; ), and even some Group X.  I was still throwing a lot of pop in: Groove Armada, Blur, The White Stripes.

The night wound up as I had to leave in a rush, so I played one last track: Hit the Road Jack by Ray Charles.

I got quite a bit of great feedback throughout the night, and even some laughs!  I didn’t get much else done but putting a rudimentary playlist together and enjoying the crowd-of-7 responce while they played Starcraft.
I’ve managed to rescue the ephemerial nature of the list of tracks I played from the Recently Played smart-list iTunes keeps and have saved it as a playlist, and made it available as a PDF for your personal perusal: KBC Lan Party Playlist.

Space Man Candy Sticks, Redesigned… UGH.
Uploaded to Flickr by Glutnix.

Carousel, the new owners of the kiwiana-status brand “Space Man Candy Sticks” have ruined an iconic New Zealand brand by redesigning the packaging. WTF were they thinking!?

Especially because they put a ginga in the deep vacuum of space without him first putting on his helmet.

So as you know, I recently switched hosts. I host a small site for a short animated film which is still in post production.

When I switched host, I needed to update that site’s record of who is handling the domain name. Friday night, I logged into the domain registrar and found the page which lets me update the nameservers. I am told this is called updating the zone file.

When I do this, it is supposed to propagate the changes through the all of the DNS servers around the world within the space of 24 hours. That’s how it works. Problem solved.

Not with this domain name. Monday morning rolled around, and still the domain name was pointing at the old host’s servers.

This is weird, because whois.net and samspade.org are reporting the dns records correctly.

So I get in contact with the registrar who handles the domain name. The lady on the other end of my web-based IM session told me it’s probably Telecom’s fault, as this kind of thing isn’t surprising, and on request provides me with phone numbers to Telecom.

After 15 minutes on hold (because of the power cuts in Auckland recently) I get through to a guy in Complex Technical Support (yes, that’s what the department is called at Telecom/Xtra), and I explain to him my problem, and stubbornly refuses to believe that their systems are as bad as I have been informed — I asked that he flush their dns cache for me, but he refused. After frustrating attempts to get him to see what I was seeing, I took his name down and department in case I needed to stick it to him.

So I talk to my System Administrator here at Natcoll, and he introduces me to a tool called dig which will let me see what different DNS servers are saying about domain names. After checking a few low level DNS servers, such as Paradise and Xtra, we checked the A-level DNS servers — and the first B level DNS server I checked was mis-reporting too! No wonder we’re having these problems.

So, after trying to raise an IM session with the registrar, I tracked down their phone number and called them for real. I got a helpful soul who said aha, no, what I was told by the other staff member is incorrect. Turns out that they are not a .com registrar themselves, but have to go through a US company to register .com domains on behalf of their customers, and it would seem that the propagation of the zone file changes I requested had failed, and they would need to request them to happen by telephone.

So all’s well that ends well. I’ve called Complex Tech Support back and asked that a message be left for the employee I spoke with, telling him that he was right, and I was fed bad information from my registrar and I wanted to apologise.

Hopefully the site will be up tomorrow morning! I guess we’ll see, eh?