Thrillmere

Rawwrrrr!

Luke — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:00:06 +0000

I got a lovely surprise delivered today. Firstly, the package turned up WAYYY quicker than I was expecting, but there was also a surprise inside! If your business sends products by delivery, you could probably learn a thing or two from Photojojo

Surprise package waiting for me at home...

Interesting items on the customs declaration

The rarest form of dino!

OMG! Rawrrrr $0

The elusive Stow-away-asaurus

For the record, this is what I bought.

Tee Crazy

Luke — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 03:58:00 +0000

I seem to have developed a T-shirt purchasing habit. Now I’m running out of room for them all! Here are some of my most recent acquisitions.

Goodbye 2011, Hello 2012

Luke — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:35:26 +0000

Well, the year is finally drawing to a close. 2011 has been filled with many changes for me – both good and bad. Things are looking good for 2012 – new job, new study and plenty of opportunities on the horizon. I hope 2011 has been good to you all, and if not, I’m sure 2012 will bring great things for you all! HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Old vs New

Luke — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 12:17:56 +0000

Old workspace

New workspace

Christmas Swag

Luke — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 10:52:05 +0000

Thanks to all my wonderful family and friends for a great Christmas this year. I’m starting to think that people might think I have a coffee problem… I got two lots of coffee, a grinder, and even coffee liqueur! Many sleepless nights ahead, no doubt. This is the first year I can remember in a long time that I actually have time off between Christmas and New Year as well! Plus I have the house to myself for the entire time. Planning on doing lots of work around the house (if I can find a park at Bunnings first). I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas too!

Coffee heaven!

AUTUM Straight Jacket (MacBook Air sleeve)

Handmade leather

Yes... I now own an Apple product...

Leather notebook from Kikki K

Mmm... smells good!

Now I need to think of something to write about!

Finally feels like Christmas!

Luke — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:38:36 +0000

Well, it finally feels like Christmas! I’ve put the tree up, finished my Christmas shopping last night, and today I wrapped all the presents. We had Christmas a bit early in our house, because Vincent left for India tonight. I decided to go with the one theme for wrapping all the presents. Little did I know it would be so hard to find brown kraft paper (a few weeks ago it was in plentiful supply!)

Presents all wrapped and waiting...

What's inside?

Cookies! nom nom nom

Random happenings

Luke — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 10:49:19 +0000

Well it’s been a busy couple of weeks with uni exams and other goings on, plus work has decided to put me through a Certificate IV Training & Assessment course at the same time. I’ve enjoyed the first half of the course, and go back for more punishment tomorrow. Congratulations to all those who just graduated from uni! My housemate just finished his degree, so we went out to dinner at Dell’Ugo at South Bank to celebrate. The food and setting was great – some pics below.

New Norica Abbey Ale

Random platters... all the seafood ended up at my end

Delicious lamb!

I also went for an afternoon drive with Dan out through Mt Nebo and on to Dayboro for lunch at the pub. Upon checking into the pub, Dan discovered this classic review on Google – “Great spot to stop for lunch or a few afternoon drinks, locals seem friendly enough, and the girls loose.” Brilliant. Oh yes, and I also saw the Inbetweeners movie, and introduced Dan and Anja to the Inbetweeners series. On the way home from our drive we discovered TINY HORSES!

ZOMG! TINY HORSES! Squeeee!

It’s a wrap!

Luke — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 05:01:19 +0000

Decided to get a bit creative with wrapping presents for Camille’s 21st. I’m pretty impressed considering I’m not a very creative person; perhaps I’m a gay man trapped in a straight man’s body!

Teppanyaki Time!

Luke — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:15:52 +0000

Again with the alliteration.

Vincent’s birthday was yesterday, so we headed into town for dinner at Kabuki (Stamford Plaza). Dinner was fantastic – we had a hilarious young chef and he cooked everything to perfection. We also had some delicious plum sake which I haven’t been able to find in Brisbane (though I have tracked down a place in Sydney that sells it). Have a look at the video below to see us all trying to avoid getting egg on our faces.

Pretty permalinks & password protected directories

Luke — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:38:41 +0000

How’s that for alliteration!?

I recently changed my portfolio/photography site over to a WordPress back end in order to easily update and maintain the content. One of the best things you can do for SEO with WordPress is to enable “pretty permalinks”. This means that your article URLs will all be more relevant to the content – rather than each post having an address like yoursite.com/?p=1234 they will instead have a more apt address like yoursite.com/2011/10/name-of-article. Now, this had never been an issue in the past, however I recently managed to break something.

On my photography site I like to password protect directories that have clients’ photos in them so that they can choose who has access to view the photos (by sending them a username and password). I simply arrange authentication with the .htaccess file in the directory. This has never really been an issue in the past either. Until, that is, I tried to use both pretty permalinks and password protected directories. Apparently WordPress doesn’t like you having your cake and eating it too (probably a good thing for the waistline).

Strangely, when you enable pretty permalinks in WordPress, you can’t access anything in .htaccess password protected directories. WordPress just shows up a 404 “Not Found” page, even though the directory exists. And it doesn’t matter if you include the file name either. Very frustrating. After quite a search, I finally found the solution. Hopefully this advice will find some poor soul before they migrate their whole WordPress database, only to discover that it hasn’t fixed the problem and decide to end their life by speeding past the nearest “Bridge Out Ahead” sign. The solution is quite simple:

Create an HTML document and call it “401.html” – it really doesn’t matter what the content of the page is, as long as it exists, so knock yourself out and fill the page with lolcats.
Create a folder in your root directory (usually public_html or wherever your main site lives) and upload the 401.html to the new directory (let’s call it “cake”).
Edit the .htaccess file in the password protected directory, and insert the following as the first line, before everything else in that file: “ErrorDocument 401 /cake/401.html”
Haz your cake and eat it, too!

P.S. Yes, I know I use en dashes incorrectly. Deal with it. Do as I say, not as I do.