Highlight of the day: borrowed a bass guitar (one pick-up version) off Dave. Spent a few hours playing today, my fingers feel like they're going to get blisters. Standard electrics have small strings that tend to cut into your fingers, but the bass has such thick strings, doing bends and slides really burns your fingers, more so than a nylon (from which I have received blisters). Hopefully my fingers will have recovered by morning, and become a little tougher (I haven't been playing enough guitar lately, my fingers have gone soft).
I was surprised when I saw the bass, its a 5 string, I had forgotten it was (last time I saw it was about a year ago). Bonus!! I have always thought its almost pointless to get a 4 string when you can get a 5, but now I'm not 100% sure, the 5th string gets in the way when playing songs typically played on a 4. On a 4 you can access the E string (or D if you tune it down) with the first two fingers, but the 5th C string gets in the way. Its also very low pitched, its surprisingly hard to play by ear, because the frequencies are so low, there's only a cycle or less between semitones, I'll keep practising. Think I'll have a listen to "The Gathering" and "Pale Forest" tomorrow, and try to play some of that.

Downloaded Apache HTTPD, PHP, and MySQL as separate packages today. We have been using XAMPP for our ITC307 project, but when we put it into production it would be best to use a more compact and controlled distribution. Grace (in another project team) needs a php/mysql system working, so tomorrow we are both going to try and figure out how to manually install the three packages, save us both some time.

Tonight Alan and I tried to get Dark-Reign working over the Internet. Haven't played it for years, and although I'm not a great fan of it, it would have made a nice change of pace, if it had worked. The problem is probably caused by the fact we are both running dedicated firewalls, config problem there somewhere I expect, anyway, off to bed.

PS. I did find a spell-checking plug-in for firefox, SpellBound works nicely. It can be downloaded from the site, installed, and once run, it will have no dictionary, simply choose download more from the spell check box, and pick one.

PPS. Another interesting thing today:

Requested by Trevor..
Site Feed
Whispers: I don't really know what this is for...

I dont know how long it has been there. FYI, it allows me to read the blog via my email client (almost as if it was an email), which I can at last. Thanks Katrina.

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