(Good Time Vibes)

Last night I went to the Funk Club at the Leederville hotel for a while. I went with Withered, Rich, Steve and Tommy. It was not bad, and I saw Aaron too. At about 11:30PM Steve got a call from [identity protected] saying that he'd "arranged" for "entry" into Ministry of Sound. We saddled up and thought we'd give it a go. The plan worked flawlessly, and we all got free entry into MoS. Not bad, for an unexpected evening.

I stayed around until about 2:30AM, and caught the start of John Digweed's set. He's pretty good, but I wasn't going to waste myself knowing that we've got Steve's bowls and party today. I snaffled a taxi with Steve back to my place and the Zed took him home. Good times.

Now, in preparation for this afternoon, I had the SMS conversation with him:

Matt (1:56PM): Do you mind if I start drinking?
Steve (1:57PM): I insist that you do.

Time to get my booze on.

After jui jitsu tonight I have:

• Left big toe sore.
• Top of left foot sore.
• Left inner knee carpet-stye burnt.
• Right kidney region bruised.
• Right ribs bruised.
• Right shoulder scratches (no pain, just visible damage).

I trained with a dude that was probably 120 kilograms, and he was a beginner too, having one blue stripe on his belt. It meant we both bore the brunt of inexperience. We were lucky though because there was only 10 in the class tonight, so the instructor's right-hand-man hung with us the whole time. The lesson I learnt was to "chillax". He showed us how letting the opponent lead means you save your energy, and flowing with them until they make a mistake is much easier than trying to push a situation of your own. It was a really good lesson.

I hope my gi has arrived by the next lesson because I'm seriously not enjoying the mega-sweaty top I borrow each time I train. The sweat is so soaked into the gi that it's probably the only substance holding it together.

I need to get Emma to make me a mouth guard too or I'll lose my teeth to a runaway elbow or botched arm-bar. I think that a gift of some description would lubricate her generosity ;)

I had a bit of a problem with Prime earlier today:

The load was between 6 and 8, which while not massive was more than the machine normally had on it. The CPU load was at about 40%, which is a lot more than the usual 6%.

It turned out that I was redirecting a script the wrong way (and not taking my own advice) from a cron entry, so it was producing email output. The mailbox was at 2 gigabytes and couldn't take anymore, which cause sendmail to nose dive. We tracked down the problems systematically and it's all back on track.

Current system load: 0.2 :)

By default, Sound Juicer wants to only rip to either FLAC or Ogg formats, and if you live in the real world you'll probably find MP3 is a more suitable format. Here's the steps you need to complete to make SJ rip it up.

Make sure you have the multiverse repositories enabled, and:

sudo apt-get install lame gstreamer0.8-mad

Open up Sound Juicer. Choose Edit, Preferences. Edit Profiles. New. Setup as shown in the image below, with the GStreamer Pipeline:
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc

If you want variable bit rate turned off, and the bitrate to be 256, you can append:
vbr=0 bitrate=256

Close Sound Juicer.

Open Applications, System Tools, Configuration Editor. Choose apps, sound-juicer. Change paranioa to "0" and it'll reduce error checking, but in my case increased the ripping speed by about 4 times! Maximum time saving.

Close gconf.

Open Sound Juicer and set MP3 as you're default ripping profile. Enjoy.

When using the Terminal Services Client that ships with most Linux distributions, and you're connecting to a Windows 2003 server, be sure to use RDPv5 over RDP. RDPv5 gives you "cut and paste" functionality, which is often essential. I'm sure it does more, but I don't care about that.

I found this out after a few minutes of cursing at the computer, and using a mix-master-mashup of ssh/scp and Samba to transfer files from the Windows machine, to a Linux box, and then back out to me in the real world.