I was at a wedding over the weekend. One of the readings was quite unusual but truly perfect. I’ll never forget it.

The reading was an extract from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

“I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

I thought it was absolutely beautiful and I was very moved by it.  It makes me smile when I think about so I wanted to share it with half dozen people who visit my blog from time to time.

I recently upgraded my copy of wordpress to 2.5.1. All apparently went smoothly until I tried to write a new post. When I pressed ‘publish’ the page would hang for a while and then return an Internal Server Error.

For those of you experiencing the same trouble. The problem was with the database. I uploaded my mysqldump of the wordpress db via phpMyAdmin on GoDaddy, I had enough grief as it was trying to get the script to go through properly, the problem was that it neglected to assign the AUTO_INCREMENT property to ID fields on all my wordpress tables. So effectively I could not create new rows.

Thanks to Ken for pointing me in the right direction.

I was holidays in Portugal the week before last. I asked my girlfriend Linda to marry me while we were there. So we came back with a wedding to plan. We’re not going to do one of those long drawn out engagements so the wedding will be May next year.

A week into the planning and we’re already fed up. It’s like there’s this whole new world of wedding politics that we’ve stumbled on. It’s not that much different from real world politics, it’s still full of bullshit and lies and secrets and pissing people off just to keep others happy.

Money is the other thing. It appears to be near impossible to do the whole wedding thing for under 20 grand. Mind you we’ll find a way to do it for 10 grand, it just means that there will be a lot of compromise. Both of us think it is idiotic that your first act as a married couple is to sink yourselves in debt to pay for your wedding.

Ah I just needed a little rant, I feel a bit better now.

If anyone knows how to get married abroad in Italy or Portugal with 20 - 25 guests for around 10k, let me know!

I had to create some tabbed navigation for a project at work recently. Not anything new really, lots of people implement it in lots of different ways. A colleague recommended a method demonstrated on SimpleBits for creating simplified css tabs however it uses background images to get the tab effect and I don’t like that.

I’d much prefer to use a pure CSS method that doesn’t involve editing an image if I want to make changes. So here I have it, a simple CSS only method of doing tabbed navigation. I’ve tested it in IE6, IE7, FF2, Opera 9 and Safari 3.1, all fine.
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I had been doing quite a bit of looking around to choose my song of the week this week. I listened to a lot of them but just wasn’t feeling ‘em. So I decided to go with a classic. One of my favourite songs ever.

I’ve really only started listening to Jack Johnson and Ben Harper since I started using Last.fm. I think they are both outstanding artists. I was looking for something from Jack Johnson in particular when I came across this gem. Enjoy.

I was really busy last week so sorry I’m only getting around to posting the song of the week today. It’s a good one though. Paddy Dunne introduced me to Lemon Jelly many moons ago. They’re just easy listening for the most part, if you’re working I find they get your creative juices flowing like no other. And speaking of creativity, these guys have got some of the greatest music videos out there.

Just a quick heads up on a great step by step guide for getting your Subversion repository up and running on Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard. It covers everything from starting your repository, to hooking up apache, authentication over SSL and setting up Trac.
Bookmark it!!

The link: http://www.sonzea.com/articles/subversion-trac.html

Scott Matthews came in as one of my recommendations on Last.fm. I instantly loved this song. I’ve been up to my eyes this week so this is my only post. Sad I know. Anyway enjoy…

Taking things downtempo a little this week. Some music I forget that I have and then come across after months and wonder why the hell I don’t listen to this stuff all the time. This is one of my favourite tracks from Nightmares on Wax. Perfect music for getting some work done.