Soon, as Canadian weather goes to hell, I will get back to the workbench and play around my little projects — one of them being the new skin I’ve silently pushed on this blog.

In all honesty, I have not really tested it in older Explorer versions because all my main computers have all sinuously been converted to Macs. Because I’m using CSS shadows, rounded corners and transparency statements that aren’t supported in Internet Explorer 7 and down, I can bet many things look odd. Consider this a work in progress!

This skin was one of the first designs I’ve completed apart from the ones I do at work. Mostly because I can’t come up with something I find worthy of The Music Tank, but also because I’ve let myself being boxed in corporate guidelines, I’ve been banging my head consistently against a wall for a while now in website designs.

I like how this one turned out though and it had the thumbs up from friends, which is a big plus it has for itself.

Of the new features introduced with the skin is a page displaying my lifestream. I tried using wordpress plugins at first, but it didn’t quite do what I wanted so I ended up regrouping all my web feeds in Yahoo Pipes and then displaying what they generated with jQuery.

Stay tuned for updates on projects and new posts on the blog in the near future. I have a few drafts waiting for me to finish up and publish.

I’m out!

You do have to let it go at some point though: just like one chooses to trust your Mom & Pop’s local merchants won’t duplicate your credit card while scanning them under the counter, you have to expect websites to treat your private information respectfully.

Amazon just sent me an alert saying another user tried to make purchases with my credit card, which they had previously linked with my account over there. I didn’t expect them to actually make proactive checks like these and was pleasantly surprised.

I have yet to understand when my card information was harvested and if transactions were made on other websites, but at least Amazon’s suspicion will be noticed by my credit card provider.

Totally awesome.

Now, I know I could be posting this news because there’s still 2 hours left before the show starts… but I know people don’t care about what I need to report so I just won’t be doing anything about it.

I had the preconceived notion that BootCamp would spoof Microsoft’s installer into thinking there is only one hard-drive using up the manually allocated space. I also expected BootCamp to somehow protect OSX’s files using special user file rights or methods that would protect it from the Microsoft installer. Windows Setup found 3 partitions (wtf?) that I went on deleting carelessly. Just for the record, I really think this is my fault in a obvious lack of paying attention to what I was doing.

Fortunately, I’m the happy owner of Time Capsule and Leopard so my whole Mac was backed up to the minute. Thing is, in all the excitement that comes with mistakenly wiping off your drive, I had forgot I could use that backup.

In a nice implementation of their solution, Apple noticed I had a Time Capsule running during Leopard’s installation process and asked me to use the backup it had found. Things went very smoothly afterwards. After a long wait, all my stuff was back where it had been before my mistake. I only had to change the file system from NTFS to whatever Mac uses previously in the process.

Apart for the wireless not working easily with my Xbox 360 (which in the end is Microsoft’s fault) and sometimes having connection hiccups I really only have good words for my Time Capsule.

Fortunately, DROC’s customer server service allowed me to renew the dot com and gave me a price discount for the trouble. Ironically, the lowered yearly fee for the domain is still more expensive than Go Daddy’s (without including the Diggnation code). However, I’m just happy I didn’t lose The Music Tank’s branding which I have already worked 9 years on (no matter how successful it has been).

While registering on Go Daddy, I also purchased Francois Faubert.com as my portfolio’s domain name. It’s so cheap that it would be crazy for someone working full time in the web design business not to do it.

I guess it means I’m old enough now to assume my real name and not leave my online presence exclusively behind my accustomed “Fake” nickname.

The more I dig into the services offered by my shared MediaTemple box, the more I’m happy to pay the 20$ a month.

For example, I’ve been looking for a free place for me to store my projects using svn for a while now. I had found Unfuddle, which seemed like a decent service for the kind of work I needed to version. However, I needed to be able to create more than one projects.

Then I remembered MediaTemple gave access to both ssh connections and svn commands, even on a shared box. I set up two different projects in about an hour with great ease because I had some experience with the basic commands and from the documentation MediaTemple provides on their website.

FTW.

However, all the tables and database structure I had built stayed with Abnormis. Hopefully my old server will come back online and I will be able to get some of the file content back, but I am really just interested in how I had built my tables — which I don’t think I’ll be able to access. I don’t even remember most lengths and data types of the columns. Even my PHP source code can’t give me much hints at the moment.

At least this morning I was able to reconnect the user table. This means future posters and tankers can already join the Tank… and do nothing afterwards. Hopefully I’ll have the news working by early afternoon.

The moral of the story is that a backup, when you are developing, is always too old.

And damn do I need to fix the transparent issues with IE 6 as soon as possible!

I intend to describe how great Media Temple’s service is, how it’s the best shared-hosting package I have experienced yet, and how happy I am with the transfer in another post. Right now, I mainly want to warn you all that lost content will be popping back as I regain access to more recent backups from the old server.

These delayed recoveries will have an impact on both this blog and The Music Tank.