James McDonald

Slovenia – Day 1

I Love Ljubljana! The people are friendly, they mostly can all speak English along with native Slovene. If you say Hello they switch to English without blinking an eye. The city is organized and the people add to that order. Bus Transport from Airport modern and...

Paris – Day 5

We went to see a Church the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paris (the name sounds better in French Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, Paris on butte Monmartre) it was on a big hill and we climbed to the top of the churches tower which was over 300 steps. Good panoramic views...

Paris – Day 4

Yesterday our first visit was to the Musée Rodin, you know, the guy that sculptured the famous "Thinker" statute. We had a tour through the Museum Gardens (Jardins) and had a good time checking out the statutes. He was a talented guy. We also did the obligatory trip...

Paris – Day 2 / 3

Day 2 After our 1st day in Paris my legs were very sore from walking just about everywhere. Day 2 was an excercise in endurance, despite severe muscular pain in my legs I still managed to walk all over the country side. We went into the Catacombs under Paris a place...

Paris – Day 1

So Paris is nothing like Sydney. The bus ride from the Airport showed me modern Paris and like all big cities there was miles and miles of industrial parks and motorways. After a "sortie" from our accommodation I feel I must repent in dust and ashes. To think that I...

Paris – Arrived

Just got to our accomodation in Paris. It's quite nice actually. It's in one one of those old buildings that has been retro fitted for the modern era. It's got interesting plumbing and electrical. But it also has wifi so I'm happy. I haven't seen much of Paris as yet....

Arrival Hong Kong Airport

Just arrived in Hong Kong. The approach was really beautiful the lights of the city and the interspersed clouds made me feel like a mythological god looking down on humanity. Hong Kong airport is big, modern and organized. Despite me being a nervous traveler, the...

Europe 2011

After several months of preparations I have half a day of work to go before we head to Sydney and fly to Paris to begin our 6 week European Vacation. I think I will divert this blog for a few weeks from the predominately IT/Linux postings and try my Lonely Planet...

The Days of our Ubuntu’s

OK so I have installed Ubuntu 11.04 on a HP Mini and am currently finding and installing useful apps so that I can run it in a Windows environment. So I find I need: tsclient (with the following 2 apps also) rdesktop (Remote Desktop Connection to Windows Boxen)...

HP Mini 100 – Making the Function Keys Function

I use Putty to access a character application that makes extensive use of F1-F11 function keys so you can imagine how annoying it is to have to press the fn key every time I wanted an F1. So a trip to the BIOS and change the "Action Key Mode" to <disabled> And...

Piwik Dreamhost Cron Job Dieing

My Dreamhost Piwik archive.sh cron job has been failing with an error: php binary not found. Make sure php5 or php exists in PATH. I presume this is due to dreamhost changing the PATH env not to include /usr/local/bin so the Piwik archive.sh code is not finding the...

Excuse Me While I have a Nerd Moment

Just having a lunch in a local Rutherford Cafe. There doesn't seem to be a free WiFi Service anywhere around so I've turned on my HTC Desires Hotspot capability and am now on the web writing this. I'm using a HP Mini 110 which came with Windows 7 and Splashtop...