Puk's Blog

So i haven't posted much in my blog of late, i've been rather busy! Had some amazing experiences of late, Glastonbury festival and Download were just amazing! Made some new friends in our little camp in Download, good bunch of chaps, was a really good weekend, think i went into it expecting not to like the music, i'm not so into heavy type stuff, but was goaded into it by a mate. To be honest, i had an awesome time, the music was good, the weather wasn't too bad, the beer was cold, ish, a good weekend all round!

So today, embracing technology I am tapping on a iPhone sat in a steak restaurant in a square called Lilla Torg in Malmo, Sweedon! Yesterday, well this morning i was in Copenhagen, Denmark! What an awesome place, life in Europe is just great. I'm sat here being served by a gorgeous waitress, drinking a beer in the lovely sunshine, why can't England develop this culture, why must we binge ourselves to a rediculous state of idiocracy, I dont understand, is it the fact we just love to lose ourselves, forget who we are?

I've been looking for an adventure since i came back from Peru, i liked it, it was awesome, but i got the bug and want to do something a little more severe! I now know a few people who did the Peruvian adventure i did, and well, its getting a bit common for my liking. At the time there was massive hype about closing the trail for a few years, let it rejuvinate, but it was decided that the country couldn't afford to lose the tourism involved.

So, what next. I posted about the American trail before, thats below this post, i quite liked the idea of that, but i've come across something a bit more radical. The idea of walking 2000 miles was a bit of a scary prospect considering my current state of unfit. So in comes Enduro Himilaya.

EnduroHimilaya simply takes my breath away at the idea of it, scary, exciting, interesting, mind blowing, all words that come from the mouths of the people who have already taken part. Now, before you read any further, i'll tell you its a motorbike journey, and, as yet, i dont own a license, but seriously, for this? I think i may need one. 2009 Trips are all but sold up, i dont have the time nor money to think about a bike license before then, but maybe 2010 is calling . . .

If Enduro Himalaya doesn't change your life it will certainly change
the way you see life. Way up in the sky life is very different, the faces and places you encounter will be unlike anywhere else on earth.
The Himalayas are not for the faint hearted the mountains sheer magnitude is a test in itself, add to that the unpredictable weather,
the constant risk of landslides, sudden border closures and route changes and you realise why this life experience doesn't appeal to every biker.

If you visit the Himalayas on your own it will blow your mind - but to come and be a part of Enduro Himalaya with the foremost guide and support team in existence you will be exposed to a route that no other tour operator dares to tackle.

We will ride roads that have been closed to the public for decades, we will sleep by huge roaring fires at the mercy of vast sapphire lit rivers and awe-inspiring snow clad peaks. If you're lucky enough to wake in the night you may hear bears calling to each other, each morning you will feel more alive than you have ever felt - This place is so heavily charged with the earths power that you simply cannot be here and stay the same.

Each night we rest our heads in weird and wonderful locations, these include 1000 year old monasteries, strange ancient temples (once used for human sacrifice) and wild isolated mountain wilderness. We ride as high as a snow leopard and tread as carefully as mice as we take on treacherous tunnels way up in the mountains and wind our way through the pristine and remote ranges of the Tibet / India border. We take these risks not to escape life but to prevent life escaping us - come and be a part of this ultimate biking adventure.

More pics hit the jump.

Sorry about the length of time the site has been down, unfortunately its taken me ages to find what is basically quite a simple problem to solve. I use Drupal for the engine on my site, its quite a nifty piece of kit, in all honesty way above what i need for pukit.com but its nice to learn with something as you go. I posted a few pages in various forums around the land for some support but nothing cropped up, relentlessly searched google and drupal to no prevail.

My basic problem was due to the fact that i could parse no html though the input form to create any content. Which as you could probably imagine is a royal pain in the ass, due to the fact i post quite a few images on here. I was also blocked out of adding to my gallery, which is most odd. I had a friend look into the site too, who knows a serious more amount of drupal than i, and alas he couldn't fix it either. Unfortunately, as is often the case of me and computing, i didn't have a recent backup either which put me in a sticky spot. I re-uploaded all my core files via ftp, overwriting everything Drupal, the problem still persisted, so assumed, and assumed wrongly (makes an arse out of me and you) that it was a database error.

I tried a fresh instalation under a new subdomain and tried to copy various fields in my database over, to keep the core content but not the rest, but this wasnt having any of it either, too many issues. So was preparing to hit the delete button and wipe the contents when i thought i'd give google one last bash, and thank God i did. I used the tags of my host (eukhost.com) and drupal, html not passing, etc, and bingo, i got a winner.

It would seem that my host has its apache security settings set that messes me up, "mod_security on", which they must have changed at some point, as i never use to have this issue. I resolved it by adding a couple of lines to my .htaccess file, in the form of:

SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off

So bingo, now it works. Urgh!

I often find myself wondering where next eh! A mate has just headed to Australia with his missus and its left me pondering again! Urgh. Would be an awesome thing to do, take a year out, work for BMW, Holden, whatever, maybe just work in a bar eh? Why not. Think the next random weekend away is due to be Copenhagen in the early Summer, alas, with Glastonbury, Reading and Download festivals this year, it doesn't leave much time to have weekend parties! But a hell of a summer it certainly shall be.

Been a while since my Inca trail trip, the photo's are making me reminisce a little. I fancy doing the Aztec trail, see the fruit of all the Myan's, but it just feels as though it may be too much like Peru, so i need something different. I've come accross an American trail, called the Appalachian trail, takes around 5million footsteps to complete, 2,175-miles. Takes a couple of months, sleep under canvas or in the shelters. Looks pretty cool, be hard to take 3 months out of work at the moment, but its certainly something i'm going to look into i believe.

Some info:

TOTAL DISTANCE: 2164 Miles
TRAIL STATUS: 100% Built
SOUTHERN TRAILHEAD:
Springer Mountain near Dahlonega, Georgia
NORTHERN TRAILHEAD:
Mt. Katahdin near Millinocket, Maine
BLAZES: White (Standard Blaze)
TYPICAL START DATES:
March 1-April 15, Northbound; July 1, Southbound
TYPICAL DIRECTION: Northbound
DIFFICULTY: Moderate to Difficult
HIGHEST POINT: 6643 feet at Clingman's Dome
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina
LOWEST POINT: 123 feet at the Trailside Zoo
Bear Mountain State Park, New York
STATES HIKED: Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusettes, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine

HIGHLIGHTS: The Appalachian Trail is a 2164 mile footpath that runs along the Appalachian Mountains from Maine to Georgia. The trail's northern terminus is in Central Maine in Baxter State Park at Mt. Katahdin. The southern terminus is in North Georgia in the Chattahooche National Forest at Springer Mountain. The Appalachian Trail (or AT as it is often called) crosses 14 states, 8 national forests, 6 units of the national park system, and 60 state park, forest, or game lands. It was the first footpath to be designated by Congress as a National Scenic Trail in 1968. It is now federally protected under the administrative jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of the Interior, but is primarily maintained and managed by the Appalachian Trail Conference. The ATC is a private and nonprofit organization which was formed on March 3, 1925 by Benton MacKaye and a small group of private citizens and public leaders. Their mission is to coordinate the numerous federal, state, and local agencies to manage the A.T. and its adjacent lands.

Other than having to put up with all the yanks, i reckon i'm good for this! hehe

-Pukout

I found this quite interesting,

1. Get your .rar file and put it in the same directory as a jpeg picture (c:\hidden is a good place to put it)
2. Open up a command prompt by clicking Start/Run and typing “cmd” and click ok.
3. In the DOS window, type “cd c:\hidden” to navigate to the folder
4. Type “copy /b input.jpg + input.rar ouput.jpg
(where input jpeg is the picture you want to show, input.rar is the file you want to hide and output.jpg will be the name of the new combined file)

I've just returned from a rather amusing weekend on the bizarre Isle of Wight. Stayed at what appears to be a summercamp for old people! Hehe, believe i was possibly one of the youngest people there, other than the workers of which i got in cheap due to friends in the right places. I was a little freaked on entry to a ballroom type place, full of older people dancing away, but was cool, after one or two pints of export!

Then cabaret! lol it was fun, i enjoyed it, was a good show, pretty girls doin cool dancing routines, Mr Bojangles was quality! The routines were ace, outfits were cool, smiles all round! Anyhow as i say, if your not a fan, dont hit it with disrepute, go and watch it, and not on the telly! I must admit, i half expected Bruce Forsyth to jump out at anypoint!

I'm such a wannabe aristocrat!

Okay, blogs are new to me, propper me me blogs anyhow. Pukit.com is all about future stuff, interesting stuff, arty' stuff. This bit is just random spiel that exits my lips via a keyboard at any random point in time. I may use it to insult the places, people i've met, or just rant at the world in a subtle public voice! Possibly humiliate myself in the process.

Today, i've been given a laptop, well, was last week to be fair, its an olden, some Celeron processor job, half the keys not working due to a red wine incident i believe. But today, it works, Godbless eBay, found a second hand keyboard, ripped it apart, rebuilt with new keyboard and hey presto! Working craptop! Great eh.

So getting my world of opensource back on track with ubunto as we speak. A lot of people wonder why anyone bothers with an opensource operating system, the people i work with often do, the people i socialise do too. I imagine my roots with linux go back to my pre-university days, i remember attending a lesson in college and a friend saying he didn't use Windows, he used Linux, and no one knew what it was (other than the seriously serious geek amongst us) and i was curious. I'd only owned a pc a couple of years, and was still running games in Dos or the new incredible Win95! I looked into linux, but i didn't really get to grips with it until university, the use of Solaris, HP-UX, Redhat, it interested me. I ran a server with redhat and could ftp into it from uni and share my work, run a http server, it was exciting, it was interesting, it was not Windows! By then XP had taken the world by hold and i was eager to get out.

So i'm back to opensource, on the craptop anyhow. Vista on my main machine, sli graphics, all that, my gaming rig, i tried Wine before, and shall not be going near that again, so vista for my main rig. At the moment, Ubunto on my craptop until i decide which way to really go. Until another day, Pukout.