I've decided to stop blogging here and move to a new blog allrite rites at blog.allrite.net. I'll leave the content here, there's a lot of history on this site. I've decided to go with Blogger for now because:

1. I don't have to spend much time maintaining and administering the site.
2. I'm familiar with it, having used Blogger to write my travel blogs allrite in asia and travelling allrite. 

Hopefully moving to the new blog will mean that it is updated more often and uses more photos. See you there!

I'm amazed how popular my Views from a train blog is in comparison with my other blogs, including this one. All it consists of is photographs taken from my mobile phone, generally of my daily commute by train. Maybe it's the fact that Telstra includes a "recently updated blogs" box on all the Bigblogs. Okay, my site isn't that popular, but it does seem to get more hits than this one.

I've also started a new blog solely devoted to recording my travels called, creatively enough, allrite's travels. I was impressed enough by Blogger's usability during our trip to China that I decided to use it on my custom domain. I've noticed that it's difficult to keep track of older travel blog entries on this Drupal powered site in comparison to Blogger's labelling and date system. Yes, a few changes to my Drupal setup could possibly cure that, but I really don't have the time or urge to fix that now, plus it's a good opportunity to play around further with Blogger and Google's systems. I'll be using the new blog to record our upcoming trip to Japan in September.

It's been quite cool here in Sydney these past couple of days. Many would say cold, but that would be disrespectful to those who live in genuinely cold climates. However, as one dutchman said, we mights as well live under umbrellas for all the insulation in your average Australian home.

A steaming hot Japanese bath would be fantastic tonight. Baths are one of those guilty pleasures largely given up due to the drought and replaced with quick showers. In Japan baths form a very important part of life. During our stay in Takayama I would return from a cold night exploring the town and relax in a hot bath spiced with the hotel supplied mineral salts.

Kanazawa was even better. On the first night we were chilled and wet from walking around the Kenroku-en cherry blossoms in the rain. When we returned to the ryokan a steaming hot Japanese bath awaited us. Firstly you wash your body clean using a shower hose while sitting on a plastic stool. Then you slowly sink into the clear and very hot waters of a big bath continuously heated. Totally relaxing, it is impossible to remain stressed.

Even better would be to have such a bath with a private outlook on to a traditional Japanese garden with the sound of gently flowing water in the background. What could be more soothing?

Thanks to some further attempts at comment spam new members of allrite's webworld (this site) now need to be manually approved by me in order to join. Register as usual and your account will be approved when I see the email. Unless you are a suspected malicious user, that is.

I've just upgraded the site to Drupal 4.7.0. I had to make some changes to the theme and deactivate some modules. There will probably be other issues that crop up.

I have now installed an image gallery and wiki on this website. I was disatisfied with Drupal's built in gallery functionality and decided to give Gallery a go. Unfortunately, only version 1.x is supported on Ilisys, so it isn't integrated with Drupal. I especially like the remote uploads options and slideshows in Gallery.

I'm using MediaWiki, mainly to gain experience with it for work. I'll try to find some purpose for it eventually.

You may have noticed that the site has a new look. This pure CSS theme, cloudscape, is derived from a phptemplate theme that I created for an intranet at work. The vertically compressed photograph in the header is of a sunrise above Northwestern China, taken from a KLM flight between Amsterdam and Seoul. The background clouds are another photograph from a KLM flight above Russia.