I found what was causing the RSS feed problem (and other problems); Wordpress sticks a bunch of rewrite rules in a .htaccess file, and Oden has disabled .htaccess use in recent Apache releases. Turned it back on again - the normal feed URLs should be working now, and you can get to old posts again. Sorry about that.

Anyone having trouble with my RSS feed, use this URL: http://www.happyassassin.net/index.php?feed=rss2 Wordpress seems to have trouble with feed URLs, I'm not sure why, but that one works.

I played terribly today, just horribly. Lost 3-0 at doubles then eked out a 1-1 draw in singles, missing easy shots left right and centre. Owch. Oh well, everyone has off days sometimes... I went out shopping earlier and went to London Drugs. "I know I want to buy something here", I thought, "I just don't know what it is". A few hours later, when my skin was peeling off halfway through the third set, I remembered it was sunscreen...ah well.

There's nothing more depressing than the sight of a band murdering its own music. I went to see Rilo Kiley at Richard's on Richards the night before last. They played a reasonable if slightly short set, and most of it was fine, if not remarkable. However, the last two songs really ruined it. The final song of the main set was Does He Love You?, one of my favourite songs off the most recent album, and the most complex song they tried all night (in retrospect it's probably significant that they played almost all uncomplicated, upbeat songs and hardly tried any of their more sophisticated stuff), and they killed it. They started out far too fast and then never quite nailed a tempo throughout the whole song, there was almost nothing in the way of chemistry between the players, and every single performance was sloppy. Now it's always difficult to play even a slightly complex song live perfectly, but then you don't have to. There's an art to giving a good impression of a complex song in a live setting - Radiohead have it in spades - and this band surely doesn't know it, or at least they didn't that night. It felt like they were trying to play the whole thing, and a) failing to manage it as well as b) completely missing the overall 'shape' of the song by trying too hard to get every individual bit right. It was just a mess. They then committed two cardinal sins of live performance; they finished with a completely unnecessary, momentum-killing improv jam, and then they milked the encore break. The crowd mostly shared my opinion of the show, it seemed, and weren't really _too_ desperate for an encore, but we stood around clapping lightly for form's sake. They milked this for a good five minutes. I've seen huge bands get rapturous receptions and come out after much less. Finally, they came back out as everyone was about to lose interest, and for their single encore song, they played...a novelty cover on the ukulele. Seriously. There's showmanship for you. Sigh. What a shame.

Heh, trying to keep a website running on Cooker is interesting. MySQL shut itself down for a bit, there, probably after I did an urpmi. Ah well. Played four points of tennis this morning before it started raining. It's June on the Pacific coast, for Pete's sake, and it's been raining all week. Ah well, the new racket felt very nice while I was warming up. Still sorting out the aftermath of the authentication migration on Mandriva systems, and things in the new Club. Both new systems are _so_ much nicer than the old ones to work with, though. Writing and modifying things in the new Club is orders of magnitude nicer, and we have a new combined user administration interface which is miles better than the horrible hacky thing we had on the old Club. Yay for progress!

So, behold! My new tennis racket. Ugly bugger, isn't it? The NPro Surge, which does not have the prettiest of colours to start with, with NXT 17 strings and a lovely red H2Overgrip, since my palms get sweaty easily. They didn't have any other colours in, sadly. Still, won't get mistaken for anyone else's, I don't think. I'll be playing with it for the first time on Friday. Played again this morning and won a tight one, 4-6 6-2 6-4, from 2-4 down in the final set. Let it be known that I hate lobs. Lobs, lobs, lobs, morning noon and night... My mother sent me some toy kittens, along with the mouse for my laptop and, for some reason unknown to man, an Australian power lead. I'm sure it's the thought that counts.

We signed up for Primus VoIP phone service a couple of weeks ago. We initially signed up under my name. They then seemed to suggest we wouldn't be accepted if I didn't have a credit card, so we signed up under my boyfriend's name instead. They then shipped us the stuff under my name anyway, so we called up to cancel the application under my boyfriend's name. I got home today to find the DHL guy outside; they'd shipped the stuff for my boyfriend's application too. Well, so far, that's just typical corporate incompetence, nothing unusual. However, this is what makes it special. Along with the box containing the router and instructions, which I'd got as well, this time there was a second box. A big box which seemed suspiciously light. It turned out to contain - only - a sheet of paper telling us how sorry they were that we'd cancelled the service, and giving us instructions on how to return the other box. The concept of not sending either box appears to have been too advanced for their procedures to cover...

Ah, that feels better. Went back to the racket store today, returned the Babolat, bought an NPro Surge and got them to lend me the Surge demo racket to play with this morning, while mine is being strung. Had a much more enjoyable game and won 5-7, 6-2, 6-4, 6-4, playing quite nicely after the first set, which was horrible. Over at Mandriva, the usual excellent communication has obviously been employed around the new Club releases. I finally pinned some people down on IRC this morning and found out that the Club releases are (probably) going to be unsupported and won't get security updates, although each Club release will probably include any security fixes since the last one. This was not what I had previously understood, and doesn't seem to have been explained very well in any release documentation, at least judging by the fact that all the Club members seem to be expecting updates. Sigh. And still no-one appears to know if we're going to do anything about an urpmi media for the Club releases. Double sigh. Oh well, I'll get it sorted somehow.

Well, now I know the Babolat Pure Control is not the racket for me. For someone else, probably, but not me. Something about the weight and balance of it made it feel like a flat-out chore to play with through three sets this morning; I was dreading serving by half way through the second set. Hitting groundstrokes was arduous and it would not forgive a short swing at _all_, and hitting serves was like pulling teeth every time. Oddly limited power, as well, for a heavy racket. It was extremely nice on volleys - firm, smooth and stable - but that was about as far as I got in liking it. It's going back to the store tomorrow. If they have the NPro 98 demo back by then I'll try it, otherwise I might just buy the NPro Surge; I need a decent racket right away, and I _really_ liked that one while I was demo'ing it. Odd match this morning - we were delayed a half hour or so at the start waiting for the rain to blow over, then played a tight slightly frustrating match with neither of us playing our best and the wind playing merry havoc with everything. Wound up losing, 5-7 7-5 2-6. Last set was nowhere near as one-sided as it looked; I could literally have won every game, I think I either led at 30 or made it to 40 in every single game, and threw some downright sitters away (I lost two 15-40 leads, on his serve). Ah well - fun nonetheless. I'll be happy with a little less wind tomorrow, though.

Played doubles yesterday, as the courts were full; won 7-5 playing with my regular singles opponent, we went down 4-2 then played very nicely till the end. Was looking forward to a second set, but it started raining - pity. I took the NPro Surge which I've been trying out back to the store (liked it a lot) to test something else; trying the Babolat Pure Control Team now, which is a little heavier but might be nice. Over at Mandriva, chaos is currently reigning due to the new Club site and the new authentication mechanism. The new Club site was down for a couple of days, plenty of login problems, and bodies flying everywhere (OK, I mostly made the last bit up). Should be mostly sorted out soon, though (in case anyone's reading my blog for news, for some weird reason, the new Club site is now back up) and once it's all smoothed out, this new system will definitely prove to be an improvement. Rafael fixed up urpmi in Cooker to allow localhost to be a member of the group in parallel mode, which I'm very happy about; maintaining Cooker on a small home network of machines is now an absolute breeze. If anyone followed my earlier guide, and is using Cooker, you can now add 'localhost' to the list of machines in parallel.cfg and quit updating it separately; simply urpmi.update -a then urpmi --parallel local --auto-select will do the job. Thanks, Rafael!