I’ve been trying to work out a nifty way to export all of my 223 previous LJ entries in to a nice RSS format in order to have them all catalogued on my site. I could reformat the XML I’ve exported, but I’d still lose the URLs to the entries themselves. It’s a shame there’s no “historical RSS feeds” to flick back to and use.

In order to attempt this, I tried out ljArchive, a nice little application that can connect to LiveJournal’s servers and download your entire posting history and the comments that were made with it. Very handy if you just want to skim through your history. It even has some mathematical models and graphs that it can draw up if you’re in to those sorts of things. I certainly find it entertaining. For a program that didn’t do what I wanted it to do, I quite like it. I just discovered that it can export your journal in to a MIDI file, too! Now I can hear my journal played as notes. Useless, but sexy.

I just got back from Newcastle and saw Grant, my mystical elf cousin/uncle. I arrived at Lake Macquarie around 3pm and we went up around Civic to check out the developments around the waterfront. Very impressive. He’s just bought a terrace house a short walk from there in Cooks Hill. It’s a cute little place. We ended up watching the NRL final back at the shack with some Italian takeaway and had a few quiet drinks. We retired at around 10pm and I failed to get more than 1 hour of solid sleep at any one time, leading to my decision to sleep in until 9am instead of getting up at 6am like I’d originally intended.

This morning, at 9am, I got up and sat outside for a while after drinking the short black Grant made me at around 8am. I guess it took a while to hit me. It’s always pleasant just sitting out on the bench at the shack and doing nothing but enjoying the view of the lake. There’s something innately peaceful about the whole experience. How wannabe-artistic do I sound? Geez.

I zipped over to Caves Beach before heading off and had a dip. There was no surf at all and I was a little cold just standing around in the water so it wasn’t long until I showered off some of the salt and sand and got back in the car and made my way back down the highway and freeway to Hornsby. I wanted to beat the holiday traffic and left Swansea at 10am. I hit the Pacific Highway at Hornsby at 11am. Quite a good run.

On the way home I stopped in at Lou’s to give her a birthday card. I thought it was a rather appropriate one and felt impressed with myself for finding it. Self-congratulation is fun. It was nice being able to see her again and things seemed to go pretty well. The whole thing was reassuring, to say the least. Hopefully, if we manage to keep getting along like that I think things should be fine. I believe she’s drinking punch at the moment with her girlfriends. I could go for a fruity mix myself. I don’t believe I shall, though.

I’m spending the rest of the day preparing myself psychologically to sit down and completely dominate the work I have left for my project – tomorrow. I’ve always been a crammer and rather than fight against my nature I’m just going to ride with it then capitalise on my skills when the time is right. I feel so insightful.

Speaking of insight, it’s only been this last week that I’ve noticed a whole new side of music. I suppose I can now relate to a lot more themes in songs these days. Honestly, it feels kinda good. I’ve always been an experience junkie like that.