Gerard McGarry

5:59am. That was the time on my alarm clock cum mobile phone this morning when my eyes blinked open. I was vertical half a second later and spitting expletives under my breath as I threw on my suit.

Somehow I'd managed to knock the alarm function off whenever it initially went off.  No snooze, no nothing. Disaster! I should've been awake an hour ago.

I should have been standing in the check-in queue at Belfast City Airport at 5:59am. As it was, I was more than half-an-hour away in Crumlin. Thankfully (and unusually) I'd prepared well enough in advance, and had my bag packed, wallet at the ready and shirt clean and ironed over the kitchen door.

So, stopping only for a cursory brush of the teeth, I raced out the door and was soon burning up the miles between my house and the airport. I couldn't switch on the stereo. Wasn't in the mood. My little phobia about missing flights was about to become a reality.

Sad to see that Flickr has gone the way of Wikipedia and started to apply the rel="nofollow" attribute to outgoing links from image descriptions.

I saw it coming a while ago. More and more Web 2.0 sites are taking counter-measures against marketers who are trying to exploit their PageRank to promote other sites. When you see SEO blogs recommending that you drop links from your Flickr images, you know the party is about to end.

So, do you continue to link to your sites from Flickr descriptions?

I took this shot back in the autumn time when we spent a weekend in Omagh. I reckon the angel could be lifted out and used in a collage type picture if I had the time and inclination to use Photoshop.

Church art always fascinates me - the mixture of statues, frescos, murals and the ornate intricacy of church furniture. Stained glass windows are another favourite. It just seems that everything in a church tells a story.

Phew! I'm stuck here in Glasgow airport for an hour or so before my flight home. And while I've got five minutes, I thought I'd update the old blog.

Personal Issues

When your blog is branded with your name on it, you are naturally more careful about the frivolous throwaway comments you might make on it. Or even deeper existential questions that are on your mind - after all, what might they reveal about you?

I'm finding it very hard to blog on this site, because I'm really not sure what image I want to project to the spectrum of people who might read it. (I say might read it. Let's face it, barely anybody knows it exists!)

At the moment, friends and family might find it. Nothing offensive there, and possibly the most accepting group of whatever I chose to write here. But I find myself pondering what employers might think - past, present and future. Should I care? I'm not inclined to, but I know myself well enough to suspect I might care in the future. For one reason or another.

And what about all those lovely people who read my more popular blogs? Well, they're getting nothing. Nada. But then, very few of them search for me anyway.

So I'm continually spinning ideas for personal posts that I can share here, but my inner editor keeps rejecting them all.

After a seriously long wait, Drupal 6 has been released to the web. By coincidence, I checked for it yesterday, as I've been watching the Drupal site for a while. I've done a quick upgrade (made a major screw-up along the way), and upgraded some modules.

All in all, this site isn't too heavy on contributed modules. I don't even use pathauto here, so upgrading was relatively straightforward.

My big screw-up was that I put the site into maintenance mode to prepare for the upgrade. Then I logged out to verify that maintenance mode had worked. Big mistake. When the site's in maintenance mode, there's no obvious way to log back in as the admin.

Thankfully, a quick search reveals that by accessing yoursite.com/user, you can log in again. Phew!

Anyway, my big test at the moment is to confirm if Windows Live Writer and Drupal 6 will work together. This post has been drafted in Live Writer, so I'm intrigued to see what happens when I hit that post button...

One of the biggest commandments in professional blogging is that you should link back to your own archives as often as possible.

And henceforth the loyal disciples of the Church of ProBlogging would link within their own blogs and never to anyone else. And little content islands sprang up of greedy bloggers who refused to share the link love with anyone else.

And the Internet wept.

The notion of linking within your own blog is based on three main reasons:

A curious thing happened yesterday. I got an email from a marketer at Atlantic Records about an emerging artist.

I wondered how said person got my email address - normally I receive communications through the Unreality TV contact form. So I scratched my head about this for a while. How do people get my direct email address? These marketers are so resourceful.

I drew a sketch of an enraged robot this morning. Since I liked the look of it, I decided to work with it a little more using a Photoshop technique I'd read about. Here's the finished product:

I finally tipped the scales with my music blog yesterday. We've been edging toward 4,000 pageviews on Unreality Music over the last month and after coming close a few times, finally tipped the scales yesterday.

That's a milestone for the blog and I'll set my sights now on achieving 5,000 pageviews per day. Hopefully within the next month.

By my estimation I've been off work for a whopping 11 days over Christmas.

Increasingly over those 11 days, I've been dying to get back to work. Part boredom, part family and friends overdose and part terrifying freefall from having no real routine. It seems like I'm a creature of habit after all.