Exam results

I've just received my exam results for last semester and I'm pleased with how they came out - 69 in Japanese and 70 in Korean.

Sucks that I nearly got a 1st in Japanese language, and after coming out of that exam I felt that if I was ever gonna get a 1st it would have been then. But 69 is still my highest mark ever from Japanese, so I'm pleased. And 70 in Korean. I've said it before, but I only seem to get 1sts from modules that aren't Japanese. I'm pretty sure it must have been this video assignment that secured it - our teacher loved it:



I only have 7 weeks of classes left now, a dissertation, one more exam, and then I'm done. I remember in 1st year I'd think how I never wanted to graduate 'cos I enjoyed uni so much. Now I can't bloody wait. It's been a good four years, but I'm totally ready to finish learning and start working. There's a possibility I'll be returning to Japan, but if not I have a sweet backup plan.

My dissertation should be no problem as well. I'm writing it on the dialect of the area where I went to study in Japan - Kansai - and it's going great. I handed in my outline and got a high mark, and the topic is something I'm genuinely interested in, so I'm enjoying writing it. Also, I have the three week Easter break to write the bulk of it, so things are looking good right about now. In fact, I'm enjoying this semester as a whole, especially compared to last semester. Classes back in Sheffield were always gonna seem dull after the year in Japan, but the department here had gone through some changes while we'd been away, meaning the quality of lessons had dropped quite a bit. Everyone was unhappy, mostly with one of our classes which was taught over the internet by a teacher who lives in Switzerland. And while that's still going on this semester, I'm now doing purely Japanese language classes, including a class on translating Japanese literature, which is interesting. Still, bring on graduation.

Uncle Ed

Last Sunday I watched the fitting finale to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics - Canada's victory against the USA in the men's ice hockey final. It was great to watch it with my uncle who's actually over from Canada at the moment. I'd been told he was coming over for a visit but had forgotten when, so it was a nice surprise when he called me up and asked me to hang out. After a rather dramatic and tense end we were both happy to see the Canadians win, and during the game my uncle was telling me all about Canada and how, although he's originally from Britain, he wants to stay over there long term 'cos it's such a great country, especially for bringing up kids. Chatting to him really got me thinking, and after doing a bit of research, I've found out that as a British citizen you can go over and work in Canada for up to a year, which could be something I could do in the future.

I've been getting into ice hockey quite a bit lately actually. Me and my mates went to see a Sheffield Steelers match for the first time the other week, and then my dad got hold of some free tickets, so I went again. It's a different atmosphere from a footy game, but it's a lot of fun, even if I don't understand all the rules yet.

The importance of artwork

Watching BBC Four's Hotel California: LA from the Byrds to the Eagles, there was a nice sound bite from Henry Diltz, the photographer who shot the cover of Crosby, Stills and Nash's self-titled first album. The quote struck me as it really illustrates the importance of an album's artwork, and also the fact that artwork was much more important back in the days of vinyl records. You wouldn't ever really hear someone say this about a CD, and much less about a digital download.

"People say 'I don't know how many hours I stared at that picture' ya know. I had a musician from England once told me, he said 'You know we used to sit there in England and look at that Crosby, Stills and Nash cover and say what is it like to be there in California? And just stare at that thing while the music played.'"

Coach Trip

One of my mates is currently on Channel 4's reality TV show, Coach Trip. He's called Matt and we were in the same Japanese class in 1st year. He lives on the same road as me now, a couple of houses up, and I bumped into him sometime last year and he told me all about Coach Trip. Basically, it's a coach of British couples travelling to various tourist destinations throughout the world, but every day you have to vote for your least favourite couple, who are then replaced by another couple. It's not something I'd watch normally, but the recent episodes have been interesting. Episode 12 especially was pretty good.

It's on Channel 4 every day at the moment at 5pm, but you can catch all the episodes online at http://www.channel4.com/programmes/coach-trip/4od. Matt's managed to stay on since the start and rarely gets a vote cast against him, so I'm guessing he'll be on it for a while longer.

Migrating from an FTP custom domain to blogspot.com and maintaining Google links

So you may have noticed that the web address of this blog has changed yet again. I think this is now the site's third URL since I started the blog three and a half years ago, and I try to maintain some kind of continuity and functionality each time something here changes.

This change was forced upon me by Blogger, who have decided in their infinite wisdom to depreciate the option to publish your blog by FTP. This meant I could still use Blogger software, but had to switch the address the blog was at from http://jephso.spheresofchaos.co.uk/blog/ to a different, custom sub-domain or to using Blogger's free blogspot.com service. At first I wanted to switch services to Tumblr, but that had no feature to import my past posts from Blogger. Next I tried Wordpress, but their import feature didn't work, only importing about 5 of my posts. Also, you can't use custom templates on Wordpress very easily, so, as you can see, in the end I stayed with Blogger and went with a new URL of http://jephso.blogspot.com/.

But many of my pages get a lot of hits from Google, and so I wanted to make sure I didn't lose my recognition from Google in the switch. I also wanted to redirect my feed, so that anyone subscribed to the old feed (http://jephso.spheresofchaos.co.uk/blog/rss.xml) would be directed to the new one (http://jephso.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss).

Accurate redirects would mean that users would actually reach the content they were looking for, and apparently having accurate redirects helps Google update itself with your new page locations - one of the annoying things about having to switch is that Google no longer knows where your pages are until it has crawled them, which can take a while, and so the custom Google search tool on the right of my blog no longer works. This should become useful again once Google has crawled all my pages though.

Apparently Blogger will unveil a tool to migrate everything automatically for you soon, but it's not available yet. So in the hope that this info may be of benefit to others who are making the switch, here's what I did:

At first I redirected the feed by placing a .htaccess file in the jephso.spheresofchaos.co.uk directory which simply said:

Redirect 301 /rss.xml http://jephso.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

I then placed another .htaccess file in the jephso.spheresofchaos.co.uk/blog directory which said:

Redirect 301 / http://jephso.blogspot.com/

That directed all traffic from from my old posts to the new homepage. But I wanted to maintain page-to-page links, so that someone clicking on a Google link to one of my posts would go to the exact post they clicked on, rather than just the blog homepage. After playing around with .htaccess files for a while I found that simply placing the following .htaccess file in the jephso.spheresofchaos.co.uk directory did the trick:

Redirect 301 /blog/ http://jephso.blogspot.com/

Now when a user clicked on one of my old posts from Google they would be directed to the same post, but at its new location. One more problem though. At some point Blogger must have changed the way URLs for labels are formed. On my old blog a list of posts under one label, for example, books, would be listed at http://jephso.spheresofchaos.co.uk/blog/labels/books.html. But on my new blogspot.com blog it's listed under http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/books/. There didn't seem to be a quick-fix solution to solve this, so I created manual redirects for each label, resulting in a big .htaccess file that looks like this:

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/art.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/art/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/blogging.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/blogging/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/books.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/books/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/driving.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/driving/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/drums.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/drums/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/film.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/film/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/food.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/food/

Redirect 301 "/blog/labels/gamewave podcast.html" http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/gamewave%20podcast/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/gigs.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/gigs/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/internet.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/internet/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/japan.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/japan/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/japanese.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/japanese/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/job.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/job/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/music.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/music/

Redirect 301 "/blog/labels/pterodactyl squad.html" http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/pterodactyl%20squad/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/reaction__review.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/reaction%2Freview/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/sheffield.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/sheffield/

Redirect 301 "/blog/labels/spheres of chaos.html" http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/spheres%20of%20chaos/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/sport.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/sport/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/t-shirts.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/t-shirts/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/technology.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/technology/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/travel.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/travel/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/tv.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/tv/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/university.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/university/

Redirect 301 "/blog/labels/video games.html" http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/video%20games/

Redirect 301 /blog/labels/weather.html http://jephso.blogspot.com/search/label/weather/

Redirect 301 /blog/ http://jephso.blogspot.com/

Redirect 301 /rss.xml http://jephso.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Note that the order of the redirects is important. As browsers check the top entry first, you want specific redirects towards the top, then more general ones towards the bottom. Also note that if you have spaces or other punctuation in your webpages, you may need to add equivalent code or put speech marks around the addresses, or else they won't be read properly.

I then went to Google and searched site:jephso.spheresofchaos.co.uk/blog/ to find all the links Google has to my old site. When doing this for yourself, remember to clear your browser's cache every time you make changes to the .htaccess file for the changes to be picked up.

Now all the old links run through to my new blog, and the new links should be picked up by Google soon. To be honest, this whole palaver has got me back into regular blogging again. I just hope Blogger don't decide to change anything again anytime soon, as this blog is now in its third incarnation. Classic templates (which I use for this blog) could be the next thing to go, but everything's sorted for now. And if you haven't subscribed to the new feed yet, make sure you do at http://jephso.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss.

Review of Madness album, The Liberty of Norton Folgate

My review of The Liberty of Norton Folgate got posted at Punknews.org.

I also had my review of Misery Signals' gig at Corporation published on the same site last year.