Posts filed under 'Blog News'
It’s 6PM, so there ends today’s 2CC drive show, and with it the tenure of Australia’s best provincial newcomer off-air for 2007, producer Michael Thompson.
Michael is leaving Canberra’s garden suburb of the north* (Mitchell) for the tropical island of Pyrmont (I was told that he was on a tropical island the last time he was in Pyrmont) where he will join the team responsible for Ray Hadley’s morning show on 2GB. At this stage it is unclear whether or not he will be taking any green mesh with him to Pyrmont.
The news came as a shock to me as I only found out today. I knew that my week or so of isolating myself from the world recently worked well, I just didn’t know that it worked that well.
Best of luck Michael, you definitely deserve the new job and I hope it all goes well for you. I don’t think that it’s within my power to turn Pyrmont in to a tropical island, but I could probably convince a professor to release a report in to global warming complete with a picture of Pyrmont floating in the ocean due to rising sea levels and an increase in temperatures by about ten degrees…not sure about the palm trees though, you might have to improvise by moving 2GB’s indoor plants to the building’s roof.
*Apologies to Mike Jeffreys for stealing his description of Mitchell…it’s the only decent description out there.
Due to my break from the blog, I’m a week behind on the Musician(s) Of The Week award and my plan was to run two Musician(s) Of The Week posts this weekend…I will still do that, but I may have to overrule the random number generator and pick one of the songs from the 101-song-list purposefully tomorrow. I know that Michael has been eagerly waiting for me to run this song for some time so I might as well do it before he forgets what Canberra’s average temperature is for May.
Samuel
August 1st, 2008 at 06:00pm
It was worth a shot, but I haven’t used it for over a week now and I can’t see myself using it again in the near future.
It was useful for a little while, but ultimately it doesn’t fit my style of blogging, and so it is gone.
Samuel
July 15th, 2008 at 05:26pm
And finally it sinks in, it’s a Monday morning, and for the first time that I can remember in a very very long time, I’m not at the beck and call of somebody else. Yes that is correct, I am unemployed.
The duration of this unemployment is yet to be decided, but will probably be in the order of weeks, although a handful of people have the power to make it less and if they decide to do so then I will be happy with that, but otherwise I will enjoy my few weeks of relative freedom.
The last time I took any proper leave from work was in October last year when I took two weeks off, one of which I spent in Sydney. It looks like I’ve built up a reasonable leave balance since then and I’ll be quite happily living off the payout from that for a few weeks.
For those of you who aren’t aware, I resigned from AussieHQ about a month and a half ago. Originally I was going to finish up on Friday June 13, but this date was pushed back by mutual agreement and I finished up on Friday July 11 instead, the last couple weeks of which I have spent working from home, which is rather fortunate considering my current lack of personal motorised transport.
Last week was somewhat quieter than usual on this blog due to my week being somewhat more hectic than usual. On top of working, I had half a dozen personal administrative matters to sort out, and I spent most of Monday and Tuesday in bed with food poisoning…well, that’s technically accurate, but not the full story.
“Food Poisoning” is definitely technically accurate, after all I ingested something which didn’t agree with my body and I became quite ill as a result, the full story isn’t quite as innocent though. If we go back to the early hours of Monday last week, everything “just got to me” and I hit what I would describe as being my most depressed state yet. I have previously reached the point of writing a suicide note and scheduling it to appear here a few hours later, only to eventually come to my senses and delete the note. On Monday I didn’t write a note, I just decided that taking 2600% of my daily dose of anti-depressants would do the job…I was wrong. Within half an hour I was very sick and I spent the better part of the next two days in a “zonked” state, clearly a large dose of the drug made its way in to my bloodstream before my body could deal with it, and it had quite an effect.
Thankfully the work I needed to do on Monday and Tuesday didn’t require an awful lot of concentration and I was able to take care of it by sitting in bed with my laptop.
To answer the obvious questions, yes I feel better (both physically and mentally) now, and no, I don’t want to do that again. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if that failed suicide attempt turns me off trying for a very very long time. Apart from being zonked for a while, I had an utterly awful taste stuck in my mouth for about four days. To understand the taste, imagine chewing any random medication you happen to have, multiply the awfulness of the taste by about three hundred, add the taste of vomiting, and there you have it, an absolutely awful taste for four days, and a really really bad memory for life.
Of course, I’m happy that I’m over that, and I feel much better now knowing that I’m not actually compelled to do anything at this very moment by virtue of employment. I could have breakfast now, or this afternoon, or just skip breakfast completely, sleep until midday, have lunch and the rest of the day’s meals in their normal sequence, and have breakfast before I next go to sleep. Regardless of what I do, nobody is actually waiting for me to do something for them or turn up somewhere, and I’m not going to get an earful and be disciplined for not doing such.
It’s not that I don’t like work…it’s just that I pretty much lost interest in the job I as doing, and I’m happy to put it behind me. Whilst it was nice to know that it was almost over, it’s much nicer to know that it actually is over.
With things looking up from a work (or lack thereof) perspective, and with me looking forward to taking a break for a few weeks, I’m pleased to say that things are also looking good from a personal transport perspective. I’ll be back on the road on Saturday afternoon, after which I’ll be in a much better position to spend a bit of time out of Canberra, and take care of a few projects and trips I’ve been putting off for some time.
That reminds me. I was planning on starting a new podcast this month. The plan was for a weekly online talkback program recorded live and released as a podcast. I haven’t had any time to deal with my plans for that lately, so I don’t know if it will actually happen this month, but it’s coming and is back near the top of my priority list.
I’ve got a lot to do, and a good amount of time in which to do it. This should be a good few weeks.
Samuel
July 14th, 2008 at 06:40am
***Post Removed shortly after 12am 24 June***
WARNING: My modifications to the Twitter Tools plugin broke the daily update posts. Do not attempt these changes unless you want to break the daily updates on your installation of Twitter Tools
Looks like the Twitter Tools plugin has gone slightly cuckoo and decided to repost the last daily digest. I think the reason it did that is because I disabled and then re-enabled the daily digests as Twitter Tools seemed to be stuck in the wrong timezone.
We’ll see if it’s feeling any better soon I suppose.
Update 1:13am: It seems to be storing tweet creation times in UTC rather than local time but storing the time it downloaded them in local time. I suppose I’ll find out around 10am if it’s worked out that I’m in Canberra and not London. I’ll see if I can find out anything more about this weird behaviour before then. End Update
Update 2:09am: It’s apparently a known issue, but not one that’s likely to be officially fixed any time soon. I didn’t find anything useful on Google either, so I went looking through the plugin and found this section related to digest creation starting on line 214:
$now = ak_gmmktime();
$yesterday = strtotime(’-1 day’, $now);
$last_post = get_option(’aktt_last_digest_post’);
if ($last_post != date(’Y-m-d 00:00:00′, $yesterday)) {
$days = ceil((strtotime(date(’Y-m-d 00:00:00′, $yesterday)) - strtotime($last_post)) / (3600 * 24));
}
else {
$days = 1;
}
for ($i = 0; $i < $days; $i++) {
$n = $days - $i;
$digest_day = strtotime('-'.$n.' days', $now);
$tweets = $wpdb->get_results(”
SELECT *
FROM $wpdb->aktt
WHERE tw_created_at >= ‘”.date(’Y-m-d 00:00:00′, $digest_day).”‘
AND tw_created_at < = '".date('Y-m-d 23:59:59', $digest_day)."'
GROUP BY tw_id
ORDER BY tw_created_at
Which I have altered to read:
$now = ak_gmmktime();
$yesterday = strtotime(’-1 day’, $now);
$last_post = get_option(’aktt_last_digest_post’);
if ($last_post != date(’Y-m-d 10:00:00′, $yesterday)) {
$days = ceil((strtotime(date(’Y-m-d 10:00:00′, $yesterday)) - strtotime($last_post)) / (3600 * 24));
}
else {
$days = 1;
}
for ($i = 0; $i < $days; $i++) {
$n = $days - $i;
$digest_day = strtotime('-'.$n.' days', $now);
$tweets = $wpdb->get_results(”
SELECT *
FROM $wpdb->aktt
WHERE tw_created_at >= ‘”.date(’Y-m-d 10:00:00′, $digest_day).”‘
AND tw_created_at < = '".date('Y-m-d 09:59:59', $now)."'
GROUP BY tw_id
ORDER BY tw_created_at
Basically I’ve added ten hours (the difference between Canberra’s timezone and GMT), hopefully that will fix the problem until it is officially fixed in an update by the plugin’s author. If this works, then I suppose that I’ll need to write a version of the workaround for those people in timezones behind GMT. It should be one extra line and a different variable, but I’ll wait to see if this works first. It hasn’t broken anything yet, so for one of my coding efforts it’s looking promising. End Update
Samuel
June 22nd, 2008 at 11:59pm
June 22nd, 2008 at 11:59pm
I decided to join twitter due to the fact that I seem to put off writing a lot of my short blog posts because I want to expand on them even though they would be fine as a short blog post.
Twitter constrains me to 140 characters per message so it’s perfect for short blog posts, and can be used for other miscellaneous updates. Hopefully this will not only make me not put off the short blog posts to the point where they never get written, but it will also make me more interested in actually writing my longer blog posts because I won’t be dismayed by all of those short blog post titles just waiting for an accompanying article.
All of my twitter updates will be posted here daily (as long as the WordPress plugin for that actually works) and I’m debating whether or not to show them in the sidebar. You can also follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/SamuelGS
At this stage I think this is just what I need to get back in to blogging regularly. Twitter’s 140 character limit is just the psychological limit that I need…I think…we’ll see how it goes.
Update: OK, it’s silly for me to post short immediate updates to twitter and only have them appear here once per day. The daily archive will be posted here once per day, but I’ve decided that the latest updates need to be visible in the sidebar. So far, so good, this is looking promising. End Update
Samuel
June 22nd, 2008 at 04:36am
June 21st, 2008 at 11:59pm
For those of you who have been having trouble reaching this website since about 8:30 this morning, it would appear that karma caught up with me and decided that once the power was restored in Mitchell and Kaleen, I had to be punished for enjoying 2CC’s endeavours in the darkness of a power outage by having my hosting provider’s network go “wonky” (as Clive Robertson would most likely say).
Of course, the fact that I work there (I may have resigned but I’m still in my notice period) and was part of the team dealing with many customers who were also affected by the wonky network just made Dr. Karma so much happier.
For slightly more details of the wonky network, see http://status.aussiehq.com.au/item/2025.html
Samuel
May 29th, 2008 at 11:12am
I thought it might interest you to learn that the list of songs on my Musicians Of The Week waiting list from which one song is randomly chosen per week, is now over 40 for the first time ever, mainly because I couldn’t sleep through a headache last night and added a bunch of songs to the list that I’ve been meaning to add for some time. The list currently contains 78 songs.
Also while not sleeping last night I completed a related project. It has been said to me on a number of occasions, mostly by people who aren’t familiar with the music I feature, that they have absolutely no idea what most of the songs sound like. Considering that almost all of the songs are on YouTube in one form or another, I have decided to add YouTube videos to the Musician(s) Of The Week posts where a reasonable video is available. Last night I went through the 150 or so posts and added videos to most of them.
I think this makes the Musician(s) Of The Week category pages much more interesting. Thank you to the people who pestered me and effectively gave me the idea.
Samuel
May 19th, 2008 at 01:05pm
On Saturday I started a new photography series which will appear shortly (probably tomorrow) and on the way there I had to travel along Old Cooma Road which starts in the ACT, and within a few metres is in New South Wales. Palerang Council (the people responsible for Queanbeyan amongst other things) are currently upgrading Old Cooma Road, albeit just a bit behind schedule:
A bridge on Old Cooma Road is currently being upgraded, and I decided to stop and take some photos of it. The full set of photos can be viewed on the photo gallery at http://photos.samuelgordonstewart.com/OldCoomaRoadBridgeUpgrade however I’ll share a couple of them with you here.
The scene as you approach from the west:
The new bridge:
The temporary detour bridge. I’m surprised that it remains stable.
Would anybody (who hasn’t already been told by me) like to guess where I was going on Saturday that required me to travel along Old Cooma Road? I took plenty of photos of my destination, and as a clue, I intend on visiting similar sites in the coming weeks to take photos of them. Anybody?
Samuel
April 29th, 2008 at 10:30am
It would appear that I’m addicted to blogging. I’ve driven myself nuts over the last week with things I would like to write about before realising that, no, I can not do that.
I do need a break from blogging, so rather than closing the site completely, I will just minimise the amount that I write on here for a few weeks. I think that is a better idea.
I’ve also removed the musicians of the week waiting list from my previous post as there is no real point to it being there.
Samuel
April 17th, 2008 at 07:37pm
I am writing this to inform you that I have decided to close this blog, mainly because I no longer have time to adequately maintain it. I have been considering this for some time and I have finally come to the conclusion that it is the right decision.
To briefly summarise my reasons, I have lately had an ever-decreasing amount of free time to dedicate to this site, or my other tasks which have a higher priority. The list of things I want to write about is almost longer than my arm, most of it now irrelevant due to the “moment” for most of it passing. I’m struggling to keep up with the regular (eg, weekly and monthly) posts, let alone the standard day-to-day posts which make this blog worth reading. There are a number of things I would like to do with this blog, but they would take even more time than the time I can’t allocate for the current list of tasks.
This doesn’t even take in to account the time required to produce podcasts…something I would love to do more of, but just have absolutely no time for.
One of my main plans for this year was coverage and analysis of the ACT election. As much as I would like to provide a very intense coverage of the election, and the people and issues surrounding it, I just won’t have enough time to even come close to doing it justice.
Ultimately, the only fair things for me as the author of this blog, and you, as a reader who comes here expecting to see something, is for me to draw a line in the sand, and close the blog.
The decision has not come easily. I have enjoyed blogging and podcasting for the last three years (OK, so I’m a couple weeks short of the three year mark) and I had a number of plans for at least the next year, and I also recognise that I have been very fortunate with the number of people who read and contribute to this blog, a number far in excess of most personal blogs. I have also had the good fortune of a good Google Pagerank. Closing this blog will effectively mean losing both of these, something which will be quite detrimental if I ever decide to start again. I recognise that this decision is one I can’t really reverse, the effects are permanent even if I do resume blogging at some stage down the track.
I would like to thank you for your support over the last three years. A very small number of you have been here right from the beginning, the majority of you joined me more recently. Either way, you have all helped to make this blog what it is. I appreciate your support, I doubt that I would have made it this far without you.
For something that started as a journal of my time at Linux.Conf.Au in 2005 and evolved in to a personal blog, the level of interest has been staggering. Admittedly I had some (not always welcome) help in the form of publicity from other websites, many of which no longer exist, and most of the readers of those websites didn’t read this blog more than once, but the number of people who have stuck around is still pleasantly surprising.
I will leave this site online for a little while. All the posts and pages will be available via their current URLs, and the site will remain navigable via the category, calendar, archive and other links. In that regard, nothing will change for a while.
In the coming days I will replace this “dynamic” database driven version of the website with a static HTML version, with any luck you won’t notice a difference. The reason for the replacement version is that whilst this site continues to run on a dynamic version, any security flaw in WordPress (of which I am currently using a slightly outdated version, and do not wish to upgrade) could result in data loss. The static version will be a complete archive of the site, allowing me to keep a backup copy for posterity. It will also allow me to provide a downloadable copy, in case anybody actually wants a copy.
I haven’t quite worked out what I’m going to do with the site after that. At this stage I think I will probably continue to update the photo gallery periodically, I will probably take this website down and just leave the downloadable version. What I will replace it with is something I haven’t decided.
I’m sure that I will have some form of online presence to replace this one at some stage. I hope that some of you will find it of some use or interest.
Once again I would like to thank all of you for reading and contributing to this site over the last few years. I’ve enjoyed most of it and I hope I have been able to provide you with some entertainment and something to think about. A number of us have failed to eye-to-eye on a number of occasions and I’m sure that I will miss some of the debates which ensued, although my sanity, keyboard, desk and head will probably be thankful for a lack of debates.
Many thanks for your interest over the last few years, hopefully I will be able to stay in contact with some of you. Best of luck to all of you.
Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Canberra
(samuel@samuelgordonstewart.com)
April 9th, 2008 at 11:31pm
To the moron out there who tried to use an SQL injection attack this morning to reset the admin password on this website…next time, try to attack a username that actually exists, and don’t format your attack so poorly that your shoddy hacking attempts end up as the display name on a comment automatically marked as spam.
If you’re going to break in, please try to cover your tracks a bit better.
Samuel
March 21st, 2008 at 05:23pm
Ten days ago Davky asked “On another topic, Sambo, have you considered running an online talkback show (is this possible using skype or something?)”.
It’s an interesting question because in July last year I planned on doing this with Samuel’s Persiflage, only to find that Skype had issues with their Skypecast service on the evening that the live show was scheduled.
At the time I floated Talkshoe as a potential viable alternative, but I was a bit dismayed that the only way to participate at the time was on the phone, via a United States phone number. The software has matured since then, and the function which was under testing at the time (taking part for free with a microphone through the Talkshoe software) is now a standard function of the software. Talkshoe is a better application for a talkback style program because you can listen in a web browser without downloading additional software, and you can take part via a text chat facility. If you want to ring in, that is possible via phone (including VOIP applications such as Skype) or through the Talkshoe downloadable application.
Talkshoe can also automatically record the show which is rather useful, as has a better management system than Skype’s skypecast system
I don’t really have time to run a show at the moment, but I’m pleased to see some improvement in the software which would make it possible, and it’s something I will be considering when I have a bit more time on my hands.
Samuel
March 17th, 2008 at 01:17pm
The things which would normally appear on this blog on a Sunday night and the wee hours of a Monday morning may be abnormally delayed this week as I have recently returned home from an unexpected nearly-seventeen hour shift at work, which was preceded by an expected four hour shift with AIR News.
I am tired, and am going to sleep. I do have one fun thing to share with your from this interesting weekend, but it can wait until I am awake and remember where I put the file.
Enjoy the remainder of your weekend.
Update 25/Feb 3:24pm: As much as I would like to deal with the Musicians of the week award and the weekly poll today, it’s not going to happen. I’ll do it sometime between this evening and daylight hours tomorrow. End Update
Samuel
February 24th, 2008 at 11:21am
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