“More” is probably the wrong word in the title, as it is really just the continuation or the underground cabling mentioned in this post from Thursday, and if the paint marks on the grass are anything to go by, it will probably continue for the better part of the week.
Sunday appeared to be a day off for the cabling people from UEA Civil & Trenchless Contractors (trenchless because they have an underground drilling machine which removes the need for trenches along the entire length of the cable), and as such, seemed like a perfect time for a few more photos.
First up, we have one of the holes they dug recently, presumably to check the progress of the conduit along the drilled hole.
Next up we have the conduit, the company sign (UEA Civil & Trenchless Contractors) and a digging machine.
And finally, the digging machine from another angle.
The first time I saw one of those digging machines (which are much more compact than a backhoe) was while I was walking to Primary School, probably during 1996 or 1997, when Reid Court and Braddon Court, the public housing apartments for the elderly on Ainslie Avenue (the brown buildings in the previous post about the underground cabling) were having the internal grounds refurbished, which included landscaping work, and resealing of the carparks.
Some of you may be aware of (or in some cases be an editor of) a website called The RiotACT. For those of you that aren’t, I will provide a brief description.
The RiotACT is a Canberra based news and opinion website which often looks at ACT politics and ACT events. In much the same way as Slashdot, readers are able to submit articles, and after review by an editor, the article may be published.
I first became aware of The RiotACT in April, when one of the editors, Johnboy, posted a review of Linux.conf.au 2005, I did much the same as a comment. After becoming aware of the main subject matter of the site, I decided to stick around, and became a regular commenter, and occasional article submitter. This went on for quite some time, and I found the debates to be quite interesting.
After a long while though, it became apparent that certain people either didn’t like me, or didn’t like my opinions, and took it upon themselves to take minute sections of my comments out of context, make a huge deal of it, and let everyone else tag along for the ride. The personal attacks didn’t bother me too much, you learn to deal with it after a while online, the constant being taken out of context didn’t overly bother me either as I would try and correct what was said. What bothered me was the way anything which was taken out of context became the subject of debate, and treated like some bigoted statement, which in turn resulted in constant “Samuel is an idiot” type posts.
After a while, it got worse, and became more consistent, with people starting to skip the “take Samuel out of context” stage, and just go straight to “Samuel is an idiot, yell at him”. This made it impossible for me to get my point across, and really hindered the ability of the site to remain on topic.
There were also some fundamental differences in opinion between myself and certain people, including an insistence that I live my life in a way which makes my opinions invalid. Apparently drinking to excess, getting into pointless fights or doing other things which I’m not interested in would turn me into a psuedo-fountain-of-wisdom. (Interestingly, there were some assumptions in the linked comment that I haven’t done certain things that I actually have done, which is why I linked to that comment. There are plenty of similar examples of pointless comments directed at me to be found if you browse through the archives of The RiotACT. There are also some interesting and factually incorrect generalisations about commercial talk radio in the linked comment.)
It was these fundamental differences and the inability of decent discussion whenever I made my views clear, which made me make the decision to leave The RiotACT. I have checked in on it a couple of times since taking that decision, and it seems to be functioning in a normal manner without me. On topic discussions seem to have returned, and the site seems to have some value again.
To summarise this, I made the decision to leave for two reasons:
There was no point wasting my time making my opinions known on The RiotACT if people were going to take them out of context and spend their time telling me how worthless my opinions are. I have no problem with people telling me my opinions are wrong (if they have a good reason), but telling me that they are worthless is just fundamentally stupid.
As long as I stayed there, The RiotACT was losing credibility due to constant flaming of me. The solution was simple, leave and focus on other things, it seems to have worked, RiotACT is better off without me and the pointless flaming directed at me.
The RiotACT has very noble intentions, and is a very interesting and useful website, it is just a pity that people felt a need to rubbish me, not because of my opinions, but because I am who I am. I wish The RiotACT success, and I didn’t want them to lose visitors because of constant junk. The people who run the site have worked hard to build it up over more than five years, I respect that, and felt that it was best for them if I left as it is the ultimate cure for the garbage directed at me, which ultimately lowered the standard of the website.
So there we go, for those who were wondering, that is why I left The RiotACT.
Well, here is yet another dream that I don’t quite know what to make of.
This dream was brief, I was in a hallway with wood panelled walls being directed into a room for a job interview with the CEO of a company, upon entering the room I saw a table, and at the table was the CEO of the company, who just happened to be ex-2CC presenter Kane Bond.
On that note, I wonder what Kane is doing these days.
As 2CC Listeners would know, Mike Welsh is currently on holidays for two weeks, however the way it is being dealt with is rather interesting.
For the five days of the drive show last week we had Mike Frame, this week for four days (Monday-Thursday) we have Pete Williams, who filled in for Mike Jeffreys on the breakfast show on Australia Day. Friday will see Mike Frame return with an outside broadcast from the grand opening of the new Bunnings store in Belconnen.
Friday will be odd for me. From 9am-2pm I have a CIT class called “Preparing for employment in your chosen profession” which sounds like an extended “please rate the following aspects of your industry by their importance” survey-a-thon. Ultimately this class (as long as it sticks to its name) is irrelevant drivel to me as I have already worked in my “chosen profession”. There will be angry letters if there isn’t at the very least a morning tea and lunch break, preferably one of them being encompassing 11:30-midday so that I don’t have to miss Best Of Laws. If I do miss it then I will just have to listen to it on Lawsie’s website.
After this class I will make my way out to the new Bunnings store in Belconnen (approximately 10-15 minutes walk from the bus interchange) and watch the outside broadcast for a while. With any luck, this Bunnings, just like the one in Tuggeranong, will have a mini-cafe.
Afterwards I will make my way home and, depending on the temperature, take Nattie for a walk.
Anyway, getting back to 2CC, I remember hearing Pete Williams on Australia Day, but only briefly as I slept through most of the breakfast show and didn’t pay much attention to the bits that I did hear. It will be interesting to see how Pete goes on the drive show.
Once again it is time to take our monthly look at the Blog View Stats, and once again Webstat stopped counting somewhere on January 30 as the site exceeded 20,000 page views for the month. I have made a couple changes to the stats, the usual file stats remain, but no longer take Samuel’s Persiflage into account, that has it’s own category now. I have also noticed the bandwidth stats provided by my webhosting company and will be including them on a monthly basis.
Google remained the most popular search engine, followed by Yahoo, and MSN.
The search keywords were mostly various combinations and misspellings of my name. John Kerr and George Gibson also featured prominently. Among the odd keywords were
candy man advert
yearbook graduation comments
pictures of Samuel’s dream
spoon restuarant
how to remove a tree crane bobcat
clarkconnect via samuel
photos of werewolf disease
chkdsk completion going backwards
dream of eating doughnuts
powerline ubuntu
november 2005 guess books of dickson
clints open mind
unfortunately samuel
songs with the word sail
Internet Explorer was the most popular browser with 66.68% of the readership, Firefox was next with 27.27%, and by Safari on 4.31%.
Windows was the most popular Operating System with 91.59% of the readership, followed by Mac with 7.14%, and Linux with 1.16%.
Australia, The US and The UK topped the Countries, with 89.34%, 3.89% and 2.99% of the readership respectively.
Samuel’s Persiflage Statistics The RSS feed was downloaded 1661 times, up from 150 in December, and making a total of 1811. Episode 1 (December 2005) was downloaded 291 times, up from 80 in December, and making a total of 371. Episode 2 (January 2006) was downloaded 144 times.
Bandwidth
August 2005: 82.93MB
September 2005: 519.89MB
October 2005: 657.85MB
November 2005: 2,870MB
December 2005: 14,010MB
January 2006: 14,240MB
This week’s award goes to Ferlin Husky, and the feature song is “The Wings Of A Dove”, this song has a very uplifting feeling to it, and nobody sings it quite the way Ferlin does.
On the wings of a snow-white dove
He sends His pure sweet love
a sign from above
on the wings of a dove
When troubles surround us, when evils come,
the body grows weak, the spirit grows numb
when these things beset us, He doesn’t forget us
He sends down His love
on the wings of a dove
On the wings of a snow-white dove
He sends His pure sweet love
a sign from above
on the wings of a dove
When Noah had drifted, on the flood many days
he searched for land, in various ways
troubles, he had some, but wasn’t forgotten
He sent him His love
On the wings of a dove
On the wings of a snow-white dove
He sends His pure sweet love
a sign from above
on the wings of a dove
On the wings of a snow-white dove
He sends His pure sweet love
a sign from above
on the wings of a dove
Ah yes, I had another strange dream, this one contained cats.
For one reason or another I was inspecting an apartment at the Bega Flats (for those of you unfamiliar with Inner North Canberra’s public housing facilities, the Bega Flats aren’t exactly what you would describe as prestigious), however this wasn’t a standard apartment for the area, instead of being small and old, it was new, huge and shiny. It had a phone in every room, and they all connected to a big black box on the wall of the kitchen (with sticky tape and wires like a power cord…).
I started looking through the rest of the apartment and walked through a large lounge room which was followed by a large open room with a pool table and a lot of open space, around the corner was a large table and three small cats (they looked more like ferrets than cats, but not to worry.)
I approached the cats and they came over to me, I gave them some attention, but the third one stayed back, I went over and picked it up but it didn’t like that so I put it down again…suddenly they cats started creeping towards me in a vicious manner, I backed off into the room with the pool table, the cats continued to follow me, the third cat caught up to me and bit my hand between my thumb and my forefinger. I could feel the pain and woke up to a stinging sensation where the bite had occured in the dream.
The keen eyed amongst you would have noticed that I missed last week’s As Time Goes By update.
As Time Goes By (Reunion Specials)
8:00pm Friday, January 27, 2006
Sandy and Harry return from their walk to find Jean anxious to tell them about the arrival of Patrick – a young black man claiming Lionel is his father. Joining Lionel and Patrick she eventually discovers Lionel was the family’s benefactor and they all consider him their father, even Patrick’s mother. Having recovered from the shock Jean takes delight in seeing Penny’s face when she introduces Patrick as Lionel’s son.
Stephen has designs on becoming a celebrity and calls Alistair for assistance. Alistair, meanwhile, decides to visit a sex shop and leaves with some bags which, unbeknownst to him, Judith and Sandy later discover. Annoyed at his tactics they give the bags to Penny and Stephen as gifts from Alistair.
Tonight at 8PM on ABC TV, the final of this special series of “reunion specials” will screen. Here is the summary from the ABC Site(Spoiler Warning: May contain plot details that you would rather see for yourself):
As Time Goes By (Reunion Specials)
8:00pm Friday, February 3, 2006
In the final As Time Goes By Reunion Special, Jean is keen for Sandy and Harry to stay living with her and Lionel, she’s even willing to adapt the house for them…
Sandy declines Jean’s offer of running the secretarial agency, as does Judith, who no longer wants to work at all.
Lionel leaves everyone at the pub and returns home for some peace and quiet, and a custard tart. However his hopes are dashed by the arrival of Mrs Bale.
Later that evening Lionel is looking forward to a quiet night in when Patrick calls from the hospital. Rocky is in the Emergency Room.
Very soon Mrs Bale, Jean, Lionel, Sandy, Harry, Judith and Alistair are surrounding Rocky to hear how he injured himself. The sister complains about them crowding the area and Lionel manages to upset the hospital clerk. Jean thinks it nice that everyone came.
This morning, as Nattie and myself went for our morning walk, we spotted some rather interesting work being carried out. The work seemed to involve new underground cabling and large orange conduit.
After our walk, I returned to the scene with a camera and took these photos of the action, by this time the sun was high, and the road was bright.
I spotted this rather unusual Google Ad on another website a short time ago.
Clicking on it took me to eBay Australia’s homepage where there was a picture of a Toyota Landcruiser. Hopefully eBay aren’t stealing cars just to take photos of them, and if they are then I can’t imagine why they would be advertising it.
Unfortunately, this is one of the pitfalls of whatever automated service they are using to generate the ads, hopefully it will be corrected before somebody really takes it the wrong way.
I would have posted this earlier, but I felt like having a quiet afternoon.
As many of you would know, I missed CIT postal enrolments due to various employment and other circumstances, and I recently made the decision (long hard decision) to go for direct enrolment at CIT, this decision was aided by the fact that CIT had a few places in the Diploma of Networking course left after postal enrolments had been completed.
This morning, after checking that I had all the papers that I thought I might, at about 9:50, I left home for the CIT direct enrolment session which was scheduled to get underway at 10am. During the walk I had the radio on.
When I got there I went through the mildly convoluted process of preparing my own timetable based on classes which still have vacancies whilst making sure I fit in all the required classes. The postal enrolment people had been through this process yesterday, it was easier for them as they didn’t have to contend with full classes and rapidly filling classes.
After this it was time to fill out the aplication form with the codes of the chosen classes, walk down the corridor to have the details checked, as well as ID checked (the course requirements were not checked for some reason), which was followed by a walk down the corridor, around the corner, down the stairs (a seminar was taking place in the landing), around the corner, down the corridor and to the end of the queue where I waited to have my application form processed, invoice created etc.
I didn’t check the exact time, but it was probably 11:30 when this process was completed.
After leaving the building I was very relieved to find a coffee shop, where I had a large flat white which I drank slowly. This coffee shop will prove to be very convenient.
After this lovely cup of coffee I walked into Civic (technically that was just across the road) and went to the Canberra Centre post office (a bit further away). At this time I still hadn’t checked the time, and 2CC were running an ad break, I took a guess that it might be 11:40, only to find 2CC coming back from the ad break with Lawsie signing off…it was midday. I got to the post office just before the lunch hour rush and paid my course fees. After this I dropped into Dad’s work and then went home and had lunch.
I had a rather quiet afternoon, I really didn’t feel like doing much, and as such sat down at the computer to watch episode two of “The IT Crowd“, Channel 4’s new comedy which they are placing online. It’s not the funniest comedy ever, and it might not last, but I am enjoying it for some reason, and thank Channel 4 for making it possible for me to watch it. I ended up watching episode two and then rewatching episode one and two.
I suppose I should summarise this by saying that, if all goes to plan, I should hold a Diploma of Network Engineering in two years from now.
