On the weekend just over a week ago, the new editions of the White Pages and Yellow Pages (the telephone directory books, for those of you in countries who use a different system…do any countries use a different system?) were delivered to my house.
I was very pleased with this, not just because of the new books, but because the standard of delivery has improved. In recent years the deliveries have been carried out by people who hurl the books about, look untidy (ie. only wearing shorts) and don’t really seem to care if you get your copy or not. Sensis (the people who produce these books) certainly were not perceived in a good way with these people effectively representing their company.
This year, I was very pleased to see that a fully clothed (Casually, but it was the weekend and they are delivering a heap of heavy books, so I wouldn’t expect a suit and tie, just as I don’t expect a suit and tie from a courier, just a neat set of clothes, preferably with the company’s logo) person delivered the books by putting them on the ground, not hurling them from the other end of the path and hoping they didn’t break anything. This ensures that the books arrive in good condition, and everyone gets their copy.
Interestingly, on Sunday this week the deliverer had involved his family in the process (presumably to speed it up), and came through my area again. A number of residents informed him that we already had the books, so the family of deliverers went on to the next area.
It is nice to see that Sensis have lifted their standards and have decent deliverers this year. The idea of involving entire families (which I suspect was the deliverers idea, not Sensis’ idea) is a great idea as it speeds up the process, keeps the family together, and makes the whole thing look much nicer from a recipient’s perspective.
Welcome to the official opening of Samuel In Dolgnwot’s second series. Series one had its own title graphic, and so does series two.
And now it’s time for episode one, which picks up where series one left off, with Samuel drinking coffee after returning home from the now goldless goldfields of Dolgnwot.
The next episode will be shown on Sunday, 12 March, 2006.
I won’t be there, mainly because I am preoccupied on Saturdays with newsreading, and also because I just can’t see much point in the whole thing. ACTION’s website makes it sound like some kind of secretive tour where they have a bus covered in a massive white sheet, take the sheet off, show you the bus and send you on your way. Maybe I’m exagerating, but the ACTION website says nothing, it basically tells you that you get to have a look around the depot and see what happens 365 days per year (in other words, the depot is still functioning and you will pass people doing their job, which they apparently don’t do on leap year day, the 366th day of the year).
So why do ACTION bother? They obviously don’t care about this “event” much as they couldn’t even be bothered to give the page a title, instead just doing a quick copy and paste of another page and change a bit of content, and leaving the title as “ACTION Buses – ACT Celebrateinthepark”.
My theory is that this is just an opportunity to see a roundup of the local bus enthusiasts, that is the people who are likely to take lots of photos of buses and put them up on websites and comment on minor changes to buses, such as the changing of the ads. This also allows ACTION to seperate the “bus spotters”, the people mentioned above, from the bus users like myself who take an interest in what happens behind the scenes without being obsessed with buses.
I have no problem with the event, and I wish ACTION all the best of luck with it, I just think it would be nice to have a proper open day with proper publicity, something which might drum up a bit of interest in the general public and potentially increase bus patronage. The way ACTION are conducting this, they will be unlikely to get anyone outside of the local bus enthusiast community attending.
As you may recall, last year I ran a series called Samuel In Dolgnwot. This ran for nearly a month with daily releases of the pictures which were drawn in 1999, at the end of the series I suggested that I might make a new series, and then confirmed that today would be the start of a new series of Samuel In Dolgnwot.
The new series will be released weekly on Sundays, however the first episode will appear tomorrow (Monday) night. The reason for this is that the new series picks up where the old series left off, and it is important that we quicky recap Series 1 of Samuel In Dolgnwot.
So, here is a quick recap of Series 1, join me tomorrow night for the first episode of Series 2 of Samuel In Dolgnwot.
(Due to the length of having all 27 episodes on the front page, and the way it probably prevents most people from scrolling to the next article, I have hidden them from front page view. Clicking on “more”, or the article’s title or the comments link will show them for you.)
This week the award goes to Suzi Quatro, and the feature song is one that Lawsie just keeps on playing, and I really enjoy, it’s “15 Minutes Of Fame”. (Transcribed from song, might not be perfectly accurate).
Egos come and egos go, on the stairway to success
Justifyin’ our existence, putin’ us to the test
We can all fall down the muddy and tall
we can all lose our crown
And the ones you hurt on the rocky road up
trip you up on the way back down.
Fifteen minutes of fame and you all used to say
Fifteen minutes of fame then they steal your star away.
Come on play the game, come shine the light down on me.
Take a bow, this is now, fifteen, fifteen minutes of fame
Money makes the world go ’round, our loss becomes their gain
selfish fingers grab it all, greed is their domain
We can all want more, but diamonds and pearls are the needs of a lonely soul
and dreams you dream in your darkest hour are desires in control
Fifteen minutes of fame and you all used to say
Fifteen minutes of fame then they steal your star away.
Come on play the game, come shine the light down on me.
Take a bow, this is now, fifteen, fifteen minutes of fame
Fifteen minutes is all you get, money and fame gonna getcha yet
Fifteen minutes is all you get, so get it while you can.
Fifteen minutes is all you get, money and fame and no regret
Fifteen minutes is all you get, so get it while you can.
Fifteen minutes of fame and you all used to say
Fifteen minutes of fame then they steal your star away.
Come on play the game, come shine the light down on me.
Take a bow, this is now, fifteen minutes of fame!
Fifteen minutes of fame and you all used to say
Fifteen minutes of fame then they steal your star away.
Come on play the game, come shine the light down on me.
Take a bow, this is now, fifteen minutes of fame!
Firstly, the KFI stream was acting up this morning, and I wasn’t awake to call Leo anyway, I’ll try again in the morning.
Secondly, there were plenty of dead air and emergency tape adventures overnight on 2CC, I didn’t time anything so I don’t know if the computer was skipping ads or 2UE were very late returning from ad breaks, the 2UE webstream sounded fine though. If anyone at 2CC wants to investigate, check 1am-3am.
Yes you read the title correctly, but no I can’t confirm that it will happen.
I intend on giving Leo Laporte a call in the morning for his Saturday “KFI Tech Guy” show (11am Saturday L.A. time, 7pm Saturday GMT, 6am Sunday Canberra time). I intend on making use of Skype for the call which, due to the fact it is a US free call number, will be a free call on Skype with the “Skype Out” service (the Skype service which lets you call standard telephone numbers extremely cheaply…no more expensive international calls). I intend on calling as close to 6am Canberra time as possible.
I have two topics to raise with Leo, but I won’t be divulging them yet, I would much rather keep them a secret until the morning.
If you’re awake and want to hear, just go to http://kfi640.com and click the “Listen Live” link. If I am able to get through, which I should be able to, then I will inform you when Leo has released the episode as a podcast (minus the ads, news and traffic), which he seems to do a few weeks after the show airs.
Those of you who regularly read through the comments on this site may remember that near the end of the popup fiasco, the subject of adware and spyware came up, and in the comments in this post, a comment was made by John B1_B5 about Spybot Search and Destroy.
You have to be careful of “Spybot” because it will work ok in the beginning, but after awhile, it sneakily starts acting as an “undercover agent” to allow ’specific’ spyware onto your machine .
Needless to say, this caused me some concern as I have been using Spybot for some time, and have even promoted it, if it is letting in spyware then it has half the computer industry fooled. So I conducted some research, but didn’t turn up anything for a while, until I stumbled upon a quote from Leo Laporte on his radio show, from Sunday February 5, 2006, somewhere around the 34 minute mark.
There are, and this is a really shameful thing, but there are people who camp out on similar names. If you go to “safernetworking.org”, not “safer-networking.org” for instance, just slightly mistyped, it’ll look like Spybot but it’s really not, it’s spyware. So these spyware guys are just nasty, they’ll do every trick in the book including pose as an anti-spyware program.
I did a bit of further research into this, including checking the non-hyphenated domain name, and lo and behold, Leo is correct. It would appear that some spyware creators are “cashing in” on the popularity of Spybot Search & Destroy by registering a very similar (and probably more commonly thought of) domain name, and putting spyware on there which pretends to be spyware. This fake Spybot exhibits the behaviour that John B1_B5 pointed out.
I brought this to the attention of John this afternoon, and he said
It’s quite possible I downloaded the fake one
I can understand that, I could have done the same thing if I wasn’t familiar with the look of the real Spybot website or was slightly inattentive.
So, to summarise, Spybot Search & Destroy is a legitimate and safe anti-spyware application, which should be downloaded from http://safer-networking.org (the website with the dash!).
2CC have a new computer! They’ve had it for a bit over a week now, and I must say that it is sounding good. It doesn’t die like the old one used to do in the middle of the night, it is capable of crossfading (long overdue) and can understand a station ID pulse coming in while it is playing something else (usually a music return) and act upon it.
This is something us night owls are very happy about as it means we don’t have the same ad break 5000 times in a row from the emergency tape any more.
The computer did have a few teething issues, and it was entertaining to listen to the local presenters telling it off, and the overnight programs were fun where it would skip the first ad in an ad break by starting two ads at the same time fading the first ad out under the second ad, funny, but cringe inducing.
In related news, 2CC have moved the spoken intro on the news theme forward a bit, this is probably related to an issue I raised a few months ago when 2UE moved into their new studios with new equipment and the overnight news intro pulse started arriving a second late. As the spoken intro was designed to finish just as the network newsreaders are scheduled to start the news (7 seconds past the hour), any delay caused a clash between the newsreader and the voiceover, by moving the voiceover forward a little bit this issue has been resolved.
Overall I would have to say the overnight broadcast quality of 2CC has improved considerably, as has the daytime quality, this change is indeed better than a holiday.
I wonder what they did with the old system and if it is for sale? The software it was running would make a good collectors item, unfortunately I can’t say any more about that for risk of breaching a confidentiality agreement.
Here we are again, with another look at the Blog View Stats for the previous month. I always enjoy this overview of the month, and I think it is really quite fascinating. Before I continue I must apoligise for the rather slow week we’ve just had here on Samuel’s Blog, I’ve been a bit busy and not really had any incentive to write an awful lot this week…we should have more in the next week.
I like the layout of last month’s stats that I’m sticking with that as a template, I will probably clean up the Samuel’s Persiflage stats next month as they will quicly become a mess if I continue to format them in this manner.
Anyway, on with the stats!
The Webstat reports for February can be found here
There were 18,327 page views in February, down from 20,002+ in January, and 5,025 visitors, down from 5,299+ in January.
There were 7,386 views of the front page on all of its URLs.
Google remained the most popular search engine, followed by Yahoo, and MSN….no surprises there!
The search keywords were again mostly various combinations and misspellings of my name. “schnappi video” came in 91 times for some reason. Among the odd keywords were
mikes-johns
smoothwallsamuel@gmail.com password
“To initiate the process for resetting the password for your”
channel 9 free cricket to watch
ready presentation
the first time i saw the cow
summary of the day after tommorow
woman for stuart bocking
phil-ricky
bunnings belconnen window
Tianjin to Wenzhou
Where is my schoolbag?
netherlands law 2CC
taking listeners beyond the ad break
practice conversation in the restuarant
what is the function of dettol?
ç‡ƒæ²¹é™„åŠ è´¹ extra
Internet Explorer was the most popular browser with 65.36% of the readership, Firefox was next with 30.52%, and by Safari on 2.81%. It would appear that the gains by firefox were at the cost of all other browsers.
Windows was the most popular Operating System with 87.36% of the readership, followed by Mac with 10.78%, and Linux with 1.82%. It looks like a few people jumped from Windows to Mac, and Mac recorded it’s first double digit percentage. I was surprised to find good old fashioned UNIX with 4 page views and OS/2 with 1 page view, it’s amazing what people will use from time to time.
Australia, The US and The UK topped the Countries, with 88.53%, 3.26% and 2.72% of the readership respectively.
Samuel’s Persiflage Statistics The RSS feed was downloaded 815 times, down from 1661 in January, which was up from 150 in December 2005 making a total of 2626. Episode 3 (February 2006) was downloaded 120 times, 81 downloads of the high quality version and 39 of the low quality version. Episode 2 (January 2006) was downloaded 98 times, down from 144 in January, and making a total of 242. Episode 1 (December 2005) was downloaded 64 times, down from 291 in January, which was up from 80 in December, and making a total of 435.
Bandwidth
February 2006 9,280MB
January 2006: 14,240MB
December 2005: 14,010MB
November 2005: 2,870MB
October 2005: 657.85MB
September 2005: 519.89MB
August 2005: 82.93MB
I was watching Senate Question Time overnight, as I often find it quite amusing the way the various members manage to sidestep questions and provide long convoluted answers to questions which were fairly straight forward. I was most amused by the way almost every question answered by a Liberal senator ended as an attack on the Labor Party.
One question caught my eye (or my ear) in particular, this question (which was one of the planted questions designed to highlight various government “achievements”, and to waste time so that the opposition can’t ask questions) from a Liberal senator to another Libral senator related to the conservation of birds, and the answer was almost entirely an attack on a certain Mark Latham, former leader of the Australian Labor Party.
I have extracted this from the online hansard copy of senate proceedings from yesterday (pages 45-46 of proceedings, pages 59-60 of PDF), but you will need to visualise the standard grandstanding for yourself, as the text doesn’t quite carry the (for lack of a better word) enthusiasm shown by Senator Ian Campbell, and certainly doesn’t include the hysterical laughter from the members of the Senate. I have also made a couple formatting changes to make it easier to read and follow.
Environment: Conservation of Australian Birds
Senator FERRIS (2.48 pm)—My question is to the Minister for Environment and Heritage, Senator Ian Campbell. Will the minister inform the Senate how the Howard government is protecting Australia’s rich and varied birdlife for future generations of Australians to enjoy?
Senator IAN CAMPBELL—I thank Senator Ferris for a question that I know is dear to her heart. Over the last 10 years the Australian government has spent over $12 million protecting our unique Australian birds. Only a couple of weeks ago I announced a further $1 million package known as the Wildlife Conservation Plan for Migratory Shorebirds.
As I do with most of my ministerial briefs, I read carefully through the list of birds that we are seeking to protect—some 36 new species of birds. Some of their names would be familiar to the opposition, like the little curlew, which I noticed on the list. There is the ruddy turnstone and the broad-billed sandpiper. But, when I got to the next one, the name stood out and
leapt off the page at me. It was nothing other than Latham’s snipe!
I asked my staff to research this unique Australian shorebird and found that Latham’s snipe has a very long bill—and I think it is getting longer with the addition of the Nikon digital camera to it. It has large eyes and it is known to dash wildly around and to fly in a zigzagging motion. Its other attributes, we found, were that it establishes its territory in open spaces like meadows and grassy floodplains by repeating nosediving displays. In spite of its showy display during the mating season, the parent birds accompanying the baby birds tend to stay in clustered grass and can thus hardly be observed. More than half of them—all senators would be upset to know—never fully mature because of various accidents.
Latham’s snipe is in fact designated as a rare species. It is also prone to suffer accidents because of the places where it lives. Not only do cows often trample over its nests located in the pasture but, sadly, motor mowers hurt parent Latham’s snipes earnestly sitting on their eggs in grass-harvesting lands.
Recently we have seen references to Latham’s lemmings also, as Senator Ferris knows. We know that for many members of the Australian Labor Party there is that iconic Australian sound of the two-stroke Victa coming across those grassy plains and attacking the lemmings, or the Latham’s snipes. These are people similar to Gavan O’Connor, who is under threat from the lawnmower being driven by Senator Stephen Conroy. Gavan O’Connor talked about the sound of the mower coming into his ears—just as the Latham’s snipe would cringe at that sound—when he said, ‘The talent in the Labor Party is subject to sleazy deals.’
Another Latham lemming or Latham’s snipe, someone who dares to challenge the Beazley orthodoxy, is Warren Snowdon, who said today, as he heard the mower approaching:
‘I think what it demonstrates is a small number of people—standover merchants, thugs and other sleazebags—undermining the good name of the Labor Party.’
Mr Sercombe, another Latham’s snipe attacked by the lawnmowers of the Labor Party—
The PRESIDENT—Minister, I remind you of relevance.
Senator IAN CAMPBELL—Thank you, Mr President. I appreciate the reminder. Bob Sercombe, regarding himself—as a Latham’s snipe, the bird that was the subject of the question, would—said that there were ‘sleazy internal deals’. You can see that the behaviour of the Australian Labor Party is no better and no worse than someone driving a lawnmower over the habitat of a Latham’s snipe.
The PRESIDENT—Minister, resume your seat.
I am amazed that Senator Ian Campbell wasted money by having his staff investigate a bird, purely so that they could write a derogatory answer about Mark Latham, even more amazing is the amount of time (and effectively senator’s salaries) which was allowed to be wasted on this junk. Admittedly the speaker, Senator Calvert did eventually tell Senator Ian Campbell to sit down, but that was after a rather lengthy spiel about nothing of any value. In fact it was 2:52pm when the next question was asked (although the answer provided to it did not address the topic), a whole four minutes after the bird question was originally asked.
Surely, this would have been better served over afternoon tea, rather than in place of valuable senate time and questions.
Senator FERRIS (2.48 pm)—My question is to the Minister for Environment and Heritage, Senator Ian Campbell. Will the minister inform the Senate how the Howard government is protecting Australia’s rich and varied birdlife for future generations of Australians to enjoy?
Senator IAN CAMPBELL—I thank Senator Ferris for a question that I know is dear to her heart. Over the last 10 years the Australian government has spent over $12 million protecting our unique Australian birds. Only a couple of weeks ago I announced a further $1 million package known as the Wildlife Conservation Plan for Migratory Shorebirds.
The PRESIDENT—Minister, I remind you of relevance.