The shorter week in the NRL brought me my second highest NRL score for the year, whilst my AFL tips were, once again 50% correct. Overall the totals are getting closer together with an upward trend.
AFL Round 8: 4/8 (50%)
NRL Round 11: 4/6 (66.67%)
Week Total: 8/14 (57.14%)
Totals:
AFL: 30/64 (46.88%)
NRL: 36/76 (47.37%)
Total: 66/140 (47.14%)
Samuel
May 22nd, 2006 at 03:16pm
On Friday morning whilst listening to The Best Of The John Laws Week on 2CC, I had an amusing, silly, unworkable and not in the least bit serious idea about radio and television in Australia.
Basically the idea was that it could be made federal law that every television and radio station in the country must broadcast the half hour or thereabouts of The Best Of The John Laws Week, and the transmitters would have to be set up to ensure that this would occur.
As I said, completely unworkable, silly and not in the least bit serious…but amusing none the less.
Samuel
5 comments May 22nd, 2006 at 10:43am
I suppose I should let you all know that I now have employment again. After studying for a while and coming to the conclusion that I’d rather be working (and perhaps study again some time in the not too near future), I have been successful in finding a full time job which appears to be something I should enjoy.
In about an hour from now (an hour from now being 8:30am), I will be at work. No need to worry though, I intend on continuing to schedule blog entries…the frequency might be a bit less than you’ve become accustomed to, but it should be fun. Last time I had full time employment I did neglect this site, I don’t intend on allowing it to happen again.
I might not be around to reply to your comments as often as I would like, but I will continue to reply…you’ll just have to wait a bit longer.
And unlike the last full time employment, this is likely to last much much much longer than two weeks, and the chances of being “overqualified” are less than minimal.
I might keep my job and the details quiet for now…I might reveal a bit more (such as what the job is) a bit further down the line, but I think it’s safe to say that non-disclosure agreements prevent most discussions of work. (If you’re really desperate for a tiny bit of info about what the job is, feel free to pay Media Monitors for a copy (either transcript or audio cassette) of my conversation with John Kerr from 3am on Saturday morning).
Incidentally, I have been on a trial Crikey subscription for about a week…I’m not really impressed with it, but I am considering forking our for a full subscription just so that I can get the TV ratings…which I will no longer be able to hear John Stanley report on after the 2pm news.
Samuel
12 comments May 22nd, 2006 at 07:30am
Before I get inundated with requests, Samuel In Dolgnwot is coming, I’ve had a busy weekend and haven’t quite finished it, so give me a day or two to get around to it. You should have it by midweek.
Samuel
1 comment May 22nd, 2006 at 12:36am
This week the award goes to Cyndi Lauper, and the song I have chosen as the feature song is “Yeah Yeah” (I always have a hard time choosing just one song per artist…and it really depends on which song I like the most at the time).
Through the burning sun
And the driving rain
Over the sea
And across the plain
Oh I’ll ask you once
And I’ll ask you again
Won’t you be my love
Won’t you be my friendYeah yeah yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeahWell the lights are low
And the hour is late
Don’t you want me baby
Through your garden gate
Don’t you feel it coming
And it feels so strong
I will never ever ever
Ever do you wrongYeah yeah yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeahNow the mountain is high
And the river is deep
We always knew
And we hold the key
Violets blue
Roses red
Love you baby
Till I’m deadYeah yeah yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeahYeah yeah yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Samuel
May 21st, 2006 at 06:37pm
It’s Mike “not quite in the plane” Frame’s birthday today (21 May), so happy birthday Mike.
Mike, it would appear, was merely filling in for the period of time between Andrew “Pye in the sky” Pye leaving for Wollongong, and Dennis Lee (could be any number of alternative spellings) taking over traffic completely.
I like Dennis, he reminds me of the stereotypical busy major capital city traffic reporter.
But I digress, Happy Birthday Mike! You must be happy that you’ve finished breakfast traffic before winter sets in.
Samuel
May 21st, 2006 at 12:45am
I have finally gotten around to fixing the problem with the “Most Recent Posts” list on the “single post and comments” pages, where posts scheduled for the future would appear in the list, and clicking on the link to them would give you a “404 page not found” error.
Here is what the list looked like on Saturday night before the change.
Here is what it looked like after the change.
Notice that a bunch of posts are no longer listed…those posts were, at time of the pictures, scheduled for the future.
The problem was caused by an oversight in the “Blix” theme coded by Sebastian Schmieg where he didn’t take into account WordPress’ ability to schedule posts. You see, to schedule a post you have to specify a time in the future for it to appear and then click “Publish” once you are happy with the post.
This changes the post’s status from “draft” to “published” in the database, which means that WordPress may show it to you on the blog.
The WordPress dashboard shows a list of recent posts and scheduled posts
This is acheived through code which checks the timestamp of the posts with the current time…much like the blog pages do. Here is the code for the recent posts:
And here is the code for the scheduled posts:
If you look carefully you will notice that the main difference (other than adding time until post appears to the scheduled posts) is that the “recent posts” section looks for timestamps “< " (less than) the current time, whilst the "scheduled posts" section looks for timestamps ">” (greater than) the current time.
The “variable” $today is defined near the top of this particular PHP script (multiple PHP scripts make up most pages both on the admin interface of WordPress, and on the public blog side of things).
So here is the code for the “Most Recent Posts” section of the sidebar, I have highlighted the code which I added from the “dashboard”.
Samuel.
2 comments May 20th, 2006 at 11:49pm
This morning on 2CC something went wrong with the 5am news from Sydney (my guess is that somebody didn’t press the right button at 2UE), and instead of news we got silence for 15 seconds, followed by the 2CC emergency tape. I’ve heard this new emergency tape a few times but it until this morning I had only heard the first few seconds.
The new emergency tape starts the same way as the old one…a short, generic, 2CC station ID, but after that it is completely different. Some presumably witty person has the first bit of “programming” on the tape as a song…namely Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound Of Silence”, a rather apt song for a tape which is launched automatically after 15 seconds of silence.
Following this song there is an outdated but relatively generic promo for Mike Jeffreys’ Breakfast Program and, if I recall correctly, one of those “advertise on commercial radio” ads.
By this stage in the emergency tape I was mildly worried about the dodgy Optus satellite that carries the Southern Cross Broadcasting signal. Thankfully though a weather pulse came through, which prompted 2CC’s computer to break the studio silence and therefore interrupt the emergency tape. The weather was followed by the return of John Kerr’s programme, which indicates to me that it was human error at 2UE that created silent news.
None the less, I hope the infamous alphabet song is hidden on 2CC’s emergency tape somewhere, as an emergency tape just isn’t an emergency tape without the cheerful sound of “A you’re adorable, B you’re so beautiful, C you’re a cutie full of charm…”. It has a strangely adorable quality that almost reassures the listener that everything will be back to normal soon.
Samuel
May 20th, 2006 at 02:41pm
Regular readers would be aware that I have referred to some people as being a “feminazi” from time to time. The word feminazi is a very misunderstood word, and whilst I believe that I know the difference between a feminazi and a feminist, I’m not so sure that everybody else does. It can be difficult to explain the difference clearly, which is the reason for this post.
Last night as I was doing one of my trawls of the sites that link here, I noticed that a page titled “Feminazis Don’t Do It For Me” linked here, and I thought they might have linked to my recent article about Canberra radio ratings, where I referred to Virginia Haussegger as a “horrible feminazi”. Ultimately it turned out that I’m just on the blogroll of the site with the “Feminazis Don’t Do It For Me” article.
Anyway, the “Feminazis Don’t Do It For Me” article written by muslim feminist Umm Yasmin seeks to clarify the difference between the two words. To quote some of the article:
I decided to visit the Women’s Room at my university to relax, have some lunch, and get away from the noise. I walked in and at first you just see a bit of a messy room with couches, a microwave, a sink, a bookcase full of books and various other bits and bobs. Then you begin to see the graffitti on the wall. “C**t-love,” “dead men don’t lie,” double female symbols hooked together, were written everywhere. All the stereotypical derogatory images of feminism comes flooding into my mind. There is a reason why an awful lot of people deride feminism for being anti-male, butch, lesbian-centric, etc.
Regular readers of Dervish will know I am a feminist, specifically a Muslim feminist. That means, I believe that no person should be treated as worth less, or be discriminated against, than others on the basis of the sex or gender. Because women have historically been the ones to face gender-discrimination, my attention is focused on feminist issues, but I am interested in ending discrimination generally.
Notice the last few words there? “I am interested in ending discrimination generally”. The words of a true feminist.
Ms. Yasmin goes on to explain what a feminazi is:
Now, of course feminism comes in a wide variety of flavours, but why is it that university Women’s Rooms have to be dominated by the feminazis? I slowly looked around the room (no one else was in there at the time) and took it all in. No, this is not my place. No, this is not my feminism. It was for and about women who hate men, who promote lesbian homosexuality as the paramount expression of sexuality, and who have little or no time for other types of feminists.
The article, not surprisingly attracted some interesting comments, and I felt compelled to reply with my own comment:
# Samuel Gordon-Stewart Says:
May 20th, 2006 at 1:03 amDear Ms. Yasmin,
I agree with your definition of “feminazi” and how it negatively affects decent feminism. In general I think that most “decent folk” (just follow along, you’ll get my meaning in a moment) understand the difference, but don’t see a difference between the two words.“feminism” is, as you eluded to, an effort to stop the ongoing discrimination against women which seems to be ingrained into western culture.
“feminazism” is, on the other hand, an effort to turn the tables so that discrimination against men is acceptable, but not against women (not that I’m saying discrimination against women is acceptable, because it isn’t, but I think you know what I’m trying to say).
Unfortunately the feminazis, being the vocal minority, have managed to mangle the public conception of feminism in such a way that people think feminism is the same thing as feminazism.
We need more genuine femanists like yourself to stand up and have a public voice, before true feminism is permanently buried under feminazi clap-trap.
Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Anyway, go over and have a read of the article by Umm Yasmin, it is a very compelling read, and I think it explains the differences very well. The comments are well worth a read as well.
Samuel
11 comments May 20th, 2006 at 06:11am
Praise the lord for spam filters!
In the last few hours, one of those unscrupulous spambots bombarded this blog with 415 spam comments about hotels, credit card rates and mortgages amongst other things.
The first comment came in a few hours ago and hit the moderation queue (technically it was misuse of the “trackback” feature found on most blogs, and I have all trackbacks and pingbacks set to hit the moderation queue, as they tend to just be notifications that other websites are linking here), and since then, the nearly 400 bits of spam have been picked up by the spam filter.
All of the comments contained a bit of bold text outlining what the link was about (eg. “Free Credit Cards”), and then some raondom gibberish text to try and fool the spam filter into thinking it is a legitimate comment (eg. “chestnuts Donovan subscribing gleamed.clattered punished anthems scroll”), followed by some more text which explains the link (eg. “Amercan Express”), followed by a link to one of their many websites.
The spam attack is still going, and I have just received my second email telling me that a comment has hit the moderation queue, with the comment being a spam comment that hasn’t been picked up by the spam filter. This time around Gmail decided that the email was spam, although I have corrected it.
A few weeks ago I was thinking about finding a way for the spam filter to email me when spam comments get caught, as it was catching legitimate comments, but now I’m glad it doesn’t notify me, as having Gmail’s spam filters start declaring that my website is spamming me with emails containing spam comments would be really annoying.
If you’ve posted a comment in the last few hours and it hasn’t appeared, could you send me an email so that I can track it down and make it appear. I’d rather not delve into the spam filter list if I can avoid it, but if it has falsely recognised legitimate comments as spam, then I would like to know so that I can inform it, and therefore improve the adpative spam filtering rules.
Incidentally, one of the really exciting things about this spam filter is that it is built in to WordPress 2.x, which means that almost every installation of WordPress is using it, and by making use of some central resources, it is a mass adaptive spam filter. So if one website gets spam, the others can learn from that and block that spam when the spambot hits them, and even learn what tricks spambots are attempting to use, and block them as well.
This is similar to what Gmail does, just Gmail does it with the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Gmail users, and therefore has millions, and possibly billions of emails to learn from each day. For the record, I have received 1165 spam emails in the last 30 days, with all but two (from memory) being correctly identified as spam by the Gmail spam filters.
1 comment May 20th, 2006 at 12:53am
As Nattie and I went for our Wednesday evening walkies we passed by a location where leaves were in the process of being cleaned up (whilst Autumn is pretty, it sure is messy). As I didn’t have the camera with me (it rarely comes out on walkies), and the light was fading anyway, I decided to come back the next day (yesterday, Thursday) and take photos.
When I got around to visiting the location in Reid again, I noticed that the leaves were still in their little neat piles, and I could hear the sound of leaf blowers in the distance.
The scene reminded me of one of the animated scenes in “Monty Python And The Holy Grail” where seasons change rapidly, and a tree is used to demonstrate it.
Anyway, on with the story, the leaf cleaning people had parked their vehicles on one side of the block. Judging by one of the vehicles they intended on mulching the leaves. The business dealing with the leaves appeared to be BurHor Horticultural Services (PH: 02 6238 1930).
On further inspection there was a great big pile of leaves inside the block.
Some of the people involved seem to take the dust factor of leaf blowers seriously…in some cases to the extent where they look like robots or aliens. (I can understand their need to cover up though, as a hayfever sufferer I know that leaf blowers are a cause of hayfever).
Overall they appeared to be doing a good job, but I had other things to do, so I left at this point and did what I needed to do.
And before you ask, yes there does eappear to be something wrong with the camera…I’m still trying to work out exactly what has happened.
Samuel
1 comment May 19th, 2006 at 03:37pm
The picture below is of a fridge magnet sent out to all (or at least most) homes in the ACT by the ACT Government a few weeks. The fridge magnet was part of a set of literature outlining the current water conservation efforts, procedures and rules in the ACT.
The reason that I am showing this to you, is not to highlight ACT water conservation, but to bring to your attention a government document which is written is plain english (I’ll excuse the “high-pressure low-volume cleaner” as I think they have well and truly drummed the meaning of that term into us in other publicity campaigns). Not only does this document outline the rules in place in the ACT in a very clear and straightforward manner, it also adds little pictures for quick reference and to add context to the text. Contact details and the people behind the production of the magnet are also clearly identified.
I must say that this is a darn sight better than the Chief Turnip’s incoherent babbling from a few weeks ago.
I will be nominating this fridge magnet for an award in the “Plain English” category of the Plain English Campaign awards.
Samuel
2 comments May 19th, 2006 at 12:49pm
2CC’s “voice of reason” and 2UE/2CC afternoon host John Stanley has signed with Southern Cross Broadcasting until the end of 2008, which means that he will most likely continue to host “Afternoons with John Stanley” until the end of 2008. (That being said, if John Laws retires I wouldn’t be overly surprised if John Stanley takes over after a short period of Tim Webster filling in).
The thing that makes this story more interesting is that, during the regular segment with resident money expert of the afternoon show, Paul Clitheroe, just after the federal budget, John presented Paul with a hypothetical scenario about a person who seemed to match John’s own description, contemplating retirement, but wondering whether or not he should put it off for a few years, after taking into account the superannuation tax break announced in the federal budget. Paul suggested that it would be a good idea…and lo and behold a short time thereafter the news emerges that John Stanley has agreed to stay with 2UE and parent company for another couple years.
Coincidence? I think not.
Samuel
2 comments May 19th, 2006 at 09:13am
This week the NRL has a shorter round to accomodate for the State Of Origin in the middle of the following week. I’ve never understood this as the State Of Origin teams are selected based on the best performers from this year, but the teams that get a week off are drawn up in the schedule the year before the competition. In my view it should be all the teams getting the week off, or none of the teams getting a week off.
These occasional shorter rounds and the fact that the AFL and NRL have a different number of matches, are both the reasons that I opted to use a percentage based scoring system rather than a “number of correctly tipped matches” system.
Anyway, on with the tips.
NRL Round 11
Roosters V Rabbitohs
Knights V Raiders
Warriors V Tigers
Bulldogs V Sharks
Sea Eagles V Storm
Panthers V Eels
AFL Round 8
Hawks V Demons
Tigers V Crows
Dockers V Kangaroos
Magpies V Cats
Bulldogs V Swans
Power V Lions
Blues V Saints
Bombers V Eagles
Samuel
May 19th, 2006 at 07:49am
The previously reported potentially time travelling pointless busway has finally been shelved by the Chief Turnip Stanhope government.
It seems that they have finally seen the light and realised that the busway will do nothing to help public transport, or at least partially. The “new” transport minister, John Hargreaves (who has taken over the role from the disastrous Simon Corbell) has shelved the busway plan, stating that it will not be built in his lifetime. Chief Turnip Stanhope, who seems to specialise in silly rants and comments has decided that Hargreaves statement does not reflect the view of the government.
Thankfully the government will retain the land (it’s not as if you could really do much with the land other than build transport corridors) which they acquired for the busway, and possibly use it in the future for something slightly more sane.
As I suggested back in October, light rail would make much more sense between the town centres. Gungahlin is growing and is in severe need of proper public transport links, and there is a remote possibility of another town centre being built west of Weston Creek, or between Weston Creek and Belconnen, which would make light rail a much better option.
Light rail could be built between each town centre, and as it runs on its own tracks it would not need to worry about road congestion. It could also run more directly between town centres than roads can and do.
It is good that this expensive busway has been scrapped, as we don’t need it, and really have much more important things to spend money on, especially with a budget deficit (regardless of what accounting methods the Chief Turnip invents to turn a deficit into a surplus).
Samuel
3 comments May 18th, 2006 at 03:35pm
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