What is it about public holiday Monday and Civic which brings all the loonies out of their shells?
Around lunch time today I ventured into Civic to pick up some lunch for the family from Kingsleys Chicken (one of our “once every now and then” fast food choices…usually we’re not fans of fast food) and some afternoon tea from Dobinsons. On my way I passed a phone booth which was occupied by two teenage girls, one of them was standing right in front of the phone, whilst the other one was standing next to her talking on her mobile phone…neither of them were using the payphone!
That, unfortunately, was a sign of things to come. When I arrived at Kingsley’s Chicken I got ticket number “01” from the machine, at the time they were serving ticket number “97” so the wait wouldn’t be too long, so I waited as 98 and 99 went past, and then they reached “00”…the girl who was serving at the time called out in a rather thick accent something which sounded like “num-bo”…I’m sure she meant “number oh”, although why she couldn’t be clear about it and call out “zero” is beyond me. Eventually, after she nearly called out my number, the person with ticket “00” came forward to see if he was next.
Then came my turn, a young bloke, possibly Inidian, called out my number, I came forward and proceeded to give him my order:
Me: “Could I get six chicken croquets and a jumbo chips please?”
Him: “Six crockets and the jumbo chips?”
I should point out that, being roughly based on a dutch food of the same name, the correct pronounciation of “croquets” is “crow-kays”, not “crockets” as the people at Kingsley’s seem to call them.
Me: “Yes please”.
Him: “I will put the gravy on the chips yes?”
Me: “No thank you, just the chips please.”
Him: “So no crockets?”
Me: “No…six croquets and a jumbo chips.”
Him: “And no gravy?”
Me: “That’s right.”
Him: “How about a drink? We have (insert list of drinks here).”
Me: “No, just the croquets and the chips please.”
Him: “Are you sure?”
Me: “Yes!”
Him: “So no drinks or gravy?”
Me: “Correct!”
Finally it sunk in, and he informed me of the total price, I gave him some money, and he gave me the correct change…but it wasn’t over, they only had four croquets ready, so he checked with one of the cooking people how long I would have to wait for the croquets…almost as if it mattered, I mean I paid for the things, what does it matter how long it will be?
Him: “The crockets will be three minutes, would you like half your order now and the rest when it’s ready, or would you like it all later?”
Me: “It doesn’t matter, just when it’s all ready.”
It got worse…he then turned around, got a cup, poured out a drink and put it on the bench in front of me…
Him: “Here is a free drink” (or something to that effect…he was mumbling…he didn’t tell me what drink it was though…would have been too bad if I had accepted it and been allergic to it, they might need a lawyer then)
Me: “I DON’T WANT…(mumbling)”
I had already explicitly declined a drink twice, so why he thought I would want one is beyond me. A few minutes later one of the cooking people brought my order over, I thanked her for it and left…leaving the drink right there on the counter.
The rest of my journey was sensible, and when I checked the radio, Glenn Wheeler on 2CC was asking people about commonly misspelled and mispronounced words, one of my personal hobby horses. I would have called in to tell him about “everythink” and “anythink” and well as “there”, “their” and “they’re”, but I had lunch first and they stopped taking calls about it by the time I got to the phone.
It looks like this will be the first blog post I’ve sent by mail to anyone in a while…I wonder if Kingsley’s Civic Manager will reply?
Well the website handled being thrown into the Radio Leo feed surprisingly well…it was pushing out close to 120mbps for about half an hour, spent a little while hovering around the 100mbps mark, and has been pushing out about 30mbps for the last few hours. This is in stark contrast to the 1mbps or thereabouts that the website is usually pushing out.
Also, by 10am (about eight hours after the website was thrown into the Radio Leo feed), it had already exceeded it’s highest ever monthly bandwidth usage, at 10am the website had used 121.24GB, nearly four times the highest monthly amount ever used, and over ten times the average monthly usage…and all due to a few hours of people madly downloading one MP3 file. The file download stats are updated every 24 hours, so I should know in about another six hours how many downloads Radio Leo generated. About three hours before Radio Leo took over, there was one download of the low quality version of Samuel’s Persiflage #8, and no downloads of the high quality version this month. Radio Leo is using the high quality version, so this will be very interesting indeed!
I was wathing the logs for a little while overnight and noticed requests for the Samuel’s Persiflage #8 MP3 file coming in every few seconds…since then I’ve noticed people subscribing to the entire series and downloading them all.
Here’s the bandwidth graph produced by Bluehost at 10am (note: times shown in Bluehost’s local timezone, Mountain USA):
(Click to enlarge)
At 10am the website had used 32% of the monthly bandwidth allowance. I will be keeping a close eye on this in the coming days, and will purchase some additional bandwidth if required.
Welcome to all the new people who have landed here as a result of the Leodotting (for those who think I’m making up weird words now, see Slashdot Effect, aka Slashdotting, and see that I’m just reinventing the word for a new meaning).
And a big thanks to Bluehost, who seem to have perfected the art of dealing with massive increases in site throughput…I shudder to think how much data they must be serving up every minute.
On the plus side, I no longer have to worry about the National Library’s PANDAS robot comes and copies the entire website in January for the PANORA Archive!
One of the many consistently controversial subjects of our time is the names that people choose for the newborn children. Sometimes these names are just plain odd, and undoubtedly some of those names will ensure that children don’t get a smooth ride through school, or have to spell it to everyone, but to the same extent, having a bit of a rough time in school (and learning to accept people’s names) is part of growing up, and you can always change your name if you get tired of spelling it.
Unfortunately some people feel that it is their need to ridicule the names chosen by parents…I’m sure we’ve all done it, seen or heard a name and thought “what???”, and that’s fine, that’s your right, I’m more concerned about the people who feel a need to publically lambast people in a lasting way over their choice of name.
Unfortunately, somebody I (up until now) had quite an amount of respect for decided to do so on the weekend. Kerces, of RiotACT fame (and occasional contributor here), decided to “name and shame” the children, and turn it into a weekly feature of RiotACT…according to her post it was a collective decision of the RiotACT administrators:
In the general interests of getting tough on bogans and the causes of bogans (plus giving Kerces an excuse to buy a newspaper each weekend), we of the secret RA server room decided to start a weekly (or at least frequent) column of bogan-tastic baby names found each week in the Canberra Time classifieds.
So, they intend on trawling the births notices of the Canberra Time each Saturday for names they don’t approve of, and then berate them publically, have a bunch of people leave comments about how horrible the name is, write about how horrible and nasty the parents must be, and let all the search engines pick it up so that when somebody in the family is bored and decides to Google the name, they end up with a screen filled with messages about what a bad family it is.
If it was just first names, it might not be so bad (of course they wouldn’t have a story if it was just first names), but publishing the full names and then going on about how miserable the lives of the children will be is really taking things way too far.
I generally wouldn’t wish this on people, but I hope RiotACT get sued for this…the sooner they take down this monstorous nonsense, the better.
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First published: Monday October 2, 2006 at 10:12am GMT+10.
Last modified: Monday October 2, 2006 at 10:12am GMT+10.
I’ll make this brief, I’m sick and tired of people having a go at John B1_B5, by continuing the silly and absurd comments made about him on The Spin Starts Here during last year’s fiasco of an encounter with them.
Whether or not John’s newly chosen screen name of “John Barnes” is his real name or not is of no importance whatsoever, nor for that matter are any of his other nicknames.
I’m tired of it, and so is John, and if it continues I will take appropriate action against the perpetrators, and that action may include deletion of comments and suspension and/or deletion of user accounts.
Update: 4/October @10:27am: To the disappointment of a few people who have emailed me, I must inform you that I am not a robot and cannot sit in front of a computer 24/7 monitoring comments…therefore it may take some time before I see “naughty” comments.
Despite some comments which were left and have since been removed, the same rules generally apply to everybody…John, I defended you, but that doesn’t give you the right to start calling other people names…that was most out of character, and directly contradicts your email on the weekend where you said “As you have noticed, I have NEVER attacked another poster on your site, and I’m certainly not going to start now .”
I’ve emailed you John, I would appreciate an explanation.
It’s all over for another year…and it looks like I came out just ahead of the 50% line, with my NRL tipping being just slightly better than my AFL tipping. This is also the only weekend of the year where I managed a perfect score in both competitions!
AFL Grand Final: 1/1 (100%)
NRL Grand Final: 1/1 (100%)
Week Total: 2/2 (100%)
Leo Laporte, guest in Samuel’s Persiflage #8, has just offered to put the episode of Samuel’s Persiflage in the “Radio Leo” podcast feed, which is more or less a compendium of his podcasts and appearances on other podcast. I have accepted this offer, but it may take the website over the monthly bandwidth limit of 999GB (assuming I’ve calculated things correctly, I’m good at getting those kind of things wrong at this hour of the morning).
I can purchase more bandwidth if required, but the website may be offline intermittently during the next week. It may also be slow over the next couple days. Please be patient, I will do my best to keep the website running. Please also note that, if the website does exceed it’s bandwidth limit, emails to samuelgordonstewart.com email addresses may stop working. In the event of the website exceeding the bandwidth limit, please use my gmail address for all correspondence.
And while I’m here, welcome to any new visitors and listeners!
Thanks for your patience.
Update (a couple minutes after original post: 1:59am): OK, here goes, we’re in the Radio Leo feed, let’s see how the webserver handles it!
This week’s award goes to Manfred Mann, and the feature song is “Do Wah Diddy”.
I remember in year three (which was a composite class containing both year three and year four students) on an excursion where we walked from the school to wherever we were going (I don’t remember where we went, it might have been to the theatre near the Legislative Assembly where Ms. Amundsen took us the back way and straight through the middle of an interview WIN News (I think it was WIN) were doing with a local politician…or it might have been a different excursion) and along the way some of us sang songs, including the chorus from this one for about five minutes, and also a song which seemed to involve an awful lot of quacking!
There she was just a-walkin’ down the street, singin’ “Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do”
Snappin’ her fingers and shufflin’ her feet, singin’ “Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do”
She looked good (looked good), she looked fine (looked fine)
She looked good, she looked fine and I nearly lost my mind
Before I knew it she was walkin’ next to me, singin’ “Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do”
Holdin’ my hand just as natural as can be, singin’ “Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do”
We walked on (walked on) to my door (my door)
We walked on to my door, then we kissed a little more
Whoa-oh, I knew we was falling in love
Yes I did, and so I told her all the things I’d been dreamin’ of
Now we’re together nearly every single day, singin’ “Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do”
A-we’re so happy and that’s how we’re gonna stay, singin’ “Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do”
Well I’m hers (I’m hers), she’s mine (she’s mine)
I’m hers, she’s mine, wedding bells are gonna chime
Whoa-oh, I knew we was falling in love
Yes I did, and so I told her all the things I’d been dreamin’ of
Now we’re together nearly every single day, singin’ “Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do”
A-we’re so happy and that’s how we’re gonna stay, singin’ “Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do”
Well I’m hers (I’m hers), she’s mine (she’s mine)
I’m hers, she’s mine, wedding bells are gonna chime
Whoa-oh-oh-oh, oh yeah
Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do, we’ll sing it
Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do, oh yeah, oh, oh yeah
Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do
