Samuel's Blog

Sleeping with the radio

Hi Stuart,

Just thought you might like to know that you kept me awake until about 3am. Usually I can fall asleep with the radio on, and struggle to get to sleep without it, but this morning I just couldn’t get to sleep with your show on. I eventually fell asleep when my radio turned off just before 3am and I was too tired to turn it back on…it turned off in the middle of a very interesting conversation too…but that summarises the whole show…it’s no wonder that I’m tired today!

Cheers,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Canberra

October 24th, 2006 at 10:30am

John B1_B5 Disappointed That I Wasn’t In Erindale On Saturday…In My Dreams

This is the second dream that I had on Saturday night…it did not actually happen, and I want to make that perfectly clear before anybody thinks it did.

This dream was very short, it consisted of me receiving an email from John B1_B5 where he informs me that he is very disappointed that I wasn’t in attendance at the Erindale Shopping Centre on Saturday when 2CC’s Mike Frame, Vicky Berry and others ran an outside broadcast as part of the grand opening celebrations of a new newsagency (I don’t remember the name). I then replied, and we were both talking to each other again.

I think the dream was a combination of events from Saturday…firstly a phone call from an informant who was at the outside broadcast and was surprised that I wasn’t…and secondly a brief discussion I had with Clayton Northcutt after recording an interview with him for Samuel’s Persiflage on Saturday night.

Samuel

4 comments October 23rd, 2006 at 02:20pm

Arboretum Officially On Hold

2CC News is reporting that the Stanhope Budget Hydrohazard Memorial Tree Garden (the arboretum we can’t afford and don’t have enough water to support) has officially been put on hold. Chief Turnip Stanhope is still babbling about how the tree garden will be the best tourist attraction Canberra has ever seen and he hopes future governments will plant the garden.

The Arboretum was allocated $6 million dollars over two years in the Stanhope government’s horror budget back in June, and I shudder to think how much money has been spent on “planning” for the arboretum since then. Stanhope says the plan for the arboretum will be sent back to the winning designers, and they will re-work it…why they need to do that when the tree garden is being scrapped is beyond me…but I bet the designers will get a decent chunk of money once the plan is sent back to them.

Perhaps they will plan a turnip garden instead…no, scrap that, the Legislative Assembly already has far too many turnips, it doesn’t need more.

Samuel

2 comments October 23rd, 2006 at 12:11pm

Hooray For Flicks And Things!

With Dale and Simon we love Flicks and Things
They’ll entertain you all with John Kerr hosting
Great films they’re toasting
Cos they know better than you (sure do)
By fax or letter or even better
Call them now thirteen-thirteen-thirty-two

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the lyrics above, that is the theme song for Flicks and Things, the movie show with Dale Synden (spelling?), Simon Foster and whoever happens to be hosting New Day Australia on 2UE at 12:30am on a Sunday, usually it’s John Kerr, but recently we have had Clinton Maynard and Clive Robertson hosting while John has been away.

Why do I bring this up? Is this a strange ad? Am I in a strange mood where I start asking you rhetorical questions that you may or may not already be asking yourself? Why, no & yes?

Well yesterday morning when Simon, Dale and Clinton ran Flicks and Things, they had their usual trivia question…or to be more precise they had a trivia question, which is something they have each week…the question was not the same as any others they have asked, and therefore I suppose is not a “usual” trivia question…but I digress…the question they posed was:
Which actor was quoted as saying “The only reason I’m in Hollywood is that I don’t have the moral courage to refuse the money”?

When I heard that question I thought that I knew it, in fact I was 90% sure of my answer, and decided that I would do some research to see if my answer was in fact correct…if so then I would ring in and answer the quiz and hope that nobody else had already rung in with my answer, if not I would not ring, as I would have an unfair advantage. My research indicated that I did have the correct answer, so a few minutes after Simon, Dale and Clinton posed the question, I rang in with my answer.

A few minutes later they took a call from somebody who rung in before me with an answer…their answer, which I don’t recall, was incorrect. I was next in line, my name and location was called out “Samuel from Canberra” and after a few moments of banter I presented my answer “Marlon Brando”…and after a few moments of making it sound like I was incorrect, it was announced that my answer was correct, and I had won two John wayne movies, of which I don’t recall the titles.

I was then put on hold and the producer wrote down my name and address, which should be in the hands of 2UE’s promotions department by now, and my DVDs should arrive soon.

Samuel

1 comment October 23rd, 2006 at 10:34am

Nattie’s Walks

One day I will have to explain how the system I devised for taking Nattie on different walks actually works, and when I do it will be filled with diagrams and explanations, but for now I will just advise you that it has changed slightly.

The majority of walks are based around one or two alternating blocks (with 27 16 blocks potentially making up those blocks), with some other walks being based on streets. The street based walks have, up until recently, been a second stage of the cycle which takes place after the block based walks have been exhausted, the street based walks were devised to provide a break between the end of the block based walks, and the restart of the block based walks. These street based walks were extended in the latest cycle to include all the streets involved in the block based walks, as such the street based walks are now a stage unto themselves rather than a mere “buffer zone” between cycles.

In the current cycle, which started a few weeks ago, Nattie and I decided to split the block based walks into two sections. The previous system involved a walk around the central block, followed by walks around each of the surrounding blocks, followed by a “super block” walk around the perimeter of the aforementioned surrounding blocks, then the same set of walks, but on the opposite side of the road, which are known as extended walks.

The standard and extended walks have now been split into seperate sections, so that we progress around the area of the walkies cycle a bit more rapidly, and see all sections of the area a bit more frequently. We still have the same number of walks, we just don’t get stuck in one area for quite as long at the expense of other areas any more.

The more I write about this, the more I realise that I am going to have to create an explanatory post with diagrams.

Samuel

2 comments October 23rd, 2006 at 08:29am

Back Seat Driver

I sometimes wonder why dreams put us in such strange situations and yet we accept them as being perfectly normal within the dream, in some ways it is as if we are actors, but are closer to being the character than the actor, as we have no idea that we are acting, and are completely immersed in the scene.

Saturday night brought me two interesting dreams, this is the first one, I will post the other one later today (at least I think this is the first one, I can never quite be sure what order they occur in).

In this dream I was in a car travelling south on the Tuggeranong Parkway, I was one of three people in the car, and oddly enough I was driving from the rear left seat, with my passengers in the front seats. I made a left turn onto an off-ramp, which would take me to Macarthur Avenue (it doesn’t matter that, in reality, those roads are not even remotely near each other), there was a bit of a queue on the offramp, and just when I stopped behind the rest of the queue, a police car pulled up behind me with lights flashing and siren wailing…for one reason or another I panicked, overtook every car on the offramp down the left side of the road, and fled down Macarthur Avenue, which strangely became Limestone Avenue. The police car did not follow.

I can only assume that the police car in the dream was not filled with police trying to apprehend me…although I am a tad perplexed as to why I fled, and why I was driving from the rear left seat.

Samuel

October 23rd, 2006 at 06:06am

Samuel’s Musician Of The Week

This week the award goes to Bob Marley, and the feature song is “I Shot The Sheriff”…I never gave much thought to how the lyrics would look on paper until now, and I must say there is a lot in this song that I never noticed previously.

(I shot the sheriff
But I didn’t shoot no deputy, oh no! oh!
I shot the sheriff
But I didn’t shoot no deputy, ooh, ooh, oo-ooh.)
Yeah! all around in my home town,
They’re tryin’ to track me down;
They say they want to bring me in guilty
For the killing of a deputy,
For the life of a deputy.
But I say:

Oh, now, now. oh!
(I shot the sheriff.) – the sheriff.
(but I swear it was in self defence.)
Oh, no! (ooh, ooh, oo-oh) yeah!
I say: I shot the sheriff – oh, lord! –
(and they say it is a capital offence.)
Yeah! (ooh, ooh, oo-oh) yeah!

Sheriff John Brown always hated me,
For what, I don’t know:
Every time I plant a seed,
He said kill it before it grow –
He said kill them before they grow.
And so:

Read it in the news:
(I shot the sheriff.) oh, lord!
(but I swear it was in self defence.)
Where was the deputy? (oo-oo-oh)
I say: I shot the sheriff,
But I swear it was in self defence. yeah! (oo-oh)

Freedom came my way one day
And I started out of town, yeah!
All of a sudden I saw sheriff John Brown
Aiming to shoot me down,
So I shot – I shot – I shot him down and I say:
If I am guilty I will pay.

(I shot the sheriff,)
But I say (but I didn’t shoot no deputy),
I didn’t shoot no deputy (oh, no-oh), oh no!
(I shot the sheriff.) i did!
But I didn’t shoot no deputy. oh! (oo-oo-ooh)

Reflexes had the better of me
And what is to be must be:
Every day the bucket a-go a well,
One day the bottom a-go drop out,
One day the bottom a-go drop out.
I say:

I – I – I – I shot the sheriff.
Lord, I didn’t shot the deputy. yeah!
I – I (shot the sheriff) –
But I didn’t shoot no deputy, yeah! no, yeah!

Samuel

October 22nd, 2006 at 07:26pm

Rory Snow wrote:

4 comments October 18th, 2006 at 12:30pm

Rain Rain Rain

Good Morning Lawsie,

I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that we had a bit of a downpour not long ago here in Canberra…only problem…the torrent of water travelling through the storm water system will run away…surely we could process at least some of the storm water for human consumption…a catchment area the size of Canberra makes a bit of sense to me.

Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Canberra

2 comments October 18th, 2006 at 10:00am

Dealing with the ACT Government online.

Here is a copy of an email I sent to Canberra Connect via their feedback form, after ten minutes of trying to find the operating hours of their shopfronts.

Email address: samuel@samuelgordonstewart.com
Topic: Our Service To You –> Website Matters – Insert The Webpage
Comment Category: Suggestion
Details:Dear sir/madam,

I am writing to you after spending ten minutes wandering around your website in an attempt to find the trading hours of your shopfronts. I do not wish to complain, as I eventually found what I was looking for via a link to the shopfronts from a service I was not interested in, and I then subsequently found a link on your homepage.

It is the link on the homepage which I wish to make a suggestion about. Currently, the link to the shopfronts is in the footer of each page, along with the Canberra Connect phone number, this is in many ways a good thing, but it isn’t particularly obvious. In my opinion, it would be wise, on the homepage, to have a large direct link to the shopfront page, with a title along the lines of “Shopfront trading hours”. I also think that it would be a good idea to have the Canberra Connect phone number near the top of the homepage.

Thank you for taking the time to read my suggestion, I hope and trust that it will not fall on deaf ears.

Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart

After submitting that I was presented with a page which informed me that I have to register to send them an email…it’s infuriating to have to register to send a suggestion, but I suppose it helps to cut down on the form spamming, and I registered anyway. Then, in a further bid to prevent people from sending the government things they might have to read, it tried to fob me off with some articles it thought might solve my problem…the pages were:

• “What is this service?” — A page telling me all about how wonderful the department of Territory and Municipal Services are for setting up this wonderful helpful website.
• “Directories and Maps” — A page with links to a lot of other websites filled with directories and maps…even less relevant than the last link.
• “Paying Bills On-Line” — It’s fairly obvious what that page is for…I can see the relevance, but I have a reason for visiting Canberra Connect in person…I would avoid the queues if I could, but I want to talk to a human about my particular issue.
• “Justice of the Peace” — A page which links to a directory of JPs, and a page about becoming a JP…I’m getting the feeling that it is just showing me random gibberish now.
• “Magpies” — Filled with information about Magpies…it looks like an ACT Government attempt to stop people thinking that magpies are evil…and it has absolutely nothing to do with my comments about the Canberra Connect shopfront operating hours.

After that bizarre and eclectic collection of random nonsense, I clicked on the “Finish Submitting Question” button, which submitted my feedback to Canberra Connect, and gave me reference number “061017-002161”. It also told me that I should receive a reply within five working days. A few seconds later it emailed a copy of my query to me.

I must say that, so far, I’m not overly impressed with the time it takes to submit feedback, or the horrid collection of irrelevant articles it showed me…but I can see a benefit in registering…I am able to modify or retract my suggestion if need be, which may be helpful in some circumstances.

I did learn something though, the shopfront page says that they have a shopfront in Dickson at the Motor Registry…it’s no help to me, because I wanted to know about the shopfront in Belconnen, but it is interesting anyway.

Samuel

1 comment October 17th, 2006 at 10:30pm

Opinions? What Opinions?

“Bob” from “Not Where You Tink” (hmmm, think perhaps…well not Bob) sent me one of those long rambling emails yesterday that people seem to enjoy sending me. I would love to quote bits of it, it’s just that I would have to give you ten minutes worth of reading material for any of his points to be made.

So, allow me to summarise. Bob is disappointed, you see, according to him all blogs are supposed to contains nothing but opinions, they are supposed to be online editorials about politics, and we all have to either extreme left wing people or extreme right wing people. Bob is very disappointed that I don’t share my opinion on “newsworthy” (I counted that word at least 50 times in his email) issues more often, or to be more precise, every moment that I’m awake. I’m supposed to be very disappointed with myself, see the error of my ways, and instantly correct my errors.

I’m not going to address the majority of Bob’s email, as it is pure nonsense…I will address the issue of why I don’t have my opinion on newsworthy issues clogging up every single post…I don’t have time! If I raise newsworthy issues and offer my opinion, I need to have time to back up my opinion when somebody disputes it…unfortunately I don’t really have enough time to sit at a computer and have debates with people all day.

I hope you all understand and aren’t as disappointed as poor Bob seems to be…I wonder if Bob has a blog?

Samuel

4 comments October 17th, 2006 at 08:09am

Corporate Podcast and Website Management Service

Over the past few days I’ve been giving some thought to what I could do if the #### #### I require for a job I’ve been offered doesn’t come through. My main thought here has been a Corporate Podcasting Service where I produce (and optionally present) podcasts for organisations, and also offer website management services.

At the moment it sounds like a good idea, I can think of a few organisations that would benefit from newsletter style podcasts which contain general notices for customers/clients, as well as short interviews with various people responsible for aspects of the organisation’s work. I can also think of a few places which could benefit from website management services.

I haven’t come across the downside of the idea yet…I’m sure it’ll come to me in the next day or two.

Any thoughts?

Samuel

7 comments October 16th, 2006 at 02:55pm

Five emails…because we know you’ll ignore the first four!

It must have been International Loopy Spammer day yesterday. For some reason I received the same bit of spam five times…the exact same email to the exact same email address five times.

The spam in question was titled “[TKO] : your (eBay) account could be suspended” and was, not surprisingly, a bogus email about an eBay account being suspended. Unfortunately these spammers aren’t very bright, they have copied various aspects of eBay messages, but not very well.

For example, there is no “from” or “reply-to” address, and as such these emails, which slipped past the spam filter somehow, landed in my inbox, and not in my eBay folder…there are further dead giveaways in the email itself.

eBay sent this message to member of ebay
Your registered name is included to show this message originated from eBay.

Hmmm, surely my eBay username should be in the first sentence then.

The links are very amusing, most eBay scam emails have links to real pages on eBay…these scammers managed to link to Yahoo Mail’s login page instead, and include faulty javascript redirects to the actual eBay pages, they even managed to have the fualty javascript redirect on an ebay.com link point to ebay.com.au

The link to “update your user account details” (which basically means “give us all your personal info so we can commit identity theft”) comes from a “respond now” button, which in a real eBay email would take you to eBay’s message centre, but in this case is the only working link, and takes you to http://madahbahana.org/signin.ebay.com

madahbahana.org is registered to something called the “Indomarching Group” in Jakarta, which for a while was using the website to “sell” fake university degrees, unfortunately in the last 24 hours or so the website has been destroyed and now only returns “403 forbidden” messages…which is a pity because I would have liked to see how bad their attempt at emulating a real eBay page was.

For the record, I received the emails yesterday at 6:06am, 6:09am, 5:41pm, 5:43pm and 6:11pm.

The headers from one email show that a php script at zvvurk.nl on behalf of 125.160.82.205 sent the emails, and the people responsible used Microsoft Word to write the emails…they really are dumb.

Update: Since writing this post I have received another one of these emails, it came in at 9:14am. End Update

Samuel

October 16th, 2006 at 12:51pm

Desperate Directories

I received an odd email on the Samuel’s Persiflage email address yesterday…have a read…

From: administrator@pod-planet.com <administrator@pod-planet.com>
To: podcast@samuelgordonstewart.com
Date: Oct 15, 2006 7:51 AM
Subject: Your Podcast Was Added to Pod-Planet.com

Hello From Pod-Planet.com!
Your Podcast Was Added to Our Directory.

Dear Podcaster,

Congratulations! A fan of your Podcast added your RSS feed for Samuel’s Persiflage to the Pod-Planet.com Podcast Directory! Pod-Planet.com is quickly becoming the hottest Podcast directory on the Web. Use our site to post or subscribe, rate or sell (coming FY07) Podcasts.

Although your Podcast has been added to our Directory, you may want to go in and categorize your Podcast in our taxonomy so that Users can quickly and easily find your Podcast by category.

In order to categorize your Podcast, you simply need to create a free account on our site. Once your account is created, simply click ‘My Administration’ in the toolbar to view and categorize your Podcast.

So far so good, it all sounds very nice, a random podcast directory has taken the time (even if a robot took the time) to let me know that I’m in their directory…the emails takes an interesting turn though…

All we ask in return for being listed in our directory is for you to add the Pod-Planet.com badge to your Website. The badges for Pod-Planet.com can be found on our badges page, and is depicted here:

It is important to note, that for security purposes, your email address in your Podcast feed must match the email account you specify during the registration process or you will not be able to categorize your Podcast.

Once again, congratulations on being submitted to Pod-Planet.com.

Pod-Planet.com (A Subsidiary of BerkeleySoft, Inc.)
http://www.pod-planet.com

Uh huh…a listener, or probably more likely a BerkeleySoft employee or robot has added me to a random podcast directory, and because of that I have to add an advertisement to my website.

A whois search shows that pod-planet.com has existed since March, but other research shows that these emails have only started in the last couple days…has BerkeleySoft wasted a heap of money on yet another pointless podcast directory and decided that they should embark on a semi-spam advertising campaign and trick a bunch of egotistical podcasters into advertising pod-planet in a bid to save their ailing investment?

I don’t know why I remember the name BerkeleySoft, but if memory serves me correctly, in a previous incarnation they were responsible for “The Learning Company” brand, which sold old software titles for $5 (I’ve got a copy of Microsoft Golf 98 from them around here somewhere, purchased sometime around 2002) and included various bits of invasive and buggy software with it. I might have them mixed up with someone else, but the name rings a bell, and for bad reasons…just can’t quite put my finger on it.

I’m not going to sign up on their website, and I don’t care if they de-list Samuel’s Persiflage, but the next episode of Samuel’s Persiflage looks like it will have a theme of “Tricks, Scams and Cons”, and I might just record a phone call with them where I probe them about their spammish practices…I’ve got a couple Australian ISPs I would like to probe the same way about other topics too.

Samuel

October 16th, 2006 at 09:10am

Apology

Poor attempt at humour…that’s how I would describe my Friday the 13th hoax. The whole flying pictures thing, the intermittent server errors and change of homepage, the cryptic rehash of a post from October 13 last year by translating it to German and back with the Google Translator…nowhere near as funny as I had hoped.

If only I’d waited until April 1…people fell for the hoax “hook, line and sinker”, I’ve had half a dozen people email me thinking the website has been hacked, I even had one person say that my website must be a virus because it makes things fly about.

One thing did go very wrong though…the final cron job which would have removed the flying pictures around 5:30pm did not run for some reason, and as such they weren’t removed until I spotted them this morning. The flying pictures were acheived with some javascript which, due to the things WordPress does to various punctuation, just doesn’t appear properly without me spending half an hour working out the HTML codes for said bits of punctuation, and another half an hour tracking down the error I made. As such, I have put the code in a text file (which should prevent any browser from trying to run and hide the javascript). Click here for the text file which contains the code to make pictures on any webpage fly, and code to embed on any webpage where you would like the pictures to fly.

Credit goes to Ryback from Hobart for the code.

So, yes, thank you to all who were concerned that the website had been hacked, and I apoligise for my bizarre attempt at humour which, ultimately, was not funny, and confused and concerned many people.

Samuel

2 comments October 15th, 2006 at 01:05am