Posts filed under 'Blog News'
John Laws will be interviewed on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope program on ABC TV tonight. The interview is pre-recorded and News Limited papers have been interested in an apparent admission by Laws that he suffers from manic depression…it’ll be interesting to see if that actually comes out in the interview. If so, I have a small story about that…I’ll wait to see the interview before making further comments.
Apart from watching that, I’ll have a new poll tonight, and I’ll catch up on the comments you have all been leaving here for the last few days.
Samuel
November 12th, 2007 at 05:15pm
I issued this warning to a reasonably regular contributor earlier today, and now I am issuing it to everyone. If you are going to refer to me by name, Samuel is the preferred choice although I can deal with Sam and am not usually bothered by it.
The one that irks me is “Sammy”. Referring to me as Sammy on these pages will most likely irritate me quite heavily and, depending on how much you manage to irritate me, could result in a banning. In all likelyhood you would have to do it multiple times to be banned, but it really depends on my mood.
I’m sorry if this upsets anyone, but I’m sure you all have things you don’t like people calling you, and in my case it is “Sammy”.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
Samuel
November 7th, 2007 at 08:14pm
You may have noticed that the Google Ads returned from a lengthy absence recently. They disappeared earlier this year when Google sent me a personal identification number through the post and I forgot to enter it, and then misplaced it. Google then cut off the ads, and I eventually remembered to ask them to re-send the PIN, which they did. I then entered it, and the ads returned.
Now that they are back, they are posing a minor administrative nuisance as some of them are promoting things which I believe to be fundamentally false. Once such ad I have spotted is for a website called “The Big Switch” which tried to encourage people to convince their local politician that climate change is caused by human activity. I sent the following email to the organisers of that website a short time ago:
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing to inform you that, effective immediately, I am blocking your Google advertisements for thebigswitch.org.au from being displayed on my website.
It is my strong view that climate change is a mostly natural phenomenon, and I will not allow you to run your scare campaign on my website.
I commend you for standing up for what you believe in, but I’m not going to accept any money for advertisements promoting something I believe to be fundamentally incorrect.
Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Canberra
https://samuelgordonstewart.com
I have now blocked ads for that website, but it could take a few hours for the block to come in to effect.
I’m not going to try and block ads for political parties as I believe they have a right to advertise wherever they like during an election campaign, but other ads that promote things I strongly disagree with will be banned if and when I spot them.
Samuel
October 20th, 2007 at 12:09pm
Or not. It looks like my sleep requirements have caught up with me again.
I’ll try again tomorrow morning.
Samuel
October 2nd, 2007 at 01:44pm
Due to work on the power supply system at the TransACT data centre in Canberra, this website may be offline for a period between midnight and 6am on Monday, September 24 (Canberra time, GMT+10). This outage includes email services. Emails sent to me during this period will be queued by a backup server and delivered to me during the day.
I apologise for the inconvenience and hope to be back with you as soon as possible.
Samuel
September 23rd, 2007 at 12:34am
Firstly, thank you to those of you who noticed my extended absence. It’s a long story and I won’t go in to it right now (and it’s not very interesting anyway). I do have a number of posts to catch up on, however I don’t know when I will get to them at this stage.
What I do know, however, is that I will be taking photos of tonight’s lunar eclipse, and I intend on putting those photos online for your enjoyment.
Samuel
August 28th, 2007 at 05:17pm
Yesterday I said I had some interesting plans for future articles on this blog, and indeed I do.
To start with, tomorrow I will be conducting the second radio review of the series…normally I wouldn’t give away the date of a radio review but I am doing so on this occasion. Seeing as the drive shift (3pm-6pm) has already been reviewed, there are three shifts to choose from. I’m not going to tell you which one will be reviewed, but I can tell you that the results of the review will be published at 9am on Monday.
Something which is probably more interesting is that I am starting a couple photography projects, one will be of the mountains and hills of Canberra, and the other will be of various bits of Canberra’s infrastructure. In this day and age the latter is going to be a tad difficult. I have an interest in the infrastructure behind the technology we take for granted mainly because I like to know how things work, however I will have to take into account the fact that such photos may seem a tad suspicious, and I will have to ensure that the photos meet certain guidelines which I will be imposing upon myself. Naturally these photos will go on the photo gallery and I will bring some of the highlights to your attention here on the blog.
I am also about to start an investigation in to a matter which I think is relatively important. I can’t say too much as the investigation will be done in a more-or-less undercover manner, however I can tell you that it will take place over the next few weeks, and I will report on it at the end of the investigation. Those of you who are good at reading between the lines may discover some clues here in the next week or so, and I will give you a head start by telling you that it has something to do with what people may be getting for free that they should be paying for.
I will also be making an important announcement about Samuel’s Persiflage shortly.
Apart from that I have a bunch of things I have been planning on writing about recently but never got around to. I will try to get on top of that backlog shortly.
Samuel
August 16th, 2007 at 08:11pm
For which I apologise. Last week I had the flu and as such didn’t manage to write an awful lot here…especially when I got worse just when I was getting better.
So far this week I’ve been sleeping a lot more than usual, probably due to still getting over the last bits of the flu.
I have some interesting plans for future articles, I’ll detail some of them shortly.
Samuel
August 15th, 2007 at 06:01pm
It looks like 2CC are gearing up for the next radio ratings again with their bus advertising starting to appear again. I have spotted one so far, but you can be sure there are more to come.
In some way I’m glad that I spotted the 2CC ad this morning, as the radio ratings period starts again on the 5th of August (and ends on the first of September), and I still have some radio reviews to get through from the last ratings period.
Obviously my radio review plan was a dismal failure as I underestimated the amount of time I would need to get through them. I’m not going to abandon the idea completely though, because I have a new plan which will take me far less time, and probably provide a better comparison between the stations. I still have to work out a few minor details first though, so I’ll give you more information about this at a later date.
In the meantime, the higher priority is finishing those radio reviews from the last ratings period!
Samuel
July 25th, 2007 at 10:30am
The title of this post is a quote from the previous post. I’ll explain what I was going on about this evening, as the explanation is a bit longer than I have time to elaborate on right now.
The good news is that the reason behind it has been alleviated, however for everyone except me, that means nothing as I haven’t explained anything yet.
Samuel
June 18th, 2007 at 10:10am
Thank you to the people who reported that the printable versions of the articles and pages on this website were returning “404 Not Found” errors instead of printable versions of articles following my WordPress upgrade on the weekend. I actually noticed it myself when I went to check something on the print layout on the weekend, but it was nice of some readers to report the error as well.
The weekend upgrade broke two things, the permalink structure for the print layout, and the WordPress plugin which produces the print layout.
For those of you who are wondering what I’m going on about, let me take you on a brief potted history of printing on this website. On the original website the layout printed quite nicely, it was a bit of a mess because the sidebar got printed with everything, but on the whole it was reasonable. After moving to WordPress and the Blix theme which this site uses, I noticed that the sidebar would print under the content, so I made a few CSS changes to prevent the sidebar from printing. Generally when people print a page of a website they are interested in the content, not the useless (on paper) links on the sidebar, so this tends to work quite well. The layout is very bland and basic, but it works.
The thing that does bug me about printing web pages though, is that all you get is a title, a date, the page as displayed on your screen, and generally a truncated URL making it impossible to find the page again three months later. On the screen a web page is fine, but on paper it tends to be lacking a bit of information, for example, generally a printed page will show links, but not tell you where they go, and because they tend to inherit the on-screen formatting they aren’t optimised for printing and tend to use more paper than they really need to.
The print layout view solves these issues by formatting the page neatly for your printer, providing the full URL in a font which doesn’t require a magnifying glass, and printing a list of links and the corresponding URLs at the bottom of the article.
The print link can be found between the end of each article and its comments (if there are any), and if you are going to print anything from this site, I would recommend using that function.
Samuel
June 13th, 2007 at 10:12am
And it’s now online. http://photos.samuelgordonstewart.com/
Samuel
June 12th, 2007 at 11:45am
Of all the things that appear on this website, the thing that I receive the most positive feedback about is the photos that I post (I also get berated for delays in posting them) and I have, on multiple occasions, had people suggest that I setup a page specifically for the photos. I agree that this would be a good idea, however there is no logical way to do this (to the best of my knowledge) in WordPress. I could easily setup a category called “photos” and add any post containing a photo to that category, but that would just produce a poorly organised set of pages of photos…it would work, but would be a rather daft way of doing it.
If I jump back to the year 2005 for a moment, prior to setting up Samuel’s Blog I had a photo gallery running on a webserver at home. This was fine at home where I had a direct connection to it, but was painfully slow for anybody trying to access it from the rest of the world as I only had a 256/64k ADSL link at the time.
The photo gallery remained in use when I setup Samuel’s Blog and was my primary image source before Google added image hosting to Blogger, this of course meant that images were slow to load, and didn’t load at all if my Internet connection died. The move to paid hosting in August 2005 made the photo gallery largely redundant as I was able to host the photos myself (along with other files which I was sticking on random servers I had space on until then). The photo gallery remained online and was linked to numerous times during the Spin Starts Here fiasco.
Recently I let the Dyndns domain name pointing at my home webserver expire, and since then the photo gallery has been sitting in limbo. Initially I planned on making a static version of it and placing it in a directory here (surprisingly easy in Gallery version 1 due to the availability of an “offline mode“), and then I started thinking about it, and much like every other project I come up with, managed to turn it in to something much more complex.
In case you haven’t already joined the dots here, I’m moving the live (not static) photo gallery to a subdomain of this website (announcement shortly). I have a few reasons for this.
Before I explain that, I’ll briefly explain the reason I’m moving the photo gallery to a subdomain rather than a subdirectory (such as https://samuelgordonstewart.com/gallery/) is due to security. Gallery requires certain domain-wide settings that WordPress doesn’t, and whilst those settings alone wouldn’t make WordPress less secure, they would provide any WordPress exploit with more scope than they would receive under the current settings. The downside of this is that the photo gallery is unlikely to be archived by Pandora.
The reasons I am re-implementing the photo gallery are quite simple. Firstly, photos take up a heap of screen space on this blog, and as I like to take photos, I have to leave a bit of time between major photo posts to avoid forcing everyone to download a heap of photos (and scroll past a heap of them when they don’t want to see them). Having the photo gallery will allow me to upload a heap of photos to the gallery, select a couple of them for display here and give you a link to the rest.
Secondly, the delays behind me posting photos (especially major photo posts) has more to do with the time it takes me to create thumbnails, rename the photos, upload them, write the posts including all the thumbnails, links to the full size versions, alternative text, then make sure I’ve got it all right before finally posting it, than anything else. This is a time consuming process, and to be perfectly honest, isn’t particularly interesting, especially when I have heaps of photos (for example, The main Underground Cabling Tour post took hours to complete). The photo gallery can take care of resizing, thumbnailing (and even rotating) photos for me.
Thirdly, and you might want to refer to the previous link for this, the photos tend to get posted with minimal text and a lot of photos…it’s pointless to post much text as people tend to focus on the photos and ignore slabs of text, meaning the lengthy photo post is not an ideal format on a blog.
Fourthly, due to all this, I tend to make plans for photographic tours, and then never get around to doing them due to the time I will have to spend afterwards processing and posting the photos.
Fifthly, the gallery would be a logical way of displaying photos for people who only want to see the photos.
The benefits for you will be more frequent photos, less photo deluges on this blog, and less delays in me getting photos online (I might finally get the photos online from my trip to Sydney earlier this year, and possibly even the photos from John Kerr’s lunch in Terrigal last year).
To streamline the migration of the existing photo gallery I have conducted some tests and trials to eliminate any issues running Gallery on this website (which is running on a significantly different (and more up-to-date) configuration to the one I am running at home), and I will migrate the actual gallery later today, after which I will give you the address, and see about a few related cosmetic changes I have planned for navigation of this website.
For those of you who are interested, initially the photo gallery will continue to run on Gallery version 1, and will most likely be upgraded to version 2 at a later stage when it outgrows version 1. At that stage I will decide whether to just make a static version of the existing gallery or go through the upgrade process. That decision will depend on a number of things, and I’ll make that position closer to the date when I’m in a better decision to weigh up the pros and cons of each choice.
Samuel
June 12th, 2007 at 06:30am
Once again it’s time for our monthly exploration of the vault, and this month we are going all the way back to the 22nd of March last year, and a story about the Commonwealth Games.
Congratulations to Australia’s Golden Lawn Bowlers
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:35pm
I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Lynsey Armitage and Karen Murphy, the two ladies who won gold in the women’s pairs lawn bowls event at the Commonwealth Games. The won gold is a thrilling and convincing show of power and excellence, overcoming Scotland 11-7, 14-3 in the final.
Lawn Bowls is a magnificent sport, and I am glad that it is receiving the profile it deserves by being a part of the Commonwealth Games.
Well done Lynsey and Karen!
It is worth noting that Australia got a medal in each of the Lawn Bowls events, with another gold going to the Mens Triples team.
Samuel
Comments
1. Chuck A. Spear | March 23rd, 2006 at 1:55 am
I agree. Lawn bowls is a fantastic and exciting sport. The asymmetrical balls combined with a precise action gets my adrenalin pumping. Terms such as; ‘jack’, ‘head’,’touchers’ and ‘dead’ are unique yet highly arousing to the ear and bodice.
The finely laid, precisely leveled and majestically manicured bowling green personifies the type of nether hair I wish my girlfriend to have.
2. wonko the sane | March 23rd, 2006 at 2:40 am
hey chuck, completely off topic and perhaps a bit of a cable-layer, but we’re making a new site and this is one of the stories we have on the site. I thought being a muso you might be interested.
http://www.brownnoiseunit.com/newsite/node/76
now, back to jacks, touchers and heads.
3. Aunty_Jack | March 23rd, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Not to mention that the women in lawn bowls are a great example for our youth. Bring back the “below the knee” hemline i say… and those large brimmes hats, so sun smart..hoorah for the ladies of lawn bowls!
4. Samuel | March 23rd, 2006 at 4:24 pm
Just don’t rip their “bloody arms off” Aunty_Jack!
5. cunninglinguist | March 24th, 2006 at 11:23 am
Aunty_Jack, right on! And the knee high stockings, over the shoulder boulder holders and stepins/big white Cottontails.
Lawn bowls ROCKS.
6. heatseeker | March 24th, 2006 at 12:52 pm
I have to admit, I found myself strangely aroused by the victorious bowls girls
June 1st, 2007 at 08:44am
Here is what Clive Robertson had to say about this website:
“You have a strange website…you should see a physician about it.”
He later added “the fact that you can’t see what is strange about it is a worry”.
Thanks Clive!
Samuel
May 29th, 2007 at 05:44am
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