It looks like Internet Explorer 6 is experiencing issues displaying this website (thanks to Khay for pointing it out to me). For one reason or another the sidebar is appearing right down the bottom of the page, below the last post…but it’s only happening on the front page. At this stage I see no reason why this is happening as nothing in the sidebar has changed since it last rendered correctly in Internet Explorer.
The good news is that the problem does not occur in Internet Explorer 7 or Mozilla Firefox or Opera or anything else for that matter.
I’ll keep trying to fix it, but I’m no expert in HTML or PHP, so if I have no luck then it will just have to stay like that until the site changes to a new webhost in a couple weeks…the new webhost has a web design team so they will (hopefully) be able to fix it if I can’t.
Despite the fact that I avoid Internet Explorer where possible, the majority of the people visiting this site do use it, so I am treating this as a priority issue. I apologise for any inconvenience this may be causing.
Update 6:31am 16 March 2007: The problem was resolved overnight…not fixed but resolved…details this evening. End Update
I’m wondering if anybody can identify the music linked below. It is the music currently used at the end of WIN Television’s News, and in the promos for 2UE’s Mike and Fitz Breakfast Show.
Firstly, the radio review schedule was on track for one day. Mix 106.3 had their first review period recorded on Thursday, but due to unforseen circumstances I have not as yet had a chance to listen to it, or set up the recording for the next station on the list, which should have been recorded today. As such the schedule has been put back by one weekday. The Mix 106.3 review will be online tomorrow morning at 6am.
Update 12:20pm Saturday February 24: Or Sunday or Monday at 6am…best, plans, mice, men. End Update
In my article about the start of Canberra’s Radio Ratings Period I incorrectly stated that 2CC are reusing the ads they plastered on the backs of ACTION Buses last year. It has since come to my attention that the ads they are using this year do not contain the face and name of Stan Zemanek.
I apologise to 2CC for this error and any inconvenience it may have caused.
I do have to wonder why another person (John Stanley or Mike Frame for example) was not added in place of Stan Zemanek.
In light of my recent look at 666 ABC Canberra, I have decided to launch a review of all of the radio stations in Canberra that are in the ratings race, namely:
666 ABC Canberra (666 AM)
Radio National (846 AM)
2CA (1053 AM)
2CC (1206 AM)
JJJ (101.5 FM)
ABC Classic FM (102.3 FM)
NewsRadio (103.9 FM)
FM 104.7 Canberra (104.7 FM)
Mix 106.3 (106.3 FM)
Each station will be reviewed twice (my previous look at ABC Local Radio doesn’t count), each review will last for one hour and will focus solely on the station under review. Reviews will be conducted on weekdays at some stage between 6am and 6pm. One station will be reviewed per day. Reviews will start today Thursday February 22 and will run until Monday March 19. This does, unfortunately, place the last review out of the ratings period.
Review dates and times will be chosen by a random number generator. It will provide the order of the first round of reviews, followed by the second round of reviews. It will then choose an hour for each review in order. These dates and times will not be published due to the possibility (no matter how small) of stations putting on better than usual performances during their review period, after all Nielsen don’t publish the details of their sample groups do they?
Review periods will be recorded and subsequently reviewed that evening, with the results of the review to appear the following morning at 6am.
Each review will contain a textual run-down of the events of the hour and my impressions of them (where appropriate), the review will also contain a section for a review of the news bulletin(s) including length and quality, a review of the standard of talk programming (non-news bulletin) in the hour, a review of the standard of music played in the hour, and the amount of advertising content in the hour.
I will also provide a star rating out of five for the quality of:
News
Talk
Music
Overall
At the half-way point of the reviews I will produce a leader board for each of those categories.
At the end of the series I will produce another leader board, which will use the average scores.
Depending on how well this series goes, I may decide to run another series in the next ratings period, and possibly even run a series outside of ratings periods.
Naturally the review, as it is run by me, will be based on my opinion. What I don’t like, somebody else probably will…that being said, I, along with the rest of you, may still be surprised by the results. I’m looking forward to this, it should be quite a lot of fun.
Paul Makin tonight between 6pm and Midnight on 2UE. Paul proved to be very good at the “down memory lane” type of programming which Saturday Night Live thrives on, during his stint on New Day Australia. This probably means that Clive Robertson is back on New Day this week.
Over the last week or so I’ve added a few features to the website.
First up is a search box which you can find on the sidebar. By default it will search this website, but you can quite easily search the web with it as well. This is something I had on the old site but never bothered to bring across to this site. I finally got around to doing it (and had to mess with the HTML Google provided in order to do it). Incidentally, that text box in the yellow section at the top of the page is also a search of sorts…but it only searches articles and does a pretty poor job of it. The Google search in the sidebar searches the whole website.
Second, each article’s page now contains a “print” link. Not long after setting up this website I did a bit of work to make the printouts a bit nicer as they originally printed out the whole sidebar and a lot of other excess crud, as a result printouts from this website are pretty clean and straightforward. However, the thing that really annoys me about website printouts is that you have no way of knowing where the links point to, and if the URL is a long one it gets chopped off. The “print” link on each article solves this problem by creating a print friendly version of the article which makes a note of the full URL, and where all the links go. I think it makes the printouts a bit better, but it’s entirely up to you which one you use.
Thirdly, I’ve recently had some pretty poor experiences with both YouTube and Google Video, the former managing to lose a video immediately after telling me it had been uploaded successfully, and the latter taking the better part of two hours to “approve” my recent video about the hot air balloon and the AirServices Australia building. As such I have installed a flash video player on this website. My videos are no longer at the mercy of third parties, and hosting them here is much better for archival purposes (such as PANDORA). Here is my new, local version of my most recent rain video.
WordPress, the software which runs this site, has now been updated to version 2.1. I have been battling the upgrade for a couple days, and this evening I finally gave up when “Fantastico” the automated installer/upgrader starting spitting new errors at me.
Those who know me will know that I can be incredibly stubborn when it comes to solving computer problems…refusing to take a secondary approach until I have exhausted all possible explanations for the primary approach to fail.
If I had wanted to, I could have gone for the manual upgrade, and that was my secondary approach, however I didn’t want to have any more downtime than absolutely necessary…and if an automated system is supposed to be able to upgrade WordPress with little-to-no downtime, why should I accept minutes of downtime, not to mention the fact that a manual upgrade would force me to use manual upgrades forever?
Before going for the manual upgrade, I decided to check with BlueHost Support to see if there was any reason why it wouldn’t be working that they were aware of.
Kevin from BlueHost support was the person who helped me on the live chat, and after a bit of work at his end, WordPress was upgraded to 2.1
It would appear that disk space was the issue. BlueHost don’t automatically upgrade people’s webspace allowance when they change the package, mainly due to most people not even coming close to their allowance…however I had virtually hit the roof of the allowance prescribed by the previous version of my hosting package. Apparently getting it upgraded to the current 200GB webspace and 2TB/month bandwidth solved the problem.
So, thank you to kevin from Bluehost Support for his assistance.
Right now I’ve got a few minor formatting issues to fix which have come about as a result of the upgrade.
I’m quite pleased to be able to announce a new section on Samuel’s Blog, Letters To The Editor.
This is your chance to set the agenda on Samuel’s Blog, all you have to do is send an email to letters@samuelgordonstewart.com. Your letter can be about almost anything, and it can be from any part of the opinion spectrum, as long as there is some point to your letter. I don’t have to agree with your letter, but I am moderating, so the usual no defamation etc rules apply.
The letters could be your opinion on something in the news, something happening here on Samuel’s Blog, or something completely different…it doesn’t matter because as I said, it’s your chance to set the agenda.
A few little rules.
1. Only emails sent to letters@samuelgordonstewart.com will be considered for inclusion
2. You must provide either your real name, your username on this blog, or a verifiable screen name you use elsewhere (you may need to point me to an example). That being said, you can tell me which name (it can be completely different, within reason) you would prefer to be published. A location would also be nice, because then I can refer to you in a logical manner (eg. Sandra from Perth).
3. I reserve the right to decide whether or not to publish your email. I also reserve the right to remove any content that I think would offend a large section of the audience (hopefully that will only mean obscuring parts of obscenities).
4. Please try to keep your emails under 500 words. I may publish them if they are longer, but don’t count on it.
I’m looking forward to receiving some interesting letters.
I haven’t decided how often I will publish the letters, it will depend on how many I receive and how much else I have ready to appear. Ultimately though, I think it’s a case of “The more the merrier!”
Are you obsessed with banning things from your forum?
Just because the public aren’t giving the answers you like, it doesn’t mean you can ban the question!
He then went on with some derogatory nonsense about John B1_B5 (want the email and the IP address John?) which I won’t publish here.
For the 15 millionth time…it is my site and I can do what I like with it (within legal parameters).
This IS NOT a forum, a forum involves a group of people writing public messages and replying to them in some sort of threaded way, generally with various categories for discussions. A forum is a very free-form generally self-moderating thing.
This is a website where I write posts and choose the subjects, and people can discuss those…it has some forum-like attributes, but is not a forum.
As for the poll question…I didn’t delete the answer because people were providing an answer I didn’t like…it was because certain individuals saw fit to get around the one answer per person regulations and add about 50 votes to the silliest answer on the list…one which I was silly to add in the first place. If they had added the votes elsewhere I would have done a bit more work to find the duplicate votes, but in this case the repeated abuse of the poll wasn’t worth my time.
I have no interest in choosing which answer wins, which would defeat the purpose of the poll, I just have an interest in gauging the opinion of people reading this website, and to do that I do have to make decisions to protect the poll from abuse.
For the record I am going to mention the few legitimate votes for “13 and under” when I write the results post on Saturday night.
While I’m here, and while the subject of this post is “madness”, I might as well address the concerns of the people at Brown Noise Unit (apparently I’m supposed to link to them if I mention them…or some such nonsense). The most laughable suggestion is that I stole their idea of having a poll in the sidebar…obviously Brown Noise Unit invented that concept…maybe they even invented the English language…I better learn Italian then because I’m obviously breaking a law by using their language.
The stolen poll idea was a laughable suggestion from The Beige Baron, but the other claims of stolen ideas or ideas they gave to me are even more laughable…here’s Chuck A. Spear:
Yes Baron. It doesn’t surprise me though. We gave him a few other good ideas.
1. The name and concept for Editorial Echoes.
2. A podcast
3. 2nd series of Dlognwot
4. The iPhone post
4. Encouragement for more of what has been lacking at that blog: Stepometre, label changes, cafe reviews, Nattie, folding the washing etc…
I think BNU should pinch one of his. The random quote generator.
Samuel is “recovering from the effects of medication”. I wish him well.
I’ll address that point-by-point.
1. Name and concept of Editorial Echoes. Name, yes, I asked for suggestions when I came up with the concept, and acknowledged Chuck for the “winning entry” in episode one.
2. A podcast…well there’s only one other podcast here, and I came up with the idea for that a looooong time ago.
4. The iPhone post…it was news, and I think Ars Technica and Cnet beat us all to it…Actually I think Apple beat us by having all the details online as Steve Jobs was announcing them.
5 (oddly numbered 4). I get lots of suggestions…doesn’t mean you own the site…but I appreciate the ideas none-the-less.
Feel free to nab the idea of the random quote generator, which isn’t my idea anyway. If you were running WordPress over at BNU I would point you in the direction of the Witty Text plugin (site currently down) which powers the random quotes here…but I’m sure you can find something for your site.
If they want to whinge about me, then so be it, but it’s about time they realised that this is my site, and their whinging is not going to change the way I choose to run it.
The title of this post is definitely a bit of selective quoting on my behalf…this is in fact an update on the Italian blogger denouncement saga (see here, here and here). I have in fact received a reply to my email defending my actions.
giusto..bravo hai ragione..infatti ora è chiuso al pubblico
adios
In an attempt to get a vague understanding of the email, I put it through the Google language mashing machine (aka Google Translator) and got this:
just. .bravo you have reason. .infatti hour is closed the public adios
As far as I could tell it had something to do with the reason for closing hours…so I forwarded the email to Frankster, who provided a legible translation.
Correct..good you are right..in fact, it’s now closed to the public.
goodbye
They seem to have accepted my argument about fair use provisions of copyright laws, and I think this means that they didn’t actually properly understand my original post in the first place when the angrily emailed me…but the “it’s now closed to the public” bit is vague…do they mean their blog (which is indeed closed to the public now), or something else? Knowing that it was open to interpretation, Frankster explained the intricacies of the translation.
So we can pretty much from this judge that the matter’s now over. He’s
acknowledged you were right all along and has realised this – so no further
action. I think when he says “chiuso al pubblico” which means “closed to the
public” it’s a term meaning the matter is closed, let’s move on – it doesn’t
mean ‘publically closed and i will continue the matter outside of public
viewing”, it’s more in a manner of speaking sort of thing.
And there we have it, the end of a rather odd chapter in the history of Samuel’s Blog.
For those of you who are wondering, things have been a bit slow around here lately, with the majority of content being emails I’ve sent in to talkback radio. Regular features have been missing or late, and the “best of” episode of Samuel’s Persiflage is still not here…you could be forgiven for thinking that I’m losing interest, but thankfully that’s not the case.
For the majority of this year to date I have been either unwell, or recovering from the effects of medication…ultimately this has not been a great year so far, I am very annoyed with how I have managed to let just about everything lapse, and even more annoyed with the illness which has caused it.
It seems that each time I’ve started to feel well again, there has been some sort of complication…either I’ve caught something else, or I haven’t quite gotten over what I had. My doctor has been somewhat perplexed by the whole thing, but it looks like we’re making progress and I should be back to 100% shortly.
The upshot of this is that Samuel’s Persiflage #12, the best of 2005/2006 episode, should be out later this week. Due to it being as late as it is, it has become the de facto January episode. I am currently considering having two episodes in February.
One of the few good things about having the time to myself to think whilst unwell is that I have had plenty of time to evaluate ideas, and I have come up with a couple for this blog which I think will be good.
With many thanks to Frankster for the translation services, I can finally bring you a proper translation of the email which the Italian blogger sent me in response to this post about blog design.
Who the hell gave you permission to publish on your site my post? Who gave
you authorisation? Please, if you have to respond, use the italian language.
(http:// address being referred to here). Immediately you are to delete your
post before I denounce you, and next time, ask permission to republish my
postings if you have something to laugh about at my expense. Did you believe
that I would not discover it???
A denouncement? That sounds like fun…bring it on!
Whilst I’m sure my previous attempt at communicating with this blogger resulted in nothing but confusion, I have decided to try again.
Hello,
I am sorry about the delay in sending you a legible reply, but I do not speak Italian and as such require the assistance of a translation service to communicate with you.
I used a screenshot of the blog in question as an example of a widespread trend in poor blog design. Under fair use provisions of copyright laws, portions of copyright material may be used for critical analysis.
I am sorry if I upset you or anyone else, but I was merely pointing out an obvious deficiency in the design of the blog. I have no comment on the content of the blog as I do not understand it. I was not trying to “laugh at your expense”, but instead examine a trend in blog design which I find disturbing, apart from which, the image I used was a low quality reproduction, and as I have already stated, such use for critical analysis is permitted under Australian copyright law.
Your blog was one I stumbled on by accident and it reminded me that I was going to write something about blog designs, and as such I used it as an example. I was not making any comment on the content of your blog.
As for your comment about me believing that you would not discover my post, you are wrong. If I had not wanted you to find out, I would never have posted a link to your blog. As it happens, I believe that it is only fair for people to be able to find out if something is written about them or one of their publications.
Once again, there is nothing personal here, and I stand by my actions as I do not think I have done anything wrong.
Kind Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Frankster translated that for me, and as such, the following email has been sent to the blogger in question.
Ciao,
Mi dispiace che devuto aspettare un momento per la leggibile messaggio, ma
non parlo italiano, e devo usare un servizio traduzione letterale per
comunicare con te.
Io usato un screenshot da la tua sito come un esempio da la popolare stile
di sventurato sito progetto. Soto la “fair use” provizorio da le legge di
copyright, parte da la copyright materiale po essere usato per anilisi
critico.
Sono spiacente se io sconvolto te o qualcuno altro, ma io soltanto stava
precisando una mancanza evidente nel disegno del tuo sito. Non ho comento su
la contenuto perche non lo capisco. Especialmente non ero “ridendo a la tua
spesa”, ma preferibilmente esamino una tendenzia nel disegno del tu sito che
disturba me, altre l’immagine che ho usato era un qualita cattiva, e come
gia ho fatto caso, e secondo legge Australiana di copyright.
Tuo sito era uno che trovato per incidente, e sono ricordato che stavo
andare per scrivere qualcosa di blog disegne, e po troppo ho usato per
esempio. Assoltamente non stavo facendo osservazione sul contenuto del
vostro blog.
Per quanto riguarda il vostro commento che credo che non abbiate scoperto,
tu hai fato un grande errore. Se non avessi desiderati scoprire, non
avrebbero invitato mai un collegamento al vostro blog. Ma come e andata, io
credo che sia soltanto giusto che la gente possa da scoprire se qualcosa è
scritta di loro o una pubblicazioni di loro.
Allora, non ce niente personale qui, e io te lo dicco asoltamente che io
credo che ho la ragione, e penso che non ho fato qualche cosa sbagliato.
Riguardi gentili,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
With any luck this will be the last we hear of this incident.
It would appear that I have received an email about my recent post about a really bad blog design which seems to be all too common on so many blogs. As far as I can tell, the email might be from the person who runs the blog I used as an example, or from someone who knows the person who runs the example blog, or from a confused bystander.
Google Translator made the following semi-legible translation:
like devil six allowed to publish to you on your situated one of mine post. who has authorized to you? and please if you must answer he uses the Italian language https://samuelgordonstewart.com/2007/01/gah#commentform you see to remove those immediately post before that he denounces to you for benino and the next time you ask the permission or if you have something to ridire makes it on mine. what you believed that you did not discover it?
As far as I can tell, the person is upset that I took a screenshot of part of the blog in question and used it as an example of a common form of poor web design. This person obviously doesn’t understand the “fair use” concept of copyright legislation.
As for the rest of the email…well I might know what they are talking about, but the automated translator has made such a mess of it that I am not willing to run through the five or so possible question I think are being asked.
So, back to the title of this post, and does anybody speak Italian? If so, if you could be so kind as to help me with a proper translation of the email then I would be most grateful…if I then enter a dialogue with the emailer, I will more than likely be happy to pay for your translation services.
come diavolo ti sei permesso di pubblicare sul tuo sito dei miei post. chi
ti ha autorizzato? e per favore se devi rispondere usa la lingua italiana
vedi togliere immediatamente quel post prima che ti denunci per benino
e la prossima volta chiedi il permesso o se hai qualcosa da ridire fallo sul
mio. che credevi che non lo scoprissi???
Update 12:58am: I sent the following reply…hopefully it clarifies things a little bit.
Hello,
I am sorry but I do not speak Italian, so I will send this email in both English, and a computer translated Italian version.
I used a screenshot of the blog in question as an example of a widespread trend in poor blog design. Under fair use provisions of copyright laws, portions of copyright material may be used for critcal analysis.
I am sorry if I upset you or anyone else, but I was merely pointing out an obvious deficiancy in the design of the blog. I have no comment on the content of the blog as I do not understand it.
Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Ciao,
Sono spiacente ma non parlo italiano, in modo da trasmetterò questo email in entrambi gli inglesi e un calcolatore ha tradotto la versione italiana.
Ho usato uno screenshot del blog in questione come esempio di una tendenza diffusa nel povero disegno del blog. Sotto le disposizioni giuste di uso delle leggi di copyright, le parti del materiale del copyright possono essere usate per analisi critcal.
Sono spiacente se rovesciassi voi o chiunque altrimenti, ma soltanto stavo precisando un deficiancy evidente nel disegno del blog. Non ho commento sul contenuto del blog poichè non lo capisco.
Riguardi,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
End Update
Update 2:17am 19 January 2006: Looks like that blog has either disappeared from the Internet, or has been restricted to authorised viewers only. I get the feeling that the person responsible for that blog is currently upset about the nasty people on the Internet, and probably at my lack of Spanish language skills. End Update