My planned moonrise photo has been delayed at least until the next full moon, depending on the time of day when the moon rises. Moonrises, in comparison to sunrises, are quite hard to capture, especially considering that the time of moonrise varies significantly on a daily basis, and moonrise is best captured with a dark sky. Ultimately this means an evening photo, any earlier and the sky is too light, and later and the nearest spot with a good view is a safety hazard.
Alright, looks like WordPress reverted to the standard theme after about a half hour outage…and as such I see little point in fixing this mess until I get home.
However, first person to solve the flying picture problem wins an Audio CD copy of three Samuel’s Persiflage episodes of their choice, leave a comment below if you have a solution.
You have until 5PM Canberra time (see the flying current weather picture, it has the time on it) aka 7am GMT.
This must be my punishment for saying that I don’t usually believe in superstitions such as Friday the 13th!
The moon photo has been delayed due to an overcast night…hopefully we the sky will be clear tonight or tomorrow night. The only problem is, the longer it gets delayed, the later at night the moonrise will be.
I see that Johnboy of RiotACT fame has decided that this blog is part of Canberra’s “weird” contribution to the blogosphere…to be quite honest, I’m flattered, and I would be tempted to replace “It’s just not normal” if I wasn’t one of five Canberra bloggers apparently “pumping all the weird into the blogosphere”.
I’ve always been a little bit odd, and it seems that those who didn’t like the fact that I’m not quite the same as everyone else, have backed off a bit, and seen the good side to my quirks and differences. “Weird” is, in reality, a bit of a fun complement…the opposite of which being “normal”, something which nobody to date has been able to define with any degree of authority.
However, and I really didn’t want to push this war of words along, John B1_B5 is not impressed with being declared one of Canberra’s weirdest, and has hit back at Johnboy and The RiotACT…according to John B1_B5, The RiotACT is “The most boring site on the Internet”, Johnboy has “no idea how utterly BORING his postings are” and his postings are often “highly inaccurate and poorly researched”.
Quite clearly, John B1_B5 is not impressed, and is really flying off the handle in disgust at the moment. It is rather interesting though that, after calling Johnboy’s article “highly inaccurate and poorly researched”, John B1_B5 went on to say:
never let the facts get in the way of a “good story” by this Commonwealth Public
Servant, who seems to devote a large amount of time posting stuff on his
private website during Public Service working hours .
OK, now who’s highly inaccurate and poorly researched? Johnboy used to work at Parliament House in the press gallery for a private company…he is now doing similar work from home on The Concatenate…at least since I’ve been reading RiotACT (April 2005) Johnboy has not been working for the public service…maybe before that, but I wouldn’t know about that.
Both Johns are quite entitled to their opinions, and it is of little concern to me what they think of each other, but if sanity is to prevail here, I would expect Johnboy to ignore John B1_B5’s bizarre retort.
Moving back to Samuel’s Blog for a moment, just for prosperity, here is what Johnboy wrote:
Samuel Gordon Stewart who’s blog would be less remarkable if he was 50 years older, and is currently (as near as I can make out) blogging statements he was hoping to make on talk-back radio.
Well, close, copies of emails I sent to Tim Webster…I missed bits of the show so I don’t know if he read either email out or not…it’s also interesting to note that on RiotACT, my name has been unhyphenated by Johnboy for over a week…oh well, all a bit of fun I suppose!
Well that was an odd day if ever I’ve had one. I had the day off from work to take care of some personal comittments which I needed to deal with (truth be told, I wasn’t expecting my contract to be renewed in the temp role I’m currently employed in, and today would have been my first day after the contract, so I had some things planned to take up a couple days until I was in another temp role). I didn’t get to the computer until a bit before 10:30, which is when I noticed that all hell had broken loose in the comments, this was followed by the loss of an online friend (John B1_B5), emails from about five people claiming that I was a hypocrite for not dealing with the comments earlier, and a lot of heavy contemplating of things.
It’s actually quite funny that, during a cup of tea, I was thinking about how it must be about a year since I met John B1_B5 in person at Mike Frame’s Erindale appearance with the 2CC Kingswood, I thought about it for a while, but was constantly distracted by thinking about what had happened between contributors on this blog.
I ended up having a bit of an outing which took my mind off things for a while, and then had lunch, and by this time I had composed my thoughts a bit and thought I should clear things up by republishing the deleted comments.
Things started to look up a bit after this, to start with the comments on other sites about the incident seemed to die down a bit, and people started to talk again here. Then I thought again about how it must be nearly a year since Framey’s Kingswood show at Erindale…and so I checked the archives to see what happened on this day, and straight after that I was on the phone to Framey to inform him that is indeed a year to the day. It’s a funny coincidence that John B1_B5 leaves on the “anniversary” of the time we met in person, and it’s even funnier that John was the first caller to 2CC’s drive show today, while I was the last.
A little bit later I took Nattie for her evening walk, we were just walking past the Reid Tennis Courts when a small black poodle came over to us. The poodle did not appear to have an owner (or an aide as I call them…you really don’t own a dog) nearby, but it did have a collar with a nametag, after a few moments of Nattie and the poodle meeting each other, I was able to gain the trust of the poodle and get hold of the collar…the poodle was not interested in staying still though, so I picked it up and went to the nearest bench, tied Nattie up momentarily (Nattie was very excited, and a bit jealous that this dog was getting carried and she wasn’t) and checked the name tag for an address.
I couldn’t find an address, but there was a phone number, and from memory the dog’s name was Tammy. I decided that it would be best to abandon the walk, take both Nattie and Tammy home, and ring the number on the tag to arrange the safe return of Tammy to her home, however it was around this time that I noticed a car had come from the same general direction as Tammy, and had been sitting at an intersection for a while for no apparent reason…I decided to take a chance and see if the person in the car lives with Tammy. As Nattie, Tammy and I walked over towards the car, the driver’s side door opened, and after a few moments and a brief discussion, I was able to establish that the man in the car (Tony), was Tammy’s “owner”, so I handed Tammy over, and they went home. After this, Nattie and I continued our walkies.
Tammy, for the record, is a lovely little friendly six month old black poodle.
It was not long after this that I started thinking about the words of dubious astrologer but great philosopher, Jonathan Cainer, in his forecast for my star sign today:
Let those amongst you who have no salacious skeletons in your own closets write the first gossip column.’ Or something like that. We all love to judge. We none of us like to be judged. Yet how often do we put ourselves in other people’s shoes or acknowledge our own failings before we criticise others? You are in the process of doing something very laudable now. Who knows how long you can manage to continue being this wise? But while the mood lasts, you may yet work some real wonders.
I do tend to be a bit sceptical about fortune tellers and people of that ilk, but I do have to admit to believing in some elements of fortune telling…it’s probably not fair of me to call Jonathan a dubious astrologer…he obviously believes strongly in what he does, and I have to admit that, in hindsight, a lot of what he says he eerily relevant to my activites of the day in question. If anything, it is a lot of other astrologers who should be called dubious, with their consistent daily babbling about how “you might have a holiday soon”…at the very least, Jonathan deserves credit for creativity…and as I said, he does have a habit of being eerily relevant.
But I digress…his comments were quite thought provoking, and I dare say he may be right.
Anyway, at the end of this day (whoops, it’s already over…it’s a new day already), I think the song “End Of The Line” by The Traveling Wilburys is appropriate:
Well it’s all right, ridin’ around in the breeze
Well it’s all right, if you live the life you please
Well it’s all right, doin’ the best you can
Well it’s all right, as long as you lend a hand
You can sit around and wait for the phone to ring
(At the end of the line)
Waiting for someone to tell you everything
(At the end of the line)
Sit around and wonder what tomorrow will bring
(At the end of the line)
Maybe a diamond ring
Well it’s all right, even if they say you’re wrong
Well it’s all right, sometimes you gotta be strong
Well it’s all right, as long as you got somewhere to lay
Well it’s all right, everyday is judgement day
Maybe somewhere down the road aways
(At the end of the line)
Youll think of me, and wonder where I am these days
(At the end of the line)
Maybe somewhere down the road when somebody plays
(At the end of the line)
Purple haze
Well it’s all right, even when push comes to shove
Well it’s all right, if you got someone to love
Well it’s all right, everything’ll work out fine
Well it’s all right, we’re goin’ to the end of the line
Don’t have to be ashamed of the car I drive
(At the end of the line)
I’m just glad to be here, happy to be alive
(At the end of the line)
It don’t matter if you’re by my side
(At the end of the line)
I’m satisfied
Well it’s all right, even if you’re old and grey
Well it’s all right, you still got something to say
Well it’s all right, remember to live and let live
Well it’s all right, the best you can do is forgive
Well it’s all right, ridin’ around in the breeze
Well it’s all right, if you live the life you please
Well it’s all right, even if the sun don’t shine
Well it’s all right, we’re going to the end of the line
I’m sorry to have to announce that John B1_B5 has announced to me by email that he will not be returning, I’m hoping that this is only temporary, but if not, well let me just say that I am deeply saddened by this.
John was the first person to leave a comment and stick around…until today I had never seen him utter profanities with his keyboard, and for the most part he has been one of the nicest people on the Internet.
I suppose this could have been avoided…if the whole bun fight with The Spin Starts Here hadn’t happened (I’ve already had a debate in the last 24 hours about who started it…I’m not having that debate again), then John B1_B5 wouldn’t have been the subject of their jokes, I wouldn’t have had an influx of visitors from that site, and the last twelve months of a lot of peoples’ lives would have been very different.
This is the kind of thing that really tests my faith in online communities…the online world is already filled with egomaniacs (myself included to some extent), but things get out of hand here in a much worse way than they do in most real-life situations. I had a bunch of things planned for today on this blog…they can all wait for tomorrow now…I was going to close the blog for the next six hours or so to give everybody a chance to calm…but it’s pointless to do that if it obscures this message.
Update 4/October @ 3:22pm: For one reason or another a whole lot of people seem to be interested in what happened in the leadup to today’s odd activity. So, I will now reprint the deleted comments, and (to provide context) the non-deleted comments which surrounded them. Let’s start with the Copyright, licence, etc post.
Warning: The following content contain language which may offend, it violates my general family-friendly policy, and you are advised to scroll to the next article if you are likely to be offended.
Loki @ 12:41am October 4 (not deleted):
John, I must say that comment is “off topic”.
And who would adjudicate this “poster Arpartheid”?
Let me guess … you?
I can’t see what your inane, off topic, idea has to do with copyright, or anything else Samuel mentioned.
*Disclaimer: I am not criticising John, or any of his many alter-egos, personally, I am merely replying to his sentiments regarding this post, and would have reacted in precisely in the same way to any other contributor to this blog.
John Barnes (aka John B1_B5) @ 6:34am October 4 (not deleted):
Whatever you say doesn’t cut any ice with me Loki . You’re just another faceless nobody hiding behind a keyboard.
John Barnes (aka John B1_B5) @ 7:33am October 4 (deleted):
So don’t dictate to me what I can or can’t say on a site that isn’t even yours, you faceless whimp.
Loki @ 7:48am October 4 (deleted):
Now that name calling is exactly what Samuel has warned us all about John, and it’s not very helpful!
Loki @ 7:49am October 4 (not deleted…a response to one of John’s comments which Loki seems to have taken in good humour):
And I don’t have the keyboard up to my face – that would be a very odd way to use it!
John Barnes (aka John B1_B5) @ 8:20am October 4 (deleted):
Go stick your face up your rear end you tincan nobody.
Now let’s move on to the other post which contained the strange “goings-ons”, the Leave John B1_B5 Alone Please post, originally placed there to stop people picking on John for no good reason, pity he had to start doing it to others.
John Barnes (aka John B1_B5) @ 11:35pm October 3 (not deleted):
And here we see one of the brothel creepers creeping around the local brothel –
John Barnes (aka John B1_B5) @ 7:38am October 4 (deleted):
Oh no, that’s not a statue, that’s a picture of Loki crawling from one brothel to another.
Loki @ 7:51am October 4 (deleted):
John, I just made a friendly, constructive comment about you post with teh odd statue, and you come back with nastiness.
Have you not read what Samuel declared in this very post? Are you setting a positive example for participants in this blog with such negative comments?
John Barnes (aka John B1_B5) @ 8:23am October 4 (deleted):
You’re a spineless nobody Loki, and I’ll say whatever I like.
What do you intend to do about it you wimp ?
These comments have been copied verbatim from my email, as every comment posted here gets sent to me by email.
It was a tad before 10:30am when I checked my email, and I sent John B1_B5 the following email:
John,
Sorry but I can’t enforce one rule for some, and another for rule for others, the name calling has been deleted (with the exclusion of one comment and retort…the one about Loki hiding behind a keyboard, the retort indicates that Loki saw that one with some humour…not that I understand why.)
Samuel
John, about ten minutes later sent the now infamous following email to me:
I’m not going to be insulted by that faceless piece of shit Samuel . I won’t be back !
I replied with:
OK well that’s your choice and I’m sorry it’s come to this.
Have a nice day John, I hope this isn’t a permanent goodbye, but if it is, then it’s been nice knowing you, and I’ve enjoyed having you on my site for as long as you’ve been there.
Samuel
I haven’t heard back, and after re-reading all of this I can only assume that John woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning…this all seems very sudden and very odd.
Johnboy (of RiotACT fame) started wondering if John B1_B5 would remain on local talk radio…well he was the first caller on 2CC’s drive show today…I was bracing myself for an on-air berating, but instead found myself listening to John chatting with Mike Frame about retread tyres, and how he thinks they should be illegal.
Incidentally, John B1_B5 has noted on his blog that he does not see how any of this has to do with The Spin Starts Here…well as I said before, if last year’s bun fight with them hadn’t occurred, then nobody would have tried to label John as a pedophile, and none of these ongoing “jokes” would ever have happened, and we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.
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!
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The same licence applies, except that you share ownership of that work with me on this website.
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Ownership and copyright remains with the original owner, and may be removed at their request, with the exclusion of fair use.
For the Samuel’s Persiflage Podcast and transcripts:
Copyright belongs to Samuel Gordon-Stewart, and is shared on an episode-by-episode basis with the people interviewed on the show. Listener feedback and other listener contributions are the shared property of Samuel Gordon-Stewart and the contributor.
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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.
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!
It’s funny how correspondence through the feedback form comes in bursts…people don’t touch it for ages, and then suddenly half a dozen people contact me in a few days. The contact form is great for anonymous contributions, tips etc as it will accept bogus email addresses, and doesn’t record IP addresses.
Anyway, a couple highlights from the last few days:
Preston writes:
Subject…: flexibus to be scrapped
………………………………………………….
Indeed I have Preston, in fact I made reference to Flexibus being scrapped nearly two weeks ago (and possibly before that…I can’t recall), but it’s nice to know that the information has been released by those more prominent than myself, and therefore is much more likely to be followed through with.
Janet writes:
What’s happening with the busses, are the drivers going on strike again?
Well they’re not going on strike again in the forseeable future. Since the strike ACTION and the Transport Workers Union have been having some useful discussions, ACTION have once again withdrawn the split shifts, and this time the TWU have publicised it, so things are looking good. The last thing I heard was Klaus Pinkas from the TWU sounding rather pleased with the progress of the talks.
James writes:
When is the next persilferlage coming out?
(Quote modified to exclude profanities)
Soon James, soon, I’m still trying to work out an appropriate interview time with a guest in the US.
nemzoid45r writes (amongst other things):
I just found your site after a friend shown it to me and u r a waste of the internet
Unfortunately that was one of the more legible passages of nemzoid45r’s email, but I’m sure you get the drift…it’s been a while since I’ve had someone berate me illegibly, so it’s nice to know people still feel a need to be idiots online.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I agree with one of Mike Jeffreys’ sayings:
“God must love idiots, becuase he made so many of them”.
I wonder what will land in my inbox in the next 24 hours?
Google once again remained the most popular search engine, despite a tiny drop, with 89.32% of all search engine referrals coming from Google. Yahoo was next with a slightly improved 9.14%, and MSN was next on 0.59%.
The top ten search keywords were:
schnappi video
samuel gordon stewart
samuel gordon
Schnappi video
riotact
2ue studio
louie the fly
samuel gordon-stewart
stan zemanek cancer
larry emdur
Among the odd keywords were
what was temperature in sydney at 3am 29th July 2006?
primary school and english and blog
机场建设费 fuel
东航 tips
Mike\’s Windmill Shop manager
if is child sidebar blix wordpress
conversation of making a booking, you are a customer calling a restaurant
australian off-air mp4
bagpipe music on webstream
spatchcock gobledegook
heatseeker browser
spring nut
animal taxi software
积分活动accumulate
Combino air-conditioned
policy¾ggar%melbourne
common words for lunatic
funny cityrail ringtones
how much would 8 bananas cost from woolworths
Internet Explorer lost a bit of ground but remained the most popular browser with 66.17% of the readership, Firefox gained and was next with 28.60%, Safari dropped to have 4.21%. Mozilla Suite, Opera and Netscape were under 1%, with Konqueror and others under 0.1%.
Windows was the most popular Operating System, and gained a small amount, with 90.31% of the readership, followed by Mac, which recorded another drop, with 7.98%, and Linux which gained slightly, to be on 1.62%. All others were under 0.10%.
The vast majority of readers were in Australia, althought the number did drop a few points to 79.28%. Next was the US with 6.67%, The UK with 3.94, and Japan with 2.27%. The rest of the 73 countires were under 1%.
also tied for this position is Deus Lo Vult: 5 referrals
Bandwidth
July 2006: 6,770MB
June 2006: 5,900MB
May 2006: 14,680MB
April 2006: 32,130MB
March 2006: 12,350MB
February 2006 9,280MB
January 2006: 14,240MB
December 2005: 14,010MB
November 2005: 2,870MB
October 2005: 657.85MB
September 2005: 519.89MB
August 2005: 82.93MB
Every now and then I send an email to a talkback radio presenter for inclusion in their program (for those not familiar with the concept, many talkback radio shows encourage listeners to send emails, as well as ring in) and as such I have decided that I will now post these emails on this website, in a new category titled “Talkback Emails”.
If I remember, this will be acheived by sending a copy of the email to a secret email address as a bcc (blind carbon copy) recipient…this should enable the email to appear automatically within moments of me sending the email. If I forget to send the copy of the email, I can quite easily copy the email in later.
This will not be a comprehensive effort, so some emails will not be included, and any email with “not-for-air” portions will either be edited before appearing, or will not appear at all.
Some of these emails contain the framework for future posts, and other contain opinions that either do not merit their own article, or I simply don’t get around to writing about. This should also improve the frequency of posts here…assuming that I send enough emails to talkback presenters!
