Alrighty then, time for me to head off to Exhibition Park to see the 2CC Outside Broadcast (which is actually indoors, but what else can you call it when you use the “OB” abbreviation?)
You can expect photos soon!
Samuel
1 comment November 25th, 2005 at 01:59pm
After some careful thought and consideration, I have decided that the recent spate of users with similar names and similar fascinations with tea towels and stories of people being killed by flying plants, is suspicious to say the least. The way some of the discussions turned into strange cupcake discussions is mildly disturbing.
In a post about my editorial policy last month, I stated
And finally, as previously mentioned, this I my website, and I shall have the final word on what is, and is not acceptable, on this site. I do not guarantee that the same thing will be applicable to each and every person who comes here, as certain people are, in my view, more welcome here than others. Your ability to leave comments here is a privilege, not a right, so treat it as such.
I am now highly convinced that the recent comments were by one person using multiple usernames and a public proxy for the sole purpose of being silly. Most of these comments have been removed, as have the accounts in question. I fear that I may have accidentally deleted a legitimate account, if that is the case you will need to reregister, I apoligise for the inconvenience.
I would really prefer to not have to delete users and comments, but sometimes I have no choice, and when I take this action, it is not something that I take lightly.
Samuel
1 comment November 23rd, 2005 at 03:51am
I have been informed that somebody is claiming I have deleted their account on this blog, I don’t know how they came to this conclusion as accounts have not been deleted. Perhaps they forgot their password in which case they can order a new one with a couple clicks, or maybe they stumbled across a post where comments are closed, that happens after a post has existed for 60 days, and may also happen at the discretion of the site owner when comments spiral out of control.
If whoever it is happens to be confused by it all, they can easily contact me via the contact form and I will try and help them out.
Samuel
November 21st, 2005 at 12:04pm
This one was from a public servant trying to intimidate a lawyer on the television show “Judge John Deed“, the quote isn’t exact, but it is close enough:
Public Servant: “I’m a public servant, we don’t learn from our mistakes, we live in the present!”
Another quote, which was the “Quote Of The Day” on Google’s Personalised Homepage (sourced from http://www.quotationspage.com/qotd.html) was by Hesketh Pearson who said “Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely- read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.”
And to all the people declaring that I am not “normal”, Ellen Goodman has some words of wisdom for you:
“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”
Samuel
2 comments November 20th, 2005 at 01:10am
You may recall that in September I started talking about my “new” radio which is actually older than myself. In this I said that I would take a photo of my radio, which I finally remembered to do today. The radio is a Sony Walkman WM-F57, built in 1986, a year before I was born. The radio features an inbuilt multidirectional auto-reverse cassette deck and a speaker, with the use of the speaker on/off switch it is possible to have headphones and the speaker in use at the same time, but this would probably drain the batteries quicker. The radio runs on two AA size batteries.
Here is the front:
As is shown under the tape deck window, the tape deck features Dolby Noise Reduction.
This picture is of the top of the radio:
The switches at the top, from left to right are as follows:
The headphone socket can be seen on the next row, to the right of that is the tape direction mode switch, which changes the auto reverse mode from “A->B->Stop” to “A->B->Restart”, to the right of that is the direction change button, followed by the fast forward button, the rewind button, the play button and the stop button.
The next row contains a socket for a 3V DC external power source.
The back of the radio (slightly out of focus):
At top right you can see the volume control dial, which works on a scale of 0-10. The visible label provides some information such as model number (WM-F57), frequency range (AM: 530-1605 kHz and FM: 87.6-108MHz), the number and type of batteries it uses and in small print a series of numbers which appear to be a serial number (3-335-824-01). The unreadable label in the photo is a notice about Dolby trademarks, and the section labeled “Open” with an arrow is the battery compartment.
On the opposite side to the volume control is a switch for band selection (AM and FM) and a tuning dial.
In the entire time I have had this radio the dial has ventured off 2CC (1206 AM) a couple times to briefly check other stations, and has only ventured off the AM band once to see what stations I could recieve (I seem to recall stopping on News Radio for about 30 seconds).
On some of Nattie’s longer walks, the radio has accompanied us, this morning would be a good example as we enjoyed David Young’s Garden on our 40 minute walk.
Samuel
9 comments November 19th, 2005 at 09:23pm
This came in overnight from The Plain English Campaign:
Thank you to everyone who sent in entries for our Golden Bull awards this year. We have spent many hours laughing at the best and worst of English gobbledygook, and have managed to compile a list of winners, which will be announced in the next few weeks. However, if you missed the deadline, do not fear as we are now accepting entries for next year’s awards. The winners of the ‘serious’ prizes including the Inside Write award, will be announced at the beginning of December.
Looks like it’ll be a busy time here on Samuel’s Blog at the start of December, we’ve got the large photographic journey to Sydney and back for the New Day Australia Christmas Function (people keep asking me about tickets, unfortunately they are all sold out), the usual monthly site stats, a summary of the Plain English Awards, and to top all that off, the Samuel Awards 2005 are also coming in December.
Samuel
November 19th, 2005 at 09:58am
I currently have plans, which are still in their formative stages, of starting a podcast which will be known as Samuel’s Persiflage. The plan at this stage is for an interview based program, with interviews on various subjects with various people.
The podcast will probably contain other things, and I have a potential jingle in mind at this time, but it probably won’t contain music other than that of my own creation due to licencing issues.
The long term plan (if this idea ever gets off the ground and becomes a success) is for it to have a sponsor to help cover costs (which would probably fix the music licencing issues) and/or make it available in a radio friendly format. At this stage there won’t be any set length for the podcast, although I’m aiming for approximately half an hour per episode…in future, a radio friendly format would force limits, but that is a long way down the track yet.
Samuel
November 14th, 2005 at 08:55pm
I just had a look at the statistics for this site and noticed that it has broken its records. It has already surpassed 1000 visitors for the month (quite an achievement when you consider the previous record for an ENTIRE month was 818 visitors) and the page views so far this month is on 4578, which is far in excess of the previous record of 2807.
Thankyou to all of you for reading and a special thankyou to all of you who have contributed.
Samuel
11 comments November 11th, 2005 at 02:57pm
What happens when you let all the people in the lunatic asylums out into society? You end up with websites like The Spin Starts Here (I wasn’t going to link to it, but I feel obliged).
My attention was drawn to that site a while back whilst searching for something, which I can no longer remember. What I do remember however is that it got a giant black mark in my books and was deemed “not to be visited”.
Recently my attention was drawn to that site again via another search, on this occasion I noticed that they were violating the Google Adsense terms and conditions, which they have since corrected.
My latest encounter with them started last night when a Google Alert for “Dickson College” landed in my inbox, the extract Google provided was
He’s from Dickson College and can write? That used to be enough to get you …
But then I got to this bit: “Yesterday around midday Dickson College had the …
The first bit was odd and caught my attention, but the second bit appeared to have a direct quote from this site, so I clicked on the link and saw the article in question. It was one of their inane discussions about Australian Idol. In the ensuing discussion somebody calling themselves rudyzarsov made a comment which included
I’m sick of looking at the bland c**p that Tssh has become and I feel that it’s only fair that I express my opinion.
This prompted a comment from “Blah Blah” who had this to say
Hey Rudy, here’s what you should do. Look up https://samuelgordonstewart.com. It’s the worst blog you’ll ever find.
Blah Blah then went on to say that The Spin Starts Here is much better etc etc.
That did bring some visitors here, and not surprisingly the visitors from TSSH weren’t impressed by a website which actually makes sense.
Anyway, it turned nasty, “eat my shorts” went on to say
Alright Blah Blah, I thought I had Samuel figured out. I thought maybe he was a retiree who used to work at 2CC and was now stalking them (as you do with previous employers). But then I got to this bit: “Yesterday around midday Dickson College had the annual year 12 photo taken. This would have been enjoyable if it wasn’t for the fact that it took about 20 photos until the photographer was satisfied.”
Excuse long quote, but for f***’s sake, is the dude serious?? So he’s in Year 12, or, as well as being a retiree stalking 2CC, he’s a retiree stalking Dickson College’s Year 12’s?? Freaky.
To which the evil pompous loony woman who seems to run the site, Caz, said this
eat my shorts, he’s a genuine bona fide school kiddy who is often spruiking 2CC in the comments over at johnboy’s site. He also doesn’t like strong language or People Who Need To Be Glassed.
Johnboy’s site being The RiotACT, where I stopped citing 2CC as a source because people started accusing me of being sponsored by or working for 2CC…which I don’t. As for strong language, well it has its place, but I generally choose not to use it. People Who Need To Be Glassed is a site of similar ilk to TSSH.
Then the Dickson College part of the Google Alert appeared in the form of a comment from “roobar”
He’s from Dickson College and can write? That used to be enough to get you put in hospital, but listening to 2CC as well. F***, standards have dropped from the old Hackett Boys days.
And of course Blah Blah just had to continue making an idiot of himself/herself
My apologies Extra Dollop, I didn’t know quite how to warn you for that blog. The whole thing actually leaves me a bit speechless, because I just can’t believe that anyone normal would love 2CC as much as this dude does.
Anyway, I felt like antagonising these idiots by replying, the upshot of which is they all proved their stupidity and Caz managed to make an idiot of herself by stating that she worked for 2CC for five years, she continues to claim that 2CC is the worst radio station on the planet, but it can’t bet that bad if she worked there for a full five years.
Showing the type of people that they truly are, they went on to pretty much try and convince me that the entire world revolves around sex, and nothing else is important…what strange individulas they must be.
I’m not going to continue quoting the utter idiots at The Spin Starts Here, but if you want to see the completely moronic conversation that I had the misfortune of being part of last night (although it was fun antagonising them) then click here to be taken to the article in question on the worthless waste of bandwidth which is, The Spin Starts Here. (Note: Comments sorted in reverse order…scroll down and read upwards)
For the record, I believe that 2CC provides quality radio, and that some people just aren’t bright enough to realise it.
Samuel
18 comments November 8th, 2005 at 03:47pm
Usually I would have done this closer to the beginning of the month, but there were so many big stories that it slipped my mind. But here it is, in a “better late than never” sense.
The number of visitors was 818, up from 556 in September, the page views however went down to 2571, from 2807 in September.
The front page measured a total of 1056 page views, comprising 875 to https://samuelgordonstewart.com, 133 to https://www.samuelgordonstewart.com, 45 to https://samuelgordonstewart.com/index.php & 3 to https://www.samuelgordonstewart.com/index.php. In total, the front page made up 41.07% of the monthly page views.
The most popular category was Linux.Conf.Au and the most popular article was Chief Turnip Acts Like Goose.
Google remained the most popular search engine, with it’s Australian incarnation delivering 47.26% of search visits alone.
Searches for John B1_B5 accounted for just over 20% of the searches for the month. Others of note include quite a few various searches for me, 2UE Stuart Bocking (who has now been removed from weekend nights on 2UE), 2CC Reunion, 2CC Birthday, Mike Jeffreys, Jingles For Daylight Savings (huh? Anybody want to help me understand why anybody would be searching for that), and the list goes on and on and on and on and on.
Internet Explorer delivered most of the people here, 66.82% in fact. Firefox was next with 30.61%. I suppose, now that this blog is being visited by more people, it is quite understandable that Internet Explorer is featuring more prominently. I still think Firefox is better though.
Windows was the operating system of choice, with 92.07% of visitors using it. Linux and Macintosh were the other two recorded.
81.15% of visitors were from Australia, with the US, New Zealand, Great Britain, France and Germany rounding out the countries above 1%.
Top referrer for the month was The RiotACT with 61 referrals, although I expect the number to drop over the next month as I have decided to stop posting there. Next up was Margo Kingston’s Webdiary’s list of links to articles on anti-terrorism laws with 18 and Loadedog.com’s links to Canberra blogs and bands was the third of the top three with 8.
The video of the horrid amount of noise ACTION’s green buses make was the most requested file, it was requested 18 times. One of the old 2CC Music Radio jingles was next with 12 requests, and the MP4 version of the video of Rob Fulton winning a million dollars on Who Wants To Be A Millionare with 11 requests rounds out the top three files of the month.
The full list of stats (excluding files and referrers) can be viewed at https://www.samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/blogstats/2005/october/
Samuel
November 7th, 2005 at 11:04pm
As previously mentioned, I gave 2CC a birthday card for it’s 30th birthday. It was more of a birthday paper than a card, but it’s the thought that counts.
Anyway, I have gone to some length to reproduce the birthday card. You may have seen in various places that sell paper, paper with pre-printed backgrounds, I used a “scrollpaper” background and printed on top of that. This is what makes the reproduction tricky, I have had to copy the scrollpaper background into the birthday card document which means I had to scan in another piece of scrollpaper (I thought I had run out of it, but I found one) and then go about inserting it into the document.
Anyway, here is the birthday card which I presented to 2CC (and I believe is currently hanging on their notice board). Clicking on the picture will open the 861KB PDF file of it.
Samuel
2 comments November 2nd, 2005 at 03:33pm
Apoligies for the recent three hours of downtime experienced by this website. The hosting provider performed an “upgrade” without notifying me…or at least, that is what they told me on the phone. I’m not inclined to believe them as the way the website reacted makes me think that something failed.
At first I was receiving “Connection Timed Out” errors which indicates that a service failed, especially seeing as the server was still responsing to pings. This later changed to “Connection Refused” errors, which indicates that the hosting provider probably pulled the plug.
It is unusual in my view to perform upgrades whilst still accepting incoming connections to services you are upgrading. Standard procedure would tell you to deny incoming connections before starting an upgrade, as this helps (in some cases) to prevent incoming connections creating problems with the upgrade. Of course my sense of procedure would also tell you that you should notify the people who will be affected by the upgrade.
I think something failed and the technicians either took advantage of that to perform an upgrade, or they called it an upgrade so that nobody would know that things failed.
I must thank regular reader and contributor John B1_B5 for confirming that the problem was not at my ISP, as this would be the first thing which a hosting provider would tell you to check if you tell them that their servers are offline. I agree with this, but I couldn’t really see a point in yelling at the technician on the phone as it is really a management decision when it comes to upgrades, and I will email them to ask them to inform customers before performing upgrades, and to make the service status visible from an external website, as it is currently only accessible through the hosting control panel website (which was also down).
John B1_B5 mentioned that he was getting a “page cannot be displayed” message. This is one of Internet Explorer’s many “friendly” messages which it will display when something is wrong. The one problem I have with these messages is that they will appear even if the website being visited has a page of it’s own for that purpose. For example, a website may (and most do) have a 404 page for cases where the page you requested can’t be found, such a page is likely to contain some useful links back to the homepage, a site search facility and probably some contact information if you think the page has appeared incorrectly. The Internet Explorer “friendly” page has a link to the homepage of the site, but is incapable of bringing you any other information, such as contact information or any messages which the website has on it’s own 404 page.
The IE Friendly pages on their own are just fine, I just think they should make way for those which the website offers when they are offered. When I was using IE I turned off friendly error pages as they annoyed me, that setting can be found at Tools–>Internet Options–>Advanced–>Browsing–>Show Friendly HTTP Error Messages
Mozilla Firefox and other browsers do not have a similar function that I am aware of.
Anyway, the site is back online now, and I apoligise for any inconvenience which the downtime caused, as I’m sure the hosting provider will to me when I email them.
Samuel
1 comment November 1st, 2005 at 08:59pm
The time has come for me to announce my Melbourne Cup tips for this year.
I have to agree with most experts who say that Makybe Diva will not win. It was fairly obvious in my view that she wouldn’t be scratched, but she won’t win. Don’t get me wrong, I think she is a very good horse, but I just don’t think she will win.
Anyway, my top three selections
7: Railings
16: On A Juene
22: Leica Falcon
And a tip from Nattie
21: Strasbourg (Well it is a food word).
The race gets underway at 3pm (GMT+11). If you can’t be near a TV to see Channel 7’s coverage (or the Sky Channel coverage) and you can’t make it to a radio (most radio stations will cover it) then you could always listen to it on the 2KY Racing Radio webstream (Website is down, but webstream still works) or the Sport 927 webstream or even the ACTTAB Radio Webstream.
Of course I’ll bring you results from the race as well.
Whoever you pick, good luck and enjoy the afternoon.
Just like last year’s Melbourne Cup day, it is raining here in Canberra.
Samuel
November 1st, 2005 at 12:32pm
This afternoon John Stanley’s featured phrase was based around the Louie The Fly song, which was discussed here recently. John obviously hasn’t read this site as he didn’t know who the singer was.
Checking back through the logs it is quite clear that John and his staff didn’t get the song from this site, as the last download of the song was a couple days ago. Other than that, it would appear that he sent at least one person here as they searched for “louie the fly mortein” a couple minutes after John mentioned it.
Oh, nearly forgot, here is the Louie The Fly song again.
And John_B1_B5 has drawn a picture of Louie The Fly
Samuel
2 comments October 27th, 2005 at 02:00pm
Not only did it take me a very long time to choose a countdown script that I like, it then took me a long time to get it right.
Firstly I used a countdown script designed to act as calender reminders, that was pretty horrible, not to mention that it was inaccurate as the web server (which is somewhere in the US) runs on some US timezone making it’s day-by-day announcements wrong by many hours. If it were me running it, then it would run on GMT which would make sense for something which will be used by people all over the world.
I changed script to something that was capable of a countdown showing days, hours & minutes. It took me a while to get that right as well, firstly I got the time difference wrong, then I managed to get it right but added a day, then corrected it for the upcoming start of daylight savings…in the wrong direction, and have now fixed it properly.
The countdown clock is now correct (including daylight savings transition) and will remain that way as long as the webserver isn’t running on Daylight Savings Time in the US, if it is then I’m going to have to fix the countdown yet again when DST finishes in the US.
Samuel
October 25th, 2005 at 11:53am
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |