I couldn’t sleep last night (which is half the reason I was able to spend so much time tracking the Las Vegas shooting story’s coverage) and wrote a few blog articles in scheduled form. Unfortunately WordPress (the software which runs this blog) seems to have changed the way scheduled posts work in its latest update and is now capable of missing schedules.
That Rush Limbaugh update was supposed to appear around 7am. It didn’t, but somehow the later story about tracking the Vegas shooting did appear on-schedule. More annoyingly, WordPress then refused to publish the Limbaugh story which meant I had to go and play with the database to make it appear.
If I wasn’t so used to random bugs appearing in new versions of WordPress, my paranoid nature would be convinced that the WordPress developers were trying to censor us right-wingers!
Update: Ugh, there goes another one missing its schedule. I’m really unimpressed now. End Update
Further Update: WordPress have released an update (version 2.9.1) in the last hour or so which allegedly fixes this bug and a few others. I’ve updated…now we wait and see. End Update
Physically I’m here, but I think my brain is elsewhere as I am still very tired. Thank you to Maritz who held the fort for a little bit longer than was arranged, Maritz will be back on Monday with her weekly column if all goes to plan.
That is the first time that I have been completely off the radar for quite some time as I did not take my laptop with me to Melbourne, and I am continuing to live without a mobile phone. I even forgot to take a watch with me, so my sense of time was non-existent. More on that later, as that topic will take a while to to write.
I’m just going to pluck the quickest blog post off my list of things to write, and publish that for you. I’ll be back later today with more items of interest.
It looks like Maritz pre-empted me, but she is right, I will be away tomorrow and Wednesday. Maritz will use the opportunity to catch up on some of her weekly columns which have been absent for a while.
I still have a few things to post before I leave, so I’m not gone just yet. I trust that you will enjoy Maritz’s company while I’m gone.
I’m still here, I just need a break every now and then, recently more so than usual.
I don’t like concerning y’all with my absences (if I want to use the word, I’ll use it), so I apologise if I did concern any of you, and I also thank you for your concern.
I’m back, although I do expect things to be a bit quiet around here for a while.
Regular readers may notice a few minor changes to the site over the next 24 hours due to the Melbourne Cup. Melbourne Cup day is generally this blog’s busiest day of the year, mainly due to people searching for this year’s results and landing on the results of previous years. These temporary changes should make life easier for the mass influx, and make the large increase in traffic a bit more worthwhile for me.
In related news, yes, I’m behind, again…and it looks like Maritz has submitted a column and has written some rather confusing Melbourne Cup tip. I’m waiting for a clarification before publishing the column.
And with that, I’m back. The whole catching up on sleep and getting my energy back thing has been a limited success, but I am now back to being able to put my thoughts in to writing without having to spend a week working out how to word it, so we’ll call it a success.
I’ve got a lot to get through, and seeing as blog posts with multiple short stories in them seem to be the flavour of the trimester on about half the blogs I read, and it’s convenient in this case, I’ll bite and run such a post here.
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Sleep? Hmmm, well it’s 3:32am as I type this and I last finished sleeping at 8am yesterday. You do the math. That said, in the last few nights I have had dreams where I:
1. Was in a repeat episode of Third Watch. Nobody could be bothered attending to the emergencies as they all knew that the people survived the episode, so why bother risking injury doing the stunts again?
2. I plunged to my death in a taxi, on a wet night where the left half of the road had been washed away. A very vivid and disturbing dream.
3. KXNT’s Alan Stock was elected as Chairman of the Nevada Action Committee, although what this actually achieved is beyond me, because the only thing he was required to do as part of this job was take five minutes out of his show each morning to read the KXNT phone number over and over and over and over and over (we’ll come back to this in five minutes when he’s done with the phone number)
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Speaking of KXNT, their traffic bed (the music they play under their traffic reports) is one of the bits of music which I managed to get stuck in my head this week. I also managed to get the First Option Mortgage jingle stuck in my head for three excruciating hours, and get it stuck in somebody else’s head simply by mentioning it on Facebook. Apparently it’s called “ear worm”. I also had another song stuck in my head, but I dare not try to remember what it was lest it happen again.
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Frasier and Seinfeld repeats at 7:30pm and 8pm weeknights respectively on Go! Channel Nine receive my perpetual thanks for this.
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There was some Bollywood movie on SBS Two the other night. I watched ten minutes of it near the beginning during which time the married couple managed to patch up their differences, and the wife declared that she didn’t really care about her husband’s flaws anyway. How they could drag that about the next three hours is beyond me, and I’m glad that I didn’t stick around to find out. The ten minutes was good for a laugh though.
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Cisco have calculated (which is probably code for “guessed”) that the average broadband Internet user downloads 11.4 gigabytes per month. I average 20-25GB per month and will probably start doubling that in the not-to-distant future if one of my household projects gets off the ground.
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Facebook have decided to preserve the accounts of deceased members, minus status updates and other “sensitive data”. This intrigues me as I have often thought about what would happen to this site and my other online data if I were to cease existing for whatever reason. I would like to keep it all online permanently, but am yet to find a viable solution. The National Library’s PANDORA project archives the essence of this site, but seems to have a lot of broken links and missing data, which is hardly surprising given the sheer size of this site (6.97GB and growing). Preserving this site is a work in progress…I suppose I’ll just have to stick around for long enough to ensure that it happens.
Anyway, if and when I shuffle off this mortal coil, I’m happy for my Facebook account to be preserved as some sort of shrine, but I don’t want anything to be removed from it. How does one go about sharing this wish with Facebook. One’s will?
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Speaking of the dead, Yahoo have finally killed off Geocities. I’m glad that I was reminded of this imminent death the other day, as I had one page on there which I needed to save. I’ll republish it on here at some stage.
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Monash Drive has been removed the ACT “National Capital Plan”. The proposed road had been slated to run along the foot of Mount Ainslie behind Hackett, Ainslie and Campbell, roughly in-line with the already cleared sections which the high voltage power lines use. Politically, the road was never going to happen, which is a pity because it could have reduced a lot of congestion, especially in the years ahead.
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We’ve been following Barack Obama’s approval ratings here for some months now using the figures from Rasmussen, who had the polling figures closest to the outcome of last year’s election. That said, the other polls are interesting as well, especially when you consider that in the Gallup poll, Obama has recorded the worst third quarter of an elected president in recorded history. A nine point drop in his approval rating in the space of three months.
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The White House have declared war on FOX News, claiming that they’re not a news organisation. The White House clearly can’t tell the difference between news programming and opinion programming, even when it’s pointed out to them. Funnily enough though, the other networks have defended FOX. Late last week, White House officials tried to ban FOX from a White House Press Pool interview session, but the other networks wouldn’t have a bar of it, quite clearly telling the White House that “if Fox can’t be a part of this, then none of us will interview your chap”. It worked, and the White House backed down, for now.
Here’s the point. FOX out-rate every other cable news network consistently, partially because of their news programming, and partially because of their opinion programming. People want to watch it. The White House don’t like the opinion programming as it is often critical of the Obama administration, unlike others such as MSNBC whose opinion programming often favours the Obama administration. The other networks know that if they let the White House exclude FOX, then they are all trapped in an unwritten “do as we say, or we cut your access” agreement. It is an attack not only on FOX, but on every other network, on freedom of the press, and on freedom of speech.
Glenn Beck, on one of FOX’s opinion shows, put together a rather amusing piece on the War On FOX which had me in hysterics when I first watched it.
One wonders if people would have voted for Obama’s “new era of bi-partisanship” if they had known that “bi-partisan” is defined as “the other side will do as we say, therefore we all agree”.
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The ANZ Bank have a new logo, and a TV ad which looks strangely familiar…I’ve seen the whole “life juggled above head, but we can make it easier” ad before, I just can’t remember where. Anyway, the logo, is it just me, or does it look like somebody chucking a tantrum after being kept in line for an hour?
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Channel Seven have announced their new digital channel, to be called “7TWO”, on (you guessed it) channel 72. I’m not in the least bit surprised that regional affiliate Prime aren’t putting it to air straight away, I mean Prime own the “6” channels in digital TV land, and it would look rather silly have 7TWO on channel 62. I suspect that Prime are working on their own branding of the new station…PRIMExtra perhaps?
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RIP Don Lane, one of the great entertainers, who passed away at the age of 75.
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Remember when the Large Hadron Collider was about to be turned on for the first time and people were afraid the world was going to end? It amazed me how many people who believed that, were subsequently placated when it was turned on, broke down, and the world didn’t end. The whole cause for concern was for when it would finally reach the actual colliding stage, which it never did.
733-KXNT, 733-5968, 733-KXNT, 733-5968 (Alan’s still going…)
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Clive Robertson filled in for Tim Webster on 2UE and 2CC’s afternoon show yesterday. What a relief! Tim Webster, as much as like him personally, has bored me to death of late…I can not listen to his show any more, I just can’t. Tim is much better suited to a news-based show than the lifestyle-amalgam show that he is now presenting. Clive, however, suits the format perfectly, and is brilliant afternoon entertainment.
Memo to 2UE for next year’s lineup: Breakfast with Mike Jeffreys, Mornings with Stuart Bocking, Afternoons with Clive Robertson, Drive with John Stanley, Nights with The Two Murrays, Overnights with Jim Ball.
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And now at 6:18 it’s time for KXNT’s traffic and weather together on the eights, here’s Tate South (finally, Alan’s morning Chairman task is finished, which means that I can wrap up this blog post).
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There was an ad on TV last night for that boat from Victoria to Tasmania and back, in which they advertised the rate for taking your car with you as being an “each way” rate (eg. “x dollars each way”). Sorry, but does that mean it’s the return rate (you can travel each way for this amount) or the one way rate (each way costs x dollars)?
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Congratulations to Chris Matlock, KXNT’s Radiostar competition winner for this year. I listened to the entries of the 20 finalists when I was last in Deniliquin, and Chris was my favourite from the start, so I was very pleased to see him win. Chris will have his own show soon, apparently, and will start off co-hosting with Ciara Turns on “Sundays with Ciara” on Sunday, November 8 between 10am and 1pm. That will either be 4am-7am or 5am-8am Monday, November 9 in Canberra, depending on whether daylight saving has ended in the US by then.
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And finally, Lord Christopher Monckton spent much of the latter part of last week and the start of this week outlining the issues with the proposed Copenhagen climate change treaty which, don’t forget, is designed to stop a warming which hasn’t happened in about the last decade. The main points:
1. The setting up of a world government, with binding power over all countries.
2. Some peculiar scheme to send all the money from the western countries to the developing countries, to pay for some supposed “climate debt”.
Glenn Beck interviewed his lordship last week, which makes for very interesting and enlightening listening.
Part one:
If you ever needed proof that the whole global warming thing has everything to do with social change, and nothing to do with climate change, you now have it.
I’ll be back in a few days. Right now, despite having a growing list of things that I would like to write about, I just can’t manage to get started, so I’m not going to try for a few days. Columns from contributors are also suspended until further notice.
Your “Jerk of the Week” submission
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd
Why should this person be the “Jerk of the Week”?
For copying his media strategy from the White House, declaring News Limited newspaper “The Australian” to be a “right-wing” publication with a determined agenda to oppose the government, the day after the White House declared war on FOX News. It’s nice to know that the Bamster and Krudd are both unable to tell the difference between opinion pieces and news reporting.
Your Name (Optional)
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Casey Hendrickson and Heather Kydd’s Jerk Of The Week airs at 6:09pm Thursday on Newsradio 840 KXNT in Las Vegas (12:09pm Friday in Canberra), but you already knew that.
As you may have noticed, time management isn’t proving to be my strong point at the moment.
If all goes to plan today, I have a number of dreams to share with you, Maritz’s column which she submitted yesterday and I am yet to read, the Musician(s) Of The Week (fortnight and a bit?) award, and more. Stay tuned.
Can you tell the difference between when I’m working and when I’m not? I tend to spend more time here when I’m not working than when I am working, and I’m sure that the difference is noticeable. The real problem though, is that I try to spend just as much time here when I’m working as when I’m not working, but because I can’t spend as much time here, I don’t get around to writing half the stuff that I want to write.
I doubt that I’ll ever learn to manage it, or bother to try.
Anyway, after work yesterday I was tired and went straight to bed, and now that it’s Thursday, I can’t see any point in publishing a Musician(s) Of The Week award, as there will be one on Sunday.
It’s bizarre but true…I stop writing, and I get more visitors. Work that one out.
Anyway, the intermission has now finished. I decided to postpone the Musician(s) Of The Week award on Sunday as I took a nap on Sunday afternoon and then had to go to 1WAY FM, which takes longer at the moment while I am car-less (I found my stolen car on my way to 1WAY FM in an undrivable state which was interesting…and Firefox spell check wants me to say that it was in an undrinkable state, which is also correct). I then caught up on sleep on Monday and was busy with work, errands and further sleep yesterday.
The Musician(s) Of The Week is coming up tonight, and I’ll publish Maritz’s column at some stage today. I have a few other things for you as well.
Incidentally, it looks like I’m back from my two-day break on the same day that Andrew Bolt is back from his month-and-a-bit break. It’s funny how these things work out.
I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that I am declaring the photo gallery to be dead, meaning that no more photos will be uploaded to it ever. This is due to yet another issue with the software which runs it.
The good news though is that it will remain online in an archived form, in its current location, and I will launch a new gallery in the near future.
Gallery version 1 is a decent application for what it does, but it is old, inefficient, hopeless at providing any useful information in errors, and virtually impossible to fix when it has anything other than an obvious problem.
The current issue (and the proverbial straw of an issue) that I am currently having with it is that it won’t create thumbnail images (the smaller versions of images that you see on the pages which show many images)…or to be more precise, will get them created by ImageMagick, but fails to recognise that they have been created. As far as I can tell, Gallery is sending a mangled command to ImageMagick which is causing ImageMagick to create the thumbnail and then spit out an error, which is causing Gallery to assume that creation of the thumbnail failed, and ignore the created thumbnail image. Bizarrely, the older version of the Gallery software which I had installed until a few weeks ago completely abandoned processing the images upon receipt of the error from ImageMagick, whereas the current version treats it as a minor error which means that it accepts the image and just doesn’t show a thumbnail.
This issue has been bugging me for a while, and as I couldn’t sleep last night I had plenty of time to play around with the Gallery installation, but didn’t really get anywhere. I did, however, manage to prove that it is a fault in my Gallery installation and not in the Gallery software as distributed, nor a problem with ImageMagick, as a clean Gallery installation does not have the problem in the same environment with the same settings.
As such, I now have the incentive to do what I have wanted to do for a while but could never be bothered to mess around with…upgrade to Gallery 2, or possibly even a different photo gallery application. Gallery 1 has a horrifying and archaic file structure, and upgrading an existing installation to the more elegant Gallery 2 is a rather appalling process, and would mangle the page layout in ways which I would prefer to never have to think about.
Leaving the gallery in its current form is not an option due to the fact that it relies on an aging, and soon-to-be-unsupported, set of PHP scripts which will undoubtedly be exploitable in the near future. Thankfully Gallery has an “offline mode” where it can be easily archived in pure HTML and images form, which will allow me to keep it online without having to worry about updating the software which runs it.
The next thing for me to do will be to play with some newer photo gallery software to decide what I will use for the next incarnation of the gallery…and you can rest assured that, due to my aversion to placing my important online data in the hands people like Flickr who have proven that they can not be trusted to leave photos in their intended form, I will be running the next gallery myself, just like the current one.
A quick shout out to whomever it was that registered a user account on this blog earlier today under the name “Barack Obama” using an email address starting with “liarpresent”.
I’m back in Canberra and was planning on resuming the Musicians Of The Week award tonight, but I’m not in the mood due to events which I don’t really want to discuss. I’ll resume normal operations tomorrow.
As much as I would like to be in Sydney today for 2GB’s outside broadcast, it is simply not feasible as I have a cold at the moment. The sore throat is gone, which is a good thing, but I’m in day three of the headache, and back ache, and leg ache etc.
The cold is the reason it has been so quiet around here for the last few days. Today is the first time I have logged in since Monday morning.
It looks like Maritz has submitted her column, so I’ll read it before publishing it, and then go back to bed.
The ANZ Bank have a new logo, and a TV ad which looks strangely familiar…I’ve seen the whole “life juggled above head, but we can make it easier” ad before, I just can’t remember where. Anyway, the logo, is it just me, or does it look like somebody chucking a tantrum after being kept in line for an hour?