Posts filed under 'Blog News'
The things which would normally appear on this blog on a Sunday night and the wee hours of a Monday morning may be abnormally delayed this week as I have recently returned home from an unexpected nearly-seventeen hour shift at work, which was preceded by an expected four hour shift with AIR News.
I am tired, and am going to sleep. I do have one fun thing to share with your from this interesting weekend, but it can wait until I am awake and remember where I put the file.
Enjoy the remainder of your weekend.
Update 25/Feb 3:24pm: As much as I would like to deal with the Musicians of the week award and the weekly poll today, it’s not going to happen. I’ll do it sometime between this evening and daylight hours tomorrow. End Update
Samuel
February 24th, 2008 at 11:21am
You may have noticed that I’ve made a couple minor changes to the layout of the website. The random quotes section has been removed for the moment as I never seem to get around to maintaining the list of quotes, it will either disappear completely or be replaced with a more automated system.
The image at the top of the page has changed slightly as well. I’ve been considering that change for about three months and finally got around to it.
There are a few more minor changes on the way, and if all goes to plan I may launch a new look on the 20th of April for the blog’s third birthday.
Samuel
February 18th, 2008 at 11:53am
The site maintenance that I mentioned half a week ago is now, more-or-less, complete. The important bits are done, and user registrations have been enabled again.
The user account audit has not been completed yet, but with 347 user accounts that is going to take a little while. I’ll set aside some time in the next few days to complete that task.
Any questions, let me know.
Samuel
February 17th, 2008 at 02:41am
Oh how I love it when people try to pass off my work as their own work.
Apart from an additional image that the beginning of “their” article, it’s a word for word, image for image copy of my editorial about magpies. I may never have known, but when they referenced an image from my website, Google’s blog search interpreted it as a link to this blog and displayed it as such on my administrative home page.
As per the licence for content on this website, they are free to use that article, as long as they link back to me as the source of it (or attribute it to me in any other way which may be agreed to). I will be contacting the publisher of the copyright violation to seek a link, hopefully they will be co-operative and I won’t be forced to report a copyright violation to Yahoo.
I have sent the following message to the person responsible for that blog via Yahoo’s message form system:
Subject: Direct copy of one of my blog posts
Hello,
I am writing to you as you appear to have copied one of my blog posts. My editorial about being nice to magpies, published in August 2006 at https://samuelgordonstewart.com/2006/08/be-nice-to-the-magpies-and-the-magpies-will-be-nice-to-you has been directly copied to http://au.blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-JMop2G40Y6Mk_lwLaImw3pxaXYzQ2Co-?cq=1&p=536 without attribution.
As per the copyright notice linked to at the bottom of that page, and every other page, on my blog (see https://samuelgordonstewart.com/2006/10/copyright-licence-etc) you are free to use my content as long as you attribute it to me. I therefore request that you place a link to my blog on your entry about magpies, or contact me so that we can reach a mutual agreement about this issue.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
samuel@samuelgordonstewart.com
Samuel
February 17th, 2008 at 01:48am
Originally posted February 16 at 9:50am
Due to scheduled maintenance by this website’s hosting provider in the early hours of Saturday the 1st of March, this website may be difficult to reach between midnight and 3am. The maintenance is expected to take this site offline for up to an hour over this period of time.
From 11:30pm on Friday until the completion of the maintenance, comments, polls, user registrations, and other dynamic aspects of this site will be suspended to avoid any potential data loss.
I will bump this advisory to the top of the page on Friday night for your reference.
Normally I wouldn’t bother notifying you of the midnight maintenance carried out on the server hosting this website as they are generally over within a few minutes, but the impact of this maintenance is higher than usual and you deserve to be informed.
Samuel
February 16th, 2008 at 09:50am
Yes, it’s been a bit quiet here lately. I’m not going to go in to the reasons why, but it will pick up again tomorrow.
Tonight you may notice some minor disruptions as I upgrade WordPress and perform an account audit. A security hole which allows a registered user to edit the posts of others exists in the version of WordPress currently installed on this website, and it certainly explains the large number of suspicious registrations lately. Account registration has been temporarily disabled and some obviously automatically created accounts have been deleted. I will be going through the rest of the accounts tonight, those that have not posted any comments since signing up may be removed.
If you have recently signed up for an account but haven’t posted any comments, your account may be removed in this process. Please feel free to sign up again or contact me to have your account reinstated. A database backup will be taken before any action is taken, so reinstating an account should be a simple matter of reimporting it from the backup.
Samuel
February 12th, 2008 at 08:05pm
As I sit here having a cup of coffee, I’m trying to work out how much sleep I’ve had in the last few days…at this moment it amounts to three hours of sleep in the last 54 hours, and seven hours of sleep in the last 58 hours.
At 11:30pm on Thursday I woke up from a four hour sleep and went to work, the next time I slept was 9:30am to 12:30pm yesterday; I haven’t slept since then and I won’t be getting to sleep until at least 10am, by which time the counter will have reached three hours of sleep in the last 58.5 hours, and seven hours of sleep in the last 62.5 hours.
It’s also safe to say that I have had a fair bit of coffee in the last few days…at least five on Friday, seven or eight yesterday, and I’m already on my third for today. The coffee isn’t keeping me awake…I’ve just had too many things to get done in the last few days to get any sleep (I’m definitely not used to working midnight to dawn on the weekend), the coffee has been helpful in keeping me alert to some extent though.
The upshot of it is that I am once again interested in running my sleep-o-meter and coffee-cup-o-meter, starting yesterday. I’m going to declare yesterday a “7.5 cups of coffee” day and start from there. As long as I remain interested in the project, updates will be posted on a weekly basis.
Samuel
January 27th, 2008 at 05:33am
If you’re a regular reader of this blog then you probably would have noticed a decline in the number of posts I have written over the last few weeks. There have been a few reasons for this including my desire to take a few weeks off from regular blogging.
I’m back on deck properly now and things should return to normal over the next few days. I will try to produce a couple episodes of Editorial Echoes per week, although one will be the limit this week, and the weekly poll returns on Sunday.
It seems funny to me that for months the “Create New Post” screen in the WordPress admin section was almost my most visited page on the Internet, and I’ve barely seen it over the last few weeks.
I have also done a tiny bit of housekeeping, removing the Samuel’s Persiflage portion of the sidebar and replacing it with a link to the Samuel’s Persiflage index page. I may place a shorter Editorial Echoes entry on the sidebar.
Also while I think of it, happy birthday to Tim for yesterday.
Samuel
January 15th, 2008 at 10:59am
On Sunday, Tuggers left a couple comments and I haven’t replied to them yet. I think the comments and the replies are of general interest so rather than simply replying, I will reproduce the comments here, and reply to them.
On “Yep, the nation’s water has been spiked” Tuggers left this comment:
Ok Samuel. The flu epidemic has passed, the election is over (Wasn’t it your first one? Very brave of you to consider standing then…) John Laws and Peter Fitzsimons have resigned from 2UE and the ACT Government is still plodding along. How about you make some more comment about Canberra thngs and even pick up the radio surveys notion again.
Tuggers, I suppose this has something to do with the lack of content on this blog recently. I’m the first to admit that I haven’t been producing anywhere near as much content as usual lately, it’s partially to do with a lack of time, and partially to do with a lack of motivation. A lot of the problem has to do with me wanting to write lengthy articles, not having enough time, and not bothering to write anything at all as a result.
The article you responded to was one I wrote on Friday, it was very short and was based around a news story I spotted and wanted to write about. I wrote a few similar articles on Friday, and the format appeared to work…I made my point in a short space of time and provided enough of the relevant news story to put my comments in context. It all happened because I spotted the news stories during the day and had a few spare minutes to make a comment…it works better than my other system of spotting something I want to write about, jotting down a couple notes and never finding time to write my article until a week later, by which time it is irrelevant, so it doesn’t get written.
I will probably continue with this shorter format as my spare time seems to have changed from being a small number large blocks to being a number of shorter blocks.
As for Canberra stories…I had about half a dozen topics last week, and I only remember one of them. My point on that topic has been mentioned by many others in many other places…but I might still write about it. I do agree that I need to write more about Canberra-centric issues though.
Yes, it was my first election…oh, there’s a second topic…must find the email that’s story is based on…
The radio reviews didn’t work very well. I just didn’t have the time to commit to it…and I think people know what I think of most formats anyway. It would probably be worthwhile running random reviews occasionally, but I don’t think I can commit to a proper series.
I have been considering comparing various international radio stations…it might be interesting to compare the breakfast shows of commercial talk stations in different countries. I think it is fair to say that I am more qualified to compare commercial talk radio than any other format.
Tuggers wrote the following in response to a cryptic email I wrote to 2UE’s Stuart Bocking.
Samuel. Since you email 2UE presenters in the middle of the night or on the weekend, there is a better than average chance many of your readers don’t know what you are talking about. How about prefacing your emails before stapling them to the blog?
This is another message that is just as confusing as the star jump business.
I should be more selective about the emails I copy on to the blog. Basically the way it works is that I will send them to the presenter and send a BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) version to the blog. A script runs every half hour to check for new messages. I have considered making the script add some text about the email being one of my contributions to talkback radio, but that wouldn’t help to put the emails in context. It would probably help if I either copied the more ambiguous emails separately with some explanatory text, or added in some explanatory text after the email appears online.
To explain that message, Sarah is the producer of 2UE’s Drive Show and for one promotional reason or another she was sent on a train trip across Australia. Part of the promotion was that presenters would cross to her on the train, so she asked Clive Robertson what time he would like to talk to her…he said 4am and she (for some unknown reason, maybe she thought he was joking) agreed. I next heard Sarah talking to Stuart Bocking at 9:30 that night, and noticed that she sounded bright and bubbly on both occasions.
As for the “star jump” stuff. The short version of that is that Glenn Wheeler abseiled down the 31 storey Stockland Building in Sydney to raise money for the starlight foundation. More details (including videos) are available on Glenn Wheeler’s highlights page and the MyTalk star jump page. For the record, I donated $50 to the cause.
Anyway thank you for your suggestions Tuggers. They’re constructive and useful, and I appreciate them.
Samuel
December 11th, 2007 at 07:39am
Just looking back through the AAP articles to see if I missed something.
Kerrie Tucker conceded defeat in the senate at about 10pm.
November 24th, 2007 at 11:34pm
John Howard expected to concede defeat it ten minutes.
November 24th, 2007 at 09:36pm
The coalition currently have a two seat advantage in Queensland, which isn’t going to be enough to get the Liberals over the line and we are very likely to see Kevin Rudd declare at 9:30. Channel Nine have just given the election to Labor.
National (46%):
Labor: 62
Coalition: 41
Independent: 1
November 24th, 2007 at 08:33pm
I’ve added a five minute refresh to the blog for the night. If you leave your browser on the front page of the blog you’ll get updates every five minutes.
Samuel
November 24th, 2007 at 07:25pm
I will get the results of the weekly poll online shortly.
Tonight I will providing half hourly or thereabouts updated on the election, and in particular, the results of Fraser, Canberra, Eden Monaro and Hume, and the overall result in the House of Representatives. I will also be providing updates on the ACT senate election.
I have decided not to rely on the commentary of the ABC, Nine or Seven, and instead will probably have Nine’s coverage muted, and be listening to 2CC all night. 2CC will be using 2UE’s coverage which will be anchored by people I can actually put up with for an entire night, namely Steve Price and John Stanley in the national tally room, and Stuart Bocking in the Sydney studio.
Naturally they will be joined by various political figures, and will have reporters in key locations.
2CC will be running their own half-hourly local updates from the tally room. From what I can gather, they will have their full contingent on news and current affairs staff on hand and in various locations to cover the local seats.
I believe that this coverage will be far better than any other broadcast coverage.
Samuel
November 24th, 2007 at 12:03pm
With the election now just over a week away, I will be increasing production of Editorial Echoes for next week as I think it is very important that it runs every day next week. To that end, there will be one episode over the weekend, and then from Monday morning there will be an episode every morning until Sunday the 25th.
The even better news is that in the latter half of next week, it looks like I have secured a five minute interview with one of the journalists who have been following the leaders around the nation throughout the campaign. I’m not going to say who it is just yet as the day they appear will depend entirely on how busy they are, working for their employing media organisation, however I will give you a clue…they were one of the journalists visible on Four Corners on Monday night. That gives you a lot of journalists to choose from if you want to guess…
Also of potential interest, on Friday next week I will be conducting an Editorial Echoes street poll to find out who people will be voting for. This will be in addition to, but not associated with, the Samuel’s Blog Weekly Poll which starts tomorrow on the same subject, and will be “broadcast” on Saturday morning (the morning of the election in other words).
Samuel
November 16th, 2007 at 08:37am
Next Posts
Previous Posts