Always on my blog

25 Mar 2004
knit one, perl several

22:01 Interested in collaborative writing? Come along!

24 Mar 2004
knit one, perl several

19:53 An entry in Jonathon's Daily Grind led me to look at Markdown, a perlism to convert text/pseudo HTML source such as you'd use on usenet or in email into real HTML. So, for example, _italic_ becomes <em>italic</em> and **bold** becomes <strong>bold</strong>. This looks quite handy; especially if/when I get down to some serious writing. It looks like it is customizable (well, it's perl innit?) and although it appears to have been designed for Movable Type, for the die-hard hand-rolling anti-blogger (<bows>) it also can be run from within everybody's favourite editor: BBEdit. W00t!

Oh, and you've got to love a guy who has the strap line 'Mac Nerdery, etc.'

Oh 2. bbdiff. Hmmm shiny.

24 Mar 2004
Before

10:43 Ever wondered how characters from the Babylon 5 universe would fare against other sci-fi creations? No, neither had I, until now.

24 Mar 2004
Wordy

10:41 Abiword. " The AbiWord word processor is a full-featured cross-platform word processor." Just downloaded; thanks to Kooij for the headsup.

24 Mar 2004
Daytona

10:35 I hadn't seen this - Oh that Apple would pay them to use it as an advert. Thanks Nige.

22 Mar 2004
My mind is going

12:23 I saw a sigquote on bofhnet just now, and thought 'cool'. Then I saw the attribution, and can not remember what was the context:

 / "I got looks ranging from anger and despair all the way \
 \ through respect to outright fear."  -- Richard P. Grant /
  

21 Mar 2004
Beer-o-matic

19:47 Easily edited to 'Ten Green Bottles', I'd have thought - or even 'Ten German Bombers', which was the version we sang on the way to school, past Brize.

21 Mar 2004
Fluff

19:46 Cool bugs.

19 Mar 2004
Daffydils

09:30 Any second now . . . Rachel will be joining in reading 'I wandered lonely as a Cloud. . .'. Great stuff.

17 Mar 2004
>BLUSH<

10:30 I've been thinking about subtlety and trumpets, own, for the blowing of; and how work in this little comment from uk.comp.mac.sys.

Nuts to it.

> That's almost a . . . compliment, isn't it Rowland?

<grin>

Something like that. Actually, I'll let you into a secret: I've looked at your Web page designs and suchlike. You do like that 'clear, minimalist' approach, don't you? And it comes across in your writing, oh yes. Clarity: it's there, and it's there deliberately, innit? Good one and all that.

Rowland.

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Blogged and confused

15 Mar 2004
Megalopolis Central

19:47 The previous entry in this steamed antiblog contained a somewhat obscure reference to my latest 'thing'. Max Barry write a novel, Jennifer Government, and - more immediately - created a website with the idea that you can play Prime Minister/President/Queen/Adolf of your own little nation in the context of thousands of other people doing the same thing.

It's been going a while, and I had heard of it late last year, but have only just (last week) got into it myself. I created The Commonwealth of Yakabako and its 'region', The Arbitrary Peninsula. We've even got a forum (on another server - NationStates.net is very slow, especially when the US wakes up). If you want to play, ping me for the password for the Peninsula.

Yah, it's a form of escapism, but I feel I need it right now.

15 Mar 2004
Geeky coolness

15:40 Jenny Government^WHubble just notified me of the Science Fiction and Telefantasy Databanks. Lots of under-funded goodness, and Jim will no doubt be pleased to learn that there are theme tunes aplenty!

15 Mar 2004
Happy birthday

15:36 Roger points out that it's the Power Mac family's tenth birthday. By a curious coincidence, my LC475 is ten next month. As a poor grad student I couldn't afford a PowerPC-based machine, even had they been available over here a the time. Now, as a poor post-doc, I still can't afford the latest offerings from Apple's stable. Need money. Lots of money.

13 Mar 2004
7.3% ABV

22:30 I thought McEwan's was for lager lout football fan-type poofters. But this 'Champion' of theirs is pretty damn' good, y'know?

13 Mar 2004
From the designer POV

21:47 1nternet Epl0der really is SHIT, isn't it?

12 Mar 2004
This vale of tears

19:25 I'm going to have to watch what I put as a strapline in this bloody thing. It has a nasty habit of becoming very apposite.

So what are you supposed to do when your best mate screws up his life so completely? I can't say much about it; there's likely to be a lot of media attention and he's gone with his wife and children to stay with mutual friends until the circus is over. I'm currently very angry with his employer for two reasons, which at the moment I can not divulge. I can't be angry with my friend though - I love him too much for that.

Silly sod. Why didn't you talk to me? I might have understood.

12 Mar 2004
No wonder they call her a Mother

19:11 I took advantage of the milder weather at the weekend to plough (all right, dig) the earth and put in a seed bed. Peas, carrots, lettuce, calabrese; and some sweetpeas along the fence(s). Of course, what happens today?

It snows.

09 Mar 2004
Shiny!

13:48 There's a new cycle/pedestrian bridge over the A14. It provides access to Tesco and Milton Country Park (see the map). Despite it being 4 or 5 miles from where we live, it makes cycling to the Park possible, even seriously tempting. There are those who whine about the '2 million of public money!' but some would moan if their arse were on fire. Stuff 'em. Looks good from where I'm sat.

07 Mar 2004
India Charlie

12:01 Nigel just pinged me with respect to iChat. So I guess I should put my handle here in case anyone wants to talk - rpg7aim.

And I don't know if he knows this yet, but his must be one of the easiest websites to find, eva!

03 Mar 2004
Execute this

20:30 I receive a moderate amount of spam. We have exim and a completely fascist spam scanner at work, and at home, Mail.app's filters are pretty good and the 150 k cable connection copes well.

Occasionally, some slips through. Most of it's pretty uninteresting, but I had a couple of real doozies today. This one, from sarah@sarahpage.com, came to my primary home address:

I'm a web master, and I was just searching Google for hair infant pubic. I found your domain, rg-d.co.uk ranked 12, which is pretty cool.

Well, that's nice. I can't imagine why anyone would search for those terms, but hey, this is the interweb. Hmm, let me check . . . nope, I can't find the .co.uk of this domain anywhere in that search (that domain is valid, btw; it even belongs to your humble chronicler).

My site is all about Health / Beauty, too . Maybe we should link up? I wouldn't be stealing any of your sales, because all I do is write informational articles...not selling anything on my site at all. And most of my visitors write back to say that they love the fact that I only write good, quality info. As a matter of fact, I've got a pretty loyal following of people that come back over and over again (they use the site as a reference), so if you link to me, you should get some pretty good traffic from it -- which is always nice.

Any visitors wanting to find out about infant pubic hair from me are going to have to revise their opinion of the good, quality [sic] info then, aren't they? We only deal with mental health here . . .

Anyway, let me know if you'd like to swap links. I've already linked to you, and will keep it up there for a few days until I hear back. Hope to hear from you soon!

Sarah Green RAC IM: 675673.

Thanks for the link, no - seriously, I appreciate it. Unfortunately you didn't leave me an actual URI, so I can't reciprocate. Sorry, you lose, don't spam me again.

And then, I get something to my hobby email address, which is slightly more bizarre. I've had spam about badges and insignia before - never replied to it, just dropped it straight into file thirteen. And then, after the introductory paragraph . . .

We invite your kind attention towards our previous e-mail offering our services in meeting your requirements of the above mentioned products.

Having had no response from your good self up till date we assure you of our competitive prices quality products and prompt delivery at all times. Let us a chance to serve you with our counter sample against your enquiry along with a sample of your own and judge us from every angle. We hope that you will answer of this e-mail and send us some of your enquiries to proceed further with your help.

Okayyyy so these guys are starting to lose it here. It's worrying, actually that they remember that I have never replied to their original spam. Hmm. But wait!

We are sure your good selves will not disappoint us and certainly favor us with your trial order in bulk for our prompt execution and delivery of our quality products in every respect.

Now that makes it all worthwhile. If anyone has any suggestions about how to promptly execute these people, here's some contact details

M. Murtza (Managing Director)
International House of Badges
Haji Pura
Sialkot 51310
Pakistan,
Web site: www.ec21.com/ihb
E-Mail: Ihbadges@pkisp.com
Ihbadges@haat.net.pk
Ihbadges@yahoo.com

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