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• Nelly on One's too many an' a hundred's not enough
• adele on And the sky was made black with unescaped entities
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• sharon on Fifteens
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links to other people's sites

Recommended Viewing

• 300†
  Does exactly what it says on the (comic book) tin. Loved it.
• Little Miss Sunshine†
  Very funny, disturbing (the beauty pageant) and completely messed up -- but in a good way.
• Laputa: Castle in the Sky†
  Story great, characterization a little on the weak side -- though the big robots are cool.
• Porco Rosso†
  Stylish, funny, exciting.
• Grave of the Fireflies†
  Very sad, which was a little unexpected since I didn't know much about it before watching it. Can be a little too slow in places though, otherwise it's very good.
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind†
  The story can get a little dense at times what with the various factions, but still really enjoyable, inventive and engaging.
• X-Men: The Last Stand†
  Opportunity, talent, money - all blown. Over 3 films X-Men has hinted of something great that could have been, this last one says "No, sorry - not going to happen". Bah.

flickr.com

Usenet deja vu

Have apolitical weblogs in Northern Ireland become the minority? If you have time please add a link to any apolitical weblogs you know of from hereabouts, I’m fed up following a link finding rabid bigots at the other end.

6 CommentsFebruary 26, 2006

Mint: Access Log Reporting

I’ve been using Mint for a couple of weeks now on this site as part of an evaluation for work and I’m happy to give it a thumbs up, straightforward install, a good set of stats by default and plenty of plugins to suit your mood. I’ll gripe about the upgrade process—having to comment out the header JavaScript that feeds Mint isn’t a nice option when you have so many pages (I choose to just moved the root folder and put up a holding page while I was upgrading)—but I’m being a little picky.

All in all for $30 it’s not a bad bit of kit, and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s looking for something off the shelf for access log reporting, for myself it’s not much of an advantage over the scripts I already have, though it certainly looks a lot better, but does provide a useful addition.

You can have a look at the Mint report for this homesite here (N.B. I just installed a couple more plugins, so they will be light on stats for now).

3 CommentsFebruary 22, 2006

Rubber Duckie

Some Christmas presents are worth waiting 2 months for:

Ta to you both. :)

4 CommentsFebruary 18, 2006

Congratulations Claire and Antony

One of my friends is getting married and while I’m pretty sure she’ll never read this I’d still like to say congratulations to Claire, and that I am really happy for you. Not at all bitter and jealous that all my close friends are now married, noooo…

2 CommentsFebruary 16, 2006

Slugger O'Toole: The Demagogue of Weblogs

This house believes that the website Slugger O’Toole is the demagogue of weblogs.

Slugger’s content is largely aggregated from other news sources, but saying so is redundant because this isn’t the essence of Slugger, the essence of Slugger is in the comments. At their best the comment sections of Slugger record a reasonably diverse and often well educated commentary on the aforementioned news items, at worst it’s a troll’s playground. Even a casual reading of the site will show the latter is more the norm than the exception.

If it were the case that the comments on Slugger were in some way marshalled to a conclusion, summarised or used to produce some editorial — if some, any, insight was mined from the comments by the site owners — then my argument would be without foundation. However this is not the case, comments are an end in themselves on Slugger, trolling drives up the numbers, longer comment threads, higher page hits, more publicity.
Even the choice of platform is wrong; Slugger is a forum shoehorned into a weblog (when was the last time your favourite forum went down because “the comment script was leaking”?) and in my opinion this is because a weblog is a more fashionable more PR friendly choice. I mean, the BBC aren’t talking about the Kingdom of the Giants Forum or the MTBrider Forum are they? Why? They aren’t weblogs!

So how is Slugger a demagogue of weblogs? Well, it was a silly throw-away statement I made on the spur of the moment so it probably doesn’t hold up to strict scrutiny, but I’ll give it a go: Slugger largely posts news items that are of interest to sectarian trolls, this drives the comments which in turn drives up the numbers. Slugger seeks power (in terms of a website, hits are power) by appealing to the prejudice of the masses (sectarianism in NI). QED?

16 CommentsFebruary 14, 2006

Fire & Ice -- A Valentine's Day Message

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

— Robert Frost, Harper’s Magazine, 1920

PS Please don’t confuse my posting poems with having knowledge of them or any literature at all, I just like the purdy words; in general I’m an illiterate buffoon.

0 CommentsFebruary 14, 2006

More Linking

May I introduce my boss Mr. Jamie Neely and his incredible weblog of things and stuff. I promise not to call this boss a muppet. At least not within earshot of an accountant anyway.

0 CommentsFebruary 6, 2006

Islamic Protests

So, a large collection of youths gathered in the streets of London and made some threats about repeating the London July 7th and New York September 11th bombings in Europe all because of a satirical comic about Islam being allied with death and bombing. I mean, case closed surely?

Can you imagine what would happen if Republicans marched into Belfast and started chanting about repeating Omagh, La Mon or Enniskillen in response to some work of Rowel Friers?

HAS THE WORLD GONE COMPLETELY MAD???

3 CommentsFebruary 5, 2006

Dreamhost, light of my life, fire of my loins.

Dreamhost have now implemented Subversion (it’s on a beta release at the minute) so now I probably could not love my web host more. I currently have 1.6TB of bandwidth per month and 60GB of disk space on my hosting platform, which brings about a complete shift in how I use my webhost. I can now host files, as well as websites, on my Dreamhost account in Subversion repositories for me to check out working copies as and when I need them. Who needs local disk space?

Well, it’s not quite that good but it’s not far off. I’ve added my ‘Imagework’ folder as a repository and can now check out at work, home or Starbucks whatever I need. I’m not even sure I need to backup stuff because DH take care of that. Oh so very cool.

If you’re thinking of signing up for a Dreamhost account, feel free to use my id ‘stephen’ as a referrer (I get cold hard cash).

4 CommentsFebruary 3, 2006

The Linking

First off I should have mentioned a long time ago that fellow fnorter Matt has a weblog and he too can see fnorts. (As usual Stray Toaster beats me to the punch but you just cacn’t compete with the financial muscle of his organisation. There’s an entire team of monkeys writing his stuff.) Also, Ganching is added to the list and Letter to America (both of whom link to slugger, which beats me. Slugger is the demagogue of weblogs people.)

Finally, some lunatic at work had the idea of forcing some people to write weblogs so they could get a better knowledge of the web. To that end please say hello to Blond Chick who may or may not have said when presented with my home site, “But this isn’t a real website, is it?”.
Be nice, encourage and educate.

7 CommentsFebruary 1, 2006