Online for 27 years
Hi! If you’re dropping by, most of my writing these days is still on my Substack Newsletter.
And 27 years… that number is getting unnervingly close to 3 decades.
Hi! If you’re dropping by, most of my writing these days is still on my Substack Newsletter.
And 27 years… that number is getting unnervingly close to 3 decades.
This site has now been online for 26 years. If you’re dropping by, most of my writing these days is on my Substack Newsletter.
You can find them all at my Substack Newsletter. I stopped mirroring the newsletter here, so subscribe directly to the newsletter instead.
Whew. A quarter century. At least I started posting again on here last year, huh?
I’ve actually been wanting to do a full redesign of this site for years now, but I need a few days to myself to do that…
If you’re actually still reading this blog, please send me a message to let me know you dropped by!
My weekly reports are also published as newletters on Substack. Subscribe here!
At this point I only run this blog to make this annual post.
I have gradually come to terms with the limitations of my time these days, and my rather modest goal for this year to write at least one substantial post on this site.
One day I will get back to a more regular cadence of posting!
Yep. This site is squarely Gen Z.
You’ll see from the post below that I’m trying out publishing a newsletter. Subscribe today!
Ok, so I obviously did no posting last year, and I failed in my attempt to fit in a redesign of this site. Life had other plans. Maybe this year?
Twenty years!
Coming soon: A 20th Anniversary redesign of this site, and most frequent posting (I promise).
Yes, but not much has been going on here lately…
Apparently, this blog has now reached the age of majority.
Wow, has it been another year already? This blog is now celebrating its 17th birthday! (Yes, I am aware of the lack of recent content on it…)
This blog turned 16 today. It has been much neglected over the last year, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to push out one or two substantial posts this year.
Wow, has it really been 14 years? Getting really close to how old I was when I first started this blog.
Haven’t had many substantive updates for a while, but I have two in the pipeline, so stay tuned.
Thirteen years of posts today. None of the usual navel-gazing this year, except to say that with the maturity of Facebook and Twitter, blogging for me has mostly been relegated to long-form posts. Expect one after I get back from Singapore.
I’ve decided to start dumping the bulk of the lengthy, interesting articles I read onto a separate site at read.hearye.org. I’ll keep the most interesting ones for this site.
I’m also too cheap to buy Instapaper so this is the way I store stuff that I want to come back to read later on my iPad.
(Oh, and if anyone wants to contribute to it, let me know and I’ll set you up with a posting account.)
I replaced the Facebook Share button with a Facebook Like button at the end of each post. Yes, FB is taking over the web. I wonder how this looks in China? Does the Great Firewall break the page?
The “Web article database” link in the sidebar is finally working.
Liveblogging for this post has now ended. Please start reading this post from the bottom.
02:23:09 am: Ok, I think we’re done for the night. I better sleep now…
02:22:27 am: Testing auto-line breaks.
Testing Twitter #hashtag auto-linking, and @username auto-linking.
02:21:19 am: Testing minor formatting fixes.
02:13:16am: Testing AJAX auto-refresh.
02:10:19am: Testing image uploading.
Intro: New feature, under testing. Couldn’t find a decent liveblogging plug-in for WordPress so I had to make my own.
I finally finished and uploaded the Portfolio section of this website! It’s a bandwidth-intensive page due to the number of graphics on it, but I wanted everything to be on the same page.
I had fun putting this together — for me it was a pleasant trip down memory lane, pulling out old files from the dusty corners of my hard drive, including something things I had totally forgotten I’d done.
Does anyone still visit this website? Please leave a comment with this post if you’re out there… I hope I haven’t managed to lose all my visitors over the last year of non-posting.
For those of you who do follow my Twitter stream, I have created an RSS Feed which strips out any Tweet posts on Hear Ye! It’s right here (and also in the sidebar).
I also put in a captcha in the comment forms. Hate them, but they’re practically necessary due to all the spambots roaming around WordPress blogs.
I’ve now made the transition over to WordPress. Pretty time consuming trying to export posts from my old database to WXR, and then importing them back in, while trying to preserve all the extra metadata (timezones, locations, etc). I think it’s all in good shape now. Hopefully this change means I’ll get back to posting a bit more.
There are still parts of the site that I’m going to be filling out over the next few weeks/months, but since I have the core functionality up for now, that’s all lower priority.
In the process of finally moving Hear Ye! off this 9 year old proprietary backend and onto WordPress, and doing a minor visual refresh. I should be done by the end of the year. Hopefully, this also means that I will get back to more regular posting since I’m hoping to implement a Tumblr-like posting feature on it.
Hear Ye! is another year older today.
The Backbench has returned. After an almost three year absence, The Backbench is back in a revised blog format. Four of us from the old Backbench are back on board (the person who isn’t has since moved on to weightier things, like helping to run a country).
For those who don’t know, Backbench was designed as a sort of online magazine with a variety of opinion pieces from young-ish people. As always, we welcome contributions.
Because articles will be released on a somewhat erratic schedule, the best thing to do is sign up for an email digest that will be sent out with each new article posting:
Made a few minor additions to the site. I’ve decided to start using Twitter, so I’ve put a Twitter feed on the sidebar. Twitter also links to my Facebook profile (on which, until now, I have not been updating the status line). I’ve also added a link to “Other notable posts” which has a list of some historical posts, just in case you were bored and wanted something to read (but there is some quite good reading there, if I do say so myself).
Made a couple of changes to the backend as well, including a “Liveblog” feature where I easily update a post as a live event unfolds – each update is automatically timestamped (a snide running commentary of a law school lecture, perhaps? :). In anticipation of the iPhone 3G giving me round-the-clock access to email, I also updated the backend email interface to accept jpg, gif and png posting, as well as audioblogging and video posting.
When I have a spare moment at work, I browse through news articles throughout the day and also get some emailed to me from friends. Work sometimes comes in spurts, so I often get interrupted and don’t get time to read through whole articles. I ended up emailing links to myself to read when I got home. After a while I decided it was quicker to be able to use a bookmarklet to post a link to a website, so I made myself a page where I could dump links throughout the day. I found it to be quite useful, so I decided to expand on the idea. I spent all of yesterday making LinkLogr (apologies for the cheesy Web 2.0-style name). Hopefully some people might find it to be a useful tool.
It’s been a long road, but this site has finally reached another milestone today. Someone should start a “blogs over 10” register :). In the process of writing up a post on my lost luggage experience in Tanzania. (It’ll appear in the placeholder post below soon.)
This site is a bit quiet… I go on holidays the week after next, so I might actually be able to post something substantive for once…
It’s been a pretty quiet year sitewise, hopefully a bit more activity for this year. Sort of scary to think that in one more year it’ll be a decade!
If you are reading this, it means that Hear Ye! has been transferred over to the new server. That explains the lack of updates over the last week. I finally got fed up of my old host and got switched over to DreamHost on Shish’s recommendation. I’m very impressed with them – they seem like an excellent hosting provider. I have even been able to resurrect the photo gallery. Let me know if there are any problems. If you’re looking for a host, DreamHost is a good one, entering this coupon will give you $47 off (and give me some money too!): HY47OFF.
Stupid bloody webhost somehow managed to “misplace” several database tables, then closed my support ticket without telling me nor resolving the problem. Luckily, I had made my own backups. Does anyone know any good multi-domain Unix/Linux webhosts? (> 500 meg storage, MySQL, etc, for under US$20/month)?
Blogathon’s starting soon… at 11.00pm.
Just realised I finally hit 4000 posts a few days ago (the 4000th post was the bunch of quicklinks on the 14th).
Australia takes on Croatia in Stuttgart early tomorrow morning. Can’t wait.
I finally got around to running some analysis on HY’s posts. The graphs that came out of it are pretty interesting. Click on the graphs to enlarge them, then you can actually see what I’m talking about below.
Click graph to enlarge
First, the left y-axis is mislabelled – it should be “Hundreds of words”, not thousands. Let’s start with the purple, green and grey lines. You’ll notice here that my rate of posting was most active in 2000 and it has been slowly declining since then. However, if you look at the purple line, the number of words typed over time have been mostly consistent, indicating a rise in the number of words per post (and confirmed by the blue 8 period moving average line). I put in a grey linear trendline for the purple line, showing a fairly even number of words posted, although it looks like it is starting to fall behind again.
I’m not really sure why I’ve become more verbose. One reason is probably that when I put the quicklink system in, that replaced the need to put one post per link. I also think that the past year has been characterised by large trip reports which have helped to keep the word count rolling. But anyway, at this rate, I’ll really be straining a lot to reach half a million words by Hear Ye’s 10 anniversary.
Click graph to enlarge
This graph shows which parts of the day I’m most likely to post. You can see the clear drop during 4.00am – 9.00am (sleeptime), 12.30pm – 2.30pm (lunchtime) and 7.00pm – 9.00pm (dinnertime). There’s a fairly consistent posting period throughout the afternoon, but posting is post likely to be a late night thing for me.
Where the red line is higher than the green line, the posts made tend to be shorter in length. One interesting feature is the 11.00pm – 1.00am period. Seems that I tend to have more to say just after midnight (reflective time, perhaps?).
Click graph to enlarge
This is definitely the most interesting graph. Each red dot represents a post, so theoretically there should be almost 4000 dots on the graph. This graph shows when posts were made throughout the last 8 years.
I did a bit of post-production editing on this graph to highlight some interesting features that I saw. Straight away you can see a dark band through the wee hours of the morning, and I’m a little surprised to see that I’ve never made a post at 7.00am. Incidentally, you now know what time of day I’m at my worst. The biggest clumps of dots fall in early 2000, and late 2001 through to mid-2002. In January 2000, I started a full time work placement at an IT company. They didn’t give me a lot of work to do, and left me to my own devices for the most part. There’s a huge spurt of posts in March 2000, where I redesigned the site (I think mostly on company time, since there was so little work for me to do!). The exact same thing happed in late 2001. The most dense cluster is there. Incidentally, it’s also about the time September 11 happened, so the net was awash with chatter. It’s funny that most of the posts at EDS were in the morning – seems like I’d get into work and have something to say.
Ironically, the three full-time work placements on the graph coincide with the heaviest posting periods. When I went back to uni, even though I had more spare time, I wasn’t using it to post. In fact, when I moved into an apartment near uni in early 2001, there is a very quiet period for the web site. In comparison, the clerkship period (where I worked 3 days a week) around the start of 2005 shows a gap of posting during work hours. That’s pretty much the contrast in how busy I was kept in those different jobs. Now that I think about it, it would be interesting to filter out weekdays and weekends and see those posting patterns.
Each site redesign usually made it easier for me to update the site. In 1998-1999, updates were done by editing static HTML and manually FTPing the file. In early 2000, I switched to a batch FTP updater. I finally implemented a database backend in late 2001 and you can immediately see how much that facilitated posting – but funnily the effect was only temporary. In January 2004, I redid the backend, but they were mainly feature adds and tidying things up – the method of posting was still the same. Nonetheless, there’s a brief spike in posts (must have been the novelty value of having a revamped backend). Finally, in mid-2005 I redesigned the site, but there is no typical spike in posting frequency because I left the country almost straight afterwards. Questions?
A recent mail:
Hi Stu,
I was just in the airport lounge in London, and wanted to check your site to see what’s going on in the world… but look at what happened!
See you soon mate,
Pro
And Happy Chinese New Year, too!
I got a call from someone yesterday telling me that I was one of 11 finalists in the SmartyHost Blog Awards, an Australian blogging competition offering a sizeable cash prize. As with all of these types of competition, it has had its fair share of controversy over selection criteria and judging issues, but that’s unavoidable given its format. Blogs are quite diverse and to compare a newslog with a special interest blog with a general purpose blog (otherwise known as an online diary) is to compare apples and oranges. It’s nonsensical. Nonetheless, I’m grateful for the exposure! I can’t say I’ve ever been linked by the SMH before.
It’s never a good idea trying to upgrade Gallery while travelling… The photo gallery will probably be down until I get back to Singapore.
Update: I sort of got it working again. It’ll just have to look ugly for awhile!
Issue 16 is now out. A lot of content in this one.
Issue 15 of The Backbench is now online. The main article for the issue looks at the topic of international students from the perspective of one.
E-mail from a friend: “You’ll be glad to know that your website is blocked by the hospital IT: due to ‘adult content’. Nights are painful.” It happened again!
I’m aware (and pretty honoured actually) that there are numerous people who I don’t know in real life but have been regularly reading my site for several years. Some leave comments, most don’t. So, I’ve redone the guestbook which has been a spammer’s toilet for the last few years, and stolen Anthony’s idea: I’d appreciate it if you spend a minute dropping a brief message about who you are in there.
Also, still accepting postcard requests, have four so far.
Let me know if anything is broken. There are a few design elements that I’m not happy with – colours and use of too many fonts – but I think the text is more readable. Permalinks now show the individual post with the comments underneath. There’s also the option to view a permalink in the context of the month it appears in. If the post is part of a series, you can also view the whole series, such as for this post. I made a half-assed attempt at converting the layout to use CSS which also means that, unfortunately for Vic, the liquid design is no longer available (though because it’s all in CSS now, it’s just a matter of replacing the default stylesheet, but CSS gives me a headache so I can’t be bothered). You can now send in mastheads in two formats – the panoramic 768×110 format, and the old 400×84 format.
Watch your step, there may be lots of broken stuff about while I fix things up.
Issue 13 of The Backbench is now online (and with a PDF version too!). Here’s a thought – if you have a blog, send in to the Backbench a rant you would otherwise reserve for your blog and give your website a plug in your biography line. Your site might get a bit of exposure from an audience you don’t normally get.
The next issue of The Backbench has gone up. It’s a few months late. We’d like to blame it on the fact that three of the editors absconded overseas during the intervening period and the other two moved house, but the real truth is we’ve been bludging a bit. This month includes an article written from Khartoum, and a piece written by a Cambridge Uni grad (for a non-Aussie perspective on things).
I allowed myself to make a self-indulgent graphic this year, so please excuse me for that. Thanks to all the readers of the site, some who have been visiting for many years now. For the observant, you may notice that today I’ve broken with a 7 year old tradition on this site – feel free to guess what it is. Anyway, onwards… 2005 should be an exciting year. I also should get around to doing some Plastic Bag style graphs on my posting habits – if anyone is interested in doing this and wants a raw data file of my posts, let me know.
For the gamblers and armchair statisticians in the audience, I wrote a Labouchere simulator. My cousin had a theory that it’s better than the Martindale System (which I agree with), and when you use it with Baccarat, where the player has an advantage if betting on the Banker (ignoring commission), might be an alternative to Blackjack. I don’t think it is, but it was an interesting theory.
Issue 11 of The Backbench has been released. It’s a good issue, if I do say so myself. It’s also available for download as a schmick looking PDF.
The Backbench’s 10th issue is now out. It’s naturally focused on the election this Saturday.
Backbench Issue 9 is out. There’s an announcement mailing list you can sign up to on the site now to get notified as new issues are released. Click on the Google ads on the left side if you feel charitable and drop us a few cents!
You’ll notice a new box on the left hand side of the page entitled “Watchlist”. If you visit any of the comments pages, you’ll also see a small box on them which allows you to add a comment thread to your watchlist. Doing this will place it into the Watchlist box. Whenever a comment is added to any thread you are watching, the thread will be flagged for you. If you have nothing on your watchlist, the watchlist box defaults to showing the five most voluminous threads which have been posted to in the last month. The whole idea of this is to give people easy access to active threads, even after they’ve been bumped way down the page by newer posts, or want to know when a question they’ve posted on specific thread is potentially answered. If it doesn’t work properly (it needs cookies enabled), let me know.
Made some minor additions to the RSS feed. I use the free and simple to use Feedreader for receiving my XML feeds.
Backbench now has a new issue announcement mailing list you can sign up to. Look on the left hand side of the front page for the subscription box.
A small handful of dim photos from last Sunday’s concert here.
Issue 8 of The Backbench is now out. I go out on a limb this time and argue that McDonald’s is not evil.
Updated the About page with a bit of code to automatically update my age. Also inserted another small section on that page. Ahh yes… it’s that stuvac procrastination thing again.
After a pretty long bludge period, Issue 6 of the Backbench is now online. Bigger and (hopefully) better than before.
Does anyone here draw cartoons by any chance? We could use a good cartoonist.
My web host disabled command line PHP, which means all my cron jobs which are PHP scripts now have to be rewritten.
Added a weather indicator in the sidebar (above “Alternatives”). It’s parsed and cached from the BOM every hour. If the Bureau changes their page structure, it’ll wreck the whole thing, so hopefully that doesn’t happen.
Issue 5 of Backbench is now online after a prolonged hiatus. Just curious, how many of you actually read the articles on it?
To address the liquid vs non-liquid layout debate, people who prefer a liquid layout for larger resolution screens and who don’t mind viewing long lines of text, can click on the “liquid” link down the left sidebar to change to said template. As usual, if there are bugs, let me know.
By popular demand, The List is back. Hit the “show whole list” to see it.
It’s here. To be honest, the site doesn’t look all that different on the front-end. It’s a format that’s worked well for a while. It looks perhaps a little tighter, but it’s essentially the same. The back-end has been redesigned from the ground up, and I’ve put in some features I’ve been wanting to put in for a long time now.
Changelog
To Do
That should do it for now.
Hear Ye! turns 6 years old today. It’s a little strange when you consider that in the near future, there will be a bunch of journal sites running around with archives that chronicle over a decade of life’s happenings. I would say that that sort of longevity is quite difficult to achieve if you were to keep a pen and paper diary instead, just because of the disadvantages of physical media.
If you’re wondering why there’s been a dearth of posts on this site, it’s because the site’s currently undergoing a long-awaited extensive redesign. Also, I’ll be in Melbourne over the long weekend doing some touristy stuff (I’ve never been to Melbourne before, funnily enough) and catching a match at the Australian Open.
I’ve decided that I won’t implement MMS posting just yet. I intended to get it working for my overseas trip. I got around to writing up everything (the MIME parsing code, writing attachments to hard drive, constructing the post text etc) but I realised that I have no idea about how MMS works overseas. Firstly, the system is different from SMSes – I actually had to enable GPRS with Vodafone to get MMSes to work and I don’t know if, when roaming on overseas networks, GPRS/WAP will be automatically enabled and whether I can send MMSes. Secondly, the format of MMS messages (which are essentially e-mails with attachments) seems to differ with the network which may trip up the parsing code I currently have, and there’s no way to test otherwise. And there’s no way I’m debugging code while I’m on holiday :).
Technical note: Posting to your blog with a mobile device (called Moblogging which is a stupid term, imho) is not difficult. Essentially, most mobile devices (PDAs, mobiles, Blackberry and so on) can send e-mails. SMSes need to be routed through an SMS-to-Email gateway, such as Excell. They arrive at your mail server and get processed by a script. You might run a cron job to run your script which checks for mail every so often. You might automatically pipe it to your script in through a .forward file, or with Procmail, or similar. The script then parses the email (which is where the bulk of the work lies), then posts it to the blog (via a SQL call, XML-RPC call, etc).
Has anyone noticed how different countries call mobile phones different things? In the US it’s cell phones. In Australia it’s mobile phones. In Asia it’s hand phones.
Issue 4 of The Backbench is now out. We’ve got a bit about ethics and investing, Italians and what they show on TV, Hicks and Habib and of course Australia and Iraq.
Backbench issue 3 is out. Check it out.
Issue 2 of Backbench has just been released. Check it out.
I got hacked yesterday. Well, not this site, but this one, which I designed. It was hacked by an anti-war group. Funny, that. (Image of the hack. 188kb.)
Update: The Federal police got called, then it turned out that the hack occurred server-wide at the US hosting company, so they called in the FBI. It seems like it’s just a coincidence that the anti-war message also happened to affect a Liberal web site.
Apparently, JP Morgan content filters have censored my site. Received this message from a friend: “Got a bit bored at work today, so attempted to view your web site. Guess what? Its banned under the category… ‘SEX content’. hahaha….” Amusing.
Today is Hear Ye’s 5th anniversary! Woohoo!
I went to a 50th birthday party a few weeks ago, the mother of a best friend. It was a huge occasion – she had invited friends who flew in from England and Southeast Asia for it. There were a barrage of speeches, which had revealed the antics of her in her teens, of her and her husband in their 20s, and so on. It was strange when I had the opportunity to listen to Mrs C’s best friend from university gossipping to us about Mrs C’s relationship issues of 30 years ago. It’s always strange to imagine how your parents might have been when they were young. Friends have often wondered why parents berate them for wearing certain clothing when aging photos show parents in attire equally as revealing (it was the era of miniskirts). We all latch onto anyone who has goss about our parents’ pasts.
All this vintage gossip normally exists as the unmentioned details in all our parents’ dark and mysterious pasts. Perhaps written in some lost teenage diary kept by mum, but more often than not secreted away in their minds, only to be freed by a kid’s incessant nagging. “Dad, how did you and mum really meet up?”
The world has since changed. Records of memories can now exist in an intangible form, yet be outside of our minds. Online diaries, weblogs and journals in the digital age roam the Internet freely, archiving thoughts, opinions and life events of those who keep them. Perpetual records of our life, infinitely duplicable, accessible globally, existing for as long as we wish to preserve them. I never had this perspective of my site when I started it, but now that I have surprised myself and managed to keep it going for so long, the record-keeping aspect of an online journal is but another reason why I keep one.
I wonder how the future generations will view the words that we type today, back when we were young.
“Dad, how can you tell me to not binge drink when you were pissed off your nut for three consecutive weeks in 2003?”
Just put in a couple fixes in response to the comments – it’s now scrollable (can’t believe I forgot to do that), and URLs starting with http:// will be automatically linked, don’t use HTML to do it.
Finally found a large block of time to do some development on this site. I’ve introduced post commenting. (I will be more likely to reply directly to e-mails sent to me than via the commenting system, though.) Let me know if there are any bugs.
I’ve also updated the stats page.
I got the RSS feed finally working, I hope. It needed a one line change of code, but, the powers of procrastination were strong.
Hrm, I just checked my guestbook for the first time in over a year, and amongst the usual mix of positive and abusive comments, I find something much more offensive… the guestbook equivalent of spammers. Appalling.
Thanks to Pete who created a couple more title pics for me: 1, 2. And just in case anyone from PwCC visits this site (and I was told at my interview, they have)… it’s only a joke :)
Erm, does anyone have any idea what is causing that Javascript error on load up? It just started happening all of a sudden one day… mail me please.
Back online, as you can see. I reduced a few query calls, and most queries should be using indexes now so the cpu load this site has hopefully won’t cause my hosting company to complain. Here is a useful guide for optimising MySQL queries.
That’s right, today marks four years of Hear Ye! That’s 1461 days…
Well, as you can probably tell, my posting rate dropped off somewhat last year but infrequent posts is more due to lack of time rather than lack of motivation. This year is fairly big for me, being my final year of uni. The Great Job Hunt starts in a couple months and the industry is not looking flash… Nonetheless, you’ll be reading about it all in due time. So, on to the 5th year. Gee, this site sorta feels ancient!
New raytraced logo. Thanks Shish!
I’ve always been curious about statistics and I’ve never seen a stats listing on any e/n or weblog site before. So, I generated a page of them about this site. Due to the number of database queries required, I’ve decided not to make the page dynamic. I’ll either set up a cronjob to run a script that will regenerate the page everyday, or just run it manually… If you have any other stats you’d like to see, drop me a mail.
I honestly don’t know how I managed to fit in 183 posts in May ’00.
Just browsing the geographical stats from my counter logs. I found it quite amazing to discover what countries some visitors to this site come from. Interesting that from a third of the world there have only been 10 visits – 9 from India (population 1bn), 1 from China (population 1.2bn). Granted people from there have no reason to visit this site, but there’ve been over 110 visits from Saudi Arabia, 4 from Namibia, 4 from the Faroe Islands…
100+ visits
USA, Australia, Canada, UK, New Zealand, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, France, Belgium.
<100
Finland, Portugal, Norway, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, Romania, Denmark, Israel, Austria, Spain, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, Ireland, Brunei Darussalam, Mexico, Poland, Hong Kong, Hungary, Russian Federation.
<10
Taiwan, India, Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Iceland, Namibia, Slovak Republic, Indonesia, Faroe Islands, Turkey, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Oman, Bulgaria, Bermuda, Nicaragua, San Marino, Chile, Philippines, Slovenia, Macedonia, Trinidad and Tobago, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Luxembourg, Venezuela, Jordan, Lithuania, Colombia, Egypt, Zimbabwe, China, Lebanon, Nepal, Yemen, Paraguay, South Korea, Uruguay, Ukraine.
Ok this page was meant to go up at 10am AEST. I slept in until noon. Oh well.
Welcome back. The site has been offline for a couple weeks now for an update. On the front-end side, you’ll see that not much has changed. The back-end, however, has changed completely. Before, you see, the backend consisted of me, a flat-text database and a copy of Frontpage. The backend has given me much headache. I’ve been developing it on my machine which has php4. Unfortunately my web host only has php4 as a cgi executable and not compiled as an Apache module. In effect, this means my code uses some critical functions that work on my computer, but break horribly on this server because of the older version of php3 in use. So, I spent a fair bit of time coding workarounds for these problems.
Anyhow, from your perspective the following things have changed:
From my perspective, maintaining this site is a lot easier. Let me know when you find any bugs.
Test post. This debugging is driving me up the wall.
The manual data entry process of moving the archives into a database continues. I’m up to July 2000 (1800+ posts, 200k+ words). It’s interesting reading back on some of my previous posts. Some things I can’t believe I wrote and some things I don’t remember I wrote.
The portal is momentarily down. FTP is having trouble transferring the file for some obscure reason.
Manual population of the DB with the archives continues. I’m up to March 1999 (which comprises 493 posts totalling around 55k words). Copying and pasting text from html code generated with an ancient version of Frontpage is not fun. Frontpage 97 must’ve violated every html standard under the sun.
Cleaned up the portal.
Well not quite, but I, pornographic distributor extraordinaire (hah!), got this in the e-mail which I thought was quite amusing (and evidently, so did the prankster who submitted the URL in the first place):
It has recently been brought to our attention that you are, or have been, in violation of the Net Authority Acceptable Internet Usage Guidelines. It has been reported that you both distribute and view offensive materials over the Internet.
Net Authority has investigated these claims by checking your webpage at http://hearye.fissure.org and verified that they are true.
As a result, your personal information has been added to one or more Net Authority Internet offender databases. Your information will be stored in the databases until enough evidence has been gathered against you to warrant further actions. To help avoid such a situation, it is strongly recommended that you cease your immoral actions on the Internet at once.
You have been added to the following databases:
– Hate Literature Offenders
– Pornography Offenders
– Child Pornography Offenders
– Bestiality Offenders
– Homosexual Pornography Offenders
– Interracial Pornography Offenders
– General Blasphemy OffendersIf you would like more information about Net Authority or the Net Authority Acceptable Internet Usage Guidelines, you may read the details at http://www.netauthority.org/. It is imperative that you fully understand the guidelines if you wish to avoid further prosecution.
While the individual who reported your actions to us will remain anonymous, he or she wished to pass these words on to you:
“Stu, you are one dirty bastard!”
May God be with you as you struggle to overcome these evil impulses. You will be in our prayers at night.
God speed,
Net Authority Investigations Department
investigations@netauthority.org
http://www.netauthority.org/
“Interracial porngraphy offenders”? What the? Oh so it’s not ok to be racist, but it’s alright to discriminate pornography based on race? Interesting categorisation, eh?
On impulse, I whipped up a crossword word finder. Not that I do crosswords, anyhow, but some of you might. At the moment, the dictionary files the words are being pulled from are incomplete (I am using the linux words file plus another with 200,000 words). Anyone know where I can get a plain text file of a dictionary of English words (no definitions)?
1. Thinking of switching over from manual updates to a PHP system (gasp!).
2. Continuing work on the rather verbose diary of my roundworld trip (current word count: 14,000).
Might as well say this now, as Internet access in Nepal is by no means guaranteed (but it is available there, which may come as a surprise to some). Hear Ye!, my regular site, will be three years old in one week, on the 28th of January. That’s 1096 days of not-always-constant updating. On to the 4th year then!
Finally complete, Up Over Down Under is a travel diary that a group of friends and I are going to be keeping updated whilst overseas. Check it out, I’ll be updating to that site instead of Hear Ye! for the 2 and a half months I’m away. You can request a postcard from us too.
I put up the article I co-wrote for a uni assignment. It’s about the Napster v RIAA case and covers what Napster is arguing in court, and what the RIAA is arguing. There’s also stuff about Australian legislation and how it deals with Napster-type situations.
I know, I know – the Olympics are well and truly over. I’m still trying to think of something to replace the medal tally with.
It’s getting there. I’ve got to port it from my computer to the server and make sure the PHP doesn’t break along the way…
… girl bloggers, Fissure’s hosting one of ’em. Hi Kyp :).
Added a search form to the sidebar, at the bottom. It only indexes Hear Ye!, and not Real.
Made my own http header fetcher. It does what it does (which is not much).
Go sign my guestbook, if you haven’t already, please.
Ok out of curiousity, Solo is running a little coding experiment to give you a chance to see how the same task is implemented in the three server-side processing systems of Cold Fusion (CF), PHP Hypertext Pre-processor (PHP) and Active Server Pages (ASP). There is a small, ordinary task involving database access and querying, output to html, saving output to file and transfering it off the server via the smtp (e-mail) and FTP protocols. If you know any of the above languages, and know how to do at least the first two steps (db query + html output) then give it a shot – it’s a good way to learn. I’ve mirrored all the information found off Solo’s site here – should contain everything you need. Send solutions to me or Solo.
Wrote a new article on a couple of web site tips you may or may not know (custom error pages, favourite icons, passwording directories and banning people).
Thanks to Bonhomme for this new banner.
Links to sunnies pictures (3 posts below).
Extreme-DM hosed my stats. Again.
Whoever made those comments about my mum on the soapbox a couple days ago is one bastard. (Wasn’t me – I never post to the soapbox.)
Got them right here.
I’d forgotten all about this: Search List-en Archives.
Added a shopping portal to the portal. I only am affiliated with Amazon :)
Here’s the article I was in. (I took out my pic cos I reckon it’s crap heh… yeah I know – I’m no fun at all :). Some of my thoughts about the article: I’m not 19, I’m 18. I did not say I “collect EN [sic]” – that sentence doesn’t even make sense. I recall saying the site was E/N. Not all “interesting” news I post about is useless – some of it can be significant. And I don’t think anyone buys that psychology mumbo-jumbo that Kip Williams spouted. Nor did I get a direct link/plug (so I got bugger all hits from it). But hey, it’s a tabloid :). I keep this site because it’s fun, engaging, develops my design and technical skills and it’s memorable (in the way I can look back on events in life and the world). I don’t bare my soul here (though I may choose to do so should I be in the mood, that’s missing the point – this isn’t a diary).
Sydney-sider? Check out Page 16 of the Daily Telegraph. Yes, Hear Ye! and a reference to the E/N community made it to print media :) However it seems they lost my URL and misquoted me, but that’s the media for you :)
If this page is loading up slow for you, I suggest you select the “shrink list” link above The List (on the sidebar). This will permanently chop the list down to about 12 sites for you (click expand list again to view all sites).
Bonhomme De Neige points to this.
Thanks to Phil for generating this. It’s been added to the pool. Feel free to submit one (attachments ok).
I don’t believe it… the soapbox on this page has been a broken link for over two weeks and not one person told me?!
Today, the total number of mails sent through list-en topped 1000. Mind you, half of those were one line e-mails, but still, it’s a milestone of sorts!
Thanks everyone for the feedback, which has been positive. The most used words describing it are “nice” and “slick” (I think you guys need to expand your vocab! :). About the black text on white – sonic says that “Text is easier to read over a white bg and all.” although Bonhomme de Neige says, “White text on black background looks a lot better (and is much easier to read) IMHO.” Oh well, can’t please everyone. I reckon the two are just as good, they just lend themselves differently to different styles of design.
Hey, it’s lunch, and there’s a bug in the posting script… it’s screwing up the AM/PMs. Ah well, eat first.
Not much for me to do at work, so I just spent the last couple hours working on a new RemoteUpdate CGI script and has the capability of archiving the remote updates so they can be merged with the “real” manually added posts with the click of a button.
One more masthead, courtesy of sonic. Viewable here directly. Thanks mate!
Added a couple more Hear Ye! mastheads. If anyone wants to make 475×125 title jpegs for this site, feel free to mail them in to me.
I think it’s time for another one of these. Please go sign this now. Thanks.
Hear Ye’s 2nd Anniversary!
Wow, 2 years old. Has it really been that long?
Two years ago, on this day, I made my first proper post to Hear Ye! Exactly two years of archives accumulated over more than 700 days of posting. Excuse me while my head swells to thrice its normal size for a few moments :) That is quite a feat given the relative rarity of e/n sites that have existed for even a single, full year. If you’re wondering why I have that ridiculously long list of sites to the left, it’s because I was here from the beginning.
This site started in the beginning of ’98, a year before the term “everything/nothing” came to exist. I updated it for a full year before I got any decent amount of visitors. Today, the hits I get in a month are more than I got in the whole of ’98. The point is, hits are nice, but they are not everything. They are not my primary motivation for keeping this site. I write, because, as I did two years ago, it is a hobby for me. I get no money from it (in fact, I lose money from it). I read my archives and am reminded of events I would have otherwise forgotten. I get interesting mails from people all the way around the world. Do not start up an e/n site if your main reason is hits. With the amount of sites that pop up each week, even buying your very own domain name will not guarantee popularity (but it does help, I’ll give you that :).
There’s been a lot of bitching about the “e/n scene”. People complain of being bored by what they regard as a “passing fad” where everyone jumps on the bandwagon (or the boat, as Ramblings so infamously put it :). Equally, there has been disillusionment by people who keep e/n sites – those who lose interest and motivation in maintaining their site. Finally, there those that say, “I’m not really an e/n site, but if you really must, I guess you could call me that.” (And aren’t there a multitude of people that have said that?) Why do people say this? It’s true that many sites start up with no real goals and just die, but there are also many sites that have been around for a long time and don’t look like going any time soon. How do the sites that have been around for a long time stick around? And why do so many sites just disappear after a few months? Here’s my opinion, and it’s mainly conjectural.
E/N sites are inherently personal sites on public display. People write about what interests themselves. Since everyone is different, it can’t be expected that everyone visiting the site will find what they write interesting. If you try spending so much time only writing for the visitors, the site is no longer personal. You’re catering for the public, and as a result your site probably shows none of your character. You have no strong interest in what you’re doing, and as a result, there’s no motivation to keep writing. Write on things that interest you – things that you might enjoy reading later in life. It’s hard to keep doing something day in, day out, in life that you don’t find interesting, and are getting nothing for. You’ll find you get visitors from people who have an interest in what you have to say. In a cyberworld where population numbers in the hundreds of millions, you’re bound to find a few people out there who will listen. As I see it, an e/n site is essentially an electronic journal, with the added element of public interaction from a common audience that has formed into a loose community of sorts.
End harangue.
Anyway, thanks to all you regular visitors and a special shout to all those who were around in 98 and are still there (you know who you guys are :). You’ve made this site all the more enjoyable to keep.
Sleeping in, that is :). I also archived a bit of this month’s posts to speed loading times slightly.
E-mail here to sms me on my mobile. Keep the message to under 140 characters (Or it will be truncated). And no, I don’t have a vibrating battery, so you can’t really send messages like “tuck me under your scrotum now.” (but you can try) Ahem. Sorry. [And remember mobile phones don’t recognise HTML so send mail in plain text! Duh]
That’s right, a scheduled period of no regular updates (not that I have been updating regularly, anyhow) from 24th December, 1999 to 8th January, 2000. I’ll be off to hot and humid Singapore, flying off on Christmas Eve, followed by a week long foray into wintery Hong Kong (city of cheap “OEM software” ;) which includes a daytrip into China. It appears we need a separate visa to get into China. I thought China retook Hong Kong, and thus since Hong Kong was now annexed with China, only one visa would be required? I guess the HK “Special Administrative Region” is still quite separate from mainland China. I’ve got a bit of a shopping list which is dominated by technological products. Singapore’s hardware is quite a bit cheaper than in Sydney (it helps that most hard drives are manufactured there, and that Creative Labs is a Singaporean company). I’ll be looking for a 2+ megapixel digital camera there, along with an international warranty for it. Which one to choose though? The Kodak DC290 looks quite good, but it’s probably out of my price range. Suggestions?
In the meantime, I set up a quick and dirty CGI script so I can update this page via the web, should I get the time, inclination, and access to a web browser. I’ll be updating between now and the 24th though, so don’t go anywhere just yet.
Yeah, been neglecting updates lately. I know that.
Wow. Net free for a whole week. Well, actually the truth is I was in rehab for internet addiction, so I couldn’t really use a mouse while I was in that strait jacket :). Thus, apologies for the distinct lack of updating.
Nonetheless, I haven’t been completely lazy. At long last I’ve moved the whole site to it’s own subdomain and done a redesign of sorts. Please let me know of any bad links or anything that’s broken. Most changes have been behind the scenes work with dynamic stuff (you no longer have to view the giant e/n listing if you don’t want to!). With this “version” of Hear Ye!, I’ve dropped Netscape 3 support, but to compensate, I’ve jumped on the themes bandwagon and offered a text-only version of the site (as well as a tongue-in-cheek weblog layout). Constructive criticism or any other mail would be appreciated. Plugs would be even more appreciated :).
I’ve begun labelling some pages with copyright notices dated for the year 2000. How cool does that look? There’s something about 2000 that makes anything it’s stuck on look futuristic (except when it’s paired with “non-compliant”).
One more video, eleven more pictures here.
From the humour page, two more pics (bottom of pics section) & one more text file.
This might keep you entertained for a little while. I just wrote up a new, updated humour page (yes that’s humour with a “u”, it’s no typo).
Just checked out my referer logs, clicked through a link and came across something that amused me.
Yes that’s Hear Ye! in 5th… apparently for linking that political quiz. It’ll be gone from the list tomorrow (with luck)
Ahhh. New content! This time I’ve written a techie article on E-Mail Headers. Good general knowledge on something we use every day.
Another one. As seen in Dumb and Dumber (damn that movie sucked). It’s right at the bottom.
Free web hosting at a non-corporate site.
Modified it for a limited time. Now it’s sorta like one of those games where each person in a group adds a paragraph to a story, except that they only have the paragraph the previous person wrote, to work on.
Consigned prior posts this month to the archive. Because I felt like it.
One addition to it, in the “with your mouth” section here (thanks to Phil).
A…
squib \Squib\, v. i. To throw squibs; to utter sarcatic or severe reflections; to contend in petty dispute; as, to squib a little debate.
on…
teenage adj : being of the age 13 through 19; “teenage mothers”; “the teen years” [syn: adolescent]
adolescent adj 1: relating to or peculiar to or suggestive of an adolescent; “adolescent problems” 2: being of the age 13 through 19; “teenage mothers”; “the teen years” 3: displaying or suggesting a lack of maturity; “adolescent insecurity”; “jejune responses to our problems”; “their behavior was juvenile”; “puerile jokes” 4: in the state of development between puberty and maturity; “adolescent boys and girls” n : a juvenile between the onset of puberty and maturityangst n : an acute but unspecific feeling of anxiety; usually reserved for philosophical anxiety about the world or about personal freedom
Because I ran out of time and want to go to sleep now.
Seems we have a horny AOLer on the soapbox :).
This is a queer one. How many of these tricks do you know?
I really don’t care what people put on the soapbox, but when it’s a post that takes up 500 kilobytes of diskspace, I do care. It costs money. So don’t, or I’ll ban your ass, Mr Block-rockin’ Beats :Þ.
Contrary to popular opinion, I am not schizophrenic. There is only one of us. um… I mean me. Yes I meant me! Sorry, slip of the tongue! No! Don’t put me back in that cell!
Archived half of this month’s entries. (See bottom of page)
Added response to the water torture analogy post (see yesterday’s post).
People are using the soapbox like it’s (I assume) a search engine. Ok, so you might make the mistake once. But typing “florida” into the box twice can only mean a certain measure of stupidity being displayed.
Apologies for not producing any juicy bits of news or any links… I’ve been flat out lately and haven’t been able to spend much time on the Internet surfing about.
I noticed that a few people are coming to this page from search engines looking for “joke.win.stupid”. If you are looking for info on this “virus” (that’s not a virus), click here and go down to the entry dated Thursday February 4, entitled “Virus???”.
In the spirit of one-upsmanship, KillKrazy has implemented DHTML that is, quite frankly, made me jealous cos it’s much more schmick than mine. The javascript he used (Overlib) is available here as free for personal use, should you wish to implement it. Here’s a nice site showing what the script can do (4th gen browsers only). It’s in French, but don’t let that stop you. Might be time to uh… update my DHTML.
Just a quick note to say I do not, have not, and will not write anything to the soapbox. Everything written to it (except the very first message posted to it) was written by some mysterious entity residing somewhere on Earth (I hope).
www.badastronomy.com has some info on astronomical facts, misconceptions in astronomy and other interesting stuff. I especially liked the tearing apart of Armageddon and Deep Impact‘s scientific accuracy (but I still reckon Armageddon’s a kick-ass film).
New article up: Not Your Usual Chain Mail Letter. It’s not really an article, just a cut and paste job on an e-mail I received.
Hear Ye celebrates its 1st Anniversary!
I made it! When I started writing this page exactly one year ago, the longest I’d ever kept a site/page going for was a couple months. It’s not exactly easy keeping a site constantly updated for a period as long as a year. The reassuring thing is that I still have the motivation I had a year ago to keep writing. Anyway I haven’t written for almost 10 days, partly because of the arrival of the new computer and the lack of transfer speed over a parallel cable :) – took a while for the data transfer.
In response to entering a new year of slavery to this page, I’ve completed the site update I’ve been promising. The update is not on this page, but it’s to the rest of the site. The whole site has been renamed (though the journal will remain titled as Hear Ye!). Here’s what’s been updated – check ’em out :
(I’ll shoot you if you don’t use a suitably modern 4th generation web browser.)
Running IE4 or NS4? Run your mouse over the general news links on the side bar to the left. I will have to cut this page down later. It’s really chewing up the bandwidth like crazy. And the fact that it’s all in one table means you have to wait for the whole thing to load before you see anything. I apologise profusely.
It’s almost done… just got a CGI to write and about three more pages to do. And I tracked down vaccine’s site address where he’s started updating again… the Christmas Island domain one at www.vaccine.cx, but I linked to where that redirects you.
I just noticed I was dating each entry with 1998. Silly me. No one noticed either, it seems. Silly you. All fixed up now.
Sorry for the specialised posts, but it’s all that’s been going on for the past couple days. I should be typing up a bit on the new Star Trek film and some other stuff onnce things stop happening :). Words for thought makes a return today as well.
Apologies for the long loading times… I know they’re getting longer, but I’m too lazy to archive more than once a month :). But I’m sure you’re surfing with 5 windows at a time, aren’t you?
Starting another site design – not of this journal, but of the rest of the site. I haven’t been really happy with the look and content of the other pages. I think I’ll try and structure it so that I can neglect them for lengthy periods of time :).
Just one of my sporadic requests for you to sign it. It’s getting lonely.
Um. I will get some. Promise. It’s just that I haven’t been at home very much for the past week. Been out every single day, and never been to bed before 1am (maybe even 2… dunno can’t remember). It should be quieter next week.
While it looks like I’m being lazy, the daily quote is being updated everyday. However, if you keep getting an old quote, it is because your browser is pulling out the page from its cache. I don’t know why this happens (I think maybe it has something to do with being loaded up into a popup window. Anyway, just clear your cache or refresh the window (refreshing window doesn’t work in IE4, though) to see the current day’s quote.
I was checking my page referrals and I came across some weird search requests. Piss funny, though:
“Keanu Reeves is gay”, “+fish +chip +bitch +pauline”, “boris yeltsin vodka” and “Yeltsin+vodka”.
Took off Car Odometer. Irrelevant and useless.
Added “Hearsay” – a daily quote
I’m at home studying all day now (14 hours of day to get through – man that is so tedious), so I gotta use up those internet hours somehow… so I spend my time downloading heaps of stuff while I’m off in my room studying (I think I got 50+ megs of stuff today – my liddle Getright program has been churning away… over half a gig in half a month). Anyway being online the whole day is interesting, cos every hour or so when I take a break, I check the puta and there’s people on icq with all sorts of n/a and away messages. So I thought of this way to keep updating the journal without making long entries… It’s the ICQ quote of the day (how lame… this is what endless studying does to you :). Updated daily or at least, sort of daily. Click here to see today’s quote (you must be as bored as me :) :
It’s here! The alleged “top secret project” I’ve been involved in is here. It arrives in the form of Digital Discourse – a cataloging site containing links to quality journal sites. Heh. Enjoy. Link is here. The link is also on the side bar.
The picture on the side is a pic of my maths teacher. Eccentric? Very. Meanwhile, work on that Something continues… I’m not saying what it is right now, but I hope it turns out well, and should be interesting…
Heh. Someone finally decided to be a smart-arse and type “something” – literally.
Big update tonight because once school starts tomorrow, I’m not going to get the chance to do many more lengthy updates (though I’ll try)… Results of the exams will be back Friday <shudder>. I also noticed I’m using ellipses ( … ) and smilies ( :) ) way too often. I gotta cut back before I start typing my essays with smilies… :) — see! There I go again.
As you can no doubt see – I’ve done a major page layout change. Looks nicer (I hope :). And look – if you haven’t signed the guestbook, could you do so? And type something meaningful – nothing about league, please – and leave your name/nickname – not someone elses! If you want a comment on AFL use the soapbox.
Added Cranial Disorder to the General News Sites – a site just like mine (with emphasis on music). Blame Shlonglor for all this :) j/k.
Added link to the guestbook above – do you realise it exists?? Well now you do.
This page needs a major layout change… more curves :) I’ll see what I can knock up within the next few days. Should be something good.
New one coming… sooner or later :)
Fixed up the problem (“document contains no data”). Maybe that error’s the cause of the lack of entries :) Sign it Now, please!
If you got to this journal directly, click here to see the main page.
The front page of the site is 80% done… still making a few pictures and so on. New poll put up.
It’s up with a topic I’ve been debating with my parents. Go there and try it out – it’s also on the bar on the side. Link here.
Wrote a poll script which actually works. Just have to find out where I can put it on this page.
Can’t be bothered updating them.
Yup. Not complete, but suitable for viewing.
For all the “fringe” news bits and anecdotes, visit the Sydney Morning Herald’s site’s Column 8. The link’s in the left column, or for Netscape 3 users, far down the bottom of the page. Netscape doesn’t like Javascript in tables. Grrr.
I’ll be instituting a mail form (soon, hopefully) to make it easier for anyone to post in info about anything designed for this journal. People like filling out forms more than typing in email. :)
For some reason, I love statistics and graphs and stuff like that. Today I signed up with showstat.com, which provides info on who visits this page. Not a paranoia thing, but a curiousity thing. On my old page, I found that people were visiting from everywhere in the world, and I mean everywhere – for example, the United Arab Emirates among numerous others, can you believe?
The “why write” section has been written. Now to create a nice header pic and to upload all the stuff.
The why write a journal should be up soon.
A modification to the journal page – added words for thought. Don’t worry – it won’t always be as morbid as the one currently (the Leviticus quotes). It might be quotes such as “I smoked marijuana but did not enhale” (from the “oral sex is not sex” man). I’ll update it whenever something new pops up. And I’ll probably move these words into the Random Quotes thingy at the bottom of the page (need to make a note of this).
February’s entries are here.
I got this e-mail from a guy who runs the company that has the site www.fissure.com. Unlikely to happen I reckon :) :
I admire your company name. (Notice ours?) If anybody asks me to help them with web site design, I’ll know where to send them. Likewise, if anybody inquires to you about Project Management training or the like, please send them our way. I haven’t had our identities confused yet, but who knows? In case you were curious, we’ve been in business since 1988.
Sincerely,
Terry Tilford
VP – terry_tilford@fissure.com
Check the bottom of this page for the link to the archive.
Got sent the final Fissure Logo. Looks cool, eh? Thanks to Shish once again. The next thing to do is animate it in some way, (relatively) easily done since it’s been 3D modelled and not just a touched up 2D pic.
Well I sent the Fissure Logo to David (the pov-raying freak :) to render it to 3D. Three hours later, and ten versions later, we came up with something that looked quite good, although there were rendering flaws. I’ll post the final version later, and maybe it’ll be animated too. It looks really good so far, though.
Well since you’re reading this, it means that I’ve uploaded the journal. Um, that means in all the previous entries I’ve sorta been talking to nobody :Þ. Nevermind, if you’re bored you can just keep reading. You might be interested in how I lost my glasses in Wet ‘n’ Wild (Jan 29’s entry) etc.
I just discovered that Zip has enabled server-side includes (.shtml files). Legends!
Heh. Stupid me, I was uploading in binary mode. Boy do I feel stupid =).
Nothing much today except the damn CGis aren’t working. Crap crap crap. Something wrong with Notepad’s carriage returns or something weird.
I decided I’m gonna upload this page in a few days, and I updated the zip homepage to notify people of the new site being designed. Woohoo! I just got CGI access! Now I can write my own scripts.
Zip is a legendary ISP. If you live in Sydney or any of the surrounding areas (they’ve even got hubs in Camden/Campbelltown, where I am), go for Zip! OzEmail charges $300 for CGI last time I checked, Acay didn’t support user CGI, Cybernet needed me to mail in my scripts because of “security reasons” (hmmm…). I’ve gone through 3 ISPs and then I found Zip (this is beginning to sound like an ad). I looked up the help page about CGIs, it aksed me to mail support. Two mails to support (the first one sent an auto-answer mail, telling me to resend if I wanted a human), and I had access. 3 1/2 days, pretty good.
With the launch of Req’s new site, I’ve started planning my new site (Stuart’s Domain – but maybe I’ll call it something else), of which this journal is the newest addition, and only part that’s been created for it so far. It’ll be a total renovation of the interface, and layout, with changes to content (more static pages and much much less pages that have to be updated). What Network Fissure is (yeah yeah pretentious, but better pretentious and admit it, than lame or diminutive :) is just the sites me and Requiem/Shish/David have put together (and anyone else who wants in, but I doubt that’ll be anyone). A logo will displayed on pages that have been created by one or both of us. There’s one on the bottom of the page below the Legalese. Woooo just made it … only two minutes to tomorrow :)
Why I wrote this journal will be made clear when I have the chance to write the appropriate page on it. I’ll stick all this in a journal directory, and also a link from an aboutme directory.
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9:08pm 
