Dan Q
This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
I only fully relax when I’m in the countryside…
I only relax when I’m in the countryside. It’s not a convenient truth, especially when London is my home and one of the most exciting and eclectic cities in the world – not to mention one of the only places I’ve managed to successfully secure full-time work!! (pending probation) I’ve viewed London through the lens…
At a little over 590 thousand words and spanning 1,349 pages, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is almost-certainly among the top ten longest single-volume English-language novels. It’s pretty fucking huge.
I only discovered A Suitable Boy this week (and haven’t read it – although there are some good reviews that give me an inclination to) when, on a whim, I decided to try to get a scale of how much I’d ever written on this blog and then decided I needed something tangible to use as a comparison. Because – give or take – that’s how much I’ve written here, too:
Of course, there’s some caveats that might make you feel that the total count should be lower:
On the other hand, there are a few reasons that it perhaps ought to be higher:
Of course, my blog doesn’t really have a plot like A Suitable Boy (might compare well to the even wordier Atlas Shrugged, though…): it’s a mixture of mostly autobiographical wittering interspersed with musings on technology and geekery and board games and magic and VR and stuff. I’m pretty sure that if I knew where my life would be now, 18 years ago (which is approximately when I first started blogging), I’d have, y’know, tried to tie it all together with an overarching theme and some character development or something.
Or perhaps throw in the odd plot twist or surprise: something with some drama to keep the reader occupied, rather than just using the web as a stream-of-conciousness diary of whatever it is I’m thinking about that week. I could mention, for example, that there’ll be another addition to our house later this year. You heard it here first (unless you already heard it from somewhere else first, in which case you heard it there first.)
Still: by the end of this post I’ll have hit a nice, easy-to-remember 594,000 words.
Well, it’s been over a year since I last updated the look-and-feel of my blog, so it felt like it was time for a redesign. The last theme was made during a period that I was just recovering from a gloomy patch, and that was reflected the design: full of heavy, dark reds, blacks, and greys, and it’s well-overdue a new look!
I was also keen to update the site to in line with the ideas and technologies that are becoming more commonplace in web design, nowadays… as well as using it as a playground for some of the more-interesting CSS3 features!
Key features of the new look include:
[spb_message color=”alert-warning” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]Note that some of these features will only work in modern browsers, so Internet Explorer users might be out of luck![/spb_message]
As always, I’m keen to hear your feedback (yes, even from those of you who subscribe by RSS). So let me know what you think!
For the first time in over seven years, I’ve recovered a handful more of my “lost” blog posts: articles that were written prior to the great server fuck-up of July 2004.
Since then, I’ve kept regular backups. A lot of the old stuff is sometimes cringeworthy (in a “did I really used to be such a dick?” way), and I’m sure that someday I’ll look back at my blog posts from today, too, and find them shockingly un-representative of me in the future. That’s the nature of getting older.
But it’s still important to me to keep all of this stuff. My blog is an extension to my diary: the public-facing side of what’s going on in my life. I back-link furiously, especially in the nostalgia-ridden “On This Day” series of blog posts I throw out once in a while.
The blog posts I’ve newly recovered are:
So there you go: especially for you stalkers or those of you looking for a trip down memory lane – some links to what I was up to in December 2003.
For those of you who are really on a roll, here’s some further reading from the period: Kit, on the last Troma Night of the year; a religious argument that Alec kicked off (thanks, archive.org); Liz starting her first blog; Paul applies for a hardship loan;
Things I’ve been doing instead of blogging, this last month, include:
That’s quite a lot of stuff, even aside from the usual work/volunteering/etc. stuff that goes on in my life, so it’s little wonder that I’ve neglected to blog about it all. Of course, there’s a guilt-inspired downside to this approach, and that’s that one feels compelled to not blog about anything else until finishing writing about the first neglected thing, and so the problem snowballs.
So this quick summary, above? That’s sort-of a declaration of blogger-bankruptcy on these topics, so I can finally stop thinking “Hmm, can’t blog about X until I’ve written about Code Week!”
Looking Back
On this day in 2003, I first launched this weblog! That means it’s eight years old today! I’d bought the scatmania.org domain name some time earlier with the intention of setting up a vanity site separately from my sub-site on the avangel.com domain, during a rush on cheap domain names perpetrated by some of the friends I’d lived with in Penbryn, but never found a significant use for it until this day. It was at about the same time that I first set up (the long-defunct) penbryn-hall.co.uk, a parody of Penbryn’s website launched as an April Fools joke against the hall, which eventually got me into some trouble with the management committee of the halls. Some friends and I had made it a tradition of ours to play pranks around the residence: our most famous one was probably 2003’s joke, in which we made a legitimate room inspection out to be an April Fools joke, with significant success.
In my initial blog post, I took care to point out that this wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination my first foray into blogging. In actual fact, I’d run a weblog, The Åvatar Diary, for a few years back in college: a few fragments of this still exist and are archived here, too. I suppose that this means that, ignoring the occasional gap, I’ve been blogging for almost thirteen years. The Åvatar Diary died after an incident with a rather creepy stalker: remember that this was in 1999, back in the day when Creepy Internet Stalkers were still new and exciting, and I panicked slightly and shut the Diary down after my stalker turned up in person somewhere that I’d hinted that I might be in a post.
I didn’t mention the new site launch, to begin with, hoping that folks might just “pick up on it” having re-appeared (I’d been promising to launch something at that domain for ages). Later, I launched Abnib, in an attempt to unite the LiveJournal users with whom I associated with those of us who hosted our own blogs. Abnib still runs, after a fashion, although I’m likely to let it die a natural death as soon as it wants to.
Looking Forward
So here I am, eight years later, still blogging on the same domain. The frequency with which I write has waxed and waned over the years, but I still find that it’s just about the best way for me to keep in touch with my friends and to keep them posted about what’s going on in my life: it’s unintrusive and can be dipped in and out of, it’s accessible to everybody, and – because I host it on my own domain – it’s under my control. That’s a million points in its favour over, say, Facebook, and it’s nice to know that it’ll exist for exactly as long as I want it to.
It also provides a great “starting point” by which people find me. Google for me by name or by many of the aliases I go by and you’ll find this site, which I think is just great: if people are trying to find me online I’m happiest knowing that the first pages they’ll get to are pages that I control, and on which I write what I want to: I’ll bet U.S. Senator Rick Santorum wishes that he had that.
I enjoy blogging about geeky stuff that interests me, things that are going on in my life, and my occasional and random thoughts about life, the universe, and everything (with a particular focus on technology and relationships). It’s put me in contact with some strange people – from pizza delivery guys who used to bring me food on Troma Nights back in Aber to crazy Internet stalkers and confused Indian programmers – and it’s helped me keep in touch with the people closest to me. And because I’m a nostalgic beast, as this and similar posts show, it’s a great excuse to back-link my way down memory lane from time to time, too.
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.
Okay, okay, I get it!
After my blog post a few days ago about the imminent death of the oft-neglected Abnib, I received a surge of complaints by IM, email, and comments. It turns out that a higher-than-expected number of you are actually using the site on a daily basis.
So I’ve extended its life by a further two years, at least. I’ve also done some quick hacking to put together a new, more-maintainable framework for it. I give to you all: Abnib 7.0!
Features not in 6.0 but now present include:
Update: Wow. So far the chat room’s seen Matt R, Ruth, Bryn, Claire and me. Just not at the same time. It’s just like old times (although Iggy, who I just reinstated, is yet to say “surfboard” even once…)
Oh yeah: I changed the look-and-feel of scatmania.org the other week, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s become a sort-of-traditional January activity for me, these years, to redesign the theme of my blog at this point in the year.
This year’s colours are black, white, greys, and red, and you’ll note also that serifed fonts are centre-stage again, appearing pretty-much-universally throughout the site for the first time since 2004. Yes, I know that it’s heavier and darker than previous versions of the site: but it’s been getting fluffier and lighter year on year for ages, now, and I thought it was time to take a turn. You know: like the economy did.
Aside from other cosmetic changes, it’s also now written using several of the new technologies of HTML5 (I may put the shiny new logo on it, at some point). So apologies to those of you running archaic and non-standards-compliant browsers (I’m looking at you, Internet Explorer 6 users) if it doesn’t look quite right, but really: when your browser is more than half as old as the web itself, it’s time to upgrade.
I’ve also got my site running over IPv6 – the next generation Internet protocol – for those of you who care about those sorts of things. If you don’t know why IPv6 is important and “a big thing”, then here’s a simple explanation. Right now you’re probably viewing the IPv4 version: but if you’re using an IPv6-capable Internet connection, you might be viewing the IPv6 version. You’re not missing out, either way: the site looks identical: but this is just my tiny contribution towards building the Internet of tomorrow.
(if you really want to, you can go to ipv6.scatmania.org to see the IPv6 version – but it’ll only work if your Internet Service Provider is on the ball and has set you up with an IPv6 address!)
Normal blogging will resume shortly, but I just wanted to quickly take advantage of a period of strong mobile signal as I sit on this Thames Travel bus (oh yeah: I’m in Oxford for a few days) to share with you a feeling of warm fuzziness I experienced earlier today. (note: this blog post took a few days to get “finished”: I’m now stuck in a small town outside Oxford by heavy snow)
In her latest blog post, my sister Becky writes about achieving a couple of things on her “to-do before I die” list. And when I read about her revelations about the nature of domestic abuse and her selfless willingness to go out of her way to help her fellow man, I was filled with an immense sense of pride.
I’ll remind you that, unlike about a fifth of the regular readers of this blog, my sister has no formal training or experience in active listening or counselling skills. She’s never been taught how to listen without prejudice, how to build rapport, or how to show empathy. She knows that this certainly isn’t part of her job description. What we’re looking at there is plain old, genuine human compassion. And it makes me proud not only of her – as my sister – but also of humankind in general, that this kind of caring for one another still exists, even for a stranger, within the general population. That’s simply awesome.
In other not-dissimilar human-compassion related news, Ruth and I were offered a lift – saving us a two-mile walk through the snow, after midnight – by two complete strangers the other night, after our bus was cancelled. It’s been a good week for stories of people being nice to one another, both in my immediate experience and in the news. I like it.
…minding my own business, and some random guy walks in through the office door, looking lost. Nobody seems to get up to see to him, so I – in my new desk, which is quite close to the door – go over to greet him. “Is there;” he begins, sounding a little unsure of himself, “Is there a ‘Scatman’ here?”
Oh; fucking hell, I think. For some reason, I’m reminded of the last time somebody wandered up and confirmed my identity by addressing me by my “blog name”, and it turned out to be a scary stalker type. I try to think back about what libellous thing I might have said this week.
“Hi; I’m from Unigryw (another company in the Technium),” he begins, “I was looking at your web site -“
“Scatmania.org,” I reply, pronouncing the hyperlink with surprising clarity.
“Yes,” he continues, “I was hoping I could use your review of Nice ‘N’ Naughty on LocalTVi.”
So, I let him. Pretty much all the original content on my weblog is covered by a creative commons license anyway, but I just told him he could do whatever he liked with it. And if only LocalTVi had an RSS feed, I’d keep an eye out for my review appearing on it, too. I thought everything had an RSS feed, these days. Ah well.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been getting more than my fair share of blogspam of late. I’ve been spending about twenty minutes every three or so days clearing out the ‘moderation’ queue and updating my keyword lists. Worse still, some spam has been getting through nonetheless (hopefully I’ve always been quick to remove it, and so none of you – my readers – have had to see any of it).
So: I’ve implemented a new anti-blogspam solution: whenever you post a comment to my weblog from now on you’ll be asked a simple question. The answer is usually obvious… to a human… but very difficult to automate a computer to answer. I appreciate any feedback on this (why not leave a comment to this post), and I’ll let you know whether it fixes the problem. And, of course, if it does, I’ll offer my code snippet back to the WordPress development team in order to include it, perhaps, with a future version: or, at least, offer it to friends of mine who use similar blog engines and are troubled by spam.
I need sleep.
In other (almost equally geeky) news, I’ve been spending a good deal of time working on my new RockMonkey WikiGame – TromaNightAdventure. If I can keep up a reasonable development rate on it this weekend (which could be tough – I’ve lots to do, and Gareth is visiting and keeps distracting me with cool technology like GPS devices and VoIP telephones), it’ll be ready on Tuesday evening. Watch this space.
The Gender Genie is quite remarkable. Copy-paste a heap of your journal entries (and state that journal entries is what they are) and it will attempt to guess your gender, based on the language used (and partially explain it’s reasoning).
I’m apparently male, with a two-thirds certainty. Not bad.
Generate apathetic journal entries automatically. This tool revolutionises blogging for those sad fucks who only uses their weblogs to say that they haven’t done much and that they haven’t had time to update, sorry (in case anybody’s reading it). I mean, really – do you actually have nothing to write about?
Whoops! As a result of some buggy code I’d written, my recent ‘blog entries didn’t get cross-posted to LiveJournal, as they usually do – it turns out that the cross-posting code I wrote only works if I write my entire blog entry at once… and my recent entries have been quite long and so I’ve written them in ‘instalments’, which didn’t work. Hmm. I’ll write a fix for that soon.
In any case; here’s a summary of my recent posts, with links so that you can go read them:
Rearing Of The Ugly Head, And Apache’s Dirty Secrets – 26th July: Reb, my ex-girlfriend, reads my blog and places a comment… so I have a bitch about it.
Something Cheery – 26th July: A pick-me-up after my grotty post about Reb.
Things I Don’t Have Time For At Work – 27th July: Rant about an indecisive co-worker.
Dreams Within Dreams Within Dreams – 28th July: Description of a weird, convoluted, recursive and self-referential dream I had. Odd.
Dadadodo: Exterminate All Rational Thought – 28th July: I download a clever word disassociation program and let it loose on Scatmania, with bizarre – yet funny – results.
This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.
Ruth wrote:
…
Dan’s journal appears to be broken.
…