blogging

Remembering December 2003

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.

scatmania.org in August 2003, showing off the simplistic look it had before it was deleted.

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.

A young Dan with his parents on a hilltop. — Nostalgia’s awesome, which I choose to represent with this photo of me and my parents on a hilltop somewhere. You have permission to “aww”.

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.

Castle of the Four Winds in early 1999. — If you remember my blog when it used to look like this, back in the late 1990s, then you’ve been following me than longer than most folks have been on the Web at all.

The blog posts I’ve newly recovered are:

Parcel of Goodies (1st December 2003), in which I get some new jeans and announce an upcoming Chez Geek Night (the predecessor to what eventually became Geek Night) at the Ship & Castle
AbNib & Str8Up (2nd December 2003), in which I apologise for Abnib being down and perv over hot young queer people
Orange Gives Me 80p For No Apparent Reason (2nd December 2003) and Justification Of What You All Already Thought About My Sanity, And About Orange’s Competence (5th December 2003), primarily about a very petty dispute I had with my mobile phone provider
The Software Engineers Behind My Alarm Clock (3rd December 2003), containing my complaints about the engineering decisions behind my clock, which woke me up too early in the morning
Troma Night (7th December 2003), about the most-recent Troma Night, at which we watched the tragically-awful A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell
Something In The Water (10th December 2003), talking about several of the new romantic releationships that have appeared amongst my friends – of these, the one that had surprised me the most is the one that lasts to this day

Andy & Sian, the adorable couple who I declared “most surprising” of the new relationships to get underway late in 2003. The pair married in 2010.

Worst 100 Films Of All Time(10th December 2003): my observation about how many Police Academy movies made it into the IMDb’s “bottom 100”
Christmas Is Coming, The Exams Are Getting Written(12th December 2003), which is, as its title suggests, about Christmas getting closer, and exams upcoming
Banned From Driving For Life, Before He’d Even Passed His Test(12th December 2003): a reflection upon a recent news story
Gatecrashing(13th December 2003), in which I drop in uninvited on a stranger’s house party, and everything goes better than expected
Final Troma Night Of The Year(14th December 2003); a short review of 2003’s final Troma Night – at this point, we probably had no idea that we’d have still been having Troma Nights for seven more years
Christians Should Be Banned From The Internet(15th December 2003): a tongue-in-cheek critique on how awful contemporary web design for Christian-centric websites were
Frustrating(16th December 2003), about things not going right at work, but things going very right in the bedroom
The Right To Read(17th December 2003), an anti-DRM rant
Out Of Place (18th December 2003), again stressed about work, but looking forward to some retro-gaming

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;

Instead Of Blogging…

Things I’ve been doing instead of blogging, this last month, include:

Code Week: hacking Three Rings code in a converted hay loft of a Derbyshire farm, as mentioned on the Three Rings blog.
Hoghton Tower: as is traditional at this time of year (see blog posts from 2010, 2009, 2005, 2003, for example), went to Preston for the Hoghton Tower concert and fireworks display, accompanied by Ruth, and my sister’s 22nd birthday. My other sister has more to say about it.
Family Picnic: Joining Ruth and JTA at Ruth’s annual family picnic, among her billions of second-cousins and third-aunts.
New Earthwarming: Having a mini housewarming on New Earth, where I live with Ruth, JTA, and Paul. A surprising number of people came from surprisingly far away, and it was fascinating to see some really interesting networking being done by a mixture of local people (from our various different “circles” down here) and distant guests.
Bodleian Staff Summer Party: Yet another reason to love my new employer! The drinks and the hog roast (well, roast vegetable sandwiches and falafel wraps for me, but still delicious) would have won me over by themselves. The band was just a bonus. The ice cream van that turned up and started dispensing free 99s: that was all just icing on the already-fabulous cake.
TeachMeet: Giving a 2-minute nanopresentation at the first Oxford Libraries TeachMeet, entitled Your Password Sucks. A copy of my presentation (now with annotations to make up for the fact that you can’t hear me talking over it) has been uploaded to the website.
New Earth Games Night: Like Geek Night, but with folks local to us, here, some of whom might have been put off by being called “Geeks”, in that strange way that people sometimes do. Also, hanging out with the Oxford On Board folks, who do similar things on Monday nights in the pub nearest my office.
Meeting Oxford Nightline: Oxford University’s Nightline is just about the only Nightline in the British Isles to not be using Three Rings, and they’re right on my doorstep, so I’ve been meeting up with some of their folks in order to try to work out why. Maybe, some day, I’ll actually understand the answer to that question.
Alton Towers & Camping: Ruth and I decided to celebrate the 4th anniversary of us getting together with a trip to Alton Towers, where their new ride, Thirteen, is really quite good (but don’t read up on it: it’s best enjoyed spoiler-free!), and a camping trip in the Lake District, with an exhausting but fulfilling trek to the summit of Glaramara.

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!”

On This Day In 2003

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.

scatmania.org in August 2003. The theme is simplistic, and the blog itself is powered by a custom-built PHP engine back-ending onto a stack of flat files. It worked, just about, but it wasn’t great.

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.

Abnib Lives On

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!

Abnib 7.0. It's survived being shot in the head twice now, so we can be sure that it's not a zombie.

Features not in 6.0 but now present include:

Easier to maintain; so when new blogs appear or old ones disappear, there’s a chance that it’ll be kept up-to-date.
Really ugly new skin thrown together in a few minutes.
Combined RSS and OPML feeds, to make it easy for you to switch to a better aggregator, as I assumed you all already had.
It’s a little faster to update itself and a lot faster to use.
Abnib Tweets, for those of you who are of the twittering persuasion. I’m not, so if there’s anybody I’ve missed you’ll have to let me know.
Abnib Rockmonkey – a random daily snippet from the long-dead Rockmonkey wiki.
Abnib Chat, the return of the abandoned chat room. Hey; if people still want Abnib, maybe they still want this, too… but I shan’t hold my breath! And no, the old Rockmokney bot, Iggy, isn’t there, so there’ll be no random cries of “Surfboard!” unless you bring them yourself.

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…)

New Look, New Protocols

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!)

In Which I Express Praise For My Sister

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.

So I’m Sat At Work…

…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.

Blogspam A Problem… No More

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

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.

Apathetic Journal Entry Generator

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?

Damn My Buggy Code!

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.

Tis late and I’m on the net… Wow, it’s almost like being back in…

This 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.

…

Thankyou

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.

Fiona wrote:

You have made me both think and laugh tonight Dan. Thank you.

Thank you Paul, you got me in to this- it is my main way of being in touch with all of you.

Thank you all for posting, I often feel as if it should be me moving to Aber, I would be happy their.

I should study, but I’ll probably knit.

Claire Seems Distracted

[this post was damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has not been possible to recover it]

[this post was partially recovered on 12 October 2018]

Claims tiredness. Suspect she’s stressed about upcoming exams. Hope that it’s one or the other.

A handful of my friends keep posting entries to their ‘blogs rapidly, in quick succession. Have you heard of putting things in the same entry?. Save your friends from scrolling themselves to death!

My first exam, Monday (Formal Methods In Software Engineering), went better than expected; should have done quite well. Feel confident about The Internet: Architecture And Operation on Saturday morning.

In other news, my new soundcard arrived, giving me an audio system which doesn’t (a) short-circuit and cause my computer to crash from time to time, (b) give me quite painful electric shocks when I connect things to it and (c) gives me stereo sound all the time, without switching to mono for no apparent reason. In addition, I have a ‘front panel’ with heaps of cool-looking connectors, MIDI ports, etc. And a few tweaks later and it works fantastically with the …

Hacking Around With LiveJournal

If this all works to-plan, my recent changes to Scatmania will mean that every time I make a new entry, a link is posted to a journal on LiveJournal. This will allow my friends to monitor my blog from their ‘friends lists’, in AbNibs absence.