a roll of the dice » arollofthedice

intermission

Paul — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:59:43 +0000

I have been pursuing some non-online interests of late including my health and taking photos

unscheduled delays

Paul — Thu, 21 May 2009 04:57:39 +0000

Please excuse the recent dearth of posts – I have had some non-swine related health issues.

Normal service to resume shortly, if all goes well, including the fabulous tale of travellers from a far flung outpost voyaging to the New Rome just as the empire begins its decline and fall (translation: we are going to the USA).

commenting back

Paul — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:30:43 +0000

Commenting should be restored to some sort of functionality with the use of a name and email address for now (not displayed) while I continue my epic battle to get recaptcha working.

new comments system – recaptcha

Paul — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 03:35:43 +0000

Until recently, commenting has been restricted to registered users due to the ridiculous torrent of spam which any website automatically attracts. Before registration was required, I was using Akismet, which was fairly effective, as in it caught 99.9%. Despite Akismet’s valiant attempts, the sheer volume of spam meant that a lot was making its way through to the site, or to the (irritating) moderation queue.

However, I am now going to give reCaptcha a go. This is one of those “write the word in the box” type system, with a twist: the words are actually from old books and the like, so by filling them in you’ll not only be proving that you’re not a disenfranchised Nigerian prince in search of a business partner, you’ll also be digitising something useful and, in time, saving today’s already overworked school children from having to walk to a library or similarly uncool and physical location in order to access classic texts.

In summary: fill out the two words in the box (with a space between them) to comment, and registration is no longer required. You may still register, and whether you do or not the site will try to remember your details (name, email etc) insofar as you’ve entered them.

Herman Melville says: “translate my new super-extra-extended edition of Moby Dick (now with even more minute details of whales) and stop spam all at the same time.

clean slate

Paul — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:06:34 +0000

Well, clearly I got sick of actually writing anything here with any regularity. Apart from anything else, there are 50 trillion blogs out there, all of which are written by people who want people to read theirs rather than wanting to read other people’s writing (understandably, I suppose, we all just want to be loved). The magic of blogging… millions of people who want other people to listen to them but don’t particularly want to listen to anyone else. It hasn’t taken long for the whole concept to fold back into what the internet really always has been, a bunch of shitty home pages with no real content of any interest and a bunch of commercially/politically/governmentally run sites with actual content, and of course the odd gem which falls into neither category.

Also, I was not enjoying the tone of my writing here. There’s something about having an undefined audience of between 0 and 6,000,000,000 people (admittedly somewhat closer to the former, although you can’t be sure… oh wait, only a billion or so actually have access to the net. ok my audience is 1 billion max, I can handle that) which leads to a sort of pompous, swaggering style which is neither representative of me (I hope) nor good reading. Looking back over some of the stuff here, someone who didn’t know me would think I was insufferable and pretentious, a young man perpetually outraged by the many perceived ills of society and not interested in much else.

However I do occasionally feel like writing a few thoughts about various matters, including:

books I’ve read;
music I’ve listened to;
the law;
miscellaneous/TBA*;

So I have decided to have a restart of sorts. I will intermittently write a few bits and pieces for the benefit of no-one in particular. You are not expected to comment, although you can. You are not really expected to read either. Quite possibly there is no you at all. I am not going to delete the older stuff, mostly because there is something intellectually dishonest to my mind about the ability to revise history to one’s liking on-line.

Oh, the picture. It was going to be Godzilla razing a city to the ground (symbolic, see? the city represents Wall Street, Godzilla is the breakdown of cross-party negotiations in the congress… also godzilla might be me and the city might be the blog, I guess) but I liked this one much better than any city-razing images I could find. Mostly because it has a cat in it.

Typical Sydney-centric attitude

Paul — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 08:10:43 +0000

Limited/no updates this week, as your author is stuck in Sydney, home of the homeless.

Well, I’m stranded in the city that never sleeps
Some of these women they just give me the creeps
I’m avoidin’ the Southside the best I can
These memories I got, they can strangle a man

Well I came ashore in the dead of the night
Lot of things can get in the way when you’re tryin’ to do what’s right
You don’t understand it – my feelings for you
You’d be honest with me if only you knew

how now, brown bureaucrat?

Paul — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 20:00:17 +0000

The lack of updates has been caused by your author’s temporary secondment to the home of closed supermarkets, icy wind and poorly dressed civil servants, Canberra.

We live in a political world
In the cities of lonesome fear,
Little by little you turn in the middle
But you’re never why you’re here

theme/wordpress update

Paul — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:35:25 +0000

I’m currently in the process of upgrading both WordPress and the blog’s theme (which is a customised version of the awesome Unsleepable theme, for anyone that cares). There may be a few teething problems, so bear with me.

Please let me know if you notice anything awry. One issue I am already aware of is that the fonts seem to have increased slightly in size, which has thrown all the formatting out somewhat.

can’t eat all that stuff in a single bite

Paul — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 01:34:10 +0000

I’ve updated the layout somewhat so that longer stories are now abbreviated on the front page – hopefully this makes the site a bit more readable. If something interests you, just click the link to read on. If not, well, I guess it’s even easier to ignore now.

I have also been testing the awesome akismet anti-spam plugin (not, as far as I can tell, related to this completely terrifying ‘sociable humanoid robot’ which I studied and feared when I did Artificial Intelligence at uni). So far it’s been nearly 100% effective, so as a result I’m going to get rid of the requirement that you provide an email address for comments, and first-time commenters will no longer be detained and subjected to stress-and-duress interrogation techniques in the ‘moderation’ facility.

spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam

Paul — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 22:06:21 +0000

As a result of the infinite joys of spam, the comment system is unfortunately going to require a name and email address – which will naturally not be used for anything other than comment moderation, published, disclosed to any third party, and so on and so on. In addition the first comment for a given name/email will be held for moderation; once approved, future comments will go straight onto the site.