I am shaking with anger/fear/disappointment. In the last few hours this weblog has had 835 minus 274 spam comments, a massive flood compared to the trickle that I was too lazy to do anything about before today.
I saw them all come into the inbox, one after the other, waiting for them to stop, but they kept coming, making three big black columns on my screen.
I’ve closed all entries, and deleted the spam comments (because I was so upset, I forgot which way around the sign was meant to go and typed delete from mt_comments where id < 274; I am a dolt – there should be a backup somewhere).
It seems that even in this little backwater of the internet, there are still people who are willing to intrude, to smash things up, to be crass and vulgar, chasing a few more tainted dollars.
Using a computer is all about confidence. Windows especially knows if you are a new user, and because most of the Windows GUI can be clicked and dragged, you’ll probably end up with the taskbar covering half of your screen, and no obvious way of getting things ‘back to normal’ sometime in the first week of use.
Then come the crashes, the CTRL-ALT-DELs, the timer icon that never goes away, and the feeling that creeps up your back as everything goes black and you realise the last time you clicked File, Save, OK was three hours ago.
Once you’ve found your way around an operating system, then you start on the programs. Just like Windows, the first few weeks with Photoshop or Illustrator or whatever can make your head spin. That one little step that means you can’t undo your changes. Where did that palette go that I was using like a pro yesterday? Why doesn’t that do that really useful thing anymore?
And then the programming languages. And that’s where I’m a little bit stuck. I can hack PHP well enough to get it to do what I need, but Flash actionscripting… I’m at that stage where the computer is one step ahead of me, and I don’t like it. Everything else I use I can predict what’s going to happen before I click OK or hit return. I can’t type a page of actionscript, like I can with PHP, and be pretty certain it will work with only a few typos to correct. In Flash, I take inch steps, previewing the movie, unsure of exactly what’s going to appear after each edit.
All I can do is take a step back, start again at page one of Foundation Actionscript for Macromedia Flash MX, and concentrate.
My eyes have just about given up from checking lines of SQL, but I’ve finally finished getting all the links into the nearly finished RealSpanish.net. If you’ve got any spanish links, send them along… (tomorrow, though. I’ve got to lie down now).
This morning a package landed on our mat from my lil’ sister Kate. The contents thereof:
Therefore my sister is the content of the <h1> field above, and shall be evermore.
So I have a brainwave on the train into work, and decide to roll my own RSS feed for the ‘What’s new’ page on RealFrench.net (the URL is here) so that anyone who was interested can subscribe to the feed and find out when we start offering free pain au chocolat downloads (Mac only, needs optional iOven). I get to work, open up HomeSite, and everything goes well, I can see my new feed in NetNewsWire, I’m satisfied that occasionally I know what I’m doing.
Then, of course, the person-who-provides-the-content/client for RealFrench calls me later on to discuss some other bits and pieces, and asks me ‘What’s this RSS thing?’. I was lost. How do you start explaining it over the phone, when one glimpse of NewsNetWire (or whatever you use) would make it obvious straight away? I just fimbled on a bit, explaining that if you had this other newsreader thing that you could see when we’d updated the site, and that these newsreader thingies aren’t just for RealFrench, but there are lots of sites out there that have RSS feeds (or Atom, or XML, or whatever) and you could put them all in your newsreader, etc etc etc.
Maybe I should have stopped trying to explain what a newsreader was and explain the main benefit of it, as far as my experience goes: it means another fifteen minutes added to the time wasted checking for anything useful in your e-mail at the beginning of the day by providing you with two or three hundred more links to sort through, and provides an outlet when boredom takes over (not that it does very often) with further surfing opportunities every half an hour…
Last week I was interviewed by the Guardian about the sandwich project, but the story never appeared, either because I was very boring or there wasn’t enough room found in the paper before National Sandwich Week ended. I’d prefer the latter but suspect the former.
Not all was lost, because none other than renowned TV personality Ms Carol Vorderperson ran a very short bit on the SP halfway down last Friday’s Carol@mirror column (I hope she added a sandwich under a pseudonym) in the Daily Mirror, so I’ve finally made it into print in an English newspaper (you can put quotes around newspaper if you like, it is the Mirror after all).
In other site news, I’ve upgraded my hosting, which now includes a 404 page (when I figure out how it works) and proper web stats. I still feel a sentimental attachment to the stats provided by little blue square at the bottom of this webpage, though. And the SP has started taking advertising from Google (again, I’m still figuring out how it works). I wonder what I could spend all that advertising revenue on…
The slug hunt continues in our garden most evenings. I must be well into triple figures (if only their heads could be mounted…). The slug extermination process I talked about earlier has been superseded in some details: instead of dropping the slugs into warm soapy water, they just crawl around in the bottom of my orange bucket until I’m satisfied/bored, and then I pour boiling water on the unfortunate creatures. Luckily they don’t make any noise when they die, but their slug skin seems to slough off into whorls on the water’s surface.
I’ve also discovered (and this makes me feel better about the treatment they get in the paragraph above) that slugs are cannibals. Squash a slug underfoot on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday there will be a glittering spaghetti of slug tracks where other slugs have feasted on their dead comrade. Horrible creatures.
I am slightly concerned, however, that there may be some kind of giant angry motherslug hiding behind the shed, watching me collecting her baby slugs with chopsticks and torch, and waiting for the right time to pounce… And then all Laura will find on the paving will be a sticky watchband and glasses.
New words for the tenth song on the new Wilco record:
Theobromines!
…don’t hurt anyone.
In my chocolate bar,
that’s where they are…
So Morrissey’s got a new single and album out. It seems the heart has grown fonder after Moz’s seven (?) year absence from the ‘new releases’ section of the record shop; after seeing the 7″ single in HMV last night, I went home and dug out my copy of Vauxhall and I to listen to (and, yes, maybe sing along…), which hasn’t been played much since I bought it on a whim when it was released in 1994. By then my Smiths obsession (maybe too strong, but interest is a bit weedy) had cooled down a bit, and I was only interested in passing.
I first heard the Smiths on a late night television show while I was still at High School (makes it before 1988, but after they’d split) playing ‘This Charming Man’, which is still one of my favorite songs. I borrowed The Queen is Dead on tape from the library (a very well stocked library for some reason or other) on the recommendation of Mark Schwartz, and can still remember telling him the next day that I didn’t think it was very good (I changed my mind later on, but it takes songs a while to grow on you). A few days later, when Hatful of Hollow turned up in the library, I snatched it out of the basket, took it home and played This Charming Man over and over on my tape deck, until my Mum told me to turn it down. I’d never heard anything as catchy as Johnny Marr’s playing on that song (and about three dozen others). During the next few weeks (of the loan period) I listened to Hatful of Hollow over and over.
Back then, there were no websites or magazines or anything to connect me with the rest of the Smiths-loving world. It was a very private thing. Even getting hold of the records (and they were records…), being a student without any money, was difficult. It seemed to us, stuck in Adelaide, that these records and songs had come out of nowhere. It took a lot of detective work and out of date copies of Melody Maker to find out anything about the band.
Mark and I both bought Viva Hate when it was released, me taking the cheap tape option, being at University, and Mark having one of those new-fangled CD things, seeing how he had got a proper job after leaving school. After Viva Hate I kind of lost touch with Mark and with Morrissey (I followed Johnny Marr through the entire Electronic thing, though, giving up when he went solo. Euuugh.), unable to keep up with things, and searching out new ‘cooler’ bands (the initials R.E.M. spring to mind) to listen to.
Been playing with the RealFrench site that’s part of my day job today, and have two new bits for you.
For everyone who gets laughed at when they try to pronouce French words, (e.g. me) have a look at Écouter, a flash driven, mp3 playin’ pronounciation page.
For people who like drop shadows and gradients, here’s my take on the design style that will instantly anchor your designs to late 2003 – early 2005: RealFrench business vocab.
salut! génial! etc etc.