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The Banter Page
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If you're wanting to get something off your chest, make general comments about the server, or post lonely hearts ads, then this is the place for you.
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oooooh, hot chocolate!
[pen] Thanks, much appreciated. Am still not well, and not particularly enheartened by a visitor yesterday saying "Oh, I had that for six weeks" :-o

But that didn't stop me from going to the football today (my second AFL match, and why complain when someone shouts you? Just rug up warm); hopefully some really nice photos... telephoto gooooooood.

Few words
Sorry folks. Mini Cheddars. Bit confused. Two words? Really, penelope. Wrong game!
Oof!
I've been kneecapped!
Chopping
[rab] You and several others by the looks of it. Bravo all. I'm finding it tough to make any headway this time round, but I'm not bitter . . .
But what about the chooks?
Ooooh, strawberries have started to come into season here! Yay!!!
[penelope] I don't see the problem there. Oh, and your hot chocolate remedy works a treat.
I'm back!
...and looking forward to regular posting!
Advance notice
I've just ordered new disks, one of which is for the web server. At the same time as moving to a new disk, I'll be taking the opportunity to upgrade to newer versions of the OS and web server.

This is the first of 3 or 4 planned outages during the remainder of this year, and will incur the largest downtime - I hope to keep it under 24 hours but promise nothing. If anyone has a problem with the machine being down on a particular day this week, let me know, either here, or by email to an address that should be fairly obvious. If I don't forget entirely, I'll point out the cause for outage at MCiOS and/or Orange at the time.

As an aside, the other planned upgrades are: a UPS, more RAM, and yet another disk.

On another note entirely; Rab - it's really quite annoying that the HTML checker insists on apostrophe pairs inside title="". Still, I guess that's what ' is for; I'm giving up my contractions for nothing or no-one. Nothing or no-one!

Indeed
[Nik] Point taken - I'll have a look at the HTML checker and see if I can get it doing something more sensible viz the quotes. Will you be upgrading MySQL too? Not that - I think - I need any of the features of the newer version when I finally upgrade, but just curious.
Also...
[Nik] Obviously if you drop me a line indicating when it'll go down, I'll arrange for a backup to be made of the game data at that point. I'm away for the bank holiday weekend, but with sufficient warning can set up a cron job to do the business, so it's irrelevant really.
Calm down!
What are you saying, like? Don't trust me to not destroy all the data, like? Eh? Eh? A benefit of switching disks and installing fresh is that the current disk won't be modified at all during the process, so data should be safe, although I'll be dumping /etc, /home, /var and /usr to CD anyway (a slightly neater variation of which will become a weekly backup to CDRW). I might go to Apache 2 and Mysql 4; I'll have a look at their feature lists and see if it's worth the risk.
Just A Minute - 2003-Aug-11
In a complete change of subject, did anyone catch last week's Just A Minute? What the hell were they saying about celebrity colonic irrigations?
JAM Last Week
[Dr Q] Which bit? "I'm A Celebrity, Get It Out Of Here"?
Getting Nik's back up
[Nik] Well - I didn't anticipate any loss of data but I never thought having too many backups was ever a problem! I'm using MySQL 4.0.12 here without difficulties. The main bonus is subqueries (not that I use these at the moment) but there is a slight difference in the way certain priveliges work, so you might find yourself saddled with some additional admin overhead if you were to upgrade. I know nothing of apache 2 - last I heard it was "experimental" which I understand to be a euphemism for "best avoided".
Toxic celebs
[DrQ] The JAM reference: IIRC, around the time of the Aussie Jungle Japes, a group of D list celebs 'volunteered' [paid obscene amounts of money] to go abroad for a filmed Celebrity Detox Week [Ch4?]. Along with most of the viewing nation, I didn't watch it but in an effort to generate interest, the red top coverage glorified in the contents of alleged celebs bowels after CI. I'm told it was a load of sh*te and believe none of them have worked since.
Ding! Dong!
The disks is here! Expect angrycake.com to fall off the world in approximately not too long.
*pulls the big red shutdown lever*
Right I'll close the games so as not to confuse everyone...
*yanks big red lever*
*big red lever clatters to floor*

*ACME Maintenance Squad drives off faster than you can say 'Spare any change?'*

*proffers new red lever*
What cowboy did this, eh? Me you say??
Good to be back
As you can see I've tightened a few screws here and there. If you notice any bugs, tell me.
Woo-hoo!
Our long international nightmare is over -- MC5 is back! Well done, rab & Nik.
Minor layout bug
[rab] See Mini Cheddars for an example -- the last word before an <hr> gets right-shifted.
Oh
Not on my browser it doesn't... probably just a small tweakette required somewhere. ETF March 37th 2008.
grrr
It was justified text wot woz doing it. Now disabled which is a shame cos where it worked I quite liked it.
Jubilation
Welcome back, Rab!
It's back! It's new improved bluey whiteness! Horrah!
Layout bug
It was doing it on mine (Mozilla Firebird 0.6/Linux), which turned out to be a pain because I'm running it at 1600x1200 with small fonts, which required me to shift my eyes a relatively long distance....
Aye, Cone
[rab] Nice new look - particularly fond of the "Stance" heading (Len Ganley, anyone?). I'm afraid I find the icons a little murky, though... there doesn't seem to be enough contrast between the grey background and the ochre/blue foreground. Indeed, I cannot distinguish them at all using peripheral vision (which slows down mouse navigation). Maybe this looks better on your PowerBook LCD, but on my PC CRT it looks grey and blobby (haven't connected my iBook to the net for four days, so don't know how it looks there).
Bluey whiteness
Yea! Its back and its prettier! Well done all concerned.

Current score:
Penelope: 3 eggs
flerdle: 1 egg
Lib: 1 egg

What a fantastic start there from Penelope.
hmmmm
I actually find this font slower to read. Just so you know.
ooooh
It seems to look different at work... hmmmm
Hokey-cokey
[Dunx] I agree with you about the murkiness of the icons. They were designed in a dark room on an LCD display, and I'm looking at them on a CRT right now. I might apply some transformations to them later.

[flerdle] I used to use your browser default font, but now have requested a sans-serif one. In principle you can override it, but in practice it might be more sensible to go back to the browser default.

[all] Keep your opinions rolling in.

New look
Love the refit - although I agree with Dunx that the buttons are murky. But a really nice feel to the site now.
[rab] Well, the buttons look better on my iBook screen! Something I will certainly need to remember next time I do some graphic design work... there is something in the OSX settings panel somewhere to change the colour balance to match that of a CRT; don't know if that would help.
Chook update
Penelope: 4
flerdle: 1
Lib: 1

Go for it Penelope! (Perhaps it was the promotion wot done it).
Henquiry
How can you tell who laid which egg?
design
Very nice, although the transparencies still aren't displaying properly under IE.
Transparently
[Projoy] That's not my fault. OK, so it is my fault that I insist on using those new-fangled PNGs rather than the old-school GIFs. I think I know of a workaround, but will be fiddly to apply.
Hey! It's working!
I'm sitting in the kitchen, with not a wire in sight, posting this. Hurrah!
Range
[rab] Sounds like you get better range than I do/did. What base station are you using?
Big range in the kitchen
[Dunx] I suspect it's because I live in a smaller house than you do :) For the record it's a LinkSys Wireless Ether-G, or similar (the one that's a four-port ethernet hub and a wireless access point). It's in the next room, I would guess about 10m, with a wall and a half in between.
Four bars, though, even on a Titanium-clad patlop.
Titanium-clad patlop
Would you like to borrow my NS4 compatibility dandelion for that?
Egg Identity
Boolbar] Two ways to identify egg layers - a sensitive art!
1. We know that a chicken is about to lay because she gets all busy looking for somewhere to go. They lay inside the chicken house ('cos they like privacy) so we see them go in. The only confusion could occur if they lay at night or if we get flerdle and Lib mixed up.
2. Egg colour. As a chicken gets into laying, her first eggs will be small and pale. Libs, being the last to start are small and light brown and flerdles are medium and tan. Pen, being a different variety, lays speckly eggs.
font fickleness
[rab] What font are you using? I wonder why it looks different at work. I've worked out what the trouble with speed of reading is - the letters in this font are quite crowded (upright strokes are close together, and overall the space between letters is small) and rounded letters like p, g, u, d are quite large, in comparison, and quite squarish, which makes them more difficult to distinguish quickly. I'm not advocating a return to serif, just noticing things about whatever it is you've chosen. I will cope.
Font affront
[flerdle] I ask for 'sans-serif'. You may be able to change your browser's default sans-serif font. I could specify 'helvetica' which might make more sense, but I'd need to check my CSS book (which is at home) to find out how to do it properly.
The Great Egg Race
Lovely. I've just had me summer holidays - two days in Lincs with my Mum. I'm back home, there was a queue on the M25 and it's raining. What's worse, now I have to empty the vacuum cleaner with all the sucked-up spiders in it. :o(
Love nest
[penelope] Tricky. One could imagine them all jumbled up inside the cylinder and thinking 'as we're stuck in here for a while - why not?' - then mating like fury so when you do the emptying bit, a whole new generation of spiderlets bent on evil revenge, burst forth with the taunting cry 'ner ner ne ner ner' . . .
[pen] More likely the spiders nuked it out and ate one another so now there is one single spider left - a very LARGE spider with LONG legs.
'racnids
Pen] Just stick 'em in a bag and send 'em to me. Chickens love spiders. And woodlice.
Re: Font. I dunno about anyone else but I like this font more than the previous one.
the lesser of two weevils
[BtD] I would gladly send you all my spiders. For some reason (too embarrassig to go into here... well OK, he was a boyfriend of mine a long, long time ago), we 've always called woodlice 'jonathans'. And I have lots under all the plant pots in the garden. Can I borrow your chickens for a couple of days?
Guess what time it is?
Having decided to not rebuild the server again, I'll be taking it down for ten minutes later (this evening, tomorrow, never) to figure out what sort of RAM I need, and also to take out the old disk and screw the new one in. This process should be painless, requiring no software changes at all.
While I remember
I'm going away tomorrow (Sun 31st) for just under a fortnight. I may have sporadic connectivity from there but one can't really rely on it.
Have a good one. I'll try not to ruin everything in the mean time.
Celebdaq Update
Congrats in advance to Uncle Korky for his upcoming first kneecapping.

Ahnold is now over £200/share with no end in sight. Even Becks couldn't top that.
Spiders
[penelope] But why did you suck them up in the first place? Spiders are on our side!
Boris
[Breadmaster] I embarked on a spider-killing spree after being dumped. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Arachnids
penelope you are CRUEL,
I am sure that flerdle will back me up here - I get spiders in the house, in summertime mainly, which are 6" to 8" across the legs and varied in body size - some are an inch or two. Whilst I detest spiders - in fact the larger ones give me the heebie jeebies - I catch them and toss them outside. So, in future, behave yourself! "Four legs is better than two..." or was that something else? ... :-)
Hairy legs
[Dujon] Sounds like you've got some Huntsmans. Huntsmen. Whatever. Greeaat big black hairy ones. I've only seen them to about 4 to 5 inches across, managed to trap one in the bathroom at a former house under a plastic container - the tok of it against the sides was fairly alarming, and spiders don't really worry me. I put it outside.

[Dujon, again] Are you in Sydney?

Why I ask, is...
Cross-posting alert to people south of the equator: See "To be a Pilgrim" here.
spiders
Having Charlotte's Web read to me at a young age has led to a life-long, well, liking if not loving of spiders; so long as they're on their webs I don't really mind. We had one on the inside of our kitchen window and we put up a sign and my mother insisted on calling it Fred. A stupid lodger murdered it in an overly helpful cleaning frenzy, which also involved her throwing out numerous useful items..
It is back
Have not been able to access this site due to very slow (interrupted) download. Anyone else had this problem?
Dujon/flerdle] Chickens would probably love big spiders too. Would they travel well by air?
Pen] Saskia reminded me of something I've now put in 'The Beige Allegro'. Ring any bells?
hrmmm
Probably illegal to export them. You'll just have to selectively breed some over there, I think. Or send your chickens on holidays.
Eight-legged friends
I believe that the huge hairy ones that occasionally hurtle across the living room carpet are called "Wolf Spiders". I really like them and always leave them alone, because they keep the place clean and are rather cute. It may be an urban myth, but I heard that their venom is actually poisonous enough to kill you, but their jaws are too weak to bite through your skin, so they're harmless (unless you let them bite you on a wound, of course). Could this really be true?
Wolfspiderman
Breadmaster] I've never heard that one, but my Dad has been bitten by Wolfspiders many times. He claims it is akin to an ant bite. Congrats on your publication by the way.
Huuuuuuuuge
It seems difficult to get information about the precise toxicology of the spider venom. Or I'm not looking hard enough. No matter. A factsheet about huntsman spiders is here: huntsman. I think up here we tend to call all large black spiders "huntsman" spiders. A factsheet about Australian wolf spiders is here: wolf. The legs seem quite different, and huntsman spiders seem to be larger.
Why can I never prevent myself looking at pages about spiders? I'm going to be creeped out and itchy for hours, now.
Miss Tuffett
There are also Harvestmen which look like spiders but aren't... they're the really skinny, ethereal- and anorexic-looking things.
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