Scottish Blogs.com

It’s been a while since I posted here, hasn’t it? I’m hoping to be able to pick things up again soon, but I’ve been absolutely swamped with work and family life… I’m in the process of developing a brand new site for Rubaidh and integrating it properly with Notes from a Messy Desk so that [...]...

My last post concerned the conspiracy theories that surround the collapse of 7 World Trade Center on the 11th of September, 2001. In that post, I tried to provide an objective rationale for why the controlled demolition hypothesis should not be believed, owing to its unfalsifiability. The truth is that this and other 9/11 conspiracy theories provoke an almost visceral response in me. I am pretty certain that I’m not the only person who feels this way. Right now, it’s pretty obvious that I don’t believe in the conspiracy theories (at least, the ones in which the US government or one of its agencies “made it happen on purpose”). However, I am no great supporter of the present US administration, and my political leanings (if transposed to America) would be...

More on the We Tell Stories fiction series and Alternate Reality Game follows shortly, but I got a bit distracted from my reading and sleuthing when I found this post by ‘nara’ on the Unfiction Forums, a community website devoted to ARG playing: I’ve been following trackbacks from the various articles mentioned here. I found the one for Jack Mottram’s submit response blog. Is the story you get from the email supposed to be about what happened to him at the station? Then, later, this: I created a twitter account to follow Jack Mottram…I hope this wouldn’t be considered stalking….this is what his last post said: Anyone else reading/playing We Tell Stories? http://tinyurl.com/2vckou - http://icanhaz.com/cluez Wonderful! For a little...

After upgrading the site yesterday, I installed a special thingy to show me statistics about who visits the weblog, what they read while they’re here and what links they click on. I haven’t had a system like this in place for years, and was quite surprised this morning by the stats. Many more people visit the site than I thought, and certain posts — the one about casuals, the one about collapsed lungs, and anything about how to do stuff on a computer — actually get a decent number of hits each day, from real live humans, as best as I can tell. So, I thought I’d try a little experiment and… add some advertisements to the site. You know, so I can profit from football hooligans arranging fights and unwell Americans without health insurance. Might as well...

Today I read with some distress that scenes from Gordon Ramsay’s The F Word were edited to make it appear that he caught several fish. He did no such thing.Distress not because I had just signed up Ramsay for a lucrative five-year spearfishing contract, but because of the statement from Channel 4 that: the broadcaster took “such errors of judgement seriously” and was working with production company Optomen to ensure there was no repeat. Perhaps the fact that this story was filed under “Entertainment” should be the giveaway clue: this is about as troubling as the use of stuntmen in action films, or identical twins to portray a single young child in a heartwarming soap opera. If such “errors of judgement” are to be taken “seriously”,...

I’m slowing down on posting for a while. Why? I’m busy. Project deadlines are looming in the coming weeks/months. Various exam-related meetings take place soon, once the task of marking has taken place. Fortunately, no stupid strikes this year. I have a couple of short trips away, scheduled right through to late July, and also some personal time off. I’ll post intermittently, but I imagine it’ll take a while for me to get back into full swing. Be sure to check in from time to time, see if I’m still......

I know metablogging is just about the most tedious form of navel gazing, but this might just be amusing enough to make the cut. Some time in 2004, I wrote a bitter aside about how the “Real Radio Fugitive” competition had caused me some minor inconvenience, and in the intervening two and a half years I promptly forgot about it. But its effect lingers on, because on “Good” Friday, the following comment was left (it hardly seems necessary to say it, but, in what follows, sic): you want to try getting off your high horse my pal and i took 11 GRAND off your real radio pish , spose though you are some snotty wee glasgow uni middle class daddy weres my cheque student have fun eatin you cheese and chips in yer damp bed sit i am now in amsterdam steak dinner washed down...

Finally, yesterday, I sorted out a workflow to easily make a note of links to interesting things from NetNewsWire to my del.icio.us. So you can look forward to a one-post summary each day of all the articles I’ve read and found particularly interesting. I’m making an effort to write a short summary along with each link. I’m using WebnoteHappy along with the latest NNW beta so I’ve got a nice easy workflow to post an item (ctrl-apple-’), write a description, add some tags, then post it to delicious. Dead easy! Hopefully easy enough that I will carry on doing it!...

Blimey, it’s been a while since I updated this, hasn’t it? Well, rest assured that I have lots of interesting things to say, and I should be resuming soon. But, for the mean time and in the interests of an intriguing non-linear narrative, let me introduce you to my other website....

Caught Spam Akismet has caught 14,504 spam for you since you installed it. That’ll have been since 16th January this year when I upgraded to WordPress 2.0, I think. I’m impressed. That’ll be about 50 spam comments every day that it’s caught. Thank you, akismet!...

Apparently I’m having a slightly distracted day. I should be fiddling around with portal catalogues in Plone and I should be creating a simple photograph gallery controller in Rails but instead I’m fiddling with my blog… If you visit the home page (or any other page, for that matter, just not through your RSS aggregator!), you’ll now be treated to a selection of my photographs that I reckon work reasonably well cropped in about 7×2 format. Keep hitting refresh and you should get a new one each time. OK, if you can’t be bothered hitting refresh, you can see them all here....

I’ve been mucking around, updating the site a little today. I’ve upgraded to the latest version of the K2 theme and installed the widgets plugin for managing the sidebar without bothering to fiddle with the theme source. So now the only theme tweak I’ve got is to put those nasty evil ads (mmm, clicky goodness!) in theloop.php. I also grabbed Ultimate Tag Warrior to have a play around with tags once again. I recall disabling the last tagging thing I had for some reason or another, but I figured I’d give it a go again. Anyway, if you spot things going awry, do let me know. Maybe you could just talk to me anyway — it would be good for my inbox to see something other than spam sometime today…...

That painfully-familiar template surrounding this blog can mean only one thing. Not that I’ve decided, in a fit of irony, to retrofit the Kubrick template onto my hacked-together CMS; but that I’ve moved to Wordpress. Back in late 2002, it was a fun idea to knock together a CMS in PHP and MySQL, and throw off the shackles of Blogger. Now, in 2006, and having taken a hiatus of over two months, I think the change to Wordpress will prove a catalyst for the resumption of blogging on this site. Hopefully, anyway. For the moment, the old posts and content remain in situ, so that I can preserve the old hyperlinks. I’ll eventually create a home page (how 90’s!) that sits at www.mrry.co.uk, and directs you here or elsewhere. In the mean time, sit back, relax, and watch as a...

Incidentally, I shall be spending the day Naked. Actually, I think I look good naked — maybe I’ll just stay like that all the time!...

I’m partway through updating the theme on this site to the latest beta of K2. I think it’s looking much prettier so far, but there’s still some customisation to be reintegrated (like all revenue-generating Google ads, and the picture of a messy desk, which really ought to be updated anyway!). What do you think? Does it look OK on your browser?...

Well, that was quick. It’s only taken me two posts to switch off the new rich text editor in Wordpress 2.0 and instead enable the Markdown plugin. Actually I had never used that plugin before either, but I’ve been writing enough documentation recently, using Markdown, that I figured I’d give it a go here too. Mostly the rich editor was irritating. I’m not quite sure what it was doing behind the scenes, HTML-wise, it was a bit sluggish, and my fingers are wired towards actually writing HTML instead of having to hit clicky buttons. So it’s gone again. tags: markdown, rich editor, wordpress...