Miscellaneous Blog

I know Mac users are sometimes fanatical, but this makes me wonder about the sanity of some of them. (Link from A Skeptical Blog)

Warning! Link contains words uttered recently by Johnny Rotten!

If you want to save the whale, don’t save this one.

A dead sperm whale has exploded while being delivered to a research centre near the southwestern city of Tainan.

Passers-by and cars were soaked in blood and body parts were sprayed over a road after the bursting of the whale, which was being carried on a trailer.

The whale had died earlier on a beach and had been collected so its remains could be used for educational purposes.

A marine biologist blamed the explosion on pressure from gases building up in the mammal as it began to decompose.

I blame the Deep Ones. Not totally sure what they’re up to, or whether or not it’s anything to do with the shoggoth washed up in Chile a few months back.

I’ve finally got round to upgrading to MT 2.661, and got out of the dark ages of 2.2. Hopefully this has better anti-spambot protection. This post is really a test to make sure everything still works!

Two posts about Stuff and the accumulation thereof. Eric Olsen has been ordering his record and CD collection, and it appears that he is one of the guys from “High Fidelity”. He even owns up to a Bay City Rollers album! Meanwhile Bruce Baugh has been getting rid of Stuff, notably Roleplaying games that he’s never actually played, and finds it cathartic to get rid of stuff that’s got negative mental associations. And it also means he’s got room to move in his apartment!

I’ve probably got too much Stuff. Most of it is model trains, accumulated over a thirty year period, rather than extreme quantities of RPG supplements. I’ve managed to collect vast fleets of N gauge stock for two different countries (Britain and Switzerland), which will need two separate layouts to run them all on. And if I hadn’t gone into internal exile up north, I might even have got assimilated into the club’s O Gauge Borg, and started a collection of much bigger stuff. And I’ve still got quite a bit of TT3 rolling stock left over from my teenage years, still gathering dust at my parents’ place. I really ought to find a decent home for that lot, it’s not as if I’m ever going to build another TT3 layout.

I did actually sell a few surplus N gauge china clay wagons at the Maidenhead and Marlow Model Railway exhibition (And the guy that bought them complained that the wheels were dirty!), and there’s probably some further thinning I can do. It might be a good idea to dispose of anything British I can’t legitimately run on a West of England based layout.

Meanwhile, anyone want to buy a never used copy of 7th Sea? Surely the Tales from Topographic Oceans of RPGs, and one game I’m never going to play or run.

David Edelstein (also known as Amadán) has finally started the blog he’s been threatening us with for some time, A Gathering of Fools. Amadán is GM of STD, has his name on more than one In Nomine supplement, so I hope we’ll see some gaming entries as well as his opinions on politics and religion.

A belated happy Christmas to all (both) of this weblog’s readers. (That’s Scott and Martyn). I’ve been in sunny Southend with my sister and family, without a net connection, and with no time to blog even if I did have one Now I’m at my parent’s place in sunny Slough, reunited with my laptop. (535 emails in three days, Eeek!)

Santa Claus didn’t bring me any RPG stuff or trains this year, but amongst other things he did bring me Led Zeppelin’s triple live CD “How The West Was Won”, and Mary Gentle’s new novel “1610: A Sundial on a Grave”. Hope it’s as wonderful as her previous “Ash”. My left wing brother also game me a set of “Regime Change” playing cards, with The Shrub as the Ace of Spades, and Mr Cheesy Grin as the Ace of Hearts.

On the other hand, Santa Claus colluded in my nephew’s uncle’s evil plan to corrupt the next generation, and delivered three Bachmann HEAs and three MEAs in assorted liveries that tell the convoluted history of rail privatisation. This has doubled the available freight stock on his layout, and gives his Loadhaul 56 and EWS 08 something to pull.

Finally, I’m not sure how I should feel when I find myself agreeing with a ten year old about music. Both my nephew and I think The Darkness should have been the Christmas Number One rather that dull ‘Mad World’.

Looks like I’ve got another problem with corrupted comments database. As before, the only cure for this seems to be to trash the entire existing comments database and start over, so all existing comments on this blog are now gone

Wherever I end up hosting, it’s got to support MySQL. Then you have at least a chance of repairing corrupted database files.

Eeek! I’ve just received a bill from my hosting company for exceeding my bandwidth quota for November. I’ve checked by web statistics, and it doesn’t look as though anything’s been slashdotted or instapundited, just the general upward trend in hits. It looks like this weblog has just outgrown my current hosting package.

This forces me to consider my options. Do I stick with the same provider and upgrade to the next level up in hosting plan, costing 50% more but giving me four times the bandwidth? Do I try and redesign the site to use less bandwidth by making the front page (which accounts for the majority of hits) smaller? Do I learn some google-fu to direct search engine hits away from the main page towards the much smaller individual archives instead?

Or should I change to a different host? My current provider had been hosting my homepage well before I started blogging; It’s really geared towards small-scale e-commerce rather than as a blog host. Perhaps one of the specialised blog hosting companies might be a better bet?

Recommendations, anyone?

I know it’s two days after the event, but what with (1) recovering from the party, (2) Sunday lunch with my parents, and (3) the long journey back to Cheshire, this is the first time I’ve had the chance to post about it.

There were a good fifty or sixty people people there. Of those on my blogroll, I met Tom Coates, Matt Webb, Annie from Going Underground and Bobbie from PolitX. Much fun was had, and much beer was drunk.

There’s a partial list of attendees here. There are even some photos, one of which is of me, although I will not say which one.

I stayed until (almost) the bitter end, caught the very last tube to Paddington, and which just got there just in time to catch the 1am train back to Slough (which was standing room only).

The UK Webloggers Christmas Party, to be held in central London, is Fast Approaching! Will you be there? Virgin Trains permitting, I will!

• Venue: Downstairs at the Well
• When: This coming Saturday 29th November from 7.00pm
• How do you find it? There’s a helpful map!
• Organised by: That lovely chap from Funjunkie.co.uk