The SquizLogKeith Pitty takes a squiz at the world. |
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The SquizLogKeith Pitty takes a squiz at the world. |
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Riverbend, the pseudonymn chosen by a young Iraqi woman, first came to my attention in August 2003.
As this inteview shows, her passion for sharing her experiences of everyday life in Baghdad, often at odds with the sanitised reports that appear in our media, continues unabated. And now a book of excerpts from her first year of blogging has been published.
To me, what could be a better example of the power of free speech that the internet and blogging enables.
Via Danny Yee.
I thought Ruby was supposed to be elegant but this example shows how any programming language can be perverted!
Via Jari.
It may not be the most challenging of golf courses but the six-hole "Royal" Crescent Head layout is certainly among the most picturesque that I've played.
It's a reassuring part of my annual trip to Crescent Head. Hasn't changed in the last ten years and is not likely to change in the next ten.
Recently trackpack spam has become a bit of a pain.
But, having been away on holidays for a week (yes - I was disconnected from the Internet for a whole week), I'm a happy vegemite on my return. You see, just before I left I made sure I installed MT-Moderate. In conjunction with MT-Blacklist it made the task of removing the 40 spam trackbacks that had accumulated a piece of cake.
And, what's better, none of the trackback spam made it to the published state of my blog. They were all waiting to be approved, which of course I declined to do. In a matter of a few clicks, the spam was gone and my blacklist updated.
For the first time I feel like I'm winning the fight against blogspam.
From yesterday's letters page in the Sydney Morning Herald, courtesy of one Peter Wall:
Already there is speculation as to the name the next Pope may choose. After more than 46 years of John and Paul, surely it must be time for Ringo and George.Pope Ringo? I like the sound of that.
Stuart MacGill has been selected in the Australian Test squad to tour England for the Ashes series. And quite rightly so. It would have been a travesty if he had been left out!
For various reasons, when I purchased my iBook, I decided against paying for Microsoft Office as well. One of the was that OpenOffice.org, which I had been using on my old Thinkpad as well as at work, was available for OS X.
So I used OpenOffice.org for OS X for several months but it was never a totally satisfactory experience. The reason? Simple. When you are used to the eye candy provided by native OS X applications, an Office application based on X11 just doesn't cut it visually. It never looked good enough, wasn't integrated with the Mac menus and didn't conform to the OS X key shortcuts.
Then I discovered NeoOffice/J, which is an open source Java-based port of OpenOffice.org created by Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin. I have been using it for the last couple of months and have been delighted. When I originally downloaded it the website contained warnings that it was beta software. Several patches have been released since but I've never experienced a problem.
A few days ago the version 1.1 release candidate was made available and declared stable enough for everyday use. So, if you're using OS X, I recommend that you give NeoOffice/J a try as an alternative to Microsoft Office.
The match situation was tense. I had been reduced to getting updates via text messages as I had part of my attention on the Woy Woy Junior Cricket Club presentations.
The previous score update, about twenty-five minutes earlier, was 8/192, which left Sydney Uni 12 to win.
I sent through another request for the score to my friend Mick Farrow, former fellow SUCC player and now chairman of selectors. Unlike the previous requests, this time I didn't get a quick response. What could this mean? Had Mick turned his phone off in disgust after Sydney Uni fell short? Or had he just not heard the message due to the noise of the celebrations?
I was tense in anticipation.
Twenty minutes or so elapsed and then the reply came through: "We won!" When I managed to catch Mick on the phone after the Woy Woy presentation finished communication was difficult due to the noise around him. However, he did manage to say:
"We got them nine down. Mo hit the winning runs through point."
So Sydney Uni have added the First Grade Premiership to the Club Championship. And for me, that is a very satisfactory conclusion to the season!
Update: Here's the write-up in the Sydney Morning Herald.