Snippets

Money for old rope? Or is it possible to blog full-time? Last year Jason Kottke tried it, couldn’t make it stick. Now John Gruber is heading down the same road.

The reason I ask is that yesterday’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek post seems to have… well not quite enraged but definitely “irked” a few people somewhat. I guess for a lot of people it comes down to personal values, namely what you value most in life.

Me? Cold hard cash. Piles of it. Enough to burn.

OK, not really, er well maybe just a small pile..

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Web design posts have been few and far between on here of late. There is a very good reason of course, namely that I want to setup a blog on onemandesigns but haven’t had a moment to do it. Ideally I’ll cross-post an excerpt on here as well but I’m not exactly sure on the details yet.

Need to get it done though, I’ve a stack of things to write about, and my head is gonna burst if I don’t get them out soon.

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I don’t blog about work on here, well not directly anyway just the occasional “ya boo sucks” kinda nonsense that everyone goes through. It’s just as well too as —and don’t ask me why this has just occurred to me— my referrer stats have shown up somebody (people?) searching for my name in conjunction with my employers name. I’m guessing it may be interview candidates as they know who is interviewing them and who I work for… or it could be someone else who is checking me out in a “professional” capacity.

Either way, a lesson to you all. Careful what you say!

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WordPress questions. I seem to have developed a penchant for my old friend the mdash (—). However, it’s becoming a bit of a drag having to type out the HTML entity code each time (& mdash ; ) and I’m wondering if there is an easier way around this problem. It’s the same for & pound ; and letter accents. Annoying.

I’m guessing I’ve missed something really obvious but CBATG.

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.htaccess files are fun, aren’t they?

Well, no not really. They still fall into the realm of black magic as far as I’m concerned but I’ve been mucking about (on a test system) with something I hope to implement here. I mentioned it, er, last week I think. A homepage.

Problem is this blog is the default page for the domain, but I’m sure I read somewhere I could do some clever redirecty thingy using .htaccess… I don’t mind moving the blog to, say, /blog/ but it’s a bit of a pain in the ass for everyone else.

Mind you, as I’m linked to under so many different monikers (as previously discussed) it might be good to force people to update their links! And yes, the most annoying one is most definitely the “Gordon McClean” links. One “c” people, ONE!

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SQL Injection attack anyone? Scottish Blogs has, suddenly, has a huge amount of rogue “submitted sites” (over 100 in the past hour, as opposed to 20 or so a day). I’ll see how many there are in the morning but might need to turn … um… something off somewhere! Balls.

AM update: Seems to have calmed down and, in the cold light of the morning I think it’s more a concerted attack on the form rather than SQL Injection. So far, so quiet(er).

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I have a new method for dealing with cold callers. Last night, Louise had gone out to dinner with friends, I was sitting at the PC doing some work when the phone rang. The phone upstairs doesn’t have a caller id display so I picked up… only for some woman to immediately start yakking down the phone at me about how I’d “won” a mobile phone and how wonderful it was and how lucky I am. Now, would I give her my mobile number?

“No…” said I, and before I could complete the sentence she was off again… I was mid-way through hanging up when I decided against it. I listened to her for about 30 seconds, and with no sign of her abating, I gently placed the handset on the desk and let her enjoy a little bit of Kate Bush. She finally stopped after a further minute (34 seconds after I put the phone down, I was counting by now) and I could just make her out.. “hello? HELLO?”.

I held my breath, expecting her to disconnect. She didn’t. Over the music I could faintly hear the next round in her glorious eulogy —this one timed at a full 77 seconds— before she paused again. “hello? HELLO?”.

Click.