Journalistic Arrogance Over Blogs (by sarah)

Ok I am sick of hearing/reading journalists refering to blogs of ordinary people as rubbish, or writen badly or as having nothing of interest to convey. If that's how they feel then they shouldnt read the bloody things should they!

What do they think the majority of blogs are for? Yeah sure a few people fancy themselves as journalists and if purporting to be one then I suppose they should act as one, but most people aren't. Most people are writing blogs as a an online diary and message board so that their family and friends can share things with them instead of having to write thousands of emails and a couple of dozen letters! Sounds very efficient to me. Some of them use them to have discussions with people about stuff that matters to them - good on them.

Of course there are going to be the odd ones here and there who are just after revenue form the ads but they are very few indeed but this would only work with high profile sites and who has them? Oh the journalists!

The arrogance has astounded me, I have to say - I think the real problem is that blogs are altering the way news is spread amongst people. We are back to the essayist and everyone pretty much can have ago at it, at least in this country. I think that the arrogance masks the fear - fear that people like Tom Reynolds and Abby Lee are pipping the 'professional' writers at the post.

At the end of the day blogs are a form of expression for the people writing and most are understandable no matter how bad the spelling and grammar (hence people actually understand what I write! - well most of the time). They are not well crafted pieces of 'literature' for some micky mouse degree somewhere so why fret about it and make the people writing their hearts and souls out feel bad cos perhapse they type quicker in txt speak for example? If you dont like it dont read it!

If it was some formal piece of work then by all means moan but they are not! And I for one like to see all the diverse goings on that blogging allows us access to!

Poor Jean :-( (by alaric)

Jean's been quite snuffly after her last round of jabs, so we were feeling sorry for her anyway, but this morning when I changed her she had really nasty nappy rash, and the elastic edge of her nappy was folded inwards rather than out - which happened to go right through the sore area and irritate it, causing it to bleed slightly 🙁

This, combined with her snuffliness, worried the nursery too much, so they rung us up to take her home again today, and I've been rubbing antiseptic ointment into her sores whenever I've changed her since, to help it heal cleanly, and washing them with cotton wool and water rather than baby wipes (because I bet they'd sting on a sore...)

Still, as usual, she is in good sprits, laughing and smiling and playing! She wails when I change her and clean the sores, but soon cheers up when she's back in a fresh nappy 🙂

Kitten Technologies (by alaric)

For some time now, I've been sitting on the domain kitten-technologies.co.uk, intended as an outlet for my "intellectual property" - whereas Snell Systems is me for hire to do bespoke stuff, Kitten Technologies is meant to be my more generic packaged outputs; all open source stuff for now, although I have plans for some more commercial things later.

Anyway, I've slowly been working towards a fairly decent automatic release management site, based around all the projects being in Subversion repository and having standardised filenames at the top level of each project root (LICENCE.txt, README.txt, VERSION.txt, etc).

But with the successful upgrading of my server infrastructure to Apache 2, I can run Subversion over HTTP, meaning I can finally allow public Subversion access (with the option to give other people commit access to individual projects in future), so I've now got the project management page up to a state where I'm not ashamed of it any more.

So, for example, I've recently been messing around with a server status monitoring package, a bit like Nagios but done in a way I prefer, which I've called The Eye Of Horus.

There is a main project information page, and a download page which links to the latest official release, and to a nightly dev snapshot tarball; and gives the public read-only Subversion URL (http://svn.kitten-technologies.co.uk/horus/trunk/), and links to a subversion browser to look at the revision histories of everything.

Right now there's only me working on any of the projects, but if others collaborate (I have a few potential takers for Horus, since it seems there's a lot of minor dissatisfaction with Nagios), I can give them Subversion commit access, and set up project mailing lists as required; but I may integrate issue tracking into the Kitten Tech site itself, if it seems useful to let others submit bug reports and the like.

Yeti Hunt (by alaric)

Well, today, we had all three sections tramping around hunting a Yeti.

I was the Yeti. Dressed in a rather fine costume Sarah's mother produced, I was covered head to foot in white fur.

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Halloween! Eeek! (by sarah)

Yesturday was the fifth Halloween(four yrs) me and Al have seen together as a couple - Halloween is actually the date of our first date!

We went for a wonder around Cheltenham and then like all those years ago we went and had dough balls in Pizza Express - the staff where all funkily dressed and we took Jean with us in her little spider outfit. The only strange thing was that as we came up to the van to load Jean in to head to Cheltenham it was a blood/firey orange sunset with a scary cloud formation that really did look like some sort of ethereal skeleton horse galloping through the skies - even Al commented on the fact it looked like this complete with colour!

This I have to say stupidly unnerved me - it just looked so creepy.

So after the meal we haeded back and I did a record punkin carving in about ten mins so that it would be glowing at our window at midnight - silly imagination running wild I have! We also made sure all the cats where in and worried when at 10 too Al found Babara collecting apples from the stream or some such. As the witching hour approached I had my remeberance/ancestor candle things I light for the dead alight (I know light appears to many times in that sentance!).

We then tidied to occupy us whilst the spookies were abroad then feeling a bit silly and sheepish we blew all the candles out and went to bed having a discuession on the fact that I have evolved my own symbolism and Al being proceeding to be the fourth person to state that I had come up with the protents or fundimentals or some such of Chaos Magik. What ever it is - it made me feel better - I have always burnt things like candles or presants I've made for the dead - I think it started when Nanny Pym died when I was like 7 - I had already made her birthday card and I found out she was going to be cremated so I chopped it up and burnt it cos obviously smoke rises and goes to heaven and then the particles get reconstrated in heaven. You should have seen how worried I was when I found out that rubbish was burnt! (I'm serious!).

Well that is a lot of silly waffle so I think I'll go to bed now!

p.s. edited cos I had an off by one error moment as Halloween is our 0 if that makes scense and I just counted the yrs!