At last we have a winner, some guy called Pete from Australia proved that he is the king of Nigritude Ultramarine, by bidding a whopping $8 for my SEO support services. His site is at number 38 in the Google chart, but with my help he might even make it to 37!
Monthly Archive for May, 2004
When America was bold and new, a Frenchman called Alexis de Tocqueville began an epic adventure in the new world and wrote a book about this emerging society. Alexis was an 18th centaury version of Alistair Cook.
These days a right-wing research organisation has been named after him: The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute appear to be a bunch of shysters who will publish anything in the guise of ‘research’. Witness their recent attempts to re-write the history of UNIX, now profoundly debunked.
This is the new front-line for IT marketing FUD, big companies like Microsoft and SCO, encourage small research companies to publish blatent mis-information. The big company gets plausable deinability (they can claim it was nothing to do with them), the small company gets cash for generating fear.
Is it time to ditch MT? The world, his dog and his friend’s dog are all up in arms because the software company that makes MT wants to charge $60 for it. As a developer myself, I dont begrudge them this money because even developers have to eat. Anyway MT never pretended to be GPL, so why is everybody acting so surprised when the developers want to be paid?
Anyway my problems with MT is that I never liked it in the first place. I only use it because Andy installed it on one of my servers, and it seemed convenient to carry on using it.
My main dislike is that MT is written in Perl/CGI and is therefore not something I feel comfortable hacking around. Furthermore I find the way MT likes to build up it’s pages off-line seems like mid-90’s technology. None of my servers are feeble enough to benefit from this kind of feature.
There seem to be quite a few good PHP based blogging systems out now… what say we try: WordPress… it seems like better software.
Sure television might be just a bunch of pixels and scan-lines, but the problem I have with it is that it tends to numb the mind and evoke unpleasant emotions whenever anybody gazes upon it.
The problem, I believe is that even with the volume turned down, the pixels on the screen often form coherent images; This would not be such a problem if the producers of TV content chose the images with more care, however this is not the case. During a typical operational life, most images produced by a TV will be aesthetically sub-optimal.
Fortunately, some design boffins have come up with an elegant and practical solution; merely make your TV’s pixels bigger, and they transform from an irritating distraction into an attractive light-show.
This weekend Doug and I did the Raw Dyfi Enduro, a 55km endurance mountain biking event in the Dyfi Forest, just north of beautiful Machynlleth. As ever, it was a very well-organised event, with heaps of enthusiasm put into the whole affair by the people from Summit Cycles and locals alike. There was a lot of climbing, but some great downhills, and the conditions weren’t too sloshy. Yes, they were very sloshy indeed, but this was Wales and the whole affair could easily have been much, much soggier. I would also like to express my thanks (somewhat cryptically for anyone who hasn’t done the event) to the drummers.
The fun of the weekend was dampened only by Telford. To be fair, it’s not Telford’s fault that we were diverted around our intended battered fish destination of Welshpool and overshot a chippie in Shrewsbury due to bladder constraints, but it is Telford’s fault that it’s a bloody ugly place. It consists of roundabouts punctuated by oddly-shaped office blocks or unhappily-clad residential towers, with little option for residents but to rely heavily on their cars for even the most minor tasks — the chippie we eventually found was styled as a ‘drive-in’.
It took us an hour of bombing around Telford to find our fishy treat, and it was worth it in the end (just about), although my tongue is still burnt from my mushy peas.
12:20pm:
Some photos from the event: I’m in the first photo, number 135, looking daft in my yellow helmy.
According to slashdot, there is a competition for professional search engine marketing types to see who can get their own page to the top of the Google chart for the phrase Nigritude Ultramarine. The competion is open to SEO guild members (an organisation that I do not belong to), and you can win an iPod or something.
Anyway, having excluded myself from the competition and not being thrilled by the prizes (I allready have a better music player and screen), I now offer myself as a SEO mercinary: If you win my eBay auction all my Nigritude Ultramarine can be yours.
What you get for $50: Links to your site from Sharesite.net, My Wiki, Portal, a highly ranked online novel, The RIAA pit of Confusion, and The Exciting Hellebore Shew.
Earlier today I received three identical spam SMS messages within half an hour of each other:
“4 mths half price Orange line rental & latest camera phones 4 FREE. Had your phone 11mths+? Call MobileUpd8 freefone 08000839402 now! or 2stoptxt T&Cs”
I’ve collected a small dodgy dossier of information on these guys - click on the link above to find see what I have discovered.