New Comments Policy

In order to avoid having random trolling on this site and promote intelligent discussions and conversation I am implementing initial comment moderation on this blog.  It’s all too easy for unpleasant people to troll around randomly and be abusive for no good reason other than they clearly have issues and they can.

I had a run in with a bunch of real idiots recently who have mastered the art of character assassination and revolting verbal abuse where it really wasn’t called for; I have subsequently deleted their trash. 

Please understand this is not any form of censorship – I find that concept abhorrent so feel free to have your say and leave your differing opinion and let’s debate differing opinions;  abuse and stupidity will no longer be tolerated though, there are chat rooms and places where stupid trolls can congregate and this is not one of them.

Why I Love and Hate Facebook

Social networking website such as Myspace and more recently Facebook have been creating huge publicity over the last couple of years. Their addictive nature have caused many a work place to have them banned from their employees web access and many a person has found themselves trolling around mindlessly for hours looking for long lost friends and family.

My Facebook profile was a revelation to me though; I set it up initially as a closed network for friends and family to share some of the things I find interesting, like my photography, and for me to see what they were up to however I never really expected the deluge which followed. First up were the work colleagues; failure to accept them into my profile would create all sorts of embarrassing shuffling in the hallway and low level mutterings so on they came. Then came the work colleagues wives … er ok … how do you respond when the bosses wife sends you a ‘naughty gift’; big potential problems right there.

Then the friends/acquaintances from school 15 years ago suddenly started popping up wanting to be best buds … ok … so we had something way back in the annals of history, let’s say hi … on they came. Then came the friend collectors who suddenly wanted to be big buds with me and share my personal virtual real-estate and swap stories of their progeny; guys back at school who, in the throws of effervescent schoolboy testosterone, you’d like to smack in the face (and probably did) all of a sudden want to be super-best-chums …. they are ‘obviously’ still way cool though because their network has 476 friends hence the need to collect you for meaningful social interaction.

Facebook looks set to create groups for your friends; each group will have privacy options that you can set which will dictate how much of your information you allow these people to see. I can’t wait for this new development and have my groups thought up already.

Family
Friends
Work Colleagues
Hobby Sharing
Dicks from my youth

Can’t wait

Photoblog moving to Ipernity

I have to say that Yahoo (Flickr) has really peeved me.  All my blog postings that include links to pictures that are still public have mysteriously all turned into little white blocks with ‘Not Available’ in them.  Click on the picture and you will be taken to the picture in question.  This all happened mysteriously when I moved my pictures to Ipernity photo sharing and although I doubt the 2 are related it has given me the much needed impetus to consolidate.  I love wordpress but the having to post your picture, write a post, get the picture link, insert into said post slog has to end.

Ipernity gives me the ability to blog, upload video, photos and a host of other wonderful functionality and it for this reason I will move the photoblog to:

http://www.ipernity.com/blog/stuartforsyth

Non photography related posts will still appear here from time to time.

Back after a hiatus

Well I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus of late, getting all the disconnected threads of my life neatly back in order. I took a jaunt back to blogger and did a whole lot of tech stuff which was fun but ultimately not very satisfying (and the community there are just not as cool and interactive as the wordpress lot).

The main problem I had with my blog was that the content was too disparate, too much stuff about too many topics to satisfy the need for a blog-theme. So I’m starting again and keeping it simple, concentrating on the things that really interest me: atheism and belief, photography and general life musings.If that’s what gets your wheels turning in the morning then perhaps we have something. It’s a new day and I’m pleased to be writing again.

The picture above is a 3 exposure HDR taken of my favourite tree in my garden, an African acacia that towers over our house and is able to grab the last rays of sunlight. Taken with a Nikon D80, f/10 1/50s ISO 200 autobracketing, exposures 2ev apart.

The Trolls on Blogger

I recently re-activated my Blogger Blog and am in the process of trying out the new Beta platform. There are definitely pros to Blogger, things like speed, customisability and seemless must-haves like email to blog postings. There are however cons and it seems so far to be mostly to do with the community and not the technical platform.

For some of us, blogging is about more than etching up the trivialities of our day in the vain hope that someone even more pathetic would find it interesting. It is about sharing a point of view and perhaps opening it up for debate. For some it’s not and these mindless sociopaths troll around other peoples hard work spreading their stupidity around like so much intellectual faeces. These semi-literate morons are somehow able to wield a keyboard like a blunt instrument leaving bread crumbs of their social ineptitude littering the blogosphere.

The urban dictionary defines a blog troll:

1.(n) -A pathetic and moronic person who maintains a blog with an unhealthy obsessive-compulsive drive, especially angsty goths (sorry to all the likeable goths out there). The content of their blogs usually includes events that no sane person would care about. Here’s sample of what a blog troll might write on their blog:
“today, I ate a sanwich. It bad – it was just ok, mediocre, I guess you could call it. After that I read a few chapters out of an Anne Rice book and was deeply moved by her erotic descriptions of gay vampires fornicating. . Then I took a nap.

2.(n) -A depraved individual who sits in front of a computer all day and posts flames of an idiotic or pseudo-intellectual nature on public forums and private websites. Many of these people actually become emotional about what is said on the afore-said mediums and feel it is their duty to punish those who disagree with them. They too may pursue this object in an obsessive-compulsive manner.

I had it today by a real moron, his blog lists a seemingly endless lust for sex and stupidity. There is no point, seemingly to anything he says yet he left a comment on one of my posts that was, well plain pointless, aggressive and … I did mention stupid already didn’t I? He completely missed the point of the article, in fact his response is so off point that I wonder if he read the article at all. It seems that trolls like these are there merely to illicit a reaction from their victims.

Stuff on his blog includes such gems as (and I quote):

Was planning to watch Borat today with a couple of work colleagues but dunno if I’ll be able to make it because I might be fucking the living daylights out of my fuckbuddy who should be here this afternoon.

or this

Seriously though although I haven’t had sex in a while( three weeks at last count) I can’t exactly blame it on my lack of game…I’ve just not been going out enough to get any punani. The last time I had sex it was friggin awesome…pounded my ex girlfriend the whole night and into the early hours of the morning…she orgasmed so loudly i thought the neighbours were going to bang on her door. That was fun, fucking her so hard. Afterwards though I felt like a dirty dick because she’s got a boyfriend and I thought I was getting back with my ex gf…the one I broke up with in January (shit, that’s almost a year ago).

I begin to see why so many good bloggers the world over all come to the same conclusion: “Don’t feed the trolls” – and so in future, taking a leaf out of their books I will merely delete troll shit. If you have a difference of opinion then excellent but please don’t troll.

To Q.N.I.T.Y I say, please do the world a favour and stop breathing and for God’s sake, never never procreate.

Healthy Skepticism and Snake Oil

Terra Sigillata hosts the 31st meeting of 'the skeptics circle', a unique event where all the critically minded from the blogsphere gather to bring a little common sense to the Internet.

I came across a very disturbing article yesterday, apparently an American preacher Ernest Angley is having flyers handed out in Lesotho as part of his 'miracle crusade'. He is going around telling the uneducated and the poor that he can cure their HIV/AIDS and their cancer. This pathetic excuse for a human being has realised that selling snake oil in a country rife with problems like AIDS is very lucrative indeed and hey if you aren't cured then presumably your faith was too weak. Throughout history people have been preyed upon by the peddlers in false hope and the charlatans, it is a pity that something can't be done to stop this or somehow inform the uninformed. They will peddle their last cent, perhaps taking food away from their children in the hope that this white man from America is able to offer them some last chance as avoiding what has undoubtedly killed many people they know.

As much as I'd love to keep writing, my textbooks are sitting on my shelf and staring at me in an unfriendly and ominous manner, time to hit the books.

Trying out Blogmad

I have come across many blogs trying to increase their traffic and they seem to use 'traffic sites' to do it.  A couple have suggested Blogmad and swear by the increase in readership.  Well after filling out the required online forms, having my email and blog checked and verified, I am finally signed up.  Let me know if you have had any luck (or disaster) with Blogmad or any other traffic site.

Yet another web username and password to keep track of. 

Huge Debate on Newsvine

I posted my 'Creationists, ID and The Flying Spaghetti Monster' article on Newsvine, so far there is a huge debate happening there.

Head on over to have your say.

It’s the end of the world, I read it on a blog!

Achtung Achtung we are all going to die!  It’s true I read it on a blog from a blog from a newspaper from a scientific magazine.  It’s so sad, I think I need to lie down.

In an effort to increase readership, many sources of information are becoming polluted by playing broken telephone – remember that game you used to play at parties when you were a kid.  Snippets of half truths abound with only the juiciest bits being posted and very often taken completely out of context.

A vine posting I read today Antarctica is shrinking was a seeded link from a CNET News.com article also entitled Antarctica is shrinking  where apparently the first ever [important words there] survey of the entire Antarctic ice sheet was conducted and it was concluded that the ice sheets mass has decrease dramatically since 2002. Um? Well if this is the first ever survey then what can they compare their data to?  You must believe this to be a credible article though because there is a footnote ‘Credit: Ben Holte Sr. NASA’, yet no mention of who Ben Holte is nor any reference to the original article.

Please, this is a call to all posters – if it is not your field of specialty then link to the original source so interested parties can get the full story.  The [snip] interesting parts [snip] taken completely [snip] out of context only add to confusion and misinformation.

Blogging, Carbon and Alien Rain

Back in the Blogger days I used a wonderful tool called w.bloggar to post to my blog. When I moved over to WordPress I tried a number of other tools, the closest I got was Quamana but this morning, to my delight, I noticed that w.Bloggar posts to WordPress blogs – no contest – welcome back w.Bloggar.

This week we are off on holiday for two weeks, I cannot wait and need this time really really badly. I often hear friends and colleagues boast about the number of years since their last holiday but I’m afraid I am not made of such stern stuff – I have a beach-ometer that slowly ticks down between holidays and a Grumpy-ometer that slowly ticks up. Both these wonderful internal devices are very much in the red at the moment and are in dire need of a reset.

In excellent news, Microsoft has denied that it will put back-doors into its new Vista OS. Governments have been asking for a way around the authentication and encryption to allow law enforcement agencies ways to get access to peoples data on seized computers.

Carbon nanotubules are back in the news, not for space elevators this time, but for super-flexible screens. Carbon nanotubules are made from rolled sheets of tightly bound carbon which are very light, incredibly strong and have excellent conductive properties. It seems that carbon nanotubules are going to revolutionise materials in the coming decades, much the same way the advent of plastic did years ago.

In other strange news, on 25 July 2001 blood red rain fell over the Kerala district of Southern India. Initial explanations implied that the cloudy red substance was atmospheric dust. Recent analysis of samples of this liquid show that it is not dust at all and researchers are puzzled as to what exactly it is. There is speculation that the rain was made up of bacteria-like organisms but it is unlike anything we know about. Hours before the first red rain, a loud sonic boom shook Kerala and it is believed to have been caused by an incoming meteorite that broke apart shedding these molecules as it went. If this is true then the red rain may have contained the first traces of extraterrestrial life ever discovered.

Bush officials are readying an intelligence briefing for the U.N. security council on Tehran’s weapons program but get this:

It will rely mainly on circumstantial evidence, much of it from documents found on a laptop purportedly purloined from an Iranian nuclear engineer and obtained by the CIA in 2004. U.S. officials insist the material is strong but concede they have no smoking gun.

You really would have thought America had learned it’s humiliating lesson from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction!

Trying out Qumana

I love desktop blog publishing tools, once I moved from Blogger I had to say goodbye to old favourites like w.bloggar and BlogJet. Now there is a new player on the blog…(sorry that was bad!).

Qumana promises all the “ease of blogging” that the other programs gave me and it has done a lot of clever things behind the scenes. When I first opened the program it asked for a URL to my blog and then auto-detected that it is a WordPress blog. It then imported all my categories and placed them next to my main edit area for ease of use. The interface is nice and clean, very easy to use and tabs at the bottom allow me to switch from WYSIWYG mode to HTML mode for those few behind the scenes tweaks I like.

I feel that this is a tool to watch because it caters to both the Windows and the Mac blogger and so far, for day to day blogging, Qumana rocks!

Blog Creep

Weblogs are slowly infiltrating our office environment, since my last email about my blog, two new colleague related blogs are fizzing and popping into being. I am trying to put my finger on what makes blogs so attractive and wonder if they are an easy forum for personal creativity or merely a narcissistic portrait of your own purported importance. Invariably we move in circles of similar interest and it is this aspect of blogs that make them so exciting for me. I love being able to browse the thoughts of people who interest me and have similar interests to me. This dissemination of information is what makes blogs and news aggregation such exciting concepts for 2006. I am sure that psychology textbooks of the future will have all sorts of withdrawal related symptoms from being unplugged from your information nexus but for now I’m loving it.