steven-dowd.co.uk

Quite a few years ago, while confined to my bed with a serious back problem, and bored to the point that you would even read the instruction manual for a VCR, I was handed a nice thick book to read, 700 pages of story called ‘Hidden Empire, THE SAGA OF SEVEN SUNS’, I was captivated by it, couldn’t put it down, ended up reading the whole thing over the next two days, only to discover at the last page, that it was book 1 of a multi-volume series, and now I just had to have the other books, the Earth Defence Forces and the Ildaran Empire just couldn’t sit around in space and wait, I needed the other books now!

One by one relatives sourced me the other books in the series, and I started reading, book, 2, 3, 4 5 arghhh! book 6 and 7 where not even written yet.. I was leaving the hero stranded, treading water in the one sea on a water world, and the next book wasn’t even written…

A year later, the eagerly awaited book 6 was released, and I was first in line to get a copy, having pre-ordered many months before with Amazon. Knowing the publication date, and expecting the delivery, I speed read through the first 5 books, to get myself back upto warp speed, and on delivery morning eagerly awaited the postman.

The book arrived, and I immediately started reading.

Everything worked out for the heroes, and the whole story moved on loads, then I ran out of pages, and looked at the publication date for book 7 … sh*t, I have to wait another 12 MONTHS!

The time passed, and again i placed a preorder with Amazon, and again, knowing the arrival date of the book, i speed read through the previous 6 books, and then the morning of the delivery arrived, and I started reading.

12 days later, i finished the book, i just couldn’t get into it, Book 7: The Ashes of Worlds, it just doesn’t flow like the other books did, it was almost boring, to be honest, if this had been book one, I wouldn’t have even bothered to finish it, the whole book to me at least read like it was written by a man who was totally fed up with the whole story, who was looking for a way to just get it ended, it was like a film that was going great, but someone realised it had reached the 1hr 28min time point, and they had to get it finished by the 1hr 30min mark.

I feel the last book, a total disappointment, not written with the enthusiasm of the previous ones, and having the feel of a film that ends oddly, or the hurried script rewrite of a weekly TV episode that one of the stars gets sacked, and the story-lines get re-wrote to kill them off in some off-screen event, because the actor was sacked and the final departure couldn’t be filmed.

All the story threads of the Saga of the Seven Suns all get finished, nothing gets left unanswered, but some of the concluding events seem almost laughable considering the effort that obviously went in to planning the complex story-lines of the previous 6 books, it may have been better to close the saga over two books, but this would have meant an 8th book, and the authors contract was most likely only for the seven.

Having taken the time to read them all, and then laid out the cash to buy the series, which isn’t a small amount to buy all seven books, I am regrettably unimpressed by the concluding volume.

There’s loads of hype around about the ‘new’ cuil search engine, everyone seems to be saying how good it is, how different etc, but I really do not like it, and I am not sure that its bots are very website friendly, they ran wild in my websites about 18 months ago, disregarding totally all that is in the Robots.txt, so much so that I ended up adding the complete range into iptables to save my server from continued hassle, at this period ‘Twiceler’ cuils roaming website scraping bot was still in training, at least thats what i was told when i emailed Jim (Jim’s the guy who keeps track of Twiceler, when he’s not busy with his horses.) asking what the f*** he was doing to my server

The cuil search engine is now alive and kicking and it seems they have changed the name from the original version of cuill to cuil, but I still don’t really like it.

So… The last week, I have been hit by spam into webforms, spam comments etc, but oddly it’s all been cuil related.

Why would anyone want to spam ‘for a search engine’?

All the spammed links have been coming into my sites from US based open proxies with no x-forwarded ip’s, the form fields, address box’s and details sections are being prefilled with crap and the main content item is then spam for the cuil search engine written in bbcode

[b][url=www.cuil.com]New Search Engine[/url][/b]

I can understand spammers that post spam links for gambling sites, drug sites or even spamming xxx site links, but who and why would anyone bother to spam website forms with links to www.cuil.com

I’m baffled, maybe Jim’s horses know?

Well, anyone that knows me, will be aware that I hate putting things political online, but the last few days I have been watching the news, and listening to the details of the proposed truckers fuel protests, and I have to wonder why its only the truckers, why private individuals everywhere, all vehicle owners do not also do their bit, so that any result of the protests will not just be confined to commercial diesel, so that petrol price comes down as well.

The fact that today the prime minister is meeting with Oil representatives just amazes me, they want to try to get the oil companies to drop their price, totally missing the point that its the TAX that is too bloody high that’s making the price of petrol so high.

If the tax was halved and the oil companies get the same price as now for their oil, then everyone would be able to afford it, why the hell is petrol taxed as much as it is, and then, VAT is added, onto the already taxed price, so we pay 17.5% VAT TAX on the TAX.

If we were in France, there would be rioting on the streets at such high fuel prices, especially when 2/3rds of the cost is directly due to the Government controlled TAX.

I thought it was ridiculous when Petrol went above 85p per litre, now its 115p per litre, and the Americans I speak to online, are complaining to me that their petrol is too high, and its HALF our price.

OPEC should state an international TAX rate, and they should limit supply to any country that tries to cash in on their population by taxing more than a prescribed rate, then every country would have a fair and universal price for fuel.

This last two weeks, I have been watching a newly found website, which I personally think is going to be the next best thing since Google,  I have watched it grow from an original idea with no direction, into a unique and very clever system, that although it still has not yet fully developed either its purpose or direction, It already has the feel of something that’s going to be super big, Infact I said a few days ago, that I would not be surprised if someone like Google ends up buying out the idea, because it really is pretty unique, and there isn’t much of that on the web anymore.

So what is it?  well its http://therarestwords.com

The site is hard to explain, I think its basically best described as a wikidictionary, or wiktionary if there was ever such a word, If you do not know what a wiki is, then you will not understand, so it is best described in none net terms, as a dictionary of words that you write your own descriptions directly into.

But its lots more than that..

To a website admin, its an opportunity to get links back into your own website, for the sake of a few minutes of your time, doing some simple, and i must say relaxing word descriptions.

But its lots more than that..

It offers admins the chance to see who else on the web, has a page with same content wordage, and maybe not even a same subject website, but one using a percentage of same wordage as your own website, you can then see what needs to be altered in your own site to make it unique, but also helps find words that still bring visitors interested in your site subject matter, and combinations of such words to help filter the traffic to those who will find your site the most use.

But its lots more than that..

It offers the admins the opportunity to look directly at competitors websites, or similar suggested sites, and to judge exactly what the different wordage in their content is, that maybe makes the difference to getting those 5 extra Google places

But its lots more than that..

As yet its a little raw, I suppose you have to be an admin or a little geeky to fully appreciate it, but its a wonderfully refreshing new idea, I have no idea who the person is that is coding the site, all he has stated is that he is Russian, which since i have a googlable history of mixing with anonymous Russian Warez Bears, Its kinda appropriate

But its lots more than that..

And its getting better every time I look … Oh,  did i say it’s –  http://therarestwords.com  and to read all about the project and the development of it, you should visit http://rarestblog.com

I am glad to be able to say that my daughter has been selected to participate in the Oxford Access Scheme Ambassador Programme being run by Oxford University, she is one of 37 school children from her age group, from around the UK, apparently around 5000 children from different schools applied to join the scheme, and the 37 successful applicants will represent their Schools as Ambassadors for further education, the programme consists of  four years of residential and one day events leading up to university application, which can be for any university, not necessarily Oxford, she attends St. Aelred’s in Newton-le-Willows. It was the first time that St. Aelred’s had applied and put forward any of their pupils, so I am sure they are as happy as my wife and myself that our daughter got selected

There is a full website that gives all the details, CLICK HERE, from that I have selected the following which describes the programme and its purpose

"The Ambassador Programme is a four-year programme designed to support its participants (Ambassadors) throughout the remainder of their secondary education. The Programme aims to work with both the Ambassadors and, through them, their peers with their post-16 choices. The Programme hopes to encourage the Ambassadors to apply to a university that matches their potential. In addition, the Ambassadors will serve as ambassadors for higher education in their school, helping to inform their peers about the options available to them."

We are invited to attend with my daughter and one of her teachers from St. Aelred’s to the introductory event at Oxford University in December, will tell you more about it after that..

But…

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Saturday evening we went to a family party, It was a Dunbar event, a surprise party for my wife’s Uncle Peter Dunbar, who is visiting from Australia, had a really good time, and the music was provided by Peters brother, Terry Dunbar, Singing and playing guitar with his pal Colin Guthrie on guitar.

I will put some more of the video clips of them onto my youtube account later, there a tremendously musical family, and really know how-to have a family party.

I am not normally superstitious, I have never been someone to worry that its Friday 13th, but yesterday, it was that day, and yesterday I had loads of hassle and bad luck, so maybe there is something in this superstition lark after all..

1. One of my canon lenses seems to have failed, the internal motor which does the auto focus, just buzz’s and doesnt do anything else, seems to have stripped a gear or slipped somehow internally, this is really annoying, as I just checked Sigma’s website, and they charge 39 quid, just to take a look at a lens, then for work on the motor another 40 quid, and then add any parts onto that.   I bought the bloody lens second-hand for 100 quid over a year ago, so the cost to fix is almost the same as looking for another one,,,  but i don’t have the money for one, so that’s that.
2. Recently I upgraded one of my failing hard drives, bad sectors on a 120 gig drive, with a brand new 400 gig drive, and yes, you guessed it, yesterday it started knocking, it also has bad sectors, and it seems to be just ‘trying to die’ .     It does have a guarantee, so at least I know it will get replaced FOC, but, what’s more annoying is, this ‘new’ drive is where I placed all my stitched panorama’s from the recent Lady Hill excavation, I did write DVD copies of the images, and gave copies to Bob and Mark Olly, .. now it looks like I am going to have to ask for copies back of my own DVD’s, because the bad sectors seem to be right across the section that hold the images, and most simply do not open anymore… so that’s that.
3. My web server decided to have a white page day, it ran out of resources, with little or no allocation of memory left it just started to display white pages, I spent around 3 hours attempting to solve the problems, restarting services, killing connections from yahoo and Google’s search bots, watching error logs etc, nothing I did seemed to help, the memory situation just got worse, I eventually got the support staff at the host involved, thinking I had missed something, or started some stupid looped process, but it turned out it was someone else, who has a VPS hosting account in the same shared server, who had major configuration issues, which was pulling the resources from all the other shared accounts, and effecting everyone, not just myself.  

   The problem is the Shared resources, I am on a shared server, I would love to upgrade to a dedicated server, but cannot afford it, I got a quote yesterday afternoon of 150 dollars per month for a dedicated server, 1800 dollars per year, at the moment i only pay 599 dollars per year, and at the moment, i don’t even have half that saved for next years hosting bill, so 1800, or 1200 more, is just out of reach… think i need to start begging

So Friday 13th was a crap day, maybe i should have seen it coming, maybe its time to take more notice of superstition

I really do not know why, but Yahoo’s search bots have been hammering my server for the last 24 hours, so much so, pointlessly, and taking no notice at all of the robot.txt that i have just added the who class c to iptable’s and banned the lot of them.

Why the hell Yahoo seem to ignore the robot text file when every other crawl bot seems to work ok, totally defeats me

Anyway, it was less hassle to just ban them, if it means getting f=dropped from the yahoo search system, then that’s no big deal, because most of the sites I have on the server get 95% of their hits from Google searched results