The amount of comment spam that is not actually spamvertising anything, but is just putting up random links to pages on other people's blogs is growing, and it is quite disturbing. Sooner or later everyone will be blocking everyone else from commenting, and the blogosphere will start dying.

It's also really difficult to delete, because you don't want to add people's sites to your blacklist, and so you have to delete each one individually rather than a big sweep through with mtblacklist.

So I'm going to have a go at installing a graphical text plugin, and see if I can't stem the flow somewhat.

It started off with me looking at my log files to see how much traffic my site does in a month, and ended up with me getting all nostalgic and reading through my June archive page, which included the trip to Queensland where I met Stu. The path I took to get there included my referer logs list a Google search on "queensland(wild west falls)" which brings up a bunch of pictures I took of the Wild West Falls ride at Movieworld (and even one I took while *on* the ride :) ). A search for Robert Wadlow brings up the same archive page (on the second page of images). Other than that there are the usual searches for star destroyer, super man, lucius malfoy, lego, bionicle, jareth, jason isaacs, lego logo, train wreck, grand junction etc etc. Mostly all image searches bring people to this blog, not anything interesting I've said (other than my AquaOne AR-620T support forum, and my creative cockroach control page).

I wanted to be in bed by now dammit! ;)

I'm sure I'm going to get flamed by someone for this, so I'll just don the asbestos suit now :)

I've been getting annoyed about the ads on tv at the moment complaining about the industrial relations crap and how it'll be easier to fire people now, and how this can only be a bad thing for Australia. Now while as a general principle I tend to agree, I also disagree from an employer's perspective (of which I'm not nor ever likely to be), or a fellow worker's perspective. My theory goes something along the lines of this: bosses don't want to fire good workers. I am quite sure they'd be willing to make similar compromises they may be asking staff to make in order to keep a good worker. Rehiring and retraining new staff is a tedious, time consuming and costly exercise. The only people who should be worried about the IR reforms are bad workers.

I work in the government sector, and know that it is near nigh impossible to fire a bad worker. Unless they do something illegal or whatever, you're basically stuck with them, and it's bad for morale all round (I know this, being in the same office as a "bad worker"). If IR changes mean it's easier to get rid of people like this, then I'm all for it. As Vic says, it just makes it less expensive for employers to get rid of dead wood.

This is just my very uneducated theory, borne of no reason or interest in politics whatsoever, so feel free to flame away :)

mmm a day that I really didn't want to come to an end...

Decided not to bother going to the beach again, so slept a bit late, before checking out and having brekky in Noosa Junction. Then wandered up and down looking at the shops, before seeing a midday session of Wallace and Grommit. It was quite silly really. Still, it was only $7, so can't complain too much. After the movie we headed up to the lookout at the top of Noosa, before a slow meander down the coast, winding up in Maroochydore late in the afternoon. Found an aquarium to look through, and did some whale spotting from the lighthouse, before chilling out for a bit, then Sizzler for dinner, and then onto the airport. Very sadly said goodbye to my boy before getting onto a Jetstar flight home.

I'd never flown Jetstar before. They really are quite an odd setup for flights. The main oddity being that they don't allocate seats. They have three boarding groups - orange for people with special needs, like little kids, then blue for people that checkin early, then silver for everyone else. I was in the blue group. So you get inside the secured terminal and gather round the three queue lines. And then it's first come first served. I waited near the front of the blue line and got onto the plane very early. I actually realised halfway up the front stairs that I could have gone to the back of the plane, which is what I'm used to doing (as business class is at the front). But Jetstar don't have business class. So I actually could have sat in the very front row of the plane, but didn't because I still had in my head that they might be reserved. So I sat in the second row. I've never sat that close to the front of the plane before! The window position was better in the second row anyway, and was out of sight of flight attendants who might have gotten grumpy at me using my camera. It's a totally different sound at the front of the plane, and not as noisy. Although this was an A320, and I'm used to 737s at the moment.

James gave me a lift home, which was lovely of him.
Although I'd really rather not be home.. would much rather have gone home with Stu :( This whole back to reality thing sux (that, and cleaning out several hundred comment spams, yay). I had a thoroughly fantastic holiday with Stu, and we managed to spend six whole days together without getting sick of each other, which can only be a good thing :)

Sigh, Stu can't think of a title for this entry, so going with the NWN option of generating a randomly generated one ;)

Another lazy morning sleeping late and pottering about - gotta love holidays :)

Late morning we went to Aquariums R us, which we thought Would be a store, but looked more like a big old house that someone was trading out of. There were houses all around it and a tiny little sign on the building meant we drove right past the place. Silly really. But we did pick up quite a few bits and pieces for Stu's tank.

After lunch (haloumi cheese yummmm) was a trek to another store, the time to get fishies. Stu wanted to get some cardinal tetras, but this place wanted $10 each for then :( So instead he got some Harlequin Rasboras which were cute too (see below)

Then it was a trip into town to attend a drinks thingie at Stu's work. It was great to put some faces to names for people like Shazzy and Tash and Geoff. And it was hawaiian shirt themed, for which Stu fit the part well and was suitably praised :) I of course had the excuse that I didn't know it was on :). Had a couple of pina coladas and have had that damned song in my head all night. Might have to go think about llamas or something :)

After drinks we went and saw Howl's Moving Castle which was really sweet and quite enjoyable.

Then finished off the evening with a slice of pizza from the New York Slice Pizzeria - yummm, and a gelato - also yummm - highly recommend the apple pie one!

And now in bed on the blackberry for another late night oops :)

So had our annual general meeting this morning for the flats. It went for two hours but turned out to be not so painful as I thought it would be. None of the inflammatory people came, and we turned out not to have to raise as much in a special levy as we first thought we would. So all in all not too bad.

As seen at Dave's, then Karla's: (editor's note: just saw it on Neil's too, but I'm a bit behind on his blog cause he posts so frequently heh. Second editor's note: it was on Kevin's site too, but I'm a bit behind there too heh)

Seven things I plan to do before I die...

1. Get married. Preferably to Stu if he'll have me
   
2. Spend at least three months touring Europe
   
3. Tour the south/east of the USA/Canada
   
4. Learn to scuba dive
   
5. Watch a (human) baby being born
   
6. Go to Tasmania
   
7. Go into space. OK so this really isn't a realistic one, but I'd still love to do it
   

1. Give a half decent massage
   
2. Touch type
   
3. Play the recorder at a basic level
   
4. Keep tropical fish
   
5. Take care of windows servers
   
6. Program perl at a very basic level
   
7. Follow instructions
   

1. Eat wasabi
   
2. Eat blue vein cheese
   
3. Lie convincingly
   
4. Play the piano (more than the very basics)
   
5. Not stress over "insignificant" things
   
6. Relate well to people
   
7. Imagine life without Stu
   

1. Smile
   
2. Eyebrows
   
3. Skin and hair
   
4. Confidence
   
5. Humour
   
6. Generosity
   
7. Affection
   

1. Ping
   
2. It wasn't me, I didn't do it
   
3. Are we having fun yet?
   
4. Can I go home now?
   
5. Doh!
   
6. Damned flipping
   
7. Good morning!
   

1. Star Trek VI, by JM Dillard
   
2. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by JK Rowling
   
3. The rest of the Harry Potter books
   
4. Boy, and Going Solo, by Roald Dahl (actually anything by Roald Dahl)
   
5. Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton
   
6. Fox in Sox, by Dr Seuss
   
7. Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, by Robert O'Brien
   

Although I just noticed there were only six groups of seven.. odd..
(editor's note: the seventh group of seven is for tagging seven people, but I don't *do* tagging heh)

So we've spent *hours* on this problem. The problem of how to display a notes richtext field as html. For the most part the data we have is just plain text, but with carriage returns that don't render if you just display them (since carriage returns without <br> tags are ignored by browers). We looked at buying Midas. We tried using a mime conversion script we found on the web. Nothing was easy. And we were working with lotusscript which is messy at the best of times, and Jim didn't know off hand how to convert line breaks to <br> tags. So today I was thinking more about the problem because go-live is next week and we're still no closer to solving it. So I wondered how i could do what I wanted to do in formula language. And I solved a decent chunk of our problems with one line of code:

@ReplaceSubString(@Text(Body);@Newline;"<br>")

It was enough to make me want to give up and go home. Or at least drink and shoot people :)

So Jim and John went skiing last weekend. They didn't tell me this before they went. They just all went. Forgetting any sort of practical issues with the situation, they still *went without me*.

So this morning Jim says to me "do you want to see some pictures?", to which I said "will I get jealous?" and complained that they keep going off without me. To which he said "oh as your employer I have to distance myself". Yah. Right. I wonder if it'd be any different if I weren't a girl.

So now I'm debating whether I want to keep lunching with them. It's not like I'll *ever* be counted as a "friend". I could start taking my own lunch in and save some money. And chat to Stu if he's at his desk. I dunno. What do people think?

I have too much stuff. Just clutter. Stuff that means nothing to nobody except me. I have boxes and boxes full of old uni and school notes. Books, although a small collection, but many from my childhood that I'm never likely to read again. Collections of train tickets, tickets to shows, show programs, toys I've had since I was a kid, and stacks of stuff that I simply never use, but can't bear to throw away. I've had a couple of goes since I've moved here to clean out stuff, and have achieved some success. But I still think I have a long way to go. And the other issue now is that I'm almost certainly going to be moving within the next couple of years, and it'd be nice to be free of all the clutter before I go. Stu did this a while back, and it's inspired me somewhat to do the same. Although I'm not sure I'm ready to let go yet.

I had a thought a while back that I could start scrapbooking a lot of bits and pieces, and write why a particular item was important to me. And use the funky collection of coloured pens I have for some noble purpose. I still haven't decided if I'll do this.

The other thing I'll probably do is take photos of some of the things I have that serve no purpose at all other than memories. I figure if I have a photo of the object, then that'll do me for the memory, and I can get rid of the actual object.

Of course I also can't bear to throw anything out that could be of some use to people, so will probably try and sell what I can on ebay, and donate the rest to charity or whoever else wants it.

So this will be my major project for the next couple of years I think. Just need to be able to break it down into weekend-sized chunks....