Site News

Last Minute Tidying

[31 Dec 02] Since I'm shifting to a slightly modified design next year (i.e. tomorrow), I thought I'd archive this year's index pages for Detail, Found and Rory Central. I've also cleaned out some redundant pages from Grinding Noises and the Textuary, and added a fifth wintry picture to Winter in Scotland.

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That Was The Year That Was

[11 Dec 02] The end of year has always been best-of-lists time around these parts, where 'always' equals 2000 and 2001. Since skipping a year would require messy surgery on the space-time continuum to remove 2002 from the collective consciousness, it seems a lot easier just to continue the tradition with the latest instalment. Guaranteed to be at least as pointless and arbitrary as whatever your local paper printed last weekend, and a lot less wasteful of trees.

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Weightless

[10 Dec 02] Since switching servers this place has been completely devoid of site stats, which gives a strange feeling of weightlessness: for all I know, the only people reading are the hardy few who leave comments. (For all I know, they're the only people who've ever been reading, and the rest were Nigerians looking for my email address.) Since nobody is watching (apart from you, obviously), I've taken the opportunity to do a bit of work on the site, culling a few of the less-exciting reviews from the rapidly aging Textuary, rolling out a new 404 page, and making a list of things to fix that should keep me going until September 2007. Now whenever I'm feeling that crushing sense of ennui that makes me want to tear the whole thing down, unplug from the Internet, buy an old typewriter and feed in a crisp sheet of A4, grab the sketch book and start drawing, or catch the first train north with a camera strung around my neck, I can just look at the list and remind myself what a vital and exciting medium this is:

Notes to Self

Oh God, the bleakness.*

*James Bachman, 8 October 2002.

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Sky

[ 8 Dec 02] It's been a while since there was anything new at Detail... so here's something to rectify that: Sky.

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Feed Me, Seymour

[28 Nov 02] While I was in the middle of completely rebuilding the whole %£$@^£& MT database, I figured I may as well throw in something I'd been intending to roll out with the forthcoming redesign: RSS feeds for Speedysnail. Personally I'm not a NetNewsWire addict yet, because most of my favourite blogs don't have RSS, but I can definitely see the attraction. Also, a couple of visitors have been looking in vain for an 'index.xml' on the site, and who am I to disappoint them?

So here they are: 0.91 and 1.0 (fight among yourselves over which one is best). Subscribe today and receive extra Speedy content, whenever I remember to write tailor-made excerpts for them.

By coincidence, Mark Pilgrim has some pertinent things to say on the subject at the moment [via plasticbag.org].

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Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

[28 Nov 02] Ye gods, what a rare form of torture. Everything was going okay until the new server ran up against the Movable Type database. Then it hit this problem, and the suggested fix didn't work. I almost gave up and went back to the old server, but had a burst of inspiration: hand-edited my most recent exported database, reinserted dummy entries to replace a few I'd deleted so that the Entry IDs would all line up properly, cleaned out the database directory, restarted MT from scratch, reconfigured everything, imported the cleaned-up entries, tweaked a couple of folder permissions, and voila.

Apologies for the disruption, which was exacerbated by the fact that I'm now in a time zone 11 hours behind my web host; and apologies to Ed for leaving the blog comments switched on when MT was switched off, which ate his lengthy comments about Klein and Schlosser.

Now at last I can post some back-dated entries written over the past few days.

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About 1 a.m.

[27 Nov 02] The site's now on the new server, but the MT database needs to be upgraded, which may or may not be straightforward; either way, I'll know soon. In the meantime, please don't try leaving comments on posts, because the Great Bit God will eat them.

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Dogged by Problems

[24 Nov 02] There's some weird stuff going on around here. For some reason new comments aren't registering in the comment count. This may be related to other glitches, which hopefully should be solved soon by switching to a new server. With any luck this won't lead to further down-time. [25/11/02: The switch is underway, so I've closed off new comments until it's complete.]

Meanwhile, a kind word from a visitor about the venerable Cartoon Lounge prompted me to scour through the archives and dig up a few more to add to it, like this old T-shirt design and this nostalgia for the early 1970s dating from the late 1980s, when I was in the full throes of Whitlam fandom (apologies to non-Aussies to whom that means nothing). I also came across the sketch below, which still appeals to me, slips of the pen and all—even if it has no actual punchline.

Sketch from 1993

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B is for Back

[19 Nov 02] It wasn't actually my intention to follow a few days away with a few days of 'The specified server could not be found', but I suppose the domain gods figured I'd been having too much fun lately, and that losing email access and the website would pull me into line. Although the DNS problem is now fixed, the CGI scripts seem to be on the blink, so no Movable Type-powered comments or search function. Grrr. Guess I'd better go sacrifice a goat.

So, the tales of travels give way to travails for another day or two yet. Sorry. More to come when everything's back to normal.

By the way, B was for Barcelona.

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Begone

[29 Oct 02] I'm disappearing for a few days. That's right—although I'll continue to post here, it'll all be invisible. (Although why would my posts be invisible just because I become invisible—surely my invisible fingers would still exert pressure on the keyboard? Waiter, I'd like a fresh one-liner, please; this one doesn't stand up to the harsh critical gaze of logic.)

Metaphorically speaking, I'm disappearing (in a non-literal sense) for a few (literally) days, to attend a symposium in the Lake district. This will, unfortunately, lead to a precipitous decline in new posts on this supposedly "frequently updated" site, to the tune of one hundred percent.

On the plus side, the rate of increase in new posts from Friday morning to sometime over the weekend could well be infinity percent.

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[25 Oct 02] So, the weekend I decide to pay a few bucks over the odds and stick with my long-standing host because I can't be bothered moving, even though I'd get more space and bandwidth if I did, would turn out to be the weekend the site's traffic doubles. The power of a MeFi sidebar link. Hello to all you new visitors, and sorry it's been a quiet week. There's more stuff backing up on the mental M4, but a truckful of work has overturned and blocked four lanes.

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[18 Oct 02] Hmm. From some of the suggestions I've had in the last twenty minutes, I suspect I'm not the only one who has accidentally used my Almanack submission box as a search box. Time to take it down, I think. It's been pretty quiet lately, anyway, and I've given the idea a decent run for now. (The search box is at the end of the page, by the way—which may change next redesign. Curse those harsh realities of usability.)

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[13 Oct 02] Found in the gutter.

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The Almanack of Everything

[ 1 Oct 02] This month I thought I'd try something a bit different* around here: instead of constantly trying to come up with new things to talk about, I'm letting you choose what I talk about. Pick a subject, any subject, or just a word or two at random, and enter them in the handy box at the top of the page. No IP address will be recorded, no salesman will call—but I'll add your contribution to the list and choose one each day to waffle about, building up a complete Almanack of Everything week by week for You to Collect. (Note that the proprietor reserves the right to treat serious subjects unseriously—and to give the whole thing away if (a) he gets bored, or (b) nobody plays along.)

For example, you type: you suck

I type: Etymologists are bitterly divided over the derivation of this popular put-down. Some insist on a strictly literal interpretation with distinctly sexual overtones. Others trace 'suck' and 'suckage' back to 'sucker', an insult beloved of fifth-graders and Warner Brothers cartoon animators. The 'all-day sucker' in fact gives an important clue to the origins of 'suck': these round lollipops are made out of solid sugar or, as Francophones would say, sucre. Americanized in spelling by Webster, 'sucre' became 'sucer'; thus, anyone who says "you suck" really means (if only they could speak French, les merdes stupides) "vous êtes sucre", or "you're sweet". Gosh, you shouldn't have.

*Idea subliminally pinched from Graham Leuschke.

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Great Weblog Mysteries

[30 Sep 02] How come when I take half the month off from blogging the number of visitors per week almost doubles—to triple what it was this time last year, in terms of distinct hosts? And yet still only half a dozen people ever leave comments?

To be honest, it was a pretty non-month for the 'snail. Never mind, I have a Cunning Plan for October.

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[29 Sep 02] Quite a few changes around here today, though you wouldn't know it to look at it: fixed various pages that weren't validating, added some forgotten closing tags, and so on. Also posted something I found on the pavement.

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Woah.

[18 Sep 02] The trouble with taking time off from blogging is that it leads to moments when the urge to update the site, check the visitor stats, read what fellow bloggers have been saying, and compulsively scour MetaFilter for juicy topics du jour completely disappears. Freed from this burden, the blogger discovers sights, sounds and smells unknown to him these past months. But something is wrong. Disturbing images flash through his mind of wired plastic pods filled with foetal-curled comrades. The blogger falters, unsure whether to eat the blue pill or the red. Black-suited Evheads close in to plug the rebel back into the blogosphere. He snatches the blue pill, gulps it down, waits for sweet release into the clean air of reality... and realises that it wasn't web-safe, and #4D59F7 shows up red on Agent Ev's monitor. Life once again becomes an electronic illusion. His hiatus is over.

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Love and Haiti

[ 1 Sep 02] I keep reading about all these bloggers who are on Haiti, and man am I jealous. It's ages since I was last in the tropics. Perhaps we could all meet up there: go snorkelling, lie on the beach, eat banana pancakes and drink pineapple shakes. Yeah! That's the ticket! I'm gonna spend a couple of weeks on Haiti!

Oh. Hiatus.

Okay, so I'm going to spend a couple of weeks on hiatus.

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[18 Aug 02] A friend has passed on some photos he's found, which has prompted me to finish off a redesign of the main page of that part of the site.

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[14 Aug 02] Finally got around to implementing Mark Pilgrim's tip to make pop-up comments accessible. You should be able to read them now even if you have Javascript disabled.

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Now We Are Three

[30 Jul 02]

The Three Speedys

Just over three years ago, I settled on a project worth putting on the web, after a year or so of contemplating the best use for a personal site. The novel came out of the bottom drawer, the cartoonist came out of hibernation, and The Stand-Up became a 'wobble', or web novel. (There's one neologism that sure caught on.) A few weeks later the first three chapters were revealed to an indifferent public, with the others following one by one over subsequent weeks. If you'd typed speedysnail.com into your browser on 30 July 1999, this is what you would have seen.

Initially the novel was all there was to the site. Fortunately, I'd avoided registering the domain as thestandup.com, and instead settled on a suggestion of Jane's, after days of trying to find a name that wasn't taken (even in '99 it wasn't easy). And so we ended up with a site named after her nickname for a key-ring.

A name that could mean anything meant a site that could mean anything, and over the past few years I've put just about everything into it: academic papers and personal tales, cartoons and photographs, old reviews and new, and a string of weblogs. Hundreds of images, hundreds of thousands of words, thousands of lines of code. It's been the major project of my early 30s.

A website is never finished, and there isn't time to do everything you want to with it. The comic strip serial, the collaborative fiction project, the lengthy photo-essays, the section of travel tales, the in-depth reviews of all-time favourite books and albums, and the follow-up episodes of Doktor Komputor have all stayed on the mental shelf. Others intended for 'any day now' remain on hold, waiting for a day without anything better to do—which isn't often.

But why keep adding to something that always looks so ephemeral from the front page no matter how much lies behind it? Doesn't that apparent ephemerality just encourage those who consider the personal web a waste of time and effort? Is it a waste of effort?

No. Server statistics are notoriously imprecise, but some of the previously published material on Speedysnail has been seen by more people here than ever saw the print versions. The number who've looked at The Stand-Up is respectable compared to the small print-runs of your average Australian first novel. I'm not sure how many people regularly read the weblog, but it's enough to feel wanted, and has been enough to make some good virtual friends.

And: maybe. While the web is great for breathing new life into old material, and great for publishing small observations and chunks of writing that might otherwise stay trapped in a notebook or a neuron, it's harder to create something significant for it—at least single-handedly and part-time. Yet those are the projects that feel the most valuable: the ones that say not just 'look at this', but this and this and this and this.

After my recent outpouring of travel-inspired words, it feels like time to write something big again—which means paying less attention to the site for a while. The updates won't disappear completely, but for the next couple of months I'd better lie low. Who knows, another big project might come out of it; something worth celebrating next birthday, perhaps.

Don't think of it as a hiatus. Think of it as me being really slack about replying to your mail. Although if you'd like to email me—perhaps via the convenient comments link on this entry—I'll be more than happy to say hello.

As the original About page read:

speedysnail is dedicated to bringing you the best in web-based entertainment. speedysnail has an accent on the unusual and amusing, but is open to anything and everything. speedysnail's first project, launched in July 1999, is The Stand-Up, a wobble (web novel) by Rory Ewins. stay tuned for more from speedysnail!

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Goodbye to Berlin

[30 Jul 02] Now on DVD and VHS, all six episodes of Berlin, the documentary series by acclaimed bloke Rory Ewins, as seen on Speedy TV. The critics rave: You little beauty! - Shauny; A damned fine entry - Ed; I want an all-Rory BBC/PBS series - Bill; I must eat your brain - Tom.

Watch it again and again on this lavishly prepared compilation, now with hidden extras* and director's commentary.** Never scroll backwards through an archive again!

*View source to reveal hidden extra HTML tags.
**He didn't have much to say, really.

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1.1 Unterbrechung

[19 Jul 02] We interrupt this programme on Germany to write some emails and do some actual work and go and visit our friends in Nottingham over the weekend. (Sorry about the anticlimax. There will be more. I have a self-imposed deadline of July 29th, the day before the site's third birthday—and something else planned for that. Oh, the suspense.)

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The Austro-Hungarian Empire Strikes Back

[12 Jul 02] I can't claim any credit for this, apart from keeping out of the way as Jane rotated around to take the photos, but her panorama of Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna is great. (She later considered doing one where I didn't sidle out of shot, but instead was duplicated half a dozen times like a touristic Jango Fett; but her compact flash cards were getting too full.)

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[11 Jul 02] More things found: on a bridge; on the Viennese U-Bahn.

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Ready for the Laughing Gas

[20 Jun 02]

||

Four days until we hit Zoo Station in Berlin, one of our favourite cities, ha ha! And thence to Vienna, where I'm giving a conference paper that's still swirling around unfinished in my head and in scraps of text (fortunately it's all making some sort of sense now). So, guess what I'm going to be doing between now and Monday morning... and guess what I'm not going to be doing.

I might drop an entry or two in here from ein Netzkaffee somewhere along the way. Otherwise, see you in the second week of July.

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[12 Jun 02] So much for this being summer repeats season.

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[ 9 Jun 02] The gradual site-wide transformation continues with a revamp of Rory Central. The Outside and About pages have been tweaked a bit, too.

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The Short Occasionally Warm Summer

[28 May 02] I was thinking the other day that Scotland is one place where you won't hear that advertising cliché of 'the Long Hot Summer'. Not when it's been struggling to get past twelve degrees this past week.

Still, sumer is icumen in, and it's time to get some more papers written, like one for a conference in July. As a result, the next couple of months will be pretty lean around here when it comes to new posts, although I'll probably sling in a Madagascar update or two to see that story through.

But for once I'm not going to close up shop and leave you with nothing to read. After all, what was always the best part of summer? That's right, sitting in front of the TV and watching repeats.

With Speedysnail coming up to its third anniversary, there's a fair amount of material stashed away in the archives—at least enough for a 'best of' once or twice a week. So from June 1, I'll be seeing how the old stuff looks in the harsh summer light of 2002. Who knows, I might even put on my George Lucas hat and turn out a Special Edition or two.

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Auld Reekie

[26 May 02] Been meaning to do this for a while: Edinburgh in black and blue.

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Surprise!

[17 May 02] Long weekend. Trip away. Penguin.

The most amusing comment left here in my absence wins my undying admiration.

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[17 May 02] Two years and counting.

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[12 May 02] Two old papers on Papua New Guinea politics, freshly liberated from the bottom drawer.

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You Make Me Feel So Blue

[25 Apr 02] One of my favourite finds from last week's travels can now be found here.

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[12 Apr 02] I've moved the Madagascar entries out of the politics category and into a category of their own.

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[28 Mar 02] Sadly, going away for the next four days means that I won't be able to update this site with an April Fool's Day prank page. So insert your own fun-filled goofery here, and have a happy Easter.

Easter Chook

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[27 Feb 02] My site host does a fairly rudimentary stats page; if you're waiting for me to notice you through my referrers you'll have a long wait. But it does enough to show that this was the second most popular page on speedysnail (after the one you're at now) in February 2002, overtaking this perennial favourite.

Millions of words written in a lifetime, and I'm going to be remembered for two hundred about a concrete worm. The Web is a Harsh Mistress.

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O Canada: The Movie

[21 Feb 02] It took a while, but I've finally put up some photos from our trip to Alberta last December. As with other instalments of Detail they'll take a while to download over a modem; there's thirteen images, totalling 1MB. (More Canadiana in the travel archives.)

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[ 8 Feb 02] One of the oldest things on this site is a slide-show from my 1993 fieldwork in Tonga. After my recent experiments in large images those slides were looking a bit small and shabby, so I figured if they're going to take up two megs of server space I might as well give them a makeover. Now with improved colours, larger images, and 28 slides instead of 63 (on the principle that less is more): it's The 1993 Silver Jubilee of Taufa'ahau Tupou IV.

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[28 Jan 02] With this tour of past incarnations of speedysnail, the grand redesign of January 2002 is complete. I hereby declare this site—relaunched! [smashes champagne bottle against side of vessel, wastes thirty quid's worth of perfectly good bubbly, injures small child with shards of broken glass]

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[25 Jan 02] By a quirk of the round shape of the Earth and the relative positions of Scotland and Australia, for eleven hours it's the national day in both my homeland and my current home: it's simultaneously Australia Day and Burns Night. The former is an excuse for a barbie, sitting around getting pissed, and listening to the Triple J Hottest 100 on the radio. The latter is an excuse for haggis, neeps and tatties, sitting around getting pissed, and listening to earnest recitations of Burns's ode to the "great chieftain o' the pudding race".

As if to remind me that I'm a long way from the southern summer, it snowed today in Edinburgh. I was stuck at work without a camera, and by the afternoon the snow had turned to rain and melted away. But it's inspired me to whip up another impromptu instalment of Detail, with four bandwidth-busting images of the Scottish winter. The first was taken on a foggy evening in Fife and the others one frosty day three weeks ago.

So grab yourself a giant lamb sausage stuffed with oatmeal, sip on a single malt, and sit back and enjoy winter in Scotland.

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[23 Jan 02] With the addition of a splendiferous site map the speedysnail redesign is almost complete. I've also added an index page (at last) to Detail, which will be seeing some more action soon; and after glancing back through the weblog archives have pulled out a year-old entry and let it stand alone elsewhere.

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Everything Old is New Again

[15 Jan 02] A new year, new site design, new logo, new weblog. Not having a place to bash out random words was getting to me after two months off the wagon. The temptation to resurrect Walking West was strong, but I wanted to make a fresh start. Instead I considered several possible titles, most of which turned out to be taken or didn't take me: Minutiae; Random; Untitled; This is Not a Weblog; Ceci N'Est Pas Un Weblog.

I was stuck. And at the same time, trying to rethink the design of the site as a whole, which I guess made the amalgamation of site and blog inevitable. Now you've got a one-stop shop for 2002 speedysnail content, though some of it will live in separate areas alongside the old stuff. A few pages are still unfinished, but will be filled in over the next week or so.

Taking advantage of Movable Type's category features should improve the usefulness of this year's archives. And at last I'm taking the plunge into the wonderful world of reader comments.

So: brain switched on, enthusiasm rekindled, site looking good (except in pre-5.x browsers; as usual, you're looking at pure XHTML+CSS), and a fresh new year awaiting us. Let's go.

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