Teh Webolg

Just a quick post to call Zenith Staybrite a bunch of telemarketing cunts. Received a phone call this morning on the ex-directory "Batphone"; the only people who have this number are family, friends, and job recruitment agencies (so you always know when not to answer it). The ignorant bastard of a lady who called refused to tell me where she got the telephone number and then hung up. Interestingly, if you call back you get a recorded message thanking you for the call, and nothing else. Ker-ching - money in the bank.

As they obviously don`t give a crap about abusing people`s ex-directory telephone numbers, here`s a number for their head office:

01603 401923

Feel free to give them a bell - I`m sure they`ll be happy to take the call.

The router will be replaced in the next few days (I haven`t decided when I`ll do this.. could be tonight or tomorrow night) so expect a bit of down time. Hopefully this`ll take about 30 minutes maximum as I need to ensure the firewall / port forwarding is set up for the network. UPLAOD CODEZ!!!1

On top of this, I`ve been blessed with membership of the rubberfeet crew! Check out the linky for hot celebrity action!

I haven`t done much new stuff on the site since the new thing went live, apart from a few b3ta pictures. However some fantastic pics have come through for the Illustrated Smiths, which is great! I hope to put a few more Jim Branning songs into the music section at the weekend. Watch this spaz.

Well bollocks to it, thought I.

I decided to put the site live because I couldn`t wait any more. As you can see, there`s not a huge difference in what`s on the site, but under the bonnet things are a bit more tidy.

The main difference is a change to navigation, which has now been moved to the top of the page; eagle-eyed viewers will notice that it looks different in IE to decent browsers. The text is intentionally small-ish, but I may do away with this in favour of a more uniform browsing experience - if IE supported CSS2 properly, it`d be a lot easier.

Anyway.. down to the site changes.

We now have:

* A brand new Illustrated Smiths section, which allows users to upload their own files - it`ll then be really quick to approve submissions and get them on the site

* A site map in case things go pear-shaped - there have been a few changes to the site and a lot of old links will no longer work, so it`s a good place to go if you`re lost (on a site with about 3 sections, this might be difficult..)

* A contact page where you can send me a nice e-mail - please use this if you find any problems with the new site; I`ll keep an eye on the server over the next few days and fix anything that`s obviously buggered

Still to come:

* The RSS feeds need updating, and I`m going to split the weblog into a couple of sections, so you can just subscribe to e.g. site updates instead of the cheesed-off rants

* A bunch of new JimSongs have been readied and will be added to the site as soon as I`m happy it`s not falling over

* I may add a comments section to the weblog, so you can call me a twat

Anyway, I hope everything goes smoothly, and I`ll keep an eye on things for a bit. I`ll also e-mail all of the lovely people who contributed to The Illustrated Smiths and see if they want to compete for most contributions!

For the geeks out there, I`ve moved the site from HTML mixed with PHP type stuff to HTML and Smarty, a nice templating engine; this is all backed up by a MySQL database. Be patient as I`m only learning PHP and coming at it from a Java background. I am however looking forward to PHP5 with proper geeky gayness like exception handling and so on. But that`s for another day.

Expect a few tweaks over the next few days as I try to stamp on any bugs I find.

Please buy the new lottery "Olympic" scratch cards. Cos I sure as hell am not paying the friggin` council tax to pay for that crap.

The evictions have apparently started, and the government`s plans to elite-ise television broadcasts have been temporarily scuppered

Ta.

/starts looking for somewhere to live outside London

According to the BBC, Londoners have returned to work in their droves as an act of defiance to the terrorists intent on terrorising.

"Hello, Mrs.Miggins, we`re the bailiffs and we`ve come to repossess your house."
"But Mr.Bailiff! I couldn`t afford to keep up payments on my mortgage."
"We know! That`s why we`re here. Hand over the keys!"
"But it wasn`t my fault! I couldn`t go to work because I was afeared of the terrorists and the tube lines were always suspended. My gas, water, and electricity have been cut off already as I couldn`t pay the bills."
"Oh dear Mrs.Miggins. You should have defied the terrorists. Now hand the keys over."

Ahh media-proclaimed patriotism. Brilliant.

Given the choice, what would you do? Cup of tea in bed would be the preferred choice for most. Including the muppets who pilot the Piccadilly Line trains, who defied the terrorists yesterday in their own way by skiving off work and leaving Londoners to make their way home. Funny how they always do this on the sunny days...

Update: and now the police have started assassinating innocent people on the streets. Another act of defiance no doubt. Yesterday this chap was linked to attempted bombings, and today he isn`t. Keep up the good work, Teh Met.

Update 2: as ever, the super duper Manic makes several good points.

Update 3: muppets the lot of them. The same people who go on strike when a colleague gets a rollocking for driving through not 1 or 2, but 4 red warning signs. Expect a lot more safety related strikes next year for the World Cup.

And Cherie Blair. Why don`t you shut the fuck up. Today she`s complaining about civil liberties, but it wasn`t so long ago she was having her shoes surgically removed from her mouth for getting into a spot of bother. Nobody elected you, love. Hardly anyone elected your husband. So get back to your legal work of defending anyone who`ll get your name in the papers, you daft ugly bint.

As Bobby Davro said to Ted Rogers

"God I love you Ted"

At which point Ted Rogers punched Bobby Davro in the knackers, and picked his nose and wiped it on Bobby Davro`s shoe.

Yes, the new site is coming along nicely, and I`m hoping to be able to unleash it to the world some time during the week of 1st-7th of August when I have a week off work.

I`ll post another message closer to the time. I bet you can hardly wait.

Yes, a whopping 4.5% of the population has registered its support for the London 2012 Olympic Bid. That`s almost as many people who voted for Labour in the election.

I`m confused as to why Old Trafford has managed to become a London olympic venue. Have the electoral boundaries been changed to include Greater Manchester?

I personally don`t want to see loads of money wasted on this rubbish (why not spend it on the NHS, schools, homeless...?) £2.375 billion could go a long way. Still it`s nice to see a big middle finger flipped to the rest of the UK as London once again becomes the only place of importance. I contacted the London2012 people and asked them where I could register opposition to the bid, and was told that there was no official means to do so as it wasn`t in their interest.

So there we go, the other 63 million UK residents want the olympics by default. Let`s hope the bid is successful, as the idiots behind it have already started spending the money.

On top of this ID card scheme, expect a rather tasty little dent in your wages.

Update: thanks to Red Ken`s blog, I`ve added a link to somewhere to say `no` to the bid. Woo. Although the number of people listed as saying no is engulfed by the supposed 3 million UK personages saying yes, it would have been nice for Seb "Daley Thompson would have kicked my ass" Coe and his mates to have allowed us the opportunity for balanced opinion.

Spastics.

Thank you to everyone who has e-mailed a picture over the past few weeks. Rest assured I haven`t been ignoring them!

I`m working on an automated submission page where you`ll be able to upload your own pictures, without bothering with e-mail. Once a picture has been submitted, I`ll check for new ones and hit a button and they`ll be live on the site, speeding things up a lot.

Why? Why?

Initially the project was something I came up with in the early hours after too much beer, and I didn`t expect so many of you lovely people to send in pictures. At the minute I have to save the pictures off from e-mail, and then go and edit some files by hand - it`s not difficult but it takes a while, which is why pictures might not appear for days or even weeks (I`ll not mention months...).

I now have a database containing all the Smiths and Morrissey albums, and all the tracks, including a few albums that weren`t on the site before. None of this is live yet of course. I have to write the submission forms, test them thoroughly and then we`re cooking on a cooker!

This update will be part of a larger overhaul of the entire site, so will probably be a few weeks away. In the meantime, please continue e-mailing as I`ll add the pictures to the new database.

Watch this space...

Dear Harry Kewell,

You were a good player at Leeds, and since you`ve moved to Liverpool, you`ve been absolutely rubbish. Worry about the fact that you couldn`t lift a ball if it was nailed to your foot instead of taking better players than you`ll ever be to court. And get a haircut.

Yours,
Major Susan Quiggle III, MBE.

p.s. why not transfer to Altrincham FC - perhaps the talented Frank Sidebottom could give you some lessons




Dear Mr.Coldplay,

Well, what can I say about your new album... bland would probably be the best way to describe it. I liked Parachutes; it had a nice depressing undercurrent. A Rush Of Blood was well produced, with a couple of good songs and a lot of easy-listening pop. The new album looks cool in a sort of Radiohead "oh the future`s coming to kill us" way - but once again it`s more middle-of-the-road background music.

This is a band I can see becoming "hard rock" for the chav masses. For god`s sake - if writing songs is so boring, stop doing it.

Yours meatily,

Donald Carp

The nuke-age of the server and installation of Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog took a bit longer than expected. This was mainly due to some kind of locale configuration problem; the installation scripts started going bananas when they encountered unicode nasties, causing the installer to cry with "corrupt tarball" messages even though they were verified by the installer. Meh to that, otherwise the site would have been live again at around 11pm last night!

Anyway, finally got the bugger going quite nicely, and it seems a bit more responsive than SUSE 9.2, so it`s all good.

Next up is a bit of a site redesign (which I`ve yet to start) to try to make the place look a bit less crap.


Update: expect a little bit of flake throughout the day as I need to tweak the box a little, and set up the virtual hosts, etc. You love it.

Update 2: whoops.. forgot to set up the RSS feed; now fixed again. Need to get CVS running again so I can version control the web site code before hacking it to bits again.