Waffle

We can get in again. All is well, though the fixes to the lock are only temporary and more work will have to be done. Our neighbour Ane is as unhappy as we are with the owners' response to our phone calls, though I for one don't see much reason to pursue the matter further.

Calvin told me he knew another way into the premises, though it's one that relies on having long legs, especially if you want to reproduce at some point in your life. I'll ask him to show it to me anyway, just in case.

I consider locks useful; I like my bike for instance, and would be walking a lot if I didn't keep it locked when not using it. When you lose power over a lock however, when you turn the key and nothing happens, locks don't just turn into paperweights, they turn against you. We've been having trouble with the lock on the gate to our studio for about a week or so, it was being fickle, and finally seemed to stop working. The gate was opened with the lock locked, so the gate door couldn't close anymore. Not very safe for our possessions, although still protected by another door, but at least with an entrance that functioned - you could still walk in and out. A man had been over to look at it, but after looking at it he discovered he didn't know how to fix it and went away again. Yes, because that is how you do your job. Try, and if you fail, walk away. This evening studio mate Josje called up and asked if I could come to the studio; someone had locked the gate, and the lock wouldn't budge anymore. She was locked in. Unfortunately, because of people swimming illegally in the neighboring swimming pool, security has been tightened the past year. Gates have been reinforced, and ugly spikes have been added. It helps keeping people out, but it also turns the building into a prison when the lock to the sole entrance freezes. With some directions from me outside, she tried climbing over the fence where it looked least likely she would become impaled. Finding no spot that would guarantuee any safe escape, we discovered the swimming pool was still open to the public. We found a lifeguard who, after explaining Josje was trying to break out, and not in, was kind enough to supply us with a ladder, and Josje managed to climb out into freedom. Leaving her bike inside, alas, forcing her to walk home. Where does this leave us? Well, our possessions are very, very safe at the moment. Anyone have use for a 2 story paperweight?

Jelena and Calvin are the only ones who don't know this yet, but as Jelena at least reads this blog, I might as well go on. As of 20:15 tonight, the building above Groningen's outdoor public pool where our studio is is empty of people, and effectively sealed. I know this because Jeroen called me at home at a little before eight to ask for advice on how to get Josje out of there. Since the public pool below the studios was still open, I suggested that she might be able to get out through the winding platform at the back, swinging herself around the edges of the big metal barricade that separates the pool grounds from the office block. I've done this, and I'm not particularly flexible, strong or brave; however, I also said she should only tried this if she was absolutely confident she could do it. I was relieved to hear a few minutes later that there were still some pool staff around and one of them had helped her out with a stepladder. Jeroen and Josje then rang all the intercoms to see if there were still people inside, as this would have been their last chance to get out.*)

We've all been waiting for this to happen. As early as last Thursday, the outside gate door couldn't be opened from the outside once it had fallen shut, so people had taken to taping over the mortice latch so the door wouldn't fall shut. Of course, tape breaks and has to be replaced, and forcing the door open isn't good for security.

On Monday I called the owners, a Groningen housing corporation, to ask them to fix this. On Tuesday, I called them again, and this time, one showed up. He soon left again, because locks weren't his area of expertise. Yesterday, a damage assessor came by to check the condition of the lock.

The repairman who came by on Tuesday did one thing that on the surface seemed cleverer and more elegant than taping over the mortice latch - he turned the lock outward while the door was open so it couldn't close. An obvious idea that I've used in the past when I absolutely needed a door kept open. However, someone left the building today and turned the lock back inward, then closed it behind him. When Josje wanted to leave a few hours later, the door wouldn't open.

So... tomorrow we'll all be raising a stink about this, because there's several dozen people working in there and none of them will be able to get in. Until then, don't be surprised if you arrive to find the door closed. If you absolutely must get in, bring gloves, and beware that you may not easily be able to get out again.

(more...)

Because Adam heard this song while he was in Groningen and asked about it: Richard Thompson - Now That I Am Dead. The sound is a bit low, but once you've turned up the volume it turns out to be decent quality.

And because you can always have some more Richard Thompson: The Ghost Of You Walks, with Danny Thompson, performed on Jools Holland's show fairly recently, judging from how D.T. looks.

1952 Vincent Black Lightning, unsourced solo performance, probably 2004-2006.

Finally, some Fairport: Now Be Thankful, performed by the Full House line-up in 1970, with Dave Swarbrick on vocals. Richard was a funny-looking young man, wasn't he?

Today's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan will appear a couple of hours later than usual, in an attempt to synch it up with Sharing a Universe, with which it is crossing over and which usually updates at around 10-ish, CET. Do not be alarmed.

While I'm discussing the scheduling, apologies for the unannounced missed Tuesday and Thursday updates. There'll be an update tomorrow, and I'll have some extra, non-story updates this weekend to make up. BTW, I still intend to make up fully for deviating from my plan to update 365 times this year.

Sorry I didn't post this on Sunday. I was hungover. After that I was kind of busy for a while. Just pretend I had to get it off Bittorrent like my weeklyDoctor Who episodes. Adam has already posted links to YouTube vids for all the entries, so I won't do that again. Here are my notes from the evening, edited so that they at least approach comprehensibility. I'll have some more substantive comments on the losing entry at the end of the post.

(more...)

While doing some background research on my Eurosong Drunk-But-Not-Quite-LiveBlogging report, I found a Corante post entitled Six Apart Spins Like a Whirling Dervish in which tech blogger Strange Attractor picks apart a Six Apart press release:

Most commercial installations don't have big server farms, nor do they have lots of technical staff. Yet even if you do chuck a few extra blades and a couple of developers at the problem, it's still difficult to make MT work in either mode, static or dynamic, if you're being hammered by spammers. Again, writing popular posts isn't the problem. Serving pages isn't the problem. Comments are the problem. Now, it's very easy to blame the spammers, but the sad fact is that spammers aren't going to go away, and tools have to be built to withstand their onslaughts. MT isn't. It didn't matter how many servers you threw at MT 3.2x, comment spam could still kill them. Oh, and just to nitpick... all that lovely open source stuff from LiveJournal? Well, let's remember that minor point of fact that 6A bought LJ for its open source goodies. No sneakily trying to claim credit for LJ, please.

You might've seen this effect already — ever check out a link that's been promoted on a big site like Digg or Slashdot and been faced with a "database connection error" when you visit the blog that got Dugg? Well, Movable Type is designed to prevent you from ever having to face that problem.

I feel like a broken record. Spam, guys, spam. Not the Slashdot Effect. (For the record, I've noticed that the Slashdot Effect is nowhere near as strong as it used to be anyway.)

Word. Rebuilds of comment spams that pass the filters take forever and sometimes fail, leaving the spam in the published posts. Regular expression filters don't work. Spam has hosed a previous installation of this blog so severely that it took down all of Xepher.net with it, causing Xepher to add resource limits to all processes. When I upgraded, every single rebuild hit those limits, until we switched the blog over to another database (to be fair, that move from ancient BerkeleyDB to SQLite was long overdue anyway). Since then, Movable Type has caused ROCR.net to go down at least once as a result of hitting the resource limits under an avalanche of trackback spam (this time, thanks to said limits, the rest of the server was spared). Since I had already stopped allowing trackbacks on the blog, I have been able to prevent a reoccurrence by chmodding mt-tb.cgi to 000 - I recommend that MT users do that to every script they don't use, so if you get your comments from Haloscan, nix your mt-comments.cgi.

Movable Type offers lots of neat functionality, particularly including easy multi-blogging, but the product's appeal has definitely faded for me. Moving to another system would require importing blog entries so that their URLs don't change, setting up multi-blogging and introducing five other people to a new blogging interface, none of which sound like fun ways to spend my time. But the next time I feel the urge to upgrade, I will probably suck it up and move to WordPress.

Well, I'm back from my holiday, and really should do the rest of that 75% finished Baraminology post. It even has nevw illustrative material. But first, the visit to co-bloggers Reinder, Jeroen, and Secret Guest Co-Blogger who May or May Not post.

It was a fun, if somewhat subdued trip, due to me recovering from a rather long illness. Got quite a lot of Dutch comics at the Stripmuseum, got enough liquorice to be sick of it for a while, practiced drawing and finally finished some old art and generally had fun with friends.

But the reason for this weekend in particular was to make fun of Eurovision, so, let's begin. I type up my notes as taken on the day, without much commentary. It's much more fun that way.

Bosnia and Herzegovenia: Very poor visuals, but a good, well-written Eastern European folksong. The lead singer was wearing a dress like a cabbage, surrounded by women staying perfectly still in odd poses and some idiotic-looking fellow with some folk-guitar - probably a balalika - serenaded her.

Spain Endlessly repetitive, but energeticly agressive song. Four posers in white suits dancing quite well, but over-choreographed. Terrible background.

Belarus At first, I thought this might be alright, then they started singing.Nice visuals, good effects with people seeing to become attached to walls.

(This was followed by a transition featuring a particularly ugly man wearing almost nothing diving into a hot spring.)

Ireland It was something like a stereotypical Irish song sung by a woman who was... either panicked or on drugs. I suspect there will be more blogging on this entry over the next few days.

Finland Elvira, Mistress of the Dark returns! And sings a not half-bad song. Sounded like something Cher would sing. Not crap, not great.

Macedonia Pure crap.

(This was followed by a transition which involved making an ice sculpture, then setting it on fire. What the hell?)

Slovenia Gothic music meets Eastern European folk music with a snappy disco beat. It... kind of works.

Hungary A pretty good blues song by a person with a good voice and a pleasant girl-next-door appearance. Probably the best so far by a long ways. One of the few I'd happily listen to again, though, admittedly, listening to it again as I type it up, it's still pretty good, but not as good as I remembered it. Singer's great though.

Lithuania Pretty average song, of the sort you'd find in a modern musical like Chess or as a background to a movie. Boring, but not ear-bleeding.

Greece Music to film porn to. If the lead singer's involved, gay porn.

Georgia Not bad, whatr's with the caucasian men dressed as Japanese warriors dancing with swords? Sweden Crossdressing man singing a retro song out of the 70's. Catchy, but music to line dance to.

France Flaming homosexuals do country and western. Badly.

Latvia Very... old-fashioned song, in Italian. That will not end, Augh!!!!! [Last four words underlined repeatedly]

Russia Five strong, agressive women's group singing a 1980's / 90's song with a strong, rocking beat. [I didn't write much on this one, probably because it was the best of the songs, and so I was distracted actually listening to it]

Germany 1940's cabaret, very well done.

Serbia Butch girl dressed as a man surrounded by beautiful women. Awfully like a bad Cher song, but far better sung.

Ukraine Bad transvestite. No further information too drunk from keychange dinking game. Keyc hanges every few seconds. At least 12. [This one's very poorly written. I was pretty drunk by then]

U.K. Stewardesses [spelt Stueurdesses - I was drunk] and stewards with inuendo by "Are You Being Served". That's about it. Done in the most awful, boriing manner, but while looking for the video, I found this version which is... far, far better, if still very silly. I suppose humour really is all in the performance, and the Eurovision performance... sucked mightily..

Romania: What the fuck? This cheesy song about love is like a children's program's theme song. Lots of key changes.

Bulgaria ...the Hell?

Turkey To quote what I wrote at the time: "I'm oo drunk to comment on this... thing. See 'Ukraine'." I'm too scared to watch it again to find out what I meant.

Armenia See Reinder's comments. At the time, I was only able to write "Can't stop laughing. What the hell?" I did laugh the entire time it was on, and could not stop. Sadly,. it still has that effect on me.

Moldova For some reason, I never wrote anything on this at the time. Watching a bit of it, I think my brain may be trying to block the memory. Nice use of classical modes, though. Pity they forgot about giving the singer a melody.

Conclusions: Russia by far the best. Hungary and Germany pretty good, a few others are alright. Several total clunkers. Don't know why Serbia won. Maybe people really like Cher and girls that look like fat 16 year old boys.

Thou shalt not watch this on YouTube*) for the stupidity will make thy brain dribble out of thine ears. Thou shalt watch it here**)

*) Unless thou hast the Greasemonkey Tamer script for Firefox (Via) and even then, as I haven't been able to download it to test it, I can't unconditionally recommend that.

**) or at Progressive Gold, for it was Martin Wisse who first revealed this to the unwashed masses, or at least one unwashed mass. You know, just in case you're reading this through an RSS feed that doesn't pick up embedded objects...

Mr. Bob posted this on the Comicgenesis forums (I think it's by him. It's not credited but it looks like his style and is the sort of thing he would do. Besides only a Dutch artist would give that much prominence to the Dutch-Belgian blocquette): Stereotypes galore, but actually pretty accurate. Especially about the Dutch having to be high to think they have a chance to ever win it again.