My First Novel is on Sale Now!

At last, it’s February 15 New York time, and Once Upon a Bookstore, my publisher’s own online bookshop, is selling copies of TimeSplash.

Get your copy here

Please, everybody, pass on this message. Retweet it, Digg it, Stumble it, and tell all your friends on Facebook. You can even mention it to people in real life, if you like.

And, if you do me the great honour of buying it and reading it, I’m dying to hear what you think of it.

(If you haven’t heard me talking about TimeSplash before and don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the website of the book that tells you everything you will ever need to know. And if you find you need to know more than that, there is also a blog of the book. Enjoy!)

My Novel TimeSplash Discussed at the e-Fiction Book Club

The e-Fiction Book Club has very kindly let me guest-blog with them. Jump across to that wonderful site and see what I had to say about opting for electronic publishing for my upcoming novel TimeSplash.

While you’re there, why not browse the site? In a world where mainstream reviewers still won’t review anything but paper, e-Fiction Book Club is providing a great service to people who want to see reviews of e-books.

TimeSplash the Motion Picture

I just wanted to let everyone know that my soon-to-be-published novel, TimeSplash, now has its own website - and its own blog! It also has its own promotional video :-)



And, while I'm here, let me just share this great quote from Stephen Jay Gould:

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Spot the ridiculous argument he's lampooning.

Normal Service Will Be Resumed As Soon As Possible

Apologies to all my regular readers!

I don't know what happened to my front page but Blogger seems to have had some kind of psychotic episode, removed all the posts and rearranged all the widgets. Everything is still here (thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster) but you now have to look a little harder to find things!

I'll be sorting it out a little later in the day (got to go and measure up the garden for a DIY job we have planned) so please bear with me.

If you like, while you're waiting for normality to be resumed, you may curse Blogger. I'm sure it helps.

-oOo-

Later that same day...

All sorted!

Don't you just hate programs with a mind of their own? They won't actually have to do anything to take over the world. They'll just have to stop doing it right for a couple of days and we'll be back in the Stone Age.

A Public Announcement on Behalf of Grumpy People Everywhere

Here's an organisation that has just been begging to exist since the days of Reagan and Thatcher dehumanised society to the point where just being alive became a cruel and unusual punishment: The Grumpy Group.

The vision of The Grumpy Group is "to exploit grumpiness in any ethical way that can be creatively imagined and implemented". Specifically, they want to harness the hithertofore untapped power of grumpiness to cheer people up, to help people stand up for themselves against a world turned indifferent, and to stick it (back) to The Man.

For those who can't afford to join a class action, or who believe that whingeing on and on on your blog doesn't actually do any good, for those who'd just like to get the electric company to accept that their bill really was paid three months ago and get their power back on, The Grumpy Group may be the very thing.

By the look of the site, they don't have many members yet - maybe something to do with the fact that hard-core grumpies gave up on the Web years ago when those f**king annoying pop-up ads first started appearing - but, hey, there was a time when MySpace only had a handful of members, right? A time when there were only three videos on YouTube? A time when the United States of America was just Idaho, or Nebraska, or whatever it was, yeah?

And so on.

The point is that grumpy people deserve to be together.

Or something like that.

2008 Retrospective

Some year, huh?

From the Obama election win to the all-but-collapse of the world economy (see 2009 for the grand finale) there have been some major world events none of us will forget in a hurry.

On a personal level, this has been an amzing year too. I finally ran down my consultancy business and retired - just in time for my savings to be halved by the America-led economic collapse. (Thanks, guys.) In return, however, I got a full year of living on this mountain, surrounded by beautiful forest and wildlife, with nothing but peace, sunshine, and my wonderful wife to keep me company. I measure my personal wealth in terms of how much leisure I have to pursue the things I enjoy, so 2008 has been a year of immense riches.

I also got a dog. Bertie - or Gobby, as I mostly call him - is a purebred mixed blessing. Handsome, fit and happy, great fun, clownish and playful, he's also a right royal pain in the arse. Mostly, now, he can control his bladder. Mostly, he doesn't steal and eat everything in his reach. But he still likes to jump on guests and chew their faces, and he has picked up new tricks, like jumping in the dam and then drying himself on the carpet, and chasing after cars like a bat out of Hell. Has he improved my life or not? The jury is still out, but 2008 is the year I'll remember as the one in which Bertie was a wild and crazy puppy.

And then there was the writing. If you only know me from this blog and not the other one, you might not even be aware that my new career as a writer of fiction has finally begun to take off. In May I won a place on a 'manuscript development retreat' after submitting my unpublished novel Time and Tyde in a national competition. It didn't lead to publication or anything but it gave me such a huge boost in understanding of the whole writing and publishing business that, in the seven months since then, I have had four short stories accepted for publication (only one is out so far), I was short-listed in one short-story competition, and was the winner in another. I have also written and polished a whole new novel (called TimeSplash!) which I am now looking for an agent to represent. This may not seem like much, but it represents a major breakthrough for me. In the whole of my life until May 2008, I had published only one short story, and had never won a writing competition. If I can keep up the momentum, 2008 will be the year I remember as the turning point in my writing career.

And there were lots of other things too - Wifie built her first website, Daughter passed her driving test, the Large Hadron Collider came online and went off-line again, I finally got a phone line installed (at enormous expense), I got in touch with all my long-lost neices and nephews in the UK, and so on, and so on.

All in all, quite a year.

I hope your 2008 was a full and rewarding one and that 2009 will be even better for everyone (prolonged global recession notwithstanding).

So now I'm a writer. Maybe.

Thing is, I write all the time. I write this stuff. I write stories. I write books. Trouble is, I'm a disillusioned, cynical writer who feels that getting anything published is such a lottery that it isn't worth even trying. I don't buy lottery tickets, or scratchies, or raffle tickets, and I don't submit my writing to publishers for the same reason - the odds are too long.

So how come I'm here at a 'writer's retreat' on beautiful Bribie Island off the Queensland coast? Well, it's a long story - which I won't bore you with - but, basically, I won the lottery (a writing competition) and the prize was this.

And for the first time in my life I have spoken to a publisher, a very charming lady called Bernadette Foley at Orbit (the speculative fiction bit of Hatchette Livre in Australia). Not only did I speak to her but we spoke about my latest manuscript - a novel called Time and Tyde - which she'd read! What's more, she had read it carefully and said such flattering things about it that she's achieved the unthinkable and given me hope. Of course, I may live to curse her for toying with my emotions like this, but right now I'm thinking 'Well, maybe I should give this publication thing another go.'

And what does that mean in practical terms? Have I rushed out and stuffed a dozen envelopes with short stories and novels and cast them on the winds of chance? Not a bit of it. What I've actually done is to start another blog (how many is that now?) This one, called 'Graham Storrs' (that's me, by the way) is intended to chart my progress as I try to get Time and Tyde published and to talk about my other literary endeavours.

It seems us writers need to market ourselves. Our names must become a brand. Our work must generate 'buzz'. So I thought I'd start with a bit of a blog, just to get the ball rolling. Later - probably if the book is published - I might start a whole website. But let's not go mad, eh?

So, if you'd like to follow the ups and downs of my budding literary career, you might like to click your way across to Graham Storrs: The Blog and scratch your itch. And, for the dedicated reader of Waving Not Drowning (that's this blog for those who don't read banners) don't worry. All the juicy stuff in my life will still be here.

A Few Of My Favourite Things

How rich a source of research material the Web must be for sociologists. I imagine sociology departments in universities no longer train people in field observation techniques since no-one there ever leaves the building anymore. They just sit in front of computer screens, surfing. And, let's face it, the stuff that's out there – especially in blogs – must be so much more revealing of people's lives than 'structured interviews' and 'semantic differentials' ever were (or even my favourite sociological technique: 'micro-phenomenological sabotage').

So, in the spirit of feeding these 'surfiologists' a bit more data, and in order to recommend some great websites, I list here the ten most frequently-used links on my browser's 'favourites' list:

1. Google. Of course, I need say nothing about this site as you know it well already. It used to be better before the sponsored links appeared but it's still my favourite search engine. I like to use the local version (google.com.au, rather than google.com) because it's biased to local content (although this can sometimes be a disadvantage.)
2. Wikipedia. Anyone who has read my blog and followed any of the links will know I love Wikipedia. Yes, there are many who say this online encyclopaedia isn't quite as good as Britannica but so what? It's free, it's easy to navigate, the coverage is pretty damned good, and I've yet to find a single article I seriously object to.
3. Technorati. This is a curious but very popular site. People with blogs register with Technorati and then Technorati tracks those blogs, ranking them for 'authority' (how many other blogs linked there recently) and providing a search engine that returns only blog postings. If you have a blog register it here. Or if you just like blogs, this is a fascinating site.
4. The Dilbert Archive. Without my daily fix of Dilbert, I go into withdrawal. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea but when you have spent your whole career working in large, high-tech corporations, as I have, Scott Adams' take on it rings very true. Sometimes the jokes are so close to the knuckle, I've suspected he must have spies working in the same building.
5. Astronomy Picture of the Day. Run by NASA, this site is a mine of information on astronomy but, more than this, it is an endless source of beautiful pictures of our gorgeous Universe. I know I'm very nerdy about this but it seems so cool to me that I can have a photo of a methane ocean on Titan as my screen background one day, and the incredible M65 spiral galaxy the next.
6. Slashdot. 'News for nerds, stuff that matters' is this site's slogan and I suppose that says everything about me because I find Slashdot's daily news round-up usually has several interesting items. Today, there was a piece about metamorphic multijunction concentrator photoelectric cells. Now where else am I going to find news like that?
7. Pageflakes. Yet Slashdot cannot supply all a nerd's daily news intake. For that, you need an RSS feed reader. I've tried a few but by far the best is Pageflakes. That's because it is a customisable, personalised site with hundreds of different widgets to choose from. The feed reader is just one of them. So I have several pages full of RSS feed widgets (categorised into; international news, local news, tech news, tech zines, etc.) plus other, useful ones that (for example) do currency conversions, show me my local weather, display random photos from Flickr, present selected quotes of the day, even a clock. Have a look at my Pageflakes home page.
8. Blogger. Blogger is Google's blog service. You can go to Blogger and start up a blog for free, then manage and maintain it with the tools they provide. It's all pretty easy. There are many, many other blog services around but I like Google. You can even get free blogging software to download and install on your own website – but why bother when Blogger takes all the pain out of it? It's on my list because I go there nearly every day to add a new blog posting.
9. Itools – Language Tools. This gives me a multi-dictionary search and a multi thesaurus search. What can I say, I'm a writer, this is an essential tool.
10. W3Schools Online Web Tutorials. The Web is just full of fantastic free stuff and this collection of tutorials on web programming is one of the best examples. It's where I learned HTML, XML and PHP and I stop by fairly frequently when I need to learn new stuff (like the 'server-side includes' I needed for the Save The Wesley Pool site I did recently).

What Fools These Mortals Be

Just how stupid are we? Apart from the obvious symptoms of idiocy – like voting for conservative governments, buying junk food, wrecking the climate, watching American TV and living in cities – there are other less obvious signs. One of these is the way we encourage online criminals to pester and exploit us.

For example, people who open emails from spammers, thus potentially verifying their email address to the spammer and making it a much more valuable and saleable commodity. Worse still are people who actually buy stuff from spammers. It's really simple, guys, if you don't buy stuff, they don't get any money and there's no reason for them to do it anymore. In fact, because there is this direct relationship between feeding the beast and the size of it, you can tell who is buying what. Basically, it is a load of sexually inadequate old farts too embarrassed to see a doctor for their Viagra prescriptions, and greedy but very stupid pinheads who think that buying a stock recommended online will get them rich, who are keeping this torrent of rubbish pouring down on us.

Then there is phishing. This is where someone with limited English and a deep grasp of human stupidity sends out a million emails asking for help moving a very large sum of money out of Nigeria (or some similarly obvious scam) and then touches up the morons who respond to it for funds for fictitious travel expenses, lawyers, bribes, and so on. Sometimes they just ask for bank and credit card details so they can do a spot of identity theft. This is a global criminal activity worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Who are all these greed-crazed halfwits who are so willing to believe any unknown stranger who spams them out of the blue? If you are one of them, send me half a million dollars immediately. Don't bother asking for my bank details though, I'll only accept cheques made out to 'cash'.

Finally, and this is my personal favourite, there are the people who deliberately visit a site called http://www.drive-by-download.info in order to have their PCs infected with a virus. Yes, I know it sounds absolutely insane but there are (at the last count) 409 people who have done this. A 'drive-by download' is a nasty little trick where a website has been set up (or hijacked) so that when people visit it – usually in response to a spam email (idiots!) - a virus is automatically loaded onto their computer. In the case of drive-by-downloads.info the perpetrator put adverts on the web, using Google Ads that went like this:

Drive-By Download
Is your PC virus-free?
Get it infected here!
drive-by-download.info

Luckily for the 409 dimwits who have visited the site, it is a harmless one run by an IT consultant doing some kind of research (on how small an IQ can be while still leaving its owner capable of pressing a mouse button, I suppose).

Students of human idiocy who like a good laugh – or those simply wanting to depress themselves utterly – should take a look at the annual Darwin Awards. These awards 'salute the improvement of the human genome by honouring those who accidentally remove themselves from it...' There should be an award for 'the most money lost in an internet scam' but the Darwins only honour people who have paid the ultimate price for their stupidity.

Save The Wesley Hydrotherapy Pool

Hi y'all. My regular reader is probably wondering why this has been such a bad month for blog postings. Well, my pathetic excuse is that I've been busy. I've recently become caught up in the campaign to save the Wesley Hospital Hydrotherapy Pool. You may have seen one or two recent postings on the subject. My wife is a user of the pool and one of the thousands of people who will suffer when the Uniting Church (which owns the Wesley Hospital) closes the pool in July. I know some of the people who are being abandoned by the church (whose advertising 'tag line' is “Helping with heart and soul” - if you can believe the hypocrisy in that – they're closing the pool to make more room for high-paying acute patient care that will increase the hospital's earnings by tens of millions each year) so I know what a terrible blow the closure of this facility will be to all of them. The Brisbane City Council is pretending that scrapping vital healthcare infrastructure has nothing to do with them but they're happy enough to give planning permission with no strings attached (like continuity of service until an alternative facility can be built, for example.) One campaigner who tried to speak to the Mayor was told that he was "too busy" to concern himself with such matters. Nice guy, huh?

Anyway, I've written the campaign a website and attended meetings and so on and it's all kept me rather busy. So, I will just point you to a couple of places to go for further information and then I'll shut up about it. Firstly, you should look at the blog of the campaign: http://savethewesleypool.blogspot.com which is full of harrowing stories by bereft pool users. Then you should go to the website: http://www.savethewesleypool.org.au which doesn't have much content yet but which contains a form for you to sign up and show your support.

Personally, I am disgusted that people who desperately need the physiotherapy they get at the pool in order to maintain their mobility in the teeth of degenerative diseases like arthritis and cerebral palsy, are simply being dumped by the Uniting Church. It is an appalling way to treat people who are working hard to avoid becoming (worse) invalids and to maintain some independence and dignity. The Uniting Church, the Brisbane City Council and the Wesley Hospital management have shown a callous indifference to the plight of thousands of needy people and their families.

'Nuff said.

Telling The Human Story

Do you ever wonder about how we tell the human story? I was reading Peter Ackroyd's The Fall of Troy over Easter – a novel about the discovery of the ruins of Troy – and it took me back, inevitably, to the story told by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey of the great heroes and their gods. And this, in turn, reminded me of the many Celtic folk tales I've read and which were once part of my own oral tradition of storytelling.

In my mind, a river of stories runs down the ages from there: the Aeneid, the legends of Arthur, Beowulf, Héloise and Abélard, the Canterbury Tales, and on through the Renaissance to modern times, the river growing broader and faster with each passing generation. The source of the river was probably a lakeside camp-fire in Olduvai Gorge with a small cluster of half-human families settling down for the night, confabulating tales of spirits and magic. And here we are, in an age when every man, woman and child with Internet access is able to tell their story to the whole wide world.

Not so long ago, our stories were learned by heart during long apprenticeships and told to audiences hungry for information and revelation. More recently, when writing was new, books were precious things, carefully crafted and lovingly read and re-read. Now books are churned out by the millions, can expect a few weeks on the bookshop shelves if their author is very lucky, and then become old and forgotten as the next month's batch is produced. Alongside them, are the newspapers and magazines and, of course, the Web. Much of what is written today is good for a few hours and then is disdained. Our story is being told now at a frantic pace, almost in real time. While it grows increasingly detailed, domestic and trivial, it grows more grandiose, global and profound.

Domestic and trivial: like the TV networks, where soaps and 'reality TV' shows begin to predominate as they try to find cheaper and more engrossing alternatives to drama and documentary, or the publishers that drop tired old literature in favour of romantic novels, action novels and 'sword and sorcery' fantasies, the Web feeds us two-paragraph news items and blogs – the daily minutiae of tens of millions of people's lives.

Grandiose and global: like a TV serial in its fourth season, the plots grow more exaggerated and earth-shattering as the audience grows more bored and demands more titillation. The old stories of heroes and their great deeds are too tame for us. What is the fall of Troy when on a whim the whole of Iraq can be crushed by invading armies? What is the slaying of Grendel when a billion people wait to die in the next flu pandemic? What is it to us that Atlantis sank beneath the waves when half the major cities in the world may disappear the same way over the next hundred years?

A Devil's Dictionary of Web Terms

Sorry, guys, I’ve been neglecting you. Two days without a posting is quite unforgivable. My only excuse is that I have been excitedly working on the plot for my new novel and this has been obsessing me for days. However, just to show I have been thinking about you, below is an extract from a help file I have been working on to accompany this blog. I know I use a lot of technical terms and many of you are not technical folk, so I’m writing a dictionary of Web and computing terms to help you out. This lot is just the first batch. There will be more. Meanwhile, if you have any terms you would like explaining, please let me know so I can deride your ignorance in public (er, I mean include them, of course).

Back Button, n. 1. The most frequently-used button on a browser or Web page. 2. A metaphor for our whole society having clicked the wrong link somewhere along the line.

Denial of Service, adj. A type of virus attack where a huge number of infected computers (see zombie) attempt to access a website, overloading its servers. The name is inspired by the credo of the major telecoms companies (see telco).

DVD, n. The basic unit of software quality. Nothing less bloated can be taken seriously as a useful piece of software since it would fit onto a less capacious storage medium.

HTTP, n. A slow, primitive, lowest-common-denominator communications protocol on which most of the Web relies. If it got any more simplistic than this, we’d be lighting signal fires on our rooftops.

Java, n. Just another stupid programming language. Really, I don’t know what all the fuss is about. (See also Ruby, PHP, C#, etc., etc., etc..)

JavaScript, n. See Java.

Outsource, v. 1. To send jobs to poor countries where workers can be more easily exploited. 2. To provide a vital customer service in an impenetrable foreign accent.

Phishing, v. 1. Nigeria’s main export industry. 2. One of Nature’s most recent punishments for the greedy and stupid (see also lotteries and online gambling). The greedy and clever, of course, continue to go unpunished and are often found running phishing scams and/or large corporations.

Pornography, n. The main purpose for which the Internet was invented. It is a common mistake to believe that a US government research agency called DARPA funded the Internet’s development. In fact it was a Nigerian organisation called Digitally Assisted Rapid Porn Access.

Standard, n. See Microsoft. Also, any agreed format, method or protocol ignored by Microsoft.

Vista, acronym. VIrtually the Same Thing Again – only this time requiring a major hardware upgrade to run it and featuring VIRUS (Very Intrusive Redundant end-User Security).

Wireless, n. A big brown box with knobs on from which crackly, distorted music emerges (see also Windows Media Player). Also, adj., A method of networking components of a computer system such that they each interfere with one another, your digital TV, and the neighbour’s pacemaker.

YouTube, n. A dumping-ground for the outpourings of millions of wannabe pop-stars, porn-stars, actors, stand-up comics and news-readers. The distilled essence of human craving and lust for fame. The Matmos of the Web.

Zombie, n. 1. See helpdesk. 2. A re-animated corpse, mindlessly roaming the streets looking for human flesh to feed on (see salesperson). 3. A computer infected with a virus that can be directed to perform insidious and evil tasks by a third party (see Windows XP).

Gina Ford Clobbers Mumsnet

Apparently, Gina Ford – the American childcare ‘guru’ – has had enough of the "relentless personal attacks on her" by people who write into the Mumsnet website.

Mumsnet was set up a few years ago by two mothers (later joined by a third) and is a place for mothers to share information about parenting. Described by Junior Pregnancy and Baby magazine (which may no longer exist) as, "engaging honest, and above all reassuring...more like a chat with friends than being told what to do," it certainly has a cosy, middle-class, working mums kind of feel to it. So how come its normally restrained readership has been viciously attacking Gina Ford?

Well, it’s probably because they care a lot about babies and don’t want to see them put through the kind of upbringing Ms Ford advocates. The Mumsnet ladies seem to have a down-to-earth, practical approach to most of the childcare issues they discuss and generally advocate deferring to the child when it comes to deciding when to eat, sleep, or defecate. Not so Ms Ford. She seem to prefer that the child be brought up to a strict schedule with feeding, play, sleeping and, well, everything decided by a rather rigid timetable.

My recent piece about Jean Liedloff’s Continuum Concept means you can probably guess which side I come down in favour of here. Liedloff’s approach is the exact opposite of Ford’s. I find the idea of raising a child according to a ‘routine’ to be completely unacceptable. No doubt such routines help busy, working mothers cope with their stressful lives, but let’s not pretend that they are for the baby’s benefit. However many good things Ms Ford advocates (and there are plenty - breastfeeding to name a very important one) the enforced scheduling of a baby’s life is not a practice that anyone should follow.

Would Ms Ford approve of someone who had absolute power over her, forcing her to eat, sleep and play, at times that suited them? Would she benefit from this routine? I hardly think so. It’s the kind of thing we do to prisoners in order to make their management more convenient. So why does she advocate doing it to a baby? The whole idea has a horribly Victorian ring to it and I had hoped we were moving away from such practices.

Naturally, with views like this, Gina Ford has upset a lot of people and they have responded in highly emotional ways. Several have been personally insulting to Ms Ford. Which is why she has been threatening Mumsnet with lawyers lately. She says she doesn’t mind the criticism but doesn’t like the personal attacks. Mumsnet, not having Ms Ford’s resources, has crumbled. All mention of Gina Ford has been removed from its website. Another victory for the rich over the (relatively) poor.

I’m sure it is very irritating to have strangers calling you names in print but it seems to me that if you set yourself up as a guru in an area as sensitive as this, you are bound to make some people angry. And let’s not forget how important all this is. It is the psychological wellbeing of little babies and future adults we are talking about here. If a few mothers get a bit overheated trying to defend children from what they see as a terrible threat, isn’t that to be expected? If Gina Ford wants to put forward such proposals, maybe she should accept that many will see them as inflammatory, that she is in fact offending a great many people, and take the backlash on the chin. Either that or stop doing it.

Evil Bible?

Now here’s a website that deserves a little more publicity. It’s extreme, it’s pugnacious, and it is very confrontational but mostly all it is doing is quoting the Bible.

The author makes the point that most 'Christians' haven’t read much of the Bible and don’t really know what it says. They also say that most ‘Christians’ selectively ignore the great bulk of ‘the Good Book’ – particularly the Old Testament – much of which is violent, racist, and what we would these days call immoral: condoning slavery, infidelity, child sex, rape and genocide.

As someone who once took the trouble to read this turgid nonsense from cover to cover, I sympathise with this website a lot. I found the Bible a real eye-opener and very, very disturbing. In fact, most of it was nothing like the happy-clappy message of love and tolerance that ‘Christians’ like to think the Bible is about. Most of it was about punishment, vengeance, mass-murder and physical and sexual abuse. Thank human rationality we don’t live in times like that anymore!

There’s plenty of fun stuff in Evil Bible.com, though (I quite like the ‘Top Ten Signs You're a Fundamentalist Christian ' ) and some great quotes, like:

"When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property." (Exodus 21:20-21 NAB)

and;

"Happy those who seize your children and smash them against a rock." (Psalms 137:9 NAB)

or how about;

“But any prophet who claims to give a message from another god or who falsely claims to speak for me must die.” (Deuteronomy 18:20-22 NLT - So let's get on with it guys. You heard the man! Kill. kill kill!)

If you can’t stand hypocrisy (like that of some ‘Christians’ overheard the other day damning homosexuals because ‘it’s forbidden in the Bible’ – “Judge not lest ye be judged” guys!) or if you just get annoyed by pious idiots who don’t even know the tenets of their own mumbo jumbo, this site is definitely the one for you. In fact there’s a Biblical quotation in there for everyone. Here’s one for the politicians:

“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ.” (Ephesians 6:5 NLT – see, it’s not just the Old Testament that has this kind of stuff in it.)

And one for Wifie: “You wives will submit to your husbands as you do to the Lord. For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of his body, the church; he gave his life to be her Saviour. As the church submits to Christ, so you wives must submit to your husbands in everything.” (Ephesians 5:22-24 NLT)

For the Bush war machine (and John Howard’s little cog in it): “Cursed be he who does the Lord’s work remissly, cursed he who holds back his sword from blood.” (Jeremiah 48:10 NAB)

And, my favourite, one for bald people who find small boys annoying: "From there Elisha went up to Bethel. While he was on his way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him. "Go up baldhead," they shouted, "go up baldhead!" The prophet turned and saw them, and he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty two of the children to pieces." (2 Kings 2:23-24 NAB)

Hey, don’t look at me. I didn’t write this stuff!

Welcome to My 100th Posting!!

Can you believe it? This is my 100th blog posting to Waving Not Drowning. Yes, 100 rants, raves, reviews and ramblings have passed before your eyes – and it is only mid-February! As my faithful reader will know, I started this little enterprise at the tail end of August last year. I had a vague notion at the time of joining in the global conversation and, if I had been tortured way back then, would have confessed that I suspected I’d have got it all off my chest by now and would be on to other things. So, for those of you who are mildly interested and have nothing better to do, here’s my state of the blog report for this rather odd milestone.

• I’m averaging a little better than one posting every two days and have been since the beginning.
• Almost 2,000 pages have been served in the past 5 months and the average number of pages served per month has gone up from 202 in September to 578 last month.
• Similarly, the number of pages served per day (my daily readership, if you like) has risen from 7 in September to 21 this month. If it keeps tripling every five months, I’ll need more fingers to do the sums on.
• Advertising income from those fascinating Google ads you all keep forgetting to click on peaked in December at about US$30 for the month and slumped in January to about US$15. Why there is not a linear relationship between ad revenue and pages served may forever be a mystery. Whatever is going on, I’m going to need about ten thousand times more readers before I get rich from this. So please mention me to your ten thousand closest friends.
• The content is still all over the place. I had expected that I would start focusing in on a single topic by now but I see no sign of it. The stupidity of governments, the evils of capitalism, the insanities of religion, my own, continuing lack of broadband – along with a few random rants, raves, reviews and jokes – seem to be evenly distributed among the 100. Still, it’s early days.
• And as for the global conversation, I’m still getting very few comments and almost all of those are from people I know. Even ‘xman’ whom I thought was a stranger, turned out to be a long-lost chum. And Technorati tells me that only two other blogs have linked to mine. Still, even two is quite good in my view – I’d have been happy with one.

But I’m still having lots of fun doing this. As well as satisfying my craving to write, I keep finding fun things to do with the blog itself – like adding those ‘Mark This Site’ buttons last month, or ‘branding’ the blog with the waving hand picture (my own arm, by the way) and my very own tag-line: ‘The blog about everything’. Talk about making a virtue out of a vice! And of course, this month I added my very own book shop. How cool is that? (Alright, so I’m easily amused. Would you rather I was out killing animals for fun – or ‘fishing’ as they call it?)

All in all, I think I’ll keep at it for a while longer.

New Feature: The Book Shop of the Blog

Way down near the bottom of the right-hand column of this page, in that scruffy, information-dense thicket you never so much as glance at, you will see a section headed 'My Websites'. This is a list of (some of) the other websites I have built and maintain. At the top of that list is a link to my new Book Shop (or 'Book Store' in the vernacular of most English-speaking people - those who speak what Microsoft calls 'English (U.S.)' - in fact 'Bookstore' would be more correct these days I suppose, since, as we become increasingly like our computers, we are finding it harder and harder to deal with spaces between words.)

The thing is, I find I sometimes write about books I've been reading and in my never-ending quest to 'monetize' my every action, it seemed like a good idea to become a franchisee for Amazon (and anyone else who would have me). So, if I ever mention a book and I think it would be worth reading, I shall add it to my book shop (book store, bookstore) so there will be a convenient place to go to buy it. It's a wonderful, win-win, synergistic outcome for all stakeholders! I become rich, as you all empty your bank accounts into Amazon's, and you... er... become the proud owners of a motley miscellany of mail-order merchanise.

Sounds great, eh?

Now, if only I could find a way to make money by clicking the StumbleUpon button, my life would be complete.

The Continuum Concept

Before my daughter was born, her mother and I read quite a lot about what to do and why. We already knew a fair bit – we had both studied psychology at uni – and we already had the examples of our own parents and those of our friends and relatives to learn from but there was one book that stood head and shoulders above all the others. In fact, it was the only book that made any sense at all and it was the one whose advice we followed as best we could. The book was The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff.

If you have a child, if you’re about to have a child, if you know someone who has a child or is having a child or even vaguely thinking about it, drop everything and go out right now and buy this book. Throw away every other book you have about child rearing and stop listening to all the people – especially your parents – offering you advice. Read this book first and then, if you still think it's worthwhile, you can try the rest. But be warned, once you have read the book and understood how child rearing should be done, you will be appalled and dismayed at the awful job most people are making of raising their children.

The Continuum Concept is possibly the most important book ever written because it explains how to make your child a happy and well-balanced person. It takes a sensible, evolutionary perspective on child-care (and was written a long, long time before this was fashionable). It starts from the premise that if your child’s reasonable demands for comfort and attention are met in a practical but diligent way, he or she will grow up secure and happy and self-confident. The things the book suggests are not hard (we followed its advice punctiliously and, honestly, it was a pleasure) but the difference is astonishing.

My daughter was always so happy and cheerful as a baby that people constantly commented on it. She never grizzled or whined. She was never ‘naughty’ or attention-seeking. Despite quite extreme difficulties in her life, she grew up sweet and loving, happy and self-assured – one of the nicest people I have ever known.

It is so, so sad that people treat their children so badly and it is no consolation that, in return, they get the children they deserve.

Get the book. Read the book. Pass it on to everyone you know (I’ve been doing this for years). Go to the Continuum Concept Network website if you need more info. But for the sake of all of us, if you have a child in your care, do him or her the biggest favour you ever could and take Liedloff’s advice!

Augmented Serendipity

Serendipity is a wonderful thing. Don’t you just love it when it happens? Well, I’ve discovered a way to make it happen more often – on the Web at least.

Those of you with keen eyes and not much to do will have noticed the button, labelled ‘StumbleUpon’, down at the bottom of the right-hand column of this page. StumbleUpon is a Web service that allows you to find websites that might be of interest to you and to record the fact that you found a particular page interesting. Honestly, you should try this. Go to the StumbleUpon site and download the toolbar for your browser (only Internet Explorer and Firefox are supported, I believe – sorry, Safari users.) You will be asked to select a range of topics in which you are interested. Don’t be satisfied with the first lot offered but click the ‘more topics’ button and tick as many as you like.

When the StumbleUpon toolbar is installed, you will have a new set of buttons across the top of your browser. The leftmost of these is called ‘Stumble!’. Click this and it will pick a website, based on your preferences, that other StumbleUpon users have recommended. The very first time I clicked it, I got The Size of Our World which is a wonderful and disturbing page (or, to use Daughter's favourite word, it is 'awesome'). I clicked again, just now and found a site called Breathing Earth – which is just plain scary! (or 'awesome' as Daughter would say.) The point is, this service really works. It delivers the kind of pages I find really interesting.

Further along your new toolbar, you will see a 'thumbs up' button called ‘I like it!’ (It should be called 'Awesome!' really, I suppose.) Whenever you come across a page you like, just click this button. This then adds it to the pool of recommended pages for others to discover. (I’m hoping that kind and generous people will give my blog entries the thumbs up from time to time – it’s a kind of advertising, you see.) If StumbleUpon delivers a page that you don’t like, you can click the thumbs down button, to let it know – thus fine-tuning your preferences and helping serendipity along just a little more.

Augmented serendipity. Don’tcha just love the Web?

OpenID - One Login To Rule Them All

Yesterday I gave myself a URI. That’s a uniform resource identifier in case you’re wondering. You already know something about these, even if you don’t think you do, because the URLs we use as website addresses are a kind of URI (URL is short for uniform resource locator). Just as a URL uniquely identifies a page in a website (among other things) a URI uniquely identifies anything at all you might find on a computer network.

I gave myself a URI not because I am such a nerd I need a computer-readable tag to identify myself (although it might look cool on a T-shirt – only kidding) but because you need one to take part in a great new scheme called OpenID. OpenID is a free and vendor-independent system that allows each person to have their own user name and password for logging on to websites. Yes, I know you’ve all got plenty of these already (I probably have about 50 myself) but this one could one day replace all of those. Just imagine it, a single user name and password that can be used at any website that participates in the scheme. In addition, you can add a profile (or a set of different profiles – known as ‘personas’ (sic) in OpenID-speak) so that websites you are dealing with for various services can pick up the data they need about you without you having to type it again and again.

There have been many other schemes like this but OpenID has the benefit of being simple, free, and not tied to any particular vendor. It leaves you in complete control of your personal data and your identity does not reside on your PC (or Mac - sorry Wifie). It is relies only on you having an unique identifier – that’s what the URI is for – and that is maintained on a set of servers around the Web.

All of these good reasons won’t make anybody use it though unless some high-volume websites adopt it for login management. That’s why the recent announcement by Bill Gates, that Microsoft would be supporting OpenID – along with earlier announcements by Technorati, Symantec and AOL – give me some hope that this one will take off.

And the best way to help it along? Go to MyOpenID and get yourself a URI, a user name and a password. It takes about two minutes (even without broadband). Then look out for websites with the OpenID logon on them. Hopefully you will see more and more of these in the next year or two.

Happy Birthday Lewis Carroll !

From the blog 'Out came one thought and then another…' is a reminder that last Friday was Lewis Carroll’s 175th birthday. And there was I trying to avoid “Australia Day’ last Friday when all the time there was something really worthwhile to celebrate. Next “Australia Day” I promise I’ll raise a glass to the old paedophile. (And I keep writing “Australia Day” in quotes because it is obviously one of those “days” that were dreamed up by a marketing consultant. Of course, that doesn’t stop a certain element among the Aussies from going out partying on the strength of it. You could declare “Dead Budgie Day” and this lot would go out and dance in fountains with flags round them and a stubbie in each hand – and stuffed budgies tied to their heads just to show they weren’t being gratuitously venal.)

The interesting thing about 'Out came one thought and then another…' is that I’d never have known it existed if it hadn’t mentioned my own blog in one of its posts. In fact, it is one of the more fascinating side effects of blogging that strangers read your maunderings and comment on them. This is what led me to Three Beautiful Things a while ago and set me reading The Japing Ape the other day.

The Japing Ape is a blog written by a gorilla. At least, that what the author’s profile says. Whoever this guy is, he maintains the fiction religiously. Each post is written as if by a gorilla. (Hey, maybe I need a gimmck like that! Do you think I could pass as a cane toad?) It’s pretty amusing stuff too – if you like your blogs whacky, bordering on completely insane. He specialises in imaginary conversations between himself (a gorilla) and various characters from real life or elsewhere. I was amazed to discover a rather naughty conversation between Lady Penelope and her chauffeur Parker. The characters are, of course, from Thunderbirds and the dialogue is so wooden, you could really imagine it coming from the brains of puppets.

Silly stuff but I like to discover such oddities now and then. It is one of the great pleasures of the Web.