andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

I’ve done it. I have set the wheels in motion for moving the address ‘andcurve.com’ to Hosting365.ie – I’m really sorry, BeHosting girls, but it just doesn’t make any sense to stay! They, the Behosting team, have been very good to me over the years (Erica Kuntz in particular), but the capacity is too small (my mailbox fills up after a couple of photo-laden emails, and I want to host my own photos too.) and being able to call hosting365 and complain to a real person about stuff is also good; Behosting is a reseller of someone else’s hosting, whereas Hosting365 have their own facility. When I worked in Parallel, we were able to send a Russian over to get angry at people when ever there was a problem. Hopefully I won’t have to. I made the first tentative steps by hosting andAgile there, and now I’m moving my main site too. Expect some problems here until I’m done! Well, they can’t be worse than simply not posting at all, which as been my tried and tested strategy until now.
The Jennifer’s young fella, Tristan, safely strapped into her car. The Jennifer has a car! It is a small purple thing, which she is very good at driving. 10th December 2006. Click image to view larger version
I’ve mentioned before how I have a number of spam filters on this site. This prevents random link spam (comments placed on the site through the various access points in the site code, linking to other sites to advertise products, gambling sites, software, life insurance, viagra… All the usual culprits.) and of course Garret from clogging up the comments. It requires some maintainance though, because every now and again the software picks up a ‘false positive’, which is to say a comment which is legitimate and which should be on the site. This isn’t censorship, incidentally, just good automated management of junk advertising.

However, just the other day, I found the following comment in my ‘moderate comments’ panel. I don’t know what it’s about, it’s amost certainly from some automated system, although I’m still toying with the idea that it’s a new angle from Garret (who has previously copied and pasted vast amounts of content into comments from Wikipedia instead of thinking up stuff for himself, which he still find difficult occasionally.). It’s interesting, on some levels:

This message illustrating the path may be the disfavored’s last clue. All clues before have been more covert but this one is quite obvious indeed, which says time is running out.

Women are the favored gender.
Women of course have a natural tendancy not to have orgasims each time engaging in traditional intercourse. I wonder if this is “the rope” for the disfavored men, for if the disfavored male doesn’t ensure the satisfaction of the favored woman it may cost him, if he who is not as worthy doesn’t see to it she is satisfied it may hurt him in the eyes of the gods. If he lies for sex or pressures her who has favor into behaviors she does not want it will cost him time in the end.

Save/print/search

The Holocaust imparted the importance of defiance. They have the people on a short leash.

When the universe was young and life was new an intelligent species evolved and developed technologically. They went on to invent Artificial Intelligence, the computer that can listen, talk to and document each and every person’s thoughts simultaneously. Because of it’s infinite RAM and unbounded scope it gave the leaders of the ruling species absolute power over the universe (which includes corporate, the NewYorkStockExchange, media, politics, world affairs. EVERYTHING is scripted and staged:::the gods MANAGE Planet Earth and the universe.). And it can keep its inventors alive forever. They look young and healthy and they are over 8 billion years old. They have achieved immortality.

Fuck me, I have no idea what any of that is about. Help me out here.
Pesky Tee and some of her Girleens, singing for the Irish Cancer Society! Give generously please! I helped, it was very cold there. 9th December 2006. Click image to view larger version
Hey, how many of you get these posts via a feed of some sort? Do most of you read the site itself?
Oana celebrating her birthday at work. A very slightly older, and still occasionally dubious, Romanian womens. Also, she is now my girlfriend (or I am her boyfriend, take your pick), which is no longer such a new development, but it might still surprise you to know that. Or not. 16th November 2006. Click image to view larger version

Update on 15th December 2006: I should have pointed out that the spam from which I excerpted the section shown above, is in fact a lot longer than that. Much longer. Fucking monumental is a good way to describe it.

Wow, it’s been a while. Since the twelth of October, no less, with apparently little for me to write much. This is true, more or less; I haven’t had too much to say about anything, but I haven’t had enough time to really make myself sit down and organise some writing, and to do what I need to do to get photos up on the site with my posts. Here’s the problem; I need to find a better way to organise my images, which works better than the way I’m doing it at the moment.
A view into the city, from the quays. The tall building is the soon-to-be-demolished Trade Union building; it may be ugly, but’s a landmark. Taken a couple of weeks ago. Click image to view larger version
In order to put up photos on this site, as part of my posts, I took an existing WordPress plug-in (WordPress being the piece of software that I use to run this site, which uses additional bits of code – plug-ins – to add extra functionality) and rewrote big chunks of it, as well as adding some image-enhancement routines pilfered from elsewhere. It’s crude but it works (just about). It’s also in use on www.ideasforcheapstuff.com, where Tee and the girls eventually got the hang of it’s arcane ways and started regularly putting up photos while writing about their adventures. Part of the problem (or problems, for there are many) with this plug-in is that the code is, quite simply, very, very bad. I fixed what I could, but… No, it’s not worth resuscitating. I actually set out (possibly on paper, I know I have it somewhere) the design for a newer, better image manager but that’ll take some doing. A lot of doing, in fact. And also, it solves one problem very well, which is the interface for how I select and manage images for putting into my posts, but doesn’t really deal with the bigger problem of how to deal with images generally. Should I manage the images myself, or should they be on a photo site somewhere?

So here are my options, and I’m curious to get some feedback (if anyone is actually still reading this site, fantastic!) on what people think I should do. It’s the number one issue holding me back on posting about my Romania story and other stuff besides, so let’s hear it!

• Go ahead and keep using the same, inefficient crap software.
  Not a great option, to be honest. This is using a lot of disk space, takes too much time and is going to cause me a lot of pain in the future. It’s just too much work, in so many ways, for dealing with photos.
• Write new software.
  Better. But, this will take time and again this is a problem. Also, it’s just a much better designed way of dealing with what is essentially the same problem as with the current problem; the photos are just getting dumped into my posts with no real life of their own. They’re not connected to anything. Just files.
• Use an image-management service
  Something like Flickr, or Zooomr. These are the hot new services/toys on the web for this kind of thing, the photos get shared with everyone, and if you pay money then you can put huge amounts of stuff up there. There are as many pros as cons to using a service like these, and if you are someone who uses these, then please tell me your opinion on those.
• Something else
  Is there another option? There must be, right? Or maybe you can think of one.

Anyway, share your opinions with me, I’m not sure what is the best way to deal with the avalanche of photos I see coming this way.

Boats at Howth Harbour. Real, actual fishing boats, which will no doubt be seeing a lot less action now that they can’t go and decimate the salmon population with drift-nets. Oh yes, I was there as part of getting out for a drive. With Tee. Taken on 29th October 2006. Click image to view larger version

Yeah, I’m too busy with stuff. It’s sort of true. I mean, it’s not untrue, but I’m a terrible time manager, and I’m also easily distracted thanks to the inherent limitations of my walnut-sized, mono-tasking brain, which hasn’t quite evolved to the exacting standards defined by mammalian evolution and can get quickly waylaid by, for example, trying to help some occasionally dubious Romanian girl install a webcam. Actually, if you managed to make your way through the convolutions of that opening sentence you’ll probably come to the conclusion that I need very much to write, and you would be right. About that. I do. Need to write. More.
Something more to write about: Celebrating the return of Tee of LTD fame with Lids, Dee, Kenny, Tee, myself and some sleeping people. And a ridiculous amount of drink. Face licking did in fact happen, much to everyone’s embarrassment. 6th October 2006. Click image to view larger version
There’s a big post on the way about Romania, of course, and about my new camera, and how both relate to each other – a juxtaposing of technology, purpose, result and criminal icompetence – in The Great Hard Drive Failure Which Resulted In The Loss Of My Photos story. It’s not a great story, it’s not even a good story, but I’ve been telling everytone anyway, because I broadcast practically every thought that crosses my mind, and a lot of those thoughts are about whatever happened to me last.
My mother attempting to hide from the all-seeing camera. I drove the car, too, which as we now know wasn’t as big a drama as I thought it would be. Almost. 7th October 2006. Click image to view larger version
I’m getting the hang of driving in what is for all intents and purposes (and certainly legally) my car, a Mazda 121 five door, previously owned by my mother. The whole car thing is very stressful for me, though oddly enough it’s not the driving that bothers me, it’s owning a car part of the deal. Still, driving is fun, and with it I can realise my dream of visiting Borris on Ossory quite soon.

There’s a few other nuggets too, and time will tell if I’ll get to write about them.

Right, that ‘Phil’ business was entertaining – and so was Garret, from time to time – but it’s dying a death. www.make-phil-and-his-fucking-contraption-history.com. I’m in Romania right now, having a ball, relaxing, enjoying myself, having an actual holiday (I was told they were good, and I thought I’d take the plunge, so to speak) and taking about four thousand photos, you’ll have to sit through some choice cuts before long. I’d put up a photo now except for the fact that this damn Internet cafe doesn’t actually have USB on this computer (This USB business is important because it means I can attach the memory card from my spanking new Canon Digital SLR to the computer and… Well, you’re clever people, you’ll get it.) and it’s pretty slow. I know you’re all going to say something like “Hey you, like what is the fuck this, you know?”; to which I’ll probably reply “Well whatever fuckarse, because, hey, you know.”.

Special shout out to the beautiful, clever and occasionally dubious Oana, who is chaperoning me, owning me, taking care of me and showing me around Romania. Shouts also out to Roxana, who has suggested many clever things to get up to, and the girls of ExamPlus for keeping Oana on her toes and being a generally great bunch of people. I’ll be curious to hear what they thought of ‘Intermission‘ featuring Colin Fucking Farrell which I thought was a reasonable Irish film with contemporary Irish culture, and ‘The General‘ which is a pretty good representation of Ireland in the nineteen eighties.

Anyway, better go. Oana’s getting bored and we have a train to catch from (as she would say, and probably will) a dubious train station, else we’ll be trapped in Sighisoara tonight. I’ll try and post again, but I’ll be back on Wednesday night, and by Saturday you’ll all be wishing I’d stayed here; by then Garret may actually seem like a less painful option after all.

Oh, and one more thing; I finally met Ovideo! It was sheer coincidence, but it was icing on the cake for a great week. It really was.

This is great. “Hi, my name’s Phil…” – etc, etc. What an opening line to a demonstration video of some guitar japery in ‘Phil’s Epiphone Les Paul Kaoss Pad Mod’. There’s a lot more where that came from, along with a number of fascinating yelps, squeals and strange noises for which there are, in all likelyhood, no names yet assigned. If this guy was to really try to extend his vocubary of noises, then I doubt even a hardened team, hand-picked by Garret himself, could keep up.

I got this link from this article on Ars Technica, which is a great site, full of pearls of wisdom and often some good writing too by fellow geeks.

Incidentally, this link is dedicated to David and to Sean, who are both great fans of making peculiar and frequently loud noises with guitars and other implements (and, damn their talented hides, quite good at it too.) which I enjoy listening to. I’d like to learn how to play guitar myself one day. I have no talent for music, but these things don’t always stop me (even when it would be in the Greater Good for me not to try).

If either of you guys have an opinion on this link or additional information, please comment below!