Yes, it is spelled correctly! Remember them? Ex Bananarama Member Siobhan Fahey and Marcella Detroit were the lead and backing vocalist respectively.

Their first single to chart in the UK was called You’re History. And that’s exactly what I say to Defensio on this blog today.

After 5 months using it, the first couple of months were great, after teaching it the commenting regime on this blog it caught all my spam comments with no problem.

Unfortunately, beginning of May is where it started to go wrong. It marked a number of genuine comments as spam and couldn’t process some other comments. Same thing happened in June. Last night I had to “unspam” 6 more comments (including one from Donncha and two from my Dad) and then today I had to self-process another 20 messages because Defensio seemed incapable. I then did the same thing on Mini! Mini! Mini!.

So, Defensio, You’re History.

Continuing the musical theme, Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back In Town. Where “The Boys” = Akismet. Can someone remind me why I left please?

On another note, this theme is starting to piss me off. I don’t know why, it’s been great. But I feel a change coming on. Possibly single column with the “sidebar” at the bottom. Expect Change.

Let’s go in reverse order from the title. First, the admission.

There is a saying that goes something along the lines of

The best laid plans of mice and men…

In an attempt to revitalise my interest in the blog I started three new series on the blog:

1. Photo of the day. With over 20,000 photos on my hard disc I was intending to share many of them on this blog in an attempt to get some decent comment and traffic, both on my blog and my Flickr stream.
2. My Week in View. Was going to be released on a Wednesday and give a quick run-down of the good, bad, ugly and utter shit that happened in the previous seven days.
3. The Beginner Photography series. I was attempting to share some of my knowledge and help beginners with the basics and getting the most from their digital camera.

As you may have noticed, I have failed on all three counts. I had about 10 days worth of photos posted, I reviewed my week just once and three editions of the photography course. I ran out of time and enthusiasm, then I had one or the other but never both at the same time.

I apologise to both the people following the photography. If you really want to learn more then please leave a comment and I will point you at some sites and magazines that are running exactly the same thing and doing much much better than I have.

The “Cloud” and Linux parts of the post are intermingled, so excuse me if this makes no sense!

Freedom from the desktop is awesome. Plain an simple. I can dedicated more time to real life instead of stuck at the PC answering emails, all the new documents I create are staying on Google Docs and I can share them with contacts without having to block the tubes with attachments. I have hit a problem with it though.

We redecorated the lounge, taking about a month to achieve start to finish. In this time my Ubuntu machine was unplugged in the other room. I had a sudden thought that perhaps I could re-jig my Sony Vaio PIII 833mhz (128mb RAM) with a small Linux install. I had heard of Damned Small Linux through conversation with a geek buddy so I looked. 50mb download, 10 minutes to install and it was up and running on the laptop. Nice and quick too. I only want it to get on the ‘net in the living room and check my mail, possible work on some Google Docs and be happy. Two problems I have hit so far:

1. The version of Firefox that’s pre-installed is (quite rightly) a hugely cut-down version. There’s no flash support and although I have told FF to install the plugin, it’s not working. This kills quite a number of sites (including this one), anything with Video (YouTube etc), the Farnborough Arshw Website and limits functionality on other sites like eBay and anything else with flash embedded.
2. More importantly than the flash, Google Docs works a treat for Word type documents, but will not play with the Google Spreadsheets application at all. This makes it rather inconvenient as I’am doing large amounts of work with spreadsheets for various projects I’m working on.

So, Google Docs is great, but I might have to dump DSL and either try another Linux distro or set the Ubuntu desktop machine up again. No great shakes with that but I like the idea of being able to completely hide the laptop. Can’t easily do that with a TFT screen, keyboard and mouse…

Please accept my apologies.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the blog is currently practically empty.

Unforeseen as at a moment’s whim I decided to delete EVERYTHING!

Panic not, it will return. I have cleared the database, the wordpress application and all the files and folders. I am going to re-upload the lot but I want to start clean. It will take me a couple of days before everything is on and settled.

Thanks for your patience!

UPDATE: Well, it would appear that I didn’t back up EVERYTHING. Although I have the XML file from the backup of the database, I really should have checked to ensure that I had all the files before I removed the folder. Means I have lost my themes and uploads (pictures) since I started the blog.

Ho hum. Shit happens! I will import the old posts at some point, want to make sure everything’s running properly first…