Category: Life

I don’t know what I was thinking.
A few posts back, I complained that the Links section was too much of an administrative overhead, so I wouldn’t be resurrecting it in this incarnation of BONWAG. It shows what mental disarray I was in at the time. What? Abandon the Links Section? (cough)
Back in November 1994, I set up BONWAG as a way of keeping track of the other interesting websites I came across, in case anyone else was interested. Hence the name – Bits Of Net What Are Good. Over time, the links list has been flooded and pruned, lost and rebuilt, and flavoured with a variety of management scripts behind it, but it’s always been the main reason I set the site up in the first place.
How can you have a site with a name like BONWAG and not point to the bits of net what are good? Without the links, it’s just an overblown weblog.
With that revelation, and without further ado, I’ve rebuilt the links section with a couple of scraps of backup I found around the place and a few wads of chewing gum.

You wake up at 9:30, and the hotel check out is at 10. Strewn all around you are t-shirts that you’ve acquired at your latest technology convention, in various stages of crumplification. What do you do? What do you do?
You employ this method of folding t-shirts perfectly in two seconds. That’s what you do.
One of my colleagues at work was so worked up about this discovery he hosted a little mini-meeting in one of the unused offices to show it off. It’s pretty cool. I think I’m going to knock off work early to go home and refold my t-shirt drawer a few times.
I also think this is the latest one of those viral emails which is going to do the rounds 20 times before you’re sick of it.

Another win today. I found the BONWAG weblog entries between January 29 and April 26 this year lurking in various places in the cache behind Yahoo.
Looking through all the search engines for a few keywords I knew I’d written down at some point in the past, I was able to find various weblog entries and just restore them to BONWAG with good old cut and paste. (I had tried looking through Google’s cache, but unfortunately, they’re too efficient over there and had already updated their site with the latest, sad looking version of BONWAG. I also tried archive.org, which would have been perfect, but for the fact they stopped indexing BONWAG last year. Scum!)
So, the upshot is that there’s a few days missing after I took the backup in January and before Yahoo indexed it, but I think that was the week I was madly catching up on the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy on DVD and what little I wrote probably made little sense, anyway. And there’s only a few entries missing from May – I was busy mourning the loss of the site and working in the US then, anyway.
Well, what do you know: this Internet thing IS a self-healing system.
As I said, I’m treating this as a chance to clean up the site… let me know what you think of the new look/content. I think I’ve recovered as much of the old BONWAG as I’m able or inclined to.
Time to move on.

I’ve just found a file called ‘blogbackup.txt’ on my computer, dated January 22, 2004. I can’t remember putting it there. I’m very happy now.

I’ve finally trawled through what’s left of BONWAG following the Great Purging of 2004, and there’s some hope.
The bad news is that the latest backup I have of the weblog entries is September 2003. It’s ironic that the backup was made by a piece of software I bitched and moaned about soon afterwards because it deleted parts of the site on its own. Strange that Dreamweaver should come to my rescue. I’ll restore the weblog entries (stretching back to 1998) when I feel inspired.
I’ll also make the site a little more easy to handle. No-one was really getting into the Message Board that much – it’s gone. The Links section, as large as it was, was only an administrative nightmare I could probably do without anyway. There are a few other sections I’ve deleted which you probably won’t miss. I’m going to keep the site simple: a weblog, a photo album, and a bunch of features, articles and toys which I get inspired to write every so often.
Hope you like the new BONWAG.
Yes, I’m going to switch on the backup program….. now.

Seen on the Subiaco Ace cinema ‘now showing’ billboards today – in this order: ‘Raising Helen’ ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ ‘Troy’.
I can’t be sure it wasn’t a happy accident.

I’m more than a little miffed at my ISP for deleting BONWAG, without keeping the backups they told me they were taking. I’ve considered turning this into a hate site for them, but there are far more constructive ways of spending my time.
Anyway, most of the site isn’t working at the moment. I’ve got the weblog and Photo Albums up and running, seeing as the big Las Vegas trip is on shortly. I’ll have to rebuild everything when I get back.
Maybe I can treat it as something positive, and think of it as a spring clean after collecting nearly 10 years of loose code.

I was newly introduced to an old Internet service last night. I’d never found Internet radio to be all that interesting in the past, especially over a 56K connection, but now that broadband is on the way, I thought I should check this out.
Launchcast allows you to set up your own Internet radio station, based on your preferences. The best thing is that you don’t necessarily specify each and every song, you just give it a rough idea of what you’re into, and it uses the recommendations of other people like you to suggest some other stuff you might be into. Already I’ve found 3 songs today which warrant further investigation. It’s like having direct access to your own program manager. You can also let the system know as you go whether each song is any good, and that will further refine your future listening.
It’s one of these services which has been around for a while, but I’ve only just caught on.
If you’re interested, you can listen to my station, and my particular/peculiar tastes right here. Let me know if you’ve got your own, too!

By popular demand, the photos from the current trip to Boston are right here, buddy.

Another US trip is underway – this time to meet with fellow CA folk at one of the big CA offices in Framingham, Massachusetts – about three-quarters of an hour west of Boston.
It seems the major industry of Framingham is ‘international headquarters’ – with a few big companies choosing to build huge multi-story office blocks on the top of little tree-girt hillocks dotted across the landscape. It all looks a little like environmental acne from here
For once, I think I’ve managed the jet lag problem properly. By sleeping right and eating the right things, I may not end up focusing at a point 3 feet behind the powerpoint presentation I’m supposed to be delivering. (I love the guides which say you need a days recovery from each timezone you cross. See you in 12 days, fella.)
The flight was smooth and relatively uneventful, unless you count the fact that American Airlines sent my winter coat on the wrong plane. I can chalk up ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ and ‘Lost in Translation’ on my in-flight movie list.
Some more ‘America is Nuts’ observations; it seems there’s no concept of a ‘ground floor’ here – the hotel lobby is on the first floor. You’re not watching the amount of fat you’re eating here – you’re ‘watching your carbs’. If you have pets, you don’t get hair on everything; you get ‘dander’. These Americans Are Crazy.