Still no word from those slackers over at innergeek.us (no link for them!). I’ll have to follow them up I suppose if I want any kind of satisfaction out of the whole affair. Hmmm, maybe I’ll just set up a keyword loaded page explaining they’re a bunch of thieves and get it ranking higher on Google then they do – that might be fun 🙂

Anyway I suppose I’d better say what other stuff I’ve been up to over the last few weeks, apart from making the odd entry about the Fiery Furnaces and Jorja Fox.

OK, I had a haircut that’s something. I also got my watch repaired. Its battery ran out the other week and while it was being replaced I thought I might as well get the glass fixed back in (it fell out when I was visiting Rebecca in Kalgoorlie in August 2002 and had been held together by sticky tape ever since). The watch people over at the Galleria did a fantastic job, not only replacing the battery and gluing the glass as requested but also cleaning the face, which had got stained in a few places from stuff leaking in. They also polished the case, and all of this for $30.00. That’s what you call value.

I’ve also been doing some more work on Abandoned in Perth – mainly adding inconsequential side pages and visiting new sites rather than processing all the photos I’ve got. Unfortunately I’m running out of pages to add and so will have to get on to actually processing the mountains of images that are waiting, which is so tedious. Oh well, my fault for setting the site up in the first place 🙂

I’m also doing a fair bit of research on local urban history – the site is starting to look (in my mind at any rate) like more of an urban archeology site than a purely urban exploration one. This is mostly down to the fascinating (ie: mind stupefyingly boring to anyone except a tragic history/geography geek such as myself 🙂 survey on the Swan River Trust website. Pages and pages of information covering the geography, history, landuse and flora of every section of the Swan and Canning rivers, in excruciating detail. It’s bloody fascinating – you could live near the river your entire life (as I have done) and not even hear a tenth of this stuff. I never knew for instance that the fairly staid and boring suburb of Bicton is built on top of an extensive cave complex. Or that there used to be natural hot springs in Nedlands. Or that UWA is built on an Aboriginal battle ground. Great stuff 🙂

I’m also planning to head down to the State Library next weekend and find out how much of the old Maylands Brickworks was destroyed for the peninsula housing development. I have the nasty feeling that the answer is ‘most of it’. Bastards. But I’ll shut up about that until I have some more information. And before I bore anyone too much 😉

Also in the website realm I’ve been looking at redesigning the Wyrmlog. This bloated, non-standards compliant layout is starting to be an embarrassment. I’m also going to be looking at a PHP solution to take some of the load off the GTP Sever – and eliminate the frames, which have always annoyed me. So don’t be surprised if there are some weird changes over the next few weeks as I experiment (cue evil laugh here – Mwahahahaha!!).

I’ll also be adding a search feature – for when you just have to know my opinion of Alisen Down say, or Guy Sebastian.

(Although as an adult, music-loving human being with intelligence greater than that of a retarded ant my opinion of Guy Sebastian should be fairly obvious 🙂

(As – given my last log entry – should be my opinion of Alisen Down 😉

About the only other thing I’ve done lately is head down to Rebecca and Dom’s on Saturday for lunch (they wanted to test out their new barbecue). I got down there a bit early so decided to make more website work for myself by photographing the derelict Elders Woolstore (over lunch I was told that a number of people have been beaten up around there recently – just as well I didn’t know or I wouldn’t have got any photos).

Oddly though my camera battery died halfway through. This only ever seems to happen in Fremantle. No doubt it’s down a localised geomagnetic anomaly – either that or convict ghosts draining the energy 😉

Anyway that’s about all I’ve got to say – boring as usual I’m afraid. I’ll obviously have to do something rash and foolish this week just to spice things up. Or get a life. One or the other 🙂

ALISEN DOWN WAS IN SMALLVILLE?!?!?!!

Why was I not informed?

And she played a Lex’s mother of all things. How about that then?

AND SHE’S GOING TO BE IN STARGATE?!??!?!!!?

cant… type…. glee…. overload…. ;D

Happened to catch a repeat of the Concert for George on ABC last night. Sam Brown (she of 1988 worldwide hit Stop) did a truly incredible version of Lead a Horse to Water. I was fully prepared to go out today and buy the concert album just to get a copy of it, however it turns out that they decided to leave it off. Oh well, I’m sure I can download it somewhere 😀

Hey, if the record companies will put what I want on CD I’m fully prepared to pay for it. If they won’t, what choice do I have? ;-D

On the bus home today I got thinking about TV and realised that my two favourite shows at the moment are CSI (that is the orginal CSI – I wouldn’t touch CSI:Miami with a ten foot swab) and (embarrasingly) Gilmore Girls. I then got thinking about a way to combine them, like some kind of crossover episode. I then got thinking about a crossover series – CSI:Star’s Hollow. I then decided that this train of thought was way too defective to continue and got back to reading New Scientist 🙂

Had a really good debate/discusion (with Ryan and Fabian) on MSN last night on the subject of the Scientific Method versus Intuition (I’d say mysticism except Ryan would get upset ;-), caves, AD&D phase systems and the relative cuteness/hotness of Jorja Fox. It may be an evil product of Micro$oft, but MSN rocks! 😀

Still haven’t got enough time/sleep to make a proper entry, but I just have to say that Tropical Iceland by the Fiery Furnances is the best song I’ve heard since The Electric Version came out.

Go listen to it. You won’t regret it.

OK people, he wrote some decent songs but Kurt Cobain was not that great. Certainly he wasn’t great enough to justify the wholesale grief and hooha surrounding the tenth anniversery of his suicide today. Hell, he wasn’t even great enough to justify the wholesale grief and hooha surrounding his suicide in the first place. Teen Spirit is a good song – but it ain’t the anthem of my generation damnit!

This whole issue has been completely resolved, and I encourage everyone to go to www.innergeek.us and take Yvette’s test, and to go to my previous blog entry and read my full apology for some stupid things typed in the heat of the moment – August 24th 2004.

To: The Owner/Administrator of www.innergeek.us.

I recently had the fortune to stumble over the Geek Test on innergeek.us. In the process of filling it out I couldn’t help but notice that several of the questions were uncannily similar to those on my own Geek Test (URL). This similarity was only reinforced when I submitted the test and received not just a percentage rating, but a label based on that rating – in exactly the same fashion as my test.

On viewing the source of the page I discovered that the original javascript I wrote for the evaluation of my test is being used (with some modifications) to calculate the score. In addition to this the HTML of the rest of the page is also clearly copied from my test, including the 100%/80% nested tables, erroneous margin tags in the outer table, nonfunctional ‘title’ class and 80% HR tags around the title.

While I don’t mean to accuse anyone of plagiarism or theft, it is quite clear that your Geek Test is an edited copy of my Geek Test. As such I feel justified in pointing out that the source of my test contains a copyright statement, which – while it may not stand up under the Rio Protocol for instance – certainly asserts my right to be acknowledged as the author of the work.

I should make it clear here that I’m NOT going to ask you to take down or modify your test. I like your test, I like what you’ve done with it and I like it that something that I created has gone on to greater things. However I do feel somewhat cheated that no acknowledgment of my original work (or that of my friends who provided many of the questions copied to your test) is provided.

Instead I would politely request that a simple acknowledgment of the origins of the test be added to the test page (in small letters down the bottom is fine) with a link back to either my Geek Test (URL), the Tales of the Geek Underclass (URL), or my website (URL). Something along the lines of “Based on the original Geek Test by D.P.Wyrm” for instance.

I feel that this is a reasonable request under the circumstances. After all, how would you feel if someone copied your version of the test (or some other content) from your website to their own and posted it without any acknowledgment of its origin or the work you put in to create it?

In return I will happily place a link to your test and website from my test.

Please let me know your response.

Regards

Denys the Purple Wyrm

Please Note: This entry was made in the heat of the moment and contains a number of statements and assumptions that are just plain wrong. The “Guy” (who as it turns out is not a guy at all – there’s an assumption right there 🙂 is actually a perfectly nice person who has addressed all the issues I raised despite the excessive raving and ranting below, and I would encourage everyone to visit her site www.innergeek.us and take her test. I’m leaving the entry as written for historical purposes, but would like to sincerely apologise to Yvette for any ill-feeling or upset caused by my tendancy to type out whatever comes into my head without actually thinking first. – August 24th 2004.

THEY’VE STOLEN MY TEST!!!!!!!!

And the code for my test as well. I mean it’s just Javascript so it’s not like it took any great skill to write, but it’s still mine. And I might also point out that every ‘purity test’ style online test I’d ever seen up to the point when I wrote mine used overcomplicated CGI scripting to calculate the score – not Javascript, so in that respect my code is (or was) somewhat pioneering.

And on top of all that it’s just plain rude. This guy finds my test, thinks it’s neat, grabs the code (and a bunch of questions) and puts it up on his website as if he thought of the whole thing – without any acknowledgement or link to the original author. It’s (and I’m mad enough to swear here so those with delicate eyes look away) plain f***ing rude!

The ironic thing about this is if he asked permission, I would have given it to him, so long as he preserved a link to my test (like this for instance). And if his test ended up being bigger than mine (which it is) or better than mine (matter of opinion) I’d be happy, because something I created had gone on to greater things. But he’s just ripping off my work and pretending it’s his, which is plain not on.

He’s even got the nerve to stick a copyright statement on his site – “