Posts from December 19, 2005

The Akismet spam filter included with WordPress.com means I am not troubled by comment spam on my blog at all, ever.

However, I recently reviewed the spam sitting there all alone in quarantine. Most was inviting me to sample all sorts of delights describing all manner of different and very imaginative ways that a man and (wo)man can be joined together.

One spam comment stood out head and shoulders above all others though with a blissfully simple but effective, marketing message.

GREAT VACUUM CLEANERS

So Typepad had plans to implement resilient disk storage but had an outage before the work was complete, which meant that users lost access to their treasured blogs as a consequence.

Elsewhere del.ico.us celebrated the Yahoo! takeover by having an outage that also meant that users lost access to their bookmarks.

I also noticed that the transaction log on the database used by Newsgator filled up over the weekend and the forums were also unavailable this morning.

My UK ISP appears to have suddenly been taken by surprise by a slight increase in users which has broken their email infrastructure causing sporadic access to email for a period close to seven days. Isn't anyone at Blueyonder responsible for capacity planning ?

I wanted to export my Newsgator feeds into OPML and experiment with SearchFox, who kindly gave me an account, to take part in the beta program.

Only one slight problem, Newsgator doesn't support OPML export. Strange but true.

I am fortunate that my job takes me to lots of exotic locations (Prague, Bergen, Amsterdam, Munich, Oslo, Nice, Paris) and now, err, West Bromwich.

The last time I was here was in October 1981 when I attended a game at The Hawthorns between West Bromwich Albion and Manchester United. The game got underway and the United fans started a chant:

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside Oh I do like to be beside the sea

Oh I do like to walk along the prom, prom, prom

And say, GO HOME West Brom

Only, 'Go Home' was substituted for a different, more colourful phrase in the English vernacular to the same effect.

Anyway, as the game was pretty uneventful, the United fans kept repeating the last line ad infinitum which was quite funny.

Next thing I knew, a policeman grabbed hold of me and my mate and escorted us both down the steps to the pitch, through a gate and led us away.

I was stunned into silence but my mate was more vociferous repeatedly asking 'What had we done ?'. This was understandable as he was a Brighton fan who had just come along for something to do and wasn't even singing.

We got led away alongside the pitch, past the United fans who applauded us (for some odd reason) and were taken to the police control room. The copper asked us for ID and took our names. He then cautioned us. We protested that we had done nothing and weren't even singing the obscene chant.

To my amazement, the copper said 'Yeah. I know but we had to do something to quieten things down'

Then I realised that we had been ejected from a football match because we happened to be standing adjacent to an aisle (easy access for the coppers without having to pull us from the middle which might provoke more trouble), the coppers knew we were together as a pair (and not in a larger group) and precisely because we were not the types to be cause trouble.

We were then kicked out into Handsworth Road where youths were lobbing stones into the United section and the copper warned us 'Listen. You've been cautioned. But if you enter the ground again and I see you, you will be arrested'.

So we ran the gauntlet of stones back to the station. As we did so, inevitably we heard loud cheering from the away end.

We got home and were soon ~~safely wrapped up in our beds~~ back in the pub, drinking hard, regaling our friends with the anecdote in the pub as we learned the final score. 3-0 to United.