The MON Blogs

Jonny Bobsled is my man

7 October 2005 – 1:28 pm

Hey! It’s my first blog attempt. I’m excited. There’s something about posting something useless about something that no one will read, which makes me wonder what the purpose of blogs are. I mean, message boards seem fine and good things of discussion, but blogs seem more ‘definitive’, if you could call it that. I like how you can only make mere “comments”, rather than “replies” on a message board which indicates more involving your opinion. Also, if they’re useless and no one reads them why do them at all? Who’s the audience we’re writing to? Especially if they’re a private thing.

So yeah. I’m excited though. I’ve blogged away! This is my definitive say. You can comment, but I’m the special person who owns this post.

By Snaykeemcgee | Posted in Random | Comments (1)

Wests are the best!

3 October 2005 – 5:30 pm

The Wests Tigers have taken out the 2005 Telstra NRL Rugby League premiership. The Wests Tigers are a joint venture between foundation rugby league clubs; Western Suburbs and Balmain.

These two clubs, and their off spring, the Wests Tigers, have had to endure plenty of hard ships in recent years. Firstly the pain of a forced merger, followed by disappointing finishes between 2000 and 2004 and plenty of on and off field controversy.

That the Tigers have found success may seem remarkable to many after so many recent years of failure. The Tiger’s success this year has come by placing faith in young talented players instead of relying on “big name” players who often join a club with an over inflated cost and ego. The Tigers on the other hand have relied on youth, promoting young players like Benji Marshall, Bryce Gibbs, Robbie Farah, Chris Heighington, Dene Halatau, Bronson Harrison and Liam Fulton. These players have come through the junior ranks and are now devoted Wests Tigers.

These young players have brought a breath of fresh air to Rugby League. They play with an irresistible flair and skill, not content to bash the ball forward like many modern teams; they play to their skills, throwing the ball around with skill and speed.

In doing so they have captured the imagination of rugby league supporters everywhere, and helped to heal many old wounds for diehard Balmain and Western Suburbs supporters who have had to put up with so much for the love of their team.

As an aside I would also like to pay my respects to those who have suffered from the recent terrorist attacks in Bali. It is a great tragedy and the thoughts of us at Middle of Nowhere go out to all those caught up in this horrific act of terrorism.

By Colonel | Posted in Random | Comments (1)

No More “Doof Doof!”

3 October 2005 – 2:05 pm

A certain white, shiny device is annoying me…

I can’t sit on a train without hearing multiple peoples “doof doof” music being played at high volume through little white headphones.

This post isn’t really about iPods (the white headphones are just the obvious thing to blame) – or any other mobile music player – just the inconsiderate people who listen to crappy music at high volume in an enclosed space.

If you like “doof doof” music that’s fine but would you turn it down so I can’t hear it.

Then there are people who play with mobile phone ringtones on trains… but thats a different post.

By devslashtux | Posted in Computers and Internet, Random | Comments (1)

Nuts!

27 September 2005 – 4:58 pm

I found this bag of pine nuts in the cupboard not too long ago and I had to take a photo of the label.

Matt

Click on the thumbnail to view the full image.

By Colonel | Posted in Random | Comments (3)

The Titanic

21 September 2005 – 9:38 pm

Wow, my first blog post, how exciting. If you’re wondering I’m Matt, also known as Colonel on the Have Your Say forums.

As Drew mentioned in his first entry, this blog is going to be a place where the members of Middle of Nowhere productions will record any sort of random thoughts they have. I like the egocentric nature of blogs that assumes our random thoughts are worth reading, but that’s for another day.

To confirm the random nature of this blog I wanted to quickly write some thoughts I had after watching a documentary on the sinking of the Titanic. The Titanic would have to be one of, if not the, most studied disasters of all time, but in every documentary you see they are all very busy explaining the science of the sinking. We (the Western world) is so obsessed with the scientific explanation of every thing (I notice with a sense of irony that CSI:Miami is currently running in another room). This documentary I was watching was going to great lengths to explain weaknesses in the steel, the way the ship broke apart, things like that. And I thought who cares?

How the ship sunk shouldn’t be the main point of inquiry. It struck an iceberg and because of some structural weaknesses it sunk. But the real tragedy was not scientific but social. It was social factors that ensured the boat was being pushed to travel as fast as possible, social factors that led to it being drastically understocked with life rafts, and it was social factors that led to the decision to load the first class passengers on first and release the rafts when they still had plenty of available space.

It was these factors that should be the main subject of research and interest. It’s of little relevance to know that the ship sunk because the steel was too weak, or too many water tight compartments were flooded, what we should be trying to understand is why so many lives were lost when those deaths could have been avoided.

In light of the tragedy in New Orleans I think this is a reasonably relevant message.

By Colonel | Posted in Social Issues | Comments (2)

A Slight Mishap

20 September 2005 – 4:01 pm

Well, the MON Site has been up for less than a week and already we’ve been on two webservers and had one potentially catastrophic mishap!

MySQLled
We went online last friday only to find the hosting provider had a problem with MySQL and wasn’t willing to fix it. This forced a quick change of server to a new hosting provider (Alternative Web Services)

Exceeded Bandwidth
Today, the second problem occurred, this time involving a cron job.

The site should be spidered at 3:00AM by phpsitemapng – a great little script for creating a Google sitemap.

Unfortunately due to a server error, the job didn’t run once every 24 hours. No, it ran once every 3 seconds!

After running in the background for quite a while I noticed that the page views on Have Your Say was going up a little quicker than it should be…

Some frantic messages to the hosting support people we began looking for the problem. After about 30 minutes of searching through server logs we found the problem…

Unfortunately, by that time the spider had slightly exceeded the sites monthly usage quota. By slightly I mean by 15,069.23MB…

Thankfully, the staff at Alternative are understanding (and quick). Not only has the problem been solved but we are back on the air – metaphorically speaking.

So a big thank you to the staff at Alternative, especially Michael who put up with me while I was extremely frentic to find the problem.

According to some rough calculations – since my server logs are somewhat messy right now the errant bot inflicted about 6,250,000 hits onto the site. The upside of this is that Have Your Say now has some great page view-counts

Hopefully, future posts won’t be quite as dramatic. At this point I can see Linux server admins worldwide thinking “6.2 million hits… That’s nothing…”

By devslashtux | Posted in Computers and Internet, MON Productions | Comments Off

Welcome to the MON Blogs

16 September 2005 – 12:21 pm

Hi.

This is the first post at The MON Blogs. More posts will be made soon, I promise.

As in introduction to what Middle of Nowhere is I’ll quote the MON Productions About Page (http://www.monproductions.com/about/)

Middle of Nowhere is essentially four people who get together and work on creative projects. We write scripts, film short movies, take photographs, draw comics, whatever.

The other 3 team members are Matt, Alex and Deon. At the moment we haven’t quite decided to use screennames or our real names – so bear with us for a little while.

I’d also like to point out that like the rest of the MON site, these Blogs are going to be a bit unpredictable. It’s likely to contain posts on anything and everything -our views on current events, politics, computers or simply a whinge about public-transport.

For those of you who are geographically inclined, we’re from Sydney, Australia – yes, people do live here and no we don’t have koalas and kangaroos in our backyards. In fact the majority of new houses in the region don’t really have backyards at all… But that’s another post.

To conclude this, the first post on The MON Blogs I welcome you! If you’d like to see what MON Productions gets up to have an explore around the rest of the MON Productions website.

By devslashtux | Posted in MON Productions, Random | Comments Off