Regular readers would know that my political persuasion in right of centre, particularly on economics, but this story is just plain wrong, even our Prime Minister, who for non-Australian readers is of a conservative persuasion, in the context of the abortion debate, defends proper sex education (in the context of a way to reduce the abortion rate)

Washington Post: Some Abstinence Programs Mislead Teens, Report Says.
Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy,” a congressional staff analysis has found.

Those and other assertions are examples of the “false, misleading, or distorted information” in the programs’ teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday, which reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.

Just for once iinet met a deadline, the new wireless card in the back of the box is working fine talking to the wireless adsl modem now located at the phone point at the other end of the house, and all is well again in the world.

iiNet (or “ii” as they now call themselves: short for “incompetent idiots”) rang last week after my faxed complaint to apologise then tell me it would still be another week until my net access was returned. In another complete f*ck up the guy who rang (he was from “upstairs” so he said) promised that someone from “downstairs” would ring in the morning to confirm 1 Dec as the date of ADSL return. Surprise, surprise, no one rang, until he eventually rang in the afternoon to apologise and make some comment about those evil ADSL connection nazis “down stairs”. No explanation has been given as to why it has taken so long.

Well its be no access 12 November, the webmail box is soo full as to make me cry, I’ve lost advertising on the Blog Herald, my ebay business has died, all thanks to f*cking iiNet. A monkey could have done it quicker than iiNet+ add the fact that they slammed me for another 12 month contract to avoid a $100 “transfer” fee to the new address (despite the fact I’ve got the same number and the connection is in the same switch) and many of their competitors are now offering $0 setup and cheaper plans……

Change you say, well at the end of the 12 months I will. I started with iiNet when they where still relatively small, now they’ve gone from 40,000 odd customers to over 200,000 they just don’t give a sh*t anymore. The new estate I’m building in has real cable internet, so bye bye ADSL this time next year.

A week and a half has passed and still no internet access from home accept for dialup which is about as useful these days as tits on a bull.
I’ve been told that for Telstra to transfer an ADSL connection from one house to the next takes 5-10 working days, despite the fact its the same phone number and exchange.
Now I was pissed at iinet my ISP, and I still am, as they left it over the whole weekend and then to Monday night to put the order through and never bothered telling me that whole week prior when I first contacted them that it would take so long, but Telstra takes the cake. Third world stuff.

Many out there will bleat that if Telstra is fully privatised (for those overseas its still 51% Government owned) that it will be worse. Bullsh*t. It’s the Government ownership that stuffs it up and makes it unaccountable. We need to open up the exchange to home point market, tighten regulation and piss the rest of the crappy company off whilst it still holds some value. Living in the bush, great, we’ll protect you under legislation and Universal service provision rules, but the quicker we piss these bastards off from public ownership the better.

Apologies for those expecting the growing volume on the Blog Herald and the Search Engine Herald to continue unabated: when moving Friday the ADSL internet connection did not follow, and my useless ISP, iinet are looking into it! 4 days without internet access is a real pain in the u know what. I hope they look into it more thoroughly than they did with the emails from all my domains THEY ARE STILL BLOCKING.

If somebody from iinet is reading this: I’ve stuck with you because of your previously great service and ease to contact. Since your takeovers and expansion, YOU SUCK. You blame my host for the email issues despite bounces indicating YOU’VE BLOCKED MY EMAIL and now you F*ck up my ADSL + want to speak to a real person on the phone, GOOD LUCK 15 minutes minimum, if I’m lucky. NOT GOOD ENOUGH IINET.

One of the most pathetic sites I have ever laid my eyes on
http://www.sorryeverybody.com/

Instead of celebrating the wonder of democracy in America and accepting the result, these sad sacks of shit denigrate the great nation with their whiney apologies to the rest of the world. If this is the attitude taken by many on the left (and I’m sure its not) its little wonder that you lost.

Americans, you have nothing to be ashamed of.

For some satirical counter spin

Believe it or not, it wasn’t just rednecks who voted for Bush

A corny tagline I know, and I promised myself to be nice to Mena at SixApart some time ago, so there will be no anti-MT tirades either here or at the Blog Herald but I have to say publicly what a wonderful time I’m having blogging using WordPress.

The most refreshing change is not having to spend 30 minutes every evening deleting and trying to block blog/ comment spam. I can’t say enough how annoying and what a sour taste this left in my mouth every night, particularly as I did this prior to blogging. After crossing my figures with reloads, refreshes and other such things, I wouldn’t feel like blogging. It had become a chore, a chore that I wanted over with as quickly as possible.

And then there was the posting issues. Once upon a time I could blog on the fly: I ran into something of interest and I blogged it. Then it became impossible, I’d been hitting back space a dozen times to try to get the post up, sometimes the posts would even disappear into thin air. It was a disincentive to blog. I can even remember Xian at one stage asking for an intern just to deal with the technical issues from the spam and the posting.

And then I changed to WordPress. First it was here at duncanriley.com, when I finally decided it was time to put a personal blog back up again after I’d abandoned and deleted it 6 months prior due to the pressure the spam was causing me.

I’m not a CSS expert and I’m the first to admit I struggle with it. But if I could teach myself html in 1995 I could pick up some CSS in 2004. The provided WP template was nothing special, but there a quite a few freebie options out there and I finally settled on one, which then gave me the opportunity to tinker.

The Blog Herald on the other hand was a far bigger task.

Firstly the design.

I’d gone for a four column portal look about 12 months ago (version 3) when blogging wasn’t as legitimate as it is now and I wanted to persuade Google that I was more that just a basic blog. A wrong attitude in reflection, I know, but I’d been pissed at being rejected for an Adsense account and became quiet obsessive about obtaining one. The template did the trick. However as pointed out by others at the time it wasn’t standard compliant and the like… I won’t repeat all the observations, although I do remember Vicki not longer after the change saying that it was a bit cramped and not easy to read. I was just happy to have Google ads in some sort of bizarre validation of maturity at a time Google was not accepting blogs at all.

The template served well during a period of unprecedented growth. But during this time blogs as serious news sources became more popular and a blogging layout more acceptable. The father of blogging for dollars (and a great bloke) Nick Denton, and a blogger I have come to like more over time Jason McCabe Calacanis popularised (through Gawker Media and WeblogsInc.) the 3 column content left blog. Its still a format almost exclusively limited to their sites, but I liked the fact that it provided a look that provided a clear visual path to the site content without being surround by the periphery items often found in blogs.

The issue then became how to replicate the look in CSS. The WeblogsInc sites use tables, which I wanted to move away from, and the Gawker blogs use CSS, but it wasn’t something easily replicated.

After 4 days of sheer will power (well constant experimentation) it was complete, sans bottom bar (I’ll get to that at a later date).

The look is both modern, caters to advertising which is needed to keep up with the bandwidth demands, and goes back to a more tradition blog style.

I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢ve also noticed what although The Blog Herald’s traffic has increase probably 50% since the changes, the bandwidth has decrease by 50%. Nothing like some standards compliant CSS to help things along.

WordPress has, all-in-all, been a dream.

The setup was a breeze (once you’ve got the right password for your mysql database!) and posting is quick and easy. There?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s a great variety of plugins, and I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢m using a few for the Blog Herald;

Comment Authorisation by Scott Merrill provides a great way to limit blog spam by forcing validation of comments by email. What it essentially means that instead of the MT Blacklist method of a list of banned sites, all comments are not posted and are forced to be moderated by me, which WordPress users will now is a standard feature, but legitimate comments can be validated from an automated email sent to their (hopefully) legitimate email address. Those which are left can either be bulk deleted from within WordPress or approved.

Faked Folders from Stephen O’Connor is a god send and should be shipped standard with WordPress. It allows the creation of static pages from within WordPress, for example on the Blog Herald, the about page is a static page. It creates modrewrites (fancy urls for those unfamiliar with the term) as well to your specifications. What it does is extend WordPress from blogging tool to page creator (CMS).

I’ll play with some more plugins shortly but these two alone complete the package for me.

WordPress has really bought back my love of blogging. For the first time in months I’m reading Daypop, Blogdex and Popdex again and getting a feel for what’s going in the Blogosphere. I’m enjoying posting and the traffic on the Blog Herald is reflecting both the quality and quantity of the posts.

I’m back!

After a long election campaign and a backlog of work I’ve finally gotten through my bloglines subs: Steve Rubel posts going back to the beginning of October. Its a relief to have finally gotten back on top of things, particularly after 4 days of non stop re-writting of the Blog Herald. Its such a pleasure to be able to post and not have spent 30 minutes prior cleaning up blog spam, then praying that the post will work!

I’ll write more soon on the change over process, although it took days there were some good lessons that should be blogged on what to do in particular things that can’t be easily found through Google, in particular WP password issues, mod rewrites and fancy urls, plugins and MT conversions.

You’ve got to love Rupert Murdoch’s soon to be Delaware based News.com.au portal, particularly given how seriously they report the news, but then again, this is the organisation that employs Phillip Adams.

GIANT squid are taking over the world, well at least the oceans, and they are getting bigger. According to scientists, squid have overtaken humans in terms of total bio-mass.

read more>

This will undoubtedly get the conspiracy theorists going:

News.com.au> A TECHNICIAN in the Royal Navy has become the first serviceman in Britain’s armed forces to be officially recognised as a Satanist, the defence ministry said. Chris Cranmer, 24, has been given the go-ahead by his captain to perform Satanic rituals on board the HMS Cumberland and is reportedly lobbying his employers to register Satanism as an official religion in the armed forces.