josh|tastic

It’s rather impressive just how much everything can change in a day. Yesterday, about this time, I was freaking out because one of my employers had cut my pay to a third of what it was (that hasn’t changed, btw) and another job hit a snag. Today though, I pulled off 5 stellar articles, all because I had a good sleep and took a half day today.

Really rather impressive how God works so mightily sometimes.

Going to spend the rest of this week, and maybe next week as well in this half day status, but we’ll see how it goes. It’s the end of the year, and I haven’t had a real break from writing since Easter. Not a bad thing, really, but it does wear on the mind a bit.

I haven’t been a massive fan of the David Letterman show, it spends too much time in the silly bin. But I caught this YouTube clip over at RGB where I write relatively often, and was pretty pleased to see Letterman ranting about climate change, with actual sense, fact and seriousness.

Now sure, some of it is probably for comedic affect (though, between you, me, and David, I’m relatively certain he’s write about the whole doomed thing). But he knew what he was talking about. He has obviously spent time by himself learning about what is happening.

It’s a rare thing to find that in Hollywood, to find someone who "knows" things and "learns" things.

Anyway, Kudos to him!

I don’t know if it was something in the water I drank over the weekend, or the fact that I walked for a bloody long way on Sunday, played Bongo’s somewhat enthusiastically, and then walked home, but I am freakin’ knackered.

Or at least, that would be the easy answer. I was knackered Sunday night, but slept really well Monday, so I should have woken up refreshed and all happy-nappy! But no, I went back to bed after "dinner" and slept a bit more.

And now, having written no less than 6 articles already, and a few more to go, I’m just… laxidazical! Or as I like to think of it, a little left of center.

ANYway!

Anyone watched the DOW of late? It’s hilAAAArious! Well, it’s only funny from an entirely morbid point of view, sure, but seriously, spend a day watching it - compare it too other days - and it is really just distressing the downward trend it has.

OK, I’m really just writing to give my head something else to do while I write… No, it doesn’t make sense, but I don’t believe it ever had too! I’m going to get on with work again though…

Not everyone is part of the Digg crowd these days. A lot of people know about it, sure, but knowing about it and using it I guess are two different matters. Subsequently, what you may not be aware of is that Digg has been going through a period these last few months - with about the same mental acuity and patience as a female going through a period - and banning users, permanently, from using Digg.

It’s a baffling turn of events for a website to ban users from using it. It would be like CNN deciding that it doesn’t want everyone to be able to read its content, just some people.

I will say that Digg has been preempting these bans with various Digg blog posts, the latest one obviously a warning to all those people who use scripts on Digg.

I’m writing this post because, obviously, I got banned. My username - MajorJJH - no longer works. But instead of it just saying that the username no longer exists, it says "Username is Invalid," rubbing a bit more salt into the wound.

OK, I thought, I wonder what I could have done to get banned? I hardly spend more than 5 minutes a day on Digg as it is, let alone use scripts or anything.

I dutifully emailed Digg support and asked them why MajorJJH had been banned. Here’s what I got in reply (emphasis mine):

Your Digg.com account, MajorJJH has been permanently banned due to egregious violations of the Digg.com TOU (www.digg.com/tos) related to script usage.

OK, I thought, I wonder why they think I’m using scripts.

The Digg support person on the other end of the email also copy and pasted Section 5.8 of the Digg TOU, before adding one last comment:

Because we must be vigilant in protecting against activities that compromise the Digg community, this decision is final and irreversible.

Now putting aside for the moment the fact that whoever was on the other end of this email must also be part of George W. Bush’s speech writing team, I’m a little perplexed at why I would have been banned. As I said, I don’t really spend that much time on Digg. I have one Digg RSS feed - Gaming - in my RSS reader that I check each day (mainly just to be notified when Zero Punctuation is released), and I sometimes shout a story of mine that has been posted up on Digg by someone else (as I will not post my own stories), but that pretty much makes up the whole of my Digg usage.

It will be interesting to see over the next few days the various other reasons that people who have been banned, but for now, well, apparently my Digg usage is at an end!

Is that Digg’s goal?

The term "bane of my existence" gets thrown around a lot these days. It’s humorous in its harshness while still managing to convey the message. For some its serious things like alcohol, drugs, what-have-you, for others the term gets used to categorize the humorous; chocolate, junk food, etc.

So I’m revising the statement to the above;

The bane of my bank balance, the enabler of my existence

And the particular thing that sparked this is Amazon.com.

Whenever I feel like just wasting some time on the internet, I invariably end up surfing through Amazon. Sure, I’ll try to read through some blogs, articles on weight loss through World of Warcraft, what have you. But within no time - and more often than not at the same time as the blogs - I make my way to Amazon.

It’s the fact that there is a bookstore I can browse through at my leisure. I’m bad enough when I get to go to Borders (the big three story Borders store out at Chadstone); I can spend literally hours just wandering through the shelves.

And while it’s harder to find a random book from the history section or whatever, Amazon does allow me to browse through my favorite genres - fantasy and science fiction - and find "similar authors/books". With that also comes the user reviews which, in all honesty, makes up for the lack of browsing I’m able to do. I know that people who love the book are going to rave and rant about it, but it’s the 1 and 2 star reviews that you go for. Sure, they may just be ranting themselves because they don’t like people who write (they exist, trust me), but some of them actually provide constructive criticism that sways me off a book.

Needless to say, the amount of changes that my shopping Cart is interminable. Some people use Wishlists and, yeah, I have 4 of them, but it’s the cart that everything gets sorted through.

All of this is a longwinded way of saying that I’m about to put through an Amazon order with the following books;

- Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book) - Neal Stephenson

- Swords Of Haven: The Adventures of Hawk & Fisher - Simon R. Green

- A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) - George R.R. Martin

- A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire) - George R.R. Martin

- Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders (P.S.) - Neil Gaiman

’tis fun!