September 2002 Archives

OK, as of right now, I've taken down the page which let you see the usage this site was getting. It was being abused by some filthy German porn spammers. They were submitting their own pages as referrers to my page which made their pages show up on my pages. With the way google works, their pages would then come up higher than normal in a Google search (as they're referred by more outside pages). Spammers - another word for scum.

Our relatives already know this, but we've bought a flat! It's in the Fortress Hill part of Hong Kong Island, quite close to the MTR. It's down a very quiet area and surprisingly quiet and village-like for the area. It's 1120 square feet in area (about 100 square meters).

It looks like we'll be able to move in to the new place in about two weeks or so. Moving the broadband connection may take a while and some miscellaneous weirdness may happen while it's being moved. While I do have a backup mail server in a different location, there may be a chance that email will fall through the cracks. If this happens (you'll get a bounce/failure to deliver message) you can resend it after I get the site back up. Check back weekly!

OK, I've been making lots of changes to the stylesheets today and there's more to come. I tend to assume that everyone reading this page uses a pretty recent browser like Mozilla or IE 6 (and some things don't even work with IE6), and design accordingly. Hence, if you want to see these pages the way I design them, you need a pretty recent browser.

Note that The site is readable in Netscape 4.7, but it doesn't look very nice. This is because that's an old and broken browser. Mozilla is a much nicer browser which works very well.

If you use a different browser and these pages look awful to you, please let me know.

Anyway, I've been doing a little fiddling with the stylesheets here. Like the new look? Comments to the webmaster. The backdrop is a little gecko lizard we found in our bathroom in the last flat. Geckos are harmless and eat cockroaches and other nasty bugs. I think they're cute, the wife disagrees. Roxanne is frightened of them, but a little fascinated as well. Conor just goes 'blup'

In a massive break from their usual greed and incompetence, ATV, the second (and very distant second at that) TV channel here are actually showing the 911 remembrance. Last year, while the attacks were still going on, they kept showing live horse-racing. (They have to broadcast a certain amount of English-language television, and they think three hours of live horse-racing a night with a few Aussies commentating on it counts.)

I'm getting probed for the above weakness by segfault.monkeys.com. Not sure whether is just a test or someone looking for an open proxy. (update 11/09/2002: it was just a test by the formmail.pl list people.)

Spammers suck. They steal time, bandwidth, money. Spam is a waste of my time and resources. There are times I'm glad I subscribe to SPEWS as well as many other blocklists. If you tried to send me email and it bounced, it was probably due to your ISP being a haven for spammers and other scum.

Also, my website is being scanned by some very dubious looking addresses: interbusiness.it and tiscali.com. I haven't heard much good about them.

It's been a month since the last update, but we've just been busy being new parents. Conor's very well behaved - he only cries when he actually needs something as opposed to all the time like some babies. He's very good at sleeping in his own cot as well. I've taken pictures of Conor every week since he was born. These will also go up on his page at some point. He had his one month inoculations the other day, and he was weighed and measured at the same time. All normal and according to plan, which is good. He's 56cm and 4.95 kg now, at 5 weeks old.

Meanwhile, Roxanne's started school! OK, it's only kindergarten, but she already has to wear a little uniform and has a schoolbag full of books. Luckily for us, the school is next door to our building, so I can drop her down to school in the mornings if I'm leaving for work around nine am. I've taken a picture of her in her school uniform, which I'll put up here at some point.