Today I dug up Ginger again by accident on the compost heap. He didn’t seem that bothered by the camera — or the spade — I expect he’s getting used to it. As you can see, his skin is matte; that’s because he’s very dusty. If you look at the pictures you should start at the bottom and work your way up, because he was climbing a hill and re-submerging himself in sawdust-covered hen droppings when he reached the top. Almost as entertaining as goats, but cheaper, I give you… GINGER! … … Oh, you have to click once on the image below to get it up to a reasonable size…
A Bad Guide 
This b’ain’t the verse, but it is toadish.
http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Philip_Larkin/4820
Coincidentally I was their one-millionth visitor. You must have been 999,99-something, dearie.
Actually, this is the first time I’ve received a comment before I wrote the post. I’d better get to work.
I think you made that up with “their one-millionth visitor”. I checked the site, and found no such figure.
You are very red in tooth and claw when it comes to blog statistics, I have noticed. Recently, you deleted a superflous comment from me and then added one of your own, “so that my comment count doesn’t decrease”, or words to that effect.
Is there some competition that I should know about? What is the goal, what the prize?
“B’ain’t” occurs frequently in the land-folk dialogs of “Jude” and “Tess”, which I just finished. Is that a Wessex thing?
Posting the photos with a reduced size that can be increased at will is an excellent solution to reducing the initial loading time!
All I know is, it said I was their one-millionth visitor and that I would receive a prize. I expect to hear something later today.
I deleted you comment at your own request. As for “What is the goal, what the prize?”, that’s Spiritual Guidance — next door, down the hall.
I hoped that would work for you.
On my end there is the quirk that when I click on Comments while looking at tiny toad images I get this thread to which I am now (I believe) adding, whereas when I click on Comments while looking at big toad images I get Nijma’s one toad-petting contribution instead.
I agree it’s a silly system; they are hidden from view unless you bother to click on the picture. There have been a few other posts that got comments on individual pictures (the last toad one got some). I think I’ll see if I can close picture comments from now on (I’m new to blogging) …
At midnight tonight my internet connection finally turns back into a Lamborghini. I’ve been trundling along on a 64 Kbps pumpkin for the last week and a half. (nota bene: Kbps, not KBps.)
Aha. So it was your machine that’s been slow. I thought it was a function of living in a densely-packed Gebiet like Køln and that you just had to live with it; whereas you’re problem was with the service (non-) provider, as I think you had said.
“This b’ain’t the verse”, GS, is a play on the name of Larkin’s great work “This be the verse”.
I gather that the West Country “I be” versus the standard “I am” is a contrast between Anglo-Saxon and Danish contributions to English.
Yes, well, let me explain: first a bit technically, then more down-to-earthily.
Look at things from the viewpoint of the browser on your computer. One thing that is important to you is the time it takes between the click on a link and completion of the associated action. By “completion of the associated action” I mean things like: page has fully displayed, file download has completed, video has started and isn’t stuttering – whatever it is you’re trying to do. If this time is “too long”, you get annoyed. What factors influence the length of these action times?
Every such action involves data transmission from your computer to another one, and back again. Data travels from your computer to the internet provider, from there through router systems, perhaps through a satellite and firewalls, and so on. Let me call each of these individual media a “transmission segment”. Your computer itself contains transmission segments, for instance the input/output channels through which a processor, running specialized software, shoves your data. The speed at which data can be transmitted across any segment is measured in bits per second. The total transmission time you experience at a client computer is the sum of the transmission times across individual segments.
Any degradation of service (trasmission time) in any segment degrades the total. It’s exactly like an old-timey mail and telegram system. You live out in the sticks, say (no offense), and want to send a telegram. You have to convey it by goat to the nearest post office, which also houses the local party-line telephone connection. The goat arrives, but the post-lady wants to finish her conversation before freeing up the line to telephone your message through to the central system. There, it is entered into a Cray computer which transports it at Warp-5 to its destination. The reply message travels back by the same route.
Some days, the reply takes hardly any time, other days it takes forever. Any number of things that happen in the transmission segments can enhance or degrade the total time. You may not even notice the effect of the Cray computer having broken down one day, if the goats were particularly frisky on their way down the hill and the post-lady didn’t dawdle on the party line.
So, it does make a difference that I live in a conurbation like Köln where everybody and his dog wants to skate on the bradband. The service provider has to control how much transmission capacity it gives to each individual connected user, so that you don’t get a first-come first-hogs situation. T-Mobile, my provider, has a pretty dumb traffic control system. It lets me whiz over the freeway until I’ve clocked up 5 GB, at which point it knifes my tires and they go flat. I have a fast computer, but can’t get up to speed on wheel rims. I’ve suggested a better system to T-Mobile – let’s see if the techies know a brilliant idea when they see one.
Thanks, dearie. I was wondering about that myself.
I wish I knew a little about that earlier Danish. Nowadays “I am” is jeg er, which is followed by du er and han or hun er. It sounds not so different from “I are” and, like “I be”, it’s not inflected.
Now I understand; it’s turning into July tonight, and now I understand the Cinderella metaphor too.
Relying on goats to transport my mail would be completely impractical, they’d just eat it on the way down to the post office. Besides, we’re not totally medieval here; we do have our own horse.
I do hope your suggestion bears fruit.
Do they still make Cray computers?
Nijma’s … toad-petting
I’m very fond of reptiles, and amphibians are a close second.
But I think Kron should increase the number of comments displayed, since the nested ones don’t always make it to my feedreader.
I’d be delighted. Could you give me a hint how I accomplish that? No, wait… I’m displaying all the comments. I think I am.
It’s in the widgets.
While you’re in there you might want to think about how many posts you want to display (although I suppose it’s easy enough to click on the archives, but sometimes I’m looking for someone’s comment I want to respond to after I’ve been busy for a while and can’t find it) (Hat displays ten). And there hasn’t been a real goat post lately either. Not that I’m picky or anything.
appearance>widgets>recent comments (click down arrow)>number of comments to show (at most 15)
Yes, I reduced the posts displayed because it was taking some people hours to get everything to open. But now GS has his July 5GB allowance back I’ll open it up to five again.
I’ll do goats tomorrow.
Thanks.
I don’t suppose you also know how to make the Leave A Comment box wider, do you? Or how to get a preview before you press ‘submit’, like LH has? I can’t find anything. Some people, like Noetica, really find it annoying if their html that they went to all that trouble to write doesn’t print like they were expecting.
I myself am not one to spurn the hand when a finger is offered, but I would be careful here. You can’t be sure that “Teacher” is not a goblin passing through who just happened to be in a helpful mood for a change. Remember what happened to all those greedy people in Grimms Märchen who weren’t satisfied with one wish granted, and kept nagging for more? I need only cite The Old Fisherman and his Wife. The North German Platt version is on my German site, under “The second sex”/”Negative theology”.
Sig is on wordpress, can’t he help?
At my site I gave the tale the heading: “Did she get what she wanted?” That’s because, on my reading, this tale again raises the old question about what God is. The highest of the high? The lowest of the low? Is there a difference, if God is all-encompassing? The story doesn’t explicitly say that the fisher-wife’s final wish was not granted – to be God, so that she could make the sun rise in the morning. It just says that on the following morning, she found herself and her husband back in the hovel in which they had originally lived (Pisspott, chamber-pot). The flounder (enchanted prince) was pretty pissed off towards the end, of course, but then errand-boys are not always best pleased with all they are obliged to do.
Sorry, forgot to sign out when I checked the dashboard of the blog with the same theme as yours. You should be able to look at comments and see the IP to get some idea of who is who. Everyone leaves a footprint.
If you want more bells and whistles you have to pay for a blog. The HTML codes available should be listed on WP forums somewhere–maybe the FAQ or a search would turn it up.
See what I mean? “Nijma” is so close to being an anagram of “a jinn” that it’s scary. You can’t be too careful.
Good thing you didn’t know me during my ghoul phase. That miniskirt and fuzzy purple sweater of yours was nothing compared to my Miskatonic-inspired halloweens.
Here’s a link to the HTML codes that are supported in the WordPress subdomains:
http://support.wordpress.com/code/
Links in comments are really easy. All you do is copy it from the address box and paste it in the comment box. It is automatically recognized as a link.
If you’re trying to encode something and you want to see it first, you might try an html editor (like the one in your wordpress blog dashboard) to make sure you didn’t leave out some vital bracket.
Can’t you manage just a little more paranoia?
Where is any “paranoia”? Are you talking about your own propensity to find things in my posts that aren’t there, and not just in my posts? Perhaps you mean “thinking about things Nijma hasn’t thought of, but that she considers far-fetched and stoopid after thinking about them”. That I could easily understand and accept, but “paranoia” doesn’t make sense.
Sloterdijk defined paranoia satirically as “the truth about the truth”. La Rochefoucauld said something like “suspicion never catches up with the deceptions it sees”.
What is truth?
Sig is on wordpress, can’t he help?
The blind leading the blind.
Dunno exactly. As the song says, you never miss it till it’s gone. Very similar to peace of mind, sex and money. I should have paid more attention.
Sloterdijk defined paranoia satirically as “the truth about the truth”.
That’s great, Grumbly, ha, ha. Thanks. I do wish he was translated well into English, I don’t think I could manage the German.
I just remembered something I’ve been meaning to tell you. A while back, at Hat, we were talking about character sets for XP. I said I found a thing called CharacterMap (I think that was its name) that I downloaded, but that didn’t help. You then commented with astonishment that “CharacterMap” is not something you download, but call up in XP.
But it was indeed a tool that somebody put on the net under the name of “CharacterMap”. I now know about the XP feature with the same name. As I said once, I have a German-language version of XP, so I don’t immediately recognize the English names of XP features.
Since I was Present At The Creation of both (I pestered them just a wee bit, with Hat’s blessing), I still consider myself to be Guardian Angel to both of them.
They both took to it like fish to water, though, and now their blogs are better than mine, so there’s not much for me to do anymore, except for the odd question.
I’m very grateful for all the help you given us, also for input like ‘more goat posts’.
I wish I could take more credit, but it’s a bit like sharing plant divisions over the back fence. You know when someone has the innate ability to grow something, and you simply point out what is there, free for the taking. Blogs are even better than plants; you don’t expect to get vegetables back the same way you get to read a blog.
Too, as Hat used to point out, rightly, it is impossible to be morose and look at the photos of those charming goats at the same time.