Kept out of bed by rampant insomnia, I’ve finally finished my long-delayed project of adding description tags to all the blogroll links in the right column. I was more or less shamed into it by John Quiggin’s generous mention of TA on last night’s Sandy McCutcheon Australia Talks Back program about blogging on ABC Radio National. John plugged Troppo Armadillo as a good place for new blog readers to start to find other blogs they might be interested in reading. So I thought I’d better complete the job of making the Troppo blogroll as user friendly as possible. I’d also appreciate any help readers might be able to give in identifying any Australian political blogs I may inadvertently have omitted from the blogroll.
Hover your cursor over each hyperlink and read my fearlessly prejudiced potted summaries (if you have an Internet Explorer browser). Feel free to disagree with my assessment, just as I’ll feel free to deem conclusively that my own opinion is self-evidently correct.
Shucks, Ken, I thought I’d get something far more scornful than “longstanding and thoughtful blogger”!
Small city syndrome – insomnia cuts in early for you. Then again, your marking awaits in the morning..
FINALLY! Thank you Ken, life is now complete.
I should point out that I’ve never lifted weights in my life, unless you count beers as weights.Apart from that everything seems fine.
I vaguely remembered that you had boasted of being able to bench press your own weight a few months ago, when John Quiggin revealed that that was one of his own unrealised ambitions. But I must be thinking of someone else (unless you bench pressed a palette of beer cartons).
“sometimes very funny (when not trying too hard)”
You’ve obviously gained access to the red biro comments written in the margins of my matric essays by each and every one of my teachers.
Sedgwick
I felt a tad presumptuous making that comment, but it’s certainly a reaction I sometimes get to your stuff. Then again, you’d have to suspect that just about every comedy/satirical writer there’s ever been is guilty of the same. If we had access to the cutting room floor of the old Monty Python series (brilliantly inspired though it often was), I bet we’d find some real shockers. In fact a few of them even got to air. If political satire involves looking for fresh angles and pushing the boundaries, you’re bound to stray over them sometimes. Why does analysis of comedy always sound so turgidly pretentious, I wonder? Maybe because it is. Anyway, I loved your Daylesford post, and the Gerald Henderson send-up was a classic.
Thanks, pretty much on the ball. I keep telling myself “less is more”, “kill your babies”. I keep ignoring myself. It’s up there somewhere with those people from the generation that went through the depression who, even though full, still can’t leave a scrap of food on a plate.
Yeah, that wasn’t me. It might have been ChrisV, but I don’t remember at all so it could have been someone completely different. If I did type that, I was lying.
Yobbo, considering how much work Ken put into the tags, I don’t think that it is too much to ecpect you to go out and lift some weights and make the tag true.
Just want to say (for what is worth) that Armadillo was my first ever blog I visited and the first time where I contributed a comment.
And yes, it was also where I found others through the links.
Tim: I promise to start lifting weights if you take up smoking and buy a gun. Fair’s fair.
Ken;
While I don’t know fig about admin law, I can tell you that the popup descriptions work Just Fine in Mozilla Firefox. I’m not sure what browser you’re using, but if it’s IE you may like to consider switching.
Jacques,
I’m hoping you’ll know a lot more about admin law by next week. When are coming in to go through your paper? As for the popup descriptions, I’m pleased to hear they work in Mozilla. But I won’t be changing from IE. I don’t have any major problems with Bill Gates or Microsoft. Good luck to them, I reckon, as long as they don’t engage in illegal anti-competitive activity. IE is a good product that does everything I want, so why should I change to Mozilla?
James is 30-ish, Sydney-based, and just completing a post-graduate librarianship qualification. He also runs the movie review show on a Sydney community radio station, and his blog reflects his eclectic interests. It’s deliberately more about movies, music and the bizarre, and only occasionally descends to mainstream political discussion. That’s why it’s one of my favourites
Flatterer. :)
Actually, I should just mention I am, in fact, 29-ish, though I will, alas, be 30 soon enough. Still, better to be thought one year older than my actual age than ten years older… at a message board I used to frequent, I somehow gave many of the others users the impression I was in my late 30s, and they were greatly surprised to find I wasn’t. Actually, I must still give that impression, cos I told Craig G. at the blogger bash last November it would be my 29th birthday the following weekend and he was surprised cos he’d also pegged me as being in my late 30s. No idea why…
Ken: Tabbed browsing. Plus an indispensible feature for bloggers: “View selection source” – lets you copy a passage and have the links and formatting copy as well.
Tim,
Sounds interesting. I’ve got Mozilla 1.4 on this PC but never bothered to use it because it didn’t seem to offer any clear advantages over IE for my purposes. I tend to be a creature of habit (which sometimes does me almost unimaginable damage, like tonight for instance). I stuck with Netscape for a long time after it started to fall behind IE. Mozilla 1.4 doesn’t seem to have the “View selection source” feature you mentioned. I see they’re now up to Mozilla 1.7, however. Does that have these features? I also see there appears to be a preview version of their “next generation” browser called Firefox 0.9.1 / 0.9.2. Which would you recommend I use?
BTW Mozilla 1.4 only displays the first line of text in my blogroll tags, which is pretty useless. Presumably more recent versions have fixed that problem, otherwise you and Jacques wouldn’t have been able to read them.
I use Firefox – poofs are innovators in marketing demographic terms. It’s vastly superior to IE though I fear it was designed by someone who imagines that Windows XP is the last word in chic.
More importantly, how is Paul Watson “militantly gay?” I know he confessed – shamelessly – to having worn yellow PVC hotpants in 1996, but bad taste knows no cultural boundaries.
Geoff,
I still remember that blurred photo of you in very tacky black leather, so I can’t easily see you as a style guru. Paul has posted various items that merit the label “militant” IMO, although I have no intention of delving into history to find them.
I’ll probably give Firefox a go, but I’ll wait and see what Tim L. has to say. Sometimes “beta” software is really buggy.
Well, I just installed and tried using Mozilla Firefox. It still doesn’t display any more than the first line of the blogroll tags, and it also didn’t import my user details in any blog comment facilities, despite my choosing the “import cookies, bookmarks etc” option from Internet Explorer. That’s a major drawback, because it means I’ll have to manually input my details in every blog comment box I want to participate in. The whole thing seems like a pointless nuisance to me, but I remain open to persuasion (albeit with renewed reservations). If these guys expect to compete successfully with Microsoft (except with people whose self-concept requires differentiation) they’re going to have to do better.
To make firefox display all of the tooltips on your blogroll you have to install the Popup ALT Attributes extension. After installing you have to restart firefox and go to Tools : Extensions and set the Option to display long tooltips in multiline. Simple :-)
How to import your cookies from IE to Firefox.
Um, bad time I know, but there’s a shiny new blog out there that I’m peddling wherever I can. Here looks like as good a spot as any to spruik.
(Actually, I seem to be locked out of Blogger at the moment. Maybe there’s a reason Blogger generates so much antipathy.)
No problems Al. I meant it about resilient (suffering bravely). I’ve added you to the blogroll.
Thanks, Ken. Now if only I could onto my own blog, I’d be having a grand night indeed.
hi ken,
thanks for the lovely description. incidentally i don’t bear you any grudges at all. i was only joking with my recent comment about you losing my readership. sigh. sometimes i don’t think anyone gets my sense of humour.
and sympathies re your breakup. does this mean you’ll reconsider the beard?
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s time for the rest of the ploggers Down Under. There is much virtual pleasure in Ken’s toil.
Speaking as a former Central European soldier, I know too well that stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But linking imperfect dustish stories while we are passing (migrating) through one of the most disorienting periods in history of the human ashes is pure ecstasy…
Some have worried that content people tend to be apathetic and easily manipulated by political leaders — contented cows, so to speak. In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World, the working classes are kept in docile submission by a diet of drugs that render them universally happy. In the real world, however, there is little evidence that contentment creates complacent citizens; in fact, studies show that happy people are more likely than alienated people to get cuturally and politically involved, not less!
Oh right! If it weren’t for those pesky bloggers… how dare they to disturb the universe;+)
Ken;
I didn’t realise I was expected to come in to discuss my assignment. I wouldn’t mind doing so in wake of the wreackage that was my academic performance this semester.
If you’re playing with firefox, there are a few things to try. The main one is to click on links with the middle button on your mouse – it may be a wheel which can be pressed. Notice how tabs popup and load in the background. Once you get used to this way of browsing, everything else seems second-best.
Firefox also enables popup blocking by default, and thus far there are no known firefox-only malware exploits (vs hundreds for IE).
I used to prefer IE to netscape also, but since firefox came out I haven’t looked back.
Jacques,
I was thinking more of the exam than the essay. You’re not “expected” to come and discuss it, but the facility is available, and it seems like a good idea for someone who’s got a supplementary exam to find out where they went wrong before sitting it. Ready staff availability for those sorts of consultations is one of the advantages of being at a small university. In your case I reckon you CAN still pass Admin Law with a bit of effort before the sup.
Don’t listen to the Firefox shills. It’s vastly overrated. The same people trying to talk you into using Firefox are the ones that think Macs are better than PCs and think Bill Gates is the devil.
Commies!
(Opera is the best browser. Firefox is collecting your data and selling it to the WWP).
I do prefer Firefox, and Macs, but I don’t really have religion pro or anti Bill Gates.
Because I like playing games, I use windows. Because I like getting the odd bit of serious programming done now and then, I also run linux. I’m broke, but if I weren’t, I’d probably get a Mac for the good feelings they give me.
Re: supp. exams, Ken, please refer to your email.
Ken, you are spot on in your description of John Ray, except for one thing.
I knew him in Sydney about 30 years ago. As far as I can remember, he’s a sociologist, or was then. But as bonkers as they come. No amount of contrary facts could ever shift him.
Jacques
I haven’t received an email from you in my CDU inbox. If you’ve attempted to send it to my old personal email address (kparish@bigpond.net.au), it’s now inoperative because it got so full of spam that it became totally unuseable (which is why I’m happily typing it here). I suggest you email me at the CDU address or phone me on Friday morning. I’ll be in my office most of the day (tied up with student interviews, and there are still a couple of spaces).
Don, in my experience, when sociologists are nuts, they are really nuts. I speak as a sociologist!