And yet again I was accused of being a know-it-all. It's one specific person, mind you. It's a man who has made it very clear that he doesn't really like women very much, and he apparently dislikes opinionated women who - ohmyghod - know anything even less.

Anyway, he once again directly called me a know-it-all.

I just told him that if he genuinely thinks that I believe I know it all, he's sorely mistaken, as there are far more things in the world about which I know nothing than there are things about which I do know.

It just really makes me wonder WTF. I mean, yeah, I DO know a hell of a lot about computers and the net, no doubt I know a great deal more than he does (which is probably why he's so threatened by me, I mean, a woman who knows about technical things, how dangerous is that?!). And I do know a fair bit about jewellery. And perfume. (Pretty threatening, I know, I mean, wow, a woman who knows about perfume and jewellery, that's pretty scary, too, right?) And when I do know about something, well, yeah, I do speak as if - wait for it - I know what I'm talking about. Because I do know what I'm talking about.

This, of course, makes me a know-it-all.

I just have to pity this man. I've seen him say really obnoxious things about battered women, about women in general, he's accused women of being "anti-male" (no, we're not anti-male, we're anti-YOU), all sorts of crap. I can easily work out why a woman who has opinions and knowledge scares the pants off him, the feeble old fart.

(Andrew, a cellist, hates Pachelbel's Canon in D. He found this totally hilarious. I did, too.)

It's summer solstice! Well, it is in the Southern Hemisphere. And it's quite hot here in Melbourne, too. I'm sitting here sweating and wearing a skirt and the top of my "tankini" swimsuit. Phew.

To those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, happy solstice to you, too, though, of course, you've got the winter one...

Anyway, happy solstice to one and all, whether sweating or freezing!

Oo, loneliness will blind you
In between the wrong and the right
Oo, coming right behind you
Swear Im gonna find you
One of these nights

One of these nights
In between the dark and the light
Coming right behind you
Swear Im gonna find you
Get ya baby one of these nights

(Title track of "One of These Nights", which is, in my opinion and also the opinion of Glenn Frey, the best Eagles album. And if you don't know who Glenn Frey is, well, Google him and find out.)

We've got tickets to see Pirates of Penzance. Mind you, the performance isn't until May (right around my birthday). But still, we've got tickets, and they're really good seats. Andrew and I will go out and have a nice meal together without the kids (woot!) and then see the show. First time we will have been to a proper show in years... Last one we saw was Les Miserables, I think... or maybe it was 42nd Street (we saw both, but I can't remember now which we saw last), and it was before Miranda was born (note: she's turning five in a couple of weeks!).

Also, Weird Al is apparently going to be performing in March, but the ticket information isn't available yet, dangit. If there are good prices and a decent show time/date, we might very well go. Because Andrew and I are both white and nerdy, that's why...

(Note: That's Birmingham, England, not the one in Alabama or anywhere else. And it's not actually a very good choir, but the concept is amusing.)

Christmas music in shops is "torture", the "forgotten pollutant" which shop workers must be able to silence for the sake of their sanity, according to activists, trade unions and a peer. The government is being asked to investigate the problem.

I keep up with the e-commerce scene, particularly in Australia, but also in the United States and elsewhere. Naturally, this means I keep up somewhat with the goings on of eBay, although I don't sell on eBay at all any more.

I must say, it appears they're more or less imploding. Their house of cards is about to fall down entirely. They're making some really stupid decisions, or they're making long-overdue decisions and implementing them in the stupidest and most knee-jerk way possible. They're alienating and pissing off EVEN MORE of their sellers. Wow, who would have thought they could manage that? (Just wait until the next fee increase which will include and even lower exposure for your goods, advertising that takes visitors off the site, and I'm not actually making that up, as there are already screen shots of the offsite advertising on eBay.)

Anyway, I just have to tell you I feel like a rat. A very smart rat. A rat who saw the ship was sinking and cleverly leapt to safety and is now developing her own e-commerce site totally apart from any other venue.

Sometimes, it's good to be a clever rat.

Many, many thanks to the lovely soul who turned me on to Pandora.

What's that, you say? Well:

Can you help me discover more music that I'll like?

Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.

We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.

It's all streamed content, extremely cool. I've found a couple new things that I like, and I'm enjoying a lot of older stuff I haven't heard in a long time. My "personal radio station" is named "Bonni Grew Up in the 70s", though I've got a few good selections from a bit newer than that (Barenaked Ladies, for example).

Right now, though, I'm listening to Boston. Mmmmmm. Boston.... (because I grew up in the 70s)

Last week at the supermarket, while shopping for my weekly supply of three dozen eggs and 12 pounds of mutton, I spotted a rack near the checkout lane containing several romance paperbacks. Normally, such trash wouldn't get a second glance from my coal black eyes, but the sight of one book practically made my chiseled jaw drop. There, on the cover of Dark Passions was yours truly, Duncan Larksthrush, in the flesh.
 
At first I thought it must have been a coincidence. There must be thousands of men with huge, glistening pectorals and shoulder-length golden hair whose steadfast gaze betrays immeasurable fathoms of passion.
 
But there can be no doubt it was me. [...]
 
Can't a brawny, brooding man ride his stallion slowly through the fresh-smelling air of a misty forest at dawn and think ruefully back to his tender childhood that seems to him now to exist in another world entirely—without having to constantly look over his perfectly sculpted shoulders?

The sky is the most unnatural colour. The light is this weird yellow colour, and the sky is just strangely grey-yellow.

This is on account of the tremendous amount of smoke from the major (and I do mean MAJOR) bush fires that are to the east of us. We're not in any danger where we are, and we're not very near the fires, but on Saturday the smoke was so severe that visibility was reduced to a rather startling level (you couldn't see familiar landscapes or even more than a couple of blocks, it was very odd and spooky). Monday was very, very windy and the smoke cleared, but today it's back, and the light is this weird yellowy colour.

Very disturbing. And moreso because I know that people are fearing for their property, their livestock, maybe their very lives. I'm thankful that all I have to cope with is the smoke.

[EDIT] I've now been out and back. The funny yellowish colour is not so noticible, but the smoke out there is very thick, and you can actually smell the burning wood. Normally I like the smell of a woodfire, but this is not good, considering that the wood that's burning is buildings and forest....

This is an actual quote from a message board. No editing at all:

Like many others I thought that selling on the internet would be simply a matter of listing the items for sale, sitting back & waiting for the bids to come rolling in.

I'm not even going to say anything snarky. The quote pretty much says it all, though, don't you think?

Well, Andrew managed to fix the broken server, as far as I can tell. That's a relief. So the Alicorna site is restored. I'm still not sure what I want to do with it, though. I mean, it was an actual business site, and since I'm not really doing that business any more (just got burned out; I still occasionally will do web design for selected people), it seems a bit... odd.

I'll have a think about it and work out what I want to do and how I want to do it. Maybe I'll just leave it alone...

Odd thing I found is that the Alicorna site actually has lower Google PageRank than the Uncommon Touch site. The reason that's odd is because I strongly suspect that the Alicorna site is far better interlinked and it's been on the net since 1998; the Uncommon Touch site has only been online less than a year. (Yes, I'm currently learning Search Engine Optimsation basics; otherwise I never would have noticed).

Well. The server is sort of fixed. I mean, the thing that was broken is fixed, but now I've found some other stuff that's broken. I got some error messages that MAY give Andrew a clue as to how to fix it, but at the moment I'm kinda past caring...

The site that's giving me the headache (at the moment, anyway) is the Alicorna site. Now, I haven't done any web development on a serious basis for some time. I still have a lot of good links and a few downloads and freebies, and some helpful stuff there, but honestly, the site is mostly maintained because... well, just because. It's not like I make any money on or from that site...

Right at the moment I'm so annoyed and ticked off that I'm considering just shutting the site down and redirecting the URL to something else.

Whether I will actually do this, I don't know. I won't do it in the middle of the night in a pissed off state of frustration, certainly (which is precisely the state I'm currently in), but I'm just so damned annoyed.

The big problem, you see, is that about a year ago Andrew put the entire web structure into a chroot jail. For the non-geeky, that means that even if someone manages to get into our server via some random web page, they will NOT be able to get into the rest of the server and actually do much. Worst they could do is trash the web partition or run various scripts that would bootstrap them elsewhere. They can't touch DNS or sendmail or any of the really useful things that the kind of slime who break into your server really want access to.

But because of this little "capsule", a lot of stuff doesn't run properly, or it only runs if you muck it around quite a lot or... bah. It's all a big stupid tiresome mess and I just feel like deleting the lot of it. It's not like there aren't plenty of web design type sites out there, y'know? The world won't miss my paltry offering of a few web templates, a bunch of links, and a handful of freebies.

Maybe I should turn it into one of those "mostly advertising" sites with loads of affiliate links and such.... *sigh* Unfortunately, I have a bit of integrity... While I don't have a problem with some monetization of websites, I just can't do that, especially to a domain I've had and loved for so long....

Oh, well. I'll think about it tomorrow.

Andrew broke all the websites I have (and a couple other peoples') that use MySQL. I don't know how he did it. Neither does he. He broke them and then mucked around for a couple hours trying to figure it out, whinging the whole time. He finally went to bed, which is good, because I got pretty sick of listening to him complain.

So if by some change you go to one of my many sites that uses MySQL and it's not there, well, this is why. Andrew broke them.

When you're an over-the-counter stock not traded on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, there's a presumption among many that your business isn't on the up and up.
 
That perception is doubly difficult to overcome when you're one of the dozens of penny stocks being touted in spam messages that regularly get blasted across the globe.