I'm Back

So I'm back in Brisbane. At the moment I'm holed up at my uncle's place, taking advantage of the free internet and cheap board. I've not gone out yet, as I'm hoarding my meager reserves of money ($150 in credit on my credit card and $30 in cash I've borrowed from my uncle).

I got in contact with Centrelink today to get on the dole. I have also been applying for quite a lot of jobs. In fact, I started before I left England, and had a phone interview today for a job with Flight Centre. It was rather brief, and they will contact me in a few days to let me know if I'm to go onto a real interview or not. I have to go into some pseudo-centrelink thing tomorrow and call them up again because their computer was broken today. I'll go into the city afterward and drop of some resumes at different places.

While in the city I'll try and pick up a new sim card for a phone I've come into possession of. I may also see if my library card still works.

I know I still haven't put all my travel stuff up yet, partly because I haven't written it yet, but it is on my list of things to do. I will however postdate stuff so that it turns up as though it were posted before this post. I hope that won't cause to many problems for those few regular readers.

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Writing time: 15 minutes
Time since last post: who knows?
Current media: Doug Anthony All Stars - The Unlimited Uncollected Sterling Deluxe Edition

An unexamined blog is not worth blogging

This message is brought to you by Google Analytics.

to the person from Sydney who keeps looking for this blog on Google, it's "Phlebas Considered" not "Phelbas Considered". I'd think after 33 visits you might want to consider bookmarking this site.

On a similar note, all of you looking for help on Project Euler's Problem No 202, you won't find it here. I bitched about how insanely tough it was once.

A list of other interesting search terms that have brought people here include crazy shit in Japan, prime meridian mecca, size of a fridge, "grand romantic gestures", burqa bdsm, bunny javascript, fake kgb badges, Iranian cunt, lesbians in okinawa, self righteousness #2 killer in world, what does it mean steady progress (I think a parent may have been wondering what a monthly report meant)

Finally, since some people are apparently wondering, for my purposes, Phlebas is pronounced "flee-bas".

Prolonged Quietude

So it's been quite a while since I've put anything on my blog. Just over a month in fact, which is the longest time between posts since I started the thing. This is I think a combination of a lot of mundane stuff happening and the big things going through my head have been too big and personal. But most of those have settled down, and the near future is definitely going to be blogworthy, so it's well time I got back in the habit of writing.

I'm going to put some stuff up over the next few days (yay for automated posting), covering stuff in some sort of order (mainly how close to the top of my mind things are).

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Writing time: 15 minutes
Time since last post: 1 month 3 days
Current media: The Usual Suspects

Profile Update

I have just updated my profile on the right since I noticed part of it is no longer accurate. Where it once read "regularly shaved" it now reads "irregularly shaved". This is actually a return to the previous version. I changed it to regularly shaved while I was in Japan because while I was working in Japan I would usually shave every day that I worked. Here, I usually only shave once or twice a week. This is mainly because the dress code here is more lax than the dress code in Japan. I wear almost the same clothes as I did in Japan, with the exception that I don't wear a tie here (One day I did wear a tie because they were taking photos for a brochure and I felt like I'd missed wearing it, which is weird because I would usually take it off as soon as I left work in Japan, but that also did change with time). In black trousers and a long sleeve collared shirt, I'm usually the most formally dressed guy. Others range from collared shirts to t-shirts, with the dress code requiring a collar. As in Japan, the women get kind of a free ride, with pretty much anything that looks reasonably respectable passing muster.

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Writing time: 12 minutes
Time since last post: 75 minutes
Current media: Same as last post

A New Address

Look up at the URL for this blog. You might notice it's different. For a start, there's no blogspot.com. Now it's http://blog.phlebasconsidered.net. I've been pondering getting my own domain for a while (back in the day I considered getting theboom.org, but that never happened) and finally did so. This is mostly because I've been messing around with mysql and php again and wanted to be able to put the stuff I've done online so that people can make what they will of them.

So far there isn't much at the site. There's a web interface to a history database I'm building. The data is currently very incomplete, but I'm working on that. And I may resurrect the forum system I started to build, but that's something I'd do more for the sake of doing than the sake of getting anyone to use it.

Anyway, just remember that there's a new address, but don't worry because the old blogspot one will still work (I may make a move to wordpress eventually mainly because I'd like to get rid of the bar at the top of the blog, but that won't happen for a while. Plus I like blogger).

And if anyone really, really, really wants an @phlebasconsidered.net email address, I might be able to sort something out (but I might make you jump through some hoops for my own amusement).

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Writing time: 10 minutes
Time since last post: 1 day
Current media: None

We are not dead yet

As has been pointed out in private communications, I have been somewhat silent on this blog as of late. This is mainly due to the fact that the 18th of November was the last day that I resided in an abode that had an internet connection, and before then I was somewhat busy with plans for moving country and visiting family and what not.

There are many matters that have arisen in the intervening days that I wish to pontificate upon through this medium, and shall do so once I have an internet connection in my new somewhat small home (This should be the 4th of December). Until then I shall be making a written record of some of the things I shall end up posting, and when I do post I shall probably write up one or two a day so as not to create a sudden surge of content.

Until then, chilax.

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Writing time: 6 minutes
Time since last post: 16 days
Current media: the noises of a Korean internet cafe

This is Sparta

Well, not really, but since this is post 301, the title seemed somewhat suitably topical. Anyway, in commemoration of a big round number in a base ten counting system (300 in binary is 100101100, octal 454, hexadecimal 12C, Japanese 三百 (still a round number, but a bit different)) I'm going to get a bit meta on you all.

It has taken a mere 35 months to reach the 300 post mark. The rate of posting has generally been going up. My first month had a mere three entries, while the lowest count this year for a month is nine.


The rate of posting has tended to oscillate up and down. Not surprisingly, there was a jump in the rate of posting when I moved to Japan, although the peak rate has not been sustained. Without doing any actual analysis, I'd say that there are 5 more posts on average in Japan. Most of the posts are to do with everyday life, and this year there have been less on politics and news (a lot of those were written while unemployed, and I had more time to pontificate on things).

The use of tags has varied, and I haven't really kept to the intention of only having a half dozen or so in the displayed list, mainly because to do that would require some simple but time consuming changes to the template, and also I want to keep some of the lower number tags on the list. A look at the rate of use of various tags would also entail more work than I'm willing to do, so won't be appearing.

Readership is broader than my original intentions, but that is not unwelcome, as my intention changed when I moved to Japan, so that now I want readers. Again in something that is not surprising, most readers are from Australia (35.38%). Japan is second (15.54%), America third (14.93%), and Thailand a strong fourth (11.04%, good job Sis) (these and other percentages are based on the last 500 visitors). On a tech side 58.2% of readers use a variant of Firefox or Mozilla, while 40.2% use Internet Explorer. Not that it really matters, since Blogger shows up pretty much the same for users of both (although if you start using more fancy templates the differences between the two become troublesome. Thank you Microsoft for trying to alter the standards).

Since I've just reached a big round number, another depressing introspective post is upcoming (I've written it a book, but I'm still not sure how much I want to put up online). Plus there is some other writing I'm pondering that may or may not show up here (again, likely to be a bit depressing (for me at least)). Lately in general I've been a bit depressive, mainly issues that have been around for a few years, and have sort of bubbled back up to the surface in recent months, but that's for another post.

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Writing time: 47 minutes
Time since last post: about an hour
Current media: Still Firefly (fourth and last episode for the night)

Hit Counting

I've always been kind of curious how many people actually visit my blog, while at the same time not wanting to know exact details. Last week I was doing some work for someone else's site, and I got a bit more interested in knowing how many people do visit, especially as I'm now doing this for others to read instead of for me to write. Anyway, to make a long story short, I've added a hit counter to the sidebar of my blog. It's down below the archives, links, and labels. It was the first one I found that didn't require an ad for the people providing the service. In fact, I'm kind of surprised that blogger doesn't provide the ability to do this themselves, as it's the only thing I've really wanted to do with the blog I haven't been able to without resorting to another company.

Anyway, just be warned, I'm watching you (in the sense that I now know if someone (anyone) has had a look at my blog since the last time I checked).

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Writing time: 6 minutes
Time since last post: 26 minutes
Current media: iTunes Shuffle (Riverdance - Riverdance)

Timing Issues

Looking over the last few posts I've noticed a seeming discrepancy in some of the timing notes I include at the end of each post. This is because Blogger uses the time I start writing as the time of the post, not when I hit the publish button, and I can't be bothered changing it.

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Writing time: 3 minutes
Time since last post: 5 minutes
Current media: You already know

Change in counting

Looking at the last two posts I noticed I used a different method of counting the days to go. Hence the lack of consistency in the title posts.

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Writing time: 1 minutes
Time since last post: 5 minutes

Some notes on labels

With the whole consolidation of labels and other issues relating therein The following is a description of what most labels actually mean

Stuff: Things happening in my life. What I'm doing.
Thoughts: What I think about things.
Politics: Things involving governments at all levels
Work: Things regarding employment, and the search of
News: About things in the news. Usually goes with thoughts.
Death: Death
Rant: like thoughts, but a bit more angry
Romance: Usually introspection on the lack of romance in my life
Tech: Technology related things, computer games, podcasts, hardware, etc
Family: Things involving family
Rambling: like thoughts, put with less purpose and direction
Fiction: Fictional writing
Government: musing on the nature of government



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Writing time: 15 minutes
Time since last post: 0 days
Current media: Six Feet Under - Season 2

Blogger Labels

Yesterday I noticed that next to the dashboard on Blogger there was an option to convert my blog over to the Blogger 2.0 beta. Naturally, I couldn't resist. The chance to have a whole bunch of new features to play with and bits to toy around with is always going to get my attention.

One thing that got my interest was labels. A way to categorise posts. So I went through and added labels to a bunch of posts. These were mostly based on the technorati tags I had used on the entries. At the end of this first stage of labeling things, I wasn't entirely happy. For a start there were a bunch of labels that were only used once, the list looked really long, some of the labels were really just duplicates or subsets of others. So initially I tried to look to see if there were some setting I could set so that it would only show labels with a few posts. But such a setting doesn't exist. So I then looked at the html version of the template with the widgets expanded. It was a bit odd, but with some help files it's reasonably clear. So I tried putting a condition in that it would only display the labels with a count of more than 2. I try that and the labels disappear. A bit more playing around I find out that equals and not equals work, but greater than won't and a less than sign is just not on. So I just put in a few nested conditions with a few not equals going up to the limit I wanted, and now the only labels showing are those with at least two posts. In hindsight I don't really need the condition saying only show the labels with a non-zero count.

Anyway, this is mainly so that if someone else is trying the same thing they find it a bit easier than I did.

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Writing time: 30 minutes
Time since last post: 1 day
Current media: Six Feet Under - Season 2

end non-chronological posting

Current posting resumes.

A few chronological notes

For the past 3 weeks I'v been visiting my sister in Thailand, and generally having a look see about the country. Unfortunately, one consequence of this is limited internet access, and no access to my own computer. As such, not much has been added to this blog. The entries following (above) this one were written by hand (novel concept) and will now be typed up for entry. More on the trip overall after I type these up.