The Musings of Chris Samuel

Today has been a day of sadness and joy.

This morning we took my fathers ashes to Freshwater West and scattered them overlooking his favourite bay in a brief respite from the downpours across Wales today.

This is tempered by the memories of my father, both here and elsewhere in Pembrokeshire.

Hywl fawr Dad!

Mum put the following acknowledgement in the local paper to thank everyone who was involved both with my fathers last few years and for the funeral.

SAMUEL Robert – Pat and family would like to thank all the carers, past and present, especially Sue Lewis and Carole Lovell from Homecare, the Fairwater District Nurses, the Doctors and Staff of Fairwater Health Centre, especially Dr Shon Phillips, the Doctors and Nurses of Ward East 2 at Llandough Hospital for their care of Bob, and help to Pat. Thanks also to Andrew Forse from J Pidgeon & Son, for his courtesy, and the Rev Martin Colton for the lovely service.

On Monday my father passed away at the age of 82.

SAMUEL Robert Alan Peacefully on Feb 25, 2008 at Llandough Hospital, beloved husband of Pat, loving father of Christopher and Alan, father-in-law of Donna and Jan, loving brother of Jean and her husband Tony, brother-in-law of Mike and Sue, uncle to Michael, Katherine and Richard. Resting at J Pidgeon & Son, Victoria Park, Cardiff until the funeral on Monday, March 3, service at 11.15am in the Briwnant Chapel at Thornhill Crematorium. Family flowers only, donations in lieu may be sent to Cancer Research (Wales), Velindre Hospital, Whitchurch, Cardiff.

You inspired a love of nature & history that will always be with me.

Love you, Dad.

This is very cool, collect the green discs with your white disk, touch blue ones to bank them and avoid the red ones or it’s game over.

My highest score to date is 2216 8599 11847, if you beat it leave a comment..

Thanks Alec!

Classic..

Minesweeper The Movie – Now that it’s a movie, you can use it to procrastinate for a full 90 minutes.

Thanks Alec..

Donna was recently interviewed about her life with autism by the Salvation Army magazine WarCry. When Donna received her complimentary copy of the magazine we were surprised to find that we both turned up on the front cover!

Picking up on something that Alec wrote about flooding and now being not a good time to be in insurance, I always think that the Monster Raving Loony Party had the right idea in their 2001 UK election manifesto.

Under a Loony government any prospective home purchaser be issued with a full description of such dictionary terms as ‘floodplain’, ‘coastal erosion’ and ‘exposed headland’. This will save time explaining why they have no house anymore after nature takes charge of the environment. In addition to this policy, building on floodplains in future will be restricted to large houseboats with recoiling tethers like dog leads. These houses will be able to float up with the floodwater and land safely again in the same place when the water subsides.

Dear Lazyweb,

I was commenting on a blog by Alec about social media and conferences and looking at the LCA 2007 programme for the first time (as I couldn’t go this year) and spotted this on the research track..

Panel Session by Chris Samuel & Gernot Heiser

Now given that this Chris Samuel couldn’t go to LCA does anyone know who that was ?

“Perl, in a Nutshell” sung by Pudge, thanks for the pointer Alec!

I read on PLOA that Michael Carden briefly tried to open his blog for comments, only to find:

The WordPress UI balked at deleting 194,000 (okay, I ignored it for a while) comment spams. I had to dig in as admin and run a fun sql query on the database to delete all 47 meg of them.

I guess I’ve got a couple of suggestions for Michael to make his life a little easier should he decide to try again.

1. Akismet has an option to “Automatically discard spam comments older than a month“, that might help (though it’d be nice to be able to adjust the time).
2. Run, do not walk, to Rich Boakes most excellent Worst Offenders plugin. This will both group comments for deletion based on various criteria but also (if you have permission) add Apache “Deny From” rules for the offending IP addresses. It’s also worth bumping the number of IP addresses it can ban up, Donna’s blog is up to over 8,000 at the moment!
3. There are also tools like Bad Behaviour to try and catch bots before they get to you and if you are a member of Project Honeypot then there is the http:BL WordPress Plugin to check and block IP’s listed as baddies there.

Anyway, I hope that helps some people out.