Gone, but Not Forgotten

Tetherd Cow is elsewhere, due to Blogger/Google's attempts to make the platform a closed system. You are being directed to the proper Tetherd Cow Ahead.

If nothing happens after a few seconds, and you're still seeing this page, click here.

Back On The Air

But not here.

The Cow has mooooooved... please go here. And all you kind people who have me linked on your blogs will have to point to the new site. If you care to keep referring your readers to me, that is...

Sayonara Blogger. You had your chance.

Off The Air

Folks, I'm really sorry, but Blogger continues to be stuffed. It all seemed to be working this morning and now I've noticed the Comments page isn't loading again and I'm having further formatting problems.

Blogger technical people are being spectacularly unhelpful. There is no information forthcoming about what the problems are, the magnitude of them, or when, or even if they are likely to be fixed. Blogger Status information continues to be completely useless (they haven't even changed the message in two days).

This is immensely frustrating as you can imagine. Because of the bizarre and intermittent nature of the problems, I can't even tell if things are working from one moment to the next.

I'm also extremely busy at the moment and I don't have time to execute my preferred option, which is to migrate The Cow across to some other platform.

As a result I'm going to put the blog on ice for a week or so, so you won't see any posts.

I simply cannot convey the measure of my extreme annoyance at this poor service from Google/Blogger. I can only reiterate what I said before: Google is cruising for a fall. If they can't reliably look after something like Blogger, why would you ever trust them with anything valuable. You have been warned.

Adios for a while.

Peter.

God Creates The Wrong Impression

Confidence

So now, I've lost all my sidebars and some other utility from my xml template for The Cow. Even though Blogger says the filer is fixed. On checking the Status Page, I got the above, very reassuring page load.

[pulls hair out]

Then I tried to upload this post and got:



Yeah, this looks fixed to me.

Bicycle Shop Built For Two

So anyway, yesterday I was in this bike shop near where I live and I heard this conversation:

Bike Shop Assistant (to woman browsing racks and racks of bikes): Can I help you?

Woman: I want to buy a bike.

BSA: So, you want to buy a bike?

Woman: Yeah, I want to buy a bike.

BSA: OK. OK.... A bike?

Woman: Yeah, I was thinking, like, maybe I should get a bike.

BSA: Right. So. A bike.

Woman: Yeah, a bike.

These people vote.

Google Took My Friends

Dear All,

I apologize for the idiotic behaviour of The Cow over these last few days, even though it really has nothing to do with me. Blogger/Blogspot is having some kind of spak attack and all manner of craptacular behaviour has resulted. I checked with the Status Page just now and apparently 'everything is back to normal'.

Well that's a new reading of the word 'normal' anyway, which seems to include the fact that the formatting on The Cow may or may not work, you may or may not be able to make comments, and if you do, they may or may not actually appear.

This is just another incident in a long line of crappy service that has occurred as a result of, or in coincidence with Google's takeover of Blogspot. It seems that Google has hit that inevitable part on the rising curve where companies (or Empires) get too big too fast and everything goes to shit.

I'll probably port everything over to an independant site pretty soon, to my great regret. I am philosophically very much inclined toward this wonderful egalitarian model of free shared information, but Google of all people should be aware how important reliability is to such endeavours. And now they're gunning to get us all to trust them with our personal data.

Well, not me chaps. You just blew it. You were doing good for a while there, and I used to be a big fan. Now you're starting to look just like any other money-hungry capitalistic venture.

If you have been trying to make comments on The Cow and have been thwarted (by lack of any facility for doing so - wha??), once again I apologize. Please don't stop visiting me - you're the only friends I have.

The Da Vinci Coda

A friend of mine told me the other day that secondhand copies of The Da Vinci Code are now so numerous that charities are refusing to take them any more. This led me to wonder to what kinds of uses we might put the ever-increasing tonnage of this dreary piece of literary ephemera as it reaches the end of its far-too-extended lifespan.

Here are some possibilities that occurred to me. Further suggestions welcome:

⊕ Send them back to Dan Brown so that he might comprehend the true magnitude of the hell he has wrought upon the rest of us.

⊕ Build a new World Trade Center out of them, because, should it be bombed by terrorists again, who would care?

⊕ Save them to build levees against rising sea levels (caused by global warming, caused by lack of trees, caused by manufacture of copies of The Da Vinci Code...)

⊕ Send them to prisons and make inmates read them if solitary confinement doesn't work.

⊕ Build churches out of them.*

⊕ Use them to lure termites away from endangered wooden buildings.

⊕ Build a huge Wickerman-style structure out of them, imprison Dan Brown inside and burn it.


OK, over to you guys.



*'Cause that would piss a lot of people off.

Return to Sender

One effective method of stopping junk mail.

Stupid News Speak

Have you noticed that there is appearing in the news media, a kind of nutty and meaningless phraseology that is peculiar to the popular press? Things like '... this senseless act of vandalism was committed in the early hours of the morning...'. Senseless act of vandalism? Like there are acts of vandalism that are sensible...?

Maybe:

Sensible vandals today sprayed graffiti over train carriages but made sure not to endanger themselves or the general public by wearing safety harnesses and protective clothing.

Here in Sydney, we have apparently just experienced 'the ugly side of racism'. This should not be confused with the redeeming side of racism which is, well, er...

Maybe:

The lighter side of racism was demonstrated in Sydney today, when white children beat and shot aboriginal children in an hilarious spoof of the early colonial encounters with the native inhabitants.

And recently the death of a famous media personality, known mostly for his astute business acumen in the field of tax 'minimisation', evoked the headline 'The Many Sides of an Enigma'.

An enigma is not like a box or other geometric figure. It doesn't have sides. Not even an inside and an outside. What is wrong with 'The Many Aspects of an Enigma', or even just simply, 'An Enigmatic Man'. Next it will be 'The Many Colours of Opportunity' or 'The Many Edges of Freedom'...

Where do these people learn this mangled form of expression? Do they ever actually think before they write? How long will it be before all language becomes entirely meaningless?