June 30, 2004
OLDER WOMEN
June 27, 2004
THINKING ABOUT PARENTS,
TIME AND MORTALITY
June 20, 2004
DIGITAL SNAPS FROM THE PAST WEEK: LONDON & BRIGHTON
June 15, 2004
LIGHT BLOGGING AND SLOW LOADING
My sister is visiting from Paris this week so we'll be out and about, hither and thither, in and out. So the blogging must take a back seat. Down Blog, down.
Btw, is anyone else finding that my blog loads very very slooowly? My friend Cass tells me that I'm the slowest load of all the many blogs he visits. Are you all being too polite to tell me? It loads fast for me on IE 5 and also on Opera, and I have broadband. So I have no way of knowing what other people see or don't see. Please speak up if you have problems. Any problems.
June 13, 2004
ARE YOU SEARCHING
FOR NIGRITUDE ULTRAMARINE?
(July 7: the contest is over. I didn't win the i-pod or flat-screen monitor).
Oh, and another
thing: I don't want to boast but...who do you think is Number
One out of 2,240,000 in a Google search for
Interviews with God ? Yesss! It is moi!
June 9, 2004
AUGUSTINE INTERVIEWS GOD: PART SEVEN
June 2, 2004
ARE WE BEING STALKED?
Of course we are.
The internet is stalkers' paradise and every bit of information,
from the size of our member to the size of our bank balance
is being avidly collected by someone somewhere for who knows
what sinister or commercial or trivial or crazy purpose.
I'm fully aware of this so I shouldn't have been gob-smacked when, innocently
clicking on a link* found
via Google (searching for "blocked referrer") I was instantly confronted
with a page headed: COLLECTED DATA ABOUT YOU,
followed by, yes, data about me. Or rather about my website: my IP number,
location, host, browser, my last 20 visitors on June 01 (with their IP and
hosts), a list of countries who have visited me and the number of my visitors
from April 20, 2003 to June 01, 2004 (35332). Actually that figure is wrong,
my own stats show 119,572. But never mind the inaccuracy, feel the spying!
*It wasn't the site's home page that opened when
I first clicked on it but their page with information about my site.
Who gave them the right to snoop my site, as well as - and this is more disturbing
- posting detailed instructions telling everyone how they too can break into
any website?
Of course I'm interested to see my stats but do I want the whole world's
hackers and nutters to have the keys to my cyber home? No I do not and I
left a message to that effect, asking the site's owner to explain what he's
up to. It's a French website, his name is Dan and I'll report back later
when/if I get an answer. Meanwhile, en garde!
UPDATE ON THE ABOVE
I must now apologise to Dan, webmaster
of the above
site, for presuming that his methods were in any
way dishonourable. He has written to me courteously and
in great detail, explaining technical points about the
way his site works. We have exchanged messages in our
native language (French) but my techie knowledge is limited
and I still find some aspects of this data-gathering
disturbing. Judge for yourselves by visiting his site.
For the sake of fairness, here is a short extract from
one of the letters I received from Dan today:
"My site is written in PHP, that's the page where you should have landed. That means that each time someone connects to the site, the html page is generated and is UNIQUE. It's normal that you get the same information when you connect as you are unique, except for your IP which is dynamically allocated, I suppose, and your browser which you can change if you want. Each time you load or reload a page, it is completely new and somene else, being somewhere else will get a different page."
Changing the subject entirely, the next God interview is nearly ready to go to press, Another day or two should do it.