Aquarionics

Apparently the owners of this house had been seeing images and hearing
voices for quite a while.
They did some research and found that a lady once lived in the house who
lost her husband during the civil war. Legend says that she used to sit at
the table and look across the fields in anticipation of her loved one
returning home. He never came back.

They say she still waits. They caught this photo (using digital imaging and
sound) of what they claim to be her.

This one is wild and a little spooky once you find the ghost in the picture.
It took me about 20 seconds to find it, but when you do, it just stands out
like one of those optical illusions.

To save you some time, concentrate around the table and sort of towards the
window. Also, if you have volume, turn it as loud as possible and you can
hear some faint murmurings which they say is the ghost talking.

The Room

Via Andrew Cardwell

Happy Halloween, world. As well as this temporary new theme, there was supposed to be a new story up today, but last night I spent three hours trying to fix our server, so it didn’t happen. Gah

Sarabian has replied to my previous rant. My issue is with the phrase

I think comments are losing their purpose as the weblogging world progresses, using tools such as referrers, pingbacks and trackbacks.

Of which I saw the implication as “comments are being, and should be, replaced by backlinks”, if that isn’t what he intended to say, then I aplogise for aiming my rant at him. The point is, somewhere buried in the text, that I’m not talking to webloggers, not primarily, nor even mostly. Most of the people who come here do not have a weblog of any kind, although some have a livejournal or something, but not a medium where they respond to such things, and so saying the above is roughly saying “You can’t talk to me if you arn’t in my gang”. ie, the gang of people with the time and inclination to write weblogs.

Finally, and possibly more importantly, people are far more likely to use comments than email.

URLs are important. Most companies are beginning to realise this fact, and that just because they have a website (http://www.thisismycoolcompany.8m.freeserve.co.notreally.flash.fuq) could not be good enough. They need a DOT COM!!!! Hah, I have one, it’s nothing special. (Why do I have a dot com? because Aquarionic Designs was once my trading name, and will be again. What’ll happen to the site then, I’m not sure). But URLs go deeper than that, Being able to understand what a link means (/archive/2002/10/30/, for example, is pretty useful) means that users can – if they want – bypass your carefully constructed navigation system because they already know where to go. There are bad aspects to this, particularly if you are relying on things on a public medium remaining secret, as Intentia did, you may get irritated with the system. There are other points, of course. The fact that Moveable Type puts it’s comments form in a place where a script – as well as a person – knows where it is without even scanning leads to Comment Spamming. This has lead to many weighty opinions on the subject of should there be comments on weblogs? Or have we moved beyond that, into the realms of Pingback and Trackback as Sarabian suggests?

Sod that. That’s elitism, it’s insulting, and it’s the very thing I blasted LiveJournal for a few months back – the idea that only people in their little community have the right to comment on pages. I can discuss Sarabian’s entry without using his commenting system, and he can know about it by the magic of Pingback. But say Mad Bull linked to me, discussing my entry. I don’t read his weblog (I just pulled it out of the random blogsnob box to the left), and I can’t trust my referer logs anymore. And that’s the people who have weblogs, or diaries of some kind, what about the people who leave comments that by no means would warrant a full entry in their own mouthpiece, even if they have one. There is a large difference between “Comment”, which is what I allow, and “Response”, which is what things like ping/trackback are designed for.

Some weblogs don’t do comments, Mark being a prime example, because they don’t fit with the style of the blog, or because the author doesn’t want them, but claiming some evolutionary advantage in not allowing people who don’t have their own weblog to comment is not good.

I’ve been working on a todo list for Epistula, Things I want to impliment, the article is here, I’d appreciate comments and suggestions, people :-)