Not quite time to write this blog’s epitaph – most of my efforts have been directed toward other projects but I plan to devote the summer to travel and development of the Operator’s Manual.
Had a couple requests for features which were conspicuously absent on this site (and even a few requests to be removed from the diabolical tar pit whose administration page remains partially incomplete) – here’s what’s new:
Search – Now available from the navigation panel at the left, or you can always run my favorite search.
Recent Comments – Will display in a panel at the left on the blog homepage.
Comment E-mail Follow-up – Still working on this one (thinking of using Subscribe to Comments 2.1 but I need to vet it first – suggestions welcome).
… and thus concludes another insomniac site update session. (Please feel free to let me know what’s broken, too)
In a candle-lighted chapel, each climbs into one of the austere wooden caskets laid side by side on the floor. Lying face up, their arms crossed over their chests, they close their eyes. And there they rest, for 10 excruciating minutes.
“It’s a way to let go of certain things,” says Jung, a former insurance company lecturer. “Afterward, you feel refreshed. You’re ready to start your life all over again, this time with a clean slate.”
- South Koreans experience what it’s like to die – and live again
by John M. Glionna for the LA Times
2010-01-04
via Dangerous Minds
Perhaps this is what I was talking about… the radio hits a patch of silence and the chatter becomes appreciable; the gears grind to a halt and the stark beauty of chaos on the assembly line momentarily appears; time enough to catch a breath before the mad dash through the forest resumes.
I’ve yet to take a real break from the incessant blogging – whether here and at the new outlet dedicated to “case files” (hopefully there is a noticeable lack of organization there … the goal is to reserve coherent thoughts for this outlet) – there is simply too much new information to overlook.
Actually, if you are reading this, you are not presently a resident fossil in the brand-new Operator Speaking Tar Pit.
… but watch yourself – you never know …
Tar Pit Operation
Tar Pit Administration
Review MySQL database for suspicious / undesirable hits and insert bans accordingly.
What this means for those I have banned: this site simply will not work the way you’d expect. Strange things will happen. Binary will be served (very slowly) instead of the text that you were anticipating. Your feed monitoring software will let you down.
I was plotting to release a WordPress plugin when I realized that the tar pit script is simple enough to work with just about any PHP-driven application… so I’ll have some source code to post as soon as I come up with a working administrative interface (though if you really want to play around with the code and you’re comfortable using SQL, e-mail me and I’ll send something your way).
For now, the MySQL schema:
SET SQL_MODE="NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO";
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `ban_agents` (
`ban_agent_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`ban_agent_name` varchar(150) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
`ban_level` enum('deny','poison') COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT 'poison',
`ban_agent_reason` varchar(150) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
`ban_agent_timestamp` datetime NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`ban_agent_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `ban_ips` (
`ban_ip_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`ban_ip_name` int(11) NOT NULL,
`ban_level` enum('deny','poison') COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT 'poison',
`ban_ip_reason` text COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
`ban_ip_timestamp` datetime NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`ban_ip_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `ban_ranges` (
`ban_range_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`ban_range_start` int(11) NOT NULL,
`ban_range_end` int(11) NOT NULL,
`ban_level` enum('deny','poison') COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT 'poison',
`ban_range_reason` varchar(150) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
`ban_range_timestamp` datetime NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`ban_range_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `hits` (
`hit_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`hit_context` enum('page','feed','feed-atom','feed-rss','feed-rss2','sitemap') COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT 'page',
`hit_ip_address` int(11) NOT NULL,
`hit_user_agent` varchar(150) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
`hit_timestamp` datetime NOT NULL,
`hit_disposition` enum('pass','tested','deny','poison') COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT 'pass',
`ban_reason_table` enum('none','ban_agents','ban_ips','ban_networks','ban_ranges') COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT 'none',
`ban_reason_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`hit_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
In response to yesterday’s CIA Invests in Social Media Monitoring post, I’ve put together a friendly little disinformation feed for unwanted bots which may happen upon the Operator Speaking blog.
If you see items like the following when you subscribe, then you’re operating from within a netblock I’ve decided to poison: (please don’t take it personally)
Barack Hussein Obama reportedly destroyed the the bodies of an unknown number of Mormon missionaries left at Washington, D.C. by an agent of Heckler & Koch. Our operative on the scene [...]
- Operator Speaking Disinformation Feed
2009-10-24
The chances are good, however, that you won’t see anything of that nature. I’ve been very selective about blocking (thus far).
Some day I may decide to shoot the messenger and block everything except feed spiders which I know to provide services which are useful to everyone (and not just your typical image-conscious public relations scumbags like my good friends Gavin Gibbons and Karol Sheinin).
Related: Superstitious as I am, I believe that if their names are mentioned often enough, they shall reappear…
I like to play voyeur with my traffic – see if I can get into the heads of those who end up on my site – though it poses some difficulty as most of my visitors are gone in a matter of seconds. Apparently I do not offer enough Flash game advertisements and glitzy graphics to compete with the social networking sites they’re used to (or they may very well disagree with whatever I happen to be saying – though rarely do they bother commenting to that effect).
Every once in a while, though, I find a gem – as with the following visit from October 13th, 2009.
Visitor:
Entrance:
Google search: “is h1n1 an engineered virus”
Duration / Pages Viewed:
Does your boss-man know that you wasted four minutes at my site, drone?
If you’re running a Google search to find answers, I’m afraid you’re definitely not on the need-to-know list… (by the by, you might want to use a proxy in the future – you know, cover your tracks and all that spy-type skulduggery crap)
Of course, there remains the likelihood that the CIA is simply interested in knowing what the public thinks of H1N1… but, if that is the case, I must protest that my apparent views are hardly representative of anything.
Over the course of reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde I’ve decided to create a Read-along category for posts wherein I will share passages from texts available at Project Gutenberg.
What’s the point? Final summation? None. Just looking to provide a few tie-ins with whatever mind I have left (as I exsanguinate a dead man’s stash of aqua vitae) and classic literature… consider it a backlash to the problem of “unwrapping the author’s meaning” which (no offense, past English literature professors) is naught but a paramasturbatory exercise in circumlocution.
Interpretative criticism is the pass-time of the hack and the bane of creativity itself – it’s a paint-by-numbers way of digesting literature and, for all the evils of the Five Paragraph Essay, this critical bent’s just another way of diluting the author’s meaning without registering or creating any meaning of one’s own… and if one should manage to really express what some author’s work means to oneself, who cares?
Parasitism is all well and good, but I’ve got to draw the line when to comes to fan fiction.
I hope to have the motivation left to provide a summary analysis which draws on the pragmatic / empirical / utilitarian lessons of a given novel / story at its conclusion (arguably more useful than some tripe about the symbolism of the color red – seriously, we all have better things to do).
FUCK ART. LET’S KILL!
I’ve had a few inquiries about the Flash MP3 player used at the Operator-Speaking.com main site – long story short, it’s from this embedded Flash MP3 player installation tutorial (imagine my luck that the color scheme matched my washed-out palette for the site).
If you would like to use the code here is a link to the Flash MP3 Player Code Builder I put together. As a courtesy to Macloo.com, please download your own copy of the Flash MP3 player and upload it to your own web space – bandwidth isn’t free.
My initial goal for this site was to present a quantity of spoken material (with accompanying text, of course).
A dearth of decent recording equipment prevented me from immediately realizing my very special plan for this site (I’ll be talking of “special plans” for a while now – thanks, Ligotti) though I did seek out a SHURE57-LC and an EDIROL UA-25 USB Audio Capture device.
… but I record over at a friend’s studio, rather than bother to plug all that junk in. Possible irony in that.
Without further ado, here’s what has changed at the Operator Speaking Spoken Word collection:
… and it only took two years …
I just had the opportunity to listen to some of the spoken word pieces hosted here and I am (ashamed? mortified? recalcitrant?) … horrified to admit that I encoded them incorrectly. Internet Explorer may yield double-time Chipmunks’ renditions.
Suffice it to say that the issue has been corrected (for now, at least).
Let me know if you encounter any further inconsistencies.
… aside from those which appear to be broadcast intentionally.
PostScript: Two more pieces available, at your leisure.