Blue Witch

As some of you may have gathered, I haven't been my usual Witchy self for a while.

For all sorts of reasons, my energies have got very unbalanced, so I'm going to remove some of the pressures that are within my power to remove, for a while.

In the past, blogland has been a place of solace, and inspiration, to me, but it too now feels very unbalanced. Many of the people in this little corner that I enjoyed reading have stopped writing, either completely, or as regularly as in the past, for various different reasons, and it doesn't feel right without them, particularly at the moment.

Publicity stunts, artificiality, falseness, popularity contests, and egos, leave me cold, in blogland as in life, and I feel that I don't want to be part of this at present.

I expect I'll be back though.
And probably sooner than I think.
Maybe even next week.

Thought for the day

Life is the movie you see through your own eyes. It makes little difference what's happening out there. It's how you take it that counts.

- Denis Waitley

Spooky coincidences

There are just too many strange and upsetting things going on.

My thanks to LaP for the unwitting perfect timing of this link (scroll up to the top once it's loaded).

Thought for the day

In life, the difficult periods are the best periods to gain experience and shore up determination. As a result, my mental status is much improved because of them.

- The Dalai Lama

Environmental Witch

DG has produced some fascinating statistics on carbon neutrality today. If you have 400 blog visitors a day, each staying for 2 minutes, to offset the CO₂ produced while generating the electricity to power their computers, one tree needs to be planted every 3 years. That's scary, isn't it?

Reminds me of my switch off your phone charger at the mains when it's not in use and save £26 a year post a few weeks ago.

Since I've had my laptop and a wireless nework, I've enjoyed the flexibility of working from anywhere around The Coven that takes my fancy. It only uses electricity when it's open, and I close it, and so put it into hibernation, when I'm not actually working on it. I also make sure that I turn the charger plug off at the mains when it's not actually charging the laptop.

More than that, by not having my main PC (and its peripherals) constantly on all day, when we received this quarter's electricity bill a few days ago, I found that we have saved 42p per day in electricity. That's £153.30 per year. Now, I know that not everyone works from home, but I bet that quite a lot of you leave your computers on all the time, even when you're out. Think about it. Do something about it.

And you do have low energy lightbulbs, don't you? Lots of places (eg IKEA) sell them very cheaply, and they last for ages (we've still got some that we fitted 10 years ago when we moved in). This site says that using them will save you around £10 a year, and the atmosphere 0.8 tonnes of CO₂.

Public Information Witch

I suspect some of you already know this, but, if you ever need to remove a page, image, or category (such as all images), or even a whole site, from Google, as well as putting a robots.txt file into the appropriate place, which will work in time (although apparently it could be months), Google have an automatic removal service (info at the bottom of the linked page - also, if you use one of the free blogging services, such as Blogger, so can't put the robots.txt file into the root server, using the automated removal service will disallow bots for 180 days, just by putting the appropriate code in with the entry in question). It says that it will take effect within 5 working days.

Someone told me about it on Tuesday. I registered and applied for an account and submitted the URL of my anti-image bot, and within 2 hours the avalanche of hits from Google images had stopped (and when I say 'avalanche' - at the beginning of the week, it was about 13 out of every 20 hits coming in from search engines, which was murdering my bandwidth).

That's one less thing off my lsit of things annoying me at present. Sadly, all of the rest are outside of my control... so it's on with the spells.

Thought for the day

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does... It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.

- Jean-Paul Sartre

Trial by blog

Time: Yesterday between dawn and 8am.
Place: Just beyond the entrance arch to The Coven Orchard, about 12 feet from the D'Ovecote.

The victim and the suspect:

Witnesses: 11 Hens and lots of other D'Oves.

Statements when questioned:
Hens: cluck, cluck.
D'Oves: coo, coo.
Ginger Familiar: buggered off for 24 hours, only just to return, purring, looking angelic.

Resting place of deceased: Buried by BW under the 3rd hexagonal stepping stone inside the Coven Orchard (because I had no idea where previous corpes were buried and didn't want to risk any exhumations), as Mr BW is in China on business/practising his Duck and so unable to attend to his usual burial plot allocation/undertaking duties.

You decide...

Nanny knows best

On Saturday we went to a local glazing company (from whom we have frequently bought glass for various purposes in the past) to order some new double-glazed panes for our solid timber custom-made-at-huge-expense (don't ask), by a local coffin maker, new back door which will be delivered and installed soon. Hopefully.

We required nine, small, 6" x 11" panes, for the top part of the door.

Apparently Nanny's 2002 Building Regulations do not allow panes for doors to be made from anything other than toughened glass. Therefore the price was to be £170 all but a few pence.

Needless to say we went elsewhere, where no questions were asked, and secured the same for just over £100.

I would like to see anyone break a 6" x 11" double glazed pane, in the top of a door, accidentally. In fact, I think it would be pretty difficult to break it on purpose.

Sensible regulations are fine, but making regulations that apply to glass, irrespective of size, is just madness. Considering that the current door has single panes that have withstood nearly 30 years of constant use, I have no qualms whatsoever about having an illegal door in our Coven. In fact, I'm actually rather pleased at the idea...

Thought for the day

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

- Confucius

Government saves UK taxpayers £20M

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says there is "no point" in pursuing plans for a referendum on the EU constitution after France and the Netherlands voted "No". He told MPs the government had decided to postpone any moves towards a poll.

Conservative shadow foreign secretary Dr Liam Fox commented:

"I may no longer practice medicine, but I can tell a corpse when I see one and this constitution is a case for the morgue if ever I saw one."

Common sense prevails. For once.

Now, about those ID cards...

Resolution

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions to help with the bandwidth problems.

Hopefully that's now sorted.

Seemed to be the only thing I could do that might make a little bit of a difference to the great malaise that seems to have crept up and overtaken me, so I started there. Always a good plan when everything seems a bit overwhelming I think. Pick something small and constructive and get on with it.

It's only the older images that appear able to be accessed despite the anti-hotlinking code. So I've done a spell and put up a surprise on each of the images that are being hotlinked. Namely this text.

I just wish there was a way of seeing the URLs of the sites hotlinking, but, if there is, I can't find it, so, sadly, I shan't be able to see the fruits of my labours in situ.

I'm usually a polite Witch, but looking back through the last few months' server stats has made me realise just what a drain these have been. And I don't buy the line that most people hotlinking don't know what they are doing, so they're getting all they deserve. I'm sure there will be those of you who disagree, but, if so, just keep your thoughts to yourself, eh? It's my site and my bandwidth and I'll do what I want to make my point and protect it in future.

I do hope that I've managed to change all the links where I've got those images linked on here... I do sometimes use images more than once after all.

And as for all the people flooding in from any number of disgusting sites for sad people to look at the pic of Mr BW giving poor Edward a bath, well, if they manage to circumvent the code, this is what they will see.

I really feel quite sick when I look at the pages that innocent image has somehow got onto. I've never understood the attraction of, or necessity for, that type of imagery, and never will. I'm not a prude (well, I don't think so - but then I wouldn't would I?), but looking at pictures of people 'exhibiting' themselves for money in ways that I'm sure their mothers wouldn't like just makes me feel very sorry for them. All of them.

I hope that the code to stop the image bots kicks in properly soon. It's been in for a month and only the posts with images put up since then seem to have been left alone. Given the number of times the Google search bots run through here in a day, I'd have thought they should have un-indexed the older images by now.

My referrals from Google have gone up from 16% six months ago to nearly 30% now (and the majority of that increase seems to be image searches). Has anyone else noticed this sort of increase? I just can't see any reason for it.

Grrrrrrrrr

I am getting more and more annoyed by people who steal bandwidth by using [img src] to display a picture on their website rather than uploading an image they find on the net to their own server.

For some reason, that I have yet to fathom, I am currently getting multiple hits per day on 'edward shower' which is a pic of dirty (but cute) dog Edward being cleaned up after a roll in a muddy field.

And yes, I have code in to stop hotlinking, and the image search bots, but it's not working 100%. So it's costing me money. Never a good thing, to cost a Witch money.

I am doing spells. Be afraid if you are stealing my (or anyone else's) bandwidth, be very afraid.

Thought for the day

----- Original Message -----
From: "Cyber Nation" [quotes@cybernation.com]
To: Blue Witch
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 8:44 AM
Subject: Great quote to start your day on a positive note!

Here's the Quotation for Friday, June 3, 2005:

Measure yourself by your best moments, not by your worst. We are too prone to judge ourselves by our moments of despondency and depression.

- Robert Johnson

Just the latest in a long list of current Spooky Witchy Moments...

Update

Well, seeing as how no-one was queueing up to write my blog while I wasn't, I suppose I'd best get back to writing it myself.

Since the last scintillating epiosde...

The first Coven Strawberry of the season, two tiny broad bean pods, and the first four globe artichokes have been consumed. The appearance of a dead duckling on the doorstep would appear to be attributable to The Ginger Familiar's murderous urges, so I haven't spoken to her for 3 days. 2 D'Oves are missing, but 3 new ones are nearly ready to fly, so that's no bad thing. I paid my first visit to a launderette for 21 years today in order to wash the 2 halves of our 15-tog now 3-years old super-kingsize duvet. I hadn't the energy to do them in the bath like I normally do, and the weather wasn't up to drying them. Don't launderettes have interesting clientelle? And aren't they expensive?

I'm always at my Witchiest when I am, let's say, less firmly grounded than usual. Strange things keep happening. I don't want to say any more.

Thought for the day

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, desire.

- Aristotle