I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Entries for week beginning November 7, 2004

November 13, 2004

Gravatar - Globally Recognized Avatar

Interesting method of creating and serving an avatar to different sites. I might add their MovableType plugin to my comments page.

Dog in the Snow

Dog in the Snow

Another couple of inches, and we might lose Bacon!

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November 12, 2004

TestMy.net :: BroadBand Speed Test

Handy Java-free bandwidth tester.

November 11, 2004

Panic - The True Story of Audion

Behind-the-scenes magic of a long-time Mac app.

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Pixelfest: group artwork

Collaborative art, one pixel at a time. Can’t wait to see how it turns out.

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Goofy Goober Rock

Currently rawking my headphones: The Spongebob Squarepants Movie Soundtrack. Quality, quality stuff. Much like the old Powerpuff Girls CD, it’s got a bunch of excellent indie artistes such as The Flaming Lips, Electrocute, The Shins and.. er.. Motorhead. Highly recommended.

November 10, 2004

Edgewall Software: Trac

“Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects.” Free? Check. Nicely designed? Check. Works with SVN? Check. Mega-wicked-nifty? Check.

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MBTA unveils new fare card

Quality name for the Token/T-Pass replacement. A month ago, I wouldn’t have got the reference, but The Kingston Trio performed this song at Fenway Park when I was there for Game 4 of the ALCS.

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November 9, 2004

Bacon meets Gnasher

Bacon meets Gnasher

The beagle-basset-blend isn't quite sure what to make of the Abyssinian wire-haired tripehound

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The Obvious Solution to Spam

A reasonably modest proposal.

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Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results

Nicely done cartograms, showing population-to-vote mappings from last week.

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Firefox - Rediscover the web

Firefox one-point-oh is out. Hurrah!

New comment spam

I’ve spotted this subtle attempt to get past human comment-spam-filters. Can’t wait to see what’s on those pages when they go live!

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November 8, 2004

Konfabulator!

CPU-consuming prettywidgets now come in Windows flavour.

So… did I miss anything?

I was in St Louis this last week on business, so haven’t really had a chance to post my reaction to the election. (Let’s just say my plan to put up a second entry titled “Unfuckingbelievable” with a screengrab of the ‘Kerry Wins’ headline from boston.com didn’t quite pan out).

Much has already been said, so I’ll just add this perspective: The British general election of 1992 was the first election night when I stayed up to watch the results.

I watched the exit-poll predictions of a Hung Parliament (no single party gaining a majority) turn into John Major’s Conservative government getting re-elected. After 13 years of Conservative governments—the reign of Thatcher, the disastereous implementation then speedy reversal of the Poll Tax, the pointlessness of the Falklands War, the shagging backbenchers—the electorate turned round, said “More Please!” and voted them back into office.

I remember a month later, Spitting Image captured it fantastically, closing their series with a hippie protest song entitled “The Times, They Aren’t A-Changing”.

The Cabinet: Now look to the future, and what do you see?
John Major: I’ll be here for ten years
Michael Heseltine: Then ten years of me.
Norman Lamont: You’ll still think I’m rubbish
The Cabinet: And we’ll all agree.
For the times, they aren’t a-changing.

But in the end, Labour swung around, voted a smooth (Rupert Murdoch approved) prettyboy to lead the party, and their landslide victory in the 1997 election was all the sweeter. The delight of seeing Mellor, Portillo, Rifkind, Forsyth and all the other Tory scum lose their seats was one of the sweetest nights of my life.

Of course, Tony Blair turned round a year later and abolished the free university education. And then supported Bush in the Iraq war. Which kind-of cancels out most of the good.

So really, the fact is: It doesn’t matter too much who wins. All politicians suck. But man, do some suck more than others. And for the next four years, the White House is going to be the Dyson vacuum cleaner of the western world.

But let’s see how the next election night turns out.


About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.