snail and spam

In the last week my connection has gone terribly slow.
Is it the effect of the US election? Either that or punters are jamming the net for Melbourne Cup tips? Or perhaps my hard drive is dying...
In any case it makes doing the rounds quite difficult, so I'm staggering the visits through the blogroll.

In other news, Scott has capped commenting on old posts to counter the spam. So if you receive Comments are not allowed on this entry blame bob@ or name@ from whom we received some 90 pieces of spam earlier today. That is - we would have received it but fortunately the fresh spam was beaten into submission error.

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Comments: snail and spam

Are you all kinds of tech-savvy? One presumes so; but if not - adaware and spybot (address on request) are essential.
Beat that spam!
Posted by vernaculo at October 29, 2004 04:53 PM

No not especially very savvy

I do have adaware here: must update and use ;)

And on the advice of Nardo and others I have now got Firefox - if that helps.

Thanks for the offer.

I'm still hoping it is an ISP/server/internet thing. There is a marked difference in the speed in the morning and mid-afternoon to evening.
Posted by boynton at October 29, 2004 05:22 PM

Your deduction vis. ISP seems accurate. Here's spybot, it's working a different edge than adaware:
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

assuming you haven't been there already
here's the extension room for Firefox:
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/

You of all people should have "linky"
and "diggler".

http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/linky

http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/diggler

linky lets you highlight the links in a page, say thumbnails or a list of images, and open them all up in tabs 1-2-3...

diggler lets you work up through the site, like the up-a-directory button, only it gives you a list you can jump straight through instead of going up one at a time.

I like Firefox, I like Mozilla still too.
I'm also fond of what Americans call mincemeat. Which used to appear in stores about this time. Real mincemeat has suet in it. Suet is now taboo. My holiday season diminished some as a consequence. Though it may be a lack in California more than the country entire.
Did you ever read Murray Bail's Eucalyptus?
David Foster's Moonlite?
Two antipodean books I loved.
Posted by vernaculo at October 29, 2004 06:01 PM

thanks for the links, I'll have a look at them.
Still getting used to Tabbed browsing - so it may take me a while to get my head around the linky concept. I haven't quite made the switch.

I quite like IE...

You are more antipodean than me in respect to those books. Must read them. Film of the former in production?

So Suet is Taboo? Who knew.
Is it Health or Veganism?
Once upon a time (in the north) it seems Suet and Spam were quite common. and relished.
http://www.netguides.org.uk/guides/1950slifestyle.html
Here in the Antipodes, people became quite attached to their suet Christmas puddings...
But now most googled Suet leads to Bird feeding or Nuttelex acceptable substitutes...
Posted by boynton at October 29, 2004 10:17 PM

Nuttelex is outside my range of experience, which may be a good thing.
Suet rides the vortex of veganism/vanity/kosher/animal-sanctity, being pig fat essentially and entirely. So thus fat, so thus meat, so thus unclean pork, so thus kept-in-pens-only-to-be-dispatched-in-wholesale-cruel-fashion.
Americans are merging with alien ghosts from a distant corner of the spirit-world, looking at things with no history at all, just infantile good/bad. Yes/no. That most of our ancestors made it through the uncertain winter on ham and sausages is no more pertinent than the coastline of Gondwanaland.
It makes it easy to move them around, opinion-wise, if you can get hold of the input mechanism, which here as in most of the rest of the world now, is the TV.
Happily, the rise of US Latino culture from peonage to middle-class voting/consuming block means entertainment from the brighter parts of the Americas. 'Telenovelas' whose design perspective is not Anglo-centric, and whose rapid-fire Spanish does not curry or kowtow to the simplified tastes of gringo appetites. So that's cool. 'Carnitas' is a delicious Mexican form of the taboo-ificated swine.
But I do miss my mincemeat.
Posted by vernaculo at October 30, 2004 07:26 AM

Not to late to experiment with Nuttelex.
I quite like it.
I've always thought Suet was more your beef and mutton. The latter perhaps more so in our sheep ridden colonial heritage.

btw : An early sheep stealing case:

"On searching the house, there were found the carcase of a sheep hanging in the bed-room, EIGHT PIECES OF KIDNEY SUET IN A SHIRT, in a box, near the bed, a kangaroo-skin knapsack, and a fowling piece, which Butler owned; five rounds of ball cartridge on Butler's person, eight bullets, and a purse of kangaroo-skin, filled with gunpowder. At the bottom of the garden, near the water, there was a large fire, in which were several shank and jaw sheep-bones; witness then searched the barn; where, concealed in the midst of a wheat mow, he, after perhaps two hours, discovered about seven cwt. Of mutton, salted in three cask."
http://www.law.mq.edu.au/sctas/html/r_v_butler_and_evans__1824.htm


(& the internet/whatever is still very slow...)
Posted by boynton at October 30, 2004 10:57 AM

I stand, politely, discreetly, informatively, corrected.
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?define=suet
Years of misconception, banished in a moment.

"The salted meat had not been long in salt"
Posted by vernaculo at October 30, 2004 01:29 PM

Who are the great suet poets?

or the lard bards?
Posted by boynton at October 31, 2004 12:27 PM

"The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping."

A non fat-free reference (and an ominous aquatic one) from the quill of the wordsmithess of whom some are much afraid - or not.
Posted by Sedgwick at October 31, 2004 03:12 PM

"buy some Alphabetty Lardy today
and see those kids wolf it down"
http://www.zen8595.zen.co.uk/lard/tophome2.html

"Lashings of dripping..."
"Five never go to the Lighthouse"...
Posted by boynton at October 31, 2004 04:03 PM