The Cabbage Patch

I’d like to know too.

Yesterday, some lucky web-traveller got to this site by searching for “ricky gervais’s sexual identity”.  Brilliant!

Tags: Ricky Gervais, weird

Introducing Gravatars - surprisingly not from Star Trek

An update of the theme I use for this here website has included Gravatars. Despite the name, Gravatars are not in fact something from bad Sci-Fi, but are actually small images (or “avatars”) that will appear next to the name of a commenter in the comments of each post. You can check the comments of this post to see an example.

If you’d like your own Gravatar, you can enter your email address at gravatar.com and upload a picture. Whenever you comment using that email address here (or at any site that supports Gravatars), the picture will automatically appear.

The Internet is Stupid, but We Love Her Anyway

So, I’ve come to the realisation that I hate the parts of the Internet that everyone else loves.

Take “social networking”, for example. I absolutely hate MySpace, but not for the reasons everyone else does. Others cite its hideous controls and mid-nineties-style flashing, squealing profile pages as reasons to exorcise the website from the social-consciousness. Me? I just hate the people who use it. And the inane comments they leave. And fact that one can’t possibly use it to liaise with one’s peers in private and are instead forced to broadcast to the entire world all the pointless drivel that takes place.

And don’t get me started on Facebook. No, I don’t want to spread your stupid vampire/zombie/whingeing harpy crap. And no, I don’t want to install the fucking Super Wall.

I think I’m genetically designed to not understand sites like MySpace or Facebook. I don’t want to broadcast everything I’m doing and everyone I’m associating with (that sounds… saucy) to the whole planet. I don’t like having conversations that take days to happen. I don’t like the implication that everyone I’ve ever met, however briefly, is my “friend”.

Of course these networks have their uses. Facebook has an awesome Poker game on it. MySpace provided an outlet for the awesome Sugarshock. And, if ever I decide to leave this little cave of mine and interact with others, I know where to find them. I just don’t get all the rest of it.

All that being said, I’ve found a “social network” I actually don’t mind using. This thing called Twitter is everywhere you look on the Internet, so I recently checked it out. It’s been variously described as “micro-blogging” or a kind of broadcast SMS. To put it in a way the rest of the world seems to understand - it’s like the status line under your name on Facebook, without the rest of Facebook. It’s a whole site dedicated to that single-line statement. This appeals to me.

I don’t know about everyone else (and I am fully prepared to admit that I am not like everybody else), but things often happen to me or occur to me that I wish to acknowledge in some ironic, witty or simply noteworthy way. If you’re a friend of mine, you’ve probably received an SMS or two from me along the lines of “I’ve just seen…” or “Did you know…?” or “Ever wonder…?”. You know, those things that happen in daily life that you really feel like sharing with, well anyone.

That is, in part, why I started this site those years ago. I wanted a place where I could say or show anything that occurred to me. However, in reality, these little types of thoughts usually don’t warrant an entire blog post to themselves. That’s why Twitter is useful. It is designed for little thoughts. In fact, it is exclusively for such a use, as each posting can only be 140 characters long.

Now, having used the site for a couple of days, I have noticed that this is another example of me not quite getting it the way everyone else does. A large part of the Twitter user base uses it in two other ways that I don’t think I ever will. The first, is to broadcast not the thoughts and opinions of the author, but the detailed minutiae of their lives. “I’m going to work now”, “I just ate lunch” - that kind of thing.

The other common use is to have those MySpace-style conversations where the reader can only see one side of any exchange. This just shits me to no end. “@ThoughtlessDrone Yes, I agree completely! HAHA!” means nothing to me, and I shouldn’t have to read it.

Nevertheless, I’m going to try using this Twitter thing and see how it works out. Knowing me, I’ll probably have abandoned it by next Tuesday.

You can see my most recent “tweets” (why does everything on the Internet have to have such a stupid name? But that’s a rant for another time) over on the newly-reinstated side-bar.

Or here.

Tags: rant, twitter, Web Sites

(Bad) Timing is Everything

As some of you noticed, I kinda stuffed-up my latest photo project thing. This time it was just a case of bad timing. A few days into it, I fell rather ill - like, stay-in-bed-eating-only-soup ill - and therefore missed a few days worth of photos. Then, I got busy preparing for and then going back to uni. By the time everything settled back down I was so far behind on the photos I just gave up.

At least, that’s my excuse.

The thing is, I’m still very interested in taking as many photos as I can. The problem is that I hate my camera and I don’t always have the time (or I’m just lazy). So, I may very well try to reboot the project (again), or I might try some other approach in the future. I’m not sure yet, so stay tuned.

Tags: Photo a Day

We’re Simplifyin’

We’ve simpled things up here at The Patch.  The sidebar is now vamoosed, leaving only the juicy contenty goodness slap bang in the middle of the page.  The long-neglected forums page has also been banished, and we’d like to encourage comments on each post page.  There’s a new page up the top there to replace the only really useful element of the sidebar - click through to the "Archives" page for a breakdown of all the posts by date or category, as well as a nifty search function.

You’ll also notice a couple new ads around the place.  As the giant tower on the sidebar is gone, there will now be smaller ads at the end of some posts.  If these get too annoying, we can change them around a bit, but you really shouldn’t be seeing more than one ad at any time.

Love the newer, simpler page? Hate it? We’d love to get your feedback in the comments.

Introducing the magical disappearing page content!

Hello World.

A couple of new features on the site, thanks to the amazing Mandigo theme which this site uses.  Well, newish.  They’ve been active for a little while now, but I forgot to mention them.

In the corner of each post you should now see some small icons:

These are buttons which change the shape of the page.  The most useful is the left button (the small arrows), which hides the sidebar and expands the post content to full width, allowing to fit more content on the screen at once and removing other distractions.

The other button shrinks the post down to it’s title.  This is mostly useful in the individual post pages, where you can hide the post and just read the comments.

How regal, indeed

Hello World.

I’ve just done a small update to the site’s theme (to Mandigo 1.26) and to the back-end software (to Wordpress 2.3).  This won’t mean much to you except for a few minor changes:

Swanky new background:

I didn’t plan or expect it, but the new version of the Mandigo theme apparently comes with a rather regal looking background pattern.  It looks kind of what I’d expect the wallpaper looks like on the walls of the bathroom in Buckingham Palace (which is absurd, of course… Buckingham Palace has heaps of bathrooms).

Categories and Tags:

The post navigation has been switched around a bit - there are now both “Categories” and “Tags” attached to each post.  This is a function of the new Wordpress that I didn’t really know what to do with, so I’ve fudged together a system that I think will work.  Posts will always be placed into one or more of the major categories (Videos, Games, Articles, etc).  They may or may not also have tag(s) attached to them.  These tags may be things that further help to describe/catalogue the post, or they might be a one off thing.  The “tag cloud” over in the sidebar shows all the tags, with the bigger labels housing more posts.

Now Celebrating Favouritism and Spelling Errors

Hello World.

Just a quick post to tell you of a couple of neat features added to The Patch recently:

View Posts by Author:

In case you missed it, there are two of us here at Patch HQ now, and that means two very different and distinct types of posts.  So now if you want to read only the posts by me, or if you want to see a page full of ranting by Tom, you can.  Just click the name under a post title to see all of the posts by that author.

 

Comment Editing:

You can now edit your own comments for up to 10 minutes after posting them.  No more pleading me to delete or change something you’ve accidentally written, and no more “oops, that was supposed to be…” comments.  As a side-effect of this, I expect grammatically perfect, error-free comments from all of you.

Apparently, Our Lingus is Quite Cunning Indeed

Hello World.

As of this writing, I have been monitoring The Patch’s stats for nearly two full days.  In that time, we have received around 33 unique visitors (a modest number, to be sure, but not bad for an un-publicised re-launch).  Of those thirty-three highly intelligent Internet consumers, at least five have arrived at this here site by searching for a rather unusual term.  “What is that term?” you may ask.  “Autocunninglingus” I would reply.

What is interesting about this is not that The Patch appears among the first results for this term in a Google search (thanks to reader Oskar’s use of the word in a comment some time ago), but that there are at least 2-3 people searching each day for this exact misspelling of this rather bizarre concept.  One person even used ALL CAPS - I think it must have been important.

The Logies and Laziness: a match made in heaven.

We have a new face (voice? text?) here at The Patch - dropped’s very own TomHB!  I’ll let him do the intro:

This post represents the marriage of two rather lazy internet publishing powerhouses (so called because of their size, rather than their kilowatt output) who’ve decided that neither could be bothered going it alone. www.dropped.wordpress.com has now been rolled into www.patchofcabbages.com - we’re now just waiting on old man Rupert to buy us out along with MySpace and Facebook.

As near as I can tell, Dave plans to continue to bring flash games, trivia and Natalie Imbruglia to your computers, while I’ve decided to abandon the sort of pious political moaning that puts the ABC’s left wing bias to shame, in order to bring to you whatever it is that is bugging me at the time of writing. This may or may not include the same left leaning, toffee nosed, middle class whining that you could have read 6 months ago on my old site…

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I won’t waste any more time…This, readers, is a fork. Nothing spectacular; four prongs, gilded in silver, a slightly salacious curve between the head and the handle. It picks up food well; if you drop it on the table it resonates in E Minor; if you prick a balloon with it, the balloon explodes; if you stab Gretel Killeen in the head with it, she still doesn’t become interesting. For all I know, this could be the best fork in the country, and yet it sits at the back of the cutlery drawer, unheralded, waiting for the next dinner party.

It’ll never win a Logie. It’ll never have the chance to get dressed up, win an award, pick a fight with Kerry Anne Kennerly or get a blow job in the toilets from a cast member of Home and Away. Yet a couple of weekends ago we saw, yet again, the pathetic sight of the small screen’s biggest names, frocked and tense, hoping their lifetime’s work will be validated by votes from the readership of TV Week, a magazine whose average buyer has a combined age and IQ of fifteen.

This is no surprise from an industry that thinks Richard Wilkins is a talent.

I had the misfortune to stumble across a few television programmes the other day. The basis of one was the observation of a group of fatally incompetent morons who together have racked up more than a 100 years of being on their L Plates. It was a cavalcade of self-aware cretins boasting to camera ‘I’ve had my Ls for 17 years and failed 9 times’ or, ‘I find it easier to turn left instead of going straight ahead or turning right’. Does this mean there are more people who, the moment they get behind the wheel, are ostensibly lobotomised to the point where they can only turn in one direction?

The other show was a re-run of ‘Australia’s Brainiest Celebrity’. I think here Channel 10 is using the word ‘celebrity’ in its original form, from the Latin celebus meaning ‘well known’ and ritus meaning ‘prat’. It is simply the dullest grouping of humanity to ever grace our screen.

I mean really, to celebrate an industry which has less cultural significance than your basic cutlery set is just ridiculous. In fact, it’s time the ABA looked at revoking all licenses until there’s something decent to watch.

TomHB. Back in the saddle.