My dullest blog in the world appears in the latest issue of The Economist. From Analysing the web: Blog mining:

“I NOTICED that the doormat was at a slightly crooked angle. I reached down and moved the mat back into its correct place.” Thus began a recent entry on The dullest blog in the world. Although this publication is something of a satire on the internet’s inane blogs, scientists are finding—to their surprise—that useful information can actually be mined from the tedium of the blogosphere.

The dullest blog in the world is here, or you can follow it via Facebook or Twitter.

[Cartoon from We Blog Cartoons.]

Posted by Dave at 10:06 am on March 15, 2010 and filed under Blogging, Mundane.

3 Comments

Regular readers will know that at the weekends the budget for this blog does not allow for the posting of cartoons or interesting anecdotes. Instead I focus largely on highlights from my filing system.

Today, a section from my bank file entitled ‘letters informing me of my idiocy’.

This is where I file letters that tell me that I have done something wrong in banking terms, generally whilst paying in my cheques at the automatic cheque machine. Usually it is because the amounts do not tally because somewhere along the line I have pressed the wrong button, either on my calculator or on the automatic cheque machine itself.

I have never been very good at pressing buttons correctly. If, at a future interview, I am asked “What are your weaknesses?”, I shall reply, “Pressing buttons correctly”. Unless the job largely relies upon the ability to press buttons correctly, in which case I shall make something up and this blog post will be quietly deleted.

Posted by Dave at 12:46 pm on February 6, 2010 and filed under Mundane, Photographs, Starting a Business.

2 Comments

Some people told me that one of my diagrams was on the front page of the digg website over the weekend. Here is a link to the page about it: Link to the page about it.

The comments are not very kind as you can see. I was wondering where the unkind people gather – perhaps it is on the digg website.

Posted by Dave at 9:29 pm on March 29, 2009 and filed under Mundane.

15 Comments

1. I was offered the opportunity to take part in 40 days of prayer for the bargain price of $9.98. For this much money I would get daily e-mail updates which I could forward on to my friends for free. They would not need to pay $9.98. I’m no businessman, but it seems to me that if you’re going to run a profitable 40 days of prayer you need to get everyone paying their $9.98.

2. A ‘wholly owned subsidiary’ of the Carphone Warehouse Group contacted me to say that they would be very happy to have a link to their site on my website, and in fact they would go as far as to write a whole page of information that I could post onto my site with a link to them. All for free. Unfortunately they “are not currently in the position of being able to exchange or return links”. Much as I’d enjoy participating in such an attempt to manipulate the search engines I have declined to respond to the unsolicited e-mail. Oddly enough I had thought, until now, that the Carphone Warehouse was a legitimate and above-board sort of company.

3. The Amazon internet company had a special offer whereby one could have a FREE trial of their ‘Amazon Prime’ service, which promises to send things out on a next-day-delivery basis. I can confirm the results of the trial based on a sample of one: The goods do not arrive the next day as promised, even if you wait in all day for them. Suffice to say it is not a service that one shall be continuing with.

Posted by Dave at 11:35 am on September 26, 2008 and filed under Mundane, Slightly grumpy.

8 Comments

Jon Birch has said kind things about the dullest blog in the world, a not-very-interesting project of mine from the 2003 era. Jon keeps a good blog over at the asbojesus with his cartoons and in-depth discussions and suchlike. He was talking about it all at Greenbelt but I unfortunately missed the talk owing to not remembering whether I knew about it or not.

A while or so ago I transferred the dullest blog to its own domain, the idea being that it would be easier to manage and I could get rid of all the spammy comments. I had planned to restart it, but lost interest. I have a whole suite (what a good word) of half-unstarted projects, of which this is one. Maybe, if I am struck by some sort of whim, I will restart it at some point.

Today I found that the dullest blog has its own group on Facebook. Good heavens. I thought everyone had forgotten about it. Anyway, I just joined the group.

So, I’m posting to tell you about a Facebook group I have joined. The dullest blog continues, just in a different form.

Posted by Dave at 11:12 pm on September 4, 2008 and filed under Mundane.

14 Comments

Hello.

This is the return of the Cartoon Blog. Sorry once again for not writing anything here even though we got back from being away nearly a week ago. Dull explanation: I haven’t been 100% well all of the time, and my wife still had some time off so last week I was only really working on a part time basis meaning I had to prioritise certain tasks of which this blog was sadly not one.

Greenbelt was marvellous, as ever. The Church Times had a tent in which some of my work was displayed and it was great to see people enjoying it. It was good to meet so many people including a number of readers of this blog.

Neil took a couple of pictures of me grinning inanely. I posted a few photos from Greenbelt on the Church Times blog and have since posted one or two cartoons.

Continued apologies to those who are still waiting for me to reply to an e-mail. I haven’t really recovered from pre-Lambeth, let alone the time I was at Lambeth, on holiday, Greenbelt, post-Greenbelt etc etc. I will aim to get on top of everything this week, but… we shall see. Sooner or later I think I may just have to admit defeat and resign from the internet.

Nevertheless I am starting September with high hopes. I plan, amongst other things, to do a bit more drawing on this blog as there has been a lack of it, and also make some long-overdue content updates to CartoonChurch.com. Thanks for your patience.

Posted by Dave at 5:03 pm on September 1, 2008 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, Mundane.

2 Comments

I have returned from holidaytime. As no-one really reads blogs in August I think I can afford to show you one or two of my holiday photographs without too much of an outcry.

This is photograph number one. If anyone can explain the meaning of the signage their prize will be the possibility of admiring glances from other frequenters of the comments page.

I have a slight virus so will not be doing any in-depth blogging or drawing work for a day or two. I will attempt to reply to some e-mails, but it might not be in an in-depth way.

Posted by Dave at 8:46 pm on August 18, 2008 and filed under Mundane, Photographs.

27 Comments

Well, the Lambeth Conference has been and gone. I had hoped to write more about it, but time has run out and I’m now taking a bit of a break from the blog for a couple of weeks.

Welcome, by the way, to readers of the Echo (local paper for south Essex): ‘Cartoonist raises bishops’ spirits‘. Do have a look around the site – hope you enjoy the church-related and non-church-related cartoons.

A few practical notes: Comments – You are of course very welcome to post them, but they won’t appear until I return. E-mails – Sorry, I am still way behind on these. I’m afraid I won’t be reading any until I return.

See you in a few weeks or at Greenbelt. Unless you live in a northern cathedral city, in which case there is a small chance that you might see me wandering the streets.

Posted by Dave at 10:32 am on August 6, 2008 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, Mundane, Sundry posts.

2 Comments

On Fridays I usually go into the City of London to the Church Times offices. I do some work on the blog and discuss things to do with my Church Times work.

Sometimes I walk there from Fenchurch street station. Yesterday I got a bit lost in the Barbican. I was taking a short cut but went astray. It is my suspicion that a good 20-30% of the people in the Barbican at any one time are people taking shortcuts who have gone a bit astray.

At lunchtime a few of us went to the food market at Whitecross street. I had one of the tasty Italian sausages in a wrap. The man on the right does the cooking, whereas the job of the man in the left is to stir the onions, ask the customers for their orders, assemble the sausage wraps, dispense the sauces and deal with the money. I’d say the man on the right has an easier job, but it ultimately carries greater responsibility.

Posted by Dave at 12:37 pm on April 19, 2008 and filed under Mundane.

5 Comments

Today I paid my tax. This is not, to most people, something that needs to be remarked upon, but it is a week’s work for me owing largely to incompetence, so I allow myself a short period of joy.

Unfortunately in my post-tax-payment euphoria I sustained a small cut on my finger by removing a carrot from the vegetable rack with excessive enthusiasm. It is a very minor injury, so you do not really need to send sympathy via the comments. Just be warned though, readers at home – watch out for sharp corners on your vegetable rack, particularly when removing carrots.

As a result of my very minor injury and the oversized plaster that was applied to the length of my finger I have been in a state of constant pointing throughout the evening. Fortunately pointing around the home is harmless enough, and is even quite fun for the first ten or fifteen minutes. There’s no harm in being a domestic pointer. I can only assume that people at my church home group have come to expect me to be pointing continually at the Bible throughout the in-depth study as no-one remarked upon it. (Did I tell you I go to a church home group by the way? Yes indeed. Thursday nights. I enjoy it.)

If I am still in a state of continual pointing tomorrow I may have to avoid social situations where pointing would be inadvisable. I’m sure there must be some. In the bank perhaps. People don’t like you to do a lot of pointing in a bank. It is just something that goes without saying in the same way that you don’t wear a balaclava into a bank or give people funny looks.

I’m rambling – good night.

Posted by Dave at 1:19 am on February 1, 2008 and filed under Mundane.

5 Comments

Link from the Times that made me mildly annoyed

Jeremy Clarkson: Unhand my patio heater, archbishop

Link from the Times that made me really quite cross

Matthew Parris: What’s smug and deserves to be decapitated?

No-one takes Jeremy Clarkson too seriously, so his rant against the Archbishop and environmentalists caused a brief frown and then… nothing. But I found the Matthew Parris article quite disturbing. Like Methodist Dave I think the writer “should be investigated by the Police, he should be fired by The Times who should print a significant apology and retraction of these remarks and make a significant contribution to cycle advocacy.”

Update:
Matthew Parris: …an apology to the cycling community
42: Lame apology
BBC NEWS | Wales | North East Wales | Cycling fury at beheading ‘joke’
Comment is free: Parris, je ne t’aime pas

Posted by Dave at 11:59 pm on January 2, 2008 and filed under Mundane.

8 Comments

This is not that interesting, but then it is Friday and none of you are reading anyway. Happy Thanksgiving, by the way, to readers from the USA.

Blog comments. As I mentioned the other day I’ve been having some problems knowing what to allow and what not to allow on the SPCK threads. There is much righteous anger which I’d like to allow, but on the other hand I don’t want to get into trouble. I’m still in the process of writing a clearer comment policy which should make the boundaries a bit clearer.

The other issue I face at the moment is comment spam. Lots and lots and lots of it. A few months ago I put some miraculous measures into place which halved the amount of spam I get overnight. I can’t tell you what those were in case the spammers are reading. Unfortunately the situation with spam has, over the last 10 days in particular got significantly worse. I’d say I now average well over one spam comment a minute – at times it is about 100 an hour. I’ve always accepted that wasting hours scrolling through spam is just a part of writing a blog you have to live with, but the amount of time it takes to go through them all is beginning to get ridiculous. I have reactivated the ‘Akismet’ anti spam device, which does a very good job of not letting very much spam though at all. The problem with it is that I have found that it marks a reasonable number of legitimate comments as spam too, meaning that you still have to go through all of the spam comments. I’m not alone in this unfortunately.

As I see it there are 3 options for the Cartoon Blog comments:

1. Allow comments as they are, but we must all accept that the Akismet device will eat about 5-10% of them, so those ones will never see the light of day
2. Make everyone fill in one of those CAPTCHA things – in other words a series of numbers or letters that you, the commenter, have to type in.
3. Give you the option to register, so that if you are logged in you can be sure your comment will get through. I know some people don’t like having to register for more and more things, so I’d still like to make it optional if I go this route.

Any thoughts welcomed. Which option do you find best on your blog? (As a side issue I’d also be interested to know whether certain blog platforms perform better then others when it comes to comment spam. Do you Blogger / Typepad / Movable Type users find that your anti-comment-spam measures work for you?)

Meanwhile other bloggers in the UK Christian sort of world are debating whether to have comments at all. Adrian Warnock has done away with comments, owing to the amount of time it takes to moderate them. Peter Kirk sees this as a refusal to be accountable, and a debate has sprung forth in his comment section and also at Methodist Dave Warnock’s blog. Dave is an unrelated Warnock, in case you were wondering. See also Dave’s post ‘Do blog comments work?‘.

All in all a bit of a kerfuffle, but there are some interesting points being made for those who are interested in such things.

In the meantime if any comments posted here don’t appear after 12 hours or so send me an e-mail and I’ll try to fish them out of the fiery comment furnace.

Posted by Dave at 10:19 am on November 23, 2007 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, Mundane, Technical.

33 Comments