Where the hell has Jack Marx gone?

Both of you who regularly read my blog will know that my blogging role model (hee hee) is a gentleman that writes a blog for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald online by the name of Jack Marx.

But he's gone!

You can see here that he hasn't posted since Friday 17 August.

A quick look at Blog Central at The Age online shows that his blog, The Daily Truth, is not even appearing anymore. I couldn't believe this so I did a double take and checked out Blog Central at the Sydney Morning Herald online as well.

Nope. Not there. So where has he gone? Will he return? And how do you complain?

The Purple Headed Earls' Complaints Blog

The Hulk and I have now commenced operations on our new addition to the blogosphere - The Purple Headed Earls' Complaints Blog.

We aim to place our complaints up there for all to see.

At the moment, there's only one up there from me - and a response - but Hulk has some absolute ripsnorters of complaints letters ready to be uploaded. I can hardly wait to see those.

And like all blogs, you, the reader, get to whinge about each and every single complaint that we put up there for all to see. And they're all in the best possible taste.

So click here. And enjoy.

Edit 28/06/2007: Nice1bruva has joined us on the blog and has already got cracking on posting. It's all good.

The Thinking Blogger Award

Well folks, Ted has nominated me for a thinking blogger award. Naturally, my ego being what it is, I'm quietly barring-up at this. Thanks Ted.

Plonka's Blog which Ted puts together is one that I read quite frequently, and his subject matter is a veritable cornucopia - and very similar subject matter to mine, although, he has excellent manners where I tend to get emotional from time to time.

But anyway, the fact that a blogger who I very much admire has nominated me is totally cool in my book.

Without further ado - here are the rules of nominating:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with 5 blogs that make you think
2. Link to this post so that people can find the exact origin of the meme.
3. Optional: Proudly display the “Thinking Blogger Award” with a link to the post that you wrote (there is a silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).
4. Your chosen blogs cannot have been previously awarded.

Not bad, eh?

I describe my blog, and have done so since 1997 as:

This page is an outlet for my own hate-filled vitriol and spiteful opinions. Uneducated as I am in the ways of the world, it's still necessary to vent my spleen at the media, the music industry, the AFL and anyone else who could have offended my sensibilities. I plan for this to be updated occasionally, depending on my state of mind. So you can either look forward to, or avoid my one-sided, uninformed and dangerously unbalanced opinions on the state of the world and everyone in it.

While this isn't exhaustive, I think that these days my targets probably tend, more often than not to be woo, religion, the finance industry and the media.

But anyway, without further ado, here are my nominations, bearing in mind that some of the blogs I frequently read, such as The Bronze Blog, The Two Percent Company Rants and 95% of You are Morons don't usually respond to these tags.

Also, BeepBeep!ItsMe and Plonka's Blog have already been nominated.

These are the blogs that make me think:

Dubito Ergo Sum (Tom Foss) - "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. --Carl Sagan"

Silly Humans (Michael Bains) - "We are what we only pretend to be. So we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Kurt Vonnegut"

Die Eigenheit (Einzige) - "Ownness [eigenheit] includes in itself everything own... But ownness has not any alien standard either, as it is not in any sense an idea like freedom, morality, humanity, and the like. It is only a description of the - owner."

The Church of the Everlasting Groove - (The Rev. Jenner J. Hull) - "The Funkiest Religion Under the Stratosphere, Baby..."

Action Skeptics - (Akusai with help from Magus) - "Annoying stupid people, one woo at a time."

Read folks, and enjoy.

Happy birthday blog

Well, I noticed it. Happy birthday to Dikkii's Diatribe. Yesterday, it was 1 year since I started Dikkii's Diatribe up again.

I probably should tell you the story of Dikkii's Diatribe.

In mid 1997, I purchased my first computer.

The first thing I did as soon as I had my new computer was to go and get hooked up to the internet. And in September of that year, I uploaded the first of what became Dikkii's Diatribe.

In those days, I began creating Dikkii's Diatribe using, initially, an application called Hotdog Express. I then found that my version of Microsoft Word that I was using (from Office 97, I think) was easier and faster to use for creating web pages, so I switched to that and re-uploaded Dikkii's Diatribe using that.

It's a real shame that none of the Hotdog Express files survived - they all looked wonderfully amateurish.

I've since re-uploaded my old diatribes here in Dikkii's Diatribe Archives, but looking at my first one again, it's interesting to note that even though nearly 10 years have passed since my first post, I have not changed my mind about public arts funding.

In January 2006, I was so pissed off about the raw deal that the Australian government gives to gay Australians with regards to marriage that I began Dikkii's Diatribe anew, this time with help from Blogger.

Why did I use Blogger®? Because when I did a sandbox test, everything seemed so easy. And I think that New Blogger™ is even easier.

(I so wish that Google is reading this - they might pay me for the gratuitous plugging)

Yeah, there are limitations to what you can do with Blogger - have a look at what Orac did to his before moving on to the utter professionalism of Scienceblogs - but it does me.

Initially, I toyed with the idea of using a new name. "The Average Bloke" was one, "Mr Mediocre's Magical Mayhem" was another. I ended up settling on Dikkii's Diatribe because, well, it has Zing! it has Zazz! and it has P'tooie! Plus, I blog about a lot of stuff that really grates my wick, because that's what I enjoy doing most.

Whingeing.

Even though I haven't changed my mind on most of what I blogged about back then, lots of other stuff has changed.

People can post comments on my blog without first emailing them to me for me to cut and paste onto the blog posts.

Google pays me to have ads up for them, and a search field. Not terribly much, mind you, but I can dig it.

RSS feeds alert regular readers through their feed-readers when I've updated the blog. Or better, via email.

Services such as Technorati and Feedburner tell me when someone has linked to my blog, or how many people are reading my feeds.

I still have green as my main colour. It's pretty much Dikkii's Diatribe's only link with it's past.

Anyway, happy birthday blog.

Edit: 19/03/2007 - I have no idea why I didn't use the Wayback Machine to retrieve the old version of this.

Here it is in all it's glory.

Enjoy.