The Lair

Somewhere around this time last year, I was posed with a problem. A bit of (personal) history here – I was doing some crucial (to my thesis, anyway) research and I was busy running experiments and writing papers and the like. By this time last year, I had finished those experiments, my results were decent and I had decided to myself that a break was required. So I was looking around for something to do.

When looking around for something to keep idle hands occupied, I usually tend to scratch my itches – so to speak. I write things that I need. Sometimes this includes writing plugins to spam fighting software, sometimes it involves various other things. But this time, I got this idea about doing an aggregator right. So, it was around this time last year that I decided to build Achcharu. Yeah, Ach is a one year old.

Yeah, so there’s ancient history here, here and here. I really didn’t write much about Ach back in the day but I’ve begun to realize the value of documenting some of my plans and assumptions because … as usually happens … I tend to forget them fairly fast. I blame my advancing years.

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Ever wondered how confusing names are? Take programmes on TV, for example. Yesterday, I was trying to explain to chickenbutt that I had an evening of glazing over in front of the idiot box ahead of me. With roasted, salted peanuts to munch on. Fine. Fair enough, I go through periods of TV hate where I don’t bother watching anything and I also go through periods of being glued in front of the TV. This is clearly one of the latter times.

So what was I watching? Dragons Den – nothing to do with dragons or mythology of any sort. Where every single one of the five “investors” are a Simon Cowell with a nipple tweaked (ok, that wasn’t a pleasant mental image for some of us. I’m sorry). The series is beginning to get a bit predictable too. Never come in and expect to give away a 5% stake of your whizz bang company, they’re going to turn around and ask for 50%. Oh, the dragons might occasionally be “generous” (with the reggae sauce guy a few weeks ago) and make it 40% because he needs to make a living.

Then there was the entertaining Party Animals – which really isn’t about much partying in the conventional sense. If I am to go all SepiaMutiny about the casting for the series, I’d note that there is a female Asian character, played by Shelley Conn. Still, it’s entertaining stuff.

And finally, there is the not so desperate and definitely not housewifey Desperate Housewives. Yes, I watch it. To quote someone else, don’t judge me. I’d maintain I watch it for the luscious Eva Longoria and that’s mostly true but recent photographs are making me rethink my position. Somewhat meh but still worth an ogle or four.

And for something completely different, the new Ach theme is somewhat whimsically called Metal Mickey. Inspired by the Suede song that I happened to be listening to fairly frequently and ultimately by the quirky BBC comedy Metal Mickey. Is there a connection? Well, I think the greys, blues and blacks look vaguely like Metal Mickey’s colours.

Boogie, boogie, boogie! Yeah. or summat like that.

Much (perhaps overly so) has been made of comment moderation, flaming and other aspects of administering online fora recently. Obviously, this is a great time for me to weigh in and reduce the signal to noise ratio even further.

See, I deal with more than just weird comments on my own site, I also need to play guardian of truth and light (such as it is) for other people’s entries via Ach. With varying results.

Some stats first. Since the last time, there has been a bit of an explosion in tagging.

(cold hard numbers and other stuff)