At about 11:04 pm yesterday eastern daylight saving time¹, the Earth reached the extreme of its latitudinal periodic oscillation², representing the very middle of geographic summer in the southern hemisphere; the point at which the sun (sol) comes to an apparent stop (stitium). This naturally means it’s time to spend money for the sake of the retail sector, and ingest unhealthy amounts of food and liquor.

In a little over a week from now, absolutely nothing astrologically or meteorologically notable will happen. We will nonetheless celebrate this fact by collectively ooing and ahhing at expensive aerial incendiary devices.

Joyeux Solstice³!

1. 12:04 pm UTC ↩
2. Nevermind that it’s a mere illusion produced by the conjunction of the Earth’s tilt and its rotation around the sun. ↩
3. I don’t mean to sound so cynical, but sometimes the folly of it all gets to me. ↩

When lodging tax returns, especially using the online eTax method, remember to meticulousy check the numbers, lest you miss an entire digit from your principle income and find yourself in debt to the Australian Tax Office 18 months later.

It’s the 26th of December, which of course means that the planet has passed the periodic minimum representing a northern hemisphere winter¹, and for the next 6 months will gradually pitch in the other direction (well, assuming your frame of reference is the planet itself and not the sun).

I hope your solstice celebratory activities were as inebriating and enjoyable as mine.

The next day of celebration will be to mark the arrival of an arbitrarily selected date in our culture-specific calendar.

May the arrival of said day greet you with plenty of festivity.

~

¹That isn’t strictly true. Due to various people changing the calendar every few hundred years, the solstice is actually a few days earlier, around about the 21st of December.

Since installing the self-hosted Wordpress.org software, I’ve had a few days of fiddling around with some of the features of the css stylesheet and the various php scripts that control this blog and, all in all, I’m impressed with what I’ve been able to do with it.

First and foremost, all those purty pictures that used to adorn the header of my blog, the ones that would change whenever I got bored of them, are now on a randomiser. So every time you reload, you’ll see a different image.

Secondly, I’ve integrated gravatars - globally recognised avatars - pretty much everywhere. So unless you want your comments to be illustrated with an anonymous-looking silhouette, you should go and get yourself a free gravatar.

Thirdly, as soon as you start writing a comment, you’ll notice a live preview underneath the comment box. It’ll even show your gravatar off to the side, if you have one. The live preview will interpret any licit html tags you want to include and will output exactly what will appear after you hit ’submit’, so now you won’t have to email me and ask me to fix up your erroneous formatting tags.

Lastly, I’ve gone and got myself a Creative Commons license, and if you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see the image and link to the license in the footer. This is just to give me a bit of legal basis next time my posts get ‘content-scraped’ without attribution, and realistically, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

I just hope you enjoy using it as much as I’ve enjoyed customising it.

A few hours ago, I began the steps to migrate this entire blog entity from its current location, on Wordpress.com, to a self-hosted location with my own domain name, meaning that this blog will from now on be located here.

I thought it would take days and days to do everything, but with a little luck, and a lot of help from the friend who is kindly hosting the site, we managed to get the whole thing up and running in something like 45 minutes!

However, there are a few teething problems that I’ll have to work through when I get some time, such as all the times I linked back to my own posts. All those URLs will need to be changed. Also, the wordpress software supports the same theme as I’m currently using, thankfully, except it’s slightly different and I’ll have to get used to the details, but chances are I’ll be able to load all those perty little pictures that change every so often (whenever I get bored of them), so they can come up at random each time you reload. First though, I have to figure out how to edit that part of the theme’s stylesheet. Until that happens, I’m afraid we’re stuck with the uninspiring defaut image.

I’ve successfully migrated all posts and comments from here to there, and for the next month or so I’ll post everything to both locations, so there’ll be a bit of continuity. Unfortunately though, I’ll lose my blog statistics and my technorati ranking. The latter aint so bad; a while back I’d attained a ranking of 50, but I think they figured out how inflated that figure was and kneecapped me back to 23. I’ve been hovering around 30 ever since. The loss of the blog stats though, is quite annoying, since as any wordpress user knows, it’s rather addictive to see all those statisticss pile up, now I’ll have to start afresh.

As for all the other bits and pieces, such as links and rss feeds, well, I’ll have to leave it up to all of you to update your rss reading software look to the new rss feed, if you use my feedburner feed then you can leave the change to me. Finally, if you link here from your site, could I be a pain and ask you to update your blogroll?

Has anyone ever had their posts mirrored on other blogs without consent, and seemingly fraudulently? What I mean is, I had two extra links to a post of mine in my wordpress.com dashboard, which I’ll repeat in full:

THE HOT JOINTS | Breaking News and Opinion created an interesting post today on Annihilation - and not just Howard�s
Here’s a short outline

Annihilation - and not just Howard’s Posted by Jangari under Election ‘07, Environment, Indigenous, Land, Law, Philosophy, Politics, The Intervention

View the rest of this entertaining post here

(source)

~

kevincmurphy created an interesting post today on Annihilation - and not just Howard�s
Here’s a short outline
Annihilation - and not just Howard’s Posted by Jangari under Election ‘07, Environment, Indigenous, Land, Law, Philosophy, Politics, The Intervention

For more information go click here

(source)

The striking similarity - by which I mean ‘complete identicality’ - between the two, and the coincidental timing with which they both appeared makes me think they’re entirely spam.

I’m not very used to spam. Has anyone else had this happen? It doesn’t appear to be malicious at all since it links only back to me, but it freak me out nonetheless.

…When Google searching for certain phrase returns a very unlikely result of the form:

www.DodgySoundingURL.nl/[your-exact-search-string]

Don’t click it, lest you find yourself forced to spend your Saturday reinstalling Windows.

Windows makes me homicidal.

Every so often I sift through the spam that Askimet catches to make sure there’s nothing legitimate in there, and there usually isn’t. But occasionally there’ll be an interesting little one-liner, buried among all the ads for drugs I’ve never heard of, that puts a smile on my dial.

Apart from the glaring ungrammatical double modal verb, this was one of the better spams I’ve received:

The normal fellow would might think that spending the time to gain intelligence on this matter is a waste of time.

Says you, mate. I wish all spam was like that; innocuous and witty. Much like this sort of spam:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=XZ6N5m8FpVg]

Tomorrow is the first of October, which means two things.

Firstly, it means that the little green box with the date next to the title of my posts will be correctly formatted again, as it appears not to enjoy the length of the word ‘September’ (something I plan to fix when I go self-hosted), but secondly, and perhaps less trivially, the Earth will, at some point throughout the day, return to the same position, with respect to the position of the Sun, as it was when I published my first post.

Things didn’t really get underway for a couple of weeks in the beginning, most notably because I still had my honours thesis to write at that point. And even then, it takes a fledgling blog a while to gain any sort of audience. After a year I’m very chuffed with where things are. So a general thanks to you all for insightful comments, discussion and kind words, both off-blog and off-line, you’ve made blogging a very enjoyable experience for me.

I started off with some small-fish idea of writing about linguistic curios and the like, with the occasional perspective from the far-North of the country, originally intended to coincide with my occasional being in the far-North of the country. However, as the year’s events regarding indigenous people in this country (and abroad) have unfolded, I’ve moved further and further into territory that’s a little less benign and has the capacity to generate some heated debate.

Then came one of the most important challenges of social engineering that aboriginal people in this country have ever faced¹ (after English occupation and possibly equal-pay). I’m referring obviously, to the Intervention. It’s been such a huge part of this blog since mid-June that I’ve given it its own category. I was even lucky enough - though it’s hard to think in terms of ‘luck’ - to have been in the field for two very crucial months while the Intervention was going gangbusters.

So given all that has happened in this pivotal year, it’s hardly surprising that the focus of this blog shifted away from being primarily about linguistics to being about something immensely more important: indigenous issues. But I still like to dabble in the wonders of natural language every now and then.

Anyway, here are some stats:

After a year of activity, I’ve had a little less than 10,000 visitors (as counted by WordPress, which I understand counts hits different from other sites) and around about 500 comments, which, given some 100 posts, is an encouraging 5 (well, 4.95) comments per post². As an aside, I also had two changes of name, in quick succession.

Askimet has kindly prevented a modest 1,710 spam comments from appearing, though that unfortunately includes a few legitimate ones captured and summarily deleted erroneously. I think the number of spam is way below what other bloggers experience, which is apparently due to the fact that my tags include such erudite subjects as syntax, ethnotoponymy and language revitalisation rather than more popular ones like sport(s), cars or film. At least that’s how it was explained to me.

Anyway, thanks again for reading, and stick around for another year at least!

~

¹This is a paraphrase of something that Jane Simpson said during her excellent plenary talk on Thursday morning at the Indigenous Languages Conference in Tandanya (Adelaide).

²I’m relying on this post to push me over the 500 comment mark before tomorrow!

I haven’t written anything that could be categorised as a metapost before, because I assume most people don’t care. But I’ll write one today, since I have three quite separate pieces of news, and lo and behold, they tie together surprisingly well.

1. I have been asked to write an article for a Sydney-based, left-wing, federal-election-motivated, free, street-press newspaper, sort of designed to rival mX, which:

…is distinctly low-brow with a much greater focus on entertainment than news than broadsheet newspapers, or even other tabloids. (wikipedia)

The previous editions have received lots of support in Sydney’s west, where commuters yearn for something intelligent to read, rather than what Kylie Minogue was wearing today. Instead, News Corporation treats them like Neanderthals and gives them nothing but trash. They want me to write about the NT intervention, but I’m not certain exactly what angle I’m going to take. But:

2. This calls into question my attempted pseudonymity. I originally intended to write the article as ‘Jangari’ and have it mention this blog, for the sake of generating more local traffic, but political opinion pieces written under pseudonyms tend to be viewed with a bit of cynicism. So I really should go ‘nonymous’. 

Besides, my pseudonymity hasn’t been entirely successful, partly because other wordpress.com bloggers who get comments from me already know my first name, owing to my naively registering my work email with my wordpress profile. Speaking of email:

3. I have a new one, which I’ve attached to my wordpress profile, as well as my gravatar. The email is jangari [at] matjjin-nehen.com, which I am able to have thanks to the fact that I just bought that domain name, it was dirt cheap. Eventually I’ll set it up as a domain for this blog, which, I understand, will turn everything in the address bar that is currently aidhoss.wordpress.com into matjjin-nehen.com but I believe I have to set up the DNS servers first, or something like that. I suspect I’d also have to pay something like ten bucks per year to wordpress for the privilege, which is a bit steep given that it’s even more than I pay for the domain in the first place. In any case, I’m told that setting up a domain for a wordpress.com blog is a bit like magic in that it works by misdirection. Or was it redirection?

Anyway, that’s what’s been happening around here at matjjin-nehen.