andrewducker | May. 30th, 2007

May. 30th, 2007

Because there are now three people in my flist talking about journals and communities being deleted in a purge of anything even tangentially related to paedophilia, including a community discussing Lolita. And one claim that they are deleting journals that have "illegal interests".

Now, I'd like to think that this is all being blown out of proportion, a few people may have done a couple of rash things, but it's all being sorted out. But can anyone point me at anything reassuring?

Alternatively, can anyone point me at an official statement?

If you're interested in what's going on, then you can find more info over at

innocence_jihad, this article and this list of suspended users/communities.

I'm going to hell for this one.

I put my flat on the market last Tuesday. I thought it was worth about £105k, the estate agent thought it was worth £100k, we agreed to put it on for offers over £87k. For those of you who don't know how scottish property sales work, you put a property on for "offers over x" and then people put in blind bids. The highest bid is then accepted and everyone goes home reasonably happy.

Instead, what happened was that on Thursday, while I was out seeing other flats, a guy came round and saw the flat and asked Ed how much we were thinking of. Ed said "Whatever we can get.", which was the right answer. The guy wouldn't take no for an answer though and pushed him, so Ed todl him we were looking for £105k. So the guy offered £106k and said he'd get a bid in the next day. I was rather happy about this, as it looked like no matter what I was going to get a decent price for it.

Except that the next day (Friday), when my solicitors called to tell me there was a bid they told me that the guy wanted it accepted by the end of the day. I wasn't happy about this, as I felt bullied into accepting early, especially on top of him pushing Ed into telling him what we wanted. So I told my solicitors I wanted to stay open until Monday (viewings are traditionally Thursdays and Sundays). I then tried to phone the guy who'd made the offer and explain the situation. He didn't answer his phone, leaving me feeling even more like he was trying to push me into a fast sale. At 4:45, however, I cracked, phoned my solicitors and said "Take it! Take it before it goes away! Damn my weak will!" or words to that effect.

Which just left Sunday's viewings to sort. We decided that Ed would go and view flats while I stayed at home and told any viewers that we weren't on the market any more. Except that at half three someone turned up, took a quick look and said "Shame it's gone, but I assume they offered you quite a lot for it." to which I replied "£106." He laughed and offered me £115k on the spot.

So on Monday morning I called my solicitors and checked the legality on backing out on the previous offer (legal, but they can't do it for me, so I've had to move to a different solicitor), and then went ahead with it. I feel slightly guilty, but not very much - if I hadn't felt bullied in the first place I'd feel moreso, but as it is I'm selling to someone who wants it more, getting more cash, and the person who tried to buy off me for cheap has to go find somewhere else.

I'm probably still going to hell though.

I emailed Eric Lippert, one of the people who works on the C# compiler at MS, and asked him for an explanation of the problem I had yesterday, and he was reasonable, helpful and agreed that my solution was better than the one in the spec.

And we also agreed that now it was in the spec it wasn't going anywhere.

Oh well - still nice to have the conversation :->

Come from Warren Ellis here.

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10 O RLY?
 YA RLY
  BTW this is true
  VISIBLE "BIG NUMBER!"
 NO WAI
  BTW this is false
  VISIBLE "LITTLE NUMBER!"
 KTHX
KTHXBYE

More here.