Entries Tagged 'Tech commentary' ↓

BLOG GOING OFFLINE:
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Some time in the next week it’s highly likely that the Orange Blog and website will go offline as due to circumstances beyond my control involving the physical relocation of a server all my data and photos have to be moved somewhere else. Yikes!

But rest assured we are in the capable hands of The Mister and even though when everything turns back on it will undoubtedly look very different, he assures me that it will still be living at the same URL (web address). Bad news for the throngs of followers using the RSS feed, there’ll probably be a new feed URL … will let you know!

For daily addicts, if you’re following me on Twitter (twitter.com/orangegirlnz) you might get some warning.

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Over & out.

Bye bye Das Blog (yes, am probably the last person on earth still using it).

Have to manage a few conversation threads at work now and so as to not get confused I found where to completely personalise my own Twitter account so that it looks totally different from the work one.

I have to say, that’s a LOT of orange! Hope it doesn’t scare people off!

Blog is another year older – that’s 5 years now I’ve been rambling away. Take a look at my first week of posts back in 2004. A rather tentative start. But in that lot of posts you’ll see the first Sunday visit to Nikau and the first rave about their date scones! God, that’s 5 years ago?

Will have to see if the Mister can extract again how many blog posts I’ve done since I started. People sometimes scoff at me because I don’t do Facebook – quite apart from the fact that they won’t let me be Orange Girl, I don’t need it, I have my lovely blog.

Some time later: the Mister saved his ‘how many blog posts are there?’ script and can report that as of today, there are 1230! That’s a lot. And considering this time last year there were 868 I’ve been rather prolific this year!

My Office Buddy has told me about 1-day.co.nz before, a website where there is a one day sale of one item only – something totally random. Today the item on sale is ‘a bag of crap’ for $11. I don’t think it’s literally crap, but rather some random items with a minimum value of $11.

So I went to the site to check it out. And it’s overloaded. But they have such a cool error message – they basically just say upfront that the site is overloaded and you have to try again, but while you’re sitting there refreshing the page, random pictures of overloaded things are displayed to keep you occupied. The one I like best is this poor little donkey …

… how on earth does he get down? I guess he’s just up there braying and flailing his legs around until they slowly lift off the boxes until the cart is light enough to lower him down. The unloaders would have to be careful not to take a big heavy item off and lower the cart too quickly!

Ommigod, while I’ve been tying this she’s gone ahead and bought a bag of crap! Wonder what it’ll be …

Look! It’s The Very Hungry Caterpiller helping to spell ‘Google’ this morning in honour of the first day of spring. Takes me back to my childhood – that big hardcover book with holes in the pages.

Hmmm, guess that means it’s first day of autumn on this side of the world.

So last weekend The Mister’s niece started blogging and today I got an email from my niece. Pretty cool.

Whoa, just did that last post (and this one) using Safari on my Vaio – only gives HTML editor – like threading the sewing machine – managed to remember at least the basics!

My not quite 9 year old nice as just started a blog! Am very impressed and given that I think she’s a real brainbox I thought she might take to the internet and get into blogging or running a website at a young age. It’s invite-only and I’m one of the lucky invitees. Yaaaay! Thanks for inviting me Caitlin, I look forward to reading what you’ve been up to.

So, this is our third year of doing Secret Santa style gift buying for one branch of the family. We set up the web-based Christmas Wish List that first year for everyone to log in to to record gift ideas to help out their Secret Santa. The drawing of who gets to be Santa for whom has been good old scraps of paper in a Tupperware container with the 6 of us taking turns at picking a name, throwing back our own or our spouse’s name.

This year we’re extending it to include the Washington family so the names-in-a-hat has become a bit more difficult. In the end, in manner of builder renovating their own kitchen, the Mister is writing (as we speak) a program that will randomly match a Santa and a recipient from the 8 names available, avoiding spouses or names already drawn and automatically emailing the name of the person you’re playing Santa to to the Santa’s address.

We could package and sell it! International Secret Santa!

So look out family … an email will be coming your way soon with “[NAME], you are Santa for …” (open the email to reveal the name randomly drawn for you).

Huh? Everywhere else lets me have this as a legitimate name (Google, email (work and play), YouTube, errr, Xero and … I’m sure I’ve signed up to other stuff but maybe not), so why not you Facebook? I really don’t want to use it (because I have this sense I am going to bombarded with more spam that I already get telling me my friends-using-Facebook are having a birthday, yet if I’ve never signed up to the damn thing how can it assume who my friends are … anyway …) but the only way I’m going to keep in touch with a couple of travelling friends is to sign up. Not everyone has a blog or personal website like I do.

What kind of discrimination is this anyway? Do they trawl through rafts of noise words in other languages to determine if someone is a colour or a gender instead of a ‘real’ name? I wonder what orange is in Russian …