Year: 2002

There are a number of people out there who don’t like the Bloggies. A fair number of people didn’t like them last year either. Just as a matter of interest, I’d be really interested in hearing some of the reasons people think they’re a bad or ridiculous idea. Mail me with your opinions. I’m not saying I’ll reply to them all, but I might write something longer about some of the debate surrounding them later if I get some good comments.

And the frustration continues… A good meal after the frustrations of this morning, everything was looking shiny and new – and more important manageable. But it only takes one e-mail to throw everything up in the air again and leave me dealing with potential financial collapse.

I have a huge overdue bill for web-hosting to deal with at the moment. It was supposed to be paid at the beginning of the month, but uncleared cheques meant that it turned up in my inbox several days later – unpaid. By the time this had happened, it looked like I would have to wait until I got paid the final time for my last full-time job. Although this meant leaving things to the last possible minute, it should have worked – except I didn’t count on not getting paid by any of the people I’ve recently worked for in time for the end of the month.

In essence this means that both plasticbag.org and barbelith.com may disappear on or shortly after the first of the month – precisely the same time, in fact, that my rent will fail to clear. This is not the right way to live one’s life.

“Hello, my name is Shetland. I’d just like to say that I find Biomagnetic K9’s last comment extremely offensive, and I think that his ignorant asseretion that sheep aren’t able to make purchases as they please is both ill-informed and does nothing to avoid the kind of stereotypes that we sheep have had to put up with. I, personally, would love to get my hoofs of 48 billion dollars.” [Does America need to spend $48 billion more on defence?]

As Davo has said, if there’s one thing that’s going to stop me winning “Best Poof” at the Bloggies it’s this picture.

Frustration: Today’s mood is frustration – frustration caused by still being owed money from Time Out for work I did in October (and spending hours on e-mail and on the phone trying to get it), frustration caused by mounting bills, frustration caused by underestimating workloads, frustration caused by the worry of huge bandwidth bills and sheer panic about the absence of anything resembling full-time work a month down the line…

Is 100k enough? Blogger Pro now has a 100k per month limit on the posts that you can make. After that stage it costs an additional $3 per 100k to run. initially I was very comfortable with this amount, but having checked out my usage (there is a link on the bottom of the Blogger Pro front page), I have realised that for plasticbag.org alone I have only been under this usage limit once in the last year. If I were running multiple blogs, no doubt the figure would increase dramatically.

I may be an exception – so I don’t want to protest too loudly – but it occurs to me that if I am not, Ev’s statement that 100k is “substantially more than the vast majority of bloggers publish – even with multiple blogs – so you probably won’t have to worry about it” may be misguided. So I am going to ask people to post up their usage figures for the last year on their weblogs. It’s important – I think – that people understand what they are actually paying for.

Interested in Blogger Pro, but want to see what you’re getting for your money? Here are some screenshots for your delectation – as the interface appears on Mac OSX.

• Capture One
• Capture Two
• Capture Three
• Capture Four

I’ve got a bit of a crush on Paul Baker. But Ultrasparky has told me that he’s heavily attached. So unfair. It’s relatively hard to meet nice guys when you’re not prepared to leave your house, and I thought I’d found me a keeper here. [Addendum: passport photos through the ages]

A few months ago I was watching an episode of Changing Rooms with one of my flatmates, when she suddenly turned purple and started pointing at the television. A guy was on the show that she’d known at University. She stared awestruck, in mounting astonishment at what was happening on the screen. Months later, I stumble upon his side of the Changing Rooms story detailed in full. God bless the interhighweb.

Translate your [English language] site into English? Well why would you want to do that? Because it’s bloody funny [thanks to The Magic Morgan Translatatron].