Posts Tagged ‘internet’

Wow! I’ve been gone two weeks. I’ve really been working hard learning and putting together a template to be used in Joomla 1.5. One of these days I ought to work on templates for my own site and blogs. Oh, I also registered a new domain name, livingzhangjiajie.com, which I plan to use to blog about Zhangjiajie. I tried to find a personal blog in that area with no luck. So maybe I’ll use this new domain to document my experiences. Who knows. Maybe it’ll be helpful one day. Or maybe it will just be another blog.

I’ve also been caught up in following the T i b e t* protests on twitter. The amount of info coming through is incredible. I found a few tweeters with interest of documenting every bit of info available on the Internet to make available to other readers to have a better understanding of the situation. Through them I found even more tweeters. I am able to get different views around the world. I also learned quickly the danger of censorship, how it can distort perception, and how it may backfire one day. You don’t need to ask me who’s censoring, do you? I was a little worried for my own Internet connectedness in the future. But there are determined people online, using all sorts of ways to break through the wall to get to the whole truth. It makes me glad to know that they are there, and they want the full story so they can make their own judgment. They also passed on a few tricks for me to use later. :-)

By the way, if you are a tweeter, you should check out iwantsandy.com. Sandy is a digital assistant. You send her instructions and she’ll remember them for you and remind you of your appointments when you want her to. You can tell her, “remind me to pick up Chinese food at 6pm.” And she will add it to your calendar and send you a reminder when it’s time. You can even ask her to remember a shopping list! Sandy works perfectly with twitter. And, if you set up twitter for text messaging, you’ll get your reminders anywhere you take your phone. No twitter account? No problem. This can be done through emails, too.

Oh yeah, CB has been home for a few days now. It’s time to really work on what we will be doing in the next few months. So nervous.

* Sorry for breaking up that word. I am being cautious here. After witnessing how “the wall” can shut out web sites with certain keywords, I don’t want any problem for me to access my own sites in the future. Paranoid, huh? Just want to be careful until I understand this thing.

Hotlinking means using an image that’s hosted on someone else’s server, not your own. It uses someone else’s bandwidth and can cause headaches if it becomes popular and accessed many many times. That’s not nice, and some webmasters can get really, really mad. Who can blame them? As a punishment to hotlinkers, some webmasters switch the images to things most inappropriate. For example:

This

Can become this

So think before you hotlink an image. Do it only when you are invited to do so. If not, you may risk having embarrassing images showing up on your web site, or be forever associated with them on a post somewhere in Cyber Space. Want more examples? See here, and here. A word of warning though, to REALLY embarrass hotlinkers, these webmasters used some adult contents. I don’t think it’s very, very bad. But don’t say that I didn’t warn you first. :-)

1. I finally got out of the house and went to th SnB at Culver City on Monday. I fully intended to cast on for Spider Queen. I took everything with me… almost. Pattern, yarn, waste yarn, needles, etc. But I forgot an important piece of information I needed. Instructions on Provisional Cast-on! Grrrr… What’s even worse. Lightening condition was not optimal and I was having a tough time looking at my knitting, even with a yarn like Manos del Uruguay. Yikes! I need reading glasses.

2. On Tuesday I went to the doctor’s office to get my blood pressure reading. He wanted to keep an eye on me because my BP was almost the level of Hypertension, and there’s family history. It was better on Tuesday, but still in the borderline range. I ordered a home monitor on Amazon.

3. I got sick. Probably caught something at the SnB, or at the hospital. Funny how you go to the hospital to stay or get healthy, but sometimes you end up taking something home with you.

Better news… I got on Ravelry. I didn’t think I’d want another account on another social networking site. But I got in line for a beta account just in case. Got it last week, and guess what… it is quite good. It’s not another blog or photo management thing. It’s more like a big digital project management for fiber lovers. It links to blogs and Flickr account, making it easy to keeping project notes super easy. You can browse projects and patterns, and with one click adding it to future project queue. I am really loving these features. And of course, there are features that let you easily connect to like-minded individuals. By the way, my ID is midpath on Ravelry. :-)

More good news. I casted on for Spider Queen last night! hehehe I was going to do the usual Provisional Cast-on by wrapping the cast-on stitches around a piece of waste yarn. (Maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t have the instructions on Monday.) But those twisted stitches could easily get out of place if one’s not careful. So I went with the Crocheted Chain method, picking up stitches through the bumps on the back of the chain. I found clear instructions here.

My last attempt to rescue my old domain, forestmeditation.net, resulted in my finding that my old hosting company regained control of my domain. What the heck?!? All this time they ignored my requests while they had the solution! I am glad that I contacted Register.com one last time. I called my old host and within an hour my old website was back online. What to do now? Well, my name is still not on the WHOIS record. First thing to do is to get that changed.