Rubenerd

My second post for 2012, and it's on the 3rd of January! I had fun doing the Post A Day 2011 challenge, but as Georgina observed in the comments for a previous post, I'm not doing it this year ;).

Cute, pretty Madoka Magica reflections picture by ゴロー on Pixiv.

Reflections, get it?!

Erica Johnson on the Post a Day 2011 website:

Remember when you first decided to take on the Post a Day/Week Challenge?

Well, you made it to the end — congratulations! Now is the perfect time to reflect on your 2011 in blogging, and your goals for 2012.

Here are eleven questions to help you determine your blogging strategy for the new year:

Questions about blogging on a blog #blogception

Why did you start the Post a Day Challenge?

Aside from drinking water, I’d never done a 365 challenge before. Given I’d already been blogging regularly for years I figured it was worth a try.

Describe the state of your blog at the time you started the challenge.

New South Wales. Bad joke. Largely the same as it is now, though with 570 odd posts less.

How did your blog evolve over the course of the challenge?

Given it’s ever expanding girth, my blog mutated and grew and extra set of limbs.

Did you post as often as you had hoped? Why or why not?

I posted at least once a day! Occasionally this entailed jumping out of bed late at night and hurriedly punching up an entry, that’s one aspect of the challenge I perhaps won’t miss as much!

What type of blogging strategy works best for you?

For some reason I work best in caw-fee shops, at later in the evening at home, that much hasn’t really changed. In the past I’d publish when I was done, but for the challenge I got used to scheduling posts — which I’d like to think reduced the sudden onslaught of posts I used to inundate your blog aggregators with!

If you could go back to the beginning, what would you do differently?

More consistency, moe and pointless diagrams.

What are you most proud of accomplishing [in 2011]?

I… wrote at least one blog post a day for a whole year! :D

Name 3 great blogs you discovered through the challenge.

An unintended consequence of blogging more is I found myself reading more for inspiration for my daily entries! As a result, in 2011 I subscribed to A Lonely September, Heartdrops.org and Oshibanashiori.

What surprised you about the challenge?

That I was able to keep it up! That’s what she said. Wait, I don’t get it. That’s what she said too. Shaddup.

What advice would you give to others who want to blog regularly?

I’m probably the last person on earth you’d want to take blogging advice from! Still, just write about what you love, care about or what makes you interesting; EVERYBODY has these whether you deny it or not. Don’t get hung up about whether what you’re writing is useful, interesting etc, just DO IT. Remember the cliche, whether you think you can succeed or fail, you’re right.

What are your blogging goals for 2012?

My biggest aim is to try only blogging about topics and ideas that make me happy. Blogging about things that angry or frustrated only render me… angry and frustrated. Maybe one-off quotes, but no lengthy articles any more.

Conclusions

Over all, PostADay2011 was a thoroughly rewarding and fun experience, and as I said I couldn't believe I actually pulled through and did it! It was tempting to continue it for 2012, and certainly Post A Day 2011 gave me so much inspiration and raw momentum I probably could!

That said, there's something rather gratifying about posting things when I want, rather than adhering to a schedule. Posting pre-written items to fulfil the Post A Day when I had a headache or too much work also seemed a little like cheating, though that may have just been me ;).

Thank you to all of you for your support, kind words and patronage!

Sugoii ne, anime was a friggen huge topic for me in 2011! Well, technically in relation to other topics, but still!

I also did Wordles for 2010, 2009 and 2008.

Suzanne Tindal writing for ZDNet.com.au:

The Australian and Music Feeds this morning flagged a spreadsheet, containing around 1500 BigPond email addresses, postal addresses and telephone numbers, that was freely accessible online. [.. Telstra] believed that the spreadsheet had been created by a consultant to use in training, and not for a malicious purpose.

It's often the case privacy and security breaches occur as a result of unwitting users, rather than someone malicious on the outside. In any event, at least they didn't display cleartext passwords again, right?

Taken on our street in Earlwood, about 15km from Sydney. Really clear evening, but I wasn't forward thinking enough to bring a tripod, and my 200mm was at least f/5 or something. Oh well ;)

To celebrate posting every day this year, here are some highlights from each month!

January

Little did I know that I'd be quoting this Steve Jobs retiring from Apple post later in the year though. Or perhaps, I did.

Dear Steve,

Even with a similar recent family experience with health, I won’t pretend to relate with what you and your family are going through right now, particularly with a tasteless media circus chasing you.

Please don’t let them get to you. Stay strong, and get better in your own time, for yourself and your family. *manhug*

Peace, health and happiness,
Ruben :)

Sent from my iPhone

February

Towards the end of the month, my old man, sister and I took a trip into inner NSW to visit the Taronga Western Plains Zoo, which gave me a great excuse to try out some new DSLR skills I'd picked up.

A professional could have done a lot better, but it was great to get out of the city for a few days and go exploring :).

March

An easy choice, we fulfilled one of my lifelong ambitions and dreams since I was in primary school: seeing Weird Al Yankovic! Now that I look back, I only wrote a stub entry, clearly I need to upload more photos from it! Best. Concert. Ever.

April

For some reason I can't fathom, I decided hilarity would ensue if I quoted lyrics from each and every song from Ben Sidran's 1990 album Cool Paradise. This post was representative of this entirely pointless series:

"Hot, like the yellow sun;
Uh oh…. FIIIIIIIIRE!"

As far as I know Ben, the sun isn’t on fire, its undergoing a sustained fusion reaction.

May

A lot happened in May. Allegedly Osama Bin Laden was killed without due process, and the rapture was supposed to kill us all.

Most importantly though, I was obsessed with the Yumekui Merry anime series, and was blogging each and every episode! I don't have time to do that any more, perhaps series summaries are called for?

June

Lots of one off posts in June, though I was most excited about being accepted into the University of Technology in Sydney despite a several year absence from tertiary education for family reasons. It's good to be back!

July

I was informed of Kyary's PonPonPon. Nothing more needs to be said, or should be said.

August

A rather packed month from a blogging perspective, traditionally that's always been the case on Rubenerd.com for some reason! We finally said farewell to the old Twitter, I did a series of UTS-inspired posts on what I couldn't live without, but most importantly of all I joined the UTS Anime club where I've made friends with so many nice, lovely people.

September

A big month for the site as I reached 4000 quality entries! I also started obsessing and blogging about Gurren Lagann after so many had told me to watch it.

October

October was the month we lost Dennis Richie and Steve Jobs. RIP.

November

If I can be a hapless consumer for a moment, November was the time I finally caved and bought a Kindle. Between then and now, I've read more novels and non fiction books than I'd read for the whole rest of the year!

For me though, the month will be remembered for the fact it contained the epic, once in a lifetime 11:11 on 11/11/11 which I celebrated in a binary-esque pointless way.

December

A month of ups and downs. On the one hand I remembered the passing of my beautiful late mum, and the intellectual and humanistic world lost one of its heavyweights with the passing of Christopher Hitchens. On the upside, we celebrated Yuletide as a family again after a four year absence, with tree and all :).

2012

It seems folks are thanking their deity of choice (or lack thereof) for the fact 2011 is over. Personally it was a year of development and progress for me, though I'm under no illusion the year went well for most. Here's hoping 2012 will have more peace, health and happiness for all. Cheers

As to the challenge itself, I wrote 587 posts of varying length and quality, maybe more given I often forgot to tag each post with the postaday2011 tag. Undecided whether I'll try for 2012!

In the spirit of @Jeorgina consolidation, I decided to see if SeaMonkey could also be used as a Google Reader replacement!

Many of these tips should also work in Thunderbird, but I haven’t tested it. Feel free to leave a comment with your own experiences if you choose to try it out!

Setting it up for feeds

SeaMonkey Mail (SMM) works around the concept of accounts. Much as you would create a new email or newsgroup account, to subscribe to web feeds you create a special "Blogs and Newsfeeds account."

1. Navigate to File → New → Account
2. Choose "Blogs and News Feeds"
3. Give it any arbitrary name. I was boring and called it "Feeds"

In your SMM sidebar, you should now see an account with the familiar square orange web feed icon alongside your mail and newsgroup accounts. Consolidation and simplification to the MAX! ^_^

Subscribing to feeds

As I found with Google Reader, creating folders to organise your feeds is easier to do before you subscribe to feeds.

1. Right click your feeds account
2. Choose "New Folder"
3. Give it a unique name, and optionally choose a parent folder. Yes, you can have a hierarchy, such as “apple” under “tech”! Take that Google Reader!

Then its simple enough to subscribe to feeds:

1. Right click your feeds account
2. Choose "Subscribe"
3. Enter the feed URL, and choose a folder to download them to.
4. Optionally, you can also hit Import to download feeds from an OPML file, pretty slick!

Caveats

One thing that caught me out initially was that SMM downloads article from feeds into folders like email, rather than just displaying them in folders like Google Reader. As Mozilla notes:

Removing or changing the folder for a feed will not affect previously downloaded articles.

If you decide to change the folder for a feed, this just means you need to drag and drop any previously downloaded entries into the new folder as well.

Thoughts

I've been using SMM to read all my web feeds for about two weeks now, and so far it's been a more than capable replacement for Google Reader. Having my feeds in the same window as my newsgroups and email accounts has also been so gosh darn convenient!

Downloading and using SeaMonkey (or Thunderbird) just for web feeds might be overkill, but if you already use it, give it a try with your feeds. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself :)

From the CBC:

So while embassy officials can provide you with list of lawyers and information on local laws, they cannot arrange a helicopter to rescue your son from a German prison yard after he was arrested on drug charges, as one family requested.

A friend of mine who's father worked at the Australian High Commission in Singapore told me a common question was which stores carried Vegemite. People actually called the High Commission to find that out!

And when they're done their set, they can say "you don't have to go home but you can't Fate/Stay here!" It practically writes itself.

Pretty sure this isn't the most elegant way to do it, but setting the /Volumes directory immutable prevents volumes from auto-mounting:

% sudo chflags uchg /Volumes

Then to revert back:

% sudo chflags nouchg /Volumes% echo The Bird is The Word

Despite being an OS X user since the first 10.0 betas, I know surprisingly little about how Macs handle volumes. Put me in front of a [purely!] FreeBSD, NetBSD or Linux box and I'm set, but Mac has its own way of doing things. Of course ;).

I'm a month early, but I decided to get ahead on my NY resolutions and start transferring my domains from GoDaddy to Hover. So far, so good.

Screenshot by me on Flickr.

The Moves like Jagger

I was about to launch into a technical discussion of what transferring entails, however I'm half asleep and the super fabulous Dave Winer already wrote all you need to know. He's complimented me once and insulted me twice, which if you know the guy well enough is high praise ;).

His steps in a nutshell:

1. Log into GoDaddy
2. Unlock the domain
3. Request an authorisation code
4. Go to Hover
5. Transfer the domain using the authorisation code
6. Confirm with GoDaddy

The only step where I differed was his assertion that GoDaddy's transfer confirmation email only includes a link to cancel the transfer, not approve it. This is no longer the case; they provide a link to the page where you approve or cancel transfers.

That’s a lot of email

Every man and his dog is talking about this, so nothing I really could say would be anything new. What I will mention however is the difference between the number of emails I received from Hover, and from GoDaddy.

These were the messages from GoDaddy:

1. DOMAIN STATUS NOTIFICATION (unlocking)
2. DOMAIN INFORMATION YOU REQUESTED (code)
3. DOMAIN NAME TRANSFER – Confirmation of Registrar Transfer Request
4. AN IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING YOUR TRANSFER (successful transfer)
5. SORRY TO SEE YOU GO. WE’LL ALWAYS WELCOME YOU BACK.

And from Hover:

1. Please confirm your contact address
2. You transfer of [domains] to Hover has completed

I suppose the onus is on GoDaddy to confirm what could potentially be an elicit transfer, but still an interesting comparison. I'll be expecting far less spam from the folks at Hover.

Before you go, here’s some upselling!

More surprising though was GoDaddy's effort to keep my business till the very end… by doing the same sales tactics that drove so many of us away. From their second last email:

P.S. Visit GoDaddy.com and SAVE 15%* off your order of $50 or more. Just use source code [gibberish] when you check out to get your special savings. Start shopping now at GoDaddy.com or order by phone at (480) 505-8821.

And the footer of the final email:

SAVE 15% OFF* YOUR NEXT ORDER OF $40 OR MORE AT GODADDY.COM!
Use offer code [gibberish].

That was the same offer code as the $50 dollar deal above. It's as if they're bargaining with me.

.XXX IS HERE!
Block others from getting your domain name.
Register your .XXX NOW!

Yay, extortion!

CASHPARKING(R)!
Make money with your parked domain!
Let us show you how…

Yay, domain squatters!

I wonder if they expect to win much business back with those exact same tactics? Not that I'm suggesting anything, but the sign of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.

In the meantime, I'm really enjoying Hover :).