Raven’s Range
Blather around a virtual range

Sunday, 20 July 2008 11:13

20 July 2008

Filed in Blog

Another week has gone by, not quite as frustrating as the one prior, but given that I’m starting to get backache and twitchy wrists/elbows, it’s time for a change! To that end we are trying to finally leave on the little road trip we first started trying to leave on two weeks ago. ;)

My primary activities for the week have been (a) writing on my current contract and (b) programming. The rework of Markeroni is going as slow as molasses but I also think I’m starting to get over the hump. I have decided that after meeting my other obligations this morning, today is the last day I’m going to work as intensely on this project until August.

There are some other things I have to take care of, not least of which is catching up on my photos of the day. I have also been upping my graphic design skills, and I am really looking forward to putting my first drafts out there for feedback.

Still…in a twisted, physically demanding kind of way I am having fun.

The bike has contrived to wear out both front and rear brake pads at the same time, and is not fit to go down the mountain, so new brake pads are on the to-do list along with, judging from the pong that Silver just generated in the litter box, new cat litter. ;)

The 18th marked 12 years since I met Don “in real life” for the first time. Judging from the pile of mail I found in my mailbox the other day, I think mail forwarding is finally happening. ;)

Today I signed up for Day of Blogs which is the grass-roots replacement for Blogathon this year and marks what I consider to be the first anniversary of my entry into the outer blogosphere. Already 50 or so bloggers have signed up for their annual ~~night of torture~~ charitable mega-blogging-session and I am seriously considering blogging on two blogs simultaneously, this one and Raven’s Rides. (LJ friends can be assured that I will be turning off the cross-posting feature for the interim. ;)

One really good thing I did for myself and my sanity this last week was to pull all of my various email accounts into one inbox. I set filters to color them so that I know which came from where, and got down from 300 pending messages to a little over a hundred. It was an excellent move.

Things are still on fire and it’s now been a month since that fateful thunderstorm. The president flew overhead to see what was what and we are getting Federal aid. The smoke has been just plain nasty lately.

There was a tempest in a teapot at BookCrossing, which had some interesting lessons for me. Basically the management rolled out a bunch of new features but set significant restrictions on posting to the forums and sending private messages. There was a huge fuss, the restrictions were rolled back, but a whole discussion on funding/becoming international began which I found quite interesting.

For a start, the European attitude to merchandising, money and spending is a whole lot different from the American, and that’s something really helpful to me as I intend to open Markeroni to Europe next year. And then there’s the issue of translating sites, something which I was only considering doing and am now actively building in. Basically one of the members said that if you were serious about it being a global site then you’d make your users a lot happier if at least the basics were in their language!

But as for the rest, it’s a typical internet fist-fight with opinions, huffings and puffings, sane people, crazy people and all the usual mish-mash.