Archives for April 2006

Well, actually mum….

April 27, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

JJ has been getting more and more into writing lately. He’s trying to write his name, he recognises different letters and he’s pretty good at recognising numbers. Consequently he’s going through lots of paper in his endeavour to learn. I’m talking one piece of A4 paper for a few scribbles.

I said to him a few times recently, ‘Why don’t you use your Megasketcher to draw on?’

He has deftly avoided the issue but it was obviously playing on his mind because a few nights ago when I put him to bed he gave me this big elaborate story that went along the lines of someone else drew some lines with texta onto the Megasketcher and it sure wasn’t him.

I picked up the offending Megasketcher and sure enough, it had two blue lines in a cross formation across it. It’s obvious to me that the fairies or one of his friends didn’t do it, that he is the one who drew on it and I told him as much. The fairies are responsible for a heck of a lot around our place and they are on hand in just about every situation. Sometimes I even have to watch out because they are sitting on his hands and I’m not allowed to squash them.

I think he thought I would freak out about the Megasketcher but I was amazingly calm. When I do lose my cool it’s over the stupidest little things, but we won’t go into that.

I don’t know how to get these lines of the Megasketcher, so if anyone can offer my any tips they would be gratefully received so we can try to stem the tide of recycling leaving the Jaycee household. Well that’s a bit dramatic. He can still use the Megasketcher, it’s just go two blue guidelines ala Photoshop now.

Silly me decided going to IKEA would be a good idea

April 26, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

I work with a couple of IKEA fans who have brainwashed me into thinking IKEA is good, so I therefore thought I would check out the newly opened Adelaide IKEA store. It opened in Adelaide on 20 April so yesterday, being the ANZAC day holiday, I thought I’d go along.

I took JJ with me, like I had a choice, and drove past IKEA, realised there were queues to get into the carpark and realised it would be better just to turn around and go home. I didn’t though. I found a carpark a couple of blocks away and still went along, with half of Adelaide.

I had no intentions of buying anything, I just wanted to case the joint for potential purchases down the track. I would have liked to pick up a catalogue but couldn’t see any of those.

JJ got bored very quickly and nagged me constantly to go home. I didn’t take too much persuading I must say.

Hopefully it will calm down within a month or so and I’ll be able to get back there one day.

Buying presents for kids birthdays

April 19, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

My son is nearly five years old and in the last year or so he’s been invited to more birthday parties. This can get quite expensive because you can’t rockup to one of these parties without a birthday present.

In my never ending endeavour to be more organised I’ve decided to buy stuff when I see it on special and I have the perfect avenue for this at my workplace.

Every couple of weeks we get a bunch of stuff delivered for us to browse through and put in a order if we wish. This stuff is a mix of mostly books, but other things also. Today I put in an order for a little girls backpack as I know a couple of little girls who might really like it and their birthdays are coming up in a few months. I also ordered a couple of sticker story books and a cookbook for myself.

These items are usually on special and I like a bargain and I can’t afford to spend a heap of money on kids birthday presents.

So to remember that I have bought these things I’ve got a special page in my diary devoted to a birthday present list. This list either has a present matched to a particular person, or a present matched to a particular age group/gender.

Therefore when a birthday is coming up I can look up this page in my diary and know that I have a present, or not.

Installing wireless broadband

April 18, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

My sister went and organised wireless broadband for herself. She came home armed with her wireless gateway modem, a CD, a quick start guide and the assurance from the salespeople that you just plug it in, turn it on and you’re away.

Yeah right!

Luckily she also organised me to come round after work one day to set it up for her. I have some technical support background and sheer pig-headedness on my side to get these things set up. She is a bit of a computer luddite.

I rocked up to her place after work one day last week and plugged everything in, went and turned on the computer and things weren’t working as they should have been. I rang up technical support and after nearly a two hour wait I finally spoke to someone. We fairly quickly established that a wireless adapter was missing from the computer – a very essential part when connecting wireless broadband. We also worked out that to get the right settings on the wireless gateway it would be easiest to plug it into a computer that had a network card which my sister didn’t have.

I do have a network card on my computer so I took home the wireless gateway and the ethernet cable and my sister bought herself a wireless adapter. When the gateway was plugged into my computer I rang up technical support – blessedly quiet over Easter, so I didn’t have to wait too long – and a different person basically said I hadn’t needed to do that really, that I could set it up at my sister’s place.

So, on Easter Sunday, off I went to my sister’s place, found the easter egg stash, armed myself with chocolate, put Free Willy 2 on the DVD for JJ to keep him occupied and installed the wireless adapter into the computer. I plugged everything else in and rang technical support again when there was no wireless connection forthcoming.

Yet a different technical support person brought up the settings on the gateway using while connected to a network card. I told him that when I was all connected in this way at my place that one of you guys told me it didn’t matter. I got step by step instructions from him what to do when it was connected to a network card and all I had to do was change the wireless setting to mixed from disabled. I had been told this the first time after the two hour wait but failed to write down proper instructions and failed to take this improperly written instructions with me.

Off I went home again – luckily only five minutes away – changed the setting, went back to my sister’s and finally got everything working with just one slight hiccup that a new piece of hardware (the bit between the phone jack and the modem/landline) will fix.

I’ve taken a while to tell this tale and it could have all been avoided with CLEAR instructions.

The quick setup guide didn’t have a vital ‘What you need to do/have first’ section. This section could have outlined that we needed a wireless adapter, and how to find out if you have one. This section could have outlined that you might need to connect the gateway to a network card to change the wireless setting. This section could have saved me a few hours and many phone calls and needless stress. This section would have only taken up a tiny bit of space. This section would have also saved a lot of technical support time from the ISP.

Not so hard I would think.

Happy 2nd blogiversary to me.

April 14, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

It’s two years ago today since I started this blog. I slipped very quietly into the blogging world and I am proud of myself that I have persisted.

I chose the title Semantically driven because I love words and language and reading, hence the word semantic in my title. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, semantic means, ‘Relating to meaning in language; relating to connotations of words; hence ~semantically.’ Well I don’t talk about meaning in language or language relating to the connotation of words so maybe my blog name is a bit misleading and I may change it. I have been thinking about a different title, but what I don’t know yet.

Perhaps when I feel I’ve found a direction for this blog apart from just writing I might change the title of it. One reason being that after I set this blog up I Googled ‘semantically driven’ and found a heap of computer related links about this term. Now when I Google ‘semantically driven’ I get this blog.

Now I am getting caught up in words and their meaning aren’t I?

As for some sort of direction for my blog, or some sort of focus. I’m one of these people who will start things and not necessarily pursue them. Here’s some things I would like to pursue more:

my Retrospective, come family photo history, come travel I’ve done in the past stories
more looking around on the web for interesting blogs/websites to gain inspiration from
do, or think about, more things in my life that I can write about?

Just a few thoughts while I sip my celebratory drink and contemplate.

Blogging Faster than Kudzu

April 13, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

A month and a bit ago I came across a website, probably through BlogHer by a novelist called Joshilyn Jackson. Her blog is called Faster than Kudzu and she’s reinstated the Zero Boss’s Blogging for Books.

When the Zero Boss was doing it I never got around to submitting an entry. As the name suggests, you write a blog entry related to a particular topic. Your blog entry is judged and if it wins, you win a book. Sounds good to me.

So it has two plusses for me. There’s the potential to win a book and it’s also a way to force me to write. I submitted an entry for March which was to write about the military in some form or other. I didn’t win by the way, and I didn’t get into the top six or seven but I did get a blog post out of it.

The other great thing about the chosen topics is that they’re really broad and can be interpreted in myriad ways.

Unfortunately I missed April’s submission. This is why I’ve added the weblog link to my ‘Blogs I read’ links so I can keep up with her blog and the Blogging for Books and get me some writin’ practise. Go and have a look, you might want to submit an entry yourself.

My attention has been elsewhere

April 12, 2006 by Jen at Semantically driven

I have been neglecting my blog over the last couple of weeks as my attention has been elsewhere.

Firstly, I’m filling in for my boss at work and I’ve been taking my work home with me in my head. A couple of mornings this week I’ve woken up and started thinking about work, and some other things, and not been able to get back to sleep. The other morning I woke up at 4.30 and eventually decided just to read my book as I couldn’t get back to sleep. I also had trouble getting to sleep that evening so I was up for nearly 24 hours. It is just about full moon time and my sleep is always thrown out around then too so it could be a combination of things.

To add to it, I spent one and a half days away from my four day work week last week because of my son so I’ve been catching up this week. I finally feel like I’m on top of things again in readiness for the four day Easter break.

When distraction is needed – shop! This is what I did yesterday lunch time. I went to the local op shop and bought up big. When I say bought up big, I got four items of clothing for myself, and three for JJ but only spent $30. Pretty good huh!

I’m looking forward to having a four day break and just spending it around the house and catching up with friends.

This post is all over the place, a bit like my head at the moment really.