Archives for March 2007

How using Google Reader can save you time and give you a kickass, dynamic blogroll

March 27, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

I recently read a blog post called ‘101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle‘ post over at I help you blog. I thought out of the 101 great ideas there must be something there I could do that I could get inspiration from to write about and I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. This post falls under a couple of the 101 categories, but mainly 65.

I’ve been using Google Reader to keep up with my weblog reading. I found I didn’t really add many links to my own, old, Typepad Blogroll here and plowing through them every day was tiresome because some are only updated weekly. Flicking to a blog that hasn’t been updated every day wastes half a minute of my time. Times this by 10 for the amount of blogs that weren’t updated regularly and times it by 5 for the days of the week that I’d check them, this adds up and like most of us I’ve got precious little time to waste.

Getting started on Google Reader

I don’t really need to go into this because Google themselves have written about this, but you need to get a Google account if you haven’t already, then start subscribing to feeds.

Subscribing to feeds

I subscribed to all the feeds of the blogs that were in my blogroll. To my surprise though, some blogs don’t have an RSS feed and as far as I’m aware all blog software has the facility to create an RSS feed.

Take it a step further and use a Feedburner feed. Information about that is at Feedburner. If you’re into statistics this is the ideal way to see roughly who’s subscribing to and reading your blog, and it makes it a whole lot easier for people to click on this link in your weblog and subscribe using their feed reader of choice, in my case Google Reader. Feedburner also gives you the option to create an email subscription for those who don’t know or care what RSS feeds are.

If the website creator hasn’t thoughtfully added a nice button for you to click and subscribe to their updates, then modern browsers allow you to detect RSS feeds automatically. I can’t cover all the browsers here, so a quick web search should help you out.

Using Google Reader and managing your feeds

You can categorise your feeds into folders. This makes it easier to check up on what you want to view when you’ve subscribed to lots of feeds. I’ve got my daily reads and other categories for digital media etc.

When you’ve subscribed to a feed you can select the Feed settings dropdown menu at the top to put this feed into a folder and/or make a new folder. This helps to categorise your feeds and is useful with the more feeds you subscribe to.

The thing I like about Google Reader is that it shows me what I’ve read and what I haven’t so I can check in whenever I get a chance and immediately see that the bold items are the ones I haven’t read. You can either mark them as read, or if you scroll down the feed item it automatically marks itself as unread. There are options to mark a read feed as unread if you want to check back on it later.

It’s also possible to select the little star to the left of each feed heading to bookmark it. I do this if I like a particular post and want to come back to it.

But the great thing about Google Reader is being able to share your favourite posts which is what I’ve done on my blog. It’s replaced my static list of Blogs I read.

How to share your favourite feeds on your blog

When you’re reading a feed you can select ‘Share’ at the bottom as per this diagram.

The cars are moving in

March 26, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

The way I’m feeling at the moment, this is about all I’m up for posting. This is to add to the what my son sleeps with series. It looks like the cars want to take over. Click on it to see a couple more. The last one was with the doll and prior to that was sleeping with the shark and sleeping as batman.

To top off a pretty crappy time in my life with a sick dad and a child that challenges me all the time, my babysitter caught up with me at school this morning and informed me that she couldn’t have JJ this Saturday night. This is the one babysitter I thought I could rely on because I pay her, she’s not just doing me a favour. To tell you the truth I can’t even remember what excuses she used. All I could think of was that she just didn’t want to babysit because of all the problems that JJ gave her last year at after school care. So now I’m paranoid that she doesn’t want to babysit anymore.

Update

March 22, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

I’ve been making excuses for the last three weeks about my lack of posting here because of my dad being in hospital. The hospital visits have slacked off a bit, but that’s mainly due to it being hard to take JJ in to see him.

Initially dad didn’t want to see JJ – mind you that was on the first day when I asked him – and knowing that JJ is quite restless and quite loud I kept him away for nearly a week. Then JJ was starting to ask if he could see his Pop and was getting quite upset when I said I’d have to check. I ended up taking him in for a little while and he’s been back since, but they are very short visits. I think the whole thing has freaked him out if the number of wet beds by JJ are anything to go by.

Dad’s stroke affected him on his right side and therefore affected his speech. Fortunately now, he’s speaking so much better which makes it a lot easier all round. The speech clarity comes and goes though. I think he gets tired talking and when he’s tired the words don’t come out as clearly. A couple of days after he had his stroke, it worsened and he lost all movement in his right arm which he is now also getting back.

As I mentioned in my previous post (linked above) a symptom of stroke can be that emotions are displayed a lot easier, ie crying and laughing. The crying has eased of somewhat but he still gets upset when people are arriving or leaving for his visits. It’s not as frequent and it doesn’t seem to last as long now though.

The main thing he’s freaking out about is that he might never be able to drive again. I don’t think anyone has actually told him this, it’s more how he feels at the moment. Apparently he asked mum if she’d cancelled his driver’s licence which of course she hasn’t.

A few days ago he had a stent put in blocked veins (or arteries?) at the back of his neck where there were blockages. This should help eliminate a further stroke. As this procedure went well, he moved to rehab today where he will be for another month or so. He’s very well aware that he’s been in hospital for nearly 4 weeks and I’m sure he’s counting down the days until he can leave hospital.

I’m certainly feeling a lot more positive about the whole thing now. The first few days really dragged on, and the initial setback freaked us all out a bit. Until then, we hadn’t thought that his stroke could get worse.

Now, practically all my spare time (I didn’t think I really had any before) is taken up with visiting him so the home maintenance is suffering a bit – nothing that can’t wait mind you. So there’ll be a few more leaves to sweep up, and a few more weeds to pick when I eventually do get around to it. I think I’ve seen my dad more in the last 4 weeks than I have in the last year which isn’t a bad thing.

Impulse

March 20, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

I get email newsletters from a couple of airlines so when I read one yesterday for $18 fares I immediately got online and started booking an $18 flight to Melbourne with Jetstar. I think everyone else was doing it too, so it took a lot longer than it should have. I think they need to do something to get around the overload problem.

Apparently there was a meltdown when they advertised $22 flights a month ago. It obviously hasn’t been fixed yet.

Despite that, I managed to contact my friend in Melbourne, make sure it was okay to lob on their doorstep in August (when the $18 fares are), and then book the tickets. By the time I paid for 2 return tickets, taxes, credit card booking fee and I even got insurance it came to just under $100 but that’s still really cheap.

I haven’t told JJ yet because I don’t want four months of when are we going on a plane?

Apologies

March 19, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

Dear blog,

Sorry I haven’t been writing for you for very regularly recently. My main excuse is this. I have plans for some writing for you but just haven’t got around to it. It doesn’t help that I wasn’t home all weekend and even though I was visiting my sister and going to a friend’s party I still didn’t have that much time just to sit around.

Hopefully things will settle down a bit more in a couple of weekends once the March madness finishes and then our relationship will get back on track.

Missing you
Jaycee.

Womadelaide 2007

March 13, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

I managed to go to Womadelaide on Sunday. I do love going to this event and have been to every one for 10 years now. For the first few years I’d go for the whole weekend but that’s changed now that JJ is on the scene, and now it’s an annual event rather than a bi-annual event.

This year I took JJ for the afternoon. The trouble with taking kids is that they want to do kids stuff all the time. Womad has a great kids area with storytelling, workshops making stuff, jumping castle, the Amazing Drumming Monkeys etc but the kids just don’t want to leave so all the music that’s on in the afternoon is hard to go and actually see, and that’s what I’ve paid to see.

We did manage to get to The Waifs but because they couldn’t see they wanted to go right up the front. Off we went fighting our way to the front where of course they still couldn’t see. And all this while Kev Carmody was a special guest singing ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’, one of my favourite songs.

That was the only music I really got to see in the afternoon. Fortunately we offloaded the kids to my friend’s husband and were unencumbered for the evening.

We ventured over to see the Kronos Quartet and ensemble but so did just about all the other thousands there. People go to Womad wanting to sit down and enjoy the music so they bring along their low-backed chairs and picnic rugs, but then their view is interrupted by people wanting to stand up. I thought I was going to witness my first ever fight at Womad because the sit-down people were really pissed off with the stand-up people. We had a nice spot near the front and would have sat down if we could, but there was no room because of the amount of people there. So the music was sometimes drowned out by people yelling ‘SIT DOWN’.

As far as I’m concerned if you want to see the musicians and you can’t because people are standing in front of you, you stand up and look. If you want to sit down and enjoy the music, sit somewhere you can see it. Further back is usually quite good at this event.

My only other gripe was that when I was watching Augie March, again I was at the front but nobody considered sitting down for them, and people in front of me sat on others shoulders. This is grown women sitting on mens shoulders to get a better view, although we were up the front so their view was quite good anyway. I put up with it, cause I’m a cool chick and I could sort of see, and I had the option of moving, right? My gripe was that one girl, whose bum was right in front of my face, was farting. It wasn’t a one off, it was continual little, smelly fluffs that were a bit offensive. I waved my hands in front of my face and made a loud comment or three which just served to embarrass my friend, not get the girl to get her smelly bum away from me.

Apart from these little incidents I really enjoyed myself. I used to be worried about losing people at this event because you’d never find them again if you hadn’t pre-arranged something. But even though I did get separated I found the people I needed to towards the end of the night. Failing that we all had mobile phones, but receiving a text asking where you are does not a rendevous make.

I watched Salif Keita who had excellent dancers. I was mesmerised by them. They did simple moves but they were so effortless, yet energetic. Salif Keita has an amazing voice and he did a couple of more acoustic songs which were just haunting and beautiful.

I ended the night by watching the Mad Professor – a UK dub and reggae producer (he helped out Massive Attack who I love). I couldn’t see a damn thing, but had a good dance nonetheless.

Before I went to bed, I washed all the dirt from my feet and wished I could stay awake to have a bath to ease my aching muscles.

Patrick White Readers’ Group – The Solid Mandala

March 7, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

Once again I decided to join in the Patrick White Readers’ Group – this time for ‘The Solid Mandala‘. The other book this group has done was ‘The Vivisector’ which I waded through and you can read my thoughts here, here and here.

I really liked the first chapter of ‘The Solid Mandala’ which is refreshingly short, unlike most of the remaining chapters in this book and most of the chapters in ‘The Vivisector’. I liked the way the protagonists, Arthur and Waldo Brown are introduced by Mrs Dun and Mrs Poulter as they are on the bus. White is very good a setting a scene and describing his characters so that we get to know the twins a bit before they make an appearance.

Then I started on Chapter 2 about Waldo and got bogged down after a little while. As I kept reading I kept wondering what the heck was happening. There didn’t seem to be any point at all other than learning about what Waldo, his brother and their parents were like. We learn that Waldo is the smaller one and Arthur is the stronger, healthier twin but he likes to help his mum knead the dough. They don’t let their father know this though, as it’s not a manly thing to do.

Then I got up to page 86 in my book and I haven’t continued. Ooh, I have loads of excuses which I won’t go into here but if you read the last week or two’s worth of entries in my blog you’ll get the idea. I feel a bit like I’ve failed, but I’m not losing any sleep over it.

I did, however, watch the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club last night to see what they said about it. It was interesting that the two older panellists, Jacki Weaver and Jason Stegar both liked the book. Jacki Weaver said it was her favourite one and she absolutely loves Patrick White. She said that you needed commitment and compassion to read it while Jason admitted it wasn’t an easy read, but he enjoyed it and he saw Patrick White in Waldo.

I don’t know that much about Patrick White but I think his way with words is reflected in Waldo’s character on p 36 of my book (the 1966 edition published by Eyre & Spottiswoode Ltd), ‘Because words were not in Arthur’s line. It was Waldo who collected them, like stamps or coins. He made lists of them. He rolled them in his mouth like polished stones.’

The two younger guests, Craig Reucassel and Marieke Hardy both disliked the book a lot. Craig said that he found it difficult. It was dense and overwhelming and nothing happened. He said that no-one would understand the crucial moments but this is where Jacki liked it as she had to use her imagination for these bits. Marieke said reading it was like wading through a vat of cold porridge.

I felt somewhat comforted after watching this that I am not alone in finding this book difficult. I don’t know if I’ll ever borrow it from the library again and try to read it, but when the Patrick White Readers’ Group comes up with the next book I’ll give it a go.