Archives for October 2007

Am moving my blog

October 31, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

I’m in the process of moving my blog. I hope to have it done before I host the All Women Carnival next Monday.

So if you get any trackbacks that look like they have my content but come from a different domain, it’s just me testing this until I switch over to the semanticallydriven.com domain. Thanks to Meg from Dipping into the Blogpond for alerting me to a potential blog scrape.

I must say that it’s a damn site harder than I imagined. I really need to have a day off to knuckle down and do it.

A lot of the websites I’ve read that talk about moving from Typepad to WordPress give you tips but not the meat to go with the tips. Things like run an SQL command to update permalinks. I’m a little bit familiar with this type of thing, but I still need to know where to go to do stuff like this so it’s a very steep learning curve.

So the posting will be a bit light on here until I get it up and running.

Please bear with me. Thanks.

Virtual colliding with reality

October 30, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

On Saturday I went to my second Flickr meet with a local Flickr group. It’s really great fun. Not only am I spreading my wings getting to meet new people I’m getting to practise my photography. Here’s a few shots I took. We started off in Second Valley which is down the bottom of Fluerieu Peninsula.

It was a warm, cloudy day but as the afternoon went on the wind picked up and eventually the rain started. Fortunately by this time we’d nearly finished so the rain and dirt came down while driving home.

As I said we started off at Second Valley. If you walk down the jetty you will find a path leading off the jetty that goes over the rocks and to a bunch of abandoned boatsheds. Who knew there is such photographic beauty in rust.

Even though these sheds have obviously been abandoned for years, someone has still shown off their graffiti talents.

I took JJ along. He used my old camera and took some great photos himself. I spent most of my time there worrying that he would fall down these rocks or fall into the water. He was with another boy so I decided to let go and hope that they would look after each other. They did, and they were both fine.

The more photographs I take makes me realise that I have started seeing things in a different way. I used to stand back and take a shot and now I’m thinking more about angles and close-ups. In the past I would have taken a few shots and been disappointed with a lot of them. Now I take heaps more shots and am still disappointed with some of them, but ooh and aah over some of them too. The Flickr group I’m in is really supportive and give positive feedback with the shots they like. They do this for JJ’s photos too.

I have more photos to share once I’ve uploaded them.

To the NaBloPoMo virgins – some words of wisdom from a veteran

October 26, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

I got the headline and post all worked out in my head and started a draft and hit save before selecting draft and now Feedburner has announced it to my readers, and there was no content. Oops.

Last year I decided to join the maniacs that wanted to post at least once per day for every single day in November. It was called NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). And by jove, I did it. Guess what, I’m not doing it again this year. I’m not that stupid. You wouldn’t think that posting once a day is very hard and it’s not if that’s what you do as the norm. My post average is about 4-5 a week and doing the extra 2-3 posts a week is harder than you might imagine.

NaBloPoMo had it’s humble beginnings at Eden Kennedy’s Fussy.org blog. Lots of maniacs joined in, and some dropped out for various reasons. As I said throughout last November I like a challenge and I wasn’t about to give up just to maintain my sanity.

This year, NaBloPoMo has gone all social. It’s not its own domain now – nablopomo.com and you can do all sorts of things there. That’s a bit of a guess because I haven’t joined or had too much of a look.

So, those words of wisdom from a NaBloPoMo veteran.

You think you know your schedule during November, but you don’t. I thought I had my November fairly nailed down last year, but it turned out to be manic. I had an interstate friend visit, I had parenting problems and I was still on dialup for most of it for goodness sake. And this was also while I was doing some extra freelance work on top of my day job. Also, don’t forget it’s the month before Christmas and things are hotting up for the holiday season.

Even if you have a NaBloPoMo plan, it will more than likely go out the window. So you 2007 NaBloPoMo’ers – take note. November’s going to the busiest month of your year.

I’ll be watching from the sidelines, sipping a cool drink, maintaining a cool head and patting myself on the back for not joining in this year. My last word. If you do take part, you’ll probably get really really sick of trying to remember how the heck to write NaBloPoMo and just start dribbling rubbish. I promise not to say ‘I told you so’.

Sleep – or lack thereof

October 26, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

It’s that time of year here where the mornings get light just after it got dark the night before. I do exaggerate, but it does get light about 5am. Because of that, and because of a persistent dry cough that starts during my sleep and eventually wakes me up, a cough that I’ve had for nearly a week, I haven’t been sleeping at all well.

Last night I made myself a hot lemon and honey tea before bed, had a cough lolly and went to bed. Fortunately I slept right through and woke up about 6.30am. Not long after I woke up JJ came into my room, saw that I was asleep, climbed very gently over the top of me (it’s usually a bounce with elbows and knees in all the soft places), gave me a kiss and cuddled up next to me. I pretended I was asleep for a little longer and then ‘woke up’.

I feel so refreshed, it’s wonderful. And I love that JJ treated me so carefully this morning. I told him that too.

This week’s All Women carnival

October 24, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

Meganbayliss The lovely Megan at ImaginIf is hosting this week’s All Women blogging carnival. Not only has she put together a post with links to all the submissions, she’s trawled the submitters blogs to get incriminating photos of them to include with their submission. I’ve returned the favour.

On top of this, she’s running a competition associated with the carnival. If you haven’t already, get over and check on the carnival. If you’re a woman, I’d recommend joining in. As I’ve said before and I’ll probably say again, it’s a great way to read some excellent blog posts and potentially find some new blogs to read.

Now, if only I could remember to submit every week!

Olive Riley’s hallo to YouTube Australia

October 24, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

You may or may not have heard of Olive Riley. She just turned 108 the other day and is probably the world’s oldest blogger.

She and her blogging helper Mike have been putting videos up on YouTube for a while now. YouTube Australia launched the other day and because of Ollie’s videos they asked if Ollie could be at the launch. Due to her birthday celebrations exhausting her she couldn’t make it but they videoed a hallo, and put it on YouTube of course.

This is the longer 2 and a half minute version (View on Youtube if you prefer). Mike had to edit it down for the launch.

A musical weekend

October 23, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

As the title suggests I had a pretty musical weekend. It kicked off really nicely with a Nick Cave and Grinderman gig at the lovely Thebarton Theatre in Adelaide. Before I extol the wonderfulness of Nick Cave I have to say that Thebarton Theatre is one of the best venues in Adelaide to see bands. It’s got personality and soul. It opened in 1928 and I sure hope it’s around in 2028 so I can potter along and see bands there. I might need to sit down rather than stand up at the front by then.

Back to Nick Cave and Grinderman. I thoroughly enjoyed the Grinderman set. I haven’t listened to lots of their music but it took me back to the days when I first started going to see bands 20 years ago in pubs. I was one of the only people who didn’t take any photos there but Daniel Boud took some great photos at the Sydney gig but not of Grinderman unfortunately. The band members all had longish hair and long beards and looked quite ZZ Top. The song ‘Words of Wisdom’ made me think that Nick Cave would be very comfortable being one of those tv preachers getting people to sell their souls.

Then Nick Cave came on doing his songs and did many favourites. He ended with a bit of whimper though, not a bang like I would have liked. A couple of times they stuffed up and I even heard Nick say at one stage that his voice was totally fucked, something I could relate to two days later.

So on to the rest of the musical weekend. Myself, my two singing/ukulele playing mates and three other good friends/supporters all went over to Yorke Peninsula on Saturday so we could play at a local Jam on the Sunday. On Saturday my voice started going downhill and on Sunday it was very croaky. I gargled salt water, I drank cups of tea, I tried not to talk, I warmed up my voice so I wouldn’t strain it while singing. I did just about everything I could think of to conserve my voice and was really really worried that it would sound crap during our three song set. It didn’t sound its best, but it was passable.

Here we are – I’m on the right.
Ukuleles

We were all really nervous but our three songs went down really well. My feet on this stool were madly shaking and so were my hands which is really unfortunate when you’re trying to play the ukulele so some of the plucking and some of the chords were quite suspect but they weren’t miked up which was quite fortunate. There’s some more photos of our weekend.