Daoine’s Mischief

…than to harrass already-edgy shoppers at a shopping centre.

Just today I was hurrying through the centre to get to the Post Office for the second time, having decided the queue was too long the first time and that I would do my other shopping first and swing by again afterwards. In that space the cause celebs had moved into prime position:

Hello! Do you like animals?

Wrong day, mate.

I have a streaming head cold and a raging headache, and I can’t take anything for it because I’m pregnant.

I have “popped out” to the pharmacy, the supermarket, and the post office - hoping I would be only half an hour or so, but I’ve already had to go to two supermarkets to get what I need of a list of 5 items (and I’m still one item short because neither supermarket has it in stock). That is on top of “just swinging by” the post office twice.

Wrong day. But tomorrow will undoubtedly be just as wrong.

Do I like animals?

Only on a barbecue.

Don’t get me wrong: I do like animals. I just never signed a contract requiring me to be honest and sincere when asked a leading question by a complete stranger.

Save yourself the martyrdom of trying to interest the completely uninterestable in your cause. There are better ways to bring people’s attention to something worthwhile. Squidoo is one of them.

Here are some top notch lenses created to promote a cause. Learn from the masters, and ditch the supermarket table and posters.

I’ll start with some animal causes since it was an animal lover I was rude to:

Frankster’s Are You Polar Bear Aware and Saving the Dancing Bears of India lenses
Kiwisoutback’s All About Endangered Species lens

And my favourite lenses that promote the concept of empowering people:

Girl Powered Peace by WorldPeaceEmerging
KIVA: For The Love Of Kiva! by MrLewisSmile
The Acumen Fund by SemperFidelis

So it appears we Aussies don’t like Starbucks enough for them to hang around. They’re closing 61 stores in Melbourne, and I, for one, am delighted to see them go. (My husband is another who feels the same way.)

Like all good coffee drinkers, we were curious when Starbucks opened here. We’d heard of the name, of course. So we gave it a go. Actually we were stupid enough to go to two different Starbucks franchises, three times. (Not each, though.) But each time we left disappointed. The coffee was awful, for a start. And it was cold. But the food was bad, too. The final time we paid a visit to Starbucks, I ordered a piece of cake that was doughy and actually left me feeling ill. I didn’t manage to finish the coffee I’d ordered as it was just making things worse.

So that was that. We avoided Starbucks from then on out. And now, hopefully, those premises will be taken over by real coffee shops.

Long live the real barista!

In the meantime, here are some real coffee lenses to savour:

Making the perfect cup of coffee, by 1SquidAddict
Interesting, fun, & Informative Things About Coffee, by TheCoffeeCorner
The Most Expensive Coffee in the World, by Naiza

And let’s all go argue with Julie:
STARBUCKS vs. DUNKIN’ DONUTS — Coffee WARS!, by JaguarJulie

(Maybe American Starbucks employ qualified baristas, but they don’t here in Aus. These kids just can’t make a decent cup of coffee and there is no way “Starbucks make the best coffee” is a statement you can make here in Australia.)

I’ve been put out of business for two weeks. A number of lowlifes with MySpace accounts and some random ignominious bloggers decided to steal my bandwidth by illegally hotlinking to my images. They sucked more than three-quarters of my bandwidth in two days, and yesterday I went to publish something to my website only to get a bandwidth exceeded warning. In the past I’ve used less than 3% of my monthly bandwidth allocation, so I never had reason to expect something like this.

I am angry. Half of my potential income for two weeks is simply gone, because a handful of miscreants wanted some nice images for their blogs. Guess what, though. I know who you are. I have half a mind to send you an invoice. I know how much my bandwidth costs me. I know how much of my bandwidth you’ve stolen. Not hard to work out what each of you owes me on that side. But a little harder to work out how much income you’ve cost me.

I now have to give a big thumbs up to Gravatar for following up on this even when I decided that creating a new account name meant that the problem was half-fixed and I couldn’t be bothered any further. The different name meant I could get the avatar on my blog page, but not on the main SquidTop page or on any comments.

So, in my grumpy mood, I didn’t even bother to email them back to tell them it had half worked. Instead they read my blog and worked out from that what had happened. And then they managed to switch the name of my new account back to “daoine”.

All sorted. Thank you Gravatar! That’s great customer service

I gave up.

Gravatar didn’t read the email I sent them, but they did respond. They told me to do exactly what I’d told them I’d already done.

So I told them that. They emailed back (actually this time within a few minutes) and said try logging into WordPress.com.

So I tried to log into WordPress. No go. First, logging in, I get “No such user.” Then I try to set up a new account and get “That user already exists. Log in.” Try logging in, and I get “No such user.” Try “Forgot password” and enter username, and I get “No such user”. Enter email address and I get “No such email address in the system.”

Back to the logic that surely No Such User means I can create that user account. Nope. That user already exists. “Did you forget your password?”

By now there’s enough of my hair on the floor to donate to Susan’s hair donation lens.

So I gave up and entered a different username to sign up with. And voila! Activate the link, open up Gravatar and I’m already signed in under that name. Upload an avatar, open SquidTop, refresh a couple of pages… and here I am. Under the wrong username, but at this stage who gives a continental two-bit hoohah.

Yup. It’s a lot of lenses to keep track of. Even if you have 50, you probably feel like you’re doing a bit of a juggling act.

I’m thrilled to bits with the new(ish) Dashboard features. Here’s how I’ve arranged my updating schedule:

 
• In addition to all the other labels I’ve madly created, I’ve added four new “Quarterly” labels (January to March; April to June; July to September; and October to December).
• All my Valentine’s lenses (including WIP Valentine’s lenses) go in the Jan-Mar category. These need to be updated in January so that they are ready for February. During February I just need to keep a check on them and update things like search terms and popular products.
• Mother’s Day and Father’s Day lenses go into the April to June section - same deal: update in April, check during May and/or June. (Plus Father’s Day goes into July-September also, for Australian Father’s Day.)
• Halloween lenses go into both the July-September and October-December sections. Updating starts in July.
• Christmas lenses go into October-December with updating overlapping Halloween. That tends to be a hectic period.
• Non-seasonal lenses go into a quieter quarter. Movie lenses go into the quarter related to when the movie comes on circuit, and are then moved to the quarter related to when the DVD is released.

Then the important part: set the quarter you are in as the new Default page. Currently my default page is July-September, meaning that all my Halloween lenses are in front of me for updating.

I was originally going to sort this month by month, but I think quarterly will be fine.

Deep breath. I’m going to try this Gravatar thingy again. How can something be so complicated? My two weeks are long up, so hopefully that has erased any stupid mistake I made last time I tried it. Wish me luck!

I published my 100th lens this week. The lucky lens is an early one for Halloween: Making Halloween Costumes from Household Items.

After seeing my Torchwood lens float up to around the 120 mark earlier in the year, and spending several weeks trying to get it more traffic to push it into the top 100, I finally gave it up as a lost cause when it dropped below 500. Then, today, I looked at my dashboard and noticed that Torchwood was right at the top - a place reserved for my Pirate Costumes lens for longer than a year. And only then did I notice the lensrank. In all my busy-ness making lens after lens to get those 100 lenses under my belt by 30 June for the Giant Squid Top 100 Club challenge, I hadn’t been paying attention to my top lenses at all. I finally have two lenses in the Top 100!

If anyone was going to beat cancer three times, we thought Jane McGrath would be the one. She was a real fighter, and even as she waged her own battle with breast, hip, and brain tumours, she was determined to help others. As founder and president of The McGrath Foundation, she did - and her legacy will go on in her Breast Care Nurse project and the campaign to raise awareness amongst younger women.

We salute this beautiful woman who died on Sunday 22 June 2008.

In Eastern countries, the rules are fairly clear - remove your shoes before entering a home or other important building. But what is the proper etiquette in the west? Would you really want a financial consultant going through your tax figures in his gungy socks?

Weigh in on the debate on whether to remove your shoes or keep them on…