Daoine’s Mischief

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…

The man who brutally attacked Lauren Huxley received a sentence of 24 years this morning. He smashed her skull and face with a metal tool and tried to destroy evidence by dousing her in petrol and setting the house alight. Lauren didn’t know him - it was possibly a random attack.

I’ve finished watching the episodes of Torchwood Season Two on YouTube, so I’ve now had a chance to update my Torchwood Alumni lens with season two tributes as well.

Be warned that the Torchwood Alumni lens contains full spoilers for both Torchwood Season One and Season Two. Spoilers are marked, though, so if you want to you can sneak a peak at Season One first, if you haven’t yet seen Season Two.