Oh Dear! Me Too …

In the end I gave in, despite putting up strong resistance for several years. I did not need it, I thought. I am a blogger, although I have been far too busy of late to find time and space to both read and write.

Lately emails and phone calls have been very frequent between myself and Sweden due to events and situations in “the old country”.

On Saturday my brother said “But you are the perfect person for it, your circumstances make the ideal and optimal setting for it. If you join you will be constantly updated about what is going on. You will feel the physical distance disappear.”

So after thinking about it for half an hour, I finally set up an account and joined . Easy peasy, lätt som en plätt, as we say in Swedish. I had been advised how to find my first “friends”.

I requested to become “friends” with people I have known all my life, which sounds a bit odd actually. All of these had their own “friends”, and mutual “friends”, who in turn had other “friends”, and so it went on.

Within half an hour others had detected me and requested to become my “friend”. I started to understand how it worked. My circle of “friends” began to widen almost organically. There was an abundance of suggested “friends”, most of whom I had no knowledge of whatsoever. I recognised some faces and names, but not necessarily in combination. Names from my past appeared on the screen in front of me, and then welcome greetings started coming up on my “wall”. I also had a message from somebody with an explanation of the difference in visibility between the “wall” and my “message” box.

When I clicked on “Friends”, the whole world seemed to stream up from below onto my screen. It would not take much to get really silly and try to make everybody my “friend”. I actually thought of the old song “Everybody Is Trying To Be My Baby”, as sung by The Beatles once.

I soon realised that I had to be selective and restrict myself, not to go into overdrive and try to break some record. I really just needed another means of communication with, in the first instance, my family.

I have not explored all features of Facebook yet, only really just opened my account, but I already know so much more of what is going on in some people’s lives, all those little things you get to hear when you bump into each other at the supermarket. I believe Facebook is trying to transform the whole world into a small market square. The trick is, I suppose, to find a balance between the advantage of virtual proximity and one’s need for some privacy.

China - Dictatorship's Dubious Internet Activities

 

China, with 400 million internet users, has set up a new wall, The Great Firewall of China. The government is trying to oppress its citizens in new ways, but people still find ways around it with clever thinking and ingenuity. We have all heard and read about it, the whole Google-in-China saga.

I found this very interesting article in The Guardian (UK) today about Chinese censorship. It is well worth a read, and then you can thank your lucky star that you are not one of China's netizens, but can use the internet as you like.

Then I found another China-related article in the same online paper, this time about how Chinese hackers are hacking Gmail accounts. The article also tells you how you can check if your Gmail account has been hacked, if there has been unusual activity. It is somewhere down in the small print at the bottom of the page. Read about how to check and also set it to alert you if something suspicious has been detected.

Who is using your email account? Well, don't panic, but it is worth checking out. And it is always useful to learn something new, isn't it? Stay in control!

Oh No I Hadn't, But I Have Now!

When I wrote my previous post I thought I had nearly finished updating the design of Pictura  Digitalis. Oh no I hadn't, but I have now!

I discovered new features and functionalities of my web design software, which I now have taken advantage of. Now I have really revamped the structure and navigation of the site. I hope it does not look too home-made. Any additions will be much more easily carried out. So I hope I have saved some future time by spending quite a few solid hours on it now.

But knowing me, I am sure I will find something else to investigate and fiddle with, improving and refining the site as such, and of course uploading more photographic efforts!

Here is an example...

The Internet And Home Security

A blogger friend of mine said that she and her husband were going on an extended weekend trip somewhere, mid-week! So more like between two extended weekends then? I thought it was a rather funny way of putting it. This coming weekend I myself am going to France to burn up a lot of firewood in the wood-burning stove and just chill out. That would constitute two extended weekends AND the days in between.

Have you noticed how I have not mentioned who this blogger friend is? I have done that out of consideration for her security. One should not let the whole world know when one's house is empty so web-surfing burglars can plan their activities and serve up a surprise for when you return. That seems to be common-sense advice in most people's minds.

However I have a somewhat different situation, living on a NATO base. It is populated by military and attached civilians of various kinds, among them teachers. Security is high, as you might expect, and burglary is almost unheard of. Although the roads actually are German public roads, the armed guards at the gates require you to identify yourself and state the purpose of your visit.

There is a German bus service which terminates here. The front of the bus displays "Hauptquartier", so it is no secret what this funny place is, but every bus passenger has to be questioned by the guard who walks down the aisle checking IDs.

Every time I return to base (ha ha), after having been into Germany proper, I have to produce my special ID or my passport. Sometimes the guard says "Boot 'n bonnet, sir!" Which means I have to personally open and show I am not hiding anything dangerous. Likewise all delivery vans have to be searched for obvious security reasons.

Both German police and British Military Police patrol the area, as well as a security force whose vehicles regularly come down even the smallest side street. So we should be able to feel extra safe and protected. Therefore I don't mind mentioning that I am going away, being under the protection of armed guards!

So even if you should forget to close your front door properly, the only real concern would be stray animals having taken up residence in your house while you've been out.

My Top Five Blog Posts – Statistically

 

Do you keep an eye on your stats? I do, mostly to see if I’ve had a visitor for the first time from a country, so I can add the flag to my little collection in a special flag folder on my PC. At the moment I have had visitors from 93 countries. Will I ever get to 100? Who knows?

The stats also reveal searches, both for text and for images. I am still amazed at how many elementary or primary school teachers search the web for work sheets on Pippi Longstocking, whom I wrote about a long time ago.

People all over the world also seem to be very concerned about their pulmonary health.

An increasing number of Brits are interested in finding out about Fougères Castle in Brittany.

The love padlocks (Liebesschlösser) on Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne pull in visitors from all corners of the world.

Then of course my blog post about Ryanair and their questionable policy on fining their passengers has a fast-growing number of hits. I am definitely not the only disgruntled (ex-) customer.

The List

1 Pippi Longstocking (lazy teachers)

2 Smoker’s Lungs (worried smokers)

3 Ryanair (frustrated passengers)

4 Love Padlocks (romantic people)

5 Fougères Castle (history nerds or holiday makers)

The Dribs and Drabs Launch

My photo web site is coming along, if not nicely, at least little by little.

I struggled for days with uploading changes that I made before I eventually figured out how to do it. I was quite ecstatic after having launched the site initially, but any subsequent additions or changes caused me problems.

Uploading elements of various kinds was slightly more complicated than I first thought. I imagined it was just a matter of uploading the html page in question, and everything that belonged to it or was affected by it would follow suit. Oh no, it wasn't.

Some pages loaded very slowly on the site, others not at all, so I looked into the size issue. Were there too many pictures in the flash galleries? Comparing file sizes did not make much sense. Was the type of gallery of any importance? My conclusion was to turn off the auto play function so the viewer wouldn't have to wait for all pictures to load before the slide show got going. But that did not solve all the problems.

In the end I found scripts and xml pages that needed to be dealt with on an individual basis, as well as the images themselves. That's when the problem of the software renaming all the images as they were prepared for uploading, came into play. In the ftp client that I use for uploading you can only get the file name, not thumbnails, so it was very difficult to find the relevant files, with names like "x87tjkh.jpg" for instance, keeping in mind that there are many hundreds of files in the one folder!

Then the simple solution hit me on the head like a giant silver hammer. Sometimes you get so involved that you don't think of the simplest solution. I should have known better.

The obvious way of finding all files that had been changed was of course, here it comes..., to click at the top of the list to sort the files according to time & date. The most recently changed or created files sit on top and can be selected very easily for transfer. Dooohh!! I am almost ashamed to admit it.

But now I can get on with completing the folders and photo galleries with the pictures I have lined up, upload them skillfully without a hitch and then get on with the comments page, which I think still does not work properly. I have, by the way, put a permanent link to the photo site on the right of this blog.

And again, apologies to my regular readers for not visiting your sights as frequently. I promise to improve shortly.

No Excuse, Just an Explanation

No, I have not disappeared, I'm still here, but work, other commitments and a holiday got in the way. It is my busiest period of the year at the moment, so I have had no time to spare. Blogging has sadly suffered.

I have used my new netbook, Samsung NC 10, for a lot of writing. My plan seems to be working. When we went to our house in France for half term holidays my new friend was by my side all the time. It began when we stayed overnight as usual in Albert. I intended to read some e-book on my netbook, turned it on and to my astonishment it told me it had detected a wireless connection. I clicked, as you do, to investigate, and found myself connected to the internet. I read some Swedish newspapers instead and even watched a music video before tucking in. Great, I thought, I did not expect this. I ended up later in the week walking the streets of various places with netbook in hand to search for internet connections. I must have looked a right fool!

It also struck me that, as late as in the sixties, people in the UK used the word wireless for a radio, which no young person of today would know, unless they watch black-and-white films.

As always when we return to our house and garden, the house needs airing and the garden needs, well, chopping down. The lawn was a meadow with half a metre of grass and flowers and had to be strimmed before it could be mowed. But we settled in straight away as usual and the week just flew by.

Now we are back, but the coming weekend we will go to my (kid) brother's 50th birthday party, so I will continue to be a bad blogger for some more time. I have however a collection of photos from our holiday in this post, and I will put up some more here and on my photo blog of interesting bird activity in our garden in other posts. See you soon bloglings!

Mural, Albert	Floral Decoration, Albert
Lawn before	Lawn after
Neighbours' Lovely Front	With a Sense of Humour
Can You See the Moon?	Not So Naked Trees

From Lo-Tech To Hi-Tech

I have had one of those philosophical moments thinking about technological development. I thought of my grandfather, who was twenty years old when the brothers Wright managed to fly an aircraft for the very first time on 17 December 1903. Well before he passed away in 1976 he had also seen the first man on the moon. Isn't that a wonderful, fantastic thought? In his lifetime mankind developed the technology to put a man on that mysterious round disc illuminating the night sky. However Leonardo da Vinci, that multi-talented brainbox from half a millennium ago with his many ingenious ideas, did not always get it right. Like this one ...

So I started thinking about technological milestones in my own life, so far. Typing this draws my mind back to when I was a little boy. Then I used a pencil for most writing; on the odd occasion we used metal-nibbed pens in school for handwriting practice. Later the fountain pen, despite the danger of making a mess of your shirt pocket or your pencil case, made it much more user-friendly since you did not have to dip the nib into a bottle of ink every five seconds. My first fountain pen though, was of the kind that you had to fill, sucking the ink up with a pulling movement. When the ink cartridge was introduced some time later you felt that things were really moving on. Then there was the ballpoint pen, the greatest of them all. How that has revolutionised writing by hand! They were initially not really affordable to the average person, but these days most people would not care if they lost their ballpoint pen.

Long before these relatively modern writing tools, the quill pen was the only alternative, the forerunner to the metal-nibbed pen. I still remember how, when I was thirteen, I had found a big wing feather from a buzzard or similar bird of prey, and I made my own modern ballpoint quill pen out of it by inserting the ink tube with ballpoint into the shaft of the feather. Genius, I thought.

As a lucky seven-year-old I was sometimes allowed to use my fathers typewriter. Remember them? When the ribbon got stuck, entangled and messy? And the arms with the letters on them jammed completely if you tried to type too quickly! Much better when the electric ones with the spinning ball were introduced. There was no stopping the world's typists then. The employers could demand even higher speeds, as long as you did not forget to put in the carbon sheet so you got a copy, because this was when photo-copying was relatively new and expensive. Do you remember those days?

I was a newly appointed deputy head teacher when my head teacher said I needed a calculator for my work. I would be reimbursed, he assured me, otherwise I might have hesitated. This one had solar cells, and I was so impressed by the whole idea that I asked the shop assistant how long the solar cells would last?! I still use my second calculator, which must be at least twenty to twenty-five years old; and the cells have not given up on me yet!

Thinking of sunlight, makes me think again of my grandfather, how he went about taking photographs. It was a slow process; at least that was what we children thought as we stood there waiting to have the group picture taken. The technology in my digital camera is quite different.

Then we have communication technology; remember telex machines? The sender had to either type, punching a tape that then (I think) was put into another machine producing typed text, or it was received as it was typed in at the other end. After telex came fax; what a revolution! You could send any document over the phone?! Unheard of! Put the sheet in the facsimile machine, watch it being pulled slowly through and then phone to check that it had been received alright. You could not really trust the fickle fax!

These days we just attach a document to an email, but hey, that was almost surpassing the computer! Young folk nowadays have little understanding of how quickly things have moved on with computers. The computer on the first lunar landing craft, The Eagle, had less memory than a modern mobile phone. I remember buying my first PC nearly twenty years ago, how I said that I did not want to become a second class citizen, I had to learn about this new technology. How things have moved on since!

In the beginning the features of a computer were extremely limited and when the internet started up it was a desperate struggle to find anything since search engines were in their infancy as well. Those of you who also know the whole development would probably agree when I say it has been mind-boggling.

I must not forget to mention mobile phones; texting, sending pictures, taking photos ...

We have come a long way from the bricks of the eighties to the iPhones. It is amazing; and you wonder what will come next. Did I forget the iPod?

And here I am blogging about it all in my personal little space in the blogosphere.

C u l8r!

ABBEY - Oh no! Not again! (cont.)

It all started early in the autumn and I blogged about it in January. Abbey is my main UK bank where I used to do internet banking several times a week. Living abroad, internet banking is crucial, and it worked wonderfully well until I had to cancel all my credit/debit cards, internet accounts, passwords and usernames because I was pick-pocketed and lost my Palm handheld computer. I was not 100% sure that I had left it in secure mode, which could make it possible for someone to access very sensitive information, as you might understand. Everything was there, albeit some in coded Swedish. I was close to panic stations.

However I managed to prevent the misuse of the information through a series of phone calls. Most replacement cards and new passwords arrived without delay, with one major exception, those from the Abbey. After a while new bank cards were delivered, but the two secret pieces of information that I needed for internet banking never materialised. I rang again and again and again. I spoke to call centre workers, who all assured me that I would have them within a couple of weeks. As if! Over several months I tried four times in vain.

Then, the fifth time, I was redirected to another call centre that dealt with slightly different banking matters, where I managed to speak to a gentleman who seemed to sound like he knew what he was talking about. You know, when you listen to the voice, full of confidence and conviction, you just know that this is a proper bank person. He actually hinted at the possibility that a high intake of new call centre staff had made it difficult to train them well enough to handle a matter such as mine, to satisfaction. I tried to suggest it might have something to do with the fact that the bank had been incorporated into the Santander Group and they had introduced a new computer system too quickly, but he would not commit to any such claim. He was perfectly correct and professional. He even gave me his extension number, which is highly unusual, and told me I could contact him again, should I not be happy with the outcome of this matter. I only wish they would stuff, sorry, staff all call centres with people like him. Thanks to Michael in Bradford I can now do internet banking with Abbey again. I salute him!

1st hit in Google search!

…and 2^nd and 3^rd and 7^th and 8^th etc. I wondered why I got so many hits from American teachers. It’s quite unbelievable really. It’s that girl Pippi Longstocking again!

I wrote about her not long ago and had some children’s drawings in a Smilebox together with a worksheet I had “made earlier”. I am a bit nerdy when it comes to statistics and like to see how people find my insignificant blog. Some are looking for info on the Rheinturm clock in Düsseldorf, others have found my angry “SAAB logo” (type in those words and you’ll find it on the first image page in Google), but Pippi is the clear favourite.

My top search hits on Pippi Longstocking

Pippi Longstocking comprehension – 1^st in Google

Pippi Longstocking drawing - 2^nd in Google

Pippi Longstocking comp questions - 3^rd in Google

Pippi Longstocking comprehension quiz - 7^th in Google

Pippi Longstocking comprehension questions - 7^th in Google

Pippi Longstocking lesson plan – 7^th in Google

Pippi Longstocking lesson plans – 8^th in Google

All of these, and similar search words, find my blog quite easily. I have found that the books about Pippi are on recommended reading lists for elementary kids in the US, so that might explain the interest from what seems to be mainly young teachers. I assume they are young because they all spell her name using lower case letters. Young teachers these days, oh dear me! ;-) Or am I prejudiced?

Google Earth and Some More Stats Stuff

I have some friends in France who just bought their first computer some weeks ago. When we saw them in February they were on a very steep learning curve. Readers of this blog and, in particular, blogger friends will not find it difficult to imagine how much there is for these novices of the PC and the Internet to learn about. Everything is new, how to log on, how to navigate, how to find their way around the keyboard even! But to see the joy in their eyes when they very proudly showed emails with pictures from relatives was a great joy to me as well. They had also discovered Google Earth and had had a look at various places, where they lived themselves for instance. Great entertainment!

All of this reminded me that I had had the first version of Google Earth on my old PC, so I decided to download the latest Beta version. And boy was I surprised at how much it had improved. I could hardly believe my eyes when I zoomed in on our house; I could see my car parked in the street, and I am pretty sure the boot was open, which means I had just done some shopping and was at that very moment inside dropping off the first load. There is no mistaking a Nordic Blue (!) car with a sunroof, and the shadow and the rear end looked a bit strange, indicating an open boot. I was speechless! From other features around where we live I figured out that the photo was roughly three years old. I could see people crossing a road, cyclists on the cycle path and various other astonishing details. Talk about Big Brother! Isn’t it scary that these satellites can see you as soon as you set foot outside your front door? What next?

I have also had some tedious fun (can you say that?) checking my visitor stats again, since I am intrigued by how the flipping thing works! All those random hits seem to come approximately 14 minutes after posting (including the time it takes to type in the title and upload two photos), and keep coming for about another four minutes. Checking the referral feature I found out how it works, I think. A visitor from country A is referred by another blog in country B, and if this second blog has no connection with me whatsoever, the country A visitor must have clicked on Next Blog to get to me. Otherwise I cannot see how it works. So I set about to check out all the country B blogs.

I found an Italian visitor referred by an Aberdeen blog, a Mexican visitor referred by a Swedish interior design blog, a Portuguese visitor coming from a Uruguayan blog and a Sri Lankan visitor finding me through a Belgian children’s entertainment blog! How is that for international? Wow! All this only goes to show how widely spread the Internet is these days. Everybody seems to be doing it. You can travel the world from your desk, see all the famous sights, find out about how other people live, share thoughts, ideas and experiences and also make blogger friends. But hey, we must not fool ourselves, although it is a great way, it is a substitute. There is nothing like the real thing, don’t you agree?

Stats Mystery

Something really weird happened today at noon. What, you wonder? Well, my photo blog does not attract many daily visitors. I don’t really try to promote it, though perhaps I should. All of a sudden, in just four and a half minutes, I had many more hits than what I usually get, like several weeks’-worth of visitors in one go! Before I checked the details in my Site Meter I thought it had to do with the fact that I had already had a mysterious comment, which I quickly deleted. That visitor’s comment seemed to be from an automated source, reacting to a key search word, namely “Sunbathing”, which on my blog was something completely innocent. The comment, from some playboy website, used a revealing vocabulary, offering an exchange of files. As if! Suffice it to say, I did not click on the link. Aaaam not stooopid!

On closer inspection of my stats, using the “Visitors By Referral” feature, I discovered this had happened before. I had not noticed this avalanche phenomenon previously, since I don’t check the photo blog stats very often. What I found was that these visits were all referred by the Blogger Navbar, and it all dawned on me. Of course! I do it myself; sometimes I just click on the “Next Blog” button, which takes you to a completely random blog. Somehow Blogger must put your blog in some sort of loop of available blogs for a few minutes. In my experience it is possibly a rather small number of blogs at a time, due to the fact that I have more than once been served the same blog within a couple of minutes. How do they choose what blogs to enter in the loop? Not a clue. All I know is that clicking that button and hoping to find anything you find remotely interesting, is like panning for gold in the Yukon. However I have to admit, I have actually found some nuggets in the last year. And of course it is always satisfying to boost a fellow blogger’s statistics; we all want the traffic, don’t we?

Blog Reading

I was just thinking how much I love Google Reader. It sits there on my screen as the first tab in Firefox. As soon as one of the blogs I have listed there, is updated, it notifies me. It saves me a lot of time, not having to trawl through my bookmarks to read new stuff. If I want to comment, I simply click on the little double arrow taking me to the new post where I also can see other comments directly underneath. Should I wish to check if I have had a reply comment to an earlier comment, the Home button takes me to the full blog. All very simple and user-friendly. Thank you, Google. BTW I know there are others, like Pageflakes, doing pretty much the same job.

Before I sign off, I have now made that call to Abbey to ask for the third time to send me internet-banking details. I was served by a not-so-customer-friendly, young man who did not have the courtesy to apologise for their bad service. He was definitely in the wrong job!

On a happier note, it is now Friday, so there will be chilled bubbly later. Hooraay!

ABBEY - Oh No, Not Again!

I have been on about this before, but some problems just don’t seem to go away. Abbey, my UK bank, introduced a new computer system last year, and you understand straight away where this is going, don’t you? If there is one foolproof way of effing something up, it surely has to be to start using a new system before it has been properly tested. I know their old system was hopelessly old, but it worked!

Not only do the programmers have to build a robust application, but the existing database has to be transferred safely, and then staff need training. I know all of that; a lot of experience, skill and effort need to go into this mammoth task. And who suffers if it doesn’t work? The customers do. I am one of those.

The first time I noticed something odd was when there was a discrepancy between the printed and the online statement. Secondly the overdraft on one account just disappeared; the new system had changed our address for that account and consequently sent statements to the wrong address. That in turn resulted in a “return-to-sender”; they thought something was afoot and withdrew the overdraft facility. The system did not pick up the difference in addresses for our six accounts. Huh?

Later in the autumn when I had to cancel bank cards and internet banking details due to a theft, the real “fun” started. The cards took forever to be delivered, twice they failed in their attempts to deliver the two separate, secret pieces of information so I can start internet banking again. To make things worse, in order to communicate my frustration, I always have to make a phone call to the UK, often being on hold for absolute ages!

The list is long. In December I rang to ask them to send me new internet banking details, to transfer money between accounts and also to pay a credit card bill, all of which resulted in the money being transferred, but the credit card bill not being paid and no internet banking details as yet. I realised it had gone wrong when I had the next credit card statement, and at the same time getting a partly wrongly-addressed letter saying there had been a problem. Houston or what?! A new phone call corrected a few of the mistakes, but I was advised to wait just a little longer for the internet banking details, since they might have been delayed due to the Christmas Holiday. Dodgy software, sloppy staff, bad management….? I don’t know. I only know that I have to make that phone call again and ask them to send the internet banking details for the third time. Wish me luck, I need it!

Family Tree – Genealogy

Here is the reason I have not posted for a few days; something caught my attention.

My brother emailed me last week, or rather, it looked like I had emailed myself; you know when it says ‘Me’ as the sender. I suspected it was something dodgy, somebody trying to make me click on a link and download offensive rubbish on my PC. So what did I do? I googled the source and found it was a completely legitimate URL, a reputable company albeit at the beta stage. It turned out to be something quite interesting, a website where you can build your family tree online. It’s like an extended-family-Wikipedia. Somebody starts building it, invites other relatives to join in the fun and contribute to a growing tree with their knowledge about relatives. It’s got the potential to spread like a bush fire.

As it happens I have taken an interest in my ancestors in the last couple of years and done a lot of scanning from photo albums. I have immersed myself in it completely sometimes, asked my 85-year-old mother about names and relationships while she still is lucid. She is the last one of the oldest generation that I can turn to for reliable information, so time is of great importance. My interest got even stronger when my dad passed away and I started looking into his old belongings, photos, slides, letters, books etc. My mother had quite a lot from her side of the family as well, so it all mounted up. My idea is to share it with siblings and cousins once it is all sorted.

So this family tree website fits the picture perfectly. I had some information from my dad, which I believe he had had from his dad. Somebody, I don’t know who, had in the past done some genealogical research and presented it in the customary way like a tree, but also attached information in prose, seemingly from parish records, about the people in the tree. Then you can read between the lines and understand even more yourself sometimes. Absolutely fascinating! The furthest this research reached into the past was the late 17^th century. It is a heck of a long time ago!

I will probably come back to this and post some of the interesting stuff and my thoughts about the people from whom I descend. Hopefully I can include pictures as well, although I have to confess I don’t have any photos from the 17^th century. If you are interested in starting your own tree, go to http://www.geni.com/ .

Visit Stats

All bloggers like visitors to their blogs, unless they are just letting off steam in an online diary and don’t care about anybody but themselves. Some are desperate to get as many visitors as possible because they are advertising stuff for themselves or for others, eager to make money out of their blog. Fair enough, but sometimes the content of the blog is very dubious. Take all these mock-blogs for instance; you know, the ones that are set up just to display links to p**n sites (don’t want to write the word in full to avoid hits by googlers!). They put up a blog with an innocent-looking title and blaaadi…blaaah posts. Every time I click on the “Next Blog” button, I seem to find one of those, more and more often. I suppose they are very difficult to police. But I have also found some good, genuine blogs that way. Otherwise it is much safer and rewarding to find interesting blogs through online friends and contacts. Some of us even sign up to MyBlogLog and show our face, part of it or just a dummy picture. This makes it a little more personal, as personal as it can get on the net. You know who has visited recently.

Most of us, if not all, have some stats provider. I have signed up to Sitemeter, but only the basic version, not wanting to part with money unnecessarily. So I have to accept the limitations in the stats provided. Sometimes I can tell who it actually is from the information. For instance some employers, big companies, institutions etc display their name, making it obvious to you who the visitor is. Then of course there are the ones who keep coming back to your blog, with the company name and location revealed, and you still cannot figure out who it is. Very frustrating! I am intrigued and puzzled sometimes; who is that? And they never leave a comment; it is like being teased!

Other visitors have somehow suppressed the information almost completely. Domain Name and Location display “Unknown”. What have they got to hide, I wonder? But the IP address is always there. Maybe there is a way of tracing that? Who knows.

Then of course there is the issue of the location of the service provider. If the visitor lives in a certain place, it is not necessarily the same place as where the service provider is located, so you cannot tell. Do I sound like an obsessed control freak? I would just like to know; I am inquisitive.

With my basic version of Sitemeter I don’t seem to be able to trust the Visit Length either. In the past I have spoken about a specific visit with a relative and asked how long it was, where Sitemeter told me “0 seconds”. Oh no, it had lasted several minutes. There must be some technical issue here, because even if you get a hit from somebody searching for certain words, surely they must spend a few seconds reading before they realise that you are for instance not an “Old Vinyl Dealer”. How does that work? I have no idea.

Anyway, it is good fun trying to keep up with who is visiting, but I do not spend sleepless nights over it!

Sweet & Sour

Well, first the sour bits; at the weekend I was pickpocket-ed in a restaurant, which meant I have had to cancel more than a handful of cards and change thirty-one passwords. Holy cow! All this because of possible information theft. I do not want to be too detailed since that might be taking a risk, but I can say that most of it was written in coded Swedish, even dialect, so there!. Now I have new, un-breakable passwords all across my internet activities. You know, when you sometimes enter a password for the first time and there is that indicator telling you how strong it is. I hit the very top, so I feel very confident about it now.



On a less soul-destroying level I had to sit through a dismal game of football yesterday. Liverpool were extremely poor against Marseille in the Champions League and lost at home 0-1. Some Liverpool players thought they had the win in a little sack before kick-off and forgot they actually had to go out there and earn it! Get your act together guys!


Here comes the sweet bit. After having enjoyed (a little too much perhaps) the Lufthansa Pilot game with a best place of 267th, I remembered a link to a game somebody sent me ages ago. I call it the Yeti and Penguin Game, not a particularly politically correct game for animal lovers, but, as you might guess, somewhat addictive, to use a British understatement. Just click a couple of times on the screen when it opens and you’ll figure out how to play it. And don’t tell me you didn’t bookmark it! ;-)

Back in business

Yes, I am now fully operational, from an IT point of view, that is. I have installed my new all-in-one printer from DELL, only a simple 926, but boy does it print well! I first printed some A4-size photos. I used a high capacity cartridge rather than a special photo print cartridge, and out came a superb picture, sharp and professional-looking. Then came the moment to print the first document, which was a letter to my UK bank to complain about their web site. I do a lot of internet banking and it normally works extremely well, but this summer their application went bonkers, deleting a long-standing overdraft on one account and delayed a transfer between some other accounts for a day, sending the a/c into the red, and charging me for an unauthorised overdraft. The cheek! However, my letter was, as always, polite and correct, but to the point. Let's see how long it takes them to rectify and reimburse. I want my money back!