SurfiOnline

When war broke out in 1914 Australia had been a federal commonwealth for only fourteen years. The new national government was eager to establish its reputation among the nations of the world. On 25 April 1915, Australia and New Zealand Army Corps landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in an expedition to open the way to the black see for allied navies.

It was the start of a campaign that lasted eight months and resulted in some 25,000 Australian casualties, including 8,700 who were killed or died of wounds or disease.

The men who served on the Gallipoli Peninsula created a legend, adding the word ‘Anzac’ to the Australian and New Zealand vocabularies and creating the notion of the Anzac spirit.

In 1916, the first anniversary of the landing was observed in Australia, New Zealand and England and by troops in Egypt. That year, 25 April was officially named ‘Anzac Day’ by the Acting Prime Minister, George Pearce.

Anzac Day Tradition

Have you ever noticed how someone is completely different on the internet to how they are in real life? This is something I’ve often thought about. The way we perceive people face to face is a lot different than on the internet. Perhaps it’s because there is a lack of expression and contact on the internet, as well as realism. Okay, well that’s the answer anyway.

It’s just funny how people show a completely different side of themselves on the internet, you look at them or speak to them in real life and they’re a completely different person, a lot of the time anyway.

Another thing, people like to create themselves a little bubble in real life and keep everyone from knowing anything about them or what’s going on in their life whether it be good or not. They’re creating a false reality where they don’t tell anyone anything and keep things to themselves. On the internet with the freedom of expression people seem to be able to go on about their life and any problems they’re having.

I’m not going to deny it either, to what I am on the internet, I am a different person in real life - and I’m sure people have noticed that too. I feel like sometimes I can better express myself on the internet that maybe sometimes I can in real life. In a sense there is like a barrier (ok, firewall) between reality and the internet for me. Only selective things are allowed to pass through this wall and other things I like to keep separated from each other - generally speaking anyway. There are things in my life that people don’t know about on the internet, and visa verse – there are things on the internet that people don’t know about me in real life.

Reality <— Firewall —> Internet

Have you ever noticed how some people on the internet don’t let on any information about them and don’t like anything being found out about them? I mean, I administer a community with other administrators and with one of them, nobody even knows his first name! We’ve known him for almost 3 years now and not one single person on the community does. Of course, that doesn’t really bother me anymore, it’s just another thing I find weird from time to time and part of that is knowing that we’re friends, and I still don’t even know his name.

Anyway, that’s about it for an “interesting” post, but a lot of it is true though. False realities in real life, the difference between people on the internet and face to face, and people with unknown identities who you feel are good friends. I’d like to write about this a bit more as I think it’s sort of an interesting topic, so we’ll see what I come up with next time.

As it would seem, the comment blacklist feature of WordPress is killing my blog! Every single comment that was posted was automatically deleted. Why? I have no idea as it looks as though it was setup how it should have been but the second I cleared the list I could post comments.

I’ve removed it for now, placed the contents of the list in to the moderation keywords. Hopefully that will have fixed it. As for the comments, no way to retrieve them.
Continue reading ‘Comment Blacklist Killing my Blog?’

And here she is again, this beautiful little puppy dog. Finally reached 16 weeks of age and she can be a true menace! Because i’m now moving my photos to Filckr, here are four that I took today of Tia.

As you can see, she’s like almost double the size of what she was when we first got her back in February. Still very cute though

Tia has also got her own photoset on my flickr account now so I can group all of the photos of her together.

It’s becoming increasingly harder to take pictures of her because of how quick she runs around the back yard. I also think it has something to do with my camera (Sony DSC-P92) which probably isn’t the best - maybe it’s time for me to get a Digital SLR?

I’ve been flickrised!

Yep, finally decided to get myself a Flickr account. At the moment it’s only a free account but when I start using it more often i’ll work out some way to pay for a pro account (not having a damn credit card at all ;)).

You can view my photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/surfichris/.

At the moment (as of writing) there are only two photos up as I was just playing around with Flickr to get used to the interface. I must say though, i’m very impressed with how easy it is to use the whole system and how powerful it is as well. Whilst playing around I installed the Flickr Gallery plugin for WordPress. You can see that here: http://www.surfionline.com/photos/. Apart from it saying there are three photos in the Lake Conjola album (when quite clearly there are two), it is pretty damn nice.

I’m still playing around and I’ll hopefully end up with a list of recent flickr’ed photos like Michael has over on the side bar at Binary Bonsai. I’ll also be using Flickr and this plugin to replace the existing gallery on this site.

Other Plugins

Okay, because of the 1.5 upgrade I decided I would start with a clean slate for plugins. Right now i’m running the following plugins:

• Auto Moderate Comments
• Flickr Gallery 0.7
• Gravatars
• MF Favorites - Thanks Michele!
• SO Recent Activity - This plugin is actually a rewrite of Brian’s Recent Comments plugin as for some reason I couldn’t create temporary tables.

I’ll probably end up adding more and playing with the new WordPress features during the rest of this weekend. I’ve also got in my head some new ideas for the new theme for this place - but wait for it, i’m going back to blue!

As you can see, i’ve updated to WordPress 1.5! Finally

RIght now i’m currently using the default WP 1.5 theme, Kubrick by Michael Heilemann. Eventually i’ll get around to designing my own templates and theme once again, but that is when I have time.

A few things probably aren’t working such as the “My Code” parser as well as numerous things missing - most noticibly the rest of the site, all of which will return with the redesign.

Keep it cool.

Chris

Okay, i’m going very much out of my league to swear on my site? Why? Because I’d like to wish Harvey Norman a very very big fuck you. Why am I being so harsh? They’ve “lost” my laptop.

I sent away one of my laptops which cost me $4000 at the end of 2003 (Toshiba Satellite A20 - the 60gb model) for repairs before I sold it. I had been experiencing problems burning data DVD’s, and high operating temperatures. After being on the phone to Toshiba about it, they recommended I sent it in to get fixed. On the 12th March we went to Harvey Norman and checked it in.

We didn’t hear anything back about it until today when we received a phone call from Kwiktron who are the company who actually do the repairs for Harvey Norman (as they’re obviously incompitent). They told us that the machine had been lost. It was marked as being in one of the containers of stock that had been sent from Harvey Norman via an internal driver to Kwiktron on the 15th, however when unpacking the container the laptop was not there and therefore it wasn’t checked in at Kwiktron.

It’s now nearly a month later and we find out about it now?! Like, what the hell? This is a pretty much top of the range laptop (and is still fairly decent compared to others on the market) and they’ve managed to lose it? You’d think both companies would have had better procedures for dealing with stock sent from one place to another for repair.

According to Kwiktron this is the first time they’ve ever lost anything of a customers (well at least in the 8 years that one employee had worked there) and Harvey Norman said they had never lost anything. I find that very hard to believe if this has just so happened to “go missing”.

Kwiktron has insurance and have offered to replace it with something of the same specs (probably another Satellite A20). I wasn’t home at the time so Dad said he’d have to speak to me about that. I don’t want it replaced with something of the same specs, I want it replaced with something of the same value as it cost me, something to my specs. Why? Because i’m now down $4000 and I don’t give a rats ass about depreciation. We’re also going to try and get some sort of compensation for this because it just shits me no end.

Whats even better? I found this out about 5 minutes before I had a test.

Anyway, I have the shits now and thats that.

Well. Lets see. I last updated on my birthday. It’s been a few weeks since then.

• I have been trying to work on MyBB but for the past few days I haven’t been able to access ANY of http://www.mybboard.com. However thats fixed now.
• I’ve had a huge TAFE assignment which was due on Monday. I think it ended up around 50 pages or so. Whats funnier is that I started it on Sunday
• Recently i’ve completed some client work for a client which involved creating a backend management system. This client introduced me into the wonderful world of XMLHttpRequest’s via javascript. It’s amzing what you can do with them and I have a feeling these could be the next big thing. Google is already using it on Google Suggest. The management system designed for this client sports a similar look to what he MyBB Admin CP is going to end up looking like in a few releases.
• While not being able to access mybboard.com or the beta website I’ve watched the entire Season 7 of Stargate SG1. Boring, huh?
• Had my 18th party on Saturday night. Was pretty damn good. I’ll upload some pictures and maybe some short videos at a later stage when I have time to capture the video off the mini DVD-R.
• I’ve decided i’m over green for the moment and am currently planning a redesign of this place. Something I said I would do a long time ago but never got around to. Anywho, MyBB is a priority at the moment.

So there you have it, thats where I have been and what I have been stuffing about with. I’m trying to get back in to the habbit of updating regularly.

I have a special post planned for a special someone whom I love very much, but thats coming later too.

Chris