So it's been 115 days since I started my Project 101 and I thought it a good idea to write some notes and observations about progress to date (actually my ulterior motive was to write a Rhetoric post because I realised that was meant to write one once a month).

My summary of progress so far is this: making a list - while clarifying some short to medium term goals, didn't actually create the impetus to complete them. Apart from some easy ones and a few 'administrative' to-do's, there wasn't any real stretch in getting things done.

So lets look at some of the ones I haven't done so well on:

34. Stop buying lunches/coffees (make my own)

I started this with good intentions, but it only lasted about a month. Laziness, procrastination, work pressures and convenience were all to blame for this not lasting longer. I will continue to attempt this to-do - but will probably treat it as a goal, rather than a must-do.

42. Work out at LEAST three times a week

This was a lot easier to do when I lived in an apartment building with a small gym downstairs. Now, in a new apartment without one, it's a bit trickier. I am trying to run more often, and with the purchase of a new bike - will be riding more often.

84. Take a photo of myself (same pose/position if possible) on the 1st of every month

I completely forgot the 1st occurrence, then missed (despite a reminder) the second two - so this to-do starts from June 09. I have an active reminder to alert me to do this, and have left the camera in the one spot to act as a mental cue.

I think I would have completed a few more a bit earlier - but with a busier personal life that requires me to be less selfish with my time and planning, moving apartments and all the drama that goes with that - I still think I am on track to make some headway when life starts to get into a bit of a pattern that makes for easier planning.

Hopefully there will be some more 'exciting' updates to come, as this one bored me just writing it.

I don't know if it's because I am a full-time professional SEO Analyst, or because I am just a picky person (ha - bite your tongues), but when I see a series of articles looking suspiciously spammy - even though their content seems intended for human readers, red flags are raised in my mind.

With the proliferation of blogging, and the emerging dominance of WordPress as the blogging tool of choice, a LOT of attention has been paid to either monetizing blogs or taking steps to optimize your blog or blog articles to rank higher in search engines. Therefore, for the most part I ignore those blogs that have articles not written for human visitors - but there is one instance I am having a large amount of difficulty looking past.
Continue reading »

If I was a new visitor/immigrant to New Zealand I would already be connected to some form of broadband by now. I would be paying less for that broadband, I wouldn't have to wait for two different technicians from the same company to connect a phone line then the broadband. I wouldn't have to wait for the connection to be in place before the company sent me a modem/router a week later, and two weeks after I began the application.

You get my point.

For all the competition (methinks it's really pseudo-competition) in the IT market, Australian pricing and service is a JOKE. I can't believe that consumers don't demand more, and better more - there's certainly enough of them...

And don't get me started on Mobile connections!

So, in the meantime, instead of whining about things I will have to go the circuitous route when it comes to posting (and getting other things done online).

Rant over - do I feel better? - hmmm, probably.

...for the 1st of the month.

Ah yes, April Fool's day no less.

But this is no April Fool's joke, no...this is the first opportunity I have had to sit down and follow-up on the last rhetoric post.

I arrived in Melbourne on the 1st of March, one month ago - after finally managing to sell just about everything I owned (the exceptions being my mountain bike and my computers), and leaving my home for the last seven years in an embarrassing state for the land-lords to deal with (not to mention lumbering them with my very missed pet dog Akira).

Since then I have managed to land the dream job (SEO Analyst - a job I applied for before I left even though I didn't get accepted till after I was already here), and tomorrow I pick up the keys to the dream apartment (photos and more to come I can assure)!

I knew around November last year that I was doing the right thing when I started thinking about moving to Melbourne. It just felt right. After only a short visit in 2004, I fell in love with the place. Since being here I am absolutely blown away by the beauty and diversity of Melbourne and Victoria - a large statement given the renowned beauty that New Zealand and Taupo are known for.

40 minutes in just about any direction can take you from high-rise city, to lush green woods, to rolling farmlands, to beaches to snowy mountains (in the winter). The juxtapositions between old and new, quiet and rowdy, country and city are very in-your-face and marvelous to behold.

The sad point to note is that there have been very few opportunities (so far) to take any quality photos, or those opportunities that have arisen have yielded less than great quality. The current two to two-and-a-half hour (!) transit each way to and from work hasn't aided that, so hopefully with my new pad located in the CBD I should get a lot more time to explore and take some shots.

City life certainly has been a nice wake-up for someone who has been pretty much a country hermit for the last dozen years. I hope that this new leash of life will give the same to this website!

Finally, if you're in Melbourne and wanna meet and hangout over a latte or VB, then drop me a note!

In November last year I turned 36...yes I am that old. This arbitrary threshold-crossing gave me cause to reflect on where I was in my life, and it wasn't exactly the greatest scorecard - still single, renting, in a job that was going downhill, stuck out in the wops with only the cat and dog to talk to yadda yadda boo hoo etc.

Not only that, but I had lost inspiration and motivation for taking photos, which for me was a real litmus-test. So several sleepless nights went by with me wondering how I could re-inject some stimulus into my 36 going on 76 lifestyle.

In one word: Melbourne. Complete upheaval of my life seemed about as good idea as any, and where better to upheave myself to that one of the most beautiful cities in the world than Melbourne. Why there in particular you may ask? Well, I have family there (Hi mum!), the quality of living is excellent, I loved it when I was there a few years ago, it's I.T. central for Australia so jobs wouldn't be an issue and it offers a complete juxtaposition of my current lifestyle, with more things to take a photo of that I could possibly want.

So after some procrastinating, online surfing, job hunting and other nonsense, I handed in my notice at work at the end of last month, started selling up everything ("The things you own - own you") and just the other day cemented it by purchasing a one-way ticket on the 1st of March.

So three weeks to go, and finally the anxiety has been replaced by the excitement. There is so much unknown - but that both excites me and frightens me. All I can hope for is to finally get back to posting daily photos that don't start looking like more of the same...

You know when you have nothing better to do (or want to avoid the things you need to do) when you spend all your time watching the coverage (including the "Fair and Balanced" Fox News) of the U.S. Presidential race, especially when you don't even live in the country!

Being in the field that I am I thought I would look at the websites of the front-running candidates. I took a loose group of parameters that I usually look at when analyzing websites and measured each candidate's site against those parameters. Continue reading »

Well, it would be fair to say that the re-introduction of the Rhetoric Blog into this site has been less than smooth. If you have been looking at the site over the last week, you will have noticed that the focus has gone back to the photoblog, at least for the main page. This is a conscious decision based both aesthetic and structural factors.

Probably the biggest hurdle that has hindered me from focusing on form over function is that WordPress has no system or plugin (at least that I could find) for offering a full-page option to a multi-page post. This caused issues both with creating a full feed and providing a usability feature on the paginated articles themselves. After overcoming this I will be looking into packaging my solution into a plugin to assist others (add it to the list).

Having decided to use the added functionality offered by Feedburner with regards to handling syndication caused it's own issues, both as part of the above situation, but also as part of a conflict with existing plugins. I had to rely on several different methods to try and view un-cached and unfiltered views of the current XML (somewhat having to rely on both Opera and IE7).

The one thing that cancels out the frustration that came with the inability of bending some aspects of my templates (Note: MY templates - not WP itself) was that it forced me to learn new techniques and up-skill myself. That being said - there's a lot of work required to update the WordPress Codex (documentation repository) as it hasn't kept up effectively with some of the more major recent updates. Given that the documentation is done mostly by volunteers this is hardly and indictment.

So where does that leave this website? Well if you're interested, keep an eye on the 'to-do' list at the bottom of the about page, my tweets on the rhetoric main page. I still won't be focusing on design until I can get the templates functioning as I wish. Even then the design will mostly consist of some minor rebranding and look'n'feel - the current layout suits - the color scheme doesn't...

WordPizzle to the Shizzle, yo

I don't know what it is with me and having to bolt on every, sometimes unnecessary, extra to software that allows me to do it. It's no different with WordPress and plugins. Same goes with Firefox and extensions (that's gonna be another post).

Sure most of it is for functionality, but a lot of it is because I like to tweak things to the point of death. But it does amaze me that so many people are happy with the base functionality that WordPress provides and instead concentrate on the visual customisation (which unfortunately seem to be mostly poorly ported versions of Kubrick).

The big push that I got was having to customize client websites to bend WordPress beyond it's normally used for (a blogging tool) towards more of a full CMS. This exposed me to a wider range of plugins that would also cross-over into the blogosphere as well.

I will leave the focus on using WordPress for a CMS to another post (i'm trying to save up a list of topics I want to write about), and concentrate on listing the plugins that are in use on this site with reasons for choosing them. This gives me the opportunity to give "props" to the plugin developers, but also give an insight to others who may like what I have done here and want to get a handle on the behind the scenes approach.

This will probably be a long post, and I want to test out post pagination - so bear with me... Continue reading »

Happy New Year!

And with it, the return (after more than 2 years) of the seriocomic rhetoric - where I get to try and form some semi-coherent sense out of what is tumbling though my brain and lay it out for the world to laugh at...

More and more this last year I have felt I have wanted to comment on a number of things - political, existential, blogging and web related; and haven't really felt that the photoblog presented a proper format to do this.

Additionally, with extra exposure to the WordPress engine that runs this site over the last 12 months on other client projects I have become more aware of new methods of presenting the information that I want, in the manner that I want.

I am (very) far from finished, but wanted to get the majority of the groundwork done before lifting the lid. View the entire post »