My Dear Hard Drive

Archive for December, 2008

Just so you know, some of my frequent commentors like Tony Single and Pushyarag2000 are automatically put to the moderation queue or spam folder for some reason. This is annoying but I can’t seem to find the reason for it. Will have try and find it later, but as for now, I didn’t do it myself and I still expect and appreciate your comments!

Popularity: 6%

When I first heard about it last weekend, it made my stomach turn. I had just moved to a country that I thought was perfect in most senses – if the higher broad band prices and slower connections that I had gotten used to didn’t count. Internet to me is like a life line. It helps me breath easier. And now, they want to tell me that they want to control my breathing. They want to make sure, that I don’t say anything that they don’t approve. Seriously, if this bill goes through, we’re moving to New Zealand. (Prepare for a flood NZ!)

The politicians say this is to protect the children from harmful content on the internet. They want to filter out anything that is inappropriate for a 15 year old or younger, according to the ACMA regulations. Why don’t you just pass a law that parents have to install a content filter for their own computer if you insist on the child safety issue?

And if it is a ploy to protect the children, what about us that have none? If we want to watch porn online we should be allowed to! What about non-filtered ISP’s for people who don’t have children? Should parents who have children be still allowed to access the net unfiltered if they are not concerned with the “baddies” or are capable to filter the content themselves.

I agree that it might be wise to OFFER a filtered service, but should it be compulsory? Good heavens, no. That just as a mere thought is appalling and sends the message of a 3rd world country out to the rest of the world. Even if it did bring no relevant harm to the user, the mere thought of a filtered Internet goes against everything I believe in, and while the world is getting more and more tolerable and liberal, this kind of approaches don’t really go down do well in International image of Australia. Internationally, people won’t be interested HOW Australia does it or WHAT is filtered, all they will hear is “Australia sensors the Internet just like China” and that’s it. China, I tell you. The country that forged a child’s singing voice.

Now if you have ever seen the Google keywords and phrases that your blog is picked up with as search results, you may also raise this question. If my blog is found with phrase “child nudity porn” is it then filtered out completely? Rest assured, nowhere on this site, or any of my other sites, have I published child porn, but clearly, I have used the word, child, nudity and porn in one place or another, sometimes even in the same post. HOW is this content filtered anyway?

What really grosses me out on this is having moral values forced upon me, in a free democratic country! The Internet is the place where you can find support, friends, soul mates and be free & yourself, and that should include the possibility of viewing and sharing material that some people would find objectionable. Should this filter be installed, who will then control what is filtered out? One day it’s adult content, the next day it’s anti-religious material and then political issues… Content warnings on TV are enough to piss me off, but I understand them. TV cannot be filtered on a device level, but your computer can. I think we should keep it at that.

More on the topic by politicians and by Aussie Bloggers.

Popularity: 6%

This Christmas I will be away from home. In 1999 I was planning to spend the Christmas with my then boyfriend, but on the morning of Christmas eve I decided I couldn’t do it, so I packed my bag and jumped into a train that was loaded full of people going home for Christmas. I didn’t get a seat during the 5 hour train ride, but that was alright, I was going home.

It may have been easier had there not been snow that year. Snow always makes me feel christmasy, it’s the most important element of Christmas to me. NOTHING says Christmas like snow. I was told there’s snow in Finland this year, just like it was a real Christmas that hadn’t heard of climate change or global warming. Snow in time. Christmas in time.

This year, I will be basking in the hot Australian Sun, not wearing a big red cardigan or anything, but shorts and a top. How depressing. I feel like it was Juhannus, the mid summer festival in Finland. If I ignore the fact that it is Christmas and concentrate on the thought that it could be Juhannus, I actually feel quite fine. But as soon as I think about snow back home, mom’s fantastic decorations inside the house, that are not the slightest bit tacky or untasteful, I want to cry. I have never seen a home that would have been decorated for Christmas with taste, other than my mothers, and oh I wish I could show you. Even the photos of a real Christmas have been destroyed when one of my dearest hard drives suddenly crashed and took most of my photos with it.

So this Christmas… All I want is a room I can crawl into to listen to Sylvia’s Christmas Song and have a good old cry. :p (If you follow the link and read the English lyrics, I think there’s been an error in translation:

“And quiet are now all the prisoners’ groans,
But oh, who pays heed to a prisoner’s moans?”

Should read something like

And quiet are now all the prisoners’ groans,
But oh, who pays heed to the singer’s moans?

And then, after having that cry and a bit of crumble and public display of disapproval of snowless Christmas, go to a beach and pretend it’s the best Juhannus ever.

Popularity: 9%

I was tagged by Pushhyarag2000 of EveolveEver.com, the blog that I took upon myself to bring to the external quality that matches the inner beauty of the writing. So here it goes. 6 random things about me.

1. I hate making phone calls to strangers, especially doctors. Hate hate hate.
2. I just ate salad with balsamic vinaigrette topping and loved it so much I had to go for seconds. Love love love.
3. My last name (the maiden name part of it) directly translated is Ringbog, and a “bog” in Australian slang means either “shit” or a toilet. Woppee. In Finnish the name is quite beautiful.
4. When I was a kid, I wanted to do mountain climbing, surfing and live in a rain forest. Of course, in Finland we don’t have mountains, waves or rain forest. That is one of the reasons I was so excited about moving to Tassie.
5. My most used hand bag is a hot pink Barbie United Colors of Benetton -bag. I got it almost 3 years ago as a birthday present from my best friend… For my 30’s.
6. During the winter, I can sleep with the electric blanket turned to maximum heat, have two dunas and be cold.

THE RULES:
1. LINK TO THE PERSON WHO TAGGED YOU
2. POST THE RULES ON YOUR BLOG
3. WRITE SIX RANDOM THINGS ABOUT YOURSELF
4. TAG SIX PEOPLE AT THE END OF YOUR POST AND LINK TO THEM
5. LET EACH PERSON KNOW THEY ARE TAGGED AND LEAVE A COMMENT ON THEIR BLOG
6. LET THE TAGGER KNOW WHEN YOUR ENTRY IS UP

Okay… 6 people…
1. Tony Single of Trottersville – for being such an active commentator! Thank you heaps. (I don’t know if you do memes. Ask the pigs, will ya?
2. Lilith of Lilith Silittää – for being a friend. Do a translation will ya? I hope you haven’t done this one yet, I think it’s been around for a while…
3. TimeThief of This Time This Space and One Cool Site – for ALWAYS having an answer. (Pick your blog.)
4. Anok of Identity check – to make him think of himself for a change.
5. Orna Ross of Orna Ross’ blog :p – for being the most interesting findling of late.
6. Drowsey Monkey for having the coolest penguins on her blog… And being rather entertaining, naturally. (<– playing down.)

Popularity: 10%

Few days ago, I followed a comment-link to read the blog of a person who left me a very interesting comment. What I found was a blog so badly designed I could not read it. I simply could not read it even tough I really really wanted to. I skimmed through some of the posts after setting my browser so that I could almost comfortably follow the lines of massive text, and found an entry that was wondering why the blog wasn’t doing too well. I found that this blogger had followed every rule in the book to get his blog out there… Exept what comes to designing blog layouts. This is the state that I found the blog in. I needed a total 27 screenshots to fit the front page onto a screenshot. 27 – I kid you not. So I contacted him directly to offer some insight to what might have effected his success as a blogger – the design. I thought it was such a shame seeing his beautiful writing being cluttered by all sorts of gadgets and widgets and thingamabobs, that you could not tell the header from a tag cloud. As it happened, I offered my help and he accepted, and we’ve been working together to improve his blog there on. I am truely happy he accepted my help as I think he makes a fantastic blogger.

Arguing with him over some design elements made me think about good web design and the beginner mistakes that I think everyone makes, especially if they are very keen on making their own layouts to start with. I know I had my era of using every possible font colour I could think of for the mere joy I knew how to change that colour. Fortunately that was 1998, and most people were still just as excited about the fact as I was, so nobody cared. In fact, I got compliments of my “3D-effect” on the website, created with the usage of different font colours! To amuse you, here’s the layout in question:

And yes, that is an animated cat on the top of the page. It was the times when you could not possibly design a website without adding animated gifs on it and “clipart” was blossoming.

Next thing of course was the fonts. What could possibly say more about your personality than the selection of fonts? And because you have a personality, you have to choose Comic Sans Ms, just like every other beginner out there. Having to let go of the crazy fonts and colours can be truly a emotionally painful growing experience. The web safe selection of fonts is just so boring! No personality, no nothing! But in the end we all give up – we hate the websites created with crazy fonts and realise that other people hate our website with crazy fonts.

These days the biggest temptation comes in the form of widgets. Put in a shout box, recent viewers of both MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog regardless of the fact that most visitors who show up on one will show up on the other, or the fact that they all came through EntreCard just to fly by your blog without reading a word and you want to reward those fleeters by giving them a drop back and some link love for dropping a card. Then you have to show your Alexa ranking, Technorati, SezWho and BlogCatalog rating. Your readers simply have to know where on earth your last visitors came from so you add that thing that shows the towns and countries of your visitors, Live Traffic Feed. You don’t see the tree from the forest any more, and the blog loads up like an old horse pulling a load of rocks uphill. However broad your band is, it is never broad enough to cater for all those widgets!

Furthermore, you have to understand that the bulk of the widgets have not been designed to help you or your reader. They are designed so that you would put a free link to their creators website onto your site. Most of them are utterly useless. Just because a widget is free to use, doesn’t mean you should use it. The same way as just because you can change the font colour, doesn’t mean you should. Just like just because you can spit for 5 meters doesn’t mean you should. Get where I’m going at?

There are a lot of free templates out there that you can pick and use as your blog template. Take advantage of them! You don’t have to do everything yourself. I have been educated in web design at a very respected school back in Finland, and I still use ready made templates just because it’s easy, convenient and frees up my time to do what is really important; Write. What I do with them is fiddle around with the colours and images to get a look that is more me. (This layout for example was grey. I don’t want grey, I want orange! And no, I don’t think this one is just perfect, no. Enough fiddling is enough for me. :p )

If you are new to blogging and web design, you will have to learn to control your enthusiasm. Running around franticly finding the next cool and hip gadget is going to drive you crazy and not necessarily drive you traffic – apart from away from your site. Every time you find a widget you want to use, stop to think: What value does this add to my reader? How is this going to help my reader to find what he wants from my site? If it is not beneficial to my reader, will it be really beneficial to me? If it is beneficial to me, is there a way I can use it without posting it to the blog? Like Alexa ranking. If your rank isn’t really good, I don’t understand why you should show it, unless you are selling advertising. If your ranking is good, then probably your comments area is blooming, so that possible advertisers know already that your blog receives engaged readership who take interest in your blog for longer than just dropping that EntreCard.

There are two rules you should follow when designing websites: Less is more and KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid. Unless you are doing an art project, in which case you are allowed to go nuts – but you knew that already. The trick is to break rules with style, but if you’re not sure what you’re doing, you’re better off just following the rules. You should be aware of one more thing. The net has a fashion. Blogs can get old fashioned. At the beginning of the year every blog had a Live Traffic Feed, and now… I can’t see them anywhere. Things change and you have to change with them, just like shopping for clothes.

Now that I got Pushhyarag2000’s blog into a readable state, he will have to teach me how to drive the traffic to a blog. Geesh that guy is like a goat herder getting people on his site!

Popularity: 12%

As my regular readers know, I am a Finn who moved to Australia in April this year. While the transition has gone smoothly on most parts, there is one thing that keeps me puzzled. Sometimes people are friendlier towards me than what I expect, and sometimes I feel they are down right rude. I know I make mistakes with my politeness here, as us Finns don’t have an equivalent to the word “please” and all these thank yous and misters and mam’s are used very sparingly and they are not considered necessary at all. Politeness comes from the tone of voice and your expression, not the words you use. We have little such shallow signs of politeness or friendliness, given that we are not the friendliest and most open people out there, not at all. That is to say that I suspect the cold shoulder I receive occasionally is due to my own behaviour, no matter how friendly I attempt to be and no matter how I remind myself to say please and thank you and not reply with one word only and the sort.

One of my problems is to ask questions. Small talk. Australians ask you ever so effortlessly about your weekend plans and the sort, and I go on and blabber about my plans without asking the same question back, not because I wasn’t interested, but because I’m used to people sharing their plans if they want to without prompting. It’s always been a problem for me, even in Finland even though the type of questions is different there, but here it is even harder, as everyone asks you questions that they either do or do not expect an answer to. Like “How’re you goin’?” That question was thrown at me by a young man who was having a smoke in front of his work place (I assume) when I walked past with my dog. What are you supposed to reply to that? Unsuspecting Finn as I was, I just said “good” and smiled, reminding a second later that I probably should have said “good thanks” and then continued on to ask how he was doing. However, by that time I was already meters away and couldn’t, obviously, return to the conversation without appearing I was actually interested in how he was doing. Clearly, he wasn’t interested in my well being either, but he must have been one of those friendly Australians, who just cannot let a stranger pass by without attempting to make a conversation, no matter how short.

I was on my way to buy some more calico. At the shop, I was waiting for someone to come to me and ask if they can help me. There was 3 assistants anyway, and I was the only customer at that point, so I kind of expected someone to come over and offer help. Nobody did though. So I did a circle around the place and returned to my original position next to the rolls of calico, expecting them to understand that I was, in fact, decided on the calico. Nobody approached me or seemed the slightest bit interested in me. Did I possibly fail to look them in the eye when I got in or give some other sort of signal of approachability or friendliness, I don’t know, but I ended up carrying the 20 meter roll onto the counter myself. I was then attended to because there was no other option I would imagine.

As my assistant was measuring 10 meters of the stuff for me, I asked if she knew where the material was manufactured. She didn’t know, but promised to ask someone else. I decided I better explain why I wanted to know, given that calico is like junk fabric to most people (the unbleached, un-everything material that most dressmakers use as mock up dress material testing the pattern) and to most people it doesn’t matter one bit where it comes from. So I explained I make wedding dresses out of calico and that Australians have a really good regulations in pesticide control and the sort when growing cotton, even if it wasn’t organic. She seemed interested at that point, and I felt like I had broken the ice. Good going, Sebbie, you’re getting the hang of it, I congratulated myself in my head.

She then went on to tell me that I should contact this-and-that person at a wedding magazine she used to work for, and tell the manager her name to get a better deal on advertising in that magazine. She also gave me an estimate of the price the advertising would probably cost. I was impressed by her willingness to help me out, but I was no longer surprised as I had noticed a lot of people will go out of their way to help you ahead by giving you contacts and tips. I thanked her excitedly, and told her that I will do exactly that, although I won’t have the money for advertising in high end magazines just yet. When she was done cutting my fabric and packing it up, she went off to find that woman who would possibly know where the fabric came from, quickly explaining why I wanted to know. She didn’t have any idea, so I said it’s all right, that I’ll just need to know where it comes from before I sell the dress to someone to whom the ecological point of view matters a lot. Before I could finish my sentence, she had already drifted off back to a conversation with the other shop assistent, and the one who was serving me had made her way over to some pile of fabric. As I hadn’t even nearly finished what I was saying, I started moving towards the door still talking, uncomfortably aware of the fact that nobody paid any attention to me whatsoever.

I managed to get back home without any more culture shocks, but it did leave me wondering how little things make such a big difference. My culture back home is seemingly very similar to this one, but still I can’t manage to buy a simple piece of calico or the daily croseries without being baffled by the differences. How I don’t know what to say when the cashier asks me that question “how are you today” as I know fully well she really doesn’t care. Why can’t they just say “G’day” and skip the fancy stuff. At least I know what the proper response to that is.

Popularity: 14%

How many times have you heard the advice: you have to work on your relationship? To me it sounds like: “If I want to work on my relationship, I have to imagine what I would do if I was truly in love with the person I’m with.” Already there is a problem. There was a problem to start with.

In my opinion marriages don’t fail because of the lack of trying. People don’t give up too easily. In my opinion, a lot of people are going too far into the relationship with people they shouldn’t have gone beyond the fourth date or something. People stay in relationships that don’t work, because they DON’T WANT TO GIVE UP. They don’t want to feel like they wasted all that time with the wrong person, so they rather work on the relationship to make the wrong person right. What do you think the chances of that working are?

People who are not in a good relationship see other couples who go have dinners at restaurants, take picnics and spend time together as examples of people who work on their relationship. “We should do that” they say. People who are doing that though probably are not thinking about things they HAVE TO do with their partner, but things they GET TO do together.

Having a good working relationship doesn’t mean not having problems. Sure you might have problems, but when there is that one thing that works; you love spending time together and see each other as friends, then the rest of the problems can be solved. Spending time together is a break from everything else, and there’s one more thing I don’t quite get: “Spending time together as a couple”. It suggests that there is some things that couples do that make the relationship work better, and that it somehow difficult to do or I don’t know… It’s something special, something that neighter one of you would probably want to do really. Watching the telly isn’t probably going to contribute to your relationship, even though I think when added to the rest of the things you do together, it can be a good way to relax together and just wind down. The other things should come naturally, things you like to do anyway. If you are with the right person, you probably have a whole range of things you like doing together, and not necessarily “as a couple”. In fact, it might be that you have to actually think about what it is that you are not doing together, like things you do with just your friends or alone, but of course, those things are important as well and you shouldn’t live without anything else in your life apart from your partner – that’s not healthy either.

Finding that right person is a very hard task. The more quirks you have, the harder it is to find that right person. I know though, that with persistence you will find the right person, and being alone should always be a more appealing option than a relationship that doesn’t work. You shouldn’t be afraid of being alone, because the alone times are always a chance for us to make things better. Make ourselves better, make our lives better, and to find that special someone that will make put a silver lining to every cloud in your life.

Popularity: 16%