Reggie Thomson’s Diary

I’m way too wimpish to write resolutions for 2007, so instead here are some dreams:

WordPress

• Convert my photography blog to a daily-updated blog with simple theme
• Develop multi-lingual sites based on Gengo
• Develop geo plug-in to have gpx uploads, kml for maps.google.com
• Create a page template for WordPress to allow eg photo reviews, movie reviews
• Increase commercial sites on server using WordPress

Server:

• WikiMedia installation
• Imagemagick

Hobbies:

• Dancing - improve by going to classes
• Chinese - perhaps private exchange only
• Japanese - not sure yet - bilingual photo blog if it doesn’t drain too much time
• Cooking - maybe I’ll earn enough money to take up entertaining again

Photography

• Get permission to take commercial photos in Cambridge
• Take lots more photos
• Improve knowledge of Photoshop
• Improve commercial aspects of website
• Tidy up website to improve css and html structure

House:

• I need a wiki for this, not a static blog

I just discovered that reggie.net might be worth $58,214! See LeapFish.com.

However, my diary is worth precisely $0.00! At least, according to this website.

The photography blog is doing slightly better at $564.54.

I posted a message to Microsoft about a phishing email I received today in my Inbox.

1. I can’t easily find a place for putting suggestions about improvements to Microsoft products on your website, hence I have use this form.
2. Specifically, an improvement to Outlook spam/phishing protection that would be easy to implement:
   I received two spoof emails today with the following in their source:
   <a href=”http://www.ndmusic4u.com/images/.paypal.com/” >https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run</a>
   I NEVER wish to see these illegal messages in my inbox.
3. Please could you mark as spam/phish any email which contains a visible href address (or perhaps just the domain) that is different from the actual one.

Thanks.

I had a brainwave this morning - to check Google cache for the contents of my photography blog. I couldn’t find it on Google, but it was all there in Yahoo’s cache. All I had to do was to copy and paste the individual entries, then change the timestamps and add all the categories.

Fortunately, I don’t get any comments on my blogs. The Chinese blog had two comments which I reinstated manually.

I’ve figured out how to backup using ftp to my Godaddy remote ftp space. Hopefully, next time I need the info, I can restore online, rather than from my backup at home.

I went out on Thursday to take some snaps - see my photography_blog. The weather was beautiful, but the wind still very cold.
I met Hiroshi Shimura on Clare Bridge. On Friday, I attended his DVD viewing at his exhibition at Clare Hall. There were some great morning misty scenes from Grantchester.

I’ve just ordered a Sto-fen Omni-bounce direct from America.

A pleasant day for mowing the lawn.

I’ve updated the structure of the diaries to put important links on the left, with the right sidebar coming after the body of the postings.

This looks great on Firefox, but the right sidebar has disappeared in IE6.0. I’ll have to check what’s happened tomorrow.

The old diary.php program now links through to the WordPress version, though I have yet to customise the style.

It took a while to sort out my timesheets this afternoon.

I ate out this evening - Sainsbury’s best salad selection in the luxurious surroundings of All Saints Gardens.

Bought “West Side Story” DVD in Borders. I could have got “Spirited Away” for four pounds less than at Tesco’s.

I finished off a few projects today, and did some admin work. This included replacing a toilet handle, and putting up some 300W earth-burning lighting. I’m the office handyman, it seems. And though I say I have environmental principles, I will submerge anything for the sake of money.

There were more people at the Chinese lesson tonight, and listening to the mp3 recording proved rather fruitless. I want to hear clear sentences at normal speech. I can then create an mp3 with just those sentences, and transcribe them onto the website. Maybe I’ll just type in some of my scrawled notes. I no longer write in Chinese characters in class, as I feel I can progress faster on my own, and writing in pinyin helps me to concentrate on pronunciation, which is more important at this stage.

I’ve signed up for another ten weeks.

On returning home, I seemed to surprise a gang of about five or six youths who were acting suspiciously around the neighbourhood cars and property. I phoned the police on the mobile - but I refuse to pay for five minutes just waiting in a call queue. By the time I got through to a human on the landline, the youths had disappeared.

I’ve just completed the mamoth task of converting my old diaries to WordPress format. All I need to do now is to get the old diary.php linking through to the correct pages.

So, welcome back, after a two-and-a-half year break from the daily diary.

With all the door slams from 26 at 02.50 this morning, I didn’t get to church, choosing instead to catch up on broken sleep.

I tried to do some more listening to last week’s Chinese lesson, but something went wrong with the recording. I only managed three sentences, and decided it wasn’t worth keeping them.

There was no need for lunch today: I munched my way through the box of Thornton’s Chocolates I was given yesterday. The doggie bag of Japanese food provided nutrition for the evening.

Relaxation tonight consisted of watching “Spirited Away”. Now that I have a daily blog, I’ll start dividing up my comments, I think.