Google Queen

I received an email today a few hours ago which is the second offer I received in a week’s time to be an editor and/or write for blogs. The first option was sent to me through email by MvdM.: he asked me to contribute articles about ‘things to do’ in London related to art, design, photography etc. and become an editor of his professional blog aimed at the business he’s in which is related to photography. I would have plenty of time to write something or look into things. Of course I agreed to do this because it’s fun and he’s a close friend! Although I’m always surprised to hear that people like my writing and read it, I’m flattered, yes…

The second email I received started with: ‘You have a great writing. I have enjoyed the articles on your blog’ which I thought was quite funny because according to my stats this person didn’t spend much time on my blog at all. He was offering me a so called ‘journalist’ function as part of some kind of bloggers news community which seemed to be based in India. I would never just trust any email that I’ll get thru my blog from any stranger that is offering me anything in particular. People will have to earn my trust no matter whether I expose myself to the outside world through my blog or not. Just because they can read my stories doesn’t mean I have to allow them access to other aspects of my life.

And because I have antennae I’m pretty good at separating the wheat from the chaff… So something started buzzing straight away… and because I consider myself the Google Queen I did what I’m good at. I searched the World Wide Web for information and found exactly what I was looking for. A confirmation to my gut feeling. So my answer to those who contacted me today is a loud no, thank you! I don’t write to collect followers. I’m not interested in your offer and I’m not writing to make money: I don’t want the four bucks, you could donate it to charity and please don’t contact me again… you really underestimate my intelligence.

On a different note: I’ve decided to put some more positive Qi in the office… I’m not really into the Feng Shui thing, well at least not conscious that is, perhaps on a subconscious gene-wise level, but adding some extra positive energy never did anyone any harm *hehe*. So I bought some Chinese lucky bamboo [Fu Gui Zhu] and organised a glass vase and some nice tiny stones to hold the bamboo. I bought six of them, yes I am superstitious. Like I said earlier, it comes with the genes *wink* Anyway… six of these silly stems because the word six sounds like “Luck” in Chinese and will bring me prosperity and favorable conditions.

My Qi spot *hehe*

My bit of luck *wink* [yes the pic on my monitor is one I took as well]

Crunchy Toast

I have had a really bad habit for years, basically because I’m not a morning person at all. I tend to be a night owl just like my dad was, my system starts to wake up at 19.00 in the evening instead of 07.00 in the morning. Countless nights I ended up working on [web design/Flash] projects and not being able to stop, driven by a perfectionist nature and eager to learn the ropes whenever it was software related or web design related… Long nights of spending time on configuring a script, adjusting it so it would work and do what I wanted it to do.

Or like the other day when my ISP decided to upgrade their Linux servers and PHP over the weekend and my blog stopped working the next day. I had no front-end blog and no back-end user interface. Reading into the problem, I found an excellent article about installing MT 4.0 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which gave me a clue to what to look for in solving the problem. It turned out to be a security breach, one that I’ve created myself installing MT 4.0 the same way I’ve installed all the previous version. Permissions that used to be fine before were no longer working with the latest Linux version and causing problems so I had to change folders around and check permission on cgi scripts etc.

My ISP couldn’t solve my problem, because they don’t have Movable Type know-how so I was forced to solve it myself staying up half the night reading into things and running installation tests, even software upgrades. But I fixed it and I so swear by my own elimination theory based on trial and error because no matter how bad, I always seem to solve the problem: software-wise that is… I’m rather impatient and unlucky in solving problems in my personal life at times but that is just an extremely slow beta version of my elimination theory which I’m still debugging *hehe*…

So because I’m not a morning person I try to stay in bed as long as I possibly can. [I’ve exaggerated in the past but admitting that on here is still a bit embarrassing so I’d better not go into details for now, perhaps in a few years when I’m old enough to start thinking of writing an autobiography because the words ‘shame and shy’ are no longer part of my vocabulary…] And because I’m stretching out the process of getting up, to such an extend that I end up being in a rush, I have no time to eat because I literally have about ten minutes to get to work. So I skip breakfast… Yes bad… I know… Very bad indeed!

But hold your horses: I was about to say that I’ve changed my ways slightly ever since I ended up in hospital… After years of eating hardly any bread, I now have a ‘typical English way’ of celebrating my morning matters, by having two slices of the finest crunchy and crispy toast that I can manage to fix, during my morning half-awake-very-much-resting state. Since I do not like soggy or soft toast it is still quite a challenge because it takes three times three long minutes of toasting the bread and letting it cool off before it gets to the crunchy phase which basically means that these days I cannot allow myself to linger anymore, only over the weekend.

And guess what I did today… Wrong…

I got up at 07.00 *hehe*

8-)

My toast this morning. Not my toaster, I’ve got a 50’s model: muuuuuch nicer!