Archive for the 'Blog Blather' Category
Thanks for the heads-up, Christine 
Sorry people, I was (obviously) fiddling with the look and widgets on the blog, and something was not quite right. If you access the blog via RSS you should have had no problems, but it was a wee bit broken for the rest of you (and me - I couldn’t even access the admin panel this morning). Should be okay now, please let me know if it isn’t.
This look is (hopefully) a temporary stopping point. I was weary of the old theme, but have no-time to finish working on my own (it does have a tantalising title though - ‘Floss Garden’ ). So I thought this was a nice fresh, simple theme to adopt in the meanwhile.
January 11 2007 | Blog Blather | 4 Comments »
I finally finished the last of my marking yesterday. I think I had just about got into the swing of it, but still, I don’t harbour any desire to do it again.
I spent much of yesterday trying to decide whether to sign up for NaBloPoMo after all. In the end, I went to bed early instead, thus missing the signup deadline, and I’m probably glad of that. Also glad of the extra couple of hours of sleep, as Niamh woke up three times again.
In a case of “don’t count your chickens” (re. the camera purchase), my tax return arrived today, and somebody at the ATO has monumentally stuffed up, doing me out of a very substantial amount of family tax benefit. I spent an hour and a half on the phone and down at Medicare today trying to sort it out. We will get the money, but it may take another month. Grrr.
I’ve signed up for another exchange even when I told myself I wouldn’t. Hardanger. Scary.
Christmas is how close? 
And I’ve realised that I have to make Niamh a Santa Sack. Like this one of Finn’s. It’s an Ellen Maurer Stroh free design - I think I’ll use the reindeer design for Niamh.
SBQ from today:
How did you decide on the title of your stitching blog? Was it random, or does it have a special meaning to you or about you?
Erm… I think I was kind of trying to be clever. Or something. Something about “The journey of a million stitches begins with a single cross”. Let’s call it random, anyway. I’ve been considering renaming to “Stitched By Mel” to match the url, but I’m still not sure about that. I feel like this blog is less and less about stitching at the moment, so I’m not sure either the name or the address are particularly appropriate. I have therefore also considered moving the whole blog to a new subdomain and renaming it Blogged.byMel. But I’m somewhat loathe to change the address. I suspect everything will just stay the same… I’m a great procrastinator 
Edit: Clearly, this entry was written back when the name of the blog was ‘Million Stitches’, and clearly, I eventually moved and renamed the blog
November 02 2006 | Blog Blather and Counted Stitchwork and Memes | 1 Comment »
Happy Halloween, to the Northern-hemisphericans dropping by Happy Beltane to those downunder who celebrate the old ways. And… um… Happy Tuesday to the rest of you?
In this household, it seems more like Christmas. Our tax return is through (well, half of it anyway). Usually this time of year means paying off debts - last year we paid off our car and a hefty credit card debt. Thanks in part to the baby bonus and in part to some gruelling overtime hours put in by OtherHalf, we’re reasonably okay on the debt front this year. Apart from the house, that is.
So today, we welcomed this new baby into the house. Isn’t she beautiful? Mmmm… digital SLR goodness. This is a purchase we’ve been planning to make for some time - my (film) SLR camera gave up the ghost recently, and we’ve been meaning to replace our (compact) digital camera with something better, so this is the ’something better’ we came up with. We (OtherHalf) found a wonderful deal on the body plus two (two!) lenses and a 1GB SD memory card. Part of the attraction of the Nikon is that the remaining film SLR camera in the household is also a Nikon, and the telephoto lens we got with the D50 is fully compatible with both Nikons. Yay! Expect more beautiful photos in my future.
And with that… ‘Blogtober’ is over! I now return you to your regularly scheduled spasmodic blogging. Just kidding. I’m hoping that with my marking commitments behind me, and with Niamh starting to sleep a little better (okay, that’s wishful thinking, I admit) I’ll be stitching and crafting (and photographing finished products) a bit more frequently, so I’ll try and be here a little more as well.
October 31 2006 | Blog Blather and General Ramblings | 2 Comments »
Just when I’m drawing close to the end of my self imposed ‘Blogtober‘ challenge, I’ve stumbled across NaBloPoMo: National Blog Posting Month, which is the bloggers’ alternative to NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Dreamed up by this blogger, the idea is simply to post on your blog every single day of November. There are prizes and all! There are also rules about not cheating by altering timestamps, so you know I’d do badly Anyway, I’m 100% certain I wouldn’t manage another month of writing every day, so I won’t be signing up. But there are loads of interesting bloggers participating (scroll down this page), so it might be fun to follow along. Let me know if any of you decide to join in
October 29 2006 | Blog Blather | 1 Comment »
I don’t really know how much I like the new Mirabilia mermaid. I’ll happily wait until seeing some WIPs before I decide completely, but she seems kind of… shapeless, to me. The colours and swirly bits look nice, I guess.
Anyway, it’s not like I need another addition to my wishlist! More stashy mail arrived yesterday - I was completely unable to resist the lure of a 60% off closing down sale at Stitched from the Heart. Along with some Antique White Quaker and Cashel to add to my dyeing stash, I picked up Teenie Tweenies Vintage Grapes and Baby bluebells fob and The Drawn Thread Autumn Arbor. I’m thinking it might be time for another trip to the Wagon soon 
I’ve truncated my blog feeds. Just in case you were wondering. You probably weren’t. It’s related to the Bitacle saga, reading about which has taken up too much of my evening. I have yet to make further moves to block Bitacle from my content, but I’m too tired to think about it right now.
And on a related note, I’m definitely now switching from my current feed reader (Sage) to Google Reader. I tried Google Reader only a couple of weeks ago, and wasn’t that happy with the interface, and it seemed a little buggy (not picking up updates from all my subscribed feeds, for example). But I had another look tonight, and it seems they’ve had a nice little makeover, which makes me happy.
That is all
October 18 2006 | Blog Blather and Counted Stitchwork and General Ramblings | 2 Comments »
So this morning I had a rather unpleasant internal examination - want to hear about the state of my cervix? No, didn’t think so
Anyway, as a result, I’m super sensitive and irritable, so I’m going to have a whine about some online-y things that have been getting me down of late.
Can anyone tell me why some people are completely comfortable with ruining the online experience for the rest of us? My question stems from a few ‘issues’ I’ve been having:
I am informed by OtherHalf that my domain name was recently appropriated by someone for use as a ’sender’ address for spam. So if I’ve spammed your mailbox lately, sorry, it truly was not me. I don’t use this domain for anything mail related. OtherHalf has put measures in place which will hopefully stop this happening again - what makes me most angry is that not everyone can necessarily protect themselves like this - I’m just lucky to have someone on hand who happens to administrate mail servers for a living.
Secondly, I was targeted by a couple of splogs recently. Splogs are apparently ’spam blogs’ - fake blogs (usually full of nonsensical or plagiarised content) set up purely for the purpose of either A) promoting other sites belonging to the blog-author via lots of linkage, or B) making money from AdSense impressions by luring visitors to the splog, or C) both. It seemed to be a couple of the B-type splogs which got me - incoming links to my blog are listed on the WordPress interface, and I usually check them out to see who’s linking to me (Um… I do believe that’s called vanity!) In this case, by visiting the blogs in question, I earned the authors a little bit of income from their Google AdSense ads. Sucks 
Edit: I just want to clear up a little misunderstanding - Splogs are not exactly the same thing as comment spam. I have quite good comment spam moderation on here, and if I got more, there are several WordPress plugins that work really well at eradicating comment spam. Splogs are not possible to control in this way - they work by linking to me, I see the incoming link via Technorati or the WordPress interface, and visit the blog to find out who it is that’s linking me. Slightly different, and I can’t control who links to me… all I can do is stop visiting those sites to check. It’s more like referer log spamming, if you know what that is. If you find what you believe is a splog on Blogspot, you can ‘flag’ that blog as having ‘offensive content’, but I don’t know how effective this is at having them removed.
OK, now the third thing is a little closer to home. Stitching Exchanges. More specifically - mine. In trying to sort out the state of affairs - who has posted and received, and who has not - it has become apparent that one of the group has… well… disappeared. Absconded. Leaving behind her a trail of unfulfilled exchanges (so I hear now). Mine included. I feel awful for the person who’s missing out on her exchange (only she won’t miss out in the end, because of course I’ll arrange a replacement for her), and I feel really let down personally (partly because I’m the moderator, and partly because I was the person to send the fiber/embellishment supplies to her to use in this exchange). Why would you do that? Personal gain? There’s very little of that in this case. Malicious intent? I guess some could take perverse pleasure from upsetting people like this… but I just don’t get it. At any rate, it has soured my first experience of moderating an exchange, and I’m not sure I’m going to be jumping in to do another.
Aaargh! There was more, actually, but I think I’ve got the bulk of my grumpiness out of the way, so I’ll just stop here… Finn and I are going to go and cook Osso Bucco to make me feel better
PS. In case you did want to know the state of
Things-Cervical, all is well, and the finger-crossing can commence now, please ! This month, one way or the other, I’m going to have a baby !
June 01 2006 | Blog Blather and Counted Stitchwork and Family and Pregnancy | 8 Comments »
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