Famous For All The Wrong Reasons

The following is an example of how the Internet can latch on to something totally unexpected and the end result is someone who is put into a royally disastrous situation. Meet Ellie who is 22 years old. According to Ellie, she gave permission for her friend to publish the photos of her modeling next to her friends car as seen within the first page of this Neowin forum thread. The pictures showcase a young woman, dressed in model type clothes but ends up not having the prettiest face in the world. For whatever reason, the net has caught on to these particular photos and now many are publishing photoshopped images to spread the joke around. Simply put, this young girl has become Internet famous but for all the wrong reasons.

Judging by the Neowin forum thread and various conversations spread amongst the net, many people don’t seem to have anything nice to say about this girl. Ellie actually published a response to the craze on her MySpace page that explains how she doesn’t care about the situation. I think it is rather hard not to care when the web is going crazy over photos of yourself spread across the web, many of which are parodies.

This is a stark reminder that no one knows what will take off on the net and become the next sensation. While many advertisers probably wish it was their product or service, it happened to be pictures of a not so pretty face. Too bad for Ellie, she has become an Internet meme that will live in infamy.

*Note* I’ve decided not to publish any photos as there are plenty of them out on the web for you to see. Type “Girlfriend model for my car” into Google to see what I mean.

Freelancing Week 2: A Good Start

Well, today is Monday which marks week number 2 of my freelancing journey. So far, I’m off to a great start with two articles already published, an interview lined up, show notes for both podcasts adjusted, a few administrative tasks done and I’ve made a few comments on some blog posts. Seems like a productive start to the week. It will get even better once my second guest post is published on Problogger which is nothing more than a review of Sphere. Hoping this post does as well as the first. I’ll try to get things straightened out around here during the weekend.

Now I am off to bed at 9:36 AM hoping that I wake up at about 3PM to grab a shower and spend the evening with my girl.

Before I let you go, I wanted to share something with you and would like your input. I wrote about this on Performancing but I’ll share it here as well. I came across a post in Twitter which made me pause and think for a moment.

definetheline: The weekend used to mean ‘no work’. Now it means ‘stop working on the things you don’t want to do, and work on the things you want to do’.

Let me know if this sounds like the weekend to you.

What Happened This Weekend

I decided that I would do a reformat of my WordPress installation and as part of that reformat, I would install WordPress 2.7 beta 2. I also plan on doing a redesign of the site to make everything much more simpler than before. However, things didn’t go as planned thanks to my webhosting provider, AnHosting a.k.a. MidPhase. Starting on 11/07/2008 4:37 PM I sent in a trouble ticket to MidPhase letting them know that I was experiencing timeout error messages when browsing to my domain. Cpanel, email, anything dealing with my account was loading slower than molasses. I became increasingly upset as I updated the ticket on 11/08/2008 2:20 AM. Ten hours went by without anyone responding to my trouble ticket. This is the first time I’ve had an experience like this with MidPhase and it was pretty frustrating.

Once two more hours went by with no update to my ticket or the situation, I called the support line for MidPhase and because it was so early in the morning, I didn’t have to deal with a queue. After talking with the gentleman and having him confirm the issues I was experiencing, he told me that a support rep has been assigned to my ticket and he would look into it. The rep responded to my ticket on 11/08/2008 4:36: AM.

By the way, I should point out that the entire problem was based around the CPU load on the shared server being to high, not allowing other things to process. It was increasingly frustrating to me because I wouldn’t think zapping whatever processes were hogging up the CPU would be that hard to shut down. What made things worst is that I had deleted my WordPress files along with the database and because I couldn’t access PHPMyAdmin or various other parts of Cpanel let alone getting my site to load, my domain was stuck on a WordPress installation error.

stupidcpu

The last time I updated the ticket was on 11/08/2008 5:26 AM. I basically had enough at this point and just hoped that things would be better after I woke up. Thankfully, things did get back to normal. Then, because my shared server was one of the ones that was recently migrated into a new data center, the file upload limit in the php.ini file was set to 2mb which means I couldn’t upload and import my WordPress WXR file. After going back and forth a few times with support, they managed to get that changed enabling me to have a successful import. The support for this particular issue was much better than the previous one.

So, that is where I stand now. I am currently configuring the plugins I know I am going to use. After that, I plan on working on the theme to get things simplified and straightened out. Special thanks to everyone who contacted me asking me what happened. Obviously, visiting a site that all of a sudden has a hello world post on it with the default Kubrick theme is a cause for concern. I appreciate those who sent me a message expressing their willingness to help if need be. Thank you.

Nothing malicious happened to the site, I just happened to go through with my WordPress reformat which I sometimes do but it turned out to be a series of badly timed events. Hopefully, things are all better now.

Kiki James Leather Journal

KikiJames, a company based in London specialized in creating various hand made journals as well as diaries, guest books, address books, wallets and purses, etc. The journal that I picked up was a chocolate brown classic wrap journal. The journal is made out of Italian bridle leather yet it is smooth to the touch. Size wise, it’s about as big as a small book (4½”x3″). This particular journal is filled with 64 empty pages with no lines which enables you to doodle, writing down notes, pictures, etc. In my own opinion, the paper has an old fashion yellowish tint to it.

The only thing keeping me from using this Journal on a regular basis is the smell. My leather coat smells nice and I’ve smelled other forms of leather that don’t smell that bad but this particular piece of leather has a potent smell that I don’t agree with. It is very hard to explain exactly what it smells like. It is a combination of general leather and something else. That something else is what I don’t like.

This means I have a journal that I won’t be using and thus, would like to give away to anyone who is interested. All you have to do to qualify for the give away is to comment on this blog post. Then, after a few days I’ll announce the winner and send it off to you.

Adjusting Has Been A Pain

This is the first week in where I begin working weekends only at the grocery store while doing freelancing Mon-Fri. One of the reasons I was looking forward to this type of work schedule was the simple fact that I would finally be able to develop a sleeping schedule that normal people use. Well, in my first week, sleeping schedules have been anything but normal. I’ve been trying to get to bed at an early time but after a year and a half of working 9PM – 5AM, it’s just not that easy. Coupled with the fact that here in northern Ohio, we have been flirting with 70 degrees all week long but thanks to my insane sleep schedule along with the time change, I haven’t been able to take advantage of it.

My writing this week has also suffered. I haven’t published as much content at Performancing this week nor have I written anything for this blog in a little while. I’ve been thinking about using some sleeping aid pills to help me out but my girlfriend is strongly against me using those. The only real choice I have now is to pull an all nighter where I stay up for most of the day and then try to go to sleep at a decent time. Pretty poor for my health but I am sick of waking up in the middle of the afternoon.

Inspired But Reality Kicked In

So last night, I like many Americans stayed up to watch/listen to all of the coverage related to the election. I ended up voting for Obama and as luck would have it, he has become the next president of the United States. However, I must admit that when I listened to John McCain’s concession speech, it touched me and was a bit inspiring. After his speech was over with, I seriously thought if I had made a mistake voting for Obama.

That question was answered once I listened to Obama’s acceptance speech. I was seriously impressed with what Obama had to say. He left no stone unturned and after he left the stage, I had this feeling of wanting to go out and kick some ass as an American to help get things back in order. Obama had one hell of a speech and it really messed with my emotions.

Then, in the back of my head, I reminded myself that there is a good chance that what Obama promised in his speech could be empty handed. After all, that is what most politicians have done, promise this and that and then come up empty handed with no one to hold them accountable for their actions or lack there of. I sincerely hope that Obama delivers on each one of his promises in the next four years.

What A Busy Week

I am pretty excited to know that I am almost finished with my 32 hour work weeks at the grocery store. At least, for the time being and everything continues to go well with freelancing. The grocery store will serve as a crutch in case things in the freelancing world cave in. This past week, I published an interview on BloggerTalks.com with Steve Hodson, published a great post that was welcomely received by the Performancing community called 7 Tips On Building Relationships Through Blogging, produced a fun open mic edition of Perfcast and to top it all off, produced an hour and a half WordPress Weekly with Jane Wells were we covered a ton of ground related to WordPress 2.7.

WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 is out and ready for the publics consumption. November 10th looks like the date for a release candidate while the end of November is aimed for the actual release of 2.7. I am going to bite the bullet and work on getting my content from my Jeffc.me domain and the content on Jeffro2pt0 back into one file and then import that into a new installation of WordPress, that being 2.7 beta 1. Then, I’m going to work on slimming down the theme and installing one plugin at a time and get back to the basics.

One of the subtle changes I am going to make is to remove the FeedBurner graphic. I was having a discussion with Andrew Rickmann on the WordPress Weekly after show and I was talking to him about going back to the basics and how I am getting to the point of doing things my way instead of the popular (what the rest of the blogosphere is doing) way.  So, I’ll remove the graphic because I don’t care to see it everyday. I’ll check in from time to time but it is not a priority for me anymore. My priority is to clean this place up, highlight my freelancing work and then publish content on a regular basis by treating this blog as if it was my Tumblr account. That means, publishing links to articles that interest me, sometimes I’ll write a long form article, opinionated pieces, bits of my personal life, random thoughts, etc.

I just feel that it is time for me to reclaim this blog as my own and no one else’s. While I enjoy writing content for people, I always enjoy writing content for myself and getting my thoughts from my head, out into the open. I want to get back to the point in time of where I can freely express myself without thinking about the boundaries I have placed on this blog by writing for others.

Will I still talk about WordPress and Web 2.0 and all that other stuff? Of course I will, as I see fit, but don’t expect this site to be an authoritative figure in any subject. I want to converse with people and discuss things, concepts, ideas, whatever. So, that will be the focus of the site after I have reformatted it. Along with the reformat, I plan on doing a redesign but it will not be anything drastic. I’m tired of spending 17 hours each time I redesign the site. I’ve always been a fan of forests and so, that is the theme I am going to head towards with the redesign.

For those that will continue to ride the train of life and blogging with me, its time to move on to the next stop. For everyone else, you can get off here. But don’t forget to send me a postcard :)

Lightning Kills 52 Cows

In a huge “bolt” of bad luck, 52 black and brown cows found themselves victims to a single lightning strike. However, how does one bolt of lightning kill 52 cows at one time? Apparently, the cows huddled near a fence during the storm to seek safety but the fence was constructed with bits of conductive wire which appears to have allowed the bolts of electricity to run its course.

The picture that is featured with the news report looks like a mass cow suicide.