Tux news - Linux ubuntu fedora gentoo gnome news

Kristy A. Bennett blogs

Feel the buzz

Posted: May 24th, 2008, 5:58pm CEST by Kristy A. Bennett

So there has been a lot cooking around here the past 48 hours and, again, I am finding it hard to sleep from the buzz (and fear of pain from my chest injury). First cab off the rank is the amazing ability I have had in the last two weeks to still loose weight and inches in spite of injury.

Studded with conversations with Jon Oxer and Arjen Lentz, there are many little projects on the boil which with some added help from Steve Walsh should begin to be pulled off in the coming week after I finish off the textual portion of my first published book. One of these projects will be another web site which I can only hope Donna Benjamin will be willing to assist me with also.

On the NetCraft Australia front, it appears that I will again be interviewing for an administration role this week as the candidate who accepted the role has had to pull out due to a family health issue. I do wish her the best in dealing with the situation as our prayers cover her family during this time. For us now, we have two candidates up for CV review first thing Monday morning. Fifty per cent of my battle is cultural fit with NetCraft team as our support staff need to be able to work effectively with a highly-technical team as well as know how to take time out with us without the need to 'be the life of the party'. So, I guess that means that this week will be no quieter than last week which involved arranging the press coverage for our staff who were showcasing Tarka at WiMAX World EMEA 2008.

Michael is also still looking for engineers for the team also which I do not envy. We have very particular skill needs of our systems engineers which vary only in a sidewards manner in respect to product exposure. The largest problem I can identify with the applications we are receiving is that are not adequate enough in detail to determine a candidates suitability. Primarily, candidates simply list the things they have experience in without indicating the depth of experience or type of application or deployment as this would indicate knowledge depth which is essential to our roles.

Back on topic, tomorrow I take a new Hiace for a test drive, with thanks to Gilbert Toyota, with a view to settling on a purchase as soon as the fit-out and re-inspection can be arranged. What a relief it will be to have the car we need at last, be-it not in our desired colour of green.

On the writing front, I have a book relating to the householder's budget coming out soon but also had Ezine Articles publish my first article submission over last night which brought tears to my eyes this morning as they took less than 12 hours to approve it. Having said that I have just taken it offline and back into the re-approval queue for adding the resource box.

My goodness I have managed to squeeze a lot into this week - life certainly isn't quiet in the Bennett house!

read more
Home Schooling Scalability

Posted: May 21st, 2008, 12:05pm CEST by Kristy A. Bennett

There is nothing like the natural learning that occurs within the family environment. Michael had pulled the scales out to weigh tonights meat for dinner before defrosting it in the microwave. As such the scales, as usual, were left on the counter.

Usually this would result in my clearing it away at the same time as the evening dishes but Karl got to them before me. Karl has had limited exposure to kitchen scales and didn't understand the need for them to zero before putting objects on it like those in our bathroom. Once we overcame this small learning experience we weighed each of the three cars that he had in his possession.

Dinoco Lightning MacQueen: 55g
Strip 'The Dinoco King' Weathers: 57g
Doc Hudson Hornet: 62g

Of course, Michael then asks the sort of question you would only hear from an Engineer - so which was the best value for money? Karl quickly ascertained that Doc was the heaviest, by reweighing them and ranking them by weight, and the best value per gram. I, however, am not sure that I agree, I think they, compared to a DVD, are the best value in combination as they provide hours upon hours of self-guided entertainment for my two very active eldest children.

So what does this demonstrate? Firstly, that Karl at a minimum understands figure to two place values, he understands the concept of weight and the idea that something can be larger of smaller than another on a scale of weight. All that learning that he had already had without me really doing a thing! Life is easy in an environment supporting natural learning.

read more
The week in review

Posted: May 18th, 2008, 4:30pm CEST by Kristy A. Bennett

It has been a long week and I am relecting back on a series of days that have left me totally exhausted.

I have spent a lot of my time working on my web site today. Now that I have hit around 120 pages I had to put some serious thought into content management, splitting taxonomies and making some areas of my web site a little more dynamic to meet the needs of areas which are growing fastest.

Yesterday, I enjoyed attending the Home Based Learning Seminar put together by Home Education Australia - South Australian Branch. I certainly appreciated their effort and found it refreshing. It was a lot of information, a lot of it not new but simply looked upon with fresh eyes, keeping my thoughts rolling well into the night. I woke up this morning with a brain stimulation hangover and much coffee was needed to get over it.

Over the course of the week I tried desperately to keep life quiet after injuring myself. Monday included a physiotherapist appointment where I was told that I have most likely seperated the rib cartlidge of three of my ribs away from my sternum. It was inflammed and too painful to touch at the time. Now the swelling has gone down the pain has worsened, as has the breathing difficulties, as I think the inflammation was in many ways immobilising the ribs before unlike now. I have since seen the GP and have an x-ray to get done also.

Tuesday and Wednesday included trips into NetCraft Australia to get some work done injected with follow-up calls with CMI Toyota only to come to the realisation that in January when they took my deposit for a vehicle they never actually ordered it leaving me with a 4 month wait if I want to have it ordered 'for real' this time. So, I am on the market for an Automatic, Turbo-Diesel Hiace secondhand to cover me off in the short term.

I have also discovered that there are lots of things I should not be doing with my injury. Anything involving my arms being above shoulder height, behind my back or lifting over 10kg is very, very bad. A combination of these is excrutiating, should be avoided as it brings me to tears, shortness of breath and will certainly shorten the lifespan of anyone who comes near me after the attempt. Let's just say I don't handle pain well.

I have no doubt that this next week will continue to be busy. Housework will still need to be squeezed in between business commitments, physio and medical appointments, my German presentation which I should write before I present on Tuesday, and most importantly caring for my brood. I just hope that the estimated recovery time from my latest injury was greatly over-estimated!

read more
Ouchie!

Posted: May 11th, 2008, 1:40pm CEST by Kristy A. Bennett

Injured once again, I realised today that I hadn't told anyone why my blogging had slowed so much over the past few months. The answer in a nutshell is that I had a fractured hand and that from here on in I should be around a bit more as I don't think my current chest injury is going to have the same effect on my on-line productivity as the household productivity!

The full story of both incidents is in my Health Journey. It's a long winded read so make sure you have a hot drink and a good 5 minutes!

read more
Please do.

Posted: April 12th, 2008, 11:32am CEST by Kristy A. Bennett

Below is an Open Letter to Ben Liau, Channel Development Manager at Planet Domain regarding registration as hosting and domain name reseller. The original email came in yesterday. I am interested to know - has anyone else has had similiarly poor service from PlanetDomain? Please refer below for later addition to this blog post.

Dear Ben Liau, Channel Development Manager

This is an Open Letter.

Planet Domain wrote:

> We have noticed there has been no activity in your account since it has been open.
>
> Please let us know if you would like to keep your account active, and reasons why.

I do not wish to keep this account active. In fact, I requested that my application as a reseller be rescinded over 12 months ago.

In the first instance, I applied as a reseller online. In the week following I received no emails to provide me with access details or any 'how-to' instructions. After a week I contacted Planet Domain and was told there was nothing that the help desk staff member could do without a manager (who was not present at that time). For the two months thereafter I called weekly either hanging up after being placed on hold for over 15 minutes or being given similar reasons - that the help desk staff members could not resend any details, that he could not access any details (since I had no ID to give them) etc. Each time I asked for my call to be returned by someone who could assist me if I wasn't already told to call back later and hung up on.

From there my calls dropped to monthly asking to speak with a manager who was not ever available. Over a year ago now I requested that my registration be cancelled. I was told that it had been. As a result I assumed that it had and have not thought about it since.

This email confirms that since my registration several years ago, which I undertook myself, I have recieved absolutely no support or service from PlanetDomain in this respect for several years even though I had paid for this service.

> If we do not get a response from you in the next 5 days, your account will be deleted from our system.

Please do.

Concerned at your poor service,
Kristy Bennett

Later today...

I received this email in return:

Planetdomain wrote:

>Your ticket has not been accepted into the system. You are required to register at the following url to submit any issues via email: http://support.planetdomain.com/
>
>Once registered, You will be able to submit any issues directly by emailing us. We are sorry for the inconvenience this might have caused.
>
>
>Planetdomain
>

This is truly pathetic!

read more
Big Boys Just Do It

Posted: April 4th, 2008, 10:55am CEST by Kristy A. Bennett

Oddly, a couple of months ago now I discovered that my little blog has managed to draw and unexpected readership which made me question the clarity of my posts as well as ask myself whether I need to to dumb my blog down to my new demographic's technical level. (I decided against in light of the whole Simpson's 'build a car that an idiot would love and only and idiot will love it' thing). Besides, where would we be if every technology practitioner didn't share the good technical oil?
My readership's response was not directly to a post of mine but rather a re-iteration that was pulled completely out of context by a reader for their own purposes. The end result was a very interesting chat with some legal people. The conversations held were very enlightening about legal process and the choices that individuals and businesses have to face. It brought reality to the study of law that I had undertaken. Another reinforcement that theory can, in most circumstances, be outdone by experience.

Overwhelming, one thing from those conversations still resounds weeks and weeks on for that situation. The thing that stands true over and over again is that the 'big boy', the experienced person, looks at their legal circumstances and chooses a course of action (which may be to do nothing) and sticks to it. They don't don't go back and re-question their choices and the certainly don't jump up and down and make threats, and certainly not threaten without following through because that is just pathetic.

Are you playing with the big boys?

read more
A Favorite...

Posted: March 3rd, 2008, 11:19am CET by Kristy A. Bennett

Favorite things tend to come and go but over the past two years there is one video clip online that I keep going back to over and over again. It is entitled 8 Photographers and 1 Dress Trashing and was published by the crew at Stillmotion Photography + Cinematography. I was definitely impressed and am now giving serious thought to dress trashing now that the girl jus for our generation has been stolen. Now I just have to find an equally impressive but suitably unique location to do it in. Suggestions are welcome!

read more
Freak!

Posted: March 2nd, 2008, 6:03am CET by Kristy A. Bennett

My sister is over today and we were studying for our German assessment on Tuesday. We are both doing Stage One German through the Australian School of Languages.

She has been talking about her Science classes across our study as she has been looking at genetics in the subject. She then brought it to my attention that I have partially webbed toes (up to the first joint). Oddly, I had never noticed that before! I now consider myself a freak.

Just to rub salt in the wound my sister quips, "Like you weren't a freak in the first place!". Thanks Berocca, I love you too you web-toed freak!

read more
I've gone 'Green & Nutty'!

Posted: March 1st, 2008, 1:13pm CET by Kristy A. Bennett

Long time, no blog, I know and for good reason too.

Thanks to Steve Walsh and his hosting services we relocated our project to a new server and have been 'honkey-dorey' ever since. In the end we also had more issues with Drupal E-commerce Module and dropped it like a hot potato opting to let PayPal be our friend in the mean time. There are murmurs of a something of a python flavor being involved in our next site life cycle. I have been meaning to get a hang of Python for a while now (for: where duration="4" and unit="years").

So the conclusion of this evenings' blather is to let the world know that Green & Nutty™ officially launched yesterday. The web site has been up from the 6^th and taking orders by the bucket load from the 17^th!!

Another job is done.

read more
Why pay when you can get it free?

Posted: February 3rd, 2008, 8:47am CET by Kristy A. Bennett

Both Michael and I will be glad to see the end of three weeks of hacking the Drupal E-commerce Module.

It has been an uphill battle with what initially seemed to be a promising application. So why pay for it when you can get it free? Here are just some reasons that come to mind...
Broken, broken, broken
The hardest thing with Open Source design is finding applications, modules and plug-ins that have been engineered properly with one person who controls where the project is going and what is adopted into it. The problem seems to minifest itself quite obviously when a functionality request comes in. Oh so easily, one of the developers simply hacks together a section of code to provide that functionality without full consideration of the overall product and the need to sustain it's integrity and then simply release it. The need for a holistic view always needs to be in the mind of the lead developer at all times and nothing should be included without serious consideration of the big picture. This section of my rant is reminice of a keynote entitled 'Sex *and* Violence: Technical and Social Lessons' given by Damian Conway at Linux Conference Australia in 2006.
Pain, pain, pain
I am not sure how many people out there get post stress migraines but I do. So each time I was told that an aspect of this application now worked as required I went to bed, slept soundly and awoke the next day with a screaming head ache only to find that something else was broken. Rightfully, fixing one bug should not then cause something that is a different and unrelated function to break. Someone ought to teach me how code something so mashed that this occurs in the first place - it is an art I am sure. To me paying means less personal pain - it becomes someone else's problem when it doesn't work.
Delays, delays, delays
Every bug means a delay in release. During the past three weeks we have dealt with over a dozen bugs, some trivial, some worth posting patches (which we have). I believe we averaged somewhere between five and seven hours fix-time per bug and another two hours added to testing for each bug identified subsequently. Let's just say it's been a long few weeks and we don't want to look at another shopping cart again for a long, long time!
Murphy's Law
Murphy's Law says that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. We got the module working, secured, tested and implemented. We loaded the site, it all worked, went back to set up some redirects and the hosting service broke. So we sought some new hosting this afternoon and hopefully my next post will be a far brighter one with some awesome news...

read more
Progress Report - William

Posted: February 1st, 2008, 4:20am CET by Kristy A. Bennett

Another milestone was hit this Monday at the home of friends, Michael and Cathy.

28 January 2008
William sits up independently on carpet. Continues to be able to do so in following days on any soft surface.

read more
Shooting up...

Posted: January 26th, 2008, 11:44pm CET by Kristy A. Bennett

One of my favorite tasks when studying was gathering information because you would always get sidetracked with other very interesting but completely irrelevant information. So I have found another one for you:

"The pharmacological reputation of the saponins used to be a simple one: on injection, like all detergents, they cause lysis of the blood cells, haemolysis, and are thus highly toxic. One thus merely has to remember that the saponins are a further reason for not injecting herbal extracts intravenously."⁰

Just in case you thought of shooting up some of your spice rack contents...

⁰ Herbs 2000

read more
No harm caused..

Posted: January 26th, 2008, 9:10am CET by Kristy A. Bennett

Today I have been polishing off web content for my new company venture. I hope to have news of the web site launch soon. In the mean time, whilst gathering related links on products I came across another product with this disclaimer:

"No trees are injured or killed during the harvesting process."

Now that's reassuring!

read more

← Weblog noogz.net →

Tux news - Linux ubuntu fedora gentoo gnome news » Kristy A. Bennett blogs

Feeds

Kristy A. Bennett blogs

Feel the buzz

Posted: May 24th, 2008, 5:58pm CEST by Kristy A. Bennett

Home Schooling Scalability

Posted: May 21st, 2008, 12:05pm CEST by Kristy A. Bennett

The week in review

Posted: May 18th, 2008, 4:30pm CEST by Kristy A. Bennett

Ouchie!

Posted: May 11th, 2008, 1:40pm CEST by Kristy A. Bennett

Please do.

Posted: April 12th, 2008, 11:32am CEST by Kristy A. Bennett

Big Boys Just Do It

Posted: April 4th, 2008, 10:55am CEST by Kristy A. Bennett

A Favorite...

Posted: March 3rd, 2008, 11:19am CET by Kristy A. Bennett

Freak!

Posted: March 2nd, 2008, 6:03am CET by Kristy A. Bennett

I've gone 'Green & Nutty'!

Posted: March 1st, 2008, 1:13pm CET by Kristy A. Bennett

Why pay when you can get it free?

Posted: February 3rd, 2008, 8:47am CET by Kristy A. Bennett

Progress Report - William

Posted: February 1st, 2008, 4:20am CET by Kristy A. Bennett

Shooting up...

Posted: January 26th, 2008, 11:44pm CET by Kristy A. Bennett

No harm caused..

Posted: January 26th, 2008, 9:10am CET by Kristy A. Bennett