This backend of this blog is continuing its descent into madness. Following on from the problems where no posts would accept tags, this seems to have fixed itself while simultaneously stopping the blog posting anything but the most recent article on the home page. All of this has taken place without user intervention. It seems the glue, velco and staples holding the back end together have finally given up the ghost. Hopefully we will be able to find time this weekend to fix things. Sorry for any weirdness until then and during the “improvements.”
Tag Archives: WhyDontYou
Camera Shops?
Well, I am in the market for a new camera – ideally a Nikon D300 however trying to find somewhere that is:
- Reliable
- Affordable
Is easier said than done, especially as this camera costs over £1000 in most UK shops (both on- and off-line). Even the best deals I can find (other than weird eBay offers) has this camera at a lot more than I can afford. This gives me some limited options.
One thing I have considered was a Froogle search (or Google Product Search as it seems to call itself now) which found an online retailer called “Apex Galaxy” who claim to sell this camera plus lens (18-135mm) for a mere £775 (really). The paranoid cynic in me screams all manner of alarm bells at this price point – surely something must be wrong here. I have done a (limited) search on Google but can’t find anything conclusive as to their legitimacy. Does anyone have any ideas? I really don’t want to throw away money I can barely afford.
Plan B is to simply not get a new camera. This is depressing so I would rather not have to resort to this!
Plan C is something I have recently concocted. If anyone knows of a camera shop or other retailer that would like to sponsor me then I am more than happy to sell my soul! If you, or someone you knows, thinks they could do with regular reviews here – including regular images showing the camera and its capabilities then I would be prepared to go out and regularly take photos and post them – along with a write up. Likewise, if you know of a travel company who would like to sponsor someone to go around the world taking pictures and blogging about the place – I am your man! You wont need to ask twice…
So, pinning all my hopes on plan C (eternal optimist that I am), please feel free to pass this on to anyone you know who might be willing to spend some money on an excellent quality sponsorship deal. The only line I will draw is veracity of my comments, if a service or system sucks I want to be able to say that – this probably means Jessops and eBuyer will not want to sponsor me…
WordPress Upgrade
Well, this blog has finally cracked and gone to WP 2.3.3 (as heather mentioned previously). However this has not been without problems, so please be patient if it occasionally seems weird here. We are trying to rectify the tagging but as I am not convinced many people used it a lot I doubt that will cause many problems. There are one or two other hurdles to cover that may mean things display strange for a while but (fingers crossed) we have caught most of them! Thanks for your patience.
Scrabo Tower – Pinhole Effect
Scrabo Tower – Pinhole Effect,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.
This blog has been a bit text-heavy of late. Heather has posted some excellent, thought provoking articles (example, example and example) and I have been slack – spending most of my time working or travelling.
In an effort to try and lighten up the blog, I am going to (irregularly) post images here – hopefully to get some feedback and constructive criticism, but if not it will cheer me up 🙂
My first choice is “Scrabo Tower” from just outside Newtownards, Northern Ireland. This is an odd little tower and I am not really sure about its history, however it is picturesque and the views around it are amazing. As this is a fake-pinhole (a picture edited to look like it was taken on an old-fashioned pinhole camera), it doesn’t really add much in the way of “colour” to the blog – but it looks nice! 🙂
[tags]Pictures, Flickr, Pinhole, Photography, WhyDontYou, Photoshop, Scrabo Tower, Digital Photography, Photo Editing, Black and White, Photos[/tags]
Upgrade Stalled
It looks like not enough people made the correct devotions to Hermes and now we are not going to try and upgrade the blog this weekend. Heather has been sidelined by a cold and a fair amount of work and my internet access time is approaching the bare minimum. When we have more time we will look at what is required with the upgrade and give it ago. Please, keep making sacrifices to Ukko though.
Comments and commenting
After the success of our recent blog comment week, it seems things have dropped off again. As a result off this we will be looking at another comment week soon, as well as making personal efforts to comment on other blogs more often in general. I would be interested in hearing how other feel about comments – do they motivate authors? Do you prefer comments or track backs? And so on. Please let me know what you think.
Downtime
In case the faithful are curious, there will be a bit of a quiet patch here on whydontyou.
I am still offline and heather has taken a few days off. Almost normal service should be resumed around 4 sept. Hopefully my net connection should be back by 6 sept but i wouldn’t hold my breath.
In the meantime, please feel free to comment and link to posts here!
Blog Comment Week
Just to let you know, the WhyDontYou Blog will institute blog comment week from today. In a nutshell we will undertake to leave a comment (and a relevant one) to the blog posts and articles we read during this week – hopefully sharing ideas or providing a counter point to the opinions given by others with the aim of broadening discussion. Where it is not possible (or appropriate) for us to leave a comment on the blog we will consider making a post here as a response (part of me feels this is a better way of engendering discourse anyway). Please feel free to join in!
Comments and Emails
As a prelude to the WhyDontYou Comment Week (due to start tomorrow if we have the time 🙂 ), we have taken Michael‘s advice and put in a comment subscription facility. Now, if you find a thread you like here you can post a comment and, if you want to be kept informed of the debate, you can tick the box and get notification of follow ups via email. All good fun. Part of the idea behind us commenting a lot more next week is to help encourage discussions and share opinions via the blogosphere – which, it seems to me, is part of the reason they exist.
New Theme Time
It has been a quiet weekend here on the blogging front, but we have worked on a new theme – returning to a Stonehenge header picture and blue colour scheme. The site should now look like the screenshot. If it is radically different there is a problem or we have removed the theme 🙂
As always, there may be a few teething problems early on, so we really do appreciate it if you can take a moment to let us know if you encounter any problems. No matter how trivial you may think a problem is, if you tell us, we can try to fix it! One thing we will try to look at is page loading time. Our initial work around for this, is to increase the use of “read more” breaks in the content of posts on this page, but I am aware some people don’t like this, so please take a moment and let me know what you think.
[tags]General,Site Admin, Theme, Whydontyou, Blog[/tags]
Back Online
Well, after a somewhat wet holiday all the WhyDontYou contributors are now back home safe and sound.
It seems our Atheistic comments here, while being studiously ignored by the Abrahamic deity were noticed by a few more elemental Gods… Obviously our lack of sacrifices to Mithras and general irreverence ensured that every day we were subjected to almost Biblical downpours. At one point it became comical – every time we were in the car it was brilliant sunshine, as soon as we got out the clouds appeared and the rain began. Seriously. Add to this a week where we had no access to the internet but every single day a thousand and one religious-nonsense blog topics forced themselves upon us. The Gods were truly displeased.
That aside, it was great fun and about a zillion photographs were taken. In fact, it has prompted me even more towards buying a “real” camera, and now I am stuck with the difficult decision between two entry level Digital SLR cameras. I have narrowed it down to a choice between the Nikon D40x and the Canon EOS 400D. I have found the Nikon for about£15 cheaper than the Canon now (because of the Nikon cashback offer) so that looks favourite – for now. If anyone has any experience of either I would be interested to hear it. The next hurdle will be where to buy it from 🙂
Anyway, enough rambling for now. Hopefully normal service will resume in the morning.
[tags]Holiday, Deities, Mithras, WhyDontYou, Technology, Nikon, Canon, D40x, EOS, EOS 400D, Camera, Digital Camera, Digital SLR, SLR[/tags]
Quiet Period
Just to let the faithful readers (both of you) here know, by wonderful coincidence all the authors here will be away on holiday over the period 1 July – 8 July, so it is quite unlikely there will be any posts.
Hopefully we will all come back refreshed, full of philosophical and atheistic vitriol and have loads of photographs to share.
Bet you cant wait… 😀
[tags]WhyDontYou, Holiday, Site admin, General, Why Dont You[/tags]
Tagged by Atheist Perspective
This blog was tagged by atheist perspective I’ve shamelessly lifted an explanation of what that means from the atheist perspective site, which is excellent by the way.
We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
– Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
– People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
– At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
– Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
Well part A is completed with minimal effort. Clearly the next stage must have to be the 8 random facts. Argh, 8 things about us that we wouldn’t mind going on the net – but are actually interesting enough to post. Damn that rules out almost anything I could put here….
Hmmm…. hmmm…..
- Between us we have lived on or visited 5 continents. Antartica is one of the two we’ve never been to, although one of us has been close enough to swim in it’s waters. (Yes, it really is as cold as you would imagine).
- Between us we speak – to a standard ranging from fluent (English) to pathetically halting (well, the others) – 5 languages and can make sense of a couple more with babelfish’s help. Oh yes, 5 languages Plus Latin.
- One of us genuinely believes the Wire is the major artwork of the 21st century. This is a minority viewpoint in every sense, even on the blog.
- We train with weights, more or less every day. One of us even got a certificate that will pay out thousands if anyone he trains gets injured, The other one has long been planning to enlist him as her personal trainer and do something spectacularly stupid…
- One of us has become obsessed with taking photographs and keeps getting better and better digital cameras every few months. And the pictures are getting better all the time as well.
- One of us refuses to accept any limitations, no matter how glaringly obvious, and hence persists in thinking she can do 3d graphics, despite the evidence of the senses.
- Terry Pratchett remains the one author we agree 100% over and have obsessively read every book produced. (Not all good though- the “actual†sci-fi books are poo and the science companion is distressing)
- CSS design is soundly despised by every one who has anything to do with this blog. Even their pets hate CSS.
Choosing 8 blogs was no easy task either. There were obvious choices – like nullifidian – who have probably already been tagged within an inch of their lives so would just get pissed off. However, I sprinkled my fairy dust over the atheist blogroll and found some worthy, if less familiar, contenders.
- Spanish Inquisition
- Bible study for atheists
- Allen zone
- Pink Proza
- The strong Atheist
- Evanescent
- ardvarchaeology
- Godfrey lazarus says
[tags]Blog Meme, Atheism, Wire, WhyDontYou, Why Dont You, Society, Culture, Travel, Languages,Blog, Meme, Blogs[/tags]
Outage
Sorry about the recent full blown outage we’ve suffered. To be honest, at the moment, I still have no idea what caused it. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
Rant about spam
It seems a hostage to fortune to say I don’t really care about spam coming to my inbox to advertise shares or pharmaceuticals or just spill out gibberish concrete poetry. One sort of spam that makes me really angry is the “System Admin” stuff that says it’s been returned from email address x@blah.com because there was an undeliverable message from my email account.
It is impossible to know which of these are spoofed from start to finish. Most, I am told. However, some could be legitimate in the sense of actually recording an attempted spam going somehere – in which case my email account has been used to spam other people. Which is obviously much worse than just getting spam yourself because it destroys your credibility.
A man I know had an AOL account that banned him three times because his address was being used as a spam source. He was mortified and out of his depth on each occasion – he had chosen AOL as his service provider, for a start, so, almost by definition, he knew virtually nothing about the Internet.
(On another occasion, this rant will expand into the area of spam comments and how it means that we have to use Akismet, which occasionally deletes real ones as it goes into a destroying frenzy, losing good comments. as well as making us look churlish.
Not that this blog can claim to be innocent of general churlishness, but the comment-deleting churlishness isn’t our fault. The ongoing looney debate shows us bending over backwards – to the point of tying ourselves in infinite knots – to avoid being churlish to soemone who is a looney fundamentalist, by his own admission.)