Staying in touch

How does this happen? How is it that guys I've been friends with for years, guys who've invited me to be part of the bridal party of their wedding, guys who I've dragged half across the country so they could be at mine, end up that I haven't talked to them for over a year?

Well some of you reading this have been invited to my blog with the hope that this will fix it. The stuff I write here is more or less the aimless ramblings I would have sent in an email anyway, but the intent is that this will be more regular and interesting.

I could have used Facebook as a social medium but I really dislike Facebook and all that it does. Facebook is a commercial enterprise, and as such there are things that happen there that I want to avoid. One of these things is that not everyone who is a friend, will see all your posts. When you're using a free account, Facebook will not distribute your updates to all your contacts. I don't know what the actual percentage is, you can probably Google it somewhere, but I know that this is true.

Plus, when you interact with a person, say John Doe, then all your friends will 'see' the interaction with John Doe and public parts of his account will become visible to them. At this stage of this journey, I am not wanting to have friends of friends joining discussions and critiquing stuff I post or write. I am just wanting to write stuff down to share with people I know personally. People who matter to me, and I'd like to think I matter to them, at least a little.

Blogger is great in that I also have been able to shut this blog off from search engines, even from Blogger's own public listing, so you're reading this because I invited you.

So, I'm glad you're here.

Going down?

I'm really starting to hate elevators. I always dreaded them to a small degree, ever since I saw the movie Speed where the elevator rescue scene occurs in the beginning and one lady is rescued just before the lift plunges some more.

Then you get the various horror films where lifts plunge just as people are trying to step on or off. I've often thought about this while I'm on an elevator, and whether I'd have the reflexes and speed to jump back and avoid losing a limb. But let's be honest, it'd be so sudden no one would have a chance.

Anyways my particular elevator loathing is directed at two in particular. The ones at the office where I work. The company I work for, has been in this building for just over a year now, and this building is almost new, having been built just over 2 years ago. The first 3 months, both elevators were fine, but then we started having them go out-of-order at least once a month.

It's not like there weren't warning signs. The mechanical bangs and clunks as the elevators traversed their course hinted that something wasn't right. We even had one lift fail with a person trapped in it for 15min. That lift then continued to be unaccessible for 2 months.

Our building isn't large. There are 4 floors and our company occupies the top floor, and there is another company holding the 2nd. The 3rd and ground floors are still empty at the moment. So the lifts aren't getting that much traffic.

However the last straw for me, was yesterday. For reasons that will be explained another day, I come in on the 2nd floor most mornings, via the carpark ramp, and catch the lift up the last two floors. (Yes, that is why I carry a spare tire, but stop criticising as this is what I do). The only working lift is on the fourth, I hit the up arrow, but below me I can hear someone who just arrived in the lobby also hit the button too.

So fair enough; the lift cruises past me, gets the ground floor, then cruises right past me to the top floor where it deposits one of my colleagues. It doesn't come back. It just sits there on the top floor tormenting me. My lift button was still illuminated reflecting my press.

After doing a little angry man dance, I've resigned myself to always using the stairs from today onwards.

I hate these elevators, and I guess these ones probably hate us all too.

Every blog has a beginning, this is mine.

The whole trigger for me starting this endeavour was partly to see if I could develop my writing skills and force myself to communicate more to a whole bunch of people I really care about. I kept telling them I'd email or call, but then things get in the way, I procrastinate, and then before you know it, it's been 2 years.

I want to stop that. This will not replace me contacting alot of them directly, but its to force me to write.

This is my project to develop my writing talents, and to work on hopefully getting better at just writing and talking about stuff that engages the people that I want to engage with.

I've been reading a bunch of blogs over the past years, many written by people who started just because they needed an avenue to vent, or because it was therapeutic, but I found many became even more interesting as the writer developed in their skills. I want to develop in a similar way too.

This blog will be my experiment. It'll be interesting to see how far I get.

Why I chose Blogger

This is my first sequel post, whoo!! Lets see if this gets easier with time. I hate iiNet right now. This may seem reasonable, or it may not, depending on what your own level of exposure to iiNet is.

Some background is this: iiNet is my internet service provider and I've been with them close to 5 years now. All up, the flow of internet has been solid, and that is great, although hardly special
considering how long the internet has been around now, and also the thousands of companies around the world achieving this very same thing to millions of other homes. But iiNet has been growing and they've gotten a bit of a reputation around my corner of Australia as being kind of innovators. Hence I expected better.

Here's where they fell down: In me trying to get my blog going. Frankly, I don't want to pay money to a hosting site, and if you think I should then you've got more cash than me. Not everyone is Donald Trump (does he blog?). As a iiNet customer, we all get 1Gb of space to use for our own personal webpages and this is great. But the iiNet site clearly states that they offer no help, other than just the
basic of getting your content into your personal allocation of space.

Now their help pages start talking about supporting PHP up to version 4 and a bunch of other gear, although with no guarantees of how long it will be there, see this. They also support one-click installs of WordPress and Joomla for their business customers. So when I go in and try to load up the appropriate version of WordPress into my own space and it starts barfing about no PHP service available, I'm rather disappointed.

Support came back with an awesome oneliner of "too bad, so sad". I paraphrase, but the intent of their reply was the same. No willingness to look into whether PHP service was there at all for residential clients, or if a configuration change was needed. Not to mention that their pages on 'getting started' are basically a bunch of links to other sites that are not really helping a beginner.

Nothing.

Well I'm kinda glad I came across Blogger. The URL is a whole lot friendlier and I don't have to waste time handcrafting HTML.