Meeting Anishas Aunty and Uncle

Today I met Anishas Uncle (Waka) and Aunty (Sumiti). We met for lunch in Mission Bay at the MECCA (85 Tamaki Drive, Mission Bay). Waka works for EDS, with his current project working with Telecom on their project to move from CDMA to GSM Technologies.

Sumiti works for the Todd Family.

On the website front, I had organised with my web host to have my sub domain of blog.nztechie.com to point to Googles ghs.google.com and activate the custom domain service that Google offered. This appeared to work, but it now appears to not be functioning. I have lodged a ticket with my host to have it fixed.

I understand that it could be a propagation issue, but I am quite confused as to how it immediately did work when set up. At this stage I have left the configuration in place on Blogger, which will make this Blog inaccessible until the problem is sorted. If you can read this, then the problem has been sorted! [Update: Shortly after writing this blog, I re-enabled the original website address of pickledhamster.blogspot.com]

Anisha went to the Ellerslie International Flower Show in Manurewa yesterday.

Useless Information: Colonel Sanders original white suit was auctioned off for $80,000 in February 2002.

Blogger Outage, Video Identification and things Anisha Wants

So, I am part way through writing today's fantastically exciting blog. I click the 'Publish Post' button, expecting Blogger to be rock-solid, fault-tolerant and without error.

I was immediately taken back when the Blogger server responded with an error 502 server error. This error, of which the message itself explains is normally reserved for situations whereby the server has insufficient bandwidth or capacity to serve requests. Heart palpitations aside, the server responded again in about 5 minutes. It is back up and going at the moment, but is as slow as molasses. See the below screenshot of the error when I attempted to connect.


Server Error 502 served by Blogger

The error really bothered me until it was resolved. I was in the middle of compiling the below list of potential Christmas presents for Anisha.

- A Strawberry Shortcake Tshirt (Jay Jays)
- iPods and portable DVD Players
- Silver Bullet
- Iron Chef DVD's
- Samsara
- Breville Mini Wizz
- Charmed TV Series DVD's

Ealier today, I applied to be a participant in the YouTube Video Identification Beta. An extract from the YouTube site on the Beta states:

"YouTube Video Identification will help copyright holders identify their works on YouTube. We have worked with Google to develop one-of-a-kind technology that can recognize videos based on a variety of factors. As its Beta status indicates, our Video Identification is brand-new, cutting-edge stuff, so we will be constantly refining and improving it. Early tests with content companies have shown very promising results. As we scale and refine our system, YouTube Video Identification will be available to all kinds of copyright holders all over the world, whether they want their content to appear on YouTube or not."

In changes to my Blog, I removed the useless Kontera advertisements. They slowed down page load, didn't work properly, were not always contextually correct, confused my blog visitors, and earned me minimal advertising money. I would not recommend Kontera and you shouldnt hear me complain about them again. Tonight, I am investigating Snap Shot Page previews.

I Have Now implemented Snap Shots on my blog. This allows a pop-up preview of all of the external links including my YouTube videos.

I have learned that I can prevent my YouTube videos from staying on top of my other pop-up content with the following code in the embed tag:

Add the following parameter to the EMBED tag:
wmode="transparent"

Useless Information: In England during Queen Victoria's time, oranges were given as Christmas presents.