Parushta and Samira
We adopted two Abyssinian kittens in July of 2011. Samira is the ruddy (reddish-brown) girl, and Parushta is her blue (grey coloured) half-brother:
First month of 2012
Christmas is a distant speck in my rear-view mirror, and we are already most of a month into 2012. I wouldn’t really say I have any “resolutions” for the New Year, but I do have some goals. It is odd how the completely arbitrary change over of a calendar causes me to re-examine my life, but I will take advantage of it. It is time to give some thought to what I want to focus on in the next year.
Server OS Upgrade
I shut down the site over the weekend and upgraded / migrated to a new server operating system. Kelly’s World was running on Mandriva 2008.1 prior to today. As of now, the site is live on a Fedora 16 server. My main reason for performing the migration was to get an OS in place that could be updated more consistently.
And Jasmine too…
We knew it was a possibility, perhaps even probable. But that didn’t make losing Jasmine at the end of May any easier.
Irene and I both noticed something wrong as soon as we came back from our week-long cruise. Jasmine looked “puffy” around her chest, and seemed somewhat disinterested and dull. After a few days, she seemed to be having problems breathing. An X-Ray showed fluid and a possible mass in her chest cavity. Fluid was drawn, and ultrasound performed. The mass was quite large, 4 cm by 2 cm, and looked like a tumor. The fluid drawn from the chest, which eased Jasmine’s breathing for only a day or so, was also tested: it confirmed the worse.
A million visitors in 8 years
I looked at the banner of my site today and see that Kelly’s World has broken the 1 million hits mark. Whoopee, and so forth.
I would like to imagine that this number represents some count of real people visiting, but the reality is less pleasant. I’d guesstimate that about 99% of the visits to my site are some combination of spambots and web crawling robots. For those of you reading this who can comprehend what I’m saying: thanks for being a real human being taking an interest in something I have to say.
New iPhone: or why I cancelled my Rogers account
I’ve had a couple of tiring and rather stressful weeks at work in a row, so I decided to take Friday afternoon off. Since it was cold (and getting colder) I couldn’t really go for a ride on my motorbike. Instead, I decided to practice some retail therapy and “upgrade” my BlackBerry Bold to an iPhone.
My BlackBerry is on Rogers, so off I went to my local Rogers Plus store…
Getting tough on spam users…
I run a simple little blog here. I don’t make any money off of my site even, although I’m not adverse to doing so as long as it isn’t obtrusive. I don’t sell anything, nor do accept submissions other than comments. The posts here are my own: they aren’t scraped, syndicated from, or re-posted from anywhere else. Mostly, this site is a vanity site, like a billion others on the Internet.
Despite the complete lack of commercial value to my site, it gets spammed. Comment spam was a problem a few years ago, and I’ve managed that via Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins for WordPress. There are still about about 100 spam comments a day hitting my site, but only one or two make it through my watchdogs. Lately, however, there has been a new irritant: spam users.
The New Year
The entire month of December has come and gone, and I’m now staring down the deep, yawning abyss of another year. I’ve been at that age the last couple of years, an age I was reminded of recently by my birthday, where thoughts sometimes turn to all that has been left undone in life.
2010 was a good year in that regard: I took some risks like getting on a motorbike again, and made a lot of new acquaintances in the process. I also lost 15 pounds and started eating a bit better. There were lots of challenges and sad times as well, but looking at things from the slightly removed vantage point of the turning year I would have to say things are going fairly well.
Letting Harley go…
We had our kitten Harley, barely five months old, euthanized last night. His last ten days of life were full of subcutaneous fluids, forced feedings, several antibiotics, and lots of love. In the end I was faced with a decision I never want to have to repeat. Harley’s immune system was damaged beyond repair by the feline leukaemia virus and, although we had managed to keep him alive for a few extra days, it wasn’t going to get better.
Site updates in progress…
UPDATE: I’ve completed the WordPress upgrades, including an update to the site theme and correction of a problem with my “Archives” page. I’m expecting to find some problems over the course of the next day or two but, for now at least, it appears that the basics are all working