At the end of 2002, after a couple of years dabbling on the internet (beginning with Yahoo! GeoCities in 1999), I wanted to retire my old domain name ten-zero.net (for obvious/not-so-obvious reasons) and move to a single-word dot com. I practically went through half the dictionary looking for a relatable word that was available and stumbled across "seriocomic". Continue reading »

For the last three years, i've published my top 10 photos that I took during the year (see Top-Ten 2009, Top-Ten 2010 and Top-Ten 2011), however with a number of new changes in my personal life, i've only managed to publish 47 photos in 2012 so I have had to reduce this year's list to 5 - here they are...
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In the tradition of the last two years (see Top-Ten 2009, Top-Ten 2010), i'm attempting to round up my top-10 favorite images that were published during the year.

This year was dominated by travel photos from Belgium and France, and then New Zealand.
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So here I am, a few days after turning 40, and having reached the end of the 101 things in 1001 days project I set for myself back in February 2009.

Looking back, I can observe a couple of key drivers about my decision to set myself these goals: Continue reading »

Here's the background on this dilemma. Around 2002, 2003 I was really getting into this whole "internet" thingo, I had been on Yahoo GeoCities for a while, migrated my site to Live Journal, then onto MovableType. Around this time, I got frustrated with not having the granular control (that comes with being a control freak) over how PERL and MT templates just didn't gel. After searching I came across this internet forum called SitePoint - full of handy tips about PERL, which led to me learning PHP, which pushed me towards B2/Cafelog, which then went on to be WordPress, which drives this website - tah-dah. Continue reading »

Following on from last year's review, I thought I'd end 2010 with a look back at my top-10 favorite images that were published during the year. This year was a less-productive one in terms of the number of photos published (111 to be precise, compared to the 213 in 2008), but interestingly all of the images that made the top 10 were taken while traveling overseas. So, without further ado:
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Welcome to the 1000th post (including photos) here on seriocomic!

One thing I was certain of when I started my '1001 things to do in 101 days' project was that life was bound to throw some distractions, opportunities, pitfalls and other things that life tends to do.

So I am just over 600 days down with less than 400 days to go and I have only just gone over the quarter mark in terms of the number of tasks i've set myself. It's worth noting that I have a number 'in progress', and that some would consider I have managed to notch up some other pretty good milestones that aren't on the list.

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It's been 417 days since I started my Project 101, approximately 300 days since my last update here on the Rhetoric blog. Pretty poor really.

It's fair to say that I'm not as far along with completing the task list as I'd like to be, but also I feel that I have achieved a lot more than I would have if there wasn't the list there to motivate me in the first place. There's at least two significant outcomes from this that have prompted me to write this particular update, and a nice little note to finish off.
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I probably would have liked to get this done a little closer to the beginning of the year, but it wasn't until I saw this post on Digital Photography School that I thought I better do something, so here we go:
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So it's been 115 days since I started my Project 101 and I thought it a good idea to write some notes and observations about progress to date (actually my ulterior motive was to write a Rhetoric post because I realised that was meant to write one once a month).

My summary of progress so far is this: making a list - while clarifying some short to medium term goals, didn't actually create the impetus to complete them. Apart from some easy ones and a few 'administrative' to-do's, there wasn't any real stretch in getting things done.

So lets look at some of the ones I haven't done so well on:
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I don't know if it's because I am a full-time professional SEO Analyst, or because I am just a picky person (ha - bite your tongues), but when I see a series of articles looking suspiciously spammy - even though their content seems intended for human readers, red flags are raised in my mind.

With the proliferation of blogging, and the emerging dominance of WordPress as the blogging tool of choice, a LOT of attention has been paid to either monetizing blogs or taking steps to optimize your blog or blog articles to rank higher in search engines. Therefore, for the most part I ignore those blogs that have articles not written for human visitors - but there is one instance I am having a large amount of difficulty looking past.
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If I was a new visitor/immigrant to New Zealand I would already be connected to some form of broadband by now. I would be paying less for that broadband, I wouldn't have to wait for two different technicians from the same company to connect a phone line then the broadband. I wouldn't have to wait for the connection to be in place before the company sent me a modem/router a week later, and two weeks after I began the application. Continue reading »

...for the 1st of the month.

Ah yes, April Fool's day no less.

But this is no April Fool's joke, no...this is the first opportunity I have had to sit down and follow-up on the last rhetoric post.
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In November last year I turned 36...yes I am that old. This arbitrary threshold-crossing gave me cause to reflect on where I was in my life, and it wasn't exactly the greatest scorecard - still single, renting, in a job that was going downhill, stuck out in the wops with only the cat and dog to talk to yadda yadda boo hoo etc.

Not only that, but I had lost inspiration and motivation for taking photos, which for me was a real litmus-test. So several sleepless nights went by with me wondering how I could re-inject some stimulus into my 36 going on 76 lifestyle. Continue reading »

You know when you have nothing better to do (or want to avoid the things you need to do) when you spend all your time watching the coverage (including the "Fair and Balanced" Fox News) of the U.S. Presidential race, especially when you don't even live in the country!

Being in the field that I am I thought I would look at the websites of the front-running candidates. I took a loose group of parameters that I usually look at when analyzing websites and measured each candidate's site against those parameters. Continue reading »

Well, it would be fair to say that the re-introduction of the Rhetoric Blog into this site has been less than smooth. If you have been looking at the site over the last week, you will have noticed that the focus has gone back to the photoblog, at least for the main page. This is a conscious decision based both aesthetic and structural factors. Continue reading »