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:

• I was still single
• My mother had recently passed away suddenly just a few months before, and I was questioning my own mortality
• I had made the big move to Australia in 2008, but was finding myself falling back into a sedentary/lazy mindset
• I knew that the big Four Oh was looming, and I wanted to be able to say that the Thirties were worth it

So, as you are reading this, you may or may not have noticed that - all things considered - I didn't exactly smash it out of the park in terms of completing those 101 goals. But in a way, that was always sort of the point. To me, there has to be some stretch involved - admittedly, having lived those 1001 days, I know I could have stretched much more. I was conservative about travel (especially international), I was conservative about new experiences - if only because I had only myself in mind when I pictured them being completed. So what else has happend to usurp these carefully laid plans?

• Just around the time of starting this project, I started seeing someone (cross off no-longer single)
• That relationship quickly (for us at least) saw us moving in together
• We bought a house (ZOMG!) around x-mas 2010, and moved in February 2011
• We got engaged (YAY!) the day this project finished (11/11/11)
• I was diagnosed with Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (BOO!) in the middle of 2009 - again bringing my mortality into focus
• I've had the good fortune to have travelled to Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong (twice), New Zealand (twice), Las Vegas, Belgium, Luxembourg and Paris in those 1001 days (WIN!)

So quite a busy time, and with no regrets about missing out on many of the things I had planned to do.

I will leave you with some thoughts that have been inspired by my taking this challenge on:

• Always set goals - even if you feel you can't complete them
• Stretch yourself (not in the Yoga-type way) - you are more capable than you realise
• Open yourself to new experiences - even if they interrupt your "plans"
• Factor in others when making plans - they make the experiences richer

I hope that if you've read this, or have been following along, that you decide to set yourself a life-goal, bucket-list, whatever-you-want-to-call-it challenge.

Special thanks goes to Michael Green, creator of The Day Zero Project that inspired me.

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.

You get my point.

For all the competition (methinks it's really pseudo-competition) in the IT market, Australian pricing and service is a JOKE. I can't believe that consumers don't demand more, and better more - there's certainly enough of them...

And don't get me started on Mobile connections!

So, in the meantime, instead of whining about things I will have to go the circuitous route when it comes to posting (and getting other things done online).

Rant over - do I feel better? - hmmm, probably.

...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.

In one word: Melbourne. Complete upheaval of my life seemed about as good idea as any, and where better to upheave myself to that one of the most beautiful cities in the world than Melbourne. Why there in particular you may ask? Well, I have family there (Hi mum!), the quality of living is excellent, I loved it when I was there a few years ago, it's I.T. central for Australia so jobs wouldn't be an issue and it offers a complete juxtaposition of my current lifestyle, with more things to take a photo of that I could possibly want.

So after some procrastinating, online surfing, job hunting and other nonsense, I handed in my notice at work at the end of last month, started selling up everything ("The things you own - own you") and just the other day cemented it by purchasing a one-way ticket on the 1st of March.

So three weeks to go, and finally the anxiety has been replaced by the excitement. There is so much unknown - but that both excites me and frightens me. All I can hope for is to finally get back to posting daily photos that don't start looking like more of the same...

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.

Probably the biggest hurdle that has hindered me from focusing on form over function is that WordPress has no system or plugin (at least that I could find) for offering a full-page option to a multi-page post. This caused issues both with creating a full feed and providing a usability feature on the paginated articles themselves. After overcoming this I will be looking into packaging my solution into a plugin to assist others (add it to the list).

Having decided to use the added functionality offered by Feedburner with regards to handling syndication caused it's own issues, both as part of the above situation, but also as part of a conflict with existing plugins. I had to rely on several different methods to try and view un-cached and unfiltered views of the current XML (somewhat having to rely on both Opera and IE7).

The one thing that cancels out the frustration that came with the inability of bending some aspects of my templates (Note: MY templates - not WP itself) was that it forced me to learn new techniques and up-skill myself. That being said - there's a lot of work required to update the WordPress Codex (documentation repository) as it hasn't kept up effectively with some of the more major recent updates. Given that the documentation is done mostly by volunteers this is hardly and indictment.

So where does that leave this website? Well if you're interested, keep an eye on the 'to-do' list at the bottom of the about page, my tweets on the rhetoric main page. I still won't be focusing on design until I can get the templates functioning as I wish. Even then the design will mostly consist of some minor rebranding and look'n'feel - the current layout suits - the color scheme doesn't...

WordPizzle to the Shizzle, yo

I don't know what it is with me and having to bolt on every, sometimes unnecessary, extra to software that allows me to do it. It's no different with WordPress and plugins. Same goes with Firefox and extensions (that's gonna be another post).

Sure most of it is for functionality, but a lot of it is because I like to tweak things to the point of death. But it does amaze me that so many people are happy with the base functionality that WordPress provides and instead concentrate on the visual customisation (which unfortunately seem to be mostly poorly ported versions of Kubrick).

The big push that I got was having to customize client websites to bend WordPress beyond it's normally used for (a blogging tool) towards more of a full CMS. This exposed me to a wider range of plugins that would also cross-over into the blogosphere as well.

I will leave the focus on using WordPress for a CMS to another post (i'm trying to save up a list of topics I want to write about), and concentrate on listing the plugins that are in use on this site with reasons for choosing them. This gives me the opportunity to give "props" to the plugin developers, but also give an insight to others who may like what I have done here and want to get a handle on the behind the scenes approach.

This will probably be a long post, and I want to test out post pagination - so bear with me... Continue reading »

Happy New Year!

And with it, the return (after more than 2 years) of the seriocomic rhetoric - where I get to try and form some semi-coherent sense out of what is tumbling though my brain and lay it out for the world to laugh at...

More and more this last year I have felt I have wanted to comment on a number of things - political, existential, blogging and web related; and haven't really felt that the photoblog presented a proper format to do this.

Additionally, with extra exposure to the WordPress engine that runs this site over the last 12 months on other client projects I have become more aware of new methods of presenting the information that I want, in the manner that I want.

I am (very) far from finished, but wanted to get the majority of the groundwork done before lifting the lid. View the entire post »