It’s being a whiny little bitch though, 200 photos per album only. And as you might be able to infer, being gone for a month, I have much more than that. So the struggle continues, but it’s getting there.

When that’s over, I’ll get something done here. Wait and watch for the magic to happen!

New Zealand, as you might know, is legendary for its beautiful and fantastical vistas which now only rarely exist elsewhere. Views like this…

…make me grateful that my eyesight wasn’t taken from me, as it could’ve been a couple of weeks ago.

Now I really need a camera, and know how to use it.

In the meantime, enjoy this funny local prank video, because it’s awesome.

Wishing you all nothing but happiness, contentment and a bit of discontent to reach for new goals, these next 300-something days. Happy new year!

7 years together today. :)

It’s still a little rough around the edges as I haven’t polished everything to what I want yet, and some more pixels will be pushed around before I can really say I’m through. But the major look and feel I’m going for (i.e., white and black, clean and simple) is here already.

Finally, sound sleep will come!

I’m trying to get inspiration from Pro Blog Design, as well as the currently-underway redesign of The Raven Republic (which I still have to finish!).

Hmm. Weeks ahead are going to be busy.

Don’t be a stranger now, you hear?

My last post was on July 28. Only after more than a full month later does the next one come. Hmm. I partly point the finger of “blame” on Twitter (follow me by the way) for being so ubiquitous and easy to use. It’s so convenient to update yourself to friends bit by bit, 140 characters at a time, instead of writing whole blog posts on how you promise to update yourself to your friends bit by bit, one blog post at a time.

Currently, again, I’ve hit some sort of deadlock where I know I can squeeze in some time to write something here, get ideas out of my head and onto a place where people can see, hear, read and play them and get the creative juices flowing, but I always fall prey to either laziness or physical fatigue – from work, not from writing here. After all, you and I know that the beginning of many good things is to note it down somewhere, and not just leave it percolating in your brain. I just gave this advice yesterday, and now I realize I haven’t been following it myself. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

So, dear blog and dear readers, I hope you have not forgotten me. I shall return to you in a few weeks time, refreshed, more involved and more consistent that before. My Twitter account may be crackling more often than this blog, but I’ve found it’s not really conducive to creative ideas, it’s really more for friends and news. Creatives, that’s where this place comes in.

And don’t worry, if I can’t be bothered to write a full-fledged entry, I’ll make sure to post a drunk half-assed one instead.

Promise!

Quick update on what’s been happening to me (which you can probably glean from my Twitter posts): I’ve been really busy at work, these past two months have been a killer. I’m also going through some bit of stress lately – again, work related. Thing is though, after I make it through this phase I feel like I’ll know for real whether I can continue doing this or not, like I can do anything and everything again. So yeah, I guess I’m psyching myself up to make it through this month.

Straight to the finish line, dude. Go straight to the finish line.

I’m no stranger to system problems. They happen. Even with the most copious amounts of preparation and prevention, this process or that procedure or this hardware hangs or breaks and needs tending to. It’s only a matter of time. But when things do fail, the least you can do, aside from trying to fix it as quickly as possible, is to tell the people who are going to be affected by it. We all know that people will assume that things will work, until they don’t. As a customer of your services, I assume that your DSL service will go uninterrupted until you tell me otherwise, because hey, I’m still paying you to provide me with that service.

Now, when it goes dead with no foreseeable causes, that’s when it really gets to me. It gets even worse when I learn that this is something that’s system-wide, and that there was no previous communication made to your customers in ways that you’re sure that they will see. You might have posted something about it on your website, but who really goes there regularly to check, anyway? And for customers whose internet access is down, how can they ever check? The pressure should be upon you to spread the word to your customers, not make them come to you for the answer. Send them letters, put notes in their monthly bills, show a short advisory on TV – do whatever it takes. Just make sure they know.

I know that you know that the last two paragraphs were very patronizing, but I don’t care. I’m usually a very patient guy, but something like this is just too hard not to bitch about, because it could have been handled a thousand times better.

For those of you wondering what the problem was, some of the myDSL accounts had their username and password combinations changed, but the notification for this never came to the people who owned those accounts. I guess what bothered me the most about the situation was that I wasted a good hour or two of my weekend trying to find a way to solve the problem, and that the solution was something really simple, but it was something you would never, ever find out about on your own. You had to ask straight from the source, but only because they didn’t exert any noticeable effort in communicating with their customers beforehand.

The thing is though, there hasn’t been any one real network provider that delivers solid performance across the nation yet. The overall nature of the service you get is really a mixed bag, a hit-or-miss affair, and it (still) winds down to where you live. Under the same ISP, some people experience good speeds while others crawl through the net at a snail’s pace and go through customer service hell. Even SkyBroadband, the new kid on the block touting more impressive packages isn’t safe. That’s probably what keeps a lot of people, me included, glued to their current ISP: there’s just no choice out there that’s a hundred percent better yet.

This sucks.