Living on an Island?

A friend of mine just got accepted for a three-month-probational period in Cork, Ireland. She’ll be working in a helpdesk call-center, starting as early as next week.

I am thrilled for her and it looks like a good prospect, if she manages to make it into a permanent position. Also, I am more than curious to see, how things will go for her and what she will have to say in terms of quality and cost of living etc. in Ireland. As a matter of fact, we loosely talked about spending Christmas together, as she might have to take shifts over the holidays and won’t be able to celebrate with her son and family. Her son will stay with his grand-parents for the time being, which sounds like a tough call for her.

Bottomline: Her new start resparked my interest in going away and I’m assessing my immediate needs and requirements again. Migrating is definitely not over, but I might be coming from a new and different perspective on things than I used to about a year ago, when I planned for Canada.

Proof of life

I feel like I need to show a sign of life on this platform, so people don’t think it’s dead. Also, I’m thinking of copying some content over from ipernity, as I’m pretty regular there.

The idea came about when reading a friend’s blog today, whom I met on flickr and who was so nice to come along to ipernity. I was quite impressed with his blog, both content- as well as presentationwise and I think I’m seeing quite a number of parallels, both in his personal as well as professional life.

This finding bred a new thought: Isn’t it funny, how you can really observe the laws of the universe in action? I mean, his life and mine seem to have so much resemblance in certain aspects, and our personal development seems to be yielding almost matching results at this time. Given the web and its tremendous capacity in terms of social interaction, you get to see effects like this for the first time ever. This is major and I’m really happy and thrilled to be living in such exciting times.

Well, gotta go on with my routine now, but should be back with more online work later.

Domain Redirect

I found out that I can forward HTTP-requests to the domain projectwestbound.com, which I own. Since my domain is with a different provider, I wasn’t all sure about that, but they support something, so the domainname remains in the browser’s address line. That causes problems, when editing, but as soon as I enter the wordpress.com’s domain, I can edit just fine.

So – projectwestbound.com is a fully viable domain with content again being hosted by wordpress.com (at no charge ). I think, that’s about the cheapest way to have a wordpress-blog including your own domain name and hosting.

Just meant to share, for what it’s worth…

Moving Part Two

As already reported in this post, I have tried to move this very blog from Fairhost24.de to 1&1. In my infinite naivety I thought this to be a straightforward undertaking given the fact that 1&1 is a mass web provider and bost themselves in offering a blog and all kinds of services. But intuition told me to better cross-check and so
I did by calling them first and asking about moving my blog to their platform.Long story, short: I never got it to work and neither did they. So after having made sure of trying any possible measure I could think of and having had massive correspondence and phone calls with them, I decided to cancel the automated transferral of the hosting fee and got it back into my account. They sent me another notice informing me that they don’t see any failure on their part and denied access to my web-hosting package. Just a good thing I configured the HTTP-refresh/forwarding directive prior to them shutting me off my account. At least, something comes up when entering projectwestbound.com into the browser’s address line.This is the second unpleasant experience with large corporations in the web 2.0 sphere, shortly after the flickr desaster… It doesn’t seem a good idea to let big companies run the services we’re all using on a daily basis…

How Redneck are you?

This is pretty funny. A test as to how much of a redneck you are… (I frankly don’t have the slightest clue where the 5% in my case factor in, but well – see for yourself )

You Are 5% Redneck

I’ll slap you so hard, your clothes will be outta style. You ain’t no redneck – you’re all Yankee!

How Redneck Are You?

Intermediate Conclusion

It’s been quite an elaborate project over the past six months: Collecting the documentation for the migration agent in preparation of my filing for permanent resident status, researching available locations and opportunities for Boinx primarily as well as for myself, getting in touch with contacts at Great Northern Way Campus to evaluate education opportunities, looking for ways of financing this, in short: Researching and evaluating just about any opportunity job-, education- and careerwise I could possibly think of. This task

Moving around…

In an attempt to homogenize all my various “homes” on the web, I have moved my domain from Fairhost24 to 1&1. What looked like a straight-forward domain transferral, export of MySQL data, optional export of WordPress-XML and re-import into the new instances of both (WordPress and MySQL) turned into a nightmare with several nights being wasted on pointless investigation, debugging attempts, expensive calls to their – clueless! – hotline and several instances of more than poor support.This episode will see legal repercussions and I have already informed my insurance about the incident. This is more than I can grasp, but I’m beginning to understand that Germany is not very likely to lose its image of web 2.0-diaspora… P.S.: Oh, and by the way: Import my previous blog-data from fairhost24 to here was a matter of a few clicks – well, o.k. I had to split the WordPress-XML export file into two chunks first, which required a little manual editing in a text application to comply with XML well-formedness, but after that, I simply uploaded the two files using the built-in import capabilities and that was it! Why can’t 1&1 come up with an easy import method like that? Damn…