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My webhost treats me, does yours? August 19, 2010

Posted by The Giddy Tiger in : Blogging, Relax & Celebrate , 1 comment so far

starbucks-cuppa1

Last weekend, we hung out at Starbucks and had drinks, without paying a single cent.  It was actually a treat from my fabulous web host.  I had been randomly chosen as the Happy Client winner for the month of June 2010 and had been presented with Starbucks vouchers.

How awesome is that?

Naturally, I shared them with my family, and we certainly had a great time…I wonder if my web host will be treating me to a nice dinner next? *hint hint* :)

starbucks-cuppa2

Lost and gone, but now recovered… June 14, 2010

Posted by The Giddy Tiger in : Blogging, Thoughts & Scribblings , 3comments

I just got home from Ipoh 3 days ago.   Hubby had been away on business trip for about 5 days, so I took both my kids to my hometown, so they could spend some quality time with their grandparents, since it coincided with the school holidays.

5 days in Ipoh meant 5 days of photos of kids having fun, photos of food and some scenery.  But when I wanted to show them to my hubby from my camera, to my horror I discovered that almost ALL the photos had VANISHED from the memory card!  I do not know how it happened but I have a feeling I might have accidentally formatted the memory card!  I don’t think there was a warning message before I clicked on OK and somehow it happened….

A quick google search told me that all was not lost.  Apparently formatted SD cards still contain *memories* of what used to be in them, and the photos could most likely be recovered.

So yesterday I spent some time downloading software to recover my photos…finally I chose Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery which I felt produced the best overall results, and voila, aabout 98% of all my photos were recovered successfully! :)  

stellar1

I’m definitely a happy camper!  The 2% unrecovered photos were not really unrecovered, it’s just that the high resolution ones of the 2% were irrecoverable, and I only got the smaller sized versions.  But it only affected like 2 or 3 shots, so basically I got almost all the shots (and my sanity) back.

See…this is what the software looks like…I get a preview of the photos which can be recovered, and I can select the ones which I want to recover.  Click on RECOVER and everything will be saved to a specified location.

stellar 

Needless to say, I am really really happy with the results and I’m glad that now I don’t have to post a blog post with only words and no pictures… :)

…I’m off to edit photos now! :)

Lean on me, Glee, Love World Love Sloggi! April 4, 2010

Posted by The Giddy Tiger in : Blogging, Thoughts & Scribblings , add a comment

 

I was watching Glee a couple of weeks back, and as I was (again) marvelling at how truly talented the people in the show are, they brought it home once again by closing the show with a wonderful rendition of Lean on Me.  I’ve always loved this song in its original version, but Glee put a contemporary twist to it, making it SO singable.

Coincidentally, at that time, I had also just heard about Sloggi’s new range of ecologically-friendly lingerie, which is made from environmentally-friendly fabrics, but instead of looking dull and morose, the Love World Love Sloggi range is both groovy, colorful and fashionable. 

So, in one of my inspirational moments, I married both the song and the lingerie collection together, and here’s what I came up with: a song entitled Love the World, sung to the popular tune of Lean on Me.  May it bring us all many happy bathroom singing moments :)

Sometimes in our lives, we all have pain
We all have sorrow
But if we are wise
We’ll do our part for a better tomorrow

Love the world, help keep her strong
Right till the end
Save the trees, carry on
Recycle, reuse
That’s all we need
A planet to live on.

Please swallow your pride
Think of the Earth when you need to throw
For there’s always a way to be eco-friendly
Love World Love Sloggi, don’t you know…

So just call on Sloggi when you need a hand
You’ll get eco-friendly lingerie to put on
I just want to thank Sloggi ‘cos they understand
We all need a planet to live on.

Love the world, help keep her strong
Right till the end
Save the trees, carry on
Recycle, reuse
That’s all we need
A planet to live on.

Love the world…

 sloggi

Has Facebook taken over your life? April 1, 2010

Posted by The Giddy Tiger in : Blogging, Thoughts & Scribblings , 1 comment so far

fv2

Two people, who haven’t seen each other since they left school, bump into each other one fine day in the shopping mall.  After exchanging the customary “How are you?” and “Where are you working now?” greetings, they say their goodbyes and one of them asks, “Hey, are you on Facebook?”

Sounds familiar?

Truth is, almost everybody who is anybody is on Facebook nowadays.  It is like the one-stop location we go to when we are online.  The question is, how much of your life has been Facebooked?

A long time ago, I was hooked on Facebook, but the excitement sorta fizzled out prematurely and I’d forgotten all about it until recently when a fellow blogger-friend asked if I played CafeWorld.  I told her yes, and she asked if she could add me to her Neighbor list so that she could expand her cafe. Why not, I thought…

…and I was hooked.  Not only on CafeWorld but I reignited my love for Farmville too.  My dear farm was getting too neglected, I thought.

So are you all caught up with this Facebook hype?  Is Facebook eating up blogging, or has it already done so?

Well, while you ponder on that, let me quickly go harvest my perfect bunch of red tulips and check on my Ginger Plum Pork Chops before I call it a night. :)

I’m not a very good blogger August 13, 2009

Posted by The Giddy Tiger in : Blogging, Close to Heart & Home, Parenting & Motherhood, Thoughts & Scribblings , 13comments

 

I’m not a very good blogger because even though my family and I have been back in Malaysia for close to a month, I have not even published a single blog post about our return.

We got our broadband connection set up about a week ago, but I didn’t even blog about that.  And now I cannot blame my lack of blogging on the absence of internet.

I did not blog about how happy I was when I discovered my frozen EBM was just 80% thawed when we arrived at our hotel, and how I rushed to ask the hotel reception to quickly put it in the cold freezer.  I also did not blog about how the next day, when I went to collect the EBM, to my horror, they had put it in the CHILLER instead of the FREEZER and everything had completely thawed!

I did not blog about how we wolfed down all the yummy Malaysian food we had missed.  I did not blog about it because I didn’t even manage to snap pictures!

I did not blog about how my hubby and I, with 2 kids in tow, cleaned our apartment bit by bit, in order to make it livable.  Thank goodness we had the hotel to stay in for a while.

I did not blog about all the boxes of our shipment that arrived about 10 days after our arrival.  The many boxes certainly made our apartment that much smaller, and we aren’t even done unpacking.

I did not blog about how atrocious the traffic is.  I suffered withdrawal symptoms and had to force myself to drive when the need arose.  Needless to say, many a time I found myself flicking the wiper controls instead of the controls for the indicators.

I also did not blog about the EXTREMELY HOT weather.  Our electricity bill will definitely skyrocket this month (after several months of not having to pay).  I find myself having to turn the air-conditioning on most of the time.

My domain disk space breached the very critical 100% mark last weekend but I did not blog about it.  I found out it was due to some Wordpress core dump files which had to be manually deleted.

I’m done with this post now, even though I still do not think of myself as a good blogger, but hey, at least I made the effort to tell y’all that I’m still here! :)

Oops! It’s the error again May 27, 2009

Posted by The Giddy Tiger in : Blogging , 7comments

 

Why is it so hard to access my blogs?  Is anyone facing the same problem?

I am getting these error messages so frequently, it is increasingly frustrating even to just moderate my comments or login to publish a post.  I have to refresh and refresh countless times before I get to my destination.  By the time the “Write Post” page loads up, sonetimes I can’t even remember what I had wanted to post.

I’ve tried changing browsers, defragmenting my PC, closing other programs, but the problem is still there!

Is it just me or is everyone else seeing this issue?  Pray tell…

Overflowing photo bucket March 30, 2009

Posted by The Giddy Tiger in : Blogging , 6comments

Okay, stop hitting F5 on your keyboard.  It ain’t  your PC’s problem you’re not seeing images on all my blogs. :P

Five days ago I was given a warning:

Then this morning, this email alert appeared in my inbox:

Ooops!  Looks like all the photobucket-hosted pictures on my blog will not be viewable till April 2nd. 

I am definitely not gonna upgrade to a Photobucket Pro account, not even with the TrialPay option because that requires me to sign up for something else extra before the free upgrade can take place (a case of GOT strings attached, kapish?).

But you know what?  In a way, I am kinda honored that my blogs have garnered enough traffic to exceed my Photobucket monthly bandwidth.  So THANKS everyone!  Meanwhile, please come back again April 2nd to see all my previous pictures now, will ya? 

So where am I uploading my photos to now?  To my web hosting server of course! :)

A lil’ miraculous migration March 13, 2009

Posted by The Giddy Tiger in : Blogging, Ethan, Hannah , 4comments

 

Credits
Elegant word art (miracles take time) from Bethany
Love Bug Paper02 from Redju Designs

A few months ago, as the estimated due date of my pregnancy loomed nearer and nearer, I had an important decision to make.  I was torn between the decision to start a new blog for the new baby in our family, or migrating Ethan’s blog to another one, combining all posts for my kids into one blog.  After some deliberation, my hubby and I decided on the latter, because it would make more sense to publish, say, a vacation post involving the kids rather than duplicating content.

So off I scooted to get the migration done.

Little did I know that there would be so many obstacles that stood in the path of such a seemingly easy task.

At first I exported the XML file from Ethan’s blog to be imported to the new blog.  Creating the subdomain and the new Wordpress blog was certainly a piece of cake, but when I tried to import the file, I realized that there was an 8MB size limit, and the XML I had imported was approximately 8.55MB.  Of course the import failed.

I then contacted my web host and they advised that I would need to restore the database from the old blog to the new blog, and that they would be happy to help me do it.  So that’s what they did.

… or so I thought.

When they told me they were done, I found out that they had actually pointed the new blog to the old one, and now the new blog redirects to the old one, which is definitely NOT what I wanted.  After a few days of them asking me to tweak the blog here and there, I finally managed to find an online tool called the Wordpress Splitter, which was able to break up the huge XML file into smaller bite-size pieces. And when I tried it out, I was so happy that it actually worked!

So that was that… :)

I was pretty pleased with myself for solving that problem.

After importing the entire contents of the blog over, I realized that I wanted to create a new category called Ethan and assign it to all the posts in the new blog, but almost all the tools I found online were not able to do that.  But my days of searching finally paid off when I stumbled on this beauty of a plugin called the Assign Categories plugin.  In just a few minutes, I was done creating the new category and assigning all posts to it :)

I then realized my blogroll had not been imported.  Oh, I know I could manually key in the links one by one, but I knew there should be some importing tool of some sort…a shortcut that would make my life easier…and I found it!  With this, all I needed was to enter the OPML URL in the Import Blogroll screen, and watch as the magic happens.

So, I was nearly done with the importing, but I still had to work on the header image.  I wanted an image that was simple yet creative, and it took me many nights to come up with a header that I was contented with.

I added the finishing touches, edited the theme a little bit here and there, and finally I was ready to unveil my latest blog, with the arrival of baby Hannah!

And it is with extreme happiness and joy that I am proud to invite everyone to bid a warm hello and welcome to Little Miracles, where miracles truly do happen! :)

Much ado about my mojo February 19, 2008

Posted by The Giddy Tiger in : Blogging, Thoughts & Scribblings , 10comments

At first I wanted to blog about the Amazing Race Asia, but procrastination took control of my life and before I knew it, we were already watching the finale on Valentine’s night, where Adrian and Collin were declared winners. It all went down to the final roadblock where Rovilson did not manage to put the flag to the country fast enough and where it proves that paying attention to all those erasers with flags on them when we were little paid off. I kinda felt sorry for Marc and Rovilson for not winning, because those two practically owned the entire race. They injected humour and entertainment in a race filled with stress and even more stress. If ever I participated in TARA, I would want to play it like Marc and Rovilson did. My hubby did state the obvious when he remarked “But they didn’t win…”, but you know, it was the way they ran the race that I want to emulate. Still, I am very pleased that Adrian and Collin won, despite the adversities and hardships they faced. Congratulations guys!

So now my dose of weekly reality teevee will just be American Idol (down to the final 24 this week!) and America’s Next Top Model, which is a program I totally enjoy watching, together with Ethan boy too, of course. Too bad that while I was googling for the picture of ANTM, I accidentally discovered that the one shown on Channel V now has already been show in the US…. so I found out who won… shucks.


Photo credits

While chatting with Rinnah yesterday, I complained to her that I had lost my blogging mojo, save for updating Ethan’s blog. The dry spell had finally gotten to me, as it had some other bloggers too. We both attribute this loss of interest to the Chinese New Year break. Too many angpows, nothing to write? Have to wait for chap goh meh to be over first? Go figure. I can’t even bring myself to blog about the upcoming elections. This year, I will be voting in Penang for the first time in my voting history. The previous times, I had done my duty as a citizen back in Ipoh. The poster war will be starting soon, I expect. Candidates are probably busy choosing their most trustworthy and honest-looking pictures to print on banners and posters that they hope can withstand the wind, the sun and the rain. So far, I have only seen BN’s banners with the tagline “Keep Reinventing” sprouting out all over the island. I just printed out the details of my voting venue yesterday and am happy that it will be held at a school which is very close to where I stay…within walking distance too, if I am hardworking enough.

Oh, by the way, I am still craving yee sang and hope to lou at least one more time before chap goh meh comes around.

Choose now: ham or eggs?? November 30, 2007

Posted by The Giddy Tiger in : Blogging, Thoughts & Scribblings , 14comments


Photo credits

Last night’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy highlighted the story of ham and eggs. Do you consider yourself the ham or the eggs? Notice that with the ham and the eggs, the chicken is involved in the process…but the pig is committed. Similarly in blogging, think about it: ham or eggs – which would you rather be and which one are you?

Pablo came up with a writing project for the month of November which will help each individual blogger answer that question, and perhaps realize what really spurs them on. I’m writing this on the last date of the project period, hoping to complete it before midnight tonight.

1. Why do you blog?

I started blogging in mid-2006, because I wanted to journal the development of my son Ethan. It was a fantastic way of sharing my thoughts and ideas as a first-time mother and of course, Ethan’s *fans* would be able to see his pictures online even though they stayed far away. It was fun to capture funny and memorable moments of Ethan growing up and equally liberating to receive feedback from the people who read my blog. Many of my fellow breastfeeding mommy friends followed suit and soon blogging became second nature.

By and by, I decided to start my own personal blog where I was able to let myself go and express myself in thoughts, words and pictures. Blogging was an outlet for me to explore what my writing could do and I often found myself intrigued by things which were irrelevant to me before I started blogging. I blog because it is my way of reaching the world, to show people how I view the world through my eyes. I also blog because I find it is a very interesting way for me to be creative, and even though I do pepper my blog with some sponsored posts every now and then, I try my best to craft it in such a way as to entice visitors, adding that hint of personal flavor whenever possible.

2. What do you hope to achieve by blogging?

My blogs will serve as a legacy for my future generations. I have no idea if or when I will stop blogging, but until that happens, I hope that my blogs will chronicle my life and how I was touched by what happened around me at that point in time. I hope to write more meaningful posts that would make my readers go, “Hmmm…she’s so right. No why didn’t I think of that before?” And especially with Ethan’s blog, I hope that through it, he will be able to learn about himself and of course, about his Mommy.

3. How much time do you spend a day doing blogging related work?

I spend an average of 2 hours doing blogging related work. Most of the picture editing (if any) is done at home though, but that depends on whether I have time or energy to do so right before I hit the pillows.

I would like to equate myself as the *ham* when it comes to blogging. I want to be committed and to ensure that my blog means something. It’s a long road ahead, and I am learning so many new things every single day. But thanks Pablo, for making me reflect about blogging and about myself.

So what are you: ham or eggs?