Journal Entries
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Back to Life (09JUL2000)
Posted Jul 9, 2000
Well life has certainly returned with a vengence. After 21 months of unemployment I finally got another job, designing and developing mission critical software and web enabled applications. Getting a new job allowed me to reactivated my credit card and jump on a plane to Singapore to get engaged to my beloved, who had met me through my travelogue site, and plans are now well in hand for our weddings later this year - weddings plural because there will be a legal UK wedding and a Chinese traditional Singapore wedding. Getting married means tidying the house, adopting sociable habits and enjoying the occasional ear bashing, but I guess it will have its compensations 
I don't get much time to surf these days, hence the lapse in my postings and a 60% reduction in my phone bill. If anything interesting happens I'll let you know, meanwhile I'm off for a soak in the bath.
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Latest reply: Jul 9, 2000
Still Life (06FEB2000)
Posted Feb 6, 2000
I've been elsewhere in Cyberspace these last few weeks.
Fame has come my way in some small part, as a travelogue which I wrote for Whispers - one of the web's top online magazines - has picked up the Whispers Readers Choice Award for January 2000. It feels like a great achievement and I am deeply honoured. I wrote the 3600 word travelogue in less than 24 hours, mostly during the night, and added 20 images from the travelogue on my website. Maybe I should consider being a freelance travel writer.
I discovered that somebody registered earthdweller.com just after Christmas so I am working hard on my website's branding to protect the image that I have created. I have the EARTHDWELLER TRAVELOGUE AWARDS and EARTHDWELLER TRAVELOGUE DIRECTORY due to start in the next few days and I don't want somebody else creating a brand which is in competition to what I am doing and using the same name. It is good in that it is helping me to focus on what I want to do with my EARTHDWELLER site and the brand that I am building, but I am also having to move quickly to protect my interests. I am having a similar problem with my community site as somebody has registered a similar name and their M.O. seems to be to link to other people's hard work rather than creating their own content and once again I feel the need to protect my interests. It is one of those problems about the WWW which has not been addressed yet, but the need to protect intellectual property on the Web is becoming very serious. I was recently in a lecture where the lecturer was asked about copyright on the Internet, and he said there is no copyright on the Internet, and at the same time I know he is very hot on plagiarism from books. If academics do not recognise that copyright exists in all material on the Internet then we have a serious problem.
I discovered recently that 8.5% of men have defective colour vision and that the defects vary widely. I am now tackling the whole area of accessibility in relation to my websites - I had no idea that up to 8.5% of men couldn't actually distinguish some of the text highlights on my site from the background colour, or that browsers for the visually impaired sometimes isolate links from their context in to a separate list, so I now need to revisit my site navigation and how I actually word the links. A document which deals with some of the issues can be found on the W3C website.
That's all for now. I'll drop by again in a few weeks time and let you know what's happening in my little corner of our planet.
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Latest reply: Feb 6, 2000
More life (27DEC1999)
Posted Dec 27, 1999
It was my birthday a few days ago - I hit 35 which is half way to seventy so I think it must be time to start turning in to a miserable old so-and-so...
Another Christmas has been and gone. It snowed a bit on Christmas Day which was good, and on Boxing Day I woke to a couple of inches of snow. One year we will get as much snow as they have on Christmas cards...
I didn't get any naff Christmas presents at all this year, which means that people are saving them to give me a really bad Christmas next year...
I have been making the most horrendous Christmas gases ever but my intake of brussels sprouts was down to only about 35 after the record 65 last year, so I think I have proved conclusively that it is the turkey and not the sprouts which are responsible for the excessive Christmas gas...
The thing which isn't really the new millennium is approaching very fast now. My PC checks out with a couple of tools so hopefully it will keep going if the power, telecomms, ISP are still functioning. If not then life will become spam-free again. I can survive without my internet access, I did so for at least 9 hours today...
I have decided on a New Year's resolution - 1024x768, but after a few days it will gradually slip back to being 800x600 again
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Latest reply: Dec 27, 1999
More life (14DEC1999)
Posted Dec 14, 1999
I am still alive but I have been saving the phone bill...well not really, I have been doing other things web-wise. I decided that I was a bit disappointed about not getting a placing in a travelogue competition that I had entered so I would submit the travelogue part of my site to some awards programmes and see what feedback I got. Well clearly the site isn't that bad as I have picked up over 20 awards since then, some of them quite highly rated amongst award schemes so worth the virtual paper that they aren't written on. You could always judge for yourself by going to http://www.earthdweller.co.uk/contiki.html . There's no stunning graphics but lots of pictures and lots of words.
Well I mentioned that my name is going to Mars on the 2001 mission - I hope they do a bit better than the last two... Some of the kids from a local school here put some work on the CD-ROM which went on the one which is "not responding presumed dead". The kids have been listening for a bleep from it but without any joy...
It's snowing outside tonight. I like snow. I watch it like I did when I was a kid, only I am bigger now and can get even more excited I think I have enough wood kicking around to make a sledge...
Oh I nearly forgot - I have been named as one of the Phenomenal Men of the Web... You must be impressed now. And some parts of my website have been reproduced as article in the online women's magazine "Whispers". Soon I will need a bigger hat
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Latest reply: Dec 14, 1999
Life 24/11/1999
Posted Nov 24, 1999
Well I haven't been in H2G2 for a week as I was in danger of spending a fortune on phone charges, as I used to do in Usenet. I told a room full of people about H2G2 last week when speaking about the kinds of things which are going on in cyberspace. Everyone remembered Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and they were thrilled to hear about the project. Yesterday I added my name to the database of names which will be put on CD-ROM to go to Mars in 2001. Check out http://spacekids.hq.nasa.gov/2001 and get your name known around the galaxy. In my little part of the universe I am busy working on the new release of MELTHAM ON THE WEB - I want to get in online by the end of November. Apart from that life carries on as usual - not enough money, not enough sleep...
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Latest reply: Nov 24, 1999
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EARTHDWELLER
Researcher U100920
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"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."