At the end of each month I usually go through the webserver logs analysing traffic and other mundane website-related things.

One of the things that I particularly take interest in is websites that point to mine and  what keywords people are typing into search engines to stumble upon my humble blog.

By far the most common keywords are headphone/audio-related as well as plenty of food and drink – who knew so many people were interested in ginger beer with ginseng?

However, amongst the technology and food concoction that this website has become, there are some hidden gems and it takes some of the funniest searches to reveal them.

Today I thought I’d share my top 3 favourites for last month (March 2010):

1. “is there any ginger ale in south korea”

Others are catching on to cousin’s conspiracy theory! Maybe he isn’t mad afterall I can’t believe a bottle of that prized fluid is so hard to track down in South Korea. Is the truth out there???

2. “pastries of shakespeare s time”

Why this would be relevant to anyone is beyond me. Once upon a time – 6 years ago! – I wrote about pastries and mentioned the shop that once went by that name but nothing from the English Playwright’s era, sorry!

3. “jackson raine”

(+related searches) Finally, this just goes to show that although I only ever wrote about Jackson once, about 4 years ago, he is such an unknown actor that my website takes the coveted #1 position on Google when searching his name. Oh memories…

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22.07.2008: By and large the issues should be resolved now. If not then continue to send to the below address. However in the next couple of days everything will well and truly be sorted – DNS propagation and the sort, you know how it is.

If you’re going to email me (or have been trying to) my email is experiencing some issues.

Please instead send to my other email address which is dc [at] vnheadphone [dot] com

Currently experiencing some issues with my host (ran out of disk space, what?) and I will try and get these issues resolved ASAP.

I am however, surprisingly able to post on the blog. Go figure. The gallery though is also mucking up so hold the photos for now folks.

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Well we’ve lost yet another brother. Last Saturday “the man” married “the one”. All in all a bit of a hectic day, but in the end things worked out in favour of most people, most importantly the bride and groom. Something I’ve observed over the past few months is I think if/when I’m married it will be a simple affair.

You may remember my post about the man’s engagement bash and the impressive baby calf that was on offer at the time. Well, his wedding reception also delivered highly in the food ranks. Although the menu arrangement could have had a bit more thought (ie the order certain dishes came out) it was overall of good quality.

The banquet was as follows (10 courses of course):

1. Salt and garlic squid
2. Pork, prawn and lotus stem salad
3. Seafood spring roll (prawn and scallop mostly)
4. Crab meat and asparagus soup
5. Lobster and egg noodles with XO sauce
6. Roasted quail
7. Steamed fish
8. Fried rice
9. Fresh fruit
10. Wedding cake

So as you can see, little was skimped on the menu and these banquets are one of, if not the main reasons I look forward to weddings (as well as seeing couples living together happily ever after… or something like that). If my sources and ability to count tables are right there were about 240 in attendance, up to 250 (24 tables of 10 + some others) so it was quite a large reception and the reception centre was truly filled to capacity.

In website related news, the photo galleries have been active as ever (at least the pay per view section) due to a number of factors. People are finally realising how easy it is to post photos, and I guess people are becoming aware of how invaluable the photo gallery is for archiving memories as well as the fact that more people have digital cameras. Many thanks goes to Chuck who is currently in the US of A and is chewing up someone’s upload bandwidth to add photos from Vegas, Hawaii and The Grand Canyon. Hope to see more as his trip progresses! You had better not come back with a wife of your own mate!

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As the title suggests lots of photos have been added to the galleries.

This time even the public galleries have been face lifted with some of the restaurants visited whilst in Melbourne.

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It seems another of my close friends is leaving.

This time Shane is going back to his home land forever and ever.

Tis sad and you will be missed my ocker comrade.

Not to worry, thanks to the internet and cheap JetStar flights we will remain in touch (or not).

And of course you will be forever immortalised in photo form.

Anyone with an account to the galleries can login and click on the updates button top left or peruse the various new sub-folders, to pay tribute to he who can only be described as Shane.

Of all my years I came across no one or no thing that was more Australian. Not even this:

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Well, everyone’s married or getting married it seems. Shame I’m not a trend follower or I’d be in serious trouble right about now. Anyhow, there’s quite a few new pictures up on the galleries from any number of recent social events.

I’d like to make particular mention of “The Man’s” engagement party this weekend just gone past. It featured of all things a tender calf on a spit roast. It’s been a while and it was worth attending this engagement, as nothing quite appetises the senses like seeing/smelling/hearing/touching/tasting a beast on a rotisserie slowly cooking away.

There are also photos of a recent BBQ and a visit to the Outback Steakhouse (photos click here) who have a suspiciously high number of oriental wait staff and an eerily strange soy sauce hint to their hickory steak sauce. They also need a new rarometre as my medium rare steak came out medium. Other medium/medium rares came out rare and just shy of blue! Needless to say not all of it was kept down by the offended parties.

I’d also like to throw in that concreters and high pressure water cleaner dudes have earned my respect. Today I tried my hand at that stuff and in a nutshell, it can be a breezy job if you know what you’re doing (not me) but if you fall victim to surface residue and water log then you’ll never get the job done, at least not what I’d consider satisfactory – all grime/scum gone.

Any how, that’s it for now. Keep posted I’ll hopefully be posting regularly again soon.

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Hello all. I’ve been without internet for 2 weeks. My MSN absense has rang alarm bells for some while others even resorted to using the phone!

*gasps*

Anyway, with my cousin moving in I decided now better than ever it was necessary to change internet and phone providers. iiNet‘s phone line rental was becoming costly and their plans are no longer competitive – we never use the phone in this house.

They are also not the only provider able to deliver ADSL2+ to our premises so brand loyalty aside there is unfortunately no reason to stick with them.

My first choice was exetel that would provide 60gb worth of combined downloads for $60. Great value. Combine that with Telstra’s HomeLine Budget phone line rental for only $19.95 comes in at $5 more per month but so much more flexibility and downloads.

Alas, exetel has no spare ports on our exchange, so the next and only other option was TPG. $60 for 30gb is ok as well, half as good value as exetel, but I suppose it’s enough even for my cousin and I together.

So we did that, but one thing led to another which led us to being offline for 2 weeks as opposed to the suggested 3-5 days. First of all iiNet have some silly “cooling off period” whereby when you disconnect from them they don’t transfer you over to the new provider just yet in case you change your mind. But in the mean time disconnect your internet service! Yeah… nice way to keep customers.

Then a bunch of incompetent help desk operators continuously fail to understand me when I say I’d like to check on the installation status and get annoyed at me when I ring back due to 1. not having my calls returned as promised or 2. being instructed to do so. Having worked at a call centre myself some of the ways these calls were handled would be deemed completely unacceptable, and I seriously hope the poor quality of those calls would be recorded and used in training as how NOT to handle calls.

Anyhow, after dealing with some hardware incompatibilities between my previous Belkin router and TPG’s ADSL network I switch back to my old Billion router which actually connects but synchronises with the line at a bit under 4megabits which is a pretty big drop from the 5 or thereabouts megabits it was achieving with the Belkin.

argh, end rant.

p.s. in other news, major gallery update with photos from all the recent events now online.

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I don’t know, but are there any of you who wished to see which photos were recently added to my photo galleries, but until now had no facility to see photos in the order they were added/updated?

Well, fear no more netizens, for I have made a recent change to the gallery which may be to your great pleasure. For all of those who aren’t keen on fishing through the miriads upon miriads of photo albums to see whether they’ve been updated, there is now a “View Latest Updates” button available top left of hand of the galleries.

I think it’s a wonderful idea, and the old gallery had such a feature but the new one didn’t and I never thought of adding that as a feature. Well, at the beckoning of at least one person, it is here. So please enjoy it.

To view the galleries click on the gallery link at the top of this page, and then you will see the new feature top left hand.

–dc

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There haven’t been many updates lately, but I recently added some photos to the galleries so any who have been missing some photos of recent events can check them out there.

Apologies for lateness of uploading, have just been terribly busy, also there have been a few changes around here such as my living away from home, my cousin from Melbourne living with us while he looks for a new home in Sydney and a few other things that I’d consider fairly substantial.

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Just came back from a quick trip to Melbourne this labour day weekend. To my dismay though, the destination folk don’t actually observe labour day, whatever that is. Anywho, good times were had and lots of eating, drinking and catching up were done. Photos now found in the gallery.

Melbourne is very much the same and plenty of time was spent in Springvale which felt like home. I would like to add though that as a result of this trip I am now one or two headshots the better and as such will soon launch my acting/modelling career.

Photos can be found here as well as in the private section for the privileged.

Thank you

–dc

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