Debra McLaren - the saga continues

Just gorgeous! However I was disappointed when I plugged it in and found there was no icon for it. So anyhoo I made one and you’re welcome to it. You need to put the icon file and the autorun.inf into the root directory of your USB drive.

IMGP1523, originally uploaded by debragail.

Getting Fluffier

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

I decided to move to Flickr for my photo hosting. I like that my photos are available for download at full resolution and some of my shots of the kittens are already popular with the cat-loving folks. However I don’t know why Flickr randomly uploads photos and won’t allow you to sort sets automatically. This looks like a job for API calls, a souped-up spreadsheet and a lot of patience. The initial spreadsheet was a few days of fiddly work, but worked perfectly. I then released it to the general public and the fun and games started. When I say the public it was actually one user who helped me. It turned out that he was an Internet Explorer user and the API call results he was pasting into the spreadsheet contained all sorts of crazy hyperlinks and chr(160)s. Last night I finally got it fixed so that it would accept data from either browser but then IE couldn’t cope with the size of the output list. Looks like another convert to Firefox! If anyone else would like a copy of the spreadsheet please email me at debra.mclaren at gmail.com.

I found to my immense disgust that I had lost a random third of my music files somewhere in the shift from my old hard drive to the Maxtor, to the WD to the FreeAgent Pro and I didn’t have it backed up anywhere. Since I regularly preach on the importance of backups I thought it was about time I got myself organised. I decided against Carbonite because my data lives on an external drive that Carbonite won’t backup. I eventually went with Mozy because of unlimited backups and good price. Since my initial backup is about 95GB it will take over 2 months. However there won’t be much change after that so subsequent backups should be bearable.

Both Wordpress and I have been out of memory recently. The fix that worked for me was to edit my php.ini file and change memory_limit to 64M. If anyone can suggest something for my own memory that would be great.

I visited my sister and brother-in-law while they were cleaning out some cupboards and found the magnificent Chadwick Speedee Add-a-Matic. It’s an adding machine as old as I am and I love it. I asked for it to be given to me for my birthday.