RACONTEUR-ESQUE SCRIBBLINGS

Courtesy of Sunday Stealing The Bud is Back Meme Every now and then, the narcissist in the blogger decides to surface and tell all and sundry about themselves. While yours truly is not really willing to divulge everything about herself (real name for one), she happens to like talking about her blog. A lot. She saw this meme, liked it and decided to honour it by stealing it. After all, that is what Sunday Stealing is all about! 1. Why did you sign up for writing your blog? It happened on a whim - I had stories to tell, and the blog kind of took them in without telling me that I'm crazy. 2. Why did you choose your blog's name? What does it mean? You know how sometimes when you convince yourself enough about something, it may just come true? The same goes for the name of this blog. According to the free dictionary, raconteur means : One who tells stories and anecdotes with skill and wit. Someday, I hope that the blog will live up to it's name :) 3. Do you ever had...

Ahem. It's how to save your blog actually, from whatever it is that may attack it someday. Some time ago, an old blog of mine got deleted by whoever was hosting it - and, they didn't even bother informing me. I whined about it in a post, and a comment left by Secret Agent Woman got me thinking. It was time to back up this blog too, although Blogger is currently hosted by Google - a huge company if there ever was one. But like everything else in this time and age, you just never know what is going to happen, and no one has guaranteed that your blog is going to be there forever, and what will become of the posts you slaved over the years - spelling mistakes and all? After listening to the podcast in the link below last week, the urge to backup is now stronger than ever. http://bfm.my/assets/files/TED%20Talks/2011-11-27_TEDTalks_SixWaysToSaveTheInternet.mp3 These are a few methods I use: Save the Blog! 1. Blogger's backup system. (found via blogger ...

They never sent a warning beforehand although they had our e-mail addresses. One day everything was there, intact, and the next day everything had suddenly disappeared. All those words, all the friends, and all those memories.  Long before Facebook was shoved in my face by a close friend back in September 2007 in which I rather reluctantly embraced it, I belonged to a similar social networking group called Friendster, where I was reunited with a few old friends, some who go back way into the crazy days of pig-tailed childhood (one of them, at least - my hair was always kept short as a child) Such good times. A little later into the social networking bandwagon, they came out with a feature known as Friendster Blogs. As I only had a miserable and erratic dial up connection back then (2005), knowledge about what the internet had to offer was rather limited, so I had no idea that Blogger (then known as Blogspot? - apparently not) even existed.  I had lots of stories to te...

Some time ago, I made use of a children's folk story to poke fun at a certain Malaysian whom I thought was in the news for all the wrong reasons. Turns out, my reference to the folk story has earned  the top spot on google Malaysia when people took the trouble to search the following: click to enlarge Now, while I'm cool about being listed on google and all that (I don't earn money from the blog, so ratings are not and have never been of any particular importance), I can't deny that I'm a tad bit embarrassed about the content of the post (funnily, the thought that the post would be embarrassing never occurred to me when I clicked 'publish') despite the fact that I think the person (for once) may have found what they're looking for. In the initial stages of blogging here on blogspot, and because everyone else was doing it too, I paid a good deal of attention on the blog statistics, and with all the tools out there which are available, it's...

is much harder than I thought it would be. I can't say why I actually put a hold to my blogging activities since the beginning of the year. I could say it was because I was busy (but being busy never prevented me from posting regularly back in 2006, or even 2008 and 2010), or perhaps being busy led to the fact that I could not focus my thoughts to form coherent sentences (this part is true... of late, each time I get an inspiration to blog about something, my thought process is always interrupted by well, interruptions in many different forms, and probably bad feng shui . Don't ask. Besides, during the short blogging break, I realised that talking about myself had actually made me more depressed then I'd actually be if I didn't write about it, because you see, things happened as they normally would the past month and a half, (some good, some so bad and shocking that you'd think it's fiction), but because I hardly dwelt on them, they didn't have the opportu...

In case you didn't already know there is a Robin Hood- esque blog out there, aptly named Sunday Stealing , where they go around stealing memes from the meme rich blogs to share with the meme poor blogs! Well, sort of anyway, cause the meme poor blogs actually have to do the stealing on their own... after all blog posts don't really write by themselves, do they? Anyway, I was checking out their blog week ago and found this meme, which I thought I'd steal because it looked like fun. Third Meme about Blogging 1. How did you come up with your blog title OR what does it mean? There is a movie out there that goes by the title Unfinished Business. I've never watched it, nor do I really know what it is about, but titles tend to stick in your head at times, so I used it. However, the reason it's used here is due to the fact that writing is my unfinished business. Another thing I ought to mention is that this particular blog had a different name originally for a very...

If blogs could talk, I wonder how their conversations with the other blogs who are their friends would be like. Will they complain about neglect or overuse? Or will they talk about the lives of their authors and reveal information that do not grace the pages of the blogs? Or will they just sit comfortably in their respective urls and enjoy each day as it goes by. Alas! This may be something we will never know. Unfinished Business Part 2 ends it's third year this very day, and is embarking onto it's fourth. Not bad at all for what started as place to secretly back up blog posts (which can explain the blog url , if anyone's ever noticed), which then turned into something else as the days and weeks and years went by. Blogging has been fun at most, and a pretty good way to view something objectively, to remember minor incidents that have happened which would otherwise be forgotten with selective memory as well as to see how we've grown up throughout the years. Even the ...

In the initial days of blogging which seems so far away, I used to avoid putting up pictures on the blog like a plague. I'd say this was contributed to the fact that I had indeed started on this addictive hobby when I was still struggling with a 56 kbps modem, and pictures would have taken a lifetime to load. After all, anyone who has known me long enough will well be aware of all the connection problems I have faced throughout, the most recent just a few months ago. These days I do put up pictures, for visual purposes at times, but the latest of the lot was a mystery! Till the very end, and on three different browsers, the picture never enlarged despite the fact that I had stated on the post right below the picture : "Click to enlarge" My mistake was I only checked it once after posting the post on Friday night and blamed it on my browser. Very convenient, aight ? Anyway, a little over a day later I spent a good half an hour putting the picture up, just to take it ...

There's like a million things swimming in my head right now, ready to burst out, but I have such limited time to sit down and properly compose something that is worth reading, what with the atrocious spelling that sometimes accompanies my post and weird sentences that seem to hang midway without any purpose.... but... I shall go through one topic at a time. So what if I'm a few days late and there is no relevence to what I post (am I making any sense here? - Oh, i don't know) by the time it gets up. Well, first things first... I recently submitted my blog for a review at World Blog Council and was worried because, well, you know how things can get when you decide to have it reviewed and all. Allow me to explain.... it was one of those in between hours of Friday night and Saturday morning, and I was reading Lizza's blog because I didn't want to sleep just yet. She had posted her blogworld Saturday, and I was clicking on the links and I ended up there. As I said, i...

She can't say why. Her sister thinks it's so unlike her. And after about an hour and a half of copying, saving and deleting and republishing, she still asks herself why. Pink is good, she thinks, and the yellow/orange/white combo has served her well. Maybe for a tad bit too long, she thinks. Besides, we can't live without shoes, and ahem! nice legs... Her only regret is she can't change the font to Arial unless she goes back to each and every post (about 298 or so) and republish them one by one. Not a very appealing idea she thinks. She's a bit crazy but not that crazy. And then there's the time factor as well. Hehehe... And then there's the issue of not having the dashboard at her disposal... Nevertheless it's not such a big problem, she says to herself... Nothing she can't solve, anyway. A bit of tweaking needs to be done, she admits, and if she doesn't like it in a few days/weeks/months/years (ha! ha!), she can always revert to the old on...

While some people just have a fantastic way with words that could stir emotions, crumble mountains or make glaciers melt, there are others who stumble at the end of every sentence, chewing the backs of their stubby pencils while deep in thought. And then there are the people who come, take a look, and form dangerous ideas in their heads. A while back, the author of one of the blogs that I frequently visit had the shock of his life when he found out that he had been plagiarised. It wasn't mere lifting of sentences from here and there, but his whole life seemed to have been copied word for word, and the pictures that accompany his posts weren't spared either. It seems as though the author (if he can be called so) of the copycat blog was entirely intrigued by this blogger's life and his opinions that he figured that it might as well be his own. Now, copying or plagiarism isn't really something new. It happens almost everywhere. Even recently (based on my definition ...

Note: I originally wrote this to be posted at one of the blogs where I'm a guest blogger , and I thought that it would be nice to put it up here as well since it deals with opinions. It may be a strange analogy, but I feel that blogging is similar to gardening in the sense that they both kind of grow when nurtured. And when it comes to gardening, if neglected weeds will grow, and for blogging, when neglected, spam will collect or someone might take over your url. I've seen it happen before. Anyway, analogies aside, I've been spending some time thinking about the blog and how it has changed over time and how it has changed me. When I first started on a blog back in April 2005 (it was on a different platform in a networking site) I only had a very vague idea about what a blog was. At that time, I had quite a lot of stories to tell but no one who would listen. So I used to sit down and write all the funny and tragic (in our eyes) incidents that happened to my friends and...

When your so called secret identity is no more a secret and the original purpose of your blog is not applicable anymore, the next best thing to dumping it into the dustbin (that will be tragic, by the way) is to give it a new identity and a new name... Therefore, I introduce to you the new name of this blog: UNFINISHED BUSINESS PART 2, because Unfinished Business (Part 1 doesn't come along with it, but that's how it may be referred to, if you like) will be still around, although probably not as much as it would like to be. Of course the content is most probably going to remain along the same lines (because I haven't changed in the least bit - except that I may have adopted a more morose persona, but then, that's inevitable)

Statistics has always been the most straightforward part of mathematics until 'probability' came into the picture. It's also one of the most interesting, especially when it comes to stuff related to blog searches. I sort of got the idea for this post after reading The Seventh Notion the other day, and I'm aware that there were many others who have done this before. Based on statcounter (which is wonderful, by the way, because it is so easy to use!) about 15.77% of people ended up on my blog post titled "blogger chicks rock" searching for 'malaysian chicks blogspot'. I don't really want to guess what they came looking for, but judging from the time they spent at my site, I doubt they got what they wanted. The second highest search that led to this blog is "red tubes". My post was about the 3 in 1 nescafe packets that I'm addicted to (which are red, by the way). I suspect the people came by looking for a site that sells red tubes,...

I was checking out Orhan's blog earlier today when I came across this meme he sort of started. And I quote directly from his blog the rules to this meme... "There are no fancy rules just the basic paste and comment approach. Take three posts from your blog or website that you feel has had the most influential impact amongst your visitors and comment about your overall reaction. I will know you have taken to this meme by leaving a comment on this post yourself." Now, my blog is somewhat on the lighter side, and I try my best to make it so, leaving the heavier stuff to the pros. Therefore, it was somewhat a challenge coming up with an idea of what could have had any influential impact on anybody at all. That and the fact that I don't really have that many readers to begin with, so who am I going to influence? Hehehe... Anyway, I've chosen 3 posts that may have had some sort of impact or another, and if it didn't change anyone's life, it's alright, ...

Do you think you're not fit enough? Well, there's a new blog in town, created by Aunty Helpful Dictator as a support network for those who need to up their fitness level. Basically it's about attempts to go and join the fitness bandwagon. She welcomes contributors, so if you're interested to put in your 3lbs of thoughts in it, just comment in her blog with your e-mail address.

Quite some time back, out of curiosity, I submitted this blog to be reviewed by Bloggy Awards . Basically, what they do is they rate your blog based on several categories such as visual asthetics, user friendliness, reading enjoyment, useful info as well as an overall experience of your blog. It's quite interesting actually, to know how your blog is perceived by others. For instance now I know I need to spruce up the blog with a little bit more visuals. Add some colour, perhaps... Anyway, if you're interested, the review can be viewed here: http://www.bloggyaward.com/bloggyaward/the-secret-backup-blog/

After a few days of non-blogging, I have decided to come back.... not that the clutter in my head has reduced or anything like that, but I kinda feel way better than I was a few weeks ago! Allright, I have another post to put up, and will be visiting my favourite hangouts soon!

*TSBB = The Secret Backup Blog Twas exactly a year ago that I was created by Terra, on a sudden whim when she decided that she wanted to blog where no one knew her personally so that she could write about everything under the sun (or above it) that bothered her. Of course she wasn't known as Terra, back then, the silly anonymous wannabe girl used her real name... Ha! Ha! (Terra nudges me to add that she will not be insulted by a blog) Now, I'm insulted... anyway, as I was saying... since it's my birthday and all, Terra has kindly allowed me to say a word or two... but I feel that I deserve a whole post. Don't you think so? I remember my first template... it was that brownish coloured thing with the fancy font (TNR)... but Terra had a strange preference for the Arial font, and she meticulously changed the font to Arial whenever she remembered. (Which was not often, by the way... and she will have to go back and republish! Ha! Ha!) And then all of a sudde...

Some time back, I recall a fellow blogger friend who one of the first few to convert to beta mention that she couldn't log into her account to post comments into non-beta blogger's pages. Now, I find myself facing the same problem... only it's the other way round. Due to my unexplainable stubborness in refusing to change to Beta, me and my blog have been relegated to the status of second class blognetizens. Bloody hell... I can't post comments on my beta blogger friends blogs in one try. It takes at least 3 attempts, and that is if I label myself as 'other' or 'anonymous'. Sometimes, I give up due to sheer frustration in attempting to leave a sign that I have visited. Other non-beta bloggerfriends have mentioned similar thoughts on this subject: Prometheus and Yaxlich . I'm afraid, that blogger has finally figured out a tactic to not woo non-beta bloggers but to coerce them into joining this society where if things go wrong, then too bad! Ha...