grand scheme » Website News

GrandCentral becomes Google Voice

Adrian — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:26:49 +0000

Google has enabled Grand Central as Google Voice. You can now contact me using the widget on the right. You should be able to get hold of me at any number I have at any time. If I don’t pick up your call will go to voicemail. A nice new feature is that the voicemail will be transcribed and appear in my email inbox (we’ll see how that goes!).

Welcome. Part 2.

Adrian — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 01:49:22 +0000

This is the new location of wadley.us. The move is three month affair planned for April through June 2008. By the end of June everything will be over here and wadley.us will point here too. For those that are interested in a little detail of why this was necessary, read on. The move was forced by the inability of my previous host (Ipower) to transition from their old platform (vdeck 1.0) to their new platform (vdeck 3.0). They’d managed to move one of my other sites (queally.net) without too much trouble, but I didn’t bother to even try to get everything working (such as the gallery 2 installation or the wordpress, though that would probably have been possible). I just moved it all over to hostgator and it worked well, set up the new emails etc. I knew the bigger problem would be when they upgraded my main site – wadley.us. And to give them credit they did try, finding the site did not pass QC for an automatic transfer and they managed to get half the site moved, and working OK (the WordPress installation). But they completely failed to notice the MediaWiki installation and lost the entire family history system. Luckily the database was still there and I hurriedly backed it up. After some delayed email responses from their support group (who seem to think 24-36 hrs is an acceptable response time) I got fed up entirely with their inability to read and understand a simple statement, and their inability to accept that their transfer broke my site. In the end it came down to them saying “it’s not installed properly”. Well d’uh!. Of course not! They broke the installation during the move by failing to test it and failing to correctly set the base parameters for the new system. It can’t be the first MediaWiki installation they’ve transitioned so I’m surprised they screwed it up so badly. Oh well. Time to dump them, they’ve been getting slower in response and the content of the responses has been getting dumber too. The site (at Ipower) is often slow to load and their throttling back of FTP upload speeds makes it a challenge to even upload the most basic of updates. Let alone try and use their touted “600GB” of space. It would take over 6 months of solid uploading at their best speeds to get a site fully loaded. As I said time to move on.

Anyway over here on hostgator we have very good updates to WordPress. MediaWiki worked first time I installed it (I’ve tried 1.11 in test mode and re-installed the family history site using 1.7.1 just fine). I’ve got six current and active WordPress installations (two of my sites and four for other groups that I manage). There’s lots of space (everyone gives that these days) and the support response is fast and generally quite intelligent.

Annoyances

Adrian — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 21:54:09 +0000

For those that view the picture archive you will probably know that there is a commenting system I put in place. This allows you to say what you want to about individual pictures, and have that comment seen by anyone else looking at that picture. It’s a handy way of letting me and others know something about the picture that we didn’t know already – like who is in it, or where it was taken. We’ve had some good comments made about the older pictures that have been very useful.

I’m sad to report that due to continued and increasing abuse by persons unknown I have had to remove this feature. I hope this is temporary, and that I will soon be able to implement a secure way you can leave comments that will distinguish between humans and the robots that try to automatically spam my website. Until then please enjoy the photos as they are. Please do email me directly if you wish to comment on them or leave comments here.

Catching up

Adrian — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:57:23 +0000

My goodness – time flies.

What’s the latest? A little on the family history, and some new photos from various events.

A new contact with a 2nd cousin in California, who has done much research on the Pratt family is very promising. K’s family tree continues to grow in size and depth with more detailed information and members of the family confirmed. A visit by K’s 3rd cousin Steven was interesting – he brought many new photos.

Our favourite local museum, the de Young, in Golden Gate Park, is only about a mile away. We recently went there to see the annual Bouquets to Art exhibit (slideshow in need of editing, but you’ll get the idea).

Winter persists but during a couple of breaks in the weather I’ve put together a few interesting panoramic pictures from our house.

On the techie side not much to report on the website, but some new and improved radio bit’n'pieces are coming together, including some new beams to try side band DX on 2m and 70cm. The volunteer season looks like it will start off well with two fun events, the MS Society’s Top Hat Classic ride in April and the ALA’s Two Rock Breathe Easy Ride in May. The ADA’s Tour de Cure maybe another coming up soon. If you think any of these charities do good work please do consider supporting them, they need it!

Plain DAFT?

Adrian — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 00:33:17 +0000

D.A.F.T. – Digital Archive Family Tree? Maybe not the best name

Now that I have your attention – whatever the overall project is finally called, today sees another piece of the jigsaw ready.

All the key pieces are now in place :

the latest addition- an encyclopedia of reminiscences and memories that you can write, to go with
a searchable archive of old (and new) family photos
a digital family tree (to keep growing)
a set of pages to easily update with news about the family and the new stuff on the site (this weblog)

This is where I need you, the rest of the family, wherever you are, to contribute.

Drop me a line by email, or leave a comment here, if you’d like to help. Have a look at what’s already there.

Oh if you are wondering what it is, it’s a wiki.

Thanks,
Adrian