Moving on

For some months now I have been meaning to close this blog and start a new, public one, but so far I haven't come around to actually doing it. The main reason for changing blogs is that this blog never really turned out the way I liked it, it always felt a little off. It has also become increasingly strange to write in English, considering we speak mostly Swedish at home these days and I even speak German more often than English. I am not really sure how to solve that problem though, as 50% of my readers don't speak Swedish and the other 50% don't speak German, but it will work itself out eventually.
So I am looking to start over and as soon as I have found a nice name for my new blog (suggestions are welcome) I will post it here so that my 2,7 loyal readers can follow me there.

Ctrl lock

If you know how to use a keyboard (as you are reading this I assume you do), you might have used the "Caps Lock" function at some point and maybe even the "Num Lock" function. But I give you the previously unheard of CONTROL LOCK function.

How does it work? Hm, let's say you are writing a posting. A very long posting. A very long posting that has not been saved for a while. You are doing your final proof-reading and want to add a single letter. You click on the space in the text where you want to enter it. The whole text gets marked. A new Firefox tab is opened. You try again, the result is the same. You panic. Less than one minute later you have more than 20 new empty tabs when suddenly the page you were working in reloads and goes blank. Everything you wrote is gone - you start to sweat. You click the "back" button. A new empty tab opens. Every time you try. You start to use foul language and close down the browser, then start it again. Only to realize that anything you do opens a new, empty tab. You go through the settings, one, two, fourteen times. You make some changes. More new, empty tabs are opened. Your language gets more explicit by the minute. More changes. More tabs. Then another browser restart. Certainly Google has the answer. But whatever you type: tabs. And pop-ups. The search bar appears, then the bookmarks are suddenly shown on the left-hand side. Your entire internet logs pop up. A thought starts to form in your head. Don't you usually have to press the Control key together with another key to access these elements? You did press some letter keys, but the Control key is not pressed in. You did not press it for sure. Is there such a thing as "Ctrl Lock"? You slowly approach the Control key with your finger and press down, expecting yet another new, empty tab. Instead everything works again like before. Except for all the settings you changed of course.

Both my husband and I have what I consider to be very decent computer skills. Neither of us has ever heard of or experienced anything like this before. I have discovered a new, if completely worthless function. If I had discovered a new, yet completely worthless animal I could at least name it after me...

Dotless

You might have noticed that the blog is looking surprisingly plain these days. The simple (and absolutely truthful) explanation is that the pink dots demanded more money and when I refused to pay they got up and left. The grey dots followed them as a sign of support (somewhat misguided, if you ask me). Well, I won't be blackmailed. And how smart was it to give up a secure, undemanding job right in the middle of a global crisis? Where else do you think you will find work that only requires you to pop up for two or three people every other week? There's plenty of dots out there that would LOVE to take your places. They are queuing outside as I'm speaking. Ha ha, in your tiny little faces!

(Having made my point: I am between servers, but there will be dots again soon.)

Polka dot overkill

After now having changed the whole design to pink I can't help but wonder if I maybe overdid it. There's just so much colour that makes the circles pop out - it looks like a polka dot convention. Maybe there is such a thing as too much pink after all.

Success!

See the pink dots up there? I couldn't let Inkscape win, so I tried out a new approach on the smaller image. And: success! Now that I know how (and that) it works I can fix the rest as well. Maybe not today though.

Damn you, Inkscape!

I just spent those precious hours after Pontus has fallen asleep and before I go to bed to learn how to use Inkscape. Inkscape is a vector graphics editor with which I hope to one day create some fancy images for my blog - if I ever understand what all those buttons and menus are for. Right now, it doesn't look like that will ever happen.

For an easy start I took my existing blog design and altered the colours, from greens to different shade of, you guessed it, pink. I clicked and I dragged and I dropped and I copied and I selected. And in the end I saved.
It was not until I tried to open the files that I found out that while Inkscape lets you save your images in GIF format, it does not create usable files. Whatever I do, and I have tried everything, the files are corrupted. I get either an error message or a blank sheet and there is nothing I can do to fix it.

Time lost, lesson learned...

Pimp my blog

I have spent the last 30 minutes looking at skins for my blog on blogskins.com. I tried out two interesting ones but returned to the tried-and-tested blogger template, because I wasn't 100% satisfied.
Maybe I should try to design something myself...

Ready, Set, Go!

I got the idea for this blog from my friend Muddiz, who updates me (and the rest of the world) about what's going on in her life, which, incidentally, is very similar to my life. We do in fact not only live similar lives, we also physically live less than 300 meters apart. So, with all of those things we have in common, how can she be filling page after page with funny little stories and witty observations of the world around us, while I sit at home and, well, do nothing?

Okay, so I do not have a cool ingrown toenail that makes for gross shocker photos and I don't have confessions to make like dreaming about tucking Björn Gustafsson in at night (an image that haunted me for a very long time btw), but I too have things to say.

Ready or not, here I come!