Lost In Cyberspace

Archive for November, 2006

So I realised that the main problem that I had the second time around with my instal of Microsoft's VWD was that in my previous uninstall the .Net 2.0 framework had been uninstalled, not by me directly, at least I am pretty sure I didn't, but more likely as an associated part of the uninstall of one of the other components. Possibly.

As for the posting of an image, Johannes recommended in his comment that I try the Direct Upload and that seems to be working fine, though on my initial instal it didn't seem so keen on the idea. So as a tester, me:

So me and my computer have been having a bad day. I only wanted to try and install a couple of freebie programmes, one of them being the Microsoft Visual Web developer 2005 (Express Edition), and so far all I have gotten is a load of errors, removed it once and tried installing again, now I am just gonna give up. I did manage to install BlogDesk which seems to run pretty well, but I can't seem to configure the picture up-load through my FTP, it uploads the pic fine, but the file never ends up where I want it to be, no matter how carefully I lay out the path. Still, it's probably just me rather than the programme. I will have another go tomorrow when I am feeling a little less frustrated.

Big thanks go out to Robert Buzink for his excellent plug in, now I can have some of my favourite videos over here!

Firefly [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r56Y0qnfhe0] Running a test on this plug-in, what better way than with a little "Firefly" madness!

It seems that 200 years after slavery began its final death throes in the former British Empire that some feel a more formal apology for what went before is needed and reparations need to be paid. I am not a history major, nor am I very knowledgeable about the Politics of the situation, and perhaps as a white male I should stay well away from any comment that could be construed as racist, but I must confess to being a little confused as to what this all means. As far as I am aware the vast majority of slaves that were brought to this country and other parts of the then empire were already slaves when they were bought. If this is the case, should it not be the ones who enslaved the individuals and sold them on that should make recompense? Were these ones not themselves black tribesmen who had conquered their neighbours or captured the slaves in raids on rival villages? This may not be the case in every single instance, consider the Amistad case, but it surely is what occurred in the vast majority of instances. Even the Amistad case shows that Western society had already rejected what was still considered a normal way of life in Africa, the capture of freemen purely for the purpose of sale. So many of the ethics of modern-day do not sit well when transported into the past, the modern day Native Americans feeling that their ancestors were hard done-by when the white man took their land, where as there seems to be no rush on their own part to issue formal apologies to the peoples their tribes displaced as they migrated into the Americas. The mistreatment of the peaceful peoples and breaking of the treaties is, of course, an entirely different matter. I realise that a lot of what I have said is an over-simplification of very complex issues, and I am sorry if what I have said is inaccurate, I am happy to receive any feedback that helps me increase my understanding of these issues.

So I did it. I made a choice and found a new home for my blog. I went with afmu in the end. The expense wasn't too great, the learning curve was perhaps the hardest part as I tried to find out about transferring files and finding a free up-loader that was within my capabilities. So here I am, with no spell checker! I tried to install two different plug-ins, one that I couldn't get to work in any way shape or form and one that seems to be incompatible with the version of Wordpress that I have installed. I guess the easiest thing for me to do would be to test out my posts in "Outlook" first, that should help me avoid too many calamities, but I will have to give that a try another time, else it will make this post a little redundant in the main! I was a little dissapointed that there was no way to import my blogs from the freebie version, at least no way that I could find, but a quick bit of "copy and paste" sorted that out. Anyways, I managed to install Wordpress on my server, and I managed to find the same theme that I had previously and get that set up too, not bad work for one weekend. Well, not for me anyways.