Tag Archives: blogging

Pass The Remote Control Darling

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Who Is The Master Of The Remote Control In Your Household?

Who owns the remote control in your home?I have to admit that I allow my wife to control what we watch on television most of the time, since we enjoy mostly the same shows, but although she is technically savvy in many ways, there are a few ways in which we differ in our methods.

We live in the UK and have Sky (Satellite) as our main provider of television services.

The Sky remote control is programmable so that it can be used to operate the television as well as the Sky Box, so that regular functions like adjusting the volume and turning the television on and off can all be done using a single remote, which as we all know is a whole lot easier than having to align 2 or more remotes on the arm of your chair, or on a coffee table.

By pressing the “TV” button you can also select different inputs on the television, for example if we want to use the Nintendo Wii or watch Terrestrial Television (new lingo for received via an aerial).

My wife sometimes gets confused however, because she will press the TV button accidentally or on purpose, and then decide later to type a channel number to switch to that channel.   Well since the remote is in TV mode and not Sky mode, the television thinks that she wants to switch to a Terrestrial channel, and therefore switches input to Terrestrial and of course there is no signal, since we don’t have an antenna plugged in.

I think she has got used to this now though, but it took a while to explain what was happening.

The real thing that I have trouble with is that because she uses the remote control to select programs, I never know if it’s a live program that we are watching, or one that we recorded earlier.   We have the TVR ability in our Sky Box to record programs automatically, even a complete series, which is wonderful, and you wonder how we ever managed with the old VCR tapes, or before that even.  I guess what you have never had you never miss, but I know I would miss this now if I had to lose it.

But the biggest difference in our attitude to watching programs is the way we watch the shows that we have already recorded.

The way that I would do it, would be to always watch the recorded version of the show, and don’t worry if it’s already started or about to begin, it doesn’t matter any more.

I would (and when I was the King Of The Remote I used to) always watch the recorded version of a show, and then delete it.

My wife however prefers to watch programs live, even though they are being recorded, so if there are 2 soaps on different channels, one after the other, we watch one live, then have to switch channels and either miss the very end of one or the beginning of the other.

After watching the shows, she then goes through the planner to see what we have recorded for those shows, and deletes the ones that we already watched (live), although the status of them is showing as Recorded not Watched, since we did not actually watch the recorded version.

More than once she has deleted something that said Recorded and that we had not watched, whereas using my method, everything you watched would actually show Watched, which to my “manly logic” means that it’s ok to delete.

I’m not sure if this makes sense to you reading this, but certainly to me it does.  Still, after a year or more of dealing with this, I have learned one thing – it’s not worth arguing about, I just let her get on with it, and if I miss an episode of a complex drama or sci-fi series where you need to watch every one at least once or completely lose track, I just stop recording the series, unless I can find the missed episode(s) showing at a different time.

It’s wonderful isn’t it having all this new remote control technology, but we still have to learn to use it, and some use it differently to others.

I guess with more sophisticated television systems, even if there is now only a need for a single remote in our household, it still doesn’t eliminate arguments over who has the remote.

This article was a project for the week for GBE2 (Global Blogging Experience) and was based on the word “Control”.

How To Schedule A Post In WordPress

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The ability to be able to schedule a post in any software package that is used for blogging comes in very handy, especially if you want to be able to write posts in advance and then to have them published at a pre-determined date and time.

Just how you schedule a post in WordPress isn’t that obvious to some people though, but this short illustrated tutorial should have you scheduling your posts easily from now on.

How To Schedule A Post In WordPress

When composing a new post, the top right side of the screen should look similar to the image above.

Click on the link that says Edit to the right of Publish Immediately, and the display will change to show the Date and Time that you want your post to be scheduled as below.

How To Schedule A Post In WordPress

All that you need to do in order to schedule your post is to change the date and/or time, click the OK button, and that’s it.  Simples…

One word of advice, if you are going to schedule posts in advance, you should always make sure that your wordpress blog has been set to the correct time zone.

You can do this on the General tab under Settings on the Dashboard.

The A-Z April Blogging Challenge

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Along with around 1,500 other writers I have been publishing articles in April as part of a challenge to write 26 articles, each with a theme of a different letter of the alphabet, beginning at A and working through to Z with each successive day.

A-Z Blogging Challenge

There are no prizes, just the feeling that you have accomplished something when you complete the mission, plus having 26 more articles on your blog, and hopefully some more regular followers.

So What Did I Write About

Beginning with the letter A on April 1st, here are the articles that I have written for the challenge so far:

A Is For April – which means April Fools Day, practical jokes, and a quick summary of the A-Z Blogging Challenge.

B Is For Brain Tumor – which my wife was diagnosed with in January, and has now almost fully recovered from thankfully.

C Is For Come Find Me – where can you find me on the internet.  If you would like to follow me on other sites like Facebook, Twitter or Stumbleupon, here is where I am.

D Is For Dine With Me – which discusses various articles that I have written about food and dining.

E Is For Evony – one of the most addictive multi-player games online.  Here I dealt with the addiction that my wife and I both had, and how games like Evony can destroy your lives.

F Is For Fish & Chips – the Great British Takeaway meal, and with my wife having spent some time in her grandparents Fish & Chip shop when she was growing up, a subject that she knows a lot about.

G Is For Gloomy Mornings – don’t you just hate waking up when it’s still dark and you look up to see just a grey sky full of threatening rain clouds.

H Is For History – one of my favourite subjects at school and ever since.  I especially love ancient history, and here my followers get to find out what it was that first interested me in history.

I Is For International Calls – which used to cost a small fortune, but which if you know what to look out for when buying an international calling card can now cost less than an inter-state phone call.

J Is For Jamaica – which is about my first trip to Jamaica in 1989 to install a computer system for one of the petroleum companies, but it’s not about work, it’s about my experiences there and my travels around the island.

K Is For Kingston Jamaica: That Is – ja mon!  This article goes on to describe more of my travels around the island of Jamaica and what it was like to be working in Kingston.

L Is For Lime Cay In Jamaica – the final part of my trip to Jamaica describes the pirate town of Port Royal, a visit to paradise at Lime Cay, and getting stranded adrift in the middle of the sea in a small boat.

M Is For Money Can It Make You Happy – which asks the question that if money is the root of all evil, why sometimes you need money to be happy.

N Is For Nuts! – which means anything from peanuts and cashews to an expression that was made famous during the Battle Of The Bulge.

Oh Dear My Muse Has Left Me – and how to overcome that dreaded phenomenon otherwise known as Writers Block.

P Is For Payne – not PAIN, PAINE or any other spelling forms…

Q Is For Queue – it’s just something that British folk do…

R Is For Reverse – meaning a change of direction, and this article changes direction after inspiration from an unexpected source…

S Is For Spam Comments – just something that has become a fact of life these days, but we can deal with it if we choose.

T Is For Today – I didn’t want to write my “T” post about the same thing as everyone else, and I wasn’t sure what to write about, so I thought “why not Today”.

U Is For Upside The Head – one of those phrases that really winds me up and makes me see red.

V Is For Vampire Woman – let the freak show begin as strange people try to change themselves to look demonic.

W Is For Wedding – and in 2 days time it’s the Royal Wedding, a huge celebration in the UK.

X Is For Xylophone – that often forgotten musical instrument, related to the Marimba that originated in Africa, and that is very entertaining to see someone play.

Y Is For Yawning – what is it that causes us to yawn? Is there a scientific reason?

Z Is For Zecharia Sitchin – a man who probably came closer than anyone to unraveling the mysteries of man’s most ancient times.

Whether you are a new visitor to Off The Record or whether you have been reading my articles for a while, I hope to see you back here reading my future articles, and if you do like them, please leave a comment, and help by sharing them.  You can find a Share button at the end of each article.

T Is For Today

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T is a letter of the alphabet that pretty much anyone ought to be able to find something to write about.   After all, there are plenty of words that begin with the letter T, like Today and Tomorrow for example. 

It’s not like the letters Q or Z which give you only limited opportunities to write about something that is different to the other thousands of people who are trying to come up with a post that is about a specific letter of the alphabet.

T however does present it’s own problems, in that there is so much choice for topic.  But I still don’t want to write about the same thing as a lot of other people, and Today I want to be different, so Tenaciously (is that the right word?) I am going to see where This leads me…

I was going to write about the Titanic, since it sailed from Southampton where we live, and on the 16th April, which was the 99th anniversary of the sinking, we went on an organized walk in the Old Cemetery in Southamtpon which is where some of the survivors were buried (after they died of course) and where there are memorials to those who perished as well as people who aided the families that were left without a breadwinner.

But since I want to create a lens on Squidoo about this and to use some of the photographs that I took, I thought to write about something else instead.

I then thought about Tubular Bells, the unique concept album from the early 1970′s that brought the name Mike Oldfield to everyone’s attention, and that helped to make Richard Branson’s Virgin Records a mega success.

But I thought that this might require a little research, and might be better left for an interesting article for another day.

Try as I might Though, it has been hard to find a Topic for Today.  

Since it’s getting late and This post is already getting quite long, I might leave it at That and see what I can write about Tomorrow.

S Is For Spam Comments

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Spam is just something that we have learned to live with these days, but no matter where you look, whether it’s your email Inbox, Blogs or Blog Posts, or even Comments left on Blog Posts, there it is – spam spam spam!

Learning to deal with Spam is something that all bloggers are having to come to terms with, and for the most part it doesn’t take any effort, however you do not want to approve any spam comments, as this provides the spammers with backlinks to their sites, and adds to their value, rather than taking away from it.

Fortunately if you use blogging software like WordPress, there is an excellent plugin called Akismet, which continually adapts to spam, and does manage to catch 99% of the spam comments.   Unfortunately it also on occasion traps genuine comments, and site owners ought to check their spam comment lists regularly to make sure that there are no genuine ones that add value to the blog showing as spam.

How To Identify Spam Comments? 

This is really very easy 99% of the time.  Comments consist of 3 parts – the senders Email Address, Web Page (optional) and Comment.  Spam comments usually have an odd email address, or a web page that is trying to sell something, or the comment does not relate to the article which the comment is left on.   Often the comment is gibberish or is stuffed with keywords, and sometimes it’s huge, containing 50+ links to a spam website.

This month I have noticed a new trend on this blog, and this is undoubtedly a new tactic that the spammers are using to try and get comments approved.

Look at the image below (you can click on it if necessary to see a larger version.

Spam Comments

Spam filters like Akismet often flag comments from addresses that the blog is not familiar with as Pending, until you have approved several of their comments that is, and then following comments from them will be automatically approved.

These comments in the image are ALL SPAM, however Akismet did not identify them as such, and do you know why?   Look at the web sites that they are linking to… Bing, Yahoo… both well rated web sites.

However, look at the comment text, and every single one is full of mis-spellings, probably deliberate, who knows, and they do not relate to the articles.

If you were to approve comments like these, then the next time a comment arrives from that IP Address or Email Address, it will be automatically approved.  Now that is something that none of us want to happen is it!

Some Spam Comments are actually really funny when you read them, and this inspired me to make a collection of the best, and the result is my Funny Spam Comments lens on Squidoo.

Finally, before I allow you to leave… if you are really fed up with Spam and all the scam websites that these comments are promoting, there are ways that you can Fight Back At Spam. 

Their websites only get traffic and trick people into making purchases, for good that are invariably fake, or just never arrive, if the visitor does not realize that they are accessing a dubious site.

There is an Add-On for all the major browsers (including MSIE) called Web Of Trust (or WOT for short), and this shows a Green Circle against any website that is trustworthy, and a Red Circle against those that are not.   If you try to access a dubious site, it presents you with a warning screen, prior to displaying a dubious page, so that visitors can be warned of potential dangers.

What you can do is to (a) Install the WOT plugin yourself, (b) make sure your friends know about it, and if you come across any dubious sites, Rate Them in WOT to let others know.  This information and more can be found at Fight Back At Spam on Squidoo.

I hope this information proved useful, and helps you in the fight against spam.  The one thing I have found from participating in this April Blogging Challenge is that the number of comments that have been trapped by the spam filtering has increased dramatically. 

If it’s been happening on my blog, it’s likely to be happening on yours too.  I hope that you too will take a stand and join in the fight to battle the spammers.  If so, don’t just delete spam comments, rate their web sites down, or if nothing else, make sure that your friends are equipped with tools like Web Of Trust so that they know to not visit spam web sites.