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Visiting mom, hospital and Sims rants

Posted on Thursday, Jul 24 2008 at 1:42 pm (529) by Rosie in Family, Personal, Photography, SNW, Spore, The Sims (2)

This isn’t going to be one of those average blog posts I have. Well, perhaps it is, a little. But I will be ranting a lot - beware of the work-at-home-mommy.

This weekend my mom is coming over again. During my pregnancy, we had to find ourselves a place to live *really* fast. This was not an easy task. It actually was horrible. Luckily we found something through ChEeTaH’s family. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had an apartment by the time Seth was born. But we did. And we’re happy here.
Thing is, that we kind of had to move away from my family. I know in foreign countries they think we all live next door to each other, because The Netherlands is so small. Well, I still have to travel two full hours to get to my mom. I don’t like taking the train with a baby. And buses here are horrible. We do not have a car. Yes, there are people without cars on this planet. We don’t have that kind of money. Anyway. It’s not an easy task to visit my family. To be honest, the last time I visited my mom was in the summer of 2007, when I was still pregnant and lived in a city near her.
My mom has been visiting me ever since I moved here. She doesn’t exactly have a lot of money herself. So she can only drop by once a month, at most. So my mom is visiting this weekend, just a day. We’ll cook dinner together. She’ll help me sew some curtains (well I already have the curtains hanging on Seth’s room, but they’re too long). We’ll walk a little outside with Seth, near the Meuse and if she can, she’ll also go to IKEA for me to get some things I couldn’t buy last time. It’s something I’m looking forward to. Ever since I gave birth to Seth (which has been 9 months now!) I’ve only seen 4 of my own family members; my mom, two cousins and an aunt. My mom and one of my cousins come visit me frequently. But the rest of my family members have either just send a card (in which they stated that they planned a visit for Seth’s birth), or nothing at all.
I’m just glad my mom visits as often as she can. I’d like to see her more often though. However we can’t move back there (too much of a hassle, no money, no transportation etc and we kind of like it here). And she can’t come and live closer to us, for the same reasons. Of course there’s Internet. But I guess it’s pretty normal that any proud grandma would like to see her (grand)children often.

I also visited the hospital today. And I don’t have any news. Except for the fact that the internist kind of made me come over for nothing. A phone call would have been good enough. The blood tests, urine tests and x-ray photos all showed nothing to worry about. And now I just have to start eating healthy (I am already eating healthy!) because I can’t stay on these medicines forever. I know that too - but that’s not a solution. I’m on my own again. I try my very best at becoming a more healthier person. But there isn’t really anyone helping me. The fact that I have (severe) constipation problems is something doctors need to take a good look at. It seems I’m all alone again. What’s wrong with the health care in this country? I pay a *HUGE* amount of money every month, but for what? I’ve had it with the doctors. I’m even too tired to rant about it.

Remember the blog post I did a few days ago about the new SNWeblogs themes? Well in the beginning I had the feeling it had been a waste of time. As it turns out, some of my team members are gone and I don’t know anything about their whereabouts. I know from certain people what they are doing, because they informed me (and the rest of our team) in our team forums. Apparently not everyone thinks it’s a good idea to do so. I am going to clean out our team very soon. If any of you read this, consider yourself warned. If you know you’ve been neglecting the whole team, including me, but especially the site, I won’t put up with this any longer. I’m pretty sick of this. I can’t do everything alone. Yet all my team members seem to have vanished. I’m not complaining about those that have informed me. But I am pissed at those that have been gone for months and have done zilch on the sites.

The whole team matter brings me to this following subject: relaxing, having fun, playing some games, perhaps even some Sims. While everyone is having fun with their personal life, their online life and their gaming life, I haven’t been enjoying anything lately. I still do enjoy creating websites. However, I wake up in the morning, start working right away until somewhere after midnight, get a few hours of sleep and start again. This is starting to break me. I can’t keep this up. I love the work, but I’d like to have some fun sometimes as well! I have fansites to bring people interesting news, forums and downloads. But what’s in it for me? I haven’t played a game for months now, except a few creatures made in the Creature Creator. I have decided I am going to play Sims very soon.

But I’m a nutcase. I want to have new recolors. So I’m making a few hundred (real amount: somewhere around 1000 recolors+walls/floors) first. I’ve done most of it already. But I can’t play without these items I’ve had in my mind for a while now. There are some things my son has in real life and I want to make those for my Sims as well - just an example. I made 600+ walls recently and I am going to use those pretty soon!

Not today though. We’re being picked up in a few hours for dinner at family. I’m guessing I won’t be back before late in the evening - maybe even night time. And since I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night - 2 hours to be precise - I’m guessing I will collapse once I get inside the apartment again.

One final rant, DeviantArt and any other online photo/art service. I’ve uploaded a few nice shots of Seth the other day, as well as some websites to show on the portfolio. Not a single soul responded on the items. This is exactly why I think I can do just fine without those lame online photo services. No one replies anyway. And if you reply on their items (multiple items!) you get maybe one or two comments back.

Original black and white photograph:
Seth Black & White

Edited version - High contrast:
Seth High Contrast

Another edited version - Soft Tone:
Seth Soft Tone

New SNWeblogs

Posted on Wednesday, Jul 23 2008 at 2:59 am (082) by Rosie in SNW

Just a quick note to tell you all that Jean and DeKDeS joined our teams. Jean joined our Sims websites as a team member and will be working on the forums. DeKDeS will be helping me out on the Spore websites, as will Hexer. You may already know Hexer from SNW, he has been working on SNW (SimsNetwork) for quite a few years now.

Now, Hexer already joined the SNWeblogs a while ago. However Jean and DeKDeS are new bloggers! Jean can be found here and DeKDeS might use this address every so often :)

Now the bigger news (don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that we have new team members, but I’m short on time and this is my portfolio, so I should focus more on portfolio stuff). I made a fancy template/theme for the SNWeblogs! I promised this a while ago, here it is!

It’s widget friendly. It’s valid XHTML Strict, valid CSS 2.1 and valid CSS 3. Oh and it matches the current SNW too of course. I will be making another one (for Spore) sometime soon. But for now this will have to do.

New SNWeblogs theme!

You can view this theme in action on most of the SNWeblog sites. I suggest you view this theme on Paul’s SNWeblog though. He has a fair amount of posts and some extra widgets as well, that way you can see what the theme is capable of!

I added this item to my portfolio of this year.

SporeMasters

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 22 2008 at 11:59 pm (958) by Rosie in EA, Games, Maxis, SNW, Spore

I was recently asked by Maxis to become a SporeMaster on the official Spore website. I decided to do it, however I know I won’t be able to work there 24/7. I will try my best of course. You won’t see me uploading many (if any) creatures on my SporeMasterRosana account though. I’d like to keep those on my “normal” Spore account (Rosana).

I’m not the only one who was asked to become a SporeMaster (that would be weird). I have a lot of company there! See here all the new SporeMasters in alphabetic order:

I’m looking forward to work with each and every one of these people!

The members on my own Spore sites won’t have to worry me being gone too much and not doing anything for SporeNetwork anymore. I’m currently developing a whole new system for our Spore sites. Don’t worry! But be patient, because I still have a lot of work to do.

Headaches, Spore, Gallery and then some more

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 15 2008 at 10:29 pm (895) by Rosie in General

I know it has been ages since I blogged. It’s not that I didn’t want to. I love blogging. But I’ve been very sick (headaches, I will tell you more about that in this post, continue reading). And I’ve been busy when I was not sick.

I’ve been having major headaches for months now. Ever since January 2008 or so, I’ve been having these awful headaches. I went to see my doctor and he just told me “it’s stress”. Well, yeah, whoopie. But that doesn’t help me one bit. Now he basically says, I can’t change anything. If the pain killers won’t help, you’re on your own. Great.
I’ve read an article about headaches in our news paper a while ago. After that I began to do some research. And as it turns out, my headaches are a lot like cluster headaches. If you do not know what kind of headache this is, please read the article on Wikipedia. And here is a website specialized in cluster headaches as well. I will go and see my doctor again soon, and I will discuss this. If he won’t do anything about it (I want him to send me to a specialist), then I will go and find another doctor who will.

This week I have visited the hospital for some physical (blood and urine) exams and an x-ray photo. I will get the test results tomorrow. I’m pretty nervous. Anyone who knows me a little, knows why I have visited the hospital. I don’t feel like talking about it right here, right now. So I just won’t.

Spore’s Creature Creator has been released for a month now (well, in two days anyway). I have made a ton of creatures. And I will offer more creatures on Sporepedia. But I am still finishing the new website. It’s almost finished, however it’s not quite done yet. It will launch soon. That’s all I will say.

There are a few “secret” projects I am working on, projects for “me”. With that I just mean it’s non-profit, and not for anyone else. Just a website by me, for me. I can’t spill the beans just yet. But one of these new projects will be a very happy project. Expect to hear more in early fall 2008.

Because of the headaches (and many other physical disabilities) I haven’t gotten many chances to work on existing websites, including SNW and some others. I am however busy on Fast Finger’s website. That one is almost done.
I have two (but possibly three) other new clients who asked for my help with their new websites. And I will be focusing on those for the next couple of weeks. I’m hoping to finish all these new websites before August. Because I planned to work on the new SNW during this entire summer. Until now, I haven’t gotten one chance to do so.

I am also happy to announce that my new gallery is almost ready to go live. I’m still finishing up a few minor design things in the css. The problem again is not that it’s difficult, it’s not difficult at all. It’s mainly the lack of time and just me being sick. I decided to use Gallery2 instead of any other (paid) online service. Here are some reasons I decided to start using Gallery(2) again!

  • I don’t like having my pictures elsewhere. If some website or service decided to change their TOS or whatever rules they apply on the content uploaded on their website, I may lose my rights on my own content. They may even abuse their own TOS’s in such a way that they are free to use the content I upload for their own purposes (like advertising, or whatever). I just don’t like that. When I host my own photos, my own rules (and rights) apply and no one can take those away.
  • I don’t want to pay an (annual) amount of money to be able to upload as many photos as I want
  • I like to customize and style my gallery. Many online services do not have this option at all. That’s fine, but I want something that fits my websites.
  • I want to be able to customize each “set”, “group”, “folder” or separate page on my gallery.
  • I don’t get a lot of feedback on my pictures on websites anyway. So it doesn’t really matter which website I choose for my pictures. The amount of comments is in general very low (most of the times I don’t get a comment at all). There is one website where I can get comments on my pictures (MyShutterSpace) and it’s a nice website. But those are mainly real photographers. They don’t want to see a whole bunch of family pics for example. And I don’t want to bother them.
  • There is just one website who offers to have a watermark placed on your uploaded pictures, and that is DeviantArt. But it’s a DeviantArt watermark. And I want to add different kinds of watermarks on different kinds of pictures.
  • I want to be able to disable my gallery with one click. With disable I really mean just put it offline for maintenance in a second. None of the websites I know can do this. You can delete everything, sure. But no gallery is capable of disabling something for a while.
  • I don’t want an upload limit for the amount of pictures, not daily, not monthly, not annual.
  • I don’t want an upload limit for the amount of space.
  • I don’t want a bandwidth limit.
  • I don’t want a limit to the amount of sets/folders/pages/groups I have.
  • I don’t want anyone to tell me I cannot upload something because it violates the TOS is any way. I don’t think I ever will. But I don’t want to worry about that either.
  • I don’t want to sign up on a website using another name than Rosiewosie, Rosie, Rosana or SNW. If it’s unavailable, I don’t want to become a member.
  • I want to be able to use (java/php) scripts on my gallery
  • I don’t want to rely on another host or service for my websites (including my gallery). If I host my own gallery, I won’t have that problem. If the site would go down, it’s my own problem. But at least I would have the means to solve that problem.
  • I want a gallery with RSS feeds.
  • I want something to show off on my portfolio.
  • I want to use my own favicon.

I’d say those are plenty of reasons I should get my own gallery. I won’t leave the websites I joined in the past. But when I’m done uploading most of my pictures (or an acceptable amount of them) I will remove some old ones from the other websites (Flickr, DeviantArt, MyShutterSpace, Facebook etc).

I’m also considering to start creating new (custom) templates for Gallery2. I am not one to say that the existing ones are ugly. But they certainly were not something I wanted to use for my own gallery. I can imagine the lack of nice templates for Gallery2 is a reason for some people not to setup their own gallery. You should though, it’s awesome software!

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I disabled my extended Twitter script for now, because of the problems Twitter is having with their stability. Or the lack thereof, whichever you prefer.
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