I love gardening and I take great pride in making my garden look inviting and peaceful. I spent a lot of time today planting some new plants in and around the current ones as well as cleaned up a bit and removed some weeds and such that had started invading.
Here are two quick pics I snapped:
Let me know what you think :)
I haven’t really been pushing for the public eye over the past year or so and actually decided to step out of the light, but I was honoured to be included in a report by Michal Wronski of Fuseware on the Top Social Brands in South Africa.
Here’s the list of the top influencers, I do see that my Klout score is listed as 55 when in fact it’s actually 57 as shown below, but nevertheless it’s an honour to be ranked up here amongst some of the best!
[Source]
A week ago I decided to start using Sleep Cycle, I was interested in my sleeping patterns but most importantly I find the application making me feel accountable and am thus going to bed earlier than usual and sleeping more hours, which is the goal.
I’ve taken screenshots of every night for the past week just for interest sakes, you can see them by clicking on the thumbnails below:
Note: The thumbnails are displaying backwards and I can’t reverse them, so it’s showing the most recent screenshot first, so you may want to work backwards.
For a $0.99 app it’s pretty awesome being able to track this information – I’ve certainly seen a difference in my sleeping patterns and I’m getting many more hours of sleep each night. The goal is 8 hours, whether I get to 8 is another story, but I’m aiming for it!
Have you used Sleep Cycle?
It’s not often that I go on about emotional things, but I feel that once a year it’s alright, I hope you agree. I woke up this morning and made my way to my office, I normally check email before doing anything else, but today I saw a note on my cupboard and then a bottle on my desk telling me that I needed to be home this evening. Pretty darn good start to the day I’d say.
Shortly afterwards I arrived at work to a desk covered in balloons, hearts, lollipops and chocolates.. what a surprise! The rest of the staff had a good chuckle as I stood there with a sheepish grin on my face and this set me up for a great day, which involved signing a really great client! Woohooo!
I arrived home on time this evening and was greeted by my gorgeous fiance, looking absolutely stunning as well as a beautiful table setup for dinner. But first, a relaxing bath, rose petals and lovely smelling goodies.
I really had an incredible day, but nothing compared to the time I got to spend with the love of my life.
At the moment I’m taking a bit of strain on the work front, a lot is happening and I’m finding myself in that position where stress levels are high and exhaustion is following closely behind. It’s nothing I can’t manage, just a bit annoying as I’d started the year off really well and seem to be slipping a little – then again, I blame it on February, possibly the worst month ever, it’s like the Tuesday of months!
Friday arrived really quickly and I just didn’t have the energy to venture out, so I pulled a lame one and crashed on the couch mostly. Saturday I was up bright and early, a trip to the Waterfront to get some gifts for Brendon’s birthday, followed by a lovely lunch at Caffeine. Then I tackled a very scary looking inbox! I fell asleep on the couch shortly afterwards whilst watching some rugby and was then up again for Brendon’s party, which took place at Cafe Chic in Vredehoek – really awesome place, I’ll definitely be heading there again. Was a great party!
Today’s been rather relaxed, I got up fairly early and got through some emails and then headed through to my folks for some lunch. After lunch I was back home, watering the garden, working on my bonsai collection and just getting things geared up for the week ahead, which I think is going to be incredibly busy.
So yeh, fairly standard weekend, but an enjoyable one nonetheless.
How was your weekend?
What an exciting surprise, a Nokia Lumia 800 just arrived on my desk, check this puppy out:
I need some time to play with it, but I’ll review it shortly!
I started experimenting with social signals as ranking factors in Search Engines; by social signals I mean the count of mentions a website has on a social network such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Google+ and so forth. I correlated a lot of metrics using a spreadsheet, which was time consuming so I decided to write a script to do it for me. I am 80% complete with the entire script so I’m not going to publish it all, but rather just a taste of what I’m doing.
The code below, when executed on Apache, will crawl Topsy and return the number of times a chosen website has been mentioned on Twitter. This code needs to be run in conjunction with a form that passes a text field with the domain name, so you may have to code that up quickly or later the code to bypass the domain inclusion.
Here’s the code:
$domain_name = $_POST['domain']; echo "Results for " . $domain_name . ": "; // build search queries // cURL contents of queries // Find match on Topsy for Twitter function grab_contents($url){ ?>
$domain_name = strtolower(trim($domain_name));
$topsy_twitter = 'http://topsy.com/s?q='.$domain_name;
$topsy_twitter_contents = grab_contents($topsy_twitter);
if(preg_match('/Search results 1<\/strong>-10<\/strong> out of (.*?) tweets/sim', $topsy_twitter_contents, $regs)){
$indexed_pages = substr($regs[1], 0, stripos($regs[1], " "));
$indexed_pages = strip_tags(str_replace(",","",$indexed_pages));
echo "Twitter Mentions: " . $indexed_pages;
}else{
echo "Twitter Mentions: 0";
}
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $data;
}
As I mentioned, I’ve adapted this to cover an assortment of social networks and am deciding whether I should compile it into an advanced WordPress Social Metrics Plugin.. watch this space.
Ok, well perhaps not my first first as I think we’ve all had a Venus Fly Trap once upon a time, but it’s my first carnivorous plant in many years and I’ve welcomed it into my sanctuary. Don’t worry, I’m still keeping my bonsai collection up to date.
Introducing the Nepenthes Hookeriana X:
The Nepenthes Hookeriana is a pitcher plant, very large intermediate to low land situated plant which is very easy to grow and becomes a monster very quickly, devouring scores of insects weekly – hopefully this will assist with all the darn flies that are around Cape Town at the moment! For those of you who are interested in far more information, you can look on WikiPedia.
If you’d like to buy one, then I suggest you look down at the bottom of my site for the link to Pan’s Carnivores – a fully fledged e-commerce website run by a gentleman in Tokai, Cape Town. He’s a really great guy too, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet him and hope to see him again soon when I buy another plant.
Shout out to Johan for introducing me!
I’ve wanted to redesign iMod for a long time now, in fact, I have a 5 page document outlining the functionality I want, but unfortunately I just don’t have the time and resources for that just yet so I decided to go for something simple instead. I purchased a framework to use and migrated everything across so that I didn’t lose any elements that exist on iMod.
So, the new theme is far cleaner, easier to navigate and basically just easier. The previous theme was rather cluttered, I didn’t respect the heatmaps I was collecting and it just turned into a mess so I’m hoping this one will suffice for the months to come until I have time and resources to roll out the big change.
Here’s to hoping that this cleaner interface will allow for easier reading and engagement.
Have a great weekend everyone!
A rather morbid topic lies below, but a topic that is really important to think about. I read an article entitled Top 5 Regrets of the Dying, and although I normally stay away from such topics, this one conveys a message that I’ve often thought about seriously, not specifically the death part, but more the getting older and looking back at regret as I see this as being an incredibly important thing to be aware of.
I always hear people moaning about their jobs, or wishing they could travel more, or wishing they’d told someone how they felt.. the list goes on and everyone can relate to someone else saying one of these things, but how conscious are you of what you’re saying to people. Let’s look at me for a second; I’m not afraid to admit that I work far too hard and a lot of people tell me that I do, but does that make me stop? No. I then read an article that communicates to us the top 5 regrets people have and I see number 2 on the list points to my exact situation – it’s a wake up call!
Take a read of these 5 reasons and their explanations:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
“This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.”
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
“This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.”
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
“Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.”
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
“Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.”
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
“This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”
When you turn 60 or approach the end of your life, could you see yourself saying one of the 5 things above? Seriously, remove your hands from the keyboard and think about this for a second, read each one carefully, think about your life and if you see yourself relating to one of the 5 reasons then it’s probably time to make changes in your life before it’s too late. You don’t have to the 20 years old to do this, you could be 60 already, there’s always time to change course and try something different that will assist you in approaching those latter years feeling more fulfilled as a person and not harboring a large amount of regret.
I love working, it keeps me motivated, it keeps me passionate and I guess I’m lucky for this, but I do question myself as to whether reason number 2 will hit me.
Are you conscious of the direction your life is going in?
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