Unsolicited

My maid, God bless her, has one standard dialogue every time I am back from my travel. Every.Single.Time. I love her. She has been with me through the tough times. She takes care of me in her own way and treats me like her own daughter. So, what is that one line? “you have become more darker”. Neither of us (she or myself) are fair skinned. I might be a tad fairer than her. But still, we both are wheat colored. It doesn’t matter if I travel to a cold country or a tropical country or just a visit to my hometown for a fortnight. Just getting out of my home makes me look more tanned, according to her. Something in the water, she believes. 

She also had her views about how I am literally wasting away by going to gym. What is there to reduce? You are already thin! You will only look more sickly. That is what she used to say and still does. This was said today morning too. BMI, Visceral Fat, Muscle Mass, Body strength – all those doesn’t matter to her. She is quite lean and strong (doing household work definitely is the best exercise ever). I do like some meat in my bones, but I like being healthier more. If that makes me a little thinner than I was, then so be it. I am happy as long as I am healthy and am able to maintain it.

I usually hear it only from her. But this time after my latest trip and back, my brother who was on his regular business visit to Bangalore also commented on how much thinner I have become and I shouldn’t reduce more. 🙄 I  had to explain him about the BMI, Fat etc… to make him not say anything more. I don’t think he was convinced but at least that 10 min explanation stopped him from saying anything further. Yesterday when I had been to office (after quite a while actually) I saw this colleague of mine and she looked me up and down and said, you look different. The look on her face was that of disappointment more than surprise. I told her that I had been working out and could be the result of that. She replied not just that… you look more tanned…why are you getting more tanned when you are already darker??? As if I am going to tanning salons for that purpose. I told her, it’s just the water. Obviously she didn’t get that inside joke.

When I was slightly obese, no one knew because of my extremely shapeless clothes. Now that my clothes size has reduced too, I get the odd comment from people that I have become thinner. I am yet to hear from someone that I have become fitter. I know I won’t be hearing that any time soon. But I am surprised at the tanning comment. I hardly wear any sunscreen when I go out, irrespective of the place or heat. I am used to the heat and sweat over here. So I usually don’t use any sunscreen (that is an additional accessory to carry too… urgh!) How can they tell the difference between dark skin and delta-dark skin (delta here means a very minute difference). I wonder what else is in store for me after my next travel or may be another month of gym.

Wondering about those likes ?

Most of you who follow OM and/or Linda might know what happened with the recent changes in the ToS of WordPress and the result of the recent automatic limitations on the follows and comments. In lieu with that, here are a few more things I found out and didn’t actually bother about it much. But then thought that it might help someone understand.

a) The Weekly Photography Challenge hosted by the DailyPost of WordPress garners almost thousands of entries. So if you really spend an hour or two going through them and liking the photographs, you might fail to notice that after your 100 or 108 th like of a post(I don’t have the exact count, but it was definitely between these two when I counted last) the rest of your likes don’t get registered. That means for a day you have a limit on the number of posts you like. I did notice this a couple of weeks ago , because I spend my Sunday’s mostly checking the results of the WPC. So make sure you don’t go beyond 100 likes in a day.
b) You might also wonder sometimes how a blogger you were following suddenly has gone MIA and figure out that the blogger was there all along, it was just you who unfollowed the blogger, when in reality you haven’t. I haven’t figured out how or why this happens, but it did happen to me thrice and this isn’t a new thing. This issue has been there since last year. That is why I have started to add a couple of them in Bloglovin’ to have a record of the bloggers I really like and would like to follow so as to not miss them, even though I do check Bloglovin’ only a couple of days a week.
c) WP Reader has a Bloglovin’ kind of interface to categorize and follow blogs. They are called Lists. You can create as many lists and then add only those blogs you want to follow in that category. One disadvantage here is that this doesn’t actually do a ‘follow’ of the blog perse. At least I tried adding mine and did not get any notifications about a follow.

d) With the recent changes to the Notifications, even though they look good and all, some comments have gone missing from the notification list. I had to make sure to check my email or the Comments section to figure them out. The Comments section of the Dashboard is always the one source of truth for the comments. And while you are there, make sure to check for non-spam comments in the Spam section too. I had times when the comments get wrongly marked as spam from people who do comment from time to time and for no reason and I end up finding their comments much later.

That is all I have for now and will update it as and when I find some more.

There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship. – Bertrand Russell

A Yearly Round Up

A round up of this year’s activities in my blog, because I did a lot than the previous year and I am really glad about it. In fact there are a few more friends of mine who know about this blog than last year and for me that isn’t a small thing. I still don’t want it to be known to my colleagues though. I am still not comfortable revealing my real name, which I sometimes feel that I should do, but I haven’t reached there yet. I am still content with my mask on and the real me is more boring than the virtual me.

So here we go.

I started participating in Steve’s Music Mix / Cosmic Musicology as it is called now, from Feb 03, 2014. Here is my first post. Since then I am a regular for that game. I listen to enough music to play and to use the songs as answers. Just check it out. Its real fun and you are most welcome to join. Thanks Steve for that brilliant idea and I am really sorry I still couldn’t get some good questions for that game.

Started participating in the Stream of Consciousness Saturday post, hosted by Linda, from Mar, 1, 2014 and have continued since then, because it is pure fun and its interesting to see how different people interpret the same prompt and also how people from different parts of the world think and post alike for a given prompt. I am no writer, but am glad to take part in this prompt. Thanks Linda for this wonderful idea and hope to have the same fun in 2015 too. She is also starting a Just Jot It January, if anyone is interested. I am planning to take part, but am not very sure.

Did two mini series this year on my own, just for the heck of it 🙂 One was about the way I got introduced to various genres of the books (which still needs a lot to be covered, but then didn’t want it to be too long a series) and was named Portable Magic and the other one was about my love for beaches and about the various beaches I have been to and my jog through the memory lane which was called Sandy Toes and Salty Kisses.

I did cross 1000 followers this year, Yay!!! and started following some awesome bloggers too. I follow some on Bloglovin’ too. As usual the top 5 posts are related to the Weekly Photography Challenge but this year, the ‘Minimalist‘ Photographs I posted, scored me a lot of comments. I was very happy to see that my favorite photograph was appreciated by all. ‘Baralikadu‘ still seems to be the top search term in my blog (guess no one else wrote about that small quaint eco tourism place) which is followed if not closely by ‘beer shampoo‘ (urgh, I still feel the smell of it) and Chotta Bheem (I ain’t fond of him and his group, even now)

So that is it. I am sure I might have missed a few details here and there, but these are the big ones. Its been an awesome and fun year with respect to blogging and wish the same for 2015 too.

 

Pingbacks – An Update

I did rant a bit on my blog when things weren’t working. So it is only fair that I update it now that it is fixed.

So yeah, pingbacks did start working for me since Saturday morning. Yay!!! For some reason, when I did post my WPC challenge post on Friday night, the pingback failed to show up in the Daily Post (DP) page. So I went back to this forum topic and updated the same. One staff from WP (I did get her name wrong in that topic. Very bad of me, but in my defense I was sleep deprived and was woken up by a bad dream just a few minutes ago and couldn’t get back to sleep) helped me check it out. So I tried it on my other blog post and in the second try (because I made my first post private) it appeared in the DP page. Hurray!!! So I went back and updated my WPC entry with the proper https link for the DP page. Nope, nada, zilch. No pingback. Didn’t work. I was super pissed about it. Then because I am used to debugging these kind of stuff at work, I went and compared the settings in both the blogs. And found one section which was unchecked in this blog which was checked in the other one from where the ping back worked. So I checked that option and to be sure, submitted one more entry and Hurray!! got the pingback from this blog for the new post too on the DP page. But as Software Engineer, we don’t rely on one or two successful runs. We need to monitor it for a while to see it passes all scenarios. So I had one more to check. I did write my SoCS post and then as usual linked it to Linda’s post waiting for it to be published and see if the pingback to my other post and to Linda’s worked or not. Just to make sure that it isn’t only the WP’s blog its working (make sure to cover all the usecases here). And it did work and I didn’t have to manually make an entry.

In case your pingbacks are still giving trouble, here is one setting which I think might help you. You can find it in ‘Setting’s at tail end of the left hand side ‘of ‘MySites’ section of your new UI of WP. 

Make sure you have checked both these options and then try it with a new post. For me updating an old post after this change, didn’t show any effect, but honestly, I didn’t spend much time to test it elaborately. Hope all of you, who had pingback issues, got it working now. If not, please update that forum topic so that the WP staff can check it out.

Happy Blogging to all.

No pinging back

Pingbacks – sounds like a simple thing doesn’t ? Just copy paste a URL of any WordPress site in your post either as a link or a text and you should be able to see your post having that link in the original post. But seems like mine hasn’t been working lately. I didn’t even notice it until I posted the Friday’s Weekly Photography Challenge response post and it didn’t show up in the comments or the article section of the Daily Post website. On checking further it seems like the previous week’s entry is also missing (I was wondering about it when I had very less visits because those are the ones that garner more attention in my blog). Not only there, even the entry to Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt went missing, when I never had a problem getting it listed in her site. I checked with a WordPress staff and they said they will check it out. But I am not sure how and when it is going to be fixed 😦 because there seems to be so many people facing the same issue.