Notice something different around here lately? This blog recently underwent a change: the name went from Beginning (beginning.anitawirawan.com) to Anita’s Notebook (anitasnotebook.com).

Beginning.anitawirawan.com was fine when there weren’t that many people reading the blog but as more and more people came by it became increasingly obvious that a change was needed to keep things comfortable for everyone.

Not only was the url long and complicated it was just plain hard for people to remember. People who were wanting to do something as simple as checking to see what was posted here that week were having a hard time remembering what url to go to and/or how to spell anitawirawan (and who could blame them lol).

Even the name Beginning was a problem, seeming to slip people’s minds easily and in many cases when talking about this blog people just resorted to calling it things like The Anita Blog :D.


AT THE BEGINNING

So where did the name Beginning even come from? I had first started this blog in 2008 sort of out of desperation to try and get things together after my brother Jody died, to somehow wake up my mind from the shock of it all by doing some writing. The name Beginning was perfect for that time because I was starting at square one in many aspects of my life and had to re-learn how to do a lot of basic things that we all usually just take for granted.

But over the years this blog has evolved and now the name just doesn’t fit because, well, thankfully I’m not at the beginning anymore. I wanted to change the name and url to something that would be easy to remember yet reflected the core of what this blog is about, the love of interesting stories.

I racked my brain trying to think of something that would be good and came up with a few ideas, but nothing seemed to fit quite right. Then one night as Jennifer and I were chatting like we usually do as we drift off to sleep we got into a conversation about how it was really starting to bother me that I couldn’t think of a new name for the blog.

We started to brainstorm possible names on the off chance that something would turn up. And anyway it was a lot of fun. We rattled off possible blog names one after the other, some were ok and some just plain off the wall causing us to go into uncontrollable fits of giggling. After a little while of throwing random stuff out there I suddenly said ‘Notebook something …something notebook …um Anita’s Notebook?’


NOTEBOOK SNIPPETS

Jennifer froze for a sec and then said ‘I really like that!’. She felt very positively about it and thought it was a perfect name because my blog is based a lot on a little Moleskine notebook that I carry in my pocket with me everywhere. I love stories (have you noticed lol) and use this book to jot down snippets of all sorts of interesting or unusual ones that I come across during the day.

A couple snippets from my notebook:



This is the story that originally inspired me to start writing hint memoirs almost a year ago. I decided to challenge myself to write one hint memoir a day for a year.


Some quickly written notes on stories that happened one day while Jennifer and I were travelling, there was no need to write the whole story down because I knew I’d remember them all once I saw the notes (especially Bluetooth Escalade guy who was too busy concentrating on being a douche to notice he hadn’t taken the gas pump out of the car before driving off).

COMFY

The more I thought about it the more I realized that yes it was the perfect name for the blog (I only had one reservation about it, how would I refer to the blog when talking about it myself? As in it would be really odd to refer to myself in third person all the time).

It wasn’t long before we were both wide awake and had broken out a laptop to buy the domain name. It was obvious that neither of us would be able to sleep until the url was bought and I figured that was a good sign. Either that or we’d wake up the next morning and be the not-so proud owners of a random domain name chosen hastily while dozing off lol.

Turns out that we liked it even more the next day :).

The process of switching over the entire blog to the new url was a tad bit more difficult of a process than brainstorming for the actual name itself, but once everything was done it felt really good and much more comfortable.

Anyway I hope that you like the new name and that the url will make things easier. Already I’ve noticed a lot more people coming in on the direct url instead of having to search Google for some weird combination of terms just to get back here again. This is the start of many improvements to come, which as mentioned in the comfy couches post aim to make this a nicer home for people who love stories. And of course as always if you have any requests feel free to email me.

Hey everyone! I know I haven’t put up a new blog post here in a few weeks but I’m back now ;).

I decided to take a short sabbatical from posting because I felt like I wasn’t doing a good enough job with this blog and needed to step back to get some perspective on things.

I really do love stories…really really love them lol and I intended for this blog to be an environment where people who love stories can feel cozy and right at home. But I wasn’t achieving that in the way I had hoped and it started to really bother me.

In a lot of ways I felt that the blog was like a house without any really comfy furniture. Sure there might be interesting stories and conversations starting up but it’s hard to hang out for long in a place without any comfy couches, just sayin.

After taking some time off I know what I need to do now though and will be making these adjustments over the next month. Things will be kicking off soon with something simple but super important: an easier to remember url to get here. The Beginning url was right for the start of this blog back in 2008 but I know that these days it’s become a pain for a lot of people who are just trying to come by and see the latest posts.

Anyway, I think you’ll be really happy with all the new stuff coming up and will feel right at home :).

Thanks,
Anita

p.s. Do you have requests? Feel free to let me know about them.

They met over rainbow ice cream and parted after the checkout lane, but the connection lasted forever.

This hint memoir was made by request as a welcome back for Jillybean. Glad you made it back safe Jillybean :).

 

What is a hint memoir?

More hint memoirs.

Feel free to post your own hint memoirs in the comments too if you want I’d love to read em :).
 

 

A while back my BBPress powered message board was having a major problem, every time a certain thread flipped over to a new page there were major delays in the new page and posts showing up.


CONVERSATION KILLER

If you manually entered the url of the new page and went there you could see the page and posts right away, but otherwise it took forever for things to show up.

And as time went on the delays got worse and worse until things came to a grinding halt and none of the new posts and pages were showing up at all. I could see the posts in my admin panel but try as I might I just couldn’t get the new posts to show up.

As you can imagine this was pretty alarming to me. The users of my message board were very nice and patient about it but I knew I had to get the problem solved fast or it would kill the flow of conversation in the community there.

I combed the BBPress help forums and some other related help forums but still couldn’t find anything that fixed the posting freeze on my particular board. In desperation I started to try random things and crossed my fingers that I wouldn’t wreck the site somehow lol. Finally I came across the answer…


+1 MORE

When I was signed in as an admin at the top of the thread there was a number of posts count that said (1945 posts +1 more). It was that ‘+1 more’ that ended up being the source of my troubles.

A long time ago I had a second thought about one of my posts, hit the delete link, and then thought nothing more about it. BBPress then made a +1 for it.

I didn’t know it then but BBPress never really deletes posts. If you hit ‘delete post’ it’s still there, just hidden and is added to the ‘+’ count at the top.


[EDITED ON SECOND THOUGHT]

So fast forward to me desperately attempting anything in hopes of fixing the pagination problem…I clicked on the +1 link and scrolled through the pages of the thread until I came across the ‘deleted’ post, which was now highlighted because I’d hit the +1 link.

By this time I’d figured out that no you can’t ever really delete a post from BBPress. I edited the post to say ‘[edited on second thought]‘ and then undeleted it.

Halleluijah, this fixed the pagination problem that was causing me so much worry. I’m posting this in hopes that it will help others out there who are having the same problem. Let me know if you have any questions about how I went about this, I can try and explain any details you might need.

[edit: I just had the pagination problem again (it's several months later). I was pretty frustrated because I'd taken care not to have any deleted posts hanging around but here was the problem yet again and I wasn't exactly thrilled at the prospect of trying to figure out yet another way to fix this annoying problem.

However my lovely wife stepped in and found what seems to be the only other solution at the moment which is to delete a random post and then undelete it. Apparently BBpress has a flaw in it that once a post is deleted on a particular thread it will periodically get confused as to the numeration of posts.

Looks like I'll have to delete and undelete every so often to keep things running smoothly on this thread...well at least it's an easy fix.]

Dear anonymous tipster,

This does not apply to the one who put in ‘none’.

Your email address was wrong, please resend the message.

Thanks,
Anita

So sorry that I’ve only been feeding you a sparse diet of hint memoirs again. I got kind of caught up with the Sir Patrick thing, but I promise a more rounded diet soon!

Love,
Anita

Lol I promise that this isn’t a hint memoir 24/7 blog.

I challenged myself to write a hint memoir everyday for the next year so that’s why you’re seeing so many being posted. But they are supposed to exist within the larger ecosystem of stories in this blog, not make up the bulk of the content.

So what’s up then? I’ve been working on a pretty time consuming project and so haven’t been able to write anything more than a few sentences here for the last couple weeks. But I’m almost done and really am looking forward to getting some new posts out there. I got so many ideas queued up it’s crazy!

Thanks for reading this :)
Anita

The Julian Assange (from Wikileaks) Quotes page got linked to by @wikileaks yesterday. I have major respect for them so it was a very cool thing to see!

So the story behind the whole quotes page thing is:

While watching videos of talks by Julian Assange on YouTube I realized that some really enlightening things were being said and decided to type them up. The quotes gave some insight into the ideas of Wikileaks and also showed many of the deep revelations that leaked documents have provided.

I put them all into a quote generator because I’ve found that’s an effective way to revisit important info over time…then made the more static quotes page and txt download to go along with it.

Didn’t think many would stop by or be into either page much (but thought it would be a shame not to post it anyway)…so yeah was very surprised yesterday. Happily surprised.

The quotes pages are ongoing projects so more quotes will be added regularly. If you want to find out more about Julian Assange or about what Wikileaks is doing see Wikileaks.
 

The format is ‘short description + large pic’, mostly because I’m usually still reading/watching/listening to whatever’s listed at the time. I’m also setting up these posts in their own mini blog at the Reading – Watching – Listening To page.
 

 The Groove Sessions – Chinese Man  

Nice music to kick back and write some blogs to :D.

 Navy Seals BUDS Class 234  

Awesome series about SEAL BUD/s training. Looks to me to be less about training and more about the weeding out of those who don’t have the drive and endurance that they’re looking for. Very awesome and inspiring stuff.

 Crush It!  

If I would have seen this book in a book store I would have quickly passed it by since the cover looks…well…scammy to me. Yeah, I’m so not looking to read an infomercial. Just sayin.

Luckily I’d come across some of Gary Vaynerchuk’s videos online which eventually got me interested in this book. It talks (from a business perspective) about something I’m totally fascinated by right now: how the internet is restructuring the physical world. Rip off the cover and read the book or better yet just listen to the audiobook like I did.

 

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Reading – Watching – Listening To Archives