Ennovy.org

Yesterday I went to the pMachine site and got a huge shock – not only a fantastic new design, but a new name, as well! pMachine has now become EllisLab.

I just stared at the screen in awe for a good minute or so before reading the news.

The pMachine EllisLab, ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter and EngineHosting (formerly pMachineHosting) sites have all been redesigned by Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain of 31Three, and they are all running on the same installation of ExpressionEngine. It looks like the members list for CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine have been merged, and the forums for each of them too. There’s going to be an article from Jesse at the Digital Web Magazine about how he designed these sites.

Congrats to everyone at EllisLab for the wonderful job. I’m so excited to see the new stuff that they’re going to be coming up with next!

My worries about running out of bandwidth last month came true – I ran out of bandwidth on February 26, and my site was down for 3 days.

Here’s a graph:

This first few days of March have been quite cold. There was a snow storm on Thursday, with freezing rain in the evening. We ended up getting the afternoon off at work to avoid the bad weather/traffic. On Friday, there were quite a few areas without power, but luckily my house and my workplace had power. Friday afternoon, it snowed heavily much like the previous day, and we got the afternoon off again. Except the snow stopped in about half an hour, so there wasn’t really any need to leave early. I’m really looking forward to spring/summer!

It’s not even the middle of February yet, and I’m at 79% of my bandwidth limit. This is a first.

I’ve closed off comments on older entries, and trackbacks too, hopefully that will slow down all of the spam attempts. I’ll also edit my robots.txt file and stop bots from crawling my site.

If I go over my bandwidth limit, it costs $0.50 US per gigabyte to keep the site up, and even though that’s not bad, I don’t want to have to pay that. So if my site looks like it’s being suspended later this month, you’ll know what happened.

I got this lovely smelling package in the mail today – my order from Lush! It’s the first time I’ve ordered online from them. Here’s a picture of the package contents:

You are looking at (going clockwise from the top left) the Blossom and Olive Grove gift sets, a huge tub of Mask of Magnaminty, Helping Hands, Glam Rock Hair Glitter, Happy Soap and Alkmaar soap.

The two gift sets were free using a coupon, and then I got the Happy Soap and hair glitter as free samples.

It’s so exciting! I can’t wait to use all of these. I feel as if I should save the gift sets to give to other people, but on the other hand I want to rip open that gorgeous packaging and squee at all of the stuff inside.

You can view other people’s stashes (much bigger than mine) at the Lush LJ community.

More Lush Talk

The labelling is different. If you go to the retail store, all of the labels have the product name in English and French, the ones I got today are in English only.

Prices have risen recently – here’s a list of items that didn’t change.

I found out just now while looking up all of the above links that one of my favourite soaps from Lush, 17 Cherry Tree Lane, has been discontinued. That really sucks. I’m using a bar of it right now and I’m going to put it away to keep it as long as possible.

I’ve mentioned Lush on my blog before, and still haven’t used that massage bar I got yet.

I have several people on my MSN contacts list who continually send email forwards to my Hotmail account. They are almost always forwards sent to him/her by someone, and someone else forwarded it to them, and so on.

Here’s a screenshot of all the popup windows I had to open to view the original attachment:

Crazy huh?

Oh, and I like Windows Live Mail. It’s quite fast and I noticed that they give out 2GB of space.

Bandwidth in November/Dec 06

( More Screenshots )

In a previous post I mentioned coming up with words ending in “se” for use in registering Swedish domain names (as they end in .se). It turns out there is a site – More Words – that does just that – it lists words ending in certain letters. According to the More Words, it is a “crossword puzzle solver, anagram lister, codeword decoder, and a helper for other word games”.

So, I could use it for finding neat top level domain names like .us (United States), .ge (Georgia), .la (Los Angeles), .aw (Aruba), .my (Malaysia), .be (Belgium), .co (Columbia), .gs (South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands) and so on. It’s fun!

• Terrify :: Monsters
• Month :: December
• Throat :: Sore
• Invasion :: Aliens
• Nail :: Tooth
• 12 :: days of Christmas
• Bicker :: Spoiled
• Thomas :: the Tank Engine
• Sibling :: Brother
• Delude :: Pour

(from Unconscious Mutterings)

Since I made a post about decorating my desktop, I thought I’d make another one for decorating a website.

If you want to spruce up your site for the holidays, here are some links:

• Seasonal Elf and Santa Smilies from Connie at Schildieproductions. Also, check out the Santa smilies and the Winter and Christmas Smilies.
• Christmas Holiday Icons from N. Design Studio.
• Falling Snow effect using javascript from Dynamic Drive.
• Create some Christmas graphics by following the Christmas Photoshop Tutorials.
• Add a realistic-looking Santa hat to your photos.

The Tinseltown theme by TwisterMC for Firefox is adorable! It’s really detailed and puts me in a festive mood.

On my desktop I’ve got a snow man background and in my dock I’ve replaced all of the icons with holiday ones.

For more downloads, check out the 12 Days of Holiday Downloads post and the Holiday Cocoa Duel.

Happy Holidays, everyone!