Rosie Lou’s Neighborhood

Well, the last order dates for the holidays have passed, and Santa's final sacks of festive MOOs are filling up fast. We're still taking new orders though, and we'll be shipping them out as fast as we can - so don't hesitate to order thank you cards for all your lovely pressies!

Just so you know, here's our warehouse and customer service closure dates over the holiday season.

Thursday 24th December - LIMITED HOURS: we'll be shipping orders in the morning, but going home in the afternoon to wrap presents.
Friday 25th December - CLOSED : we'll be at home feasting on mince pies and turkey.
Monday 28th December - UK CLOSED: we'll be buying new trousers to fit our expanded waistlines!! (please note this is a UK Holiday only).
Tuesday 29th December - OPEN: business as usual.
Wednesday 30th December - OPEN: business as usual.
Thursday 31st December - OPEN: business as usual.
Friday 1st January - CLOSED : we'll be trying out our New Year resolutions and nursing hangovers.
Monday 4th January - OPEN: that's it, holidays over, back to work!

It's also important to note that our StickerBook turnaround in the UK is severely delayed over the holidays. Any orders placed after the 20th December will not be dispatched until the week of the 4th January.

That's all for now - Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the MOO Warehouse Crew!

What would it take to get you to start a new life on a new world?
Sponsored by AVATAR. In theaters December 18. Buy tickets now.

 Nothing short of a catastrophic natural or political disaster. The vast majority of my ancestors were not explorers; they were refugees, in a sense. They fled poverty, hunger, and religious persecution. I couldn't leave my home for anything less than that, either.

What's the worst book you've ever read?

If a book is really, really crappy I will put it down. Crappy as in bad prose and a boring plot. So "worst" to me means books that I have read all the way through and still hated. Wuthering Heights is definitely up there. I hated all the characters. I mean, really loathed them. I wanted them all to die horrible deaths. Heart of Darkness gets the prize for most boring book. It wasn't very long, but good heavens was it tedious.

If you could hang out with any movie character for a day, whom would you choose as your sidekick?
Sponsored by The Official AVATAR Community on TypePad. See AVATAR in theaters December 18, 2009.

Listen, "Avatar Community", if I get to hang out with any movie character I choose, I'm gonna pick a leading man, not a sidekick. Let's be real.

If I had to pick a sidekick specifically, you can't go wrong with a wizard, elf, Dunedin, or a stouthearted hobbit, could you?

What’s your favorite movie quote of all time?
Sponsored by The Official AVATAR Community on TypePad. See AVATAR in theaters December 18, 2009.

Perhaps not of all time, but certainly of Christmas time:

"Fra-GEE-lay....must be Italian!"

Followed very closely by:

"Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls!"

What one film do you think everyone should see?
Sponsored by The Official AVATAR Community on TypePad. See AVATAR in theaters December 18, 2009.

Oh lord, so many. Right now I'm in the mood for The Fugitive, though, so I'll go with that one.

"Care to revise your statement, sir?"

 
"What?"

"Do you want to change you bullshit story, sir?"

Days blocked on Vox bis

Key to the calendar. Yellow: days when Vox worked normally. Pink: days when the compose screen took minutes or hours to load. Red: days when Vox would not allow me to compose at all.

I’m sure most of you will agree that putting up with a compose screen that will not load for hours or days since October 28 is being pretty patient.
   In that time, Daisy and Six Apart have been great at trying to help me troubleshoot why this is happening. They have confirmed that there is something wrong and that, even at Six Apart HQ in California, they cannot get the compose screen to come up when logged on as me.
   A number of solutions have been proposed, but despite carrying them out, the loading delay remains intolerably long.
   It’s as though the Six Apart servers (after becoming self-aware!) know it’s me and fail to serve the compose page. No code is downloaded.
   I remain convinced that whatever is happening to me is connected to what happened to Patricia (who has only made 50-odd posts on Vox, but has exactly the same symptoms) and Ninja (who can no longer compose with this site without switching to Internet Explorer—Vox is the only site which he has to make a browser switch for). I also believe the bug is connected to the one that locked out all the Australians I knew on this service in August 2009.
   We also have the mysterious period between November 16 and 18 when the site operated normally, and the compose screen came up on demand. What happened on those three days? I had more tags in my account than when the site first blocked me from composing, and possibly more neighbours. Yet for those days, everything was normal here.
   I have never suggested seriously that the block was malicious (though it was fun to entertain some outlandish theories), but it does seem to be rather coincidental that I come across bugs on Vox, Blogger, Facebook and other services continually. Many have been documented on this blog. I just never thought that among the last regular blog posts, the bugs I write about would be Vox’s.
   One day I am sure they will find the error, or there will be a new version of Vox which remedies it. The underlying code is updated a lot more frequently with incremental improvements than Team Vox will have us know. Until then, I will check in here periodically—to read your posts, delete spammers, and administer the many groups that I run—but we will have to say farewell to my regular updates. I will also click on ‘Create’ from time to time to see if the bug has been fixed, and, if the site ever lets me, post the odd private neighbourhood or friends-only entry.
   Finally, you could say, my disappointment outweighed my patience. As some of you read in a private post yesterday, this is a good time to move on.
   Vox is, after all, still in beta, if its terms and conditions (revised a few months ago) are to be believed, so there’s no point my getting mad about this. It is what I signed up for in 2006 when I began as a Vox beta tester. Three years on, it appears I was still in the same boat, but with a less reliable site.
   Thank you for all your friendships over the last three years. I have enjoyed it and everything this blog has offered. You can still find me on Facebook (a site with far worse issues than Vox ever had), Tumblr and at my main blog, where I am already ramping up the posting I do. I have a campaign site for the 2010 mayoral election here in Wellington, and will offer occasional commentary at Lucire’s web edition. If the Vox cravings get too much, I might enter the odd thing at lucire.vox.com, but even that account began to fail a few days ago.
   This is not a total farewell. In the words of Gen Douglas MacArthur, ‘I shall return.’

A sunny day in Wellington, even if it took over half a day to get a compose screen on Vox. I’m already blogging more on Blogger, so I suspect these posts will become fewer (and not out of choice). This was around 5 p.m. today:

Victoria Street outside the CPO, summer 2009

Not sure how many hours it has been since Vox was capable of loading a compose window for me. I lost count. I no longer believe that deleting tags has helped, especially as it is now 2.20 a.m. and I had no access to Vox all evening. Please write me with your next theory, Vox.
   As a result of the return to terrible load times, Kimmie’s theory about a dodgy neighbour might still be true. I haven’t deleted everyone from my neighbourhood and started from scratch, which is arguably the next step, if I have sufficient time to waste.
   I have downloaded Firebug (thanks to my friend Andrew Carr-Smith) to see what data Vox loads on to my browser in the times I get a blank compose screen. Answer: none. Nothing even begins to load.
   I still think the Vox server knows when it’s me, Patricia or Ninja, or any of the others who might have left here without telling us why, and fails to serve any compose screen to us. I still reckon that there is something peculiar about our accounts that the programming does not like.