The downside of renting your own domain

I have a few domains - thepotters.org is my main one for the family, stagepics.co.uk is another, ross-online.org.uk and sabos.co.uk are domains that I rent and manage on behalf of others.

Completely separately, there is the subject of spam. When spammers are sending junk mail, they know that many mail servers will do a lookup to check that the mail they are sending appears to come from a valid domain.

So spammers create email addresses based on real domains, with any old string before the "@" sign.

That means that when automated reponses or hate mail come back, they go to the domain that the spammer created. And in all of my domains, I have a "catch-all" set up, so that any email sent to that domain comes back to me.

Which is why I have had over one hundred and fifty mail messages telling me that panuche [at] thepotters.org is not a member. Started the morning beautifully, that did!

IT WISNAE ME!

Carbonite follow-up

Well, my Carbonite problems are sorted out. I didn't get an response to the web form I filled in, but the "live help" service worked a treat.

It appears that my problems related to a Windows Defender update that trashed my hosts file - when I updated my hosts file to add 127.0.0.1 as the IP address relating to localhost, everything came back to life.

Carbonite backup...

For several months now, I've been using Carbonite for online backup. Any file I create or change gets copied to a server somewhere in the USA and backed up. If fire should engulf my house (let's hope nobody's in at the time) I can get all my photos back from the server. All my personal papers I have also scanned, and feel comfortable that they're backed up somewhere.

It's hell on my broadband connection, but that's what broadband's for...

Anyway, such a service is only as good as its response when things go wrong. In the past couple of days, all of my Carbonite windows seem to have been replaced by an internet explorer window saying that "This program cannot display the webpage".

I have sent them an email explaining the problem. Let's see how long it takes them to respond.

Deep Zoom Composer

(Second try posting this)

I have been playing with a new Microsoft technology called Silverlight (in this day and age, it's well worth having a few strings to one's bow).

Anyway, one tool built on this is called Deep Zoom Composer, and it's pretty cool. I've thrown together a Deep Zoom panel with over 1000 StagePics photographs at http://www.stagepics.co.uk/sp2

Drag the black surface around with your mouse to see more pictures. Birl the mouse wheel to zoom in and out, or click (to zoom in) and shift-click (to zoom out) if you have no mouse wheel.

I'm very impressed, and am looking forward to playing more with this technology.

Two Shows

This has been an amazingly busy week!

I haven't taken any show photos for a couple of months, but this week I had two productions to shoot - vastly different to each other, too

On Monday, I went into Edinburgh to photograph Edinburgh Music Theatre's production of Hair. As ususal from EMT, I was impressed by the performances. Everyone on stage was committed to the show, and it was clear how much work they had been doing. They knew what to do, when to do it and they were able to rely on their colleagues to do the same thing. They were focused and intent on what they were doing. While the show was not exactly my cup of tea, the quality of performance was simply outstanding.

Tuesday saw me in Dunfermline, watching Carnegie Youth Theatre's Annie. Once again, I was amazed by how well the show was performed. I could not think of the performers as "children" - they were performers who were so good on stage that they demanded to be compared to an adult copmany, and they did as well as most of those!

Congratulations to both - and I'll have your photographs online as soon as possible!