My Several Worlds

I hate to admit it, but the last thing on my mind this month has been the wedding. May 10th came and went and I still hadn’t accomplished much on my to-do list. We’ve still managed to knock a few things off our list despite unusual circumstances we’ve faced over the past four weeks.

The wedding invitations arrived last month. Some of my friends have been doing more moving around over the last year than I have, so I mailed out those invitations early. I finished our Wedding Web Page as well.

After much deliberation, I have finally picked my bridesmaid dresses. My girls will be wearing a rich, warm coral which is going to look stunning in the natural surroundings. I just finished sending an email out to the girls tonight to let them have a look at it and to find out about their sizes. We ordered a dress to see what it looks like and it will be shipped to Taiwan later this month.

We’ve also picked out our wedding bands.

I’m still trying to decide how I want to wear my hair, and I’m giving a lot of thought to shoes and accessories. I’ve been trying to motivate John into looking at ideas for the groomsmen, but it just isn’t happening. I don’t think it’s really hit him yet.

I know we still have plenty of time, but I had a bit of a panic attack after looking at all the things we need to do in the time we have left. Mainly I’m concerned about how much needs to be attended to while I’m in Canada. At this point, we are planning to be back in North America for the 11th of November and we fly to Mexico on the 6th of December. It hardly seems like enough time at all to get things organized and ready to go. I wonder if I’m going to turn into a bride-zilla?

Twitter is busting at the seams with news about the earthquake that hit the southwestern province of Sichuan in China today. And once again, the popular micro-blogging platform seems to have beaten everyone to the punch for providing breaking news, links and photos about the event.

Robert Scoble tweeted heavily about the quake and has just posted a timeline of the first Tweets available after the quake.

Earlier this week, I blogged about the lightening fast bits of information that come from Twitter on a daily basis. I’ve also mentioned following big tech guys like Scoble for exactly this reason.

I couldn’t find any information about the quake earlier today. As it turns out, Scoble was on the front-line today, providing information as it came in from Twitter users throughout China. Interestingly enough, @reutersindia and @thenytimes also had breaking news via Twitter feeds before the news was released in the mass media.

I remain convinced that Twitter is one of the fastest ways to obtain information on the web. How accurate the information is remains to be seen as it raises questions of how reliable eye-witness and first-hand reports in place of traditional means of media coverage.

Rory Cellan-Jones at BBC News dot.life reports:

“When I logged on to my desktop Twitter application (sad, I know) it was alive with Tweets about the earthquake in China. Most of them were from the celebrated technology blogger Robert Scoble, who is famous, perhaps notorious, for receiving a Twitter message every second of the day.

He is based in California, but thousands of miles away from the quake he was providing breaking news about it, linking to sites like the BBC and the New York Times, even providing a first picture - though how authentic that is remains to be seen. He now claims that Twitter had the breaking news even before the United States Geological Survey, which provides early warnings of seismic events.”

Read the rest of his article here.

One of Taiwan’s best kept secrets can be found in heart of Sansia, in the southwestern part of Taipei County.  It’s called Queen Town, and it’s a gorgeous little getaway spot for a day of BBQ’ing or for a weekend camping expedition.  

Pool side view.

BBQ Alley

River Folk.

Set in a lush tropical surroundings, Queen Town boasts two large covered areas for BBQ-ing and pic-nics, a camp ground, a restaurant, a swimming pool and a gorgeous outside patio with a lovely little fish pond.  All of these amenities are perched at the top of a hill.  Take a short stroll to the edge of the campground and follow the shaded stairway down to the cool waters of a rushing river. 

Little Jeannie.

My boss, Carol, and her daughter, Jeannie.

We’ve enjoyed our Gram company BBQ at Queen Town for the last two years.  Last weekend, we headed out again at 9am with a group of 30 friends and co-workers from our Shu-lin Branch.  We arrived shortly before 11am and quickly piled our food and supplies into shopping carts provided by the management.  From there, we headed to our site and within half an hour, the guys had fires started and food on the grill.  We spent the day in the sun.  We ate until we were full and then ate some more after a short dip in the pool.  John and I arrived back in Banciao shortly after 5pm.  We were so tired and full, we decided to cut our evening short and went to bed early.  These company BBQ’s just keep getting better and better.  We’re hoping to get a group of foreign friends together sometime over the summer for a get-together. 

My friend, Claire, and her daughter.

Ginger and Annie spent the day tearing around on rented bicycles.

Ice cream monsters.

Queen Town is easily accessible by several routes. We drove from Shu-lin along Provincial Highway 3. For more information go to www.queen-village.com or telephone 02 2668 2591

A long-tailed macaque takes a short break in the early afternoon sun just outside of Phuket, Thailand.

I received some rather disturbing news earlier this week when my friend, MJ, contacted me to let me know that the photography article he wrote for My Several Worlds had been copied in its entirety and was being used on another website!

A quick visit to the offending website confirmed that not only MJ’s article had been stolen. This noob had ripped off my entire website! All of my photos and full articles had been posted without credit on this site. Our engagement photos, my health updates, my travel posts, absolutely everything. Even my categories had been copied. I was stunned.

This was my first real introduction into the world of spamming and to be honest, I had no idea where to start with getting my content removed from someone’s site. I felt completely violated. I don’t mind if people want to use my content, provided they ask permission and they link back to My Several Worlds and give me photo credit. Unfortunately, the Internet makes it really easy to rip things off. One can simply cut and paste entire web pages and claim it as their own with a few minor adjustments.

I’m not going to name the website because I don’t want to drive any more traffic to them, but let me tell you, I was pissed. I immediately posted about it on Twitter and heard back from a few Twitter friends within minutes. They recommended checking out CopyScape to search for copies of my site on the Internet. While I was at it, I took the time to go over CopyScape with a fine tooth comb. In addition to learning how to respond to plagiarism, I also got a crash course on preventing plagiarism.

I took four major steps.

1. I contacted the owner of the website with a polite message asking for the stolen content to be removed immediately.

2. Then I used a Whois service to find out who the web hosting company was (GoDaddy) and contacted them to let them know that one of their customers was abusing their terms of agreement by posting stolen content.

3. Then I went through the website and found a few other bloggers who had had been ripped off. I got in contact with them to let them know about my intent to have my material removed from the site.

4. Finally I filed a notice with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which results in informing search engines like Google to have the offending site removed from their search results.

Surprisingly, these four steps only took about thirty minutes of my time and I learned a valuable lesson.

I received my reward this morning when I learned that the offending account has been suspended. Success! Spammers beware. Your craft will not be tolerated in any of my worlds.

Everyone’s talking about Tweeting these days. Over the past week, I’ve seen quite a few of my blogger friends jump on the bandwagon. In the last two days, I’ve started following Stevo from Asian Ramblings, TC Lin of Poagao, Ashish Lin of Tumbling in Taiwan and MJ Klein aka The New Hampshire Bushman. I’ve included their Twitter links here in case you’re interested in seeing what they have to offer the world of Twitter.

MJ wrote an interesting article today about Twitter, and I found my reply getting longer and longer with each passing second. I decided to add my comments to this article, which was started a week ago. Here’s my take on how best to use Twitter’s services.

Frankly put, Twitter is what you make it. It can be about your everyday musings. It can be used to promote your blog. You can post interesting URL’s and create discussion over them. You can promote your friends. For all you expats out there, join a Twitter group like the China Twitterati or Expatacular and follow what’s happening with expats and locals throughout China and the rest of the world. If you’re looking for followers, following a group like The China Twitterati List is definitely the fastest way to find them. Check out their mass following here.

Twitter is a constant flow of information. Some of it is completely useless. Some of it is informative. Some of it is funny and some of it is down-right ridiculous.

I like following the big guys like @mashable, @problogger, and @scobleizer because the tech information coming from these guys is instantaneous. They tweet from major tech conferences around the world. It’s all in the moment. You are privy to information before it’s officially released. You won’t get a faster update anywhere else.

I’ve found a really neat group of people who share one or several interests with me, be it travel-related, food-related, photography-related or tech-related. Twitter has opened up my world. I’ve found a whole new slew of friends. I’ve noticed a significant increase in my traffic and best of all, these visitors are social networkers, which means they love to leave comments! Twitter is one of the best website marketing tools around as far as I’m concerned, provided you put in the time to get to know other users.

My first Twitter friend was Mark Forman aka bbluesman. I’ve found out more about him in the last several months then I learned at the party I met him at in October last year. My guilty little secret is that I actually stole a bunch of his friends when I first signed on, because I wasn’t sure how to use the service. Since then, I’ve found out that Mark is a great judge of character. His friends were most welcoming and helped me navigate the world of Twitter with ease.

Understanding how Twitter works can take a little time to get used to, but I hope you come to like it as much as I do.
Are you following me on Twitter?

A street vendor from the Muslim Quarter in Xian, China.

Time for some link love. I’m not very regular with these posts. I’m sure I should probably have some sort of set schedule for link love, like The Bushman or David Reid, but to be honest, I like posting when the mood strikes me.

My first shout out goes to two very special bloggers in Taiwan: Mark Forman and MJ Klein because I think these guys might have the biggest hearts of anyone I know. Being so far away from home and being ill can be very disheartening, so it was extra nice to hear from both these guys on a regular basis.

Mark has kept my spirits up with daily messages on Twitter and a terrific e-card that had both John and I laughing. He always has amazing videos and podcasts up. His most recent video is a collaboration with his son and was taken from the back of his scooter.

MJ and his lovely wife, Hui Chen, have been wonderfully supportive. MJ helped me out by sending along a guest article to keep readers entertained. I have to admit, while I was ill the last thing I wanted to think about was this blog. MJ couldn’t have given me a better gift. On top of that, he and his wife, Hui Chen hunted down some medical contacts for me.

MJ just posted his infamous Bushman’s Picks for the week. Go check it out and while you’re at it, be sure to wish him well in this month’s upcoming May Day event. He and his band are going to be rocking on-stage once again.

Thanks very much to the three of you.

No link love would be complete without including my friend, Stevo, of Asian Ramblings. In addition to being my sounding board for all things bloggy, he’s just an all-around nice guy. He’s got some terrific things coming down the pipeline. Watch this space for an announcement coming soon about a new site he’s working on. I’m super-excited to be a part of it.

Some of you may remember RT Cunningham of Untwisted Vortex. I’ve been following his blog for almost a year now. He gave My Several Worlds a great review several months ago. RT recently jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, and has once again become almost a daily fixture in my life. His wife has been suffering from her own health problems and I would like to take this opportunity to let them know that I am thinking of them and wishing her a speedy recovery.

David Reid of David on Formosa has linked to My Several Worlds almost every week this month and I’d like to say thanks. I’ve been quite down about the quality of travel related posts I’ve been putting out lately, but if they’re good enough to get mentioned on David’s site, then that’s good enough for me!

Over at Fighting Windmills things just keep getting better and better. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy reading this blog. I’ve been feeling quite guilty because I thought this link was on my blogroll and it wasn’t. Somehow it got lost in the move. Head on over and check it out. Great things happened this month with NaBloPoMo’s April Letters. They’re some of the best I’ve seen!

And hello Peder Hanson! He’s the new comeback kid. I met Peder when I was living in Northern China. We had a blast together and have recently hooked up again via several social networking sites. Peder started a blog way back in 2003 and has recently decided to revive it. I’ve enjoyed reading about some of our old escapades and I’m looking forward to catching up on his new adventures back home.

Boo-yah! Carrie’s back with a brand new schtick. No more moping around and feeling sorry for myself after seeing the doctor this morning and getting A CLEAN BILL OF HEALTH! No more pills. No more long waits and painful visits to the doctor. No more feeling weak and weepy. These last three days especially have made all the difference in the world. I’m feeling positive. I’m getting my strength back. I’m heading back to the top again!

I’m thoroughly impressed with the doctors at National Taiwan University Hospital. They were terrific and I’m so glad my friends insisted I go there to get treated. At first, I felt the treatment I was receiving was a little radical and I was completely miserable, but I can’t believe how much better I feel. Good things are coming my way. I can feel it. I’m going to take it easy and I hope to get back to the gym and on a regular workout program again later on this week.

Baby steps are in order. I’m not going to come back too hard, but it’s so nice to have my life back again. Thanks everyone and most importantly, thanks Mom and Dad. You’ve been listening to my frantic, weeping phone calls for the past three weeks. It know it was hard on you both. You guys are the greatest.