It’s Monday, you know what that means. Time to tell you the mis-adventures of  Dave and Deb preparing for India and how things are going at theplanetd.

Let me start by talking to you about our electronics. As many of you know, we bought and Iphone and are ready to use it to keep in touch during our travels.  We made sure to buy one that is a little bit older because the software is easier to unlock.  Or so we thought. Dave went through all of the steps to unlock the phone and we thought all was well.

That is until we put in our Sim card and didn’t get a signal.

After further investigation on the Internet, Dave discovered that the guy that sold him the phone updated the firmware for which there is no way to unlock.  Can’t blame the guy, he thought he was being nice.

So now we have an Iphone, that cannot be unlocked at the moment.  We have it up on Craigslist now and are hoping to sell it before buying an already unlocked phone. The good new is that at least we tried it here in Canada before leaving for India.

The next misadventure happened when we bought batteries for our new Panasonic GH1 Camera.  We like to have 3 batteries.  One came with the camera and then we bought an extra battery at the camera shop.  But at 90 bucks a pop, we decided that one Panasonic battery was enough and we would buy a third party battery for our other back up battery.  It is much cheaper and we have always used third party batteries for our cameras in the past and they have always worked fine.  Not this time.

Yet again the bloody firmware came back to haunt us.

Panasonic updated this specific model so that you cannot use third party batteries.  You have to use the Panasonic battery which is 3 times the price.

So now we are sitting with a battery that we cannot use and an iphone that we cannot use.  Hey at least we don’t leave for 4 weeks.

On a positive note, we have sped up our site.

We hired a great guy once again from Scriptlance and he made our site 70% faster.  We have noticed a huge improvement.  He says that he has done all that he can for now, and the next step that we need to do is change hosts.  Bluehost is too limiting for our site and we haven’t been thrilled with the amount that bluehost is down anyway. It seems that several times a week our site is down due to server problems.

We are considering changing as our term is expiring with bluehost in a couple of weeks, but it seem like a daunting task.  He is suggesting we change to Host9.

Anyone else have some advice on servers and changing from one to another?

We still have to re-size our photos as well to speed it up even more. We uploaded way too big of files, so that is a task for Dave to do in the next couple of weeks. But for now, we are feeling pretty good with the loading time.

Other News…

We are going to be trying out some Microfiber Firm Support Travel Socks for our adventures and travels. It is always nice to be contacted to try out a product or two and we are going to put these socks through their paces. We let you know how they hold up as we hike and trek our way through Asia.

We developed some nice links this week too.  Is it just me or is it the time of year? But we suddenly started receiving offers from companies to place ads and to do some nice link exchanges too.  We assume that it must be because it is October. It is the beginning of the 4th quarter of the year, so people are updating their links and adspace.

The business of Blogging still baffles us, but we are slowly learning and with great friends out there sharing information, we are starting to catch on.

Last and probably least…

We seem to be doing well with checking off the to do list for our travels. We put everything in storage this weekend and for this last week in October we are living in an empty apartment sleeping on our memory foam mattress (on the floor)  We still have our Internet and computers, so we will be fine. Oh and we kept our wine glasses out of storage for now so we got everything we need!

We have our Visa’s, our shots, our medications and we are completely. packed  Our addresses are changed and forwarded, our banking is set and our insurance is confirmed.

It is funny though. Everything is falling into place and yet we both feel a little anxious and unsettled. I feel like there is a lot to be done, but really there isn’t.  Actually, this week should be nice. I don’t have to worry about packing or making a tonne of phone calls. I don’t have a giant pile of things that need to be tackled and yet, I keep feeling like I have so much to do.  It is difficult to adjust to suddenly having very little to do.

I actually think that I will be able to catch up on reading other people’s blogs, doing my lessons at MatadorU and finally doing some research on India and Sri Lanka.

It has been so crazy and hectic for the past couple of months, that it is going to be a welcomed change in  the final weeks leading up to our travels to enjoy the company of friends and family and to slow down a bit and relax.

Wow!

Let’s start with technical difficulties.

As much as I love the Internet, the technical side of things really freaks me out sometimes.

You put a lot of work into networking a marketing and really you have no control over anything.  We have worked hard on establishing ourselves on Twitter and to have to start all over so close to leaving for Asia would be a real bummer.  We had decided to focus on Twitter as our main form of networking. We thought that it would be the best and easiest way for us to connect with other travelers and Bloggers while we are traveling.  We did a good job too.  We have developed great friendships, Topsy lists us as “highly influential” we have gained a nice amount of followers quickly and frankly, we love Twitter.

Last week we noticed that someone posted an ad from our profile on Twitter.  It said something like…”I just signed up for a rewards program” and it had a link to website.  We quickly deleted it because first of all we didn’t post it and second we didn’t want someone clicking through to a malicious site from our name @theplanetd.  We were nervous that someone had hacked our account so we quickly changed our password and deleted any third party applications that we didn’t recognize in our connections.

Everything was fine and we felt better…

but here is where we think that troubles began.

We didn’t change our password with the 3rd party applications that we left on our Twitter account and one or more of them was obviously trying to gain access.  These third party sites are Tweetdeck, wefollow, twit this etc.  If they keep trying to access your account without the valid password too many times, Twitter will lock your account.

So here is what we did…

1. We could not sign in from the twitter home page.  But when we clicked on the “forgot password” icon we could access Twitter through the link that they sent to our email.  However, once we logged out, we were locked out again.
2. If we went to Twitter help we stayed signed in so we could access our account for some reason, so we did that.
3. We could not find anywhere on the support page where we could let Twitter know that we were having problems.  We had read that you could send them a ticket, but we could not find a way to contact them anywhere.  And we went of the support section with a magnifying glass.  There is just no way to contact them. We clicked on every link from that page and even if your click on contact us at the bottom of the Twitter feed, it just goes right back to the help page when you click on support.  If anyone knows how to get a hold of them, I would love to hear it.
4. We went into our connections settings and revoked access to all 3rd party applications for now.
5. We signed back in after waiting an hour and everything worked fine.

So we are back on Twitter.  However, we have Tweetdeck etc. disabled for now. I don’t want to sign back into them yet. I think that I will just give it a few days.

I will keep you posted if it happens again.

Other Frustrations

Does anyone else have a problem with Throttling on their site?  We have points where people throttle our account to the point that it freezes our site.  We use Bluehost and at times we have spammers hit our site hundreds of times in a minute causing the site to slow down or stop.

Once our site was down for quite a while so Dave went online with Bluehost.  They told him that certain sites were basically attacking ours and that we have to block them.  What we do is go into our Bluehost Control panel and click on CPU Throttling.  Sometimes it is through the roof.  They told us that we have to block those ip addresses that are hitting us.  Man, that is a lot of work.

Just to clarify…it is not the usual spam that Askimet catches, this doesn’t affect us at all,  it is bandwidth throttling. Which I still don’t really understand.

Do other people have this problem with different providers? Are we just having bad luck this month?

I must admit, that Bluehost’s customer care is excellent however.  Whenever we have an issue and contact them, they are right there to help us out.

Speeding up our site

I also really need to work on making our site faster.  People could say that it is the featured video in the side bar, but many people have video streaming from youtube and it doesn’t slow them down.  We have thought that maybe it is because of the featured content slider on the home page, but a lot of people have that as well and their sites are fast.

We have cleaned up errors and we have installed super cache but that hasn’t sped up the site.  We are definitely needing to solve this little mystery.  I don’t like waiting for a blog to load, so I definitely don’t want people to have to wait for our blog.

So anyway, that is our week in review this week.  Just annoying technical difficulties.

Outside of the blog things are moving along well.

• We have been moving our contents to storage and have made quite the dent in our apartment.  It looks like moving day is going to be pretty manageable.
• We are bringing in our Visa Application for India tomorrow
• Doctors visits are done.
• Optomitrist – ?
• We have bought our new camera and camcorder – That is a post for Dave to write about in the near future
• We are all packed. I know it is early, but we don’t use anything that we are bringing with us.
• All medications and first aid – ?

For some reason I am getting busier at work as time gets closer.  On one hand I enjoy making the extra money, on the other, I have a lot to do and work is really getting in my way. Dave is busy as usual, so time is just flying by.  We are both feeling a little anxious.  No excitement brewing yet. We are too busy checking off the to do list.

So that is what we have done this week.