Purple Pursuit

Her split personality always causes tension at blogging time. We help her brainstorm ideas for posts, but she has her own agenda. However, she does get guilt feelings about neglecting us whenever there’s a blogging conference.

This morning, we had a premonition in our soles that she was going to let us write a post for the first time in months! On Thursday she went to the WordCamp 2007 Israel conference, so we were bound to get to write.

In any case, the WordCamp conference was all about using WordPress, but she uses Joomla for her other blog. You have no idea how jealous she is of us, because we blog on WordPress.

We just can’t believe what she did after the blogging conference. Instead of posting about the conference, she decided to do housekeeping on her other blog!

Lorelle came to Israel for the conference, and among other things, she lectured about trackback spam.

Tamar went into a frenzy after that. She became obsessed with clearing out over 13,000 trackback spams on her other blog (she wrote that there were 10,000 trackback spams, but that’s because it was 2:00 a.m. when she wrote the post and it just proves that you shouldn’t write when you are overtired).

Our friend Ilana was at the conference too. Ilana declared in public that she didn’t want to use WordPress for her blog, and caused a lot of commotion in the Israeli blogosphere.

Ilana is right: having to keep up an independent blog is a lot more technical work than using someone else’s platform. Fact: Ilana wrote her post right after the conference, while Tamar ended up doing housekeeping on hers, and then writing a boring post. But Mark is right too: When you’re using someone else’s platform out of convenience, you could go down with the ship.

We write so sporadically that if our blog were on a free platform, we’d probably get closed down for not logging in often enough. That’s what happened to all Tamar’s stuff that was on Tripod and the old Geocities. Gone! Disappeared!

Technorati Tags: WordCamp2007israel , WordPress , crocs , trackback spam , Lorelle

Of all places for it to happen, her rosy naivety was shattered at the blogference.

It was the last session of the day, and she was determined to connect her laptop to the wireless internet that had been evading her all day.

Never mind the numerous TV documentaries that had warned her about the dangers of connecting to an open wireless network. What could possibly be dangerous at an academic institute of higher education?

Suddenly a new wireless connection appeared:

Free Wireless Connection it was called.

Underneath the name of the connection were the foreboding words: Peer-to-Peer Connection, but typically of lavender personality people with rosy perceptions, the words floated right by her, and she connected.

A few moments later, an unexpected dialog box popped up, informing her that Yotam7 wanted permission to download media files from her computer!

The words Peer-to-Peer abruptly floated back into her frame of reference, shaking her consciousness to reconstruct the current reality:

She’d been duped by a hacker who had planted spyware on her laptop!

By her own hand (well, actually her own forefinger) she had connected directly to a strange private laptop that now had direct access to her data!

A swift click of the mouse deactivated the connection, but the potential damage had been done.

She didn’t want to trouble Ilana, who was sitting next to her during this earth-shattering event. Ilana was avidly taking notes for her blog while listening to the current speaker.

So she strained her eyes a few rows down to where Yigal was sitting, but he was typing away at a post that was shortly going up on his blog. He didn’t seem to be bothered about being connected to an open wireless network.

Drawing both her cameras from her back-pack, she documented the crime scene, which was easy to photograph because nothing purple was in view. We were cowering under the table.

She didn’t manage to pin-point any suspects (or so she tells us, and so will you be able to see for yourselves as soon as she figures out how to put the video clip on the blog), but we got to report the scoop of our lives.

Technorati Tags: blogference, lavender, crocs, rosy, perception, reality, wireless networks, security, hacker, scoop, blog, purple, peer-to-peer