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

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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

At that time she didn’t have an inkling that she would be going there herself in August, so she gave Marcus strict instructions about what to buy. She even provided him with a printout of this picture -

Marcus hadn’t met us yet or seen our shade of lavender because we were still in Eilat when he left for India.

“Pink, lavender - what difference does it make?” or so he thought, and he bought her a lovely pink pashmina.

Here’s a photo of us with the pink pashmina.

What do you think?

We’re still neurotic about being left behind (here and here), but now we think that she’ll have to take us to India.

How else will she find us a perfect match?

Technorati Tags: lavender, crocs, pink, pashmina, India

She has to get ready for work now, and when she comes home, Marcus likes to spend time with her, so we don’t know when we’ll get another chance to talk. Just in case you’re curious, here’s what we want to talk about:

1. the pink pashmina shawl that Marcus bought her when he was in India in May, when he was supposed to bring her a lavender pashmina to match us.

2. the pile of rubbish on the sidewalk at the railway station that we had to walk through until she took care of it for us.

Technorati Tags: crocs, lavender, hacker, blogference 2007, pink, pashmina, shawl, India, rubbish, railway

She actually went to 5 different shoe stores tonight! She kept taking us on and off all evening, but the ones she wanted weren’t available in her size. She was quite puzzled about why the stores in this country only carry sturdy, supportive walking sandals for men.

She did find the sandals she wanted at a specialty hiking store, but they cost over 500 NIS. She’s only going to India for 2 weeks, so it seems a waste to spend that kind of money. She doesn’t need hiking sandals at home because she has us.

We know that long blog posts can be boring, but we just have to tell you about the saleswoman at Kol Naal Center: Tamar asked for hiking sandals, but the woman said they didn’t carry any for women and that Tamar should look around to see if there was a comfortable sandal that would do instead. Then the woman proceeded to make suggestions, but all the sandals she pointed out had chunky, high heels.
“I’m going mountain climbing!” Tamar kept insisting, but the salewoman obviously didn’t have a clue that you can’t climb mountains in heels.

We thought she wanted to replace us, a suspicion we already raised before, but in the end she didn’t buy any hiking sandals, and we went home with her. Thank goodness for clueless shoe saleswomen.

Technorati Tags: crocs, lavender, hiking sandals, salespeople, shoe store, neurotic, India, trek, mountain climbing

We were the only crocs at the blogference, but we still felt welcome because the colour scheme was purple.

Look - even the sign pointing the way was purple!

We don’t know why she is so obsessed with purple, since our colour is so hard to photograph - we look blue in most photos - and she’s not happy about that.

The other day, when she first took our picture, she had us posing in 3 different spots in the house. Finally she stuck us in a dark corner on a navy blue chair and turned off the flash. That’s how she’s showing us on the About Us page.

There was one guy at the blogference wearing a purple shirt. She must have taken about 5 photos of him, and none of them came out right. She was so disappointed.

The napkins were purple too, but the napkin and the pizza were more mobile than the sign and the shirt, so she thought they might be more photogenic inside one of the buildings.

We don’t think that made any difference.

Technorati Tags: crocs, lavender, purple, blue, napkin, shirt, colour scheme, blogference, photography

Pink and purple are analgous on the colour wheel - so much so that they are sometimes confused.

The consequences being that pink plays a supporting role to purple.

Technorati Tags: pink, purple

We’ll be devasted if she leaves us at home.

Technorati Tags: crocs, lavender, India, New Delhi