This was my first time with long-term care of neonatal kittens so while I had good experience with cats in general, there was, and is, still lots to learn. I wanted to share some of my learnings and experience with these kittens so far in the hope it might help others who end up in a similar situation.

The Story

Meet Polly, Tajia, Sheba and Dorian.

Four very young kittens were dumped without their mother, well before they should have been separated. None of the regular fosterers that have the experience and capability with neonatal kittens (they require a higher degree of care and time to survive) was available so their future looked bleak; I happened to be there that day and decided to take them on and give them at least a chance.

At this stage, we were starting with a low chance of survivability given the age they were separated from their mother. Their eyes were just open so but they still weren’t seeing much. I’ll discuss estimating age further down, but our best guess at that point was that they were a little under 2 weeks.

A couple of days after I took them on, we got them treated for fleas. A flea burden of even a handful can prove fatal for kittens; they drink the blood leading to anemia among other issues so a simple step is very important.

After 3 days none of them had pooed. Given they were on formula I wasn’t expecting much and certainly not anything too solid with the change in diet, but I expected something! After consulting with the shelter I was off to the vet the next day to get them checked out for constipation, and after a thermometer where no one would like one, they started toileting!

And then came the diarrhoea.

Diarrhoea is another huge risk for kittens, especially the very tiny ones. There isn’t much to them, so dehydration can set in quick and has a high chance of fatality. 2 of my kittens in particular basically had a bit of constant leakage. They were still happy enough and eating, but when their appetite started to decline we were off to the vet again.

Since I’d gotten them, there had been no appreciable weight gain despite a reasonable appetite and feeding schedule. Putting the whole story together with the vet, our prevailing theory was likely parasitic burden (worms) which accounted for the initial lack of weight gain; and now the kittens were starting to feel unwell which had led to not wanting to eat.

So a dose of wormer and hopefully some improvement would be seen. I also increased the frequency of feeds from 4 hourly to between 2 and 2.5 hourly to combat dehydration.

That was Friday, by the following Tuesday there had been some blood in their poos (expected after worming), but all signs still pointed to the worms still having a fair hold so another dose of wormer to start the day. 3 out of 4 of the kittens were active and causing havoc although not yet gaining any appreciable weight.

But that leaves 1.

Since Monday night, one of the kittens (Polly) had been reluctant to take food, so she has basically been force fed to keep some fluids on board. When I went to feed at 14:30 the next day I had to search the crate to find her. She was curled up next to the hot water bottle, having crawled under the bedding so she was right beside it.

She was limp, and at first, I thought she had already passed, but she was still alive. I wrapped her in a blanket and she reluctantly accepted formula, but while there was movement in her head, her body remained limp. It wasn’t looking promising, but I decided that a trip to the vet was required, either if she was going to have a chance at coming back from the brink or to end her suffering.

Sadly it was the latter. It’s upsetting to have had it end this way as it’s natural to get some attachment to the little fluff balls. It’s also hard wondering if you’d done anything differently if the outcome may have been different also.

The hardest part of fostering neonates.

In the end, their chances of survival weren’t high to start with. And actually, as a fosterer it’s important to concentrate on the fact that she had a chance she wouldn’t otherwise have had; not to mention the other 3 that are (fingers crossed) doing well.

We’re now on Sunday after the loss of Polly and the other three are doing okay. Dorian is putting on weight and proving to be a little hungry sod; the other two are holding their weight and only just starting to make small gains. We’re also starting to see some better-formed poo, and they are getting the idea of the litter tray more often.

I’ve started offering them wet food and biscuits, along with a bowl of water. 2 of them love the wet food and Dorian (shock) is the first to show some interest in the biscuits. The water is getting more use for play than drink, but they will get the hang of it. I’m still supplementing with formula to help keep good nutrition and hydration as they gradually transition over to the other foods more significantly.

Helpful bits and pieces

Here are some random notes and links that I put together while researching and learning. They might be useful to someone else, but my disclaimer is that I have no training in this area so these notes are my own interpretation and options of what I’ve researched.

The advice from your shelter or a vet should always trump anything I say here, and if in doubt you should always ask them if you’re unsure about anything.

Estimating the age of kittens

Sheba

There are many websites that will tell you how to estimate a kittens age, based on various development factors. The first thing I learned, is that many of them disagree to some extent, and even those that agree have a margin of error.

The 4 kittens I had had certain development inconsistencies which led me around in circles; one guide would tell me that based on their eyes they were 14 days, but based on their ears they were 5 days… Not so helpful, and it took me a while to come to a consensus.

Eyes

As best I can tell, a kitten’s eyes can open anywhere from around 5 – 14 days depending on who you ask or where you read. Based on conversations with a couple of local vets, expect fully open eyes to be around 10-14 days, but if it seems earlier, don’t be too shocked.

Ears

What I read suggests ears are unfolded by around 3 weeks. My critters took longer, so that threw me a little. Also, different breeds vary apparently, so this is a hard one to get a good measure on.

Teeth

While most things have a wide variability depending on things like health, breed etc. my understanding is that teeth are one of the better tells. While there is probably some variance for certain breeds, overall teeth seem to have one of the more reliable tells.

A kitten’s baby teeth develop starting with the incisors, middle to outer with upper and lower likely coming through matching. Then comes canines, and then pre-molars. The order is reliably predictable and over a certain period of development time are a great marker.

If you are trying to predict age during the period their teeth develop, I’d go with them as the main guide. Obviously, if you have them before they have any teeth, or after they have gotten all their teeth, that reduces what time period you can estimate.

The best resource I found on teeth was http://princetonvet.net/age-cat-by-its-teeth/.

Feeding and Weight

While trying to establish how much these guys should be eating, I came across a wide range of feeding charts.

Based on age, I found my kittens rated as underweight for all of them This isn’t uncommon for orphaned/abandoned kittens especially early in life.

As for how much to feed them, I couldn’t find much agreement, however, I landed on 6-10mL for 2 weeks old. Around 3+ weeks we moved up to around 15mL from there, at a 4-hour feeding interval. This was based on advice from my shelter, so ask them or a vet if you’re unsure.

Vets can also make a much better estimate of age to be able to guide to safe and required feeding amounts. Depending on what formula you’re using, they will often have good guides on the packet in lieu of any other guidance (I’m using Milligans Multi-milk replacer).

I syringe fed as I find it easier when they aren’t used to formula feeding. I also got a hold of a “Miracle Nipple” which gave the best part of the bottle feeding also. Using the syringe made it easy to track how much they were eating, and the nipple made it easier for them to suckle.

I used the following table from http://www.kittenlady.org/ as a guide for what weights would be “ideal” for their age.

Remember this is only a guide. Your milage may vary.

Overfeeding

Overfeeding can lead to diarrhoea which as mentioned above is a problem, and kittens won’t always just stop when they have had enough so early on the 10mL was a hard limit. As they grew I would stop when they started to lose interest even though if prompted they would continue feeding. I’ve also read that overfeeding could lead to greater health decline and death in some circumstances.

When I decreased the time between feeds to combat dehydration I accordingly didn’t expect as much to be eaten each feed, so timing plays a part also.

As I mentioned above, I’m now also offering wet food (currently i/d food to help settle the diarrhoea which is working well but eventually onto standard kitten food), and dry kitten biscuits. I’ve put water in there as well so that they have the opportunity to make up fluids they don’t get in dry food. In the meantime feeds of formula are still important as this needs to be a transition, not a switch.

Gradually they will transition more to the wet and dry foods, and the need for formula will stop altogether.

Record keeping – The Kitten Logbook

I was a little slow off the bat with keeping records. When the kittens started having issues with diarrhoea, I realised I needed to keep better notes of what was happening. My memory only covered so much!

I needed to record how much they were eating, what their toileting was like, and each time I weighed them. I found some templates online but none covered the things I was specifically after. So I made one up myself. You can grab a copy of my Kitten Logbook template for yourself if you need one or just want to try mine.

Besides helping me track kitten progress, it was really useful to be able to take with me to the vet. Memory is fallible, and details are important. Particularly, as much of a messy topic as it is, notes on their toileting; descriptions of colour and texture of faeces.

Below you can see a picture of some of my completed forms to get an idea how I used them.

Polly’s Log. Click to see larger.

The document is designed to be printed 2-sided with short edge binding, giving more room for notes on the back, but that space may change. Some things like Animal ID may not be relevant to you depending on the shelter you’re working with; for me, these are the ID’s that are used to identify the kitten with the shelter records especially for vet visits.

The main design may change a little too as I’m now starting to wean them off formula, which changes the sort of information that can be recorded (or that it’s useful to record). As I get more experience in this phase I may adapt the design. Regardless, I’ll share whatever I come up with.

Poo

Not a favourite topic for most, but one that can tell you a lot about the health of your kitten.

I found that there was a fair amount of information online, but most of it just descriptions, or illustrated colouring. So I wanted to add some photos here so you could see some of the things you might expect.

It’s by no means a comprehensive collection of even the types I saw, but I wasn’t always taking pictures! The more yellow poo is common colouring for formula fed kittens and gets darker when they start eating wet food.

Note that the “Formed, formula fed poo” wasn’t one I saw often. When formed, the formula based ones were normally thicker and looked like the consistency of toothpaste.

Some of the darker ones have blood flecks in them too but that was expected due to recent de-worming. If you haven’t recently wormed or you’re unsure, blood in the stool should be something to seek advice for.

Also, remember that while they are young you have to stimulate them to toilet. At 5 weeks mine are toileting themselves but I am still stimulating after feeding to ensure they are ALL getting everything out okay, and regularly at least one of them will let more out. I’ll be stopping this soon but be sure to make sure all of yours are self-toileting before you abandon this step.

Thanks

It has to be added. I want to say a huge thanks to the staff at the Napier & Hawke’s Bay branch of the SPCA for their help and support, and putting up with my often stupid questions. You guys are awesome and do a bloody great job!

Also thanks has to go to my partner who took the unexpected arrival in her stride, and who has helped do feeds while I’ve been stuck at training or on callouts.

Other Links

These are some other links I came across giving info on development and health of kittens and other useful resources. I’ll update more if I come across some other good ones. Remember, results may vary and always seek advice from a shelter or vet.

Development timelines

• http://www.kittenlady.org/age/
• https://www.cat-world.com.au/kitten-development-weeks-1-8.html

General / Other

• https://gentlepawspetsitting.com/kitten-primer/
• http://www.kittenlady.org/ – The kitten lady is pretty awesome and has some great youtube clips.

Toilet Business

• http://kittencoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/NKC-Fast-Facts_Poop-Chart_5-2017.pdf
• http://www.kittenbaby.com/bowel-movement.php

The post Experiences fostering neonatal kittens appeared first on Random Insanity.

I’ve spent the last couple of days doing a little consolidation of servers in between other work. A couple of posts ago I wrote about moving everything to AWS Lightsail; well I’ve now moved them to plain old AWS EC2 instead.

Why? A number of reasons really. It was much easier to consolidate them into a single server so cost-effective. And it’s a model I’m much more used to; installing things from the ground up, compiling Nginx with the configuration I want, getting Letsencrypt SSL running etc. While this was doable on Lightsail, the default approach is fairly template-based and I’d rolled out WordPress with the Bitnami templates, which work really well for most users but as somewhat of a power user I found myself having to work AROUND all their nice user-friendly setup.

The last site to bring into the fold was this one; “Random Insanity”.

The ramblings of an overactive mind

While checking things were up and running after the transfer (and killing time waiting for a client to come online), I spent time on my last blog post about Letsencrypt and my latest little bit of coding, played around with themes, and spent a while trawling through older posts checking that everything was playing nice.

And wow, I may not post much, but some of the ones from years ago stirred up a bunch of memories about times, places and people that have come and gone from my life.

Particularly it got me thinking about friends whom I don’t necessarily see or talk to as much as I’d like it to be. And it’s not like we had a falling out or anything. Many times it’s just an evolution of life; we get busy and so wrapped up in often unimportant things. And everyone does it at some point. So while my mind was strolling down memory lane, with YouTube playing enough music to keep me awake and positive enough, I decided to plug this less-technical post in – who knows maybe with the change in my work status I’ll start putting stuff on here more regularly.

Friends come and go

I don’t know that there is a solution to the fading of people from our lives. I’m not even sure it is a problem in the first place. Sure, I wish some of those people still played as much of a role, accounted for hours of conversation on a regular basis, shared with you and allowed you to share with them, but for better or worse I don’t think many people can count in high numbers those that have stayed with them throughout huge swaths of their lives.

I’ve got some awesome friends who I am very grateful for, and who I wouldn’t want to be without. But I can’t help but wonder just how people I’ve felt that way about in the past are now little more than an occasional thought and smile about what was, and one day who of the current list are going to fall by the wayside too. It’s an interesting thought, albeit a little depressing if you dwell on it in the wrong way.

The soppy stuff

(also known as “why one shouldn’t post after midnight while sleep deprived”)

So, to friends past, present and future. Thank you for the role you have/do/will play in my life. I guess we can only trust that the coming and going is for the right reason in the grand scheme (and if someone wants to tell me it’s God’s will or some such rhetoric I’m pretty sure we can shuffle the “into the past” process along. Just saying.).

I do hope, however, that those I don’t see often, don’t talk to often beyond the occasional birthday wish or Christmas pleasantry, know they are still valued as friends and while we aren’t in constant communication, I don’t want that status to be forgotten.

Enjoy the new week everyone. Sorry to say, I have another topic in mind for another ramble so you might get bombarded with another post sometime soon. 3 in quick succession; possibly something unheard of in 10+ years!

The post The one in which we think about friends. appeared first on Random Insanity.

Domains

I thought domains would be easy. I have a pretty good understanding of domain registration and DNS, having worked with them for years so I went looking for a new registrar. I needed to relocate registration and hosting of both domains, and my main requirements looking around were ease of management and price.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’d already settled on Amazon Lightsail for my site hosting, so Amazon seemed a good option for DNS to keep it all together also.

While the web hosting was basically identical for the 2 sites, the domain portion has a little (only a little) variety.

RandomInsanity.net.nz

As the first of the 2 sites I moved, I jumped into AWS Route53 and set up my DNS settings. Quite easy, and as best I can tell, will at worst cost me a couple of bucks a month if there are lots of requests (I’m thinking spamming etc; I don’t expect my readership to be that large!).

I also used Route53 and transferred my domain hosting over. Pretty easy, although it gave me some messages about my current provider having to approve it etc. which in the end I suspect is a just half generic warning for some other registries that require that. Route53 wasn’t the cheapest registrar I’d found here, but for ease of management, I thought I’d just keep it all together.

The one thing I’ll note is to keep an eye on your email. They send you info and anything you need to do which may not always be obvious on the console.

SaferHomes.nz

After randominsanity.net.nz being so easy, I planned to so saferhomes.nz the same way. And then I hit the real world.

The easier part first: instead of the Route53 hosting of the domain records, I used the inbuilt DNS part of Lightsail which as best I can tell has no particular additional charge beyond the Lightsail plan I was on. Same general result but different management location. Cool, done.

And then I went to transfer the domain.

Despite .nz having been commonplace for New Zealand for a couple of years now, it seems Route53 does not support this top-level domain (the support .co.nz, .org.nz, .net.nz, but plain old .nz). Gandi, the registrar AWS state they use supports it, but AWS themselves don’t. Bugger.

At first, I thought I must be doing something wrong, but after a while, I’d found numerous forum posts asking AWS when they would support it, right back from when it first became available, with no commitment beyond “it’s on our backlog”. Amazon’s own documentation, when you dig deep enough, has a list of the TLD’s (Top Level Domains) that they support and .nz is not listed.

So, there goes my plan of keeping it all together. In the end, I have moved the registration to Domains4Less and then just entered the AWS name servers for the domain into the records. Not ideal, but it seems to be working well.

Email

The email was much easier in the end. I actually had saferhomes.nz using Google’s GSuite already so I left it where it was.

For randominsanity.net.nz, my initial thought was that I would just find a way to forward it all to a Gmail account I currently tie my personal address in with. However, until now, I’d been basically using a full email account on my ISP network, with Gmail just grabbing email using POP and sending to that user using SMTP. Given I wanted to kill that mailbox, that wasn’t going to work.

I probably spent a couple of hours looking at solutions. Ideally just finding somewhere that’d charge me bugger all to do a blind mail relay for my domain, but that wasn’t really a service in wide supply. I looked at Amazon services, using their Simple Email Service which short of using a lot of work (S3 buckets and Lambda functions) probably wasn’t going to do what I wanted nicely anyway.

In the end, I just bit the bullet and setup another GSuite account for it. It costs me $5 to have my mailbox. I could have used Amazon’s WorkMail feature for a similar price but it didn’t look as polished as Gmail/GSuite so I erred on staying with the option I was familiar with since I had no intention of moving the saferhomes email.

Summary

Well, that’s really it at present. Maybe there won’t be a part 3…

In short, this is what I’ve ended up with:

RandomInsanity.net.nz

• Domain Registration: Amazon Route53
• Domain Hosting: Amazon Route53
• Website Hosting: Amazon Lightsail
• Email Hosting: Google GSuite

SaferHomes.nz

• Domain Registration: Domains4Less
• Domain Hosting: Amazon Lightsail
• Website Hosting: Amazon Lightsail
• Email Hosting: Google GSuite

SSL was a bit of a mission, and I can’t say I’m 100% on exactly which bit resolved it but it can be done. Basically following various Bitnami documentation.

Outbound email required configuration of SMTP credentials in WordPress but once that was done it worked fine, for what I needed anyway.

Hopefully, someone might find this something resembling interesting, and maybe even helpful. I’ll try to provide updates as the journey continues or as my setup evolves (I may still try moving everything to a more home-grown EC2/RDS type setup, but we’ll see how we go).

The post Migrating WordPress to AWS Lightsail (and other related changes) – Part 2 appeared first on Random Insanity.

Besides the obvious Broadband, I’ve got 2 websites (well, more than 2 but only 2 I’m going to keep alive) and a number of domains, as well as some email hosting. Moving all this has been a bit of a mixed journey and although it’s still going on, I thought I’d start putting together a bit of the story, challenges, lessons, solutions etc. for anyone else who is looking at moving such things for themselves.

After getting part way through this article, I realised how long it was getting, so I’m going to break it down into parts. Part 1 will be websites, part 2 will cover the rest.

TL;DR

I moved 2 WordPress sites to Amazon Lightsail, mail to Google GSuite, and domains are still a work in progress with domain hosting being a mix of AWS Route53 and Lightsail, and domain registration being AWS Route53 and Domains4Less. Do you want to know why? Read!

The story

After 11 years at my current work, I’d just tended to keep all the things I could in our systems. Partially because I built said systems so had great control/flexibility/etc. and partially because, for the most part, it cost me nothing. So as part of leaving, rather than keeping everything in place and paying their advertised rates, I decided a move was necessary!

For the purpose of this post, I’ll concentrate on 2 domains. The first one “randominsanity.net.nz” (AKA, this site) is my personal stuff, blog, email, basic. The second is a business domain “saferhomes.nz” (A company I’m a co-founder of). For both, we’ll look at domain, website and email (not necessarily in that order mind you).

Websites

As the generally larger part of the project, I started looking for a new web host first off. Both the sites I’m dealing with are WordPress, currently hosted using Plesk on my employers’ web server.

I looked at various locations, both web hosting and straight out VPS, with varying cost and resources. I liked the VPS idea in that I could probably just run both sites (they are pretty low traffic) on one server; I’ve certainly got the sysadmin skills to run the server and manage all that so why pay for someone else doing that stuff! In the end VPS still looked like it would end up more expensive than just outright hosting in many instances.

Due to already evaluating AWS for another project recently, this was one of the places I looked, almost out of pure curiosity more than serious intent. While the pricing on AWS can be quite hard to piece together, best I could tell I could probably do what I needed within their free tier (at least for the first year) and costs wouldn’t be tooooo huge beyond that.

So, I could setup a server on EC2, run a MySQL database on RDS, and even do a bunch of my DNS on Route53 (we’ll talk more about DNS soon). Appealing, not overly difficult concept, and just enough new stuff to make it an interesting challenge. However, as one might imagine, with less than 4 weeks of employment left, a job hunt in the works, a mortgage and all the other bills one acquires as part of being an adult, I came to the conclusion that I wanted something a little faster and easier, with less thinking.

Still, AWS had strong appeal as I wanted to do more there in future. Then I spotted Amazon Lightsail. Almost a sub-service of AWS, accounts linked but designed to be nicely functional for those not dealing with the normal AWS console. Lightsail touts a low-end plan of $5 (US) per month and the ability to deploy a pre-configured WordPress site, which I took an educated guess I’d be able to migrate my current sites overtop of without too much effort.

So Lightsail it was.

I started with my personal domain as a guinea pig first (experiments are rarely good on business domains). A new AWS account was easy to setup, and jumping over to Lightsail I had a generic WordPress site going in about 5 minutes flat.

Lightsail gives you a dedicated IP address for your container (I consider their deployed site/server as a container – maybe I’ve just been playing in the docker space for too long) which you can use to access your website before sorting any DNS; a nice way to be able to prep the site before migration.

The first gotcha I realised in Lightsail is that although you get a public IP, it’s my understanding (from reading rather than having his the issue) is that the IP they allocate is dynamic, which I assume means either that a new IP may get allocated of you restart the container, or (and this is probably more likely) that it’s a little like EC2 where you could kill and redeploy the container but you’d lose the ability to get the same IP again. While the latter wasn’t a major likelihood for me, in case it was the former, I made use of the easy spot in Lightsail to create a Static IP which I can then point to my container and use henceforth. A quick note for young players, while the Static IP is free (for up to 5), it will get charged if you don’t have it attached to a container!!

Okay, so I have WordPress running and accessible… now how to get all my content across?

I had a quick go with WordPress’s inbuilt export/import. That moved all my posts across just fine, but then the theme I was using no longer seemed to be available from WordPress. Cool, copy the theme directory over… nope, seems I’d done some customisation of the theme which I couldn’t recall, so the theme looked quite different out of the box.

Right, plan B (there’s always a plan B, and as is often the case, it was Google). Rather than reinvent the wheel, a quick Google confirmed I wasn’t the first to have this mission (Shock!), nor the first to document a little of the journey for the benefit of others. You can find the article I read here, but basically there is lovely plugin for WordPress (All-in-One WP Migration – love the creative naming) that does a really good and complete site export/import. Install the plugin at each end and follow your nose!

The one trick I did find during export was that since I was keeping the same domain, under the advanced options on the export screen I selected “Do not replace the email domain” as well as “Do not export spam comments”. Other than that it was plain sailing!!

Saferhomes.nz was pretty much identical. Although, while I chose the advanced export options on my first site, when it came to the saferhomes domain I forgot them and it caused a sufficient headache on the other end that I actually went back and re-did the export with them selected. If you’re changing domain I don’t expect it’ll be such an issue but it certainly helped for just moving the domain to another).

With saferhomes.nz though I have an additional challenge. Under Plesk I had it using Letsencrypt to automatically get and keep an SSL certificate up-to-date. Lightsail’s WordPress has no such easy feature, and it uses a custom server setup for WordPress and Apache from Bitnami. SSL is a must on this site, so I’m currently working on getting Letsencrypt running in this new landscape. It’s a work in progress, but I’ll ether make a new post on how I succeeded (yes, I’m backing myself to crack it) once I finish.

Other than that, 2 websites running on Lightsail and accessible via IP!

Wow, that’s a lot. Stay tuned (or go look) for parts 2 and probably 3 in due course.

The post Migrating WordPress to AWS Lightsail (and other related changes) – Part 1 appeared first on Random Insanity.

Basically, as some of you who know me or have read other bits of my blog will know, I subscribe to Hulu (among other services) which is a geo-restricted service locked down to the US.

Geo-restriction is pretty easy to overcome. As I mention in another article, there are a bunch of services out there to assist. I’ve used Unblock-US in the past but currently use MediaHint. It works great and has a browser plugin that helps when on the go (not at home with my permanent setup). However, Hulu requires a little more than looking like you’re accessing it from the US; it requires a US credit card also!

For around a year now I’ve been using Entropay, which gives you a virtual US credit card to run pre-pay. It also worked great for the last year (with the exception that my NZ based bank requires disabling some security to top it up as they deem it a suspicious site), however, the card has now hit its expiry date so I’ve gone to Hulu to update the card info… only to find it no longer accepts it! I’ve recently also had a go at setting up a US iTunes account with the same issue that iTunes wouldn’t accept the Entropay card as US based. I’ve no idea why, or what they use to determine such things, but it just didn’t work!

So, I’ve done some looking around to see what other services are out there. The list has certainly grown since I first looked! This time, I’m having a go at Payoneer. I decided I’d document a little of how it goes to help other people evaluating it also.

Thursday 11 – Morning

So far I’ve signed up on the Payoneer site and handed over a bunch of detail. It expects that you’re not in the US so you don’t have to fudge details for any of that, and apparently, they are now sending me a physical US issued MasterCard! They offer a service to help people receive payments from all over the world, and have a couple of options on how to make use of received funds – and this is one of them.

They ask for some “government issued ID” – I’ve given them a drivers licence. Although they took this detail and rapidly approved my account request, after I topped up the card (basically by requesting a payment from myself for some fictional service) I got another email asking for info on my business (service or product based, refund policy, website etc.) as well as a scanned copy of my licence. If I hadn’t heard enough good stuff about this place I’d be a little dubious already, but I’m confident enough that it’s legit that I’ve provided the necessary detail and am awaiting the deposit of my “received funds” in my US account.

I requested a payment of $20USD as the “seller”, and as the “buyer”, I had the option to either pay the transaction fee myself on top of the $20 or deduct it from the seller’s payment. I chose the former as it doesn’t really matter given I’m both parties, but for reference it was $0.62 fee, which I assume is some percentage calculation of the payment amount.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten so far. Now we wait… Or I wait anyway because you probably don’t care THAT much!

The post Payoneer – An internet payment journey – Part 1 appeared first on Random Insanity.

Everyone comes into your life for a reason. It may not always be the reason we thought or might have hoped, but there is a reason regardless. The best we can do is enjoy what we can and treasure that person while we can, as we never know when for some reason they will stop being a part of your life. Treasure today, treasure your friends, whether they fit in your life the way you wanted or not. Life’s too short to dwell on what might have been.

It’s been a busy few weeks.

Last weekend was 3 days with fire service doing first aid for the National Mountain Biking Champs at Eskdale. 2 days of downhill and the third cross country. Not too much carnage but lots of trekking up and down hills. It was fun but killed a weekend really well!

This week back to work, late nights, 19:30/20:30 and even 21:30 out of the office. It’s been nice and productive after hours when the distractions have gone. I suspect pretty soon the delivery boys for a number of the local places will not have to be told which door to come to… possibly not a good thing but oh well. We’ve got another developer on board which is great, not only in terms of work load but also to bounce ideas off, to look over code, to share our varying knowledge in the whole “two heads are better than one” style. He may be a junior developer but there’s definitely room for us both to learn stuff off each other, and it’s good having a second person trying to explain stuff to the non-coders! =P

A couple of weekends back was the wellington road trip and Homegrown. Wow what a blast. Homegrown was great, lots of great music, possibly a little more to drink than ideal but certainly not overboard lol. And an awesome time with good people; could have spent longer but all good things come to an end. =/

This weekend has been pretty quiet which has been nice too. Some work, some working on my own website, some time watching movies, and of course a good time with friends.

Progress on the website is good, functionality wise at least. I’m no designer, never claimed to be, and it’s showing… I have an idea of what I want to achieve with the look, but the current design just isn’t working I think. Might have to pull in some external advice. I’ve cut the content areas down for now, as much to concentrate on the bits I want most to get live (aka the photography galleries).

On top of all this, I’ve been looking into the WSO2 suite (http://wso2.org). It’s more than I can motivate my brain to explain at present, but lets just say it’s got potential application for something I’m interested in. For those who have too much time on your hands and a clue what SOA is, go have a read!

I’m sure that I’ve missed plenty of details, and the ones I’ve put in are nice and random and probably don’t make too much sense lol. But oh well, that’s a bit for now!

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The insurance debacle…

Those who read my last post may recall the “fun” I had with a lady deciding her car should be part of mine. Well, after the lovely letter I sent into my insurance company (at their behest) detailing my side of the incident, I followed up a week or so later just to confirm they had it for a start, and to see if any progress had been made.

While on the phone, a nice guy dug through their shared email system in which my submission should have supposedly arrived (it hadn’t been logged on my file yet) and found it. Equally, no responses from the other party had been logged, but he said if I didn’t mind holding he’d call her insurance company and see if they had got it from her yet. So after about 15 minutes of being on hold he came back to me reporting that the other insurance company hadn’t got their clients version back yet but after reading my submission both my insurance and hers agreed that she was in the wrong and even before they got her side. So my excess was waved and I finally got my car repaired!

I didn’t ever really think that they would side with her but I was surprised that even her insurance decided she was in the wrong without her side! I must have made a compelling argument lol.

I did finally get a copy of her side when she submitted it and I can see how she may have managed to convince herself that I was at fault, but it was one of those stories that if you started asking questions about any of the points it would have unraveled nicely. At the end of the day the accident happened because of the way in which she introduced herself to the existing flow of traffic. ’nuff said. Cheers State!

Music…

Those of you who know me will know that I love my music! At the moment I’m listening to “The A Team” by Ed Sheeran. It’s a really sad song once you listen to the lyrics but damn catchy tune.

I also imported “A State of Trance Year Mix 2011” from europe. Ordered around christmas and arrived shortly into January. Cost me all of about $35 including shipping for a 2 CD album and it’s been played over and over so I think it was a bargain and money well spent lol.

People…

I’ve met a few new and interesting people already this early in the year. Some more interesting than others, and some particularly who are helping encourage me to try new things and forced me to think about some things that I have avoided for quite some time. This is a good thing for the record (I think…). I’m told I’ve been smiling more recently too lol.

Between road trips and spa baths it’s been a lot of fun and relaxation with new friends; not entirely stress free but certainly enough to tip the balance back the right way.

There has of course been the sad farewell to someone who while wasn’t a blood relation certainly rated as family to me. Farewell Grandpa, I’d like to think we celebrate your life will lived. You are and will be missed by many.

Speaking of Road Trips…

Well last month saw a trip to Auckland and Hamilton for a weekend (one night in each) involving live music and possibly a little too much to drink. Definitly too much driving in a fairly short period of time but well worth it over all. Good to catch up with friends too.

This coming Friday sees another trip starting too. Off to Wellington with one of those new and interesting people for Homegrown. There’s actually a small group of us going so should be an awesome experience and again good to get out and do something different! Who know’s what will eventuate…

Work…

Well we all know that work is one of those things that just kinda has to happen, but lately I’m pleased to say there’s been some improvement after all the uncertainty and things are looking up. Certainly enjoying work a little more again. And it’s helped by us all having moved offices much closer to home and town (pretty much anywhere away from smelly Whakatu would have been an upgrade!).

They jury is still out on how things will go long term but things are showing more promise than they have in some time!

Website…

Another thing one or two people in the world may have noticed is that my main website is currently replaced by a holding page as I build its replacement. The old one was an experiment in CSS based design and the ability to have the same content displayed significantly differently through the use of alternate style sheets.

That was all well and good but it’s rather outdated now and with more of my photos going public with the website URL in the watermark it seems a good idea to revamp it into a more professional front. The new design is simplistic and clean.

While the basic bits are done I’m writing a new gallery engine to display some of my pics; a mix of open source JS based popups with a bit of maths to get some gallery thumbnail pages with some more iterating layout (if all goes to plan). It’s been slow going with lots of other stuff on as well but hopefully something new to go live not too far off!

Anyway, time to start on dinner (yummy pork roast) so maybe I might make it back to another update some time soon and fill in the many things I no doubt missed! =P

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Friday the 22nd of July 2011 was a slow rainy day. As we do from time to time, some of us at work decided that being a rainy Friday, it made it a perfect candidate for fish’n’chips, so after doing the rounds for orders I placed a call to the shop and then headed into Clive to pick it all up. The rain had eased and was more of a drizzle now, so while still wet and not fun to stand in, visibility was pretty good for the short drive. After picking up the order I jumped in the car and headed for the office again.

Southbound just into the 100km stretch of SH2 I started to accelerate as I came onto the first small straight, and noticed a white car on the opposite side of the road, but pointing in the same direction I was with its nose nudged slightly to the oncoming lane. It looked like it was parked, except that it was too close to the road, especially as it was facing the wrong direction. And sure enough as I got closer it pulled across the oncoming lane and tried to pull into my lane… the only problem being that my car was occupying that space already! The white car hit mine, we got the cars off the road, inspected the damage, exchanged details etc, and as the cars were both still drivable, went our separate ways. While I felt pretty pissed off at it all, I was glad at least that she hadn’t tried to say it was my fault and hoped that things could just get repaired and back to normal.

Upon arrival back at the office, the rest of the team started on lunch, while I spent the better part of 20 minutes on the phone with my insurance company (State), relaying the information I had collected from the driver of the other vehicle, and giving a detailed description of what happened. This included the drivers comment that she had “misjudged” how close I was and that she had intended to move over to the southbound shoulder, wait for me to pass and then pull out behind me. Unfortunately while on the phone, the lady I was speaking to had tried the cell number without response so a quick effort to get her admission of responsibility wasn’t going to play nice, but State would continue to work on getting in touch with her. The lady also assured me that as I had Full cover plus hire car cover with them, that while my car was being repaired they could arrange a hire car. Great, wonderful, glad to know the dosh I fork out each week might actually pay off!

A short while after I got off the phone with the insurance company I took the car into one of their preferred repairer’s for assessment which included nothing more (and I mean NOTHING more) than a couple of photos of the damage; no questions, no further investigation to see if it was more than panel damage etc. But that’s fine, I figure they know what they are doing and I’m certainly no mechanic to question their process for such an initial assessment.

So everything should be good… In a perfect world at least.

My concern was raised the following Tuesday when mid morning I received a call on my cell asking to speak to … the driver of the other car! After a bit of back and forth, I established that they were returning a call she had made to them, and somehow the cell number had got mixed up by the return caller. I thought that while the mix up was a little concerning, at least they were getting to talk to her to get things moving along further. Silly me!

Tuesday afternoon, after hearing nothing I phoned the insurance company again to enquire about the status of my claim, only to be told that the driver of the other car was not admitting liability for the accident and that both she and I would receive in the post some paperwork asking us to give a written statement and a diagram. At this point I started to get a little more pissed off; I was driving a car that I couldn’t open the drivers door properly on, and that had developed a lovely little shake in the stearing that resulted in me deciding that I wasn’t willing to drive it to Wellington the coming weekend for fear it would crap out while in transit somewhere far from home!

So on the 1st of August the letter finally arrived and today (the 2nd) I filled it all out and emailed it to them this evening. The more I wrote, the more pissed off with it all I got. Excess aside, they still haven’t got my car fixed; what would happen if it wasn’t drivable? What if there is as yet unseen damage that is going to result in additional damage or failure, of the steering for example! I decided to put it all on here and vent my frustration to the world. I’ll also be asking some rather pointed questions about other aspects of my policy to the insurance company to see what they have to say, and ultimately will decide if I want to stay with them or if I want to change.

The following is the email I sent to them and the accompanying picture. For now I won’t put any identifiable details about the other party in here, but who knows, that may change depending on how irritated I get before this whole thing is over!

To whom it may concern,

The following statement and attached pictures are in reply to the letter dated 26^th July 2011 from <The name of their “Claims Consultant”> requesting further information in relation to claim <Claim Number>.

At approximately 12:30, Friday the 22nd of July I was travelling south bound from Clive returning to work in Whakatu. The weather was overcast and had been raining heavily, however there was only a light rain and good visibility at the time. As a matter of habit I had my headlights on to increase my visibility to others with the sporadic rain that had been coming.

When the accident occurred I had transitioned from the 70km/hr to the 100km/hr speed zone and started to increase my speed as I came into a straight section of road. As I entered the straight I noticed a white car on the opposite side of the road facing southbound (the wrong direction for the side the vehicle was on). Once I gotten closer that car began to move forward onto the road, crossing the oncoming lane and heading for my lane. I was forced to move left off the road and did so as much as I could without moving into the muddy siding and risking total loss of traction; I also applied the brakes and sounded the horn as I did so. The white car continued and impacted my drivers side front door and front panel; it also bent my wing mirror in.

After both vehicles had come to a stop, the white car was in the southbound lane and had pushed my car off the road even further. In order to avoid a further accident I moved my car left and forward to allow both cars to get off the road. The driver of the white car seemed very concerned and apologetic. We inspected the damage to both cars; I’d had difficulty opening the drivers side door on my car and notable bending had occurred on the impacted panels as well as damage to the front drivers side tyre. Her vehicle showed little noticeable damage however the bright white paint and overcast day made it hard to distinguish any minor deformities that had resulted in the accident.

At the scene, she apologised and explained that she had misjudged how close I was when she pulled out, and that her intention had been to pull her car across both lanes and onto the south bound shoulder, allowing my car to pass before pulling out behind me. It seemed clear from her comments that she acknowledged that it was her misjudgement that had resulted in her hitting my car and I took this as to an acknowledgement of liability.

Due to the apparent agreement on the cause and the fact no one was injured and that the damage appeared relatively minor (both cars were still drivable without significant risk) I opted not to ask Police to respond.

After exchanging details and inspecting my car to ensure it was not likely to do too much more damage driving the remaining few minutes to work, I returned to the office and called State to report the accident. Logs indicate this call was made at 12:42pm.

After loading the claim, I took the vehicle to Napier Collision Repair for an assessment, during which they took photos of the visible damage. Since then having had to drive my car in its current state I’ve also noticed that there is now a shake in the steering that I can only attribute to being shunted in the side by another vehicle. Access to the drivers compartment is still restricted also, due to being unable to properly open the drivers side door.

On the morning of Tuesday the 26th I received a call on my cellphone asking to speak to <the other driver>, which is the driver of the car that hit mine. There had obviously been some confusion as someone at State was apparently returning <her> call and had for some reason mixed my number up in the process. That afternoon after hearing nothing back and growing more concerned as to what other details may have gotten confused, I decided to follow up with State at which point I was told that <she> was not admitting liability and that although I had given a statement and description over the phone I would now be required to give one in writing along with a diagram.

The accompanying diagram shows the relative position and movement of the two vehicles both before impact and at the point of impact, with vehicle A representing my vehicle, and vehicle B representing the other vehicle. Both vehicles were pointing in a southbound direction with vehicle A approaching in motion along the southbound lane, and vehicle B beginning from a stopped position facing the wrong direction on the northbound shoulder. From here, vehicle B moves across the northbound lane and merges into the front right hand side of vehicle A (my car). At the time I was traveling somewhere under 100km/hr as I had only just entered the 100km/hr zone and following a brief period of acceleration had started to slow my speed (prior to reaching 100km/hr) as a result of recognition this hazard unfolding.

Please feel free to contact me if you wish to clarify any further details. I trust that this provides sufficient information to allow you to make an informed decision as to the liability for the accident allowing the claim to progress.

 

Kind Regards,

<me>

So what do you all think? Had the same trouble yourself? Feel free to name and shame (or complement if appropriate) your insurance company, as I’ll be shopping around again in the near future!

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As well as the usual updates to base code and tiding up of plugins, I’ve now hooked things up so that hopefully this will now bombard facebook with whatever I post as well, just to help the couple that tend to read things on here in the loop. =P

Finally got the new passport today (yes, a rather essential piece of the puzzle). Pitty it’s only valid for 5 years (my last one ran out in Jan 2009 but had had a 10 year life). Finalise tickets on tuesday.

It should be a great trip, with among other things some great photo opportunities to be had on a 2 week bus trip covering a pile of Aussie along the way. Not to mention the exciting/scary/confusing prospect of meeting what can be best described as meeting up with some long lost family.

But anyway, more to come… maybe. Lets see if this facebook plugin works or not!

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