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Most of you know I live in Melbourne, which is in the state of Victoria where we have suffered an immense heatwave and along with massive bushfires with devastating results.  I know the news has been all over the world.

My husband and I live in a suburb 22kms southeast of Melbourne and our surrounding areas are safe from the fires, however the nearest grass fire was literally less than 15 mins away from our home only a couple of weeks ago.  Two of our daughters live closer to the hills and have had fires only a few minutes away from where they live but they have been safe. We have another daughter 3 hours north in horse country and a major fire is burning only about 15 mins away from her. We keep in touch regularly to make sure she is ok.  A friend of ours lives 90 mins further southeast from us and again, she has been in an area very close to a major bushfire and in fact, her small town had fires coming closer only a week ago.  However her town is now safe although they were on alert for several days.  We were in constant phone contact with her during that time.

So many have lost their homes, their lives, their livestock, crops, the list goes on.  Massive efforts in fund raising and collecting clothing, food, toiletries, household items, etc is taking place all over the country.  The funds raised are the highest I’ve ever known in a fund raising effort.  And firemen have flown over from other states and countries to assist in the firefighting which will continue for some time to come.

If you’re interested in learning about our city of Melbourne and keeping in touch with what’s happening, I have a blog named “Much About Melbourne“. Until yesterday it was housed at Blogger but I’ve now purchased the domain for it and shifted it to my server.  I invite you to come pay a visit from time to time.  And the photo I’ve used in the header is one I took in December 2007 when my husband and I were staying at the Crown Towers on the edge of the CBD. It’s looking over the Yarra River and towards the famous Flinders Street Train Station (the long yellow building almost centre).

Tags: by Kathie Thomas
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I have a sister going through a life challenge at the moment and I was thinking back to a time when I thought that my life was coming to an end too – not physically, but emotionally.  I didn’t know where I was headed.  I want to share with you the thoughts I shared with my sister, in the hope that it might encourage some of you too.

Late 1993/early 1994 before I began my business I worked for a pig of a man named George. He  had no respect for women.  I was engaged to be his Personal Assistant, set up his new office, help buy furniture and equipment and establish the business. He’d been flown over from another state by ‘daddy’ to establish an Eastern seaboard branch of their family business.

My thoughts were I would get 2 years experience in small business before branching out on my own but a few short months with George stripped me of all my confidence and I thought my abilities too. He was rude, demanding, lied, and was horrible. I’d drive into the car garage beneath the office building holding my breath till I could see if his car was there and then start breathing again when it wasn’t.  He’d accuse me of losing papers that I would find on his desk in a tray where I’d put them – he never apologised.  I was often in tears.

His wife was obviously terrified of him and I asked her one day why she put up with him. She was scared he would hear me – we only had a glass wall between our offices.  I ended up going to the doctor because I had all sorts of health problems and in the end the doc said to me ‘put up with it, or leave the job’.  So I decided to leave but when I went to give my notice the following day George told me that it wasn’t working out and he’d give me time to find another job. I told him fine, I’m leaving at the end of the week, I’ve got another job.  He was totally surprised. My new job?  My business.  I decided it was now or never and I’m glad I did.  I still wasn’t sure what or how it was going to happen but I decided that I didn’t want to find another job – I had to make my business work.

5 months later I bumped into a lady in an office downstairs from George’s and she asked me what we used to do all day?  I asked her why and she says there’s always yelling and screaming and George had gone through 5 more secretaries after me.  And here I was thinking that I’d not given it enough time to settle. He’d gone through 5 secretaries in 5 months – the amount of time I’d stuck it out with him. Do you think that lifted my spirits?

Use this time as a recovery time and a time for really exploring what you want to do with your life. What are your passions and dreams? What turns on a hot button for you? Is there something you’ve always wanted to do since you were a kid (doesn’t matter if there isn’t but it’s worth going back there to explore).

What I am doing today I have wanted to do all my life.  I didn’t know what exactly or how, but I always knew I wanted to run a business of my own.  I always knew I wanted control and didn’t want to have to answer to others.  I always knew I wanted to write. I just didn’t know what about, when or how. But it’s all come together.

Allow yourself to explore, dream, think, dare – let yourself and your mind go to places you haven’t allowed yourself for a long time.  You may find passions there to reignite and from that, new dreams and aspirations.  You may find you will gain new strength and courage and be able to  move forward and look forward to things again.

If you are going through ’stuff’ right now and can’t see a future or can’t see a light at the end of your tunnel, then take heart. We all go through it and I do mean ‘through it’. There is an end where the light comes back on, the tunnel ends and you can start to see a hope and a future again.

Sometimes it’s those dark tunnels that really help us to turn corners in our lives and even though we don’t feel it at the time, it is often a time of real learning – about ourselves and about others.

I pray and hope that you will be encouraged to spend time thinking and exploring so you can move forward again – and I would love to hear about it!

lack of confidence, dark tunnel, self-confidence, life challenge

Tags: Author's Thoughts, Women in Business, Work From Home by Kathie Thomas
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Are you getting one of these messages?  One of my clients was too with her Wordpress blog and nothing I did seemed to help the problem. Did lots of research, asked questions at forums and tried to restore her database once again – she’d already had it done previously.  Checked that the index.php file was in place.

We decided to set up a new webspace with a new domain elsewhere and download all the files via FTP and then upload them to the new webspace.  I was about 1/2 way through the upload when I discovered something.  The webspace I’d set up for her was almost full and I had heaps of files to go.

So I went back to her other webhost and had to do a search in her Account Management system to locate the information relating to her webhosting. Gotta love these hosts that don’t use cpanel for ease of use!  Anyway, I discovered that she had 296mb of files in what was supposed to be a 150mb allotment.  I think I found the problem!

I immediately filled out a support request to her host to find out if in fact I was correct and could they do a temporary disk space increase so we could do a full backup and run a database export.  I emailed my client and told her what I believed I’d found. She’d been told by her host that she’d been hacked and she better upgrade her Wordpress.

When I thought about it I remembered an incident a year or two earlier where a small website I was working on (25mbs) gave the same error message when I was trying to switch to a new template I’d uploaded and it took me awhile to figure out why that was.  I should have remembered.

So, if you are experiencing that same error message – before anything else – check your webspace allotment.  If it’s full, get it increased and then rerun whatever it is you’re doing.

Please let me know if this post has helped you as I did a search extensively looking for help on this issue and did not come across the possiblity of the webspace being full – hopefully I can save you the hours I put in to eventually find this out!

500 Internal Error, full webspace, server error, webpage won’t view

Tags: About Blogging, Technology, Wordpress by Kathie Thomas
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Regular readers will know I’ve been doing posts about various social networks. There’s a lot of good things about them but there are some things you need to be careful about too.

I was reading SpeakerNet News recently and saw a quote about the use of Facebook and Twitter and how you conduct yourself there. Now, may I say, that I think it is always important to conduct yourself professionally, or in the manner you would always want to be perceived.  No use in behaving one way in one place and different in another and not think anyone will notice.  They will.

Anyway, let me share with you what Rita Makana Risser has to say:

Peter Shankman reports on a speaker who twittered on his way to speak to FedEx in Memphis about how he would die if he had to live there. He showed up to a hostile audience! Be aware that what might seem cute or funny to your pals can be an insult to your audience or meeting planners. It might be a good idea to limit posts on politics to groups that share your political views. A political posting on Facebook by one of my friends for all her friends to see caused quite a bit of discussion ­ and not the good kind. Whether or not you want to use Facebook for business purposes, meeting planners and corporate types are looking at us wherever we show up, and making decisions based on what we post. You can have a business page on Facebook as well as a personal page, and that’s what I have done. Your personal page is for real friends and family; the business one is for everyone else.

I think what Rita says makes a lot of sense, don’t you?

Twitter, Facebook, behaviour, social networking

Tags: Facebook, Forums, Networking, Social Networks, Twitter by Kathie Thomas
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