Try, try again. But after failing 775 times, perhaps it is time to rethink your plans. A South Korean woman has failed a driver’s license test 775 times. But is still trying, despite spending close to $7,000 in fees in her failed attempts.
Cha Sa-soon, 68, has been trying since 2005 to pass the written portion of the test to get a licence, but she has so far failed to get the 60 percent required to clear it.
“I’ve looked up some guidebooks to get a driver’s licence, and they were saying it takes at most five years to get this,” Cha said in North Jeolla province, where farmers on tractors or cows can be just as common on country roads as motor vehicles.
“It’s already been four years, so I might pass the test next time. That’s what I hope for.”
Something tells me that Cha Sa-soon would not lose interest in her iPod apps.
She should move to the US. She woulod be a shoo-in for a license in most places here.
Well, the latest short list for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year has been published. We have, of course, reported on the Diagram Prize before. (We are still hiding from some women and the squids are still riled up.) Personally, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard are pulling for the dark horse candidate: Strip and Knit with Style.
The shortlist for the annual Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year has been unveiled by The Bookseller. Six titles, with subjects ranging from fromage frais to strip knitting, make up the shortlist for the hotly contested award, which is now in its 31st year.
Horace Bent, The Bookseller magazine’s legendary diarist and custodian of the prize, said: “Never have I found it so problematic to pick a shortlist of just six. At a time when the economic climate is forbidding and cost-cutting companies are ten-a-penny, I’m proud to report that the British publishing industry has remained as stubborn in the face of change as ever.”
Philip Stone, a sales analyst at The Bookseller, added: “We received a huge number of entries this year and the debate was furious as to which would be included on the shortlist. Six seems such a cruelly low number given titles such as Excrement in the Late Middle Ages and All Dogs Have ADHD were rejected.
That last title was rightfully rejected. There is no sign of ADHD from the Crabitat staff puppies when food is involved. Trust us. S\
So, go vote for your favorite (which really should be Strip and Knit with Style. We’re just saying). Tell ‘em Blue Crab Boulevard sent you.
Since I’ve been struggling with tech things the past day, it seems fitting that my first post after the restoration of the Crabitat be about tech things. (Well, it’s the first post not dealing with the crash or the aftereffects, at any rate.)
It seems that all those really cool applications people can buy for their iPhones and iPods from the Apple App Store are only amusing for a very brief time. Like a day at most. Most of those cool, must have apps are abandoned by their purchasers after a day.
Just 30 percent of people who buy an iPhone application actually use it the day after it was purchased, according to Pinch Media, which analyzed over 30 million downloads from Apple’s App Store. And the numbers plunge from there: after 20 days, less than 5 percent of those who downloaded an application are actively using it. The drop-off is worse for free applications.
Talk about short attention spans.
There is some good advice for app developers in the article: Get your money up front. Depending on ad-driven income, given these statistics, is economic suicide.
Yesterday was not a great day. But the website is back up, although the domain name is changed until I can get bluecrabboulevard.com back in shape. There appear to be some problems with scripts on the main site. Unfortunately, I am not much with programming, so the .com domain may be offline for some time.
I don’t know if it was just cumulative errors that caused all the problems or if there was some kind of exploit hitting on a weakness. All I know is that it was a very stressful thing to deal with. Fortunately, I had some really excellent tech support today from the hosting company. They had to go in through the shell to move the database over here to this domain. Some 11,000 posts and 25,000+ comments were too much for the WordPress import feature.
For now, I’m sure there are busted links all over the place and there will probably be some things that are acting weird. But the logs show no slow SQL queries since about 9:47 this morning. That would be about the time I flipped the switch on the redirect to the .net domain.
I’ll be putting the place back together over the next few days. Right about now, I need some Advil. This hasn’t been fun.
UPDATE: The hosting company has just confirmed that the redirect worked and that the website is running fine with no errors. Now comes the hard part: fixing the old site to run again.
Then a new install of WordPress on a backup domain is working. There should be a redirect that takes you from bluecrabboulevard.com to this bluecrabboulevard.net installation. Please leave a comment if you did reach the site. I’m scrambling like heck to get this thing set up and running properly.
Humor, World news | Gaius February 21, 2009 | 
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