For those who are concerned about people who have been a reported member and have been pending in there for a while - good news, it's been cleared out!

Hopefully the Reported Members function will be fixed fully so that it does not break down again.

I saw The Simpsons Movie on Saturday with a couple of friends to cheer me up. My hot water system died on the weekend - not pretty, especially when it is winter!!

The Simpsons Movie was really good I thought, even though I notice it is getting some mixed reviewed (ranging from 3-4.. which is good..) but I think that's because people put too much expectation of the movie.

If you are content with just having an extra long Simpsons episode that you pay to watch instead of watching it for free on the TV without placing too much expectations, you'll really enjoy it.

I thought the animation style was quite good, it's amazing how it's all/mostly hand drawn and not so computerised like movies are nowadays.

It's also amazing that the voice actors can twist/contort their voices into so many characters voices. It's incredible!

I thought I'd take this opportunity to share with you what bugs are currently fixed (hopefully for good!)

1. Some people who had children under the age of 1 didn't have their child's age appearing. It should now appear as eg 6 months old.
2. The bug of other peoples photos mysteriously appearing in other people's photo album has been fixed.

ps-kind thanks to the animations group. I'm not sure why hermy's pics aren't moving but everyone else's is.....

I've just been reading Izzy's blog about her and her twins which were born recently. It sounds quite tough having to deal with twins.

I would imagine it would be quite a tough decision to have to choose which baby to deal with if both of them need a feed or both of them are crying at the same time and no one else is there to help you with. Although I suppose you could alternate between them, but it'd be hard to keep track of whose turn is next for what thing!

I admire those parents who cope with twins or triplets... or imagine even that couple who had those octuplets! Now that's tough having to figure out which of the 8 to deal with first!

The past few weeks were relatively quiet in terms of annoyances - that I know of any way!

The biggest issue over the past few weeks has reared it's head again in Q&A - it's Privacy. People are concerned about their privacy on Minti. As I have suggested to the people who have asked me about this, you are in control what appears and what does not appear on the internet. And thus, you are responsible and in control for what appears on your Minti home page. Some people don't mind putting pics of themselves and their family up on the net, some people do. For those who are concerned about their private details being online, I would suggest the following things:

1) Using an alias - I assume most of you would use an alias an not put your full name on Minti

2) If you are concerned that your childrens names are being found on Google or Yahoo or MSN, then change it to an alias as well.. such as "Missy 1", "Angel", "Little Devil", etc.

3) Don't give out your personal details that easily unless you trust/are comfortable that person - just like in real life

* The Duplications also reared it's head again - duplicated comments, photos, etc. On a related note, it does seem like people can report and re-report things they disagree with. I don't think there will be a fix for this soon, as reporting should only be done where it is really needed.

* Friends Patch - yes, I am aware that it still hasn't been fixed yet. Please be patient while we go through all our bugs.

OTHER
* For those who are Safari and Opera users - we recommend that you use another browser such as FireFox or Internet Explorer. Unfortunately we cannot do anything about supporting Safari and Opera as the software we use for some reason it not Safari or Opera friendly.

I notice that there's a fun, fast growing group on Minti called Any Sort of Questions for me, which I recommend people to visit. The questions and answered can be told by any one.

Some of the fun questions include what is your favourite drink-liqueur, where would you like to go on holiday to, and what would you be doing if you weren't on Minti right now.

Recently I posted up a question in Q&A about if you could only teach your child one thing, what would it be at http://www.minti.com/questions-and-answers/discussion/438902.

There were a lot of really great answers, and I notice a common theme seemed to be love, compassion and respect. I suppose the challenge is probably to be able to teach them these ideals and to always act it out.

I notice over the past few weeks that people have been trying to delete photos that probably have been posted up elsewhere like in blogs and things like that.

This is a bit unfortunate as this might contribute to the amount of pictures with the ugly large x's with the message "you cannot see this picture" or "you are forbidden to see this picture" or something like that.

Some people have complained because they are wondering where the photos in the blogs/lounges, etc have gone to.

So my main tip is: don't report/delete a photo unless you really have to.

I have chosen lightbee to be our next Minti Featured Member! Congratulations lightbee.

Please visit lightbee to congratulate her on being the next Minti Featured Member. You can read her acceptance speech/interview here.

People who have already been a featured member:

1. Izzy
2. hrs2004
3. TheMentorMom
4. cheleinkal
5. wildrose
6. lindterbean
7. Tracey
8. pfallerj
   
9. mcm
10. MomtobeKim
11. jenlemen
12. Kristen
13. Missed - unlucky no. 13!
14. breannababy
15. cookclan
16. Jessgore
17. Frontier
18. Hermy

As some of you may be aware, I am/have been collecting data of what the annoyances on Minti are. This weekend we had the slowness of Minti for some reason, which thankfully is now is being dealt with again. Hopefully this time whatever it was that was slowing Minti down will get faster again.

Other than this annoyance, the top spot is now duplication - of photos, comments, etc. This probably has something to do with the system, or possible someone pressing "ok" or "save" more than once accidentally.

Other annoyances:

* Pictures - the GIF's (aka moving or glittery pictures) aren't moving or being glittery.

Also, in regards to the pictures it seems people are a little annoyed about the FCKEditor system because it is too tedious. I actually have to agree with you on this one, I also feel that it was a bit too tedious to upload.

I also had a complaint that we should have a delete button instead of having to go through each one and report them. I understand that the reason why we report them instead of having a delete button is because someone might go through your pictures and find one that they feel is unsuitable - so it is better that we just keep this voting system. However, saying this, I do recall that this issue is being thought about more.

* Change of email address - the personal details in your settings are unable to be changed for some reason. Please be aware that you are currently unable to change your email and password for some odd reason.

* Voting - people are unable to vote on people in Q&A when they comment. For those who are experiencing this problem, I would say that it is your browser (internet explorer, etc) problem. Please check whether your browser accepts javascript (automatically, not on demand).

* Refer-a-friend button is not working at the moment - or randomly works for some people, but only after a while.

* Content being put into the wrong place - as Minti grows bigger and bigger, someone suggested that it would be nice if we could keep the advice list as advice, etc and migrate text that is in the wrong category.

As discussed in Q&A a while ago, people did want to just put things in Q&A instead of their blogs or groups because people take a little longer to answer questions, so unfortunately this can't be changed unless the community decides to actively do something about this.

* The Rude Word Filter - yes, the word sex and kill are indeed "rude words" according to the filter. It may be annoying, but it is there for a good reason. To find out more, please visit http://www.minti.com/groups/36894/Tech-Help-Forum/blog/432684/

This photo was taken last year in Singapore at Fort Canning. Fort Canning is a park where they have a cooking school, spice garden, and it is also a place where people can register for marriage - hence the love hearts. Isn't that cool?

I was just reading TheMentorMom's blog at http://www.minti.com/members/thementormom/blog/ and she seems to have some great ideas of what to do in the summer with your kids during the holidays.

It includes a Shaving Cream Activity (just don't tell your other half you stole their shaving cream!), water activities, left over cereal box activities and more.

i think some of these things can be done in both the summer and winter holidays though. I might even try them out one day. Hey, I'm a big kid, don't look at me that way!

I've received a few emails over the past few days from various people about the voting issue.

I would like to remind you (in a friendly way ) that voting is just part of the fun of Minti. Do not take it personally if someone has voted you low, medium or high - or no one votes on something you have typed at all.

Voting and ranking is for fun, and not to create huge debates over. Minti is not a popularity contest, always having excellently rated comments or advice, and being in the top 10 of Minti does not mean that you are the number 1 parent out of all parents in the world in real life.

In real life, we all face people who do not like what we say - whether it be our children rebelling against what we are saying, to Politicians who we disagree with what they are saying and doing.

Just like in real life, we are allowed to judge or vote in our minds whether we think what someone is saying is good or bad. For example we tell people to do what X says because it's good, but some people will say that what X says is total rubbish. Some people will be neutral about X's statement.

Let people vote however they want to. Do not be afraid to put up advice, questions, blogs, etc on what you want to say. In the end, if you wrote something and truly believe and act through in what you have written, then that is all that really matters.

I stumbled upon Glubble which is a multi-user family-friendly browser. For those who do not know what a browser is, it's basically Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, etc.

Glubble turns FireFox into a multi-user, family browser. It is designed to create an internet world you can trust for young children.

It enables families to link their browsers together online to enable children to experience trusted surfing and searching on Google and Yahoo based on sites in the Glubble world's "white list". If a child clicks on a page that is not on the "white list" (ie it is potentially bad like porn, etc) then an email will be sent to the parent for the parent to approve whether it can go onto the child's good, white list or not.

I think this pre-approved collection of white list is quite important especially for young children going around on the internet, to make the internet more user-friendly.

And you won't have to worry about your child going onto the wrong website.