A Gardening Day at School

This photo is in the Flickr selection, but I wanted to put it directly on the blog. I took this during a gardening day at my son‘s school. For some reason beyond me the photo caused an emotional reaction beyond intellectual definition for me. =30= 

Darn Dandelions!

There is one day a week I can cut the grass. This weekend there were two.

Last weekend we were in the middle of a nor'easter, not a time to cut grass. What I learned this week is, if you let the grass and accompanying foliage grow over a two week period, in the Spring, in New England, when it has rained a LOT, the dandelion stems take on a woody quality.

This is a quality not very compatible with the manual lawn mower’s method of cutting. You know the dandelions have evolved when they jam up the revolving lawn mower blade. What they don’t know is my neighbor has a tractor, with a military size engine. I will get those suckers next Saturday.

If it isn’t raining again.

Happy Sunday.
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You Would Think There'd Be More

Most of the blogging software that I have been installing of late does not come with a spellchecker, the way this, Thingamablog and w::bloggar do. In fact, I have been making entries, cutting them and pasting them into either bloggar or Thingamablog for spell checking.

I could have done it in Word, but I ususally have either of the two blog editors up and running and MS programs take almost as long to load as Adobe. Now, even though I am writing this in Thingamablog, the spellchecker I currently am running, Spell Catcher Plus seems to be adopting itself to my typing style.

This is a good thing.

I may keep it, I may not. That is the way with trial software. I also may have already paid for this. I will have to go and check my records but I think I may have evaluated it in a DOS version a long time ago. The interface looks familiar.
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New Famous Grazing Blog

Starting with last Friday's showing of the Revenge of Sith, reviewed by me at Field Grazing,

there were many monumental bits of media this week that crossed my path. NCIS killed off a character. Raymond is no more, Charmed went off like it was leaving but the news on the web was that it was coming back.

Sadly it would seem that Andromeda is no more. It had a Mary Tyler Mo0re style of character exit that I found to be out of character. I thought the blowing up of the entire Earth when they finally get there to be a bit much. It was probably more the frustration of the Writers with WB that caused the explosion than the touted tectonic interactions.

Then there was Enterprise, the "last" of the Star Trek series. I can't see that franchise staying away for too long. SG1 is still on there air, though a new crew is promised for next years with one of the Nelson brothers as the leader. The last thing he led was the TV version of the C~I~A.

That's all for now. This is an inaugural review for the the new Famous Grazing Blog, Serene Grazing, based on the Seridipity Blog software.. There is a SPIP and a Nucleus version in the works. Watch your local Famous Grazing for their opening announcements.
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Greasemonkey

I have installed Greasemonkey as an extension to Firefox. I am not exactly sure what it does yet and how Platypus! is related to it.

It's just that once or twice a month I go to the extensions page on the Mozilla site and add the extensions I thought might enhance the Firefox experience. Then I sometimes forget they're there until the need for them arise.

Others I have removed for slowing down either the loading of Firefox itself or the slowing of the machine in general. One I even took off because it added money to the writer without adding value to Firefox.

These are Thursday morning thoughts as I get ready to go off to work.
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DeadJournal

Following Leo LaPorte's recommendation, I went to DeadJournal.com to see what I could see. What I saw was a request for funds to sign up. I am not so profane that I need to pay money to join a blog host who encourages profanity and make you pay for the privilege.

The fact that it's a pay display site probably removes the portal from illegal sanctions based on comment.

=30=

Editors

Flashlights, large mugs, good pens and text editors. These are the four items I seem to have an awful lot of. The latest text editors I have down loaded from Snapfiles pro are called Syn Text Editor and GridinSoft Editor. The first is too busy when it opens and the second was obviously written by someone to whom Engish is not their first language. After quick review, I don' think either of these will become my default Notepad replacement.

For now I'll stick to EditPad Lite.
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Do you Blog?

In a conversation overheard on the elevatorat work on Friday one
coworker asked another, "I just read Greeenberg's article on Blogging, do you blog?"

Of course I do, but not about this job, I blog about skiing." "Skiing in May?" Came the reply. The rest of the conversation was lost when the doors opened and the skiblogger left the box.

Feeling bold, I asked the original questioner, "Do you blog?" "Huh!"?" Then I realized the ongoing paranoia about blogging that involves your company and let it drop.

The thought I carried away from the semi-encounter was if I blog,
about what do I? If not about anything in general, there must be a
focus. Then it occurred to me, I blog for the sake of blogging . No
more, no less. In this Famous
Grazing series, I blog mostly about blogging itself.

On some, especially the older ones like Belltowernews.com, I will
wonder off topic and click on the Muse box instead of the Blog box.

In the case of this message, I clicked both.

Do you blog, or just surf?
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WhatWIki?

I mentioned earlier that I was looking into the TidyWiki set up. It's a fun thing with which to play, but I am not sure if it's something I can use at the moment. I have loaded one up on the server and called it GrazingNotebookWiki. Another version is the Grazing Agenda. Kudos to those who have put the hours into this.

The lawn needs mowing, the oil needs to be changed and the rugs need to be vacuumed. WikiStuff is for the rare spare time for now.
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Sith sucith

I Just returned from seeing The Revenge of the Sith. As soon as the
shock of the overwhelming special effects wore off, I realized I had
just sat through a really bad "C" movie with D-Grade dialog. Cut to the
chase - everybody who wasn't in Chapter IV dies. There, I saved you the
price of admission.

It was beyond violent. Children are killed, living bodies are burned,

people are haphazardly decapitated for sport. If there is someone with
the stomach for it, I would like to know the body count of just the
living creatures who are killed, never mind the 'droids.

The space battles in the original series where like a first generation

pacman game compared to the detailed carnage in this movie. I know in
real life, no animals were hurt, but will an eight year old child know
this? There were many of them in costume at the theater. I will not take
my son to see this.

I am a person who has known war and real battles in the street. I have

the scars and nightmares to prove it. People have died in my arms, real people.

From my point of view, Sith really Sucith.

=30=

TechTV Leo Laporte's 2003 Technology Almanac

his current volume

See All Sideblogs

Another Distraction

Don't know how I drifted over to TidyWiki, but once I got there I spent the next hour reading the HOW-TO files on putting one up. It isn't all that cut and dry, but I think it will be worth the effort once I get it up and running. Be careful if you go there, it grabs you if you are a blogger.
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Leo Laporte's 2003 Technology Manual.

I was cleaning up the pile of books that have gathered in layers by the side of the bed. I found my 2003 copy of Leo Laporte's 2003 Technology Manual. Out of curiosity, I went the the chapter on blogging. In he mentions several interesting items; the one about the developer of Grey matter, Noah Grey and the condition that caused him to find Blogging a suitable way with which to communicate with the world.

ON the Monday, November 17, 2003 almanac Leo mentions several links. I wondered, all of a little less than two years later how many of the sites are still active. The first mentioned was glassdog.com. That's still there.

Then he mentions NoahGrey.com. It is a site worth visiting. Read the biography and don't miss this picture of a cat.

There are a few more paragraphs about NoahGrey. This is followed by a TIP OF THE DAY, which involves going to blogdex.media.mit.edu to see the a blog index mapping the entire blog related universe.

That's still there. There's an article on the opening page regarding the "Piano Man" from the BBC. I heard about him on the radio coming home. I hope he is for real, and if so, he is either from another planet or a loving caring family comes forth to support him.

Didn't find the index Leo mentions, but it looks like a fairly full site, I am sure it's in there somewhere.

The last blog related link mentioned on the page has to do with something called: "Cyberian. He is recommending you go to cyberian.tripop.com/blog.htm to download whatever it is found to where this link leads. NOPE, that's not there anymore.

Because that one no longer existed, Ill give you the first one from the next page, still about blogs: evhead.

The point I am trying to make here, is that even though the is the ancient 2004 Technology Almanac, most of the information is still up to date. imagine how way ahead of things are in his current volume
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Drupal

Okay, I read the installation instructions in detail, created a new
MYSql database at brdk.net called drupal, loaded the drupal database
instructions on it and finally got what looks like a version of a blog
up at http://www.brdk.net/drupal. Still not sure what I am doing, but
with few more weeks and translation of the user manual, I might get
something up that resembles this Thingamablog set up.

It is only the stubborn part of me that is working on this. The
personal note from Drupal's main developer which said in effect that he
would try to make it so that even an idiot like me could get it up, has
caused me to put more effort into it than I am yet to be convinced it is
worth.

We shall see.
=30=

Good Sunday Morning.

When I sat down and hit the icon for WinAmp Random selection the first choice was "I'll See You in Church on Sunday Morning." by Sonny Osborne. It was followed by Ella Fitzgerald singing "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off!" Should I read tea leaves in this?-grin-

Weather people predicted a totally wet weekend. With the exception of a few clouds on Saturday morning, it has been a perfect Spring weekend. I wonder how many plans, like the picnic Birthday party we didn't attend, were called off because of the forecast. Is there such a thing as bad prediction insurance? I am sure there is. See: Betty Grable's Legs...

Ella Fitzgerald's Voice is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.

Time for Breakfast!
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Lost some entries here

While I was off editing Dragons Grazing, it would seem all of the entries between Thursday and today went south.

There is the posibility that I posted some things to Home Grazing and did not cc: them to Bell Tower News, but I don't think so.
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bBlog

To do things like post this pBlog graphic with the imbedded link to the forum, you need to either speak HTML, or have a decent HTML editor. To quickly put the graphic and its link together, I used w::bloggar. Now I have to figure out how to configure w::bloggar to post to pBlog. It does post to Drupal and Wordpress, so there is a way.
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---

Using w:bloggar to post to Open Grazing.

I have to come up with a better editor for Open Grazing. Its vanilla editor, with which it is packed, is for the pits. I could use the w::bloggar editor and cut and past, but that takes so much away from the spontaneities of blog posting.
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---

(I will post this on Bell Tower News just because I should.)

Open Grazing Open

I just figured out the problem with my "mySQL" setup with bBlog, (not to
be confused with pBlog,) it was an arcane setting, but now it's
all up and running as Open
Grazing

=30=

The other grazing blog:

Home Grazing

Exploit code chases two Firefox flaws

By Dawn Kawamoto, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: May 9, 2005, 8:14 AM PT
--
Two vulnerabilities in the popular Firefox browser have been rated "extremely critical" because exploit code is now available to take advantage of them.

=30=

Saturday Morning Posted in the Afternoon.

We awoke this morning to the sound of an Electrical Transformer exploding down the block.

This, of course, caused all the power to shutdown for ourselves and immediate neighbors.
It is in situations like this having a laptop as your primary conduit, is a good thing. The house
PC was struggling to stay alive on the UPS. It did long enough for me to save everything and shut it down.

What was most amazing was the quite. No motors buzzing, no electronics humming or beeping.
There's a lively windstorm whipping up the neighborhood and it was easier to hear it as it blew
down tree limbs or caused various ventilation functions to kick in or hit back as the wind tried
to come into the house. I was able to sit on the couch in the living room and read a book by daylight.
Normally on a Saturday morning the living room is occupied and the sound of the Disney Channel
permeates the air.

The good news is the water and gas were still operating. I was able to put on the kettle and
have some tea while I read my book with the music of the wind in the background. Following
the advise not to open the refrigerator, I fell back on the Carnation Non-fat Dry milk for the
tea. Non-dairy creamers and tea don't mix. IMHO.

Enough for the Saturday morning notes to be posted when the power returns.

=30=

Have you ever been to BJ's

Berkley and Johnson, to be exact. It's similar to Costco in a lot of ways and in a lot of ways different. You need to be a member. The fee for membership is made up over the year in savings on things like two tons of catfood, 1,000 pounds of ground turkey, etc. The difference between the two is at BJ's there are more human sized packages available.

Our friend from Ossining calls it the Honey I Shrunk the Kids store. She got that from watching a young girl try to manoeuvre a huge box of Cherios into her mother's cart.

This is a suburban experience. When I lived in the big cities, you bought what you could carry back to your apartment. If you were going for a lot, you took your folding shopping cart and hooked it the front of the stores. I noticed there are no hooks in suburban stores. You take your cart to the car.

When I miss the simplicity of apartment living, usually this is when I am mowing the lawn or shoveling snow, the story of the bum on the park bench comes to mind. If you've heard it before, read it again.

There was a bum who slept each night on park bench across the street from a swanky high rise. A woman who lived in the high rise, who spent more in a week on her poodle than the bum spent in a year on food, walked by the bench each evening when she went out to walk her dog. The dog would always stop by the bum to be pet. The lady and the bum who exchange pleasantries and each would go to their designated corners.

On one very cold winter day, the lady noticed how the bum was shivering, with only crumpled newspapers between his thin cloth coat and his skin. In a sudden and uncharacteristic surge of charity, she invited him to come up to her apartment to spend the night in the guest room. He thanked her and took her up on the invitation.

The next morning when she awoke, the lady looked out on the park and noticed the bum was back on the bench, wrapped in cardboard. She checked her apartment to make sure nothing was stolen. Then she wrapped herself in furs and took the poodle out for a walk.

When the came up to the bum she enquired why he left. He said, "When I sleep on this bench, I dream of living in the lap of luxury and sleep soundly. When I was in you soft and warm bed, all I could dream about was sleeping on a cold hard park bench. I couldn't stay asleep until I came back out here."

Is there a moral here? I suppose the wise saying, as a thing is viewed, so it appears would apply.
=30=

Review redux

--The title of Bill Bryson's "A
Short History of Nearly Everything" does not sell itself short. It
is exactly that.

Don't be intimidated by either the scope or the size of the book. It is
engaging, entertaining, informative and an all round good read. As a
word of advice, don't say "ooh ooh, listen to this part..." to your
family. Taken out of context many of the tidbits are a tad arcane. The
part about the inventor of the Geiger Counter being a hard core Nazi was
a bit of a surprise...

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