Just a few hours more!

Only a few hours left in 2005.

I wonder how long it will take me to write 2006. I know it will be a while because I wrote ‘1995’ before correcting it.

Most of my blogging of late has been over at Grazing Planet and Home Grazing, using Easy Blogs and Thingamablog respectively.

It all comes down to ease of use. In the case of Easy Blogs it is ease of use as it relates to graphics. Once you learn the use of the big X on the right side of the window, your illustrations are limitless.

Thingamablog has the attached newsreader that with a click becomes a blog entry. So, two blogs with two different engines of creation. And then there’s Blogger.

Happy New Year!

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M, Formerly known as Mj

M, Formerly known as Mj,
uploaded by sgtret.

I am busily updating my Flickr account. I finally went pro and am digging up stuff from WAY back to add.

Oh, Yes, the Health!

If you’ve been watching the entries regarding the pneumonia, the good news is I am 90% better. The lungs are clear and most of the congestion is gone. My energy is not quite where it was, but is improving on a daily basis.

That’s the good news. On the other side of the coin, I am on call this weekend and next weekend to make up for the three weeks I was taken of “call.” Oh well.

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Famous Grazing URL

It occurred to that with all of the Famous Grazing blogs out there, we should own FamousGrazing.com. Now we do. We opened a Easy Blogs blog there with the purpose of commenting on the blogs themselves.

This will leave Belltowernews, the former default site for Famous Grazing blogs, to go back to the simple journal weblog it as it started.

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Blog Easy is Addicting

I have been spening most of blogging time filling in the vacant spaces at the more substantial of the two new Blog Easy grazing blogs. The creation of Articles is my latest project.

Once I have that all in place, it will be abandoned along with the other grazing blogs coming out of other than Blogger clay.
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Tomorrow to Work?

I will make an attempt to return to work tomorrow. I am not sure if I will make it through the entire day, but it will be worth a try. The coughing has settled down to a controllable amount and comes with ample warning.

There is another doctor’s appointment tomorrow afternoon, so I will be leaving work early on Wednesday.
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A Tad Better

For those of you who have been following my adventures with pneumonia here, the good news is today, for the first time through all of this, I am feeling a little better. There is still a crackling sound in the lungs, so the pneumonia is not gone, but, I feel a little more energetic than I have for weeks.

My son and I are going downtown for haircuts this afternoon. That has to be a good sign. I will admit my personal grooming habits have been in the dumps for at least a month. I frightened myself when I glanced at my face in the bathroom mirror this morning.
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Two New Famous Grazing Blogs

Using Easy Blogs blog generator, I have created two new Famous Grazing blogs. The first is called Easy Grazing. The other, a retread of a failed site, is called Planets Grazing.

The Easy Blog blog generator requires you to have a hosted site. Our company has a little-used site at brdk.net, so I just added a two new folders to house the Easy Blogs generated pages.

The initial templates chosen lack a certain sophistication, but have great potential. I will spend some time learning the method the templates are generated and tweek each one in a different direction.

In a recent questionnaire sent by a dear friend, I was asked what I do when I am bored. I replied: design web sites and blogs. This caused me to go out and look for another non MySQL or php based blog generator. I certainly found that in Easy Blogs.
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Fortune Cookie

Tonight’s fortune cookie read: “The work will teach you how to do it.” This is followed by a series of numbrers: 34, 25, 1, 47, 8, 33. I will have to see if that number won the next lottery, whatever it is called, around here.

You can tell how stir crazy I’ve become when I report as news the saying on fortune cookie.

Que sera, sera.
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Risen to the Level of Boredom!

Okay, this being sick thing has risen to the height of boredom. I want to stop “resting” and get on with my life. My schedule had one free day in December and that was today.

Perhaps it’s because the anti-biotic treatment ended today and I am not better that I’ve become so peckish. It was a December twenty-one years ago that had me in a hospital close to death. Maybe...

Enough group therapy!

I am going to send myself a get well card and take it seriously
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Flicking Through Flikr

The pain from the torn muscle is keeping me up. I was looking for something that would bore me to sleep, so I went to my Flickr.com account to browse though my uploaded photos.

That didn’t take long because I am yet to spring for the pro account. I went to popular tags and clicked on San Francisco.

I must’ve looked at three to four hundred thumnails. It was amazing to me how the majority of the photos had no people in them. There were the posed tourist shots taken in all of the places where I have been photographed by visiting family.

Then there are the Christmas Office Party shots. There are several up there I am sure the poser would rather not have on a public forum. It was then I realized what I was doing. I had become a virtual One-Hour Photo shop clerk, living vicariously though snapshots taken by others.

A low point in my life.

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Half Century of Places

Central Park Bandshell, Columbus Circle, Washington Square, Thompkins Square, Cooper Union Square, St. Mark’s Place, Avenue D, West Fourth Street, Tenth Avenue, Fort Washington, Turtle Bay, Lennox Hill, Parris Island, Pendleton, San Mateo, Sacramento Street, Nob Hill, Golden Gate Park, Golden Gate Bridge, Marin, Charlotte, Burlington, Quincy,
Providence, East Providence, Deer Isle, Staten Island, Gouvenor’s Island, Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Treasure Island, Alkatraz, Juarez, Seattle, Vancouver, Montreal, Quebec City, Ontario, Toronto, etc.

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If it is not quite Winter yet...

If it is not quite Winter yet, why is there a small blizzard blowing in my front yard?

I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning, as I am sure many other people do as well. BUT, this is my appointment, it is my ribs that are killing me from coughing, and it is my lungs that have had just about as much of this pneumonia crap as they can stand.

Cool off, whew! If you can’t rant on your own blog, where would be a better place?

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Just When The Silver Lining Starts Flashing!

Just when you think all is getting better, things happen.

A cough came out of the blue while I was sitting in an awkward position last night. For some reason a rib poked my gut and now something seems to be torn. This makes every cough feel like a sharp punch in the gut.

Oh what fun.

The good side of this is the coughs are coming less frequently. I am just in mild terror when they do.
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Pneumonia is not fun

This is the 21st Century and Pneumonia is not treated as the life threatening condition as it was in the middle of the twentieth, when I had it last.

In my infancy I contracted it and miraculously survived. It was a proud moment for my mother. Many times I would hear her say to other mothers words like “...didn’t think he would make it” or “it must have been god’s will.”etc.

Now I call in to work and say I have been diagnosed with pneumonia and they want to know if I will be coming in on Monday. In part wonderful and in part sad. Pneumonia is still a major killer amongst the elderly and infirm. I don’t quite qualify as either but am certainly on the downhill side in the direction of both.

With the uber-antibiotic churning through my system and a night time prescription medicine knocking me out for so long, I just about skipped today, I feel on the mend.

I feel as bad as I did when first I went to the doctor and was told it was just a mild infection and should pass in a week or two. As things go at the moment, feeling that bad is an improvement.

I am not going to work on Monday.
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Is that sunlight?

Probably the only climate related thing I miss about living in California is the sunlight.

Of course, when I was there, I missed the changing weather.

In May, we plan to go to Alaska for a week. It is the only one of the fifty upon which I have not put foot. I understand there will be almost constant sunlight while we are there. That should take care of my missing sunlight.

All of the above was inspired by the sun coming through the now bare New England trees into my office. In the summer, I would’ve pulled the curtains, but for now, I am enjoying the light.
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Health Update.

For those of you paying attention, I am on the fifth day of a ten day stint of antibiotics. There has been mild improvement, but not marked.
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BlogWizard a Bust!

BlogWizard from Lionhardt looked like it might have some potential as an alternative to posting one by one on the variety of grazing blogs we have running.

I downloaded it for evaluation, version 2.0.0.8. I couldn’t get it to sign on to Blogger.com to post a simple message. The error message it always gave was:

Socket Error # 10054
Connection reset by peer.

I didn’t give up there.

When I clicked on help, no help appeared, either in the program, or as is so often of late, on my browser.

Not to be defeated, I went to their website - looked into their meagre troubleshooting section and found what basically said, if you’re getting a socket error, you are not connected to the Internet. Of course, I had to go to their page to read that, and to accomplish this, I would need to be connected to the Internet.

It went on to state if there were any other problems to contact their user support, but, if I read the rest of the comment correctly, if I was a user with less than 10 licenses, I would be put on a waiting list scaled according to my license status.

You can be sure I did the next right thing, deleting the program entirely from my machine.

Oh, well. More starfish and all that.
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XTort — Beware!

It is a very good site!

The beware is just because it is so good, don’t go there while at your job. You won’t be able to tear yourself away from the selection.

There is also the danger that you will be tempted to download the freeware onto your work computer. We all know how ant-freeware the corporate slugs are.

It goes against the grain of a for-BIG-profit organization to support something that works and is for free. There is a natural level of suspicion attached to the “free lunch.” This suspicion is based on a long history of scam artists taking advantage of the gullibly greedy part of all of us.

So don’t be too hard on them and download these files in the comfort of your own Starbucks WiFi zone, or even at home.
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Is Xtort.net For Real?

Now that I am so sick I couldn’t answer the phone this morning because I didn’t have the strength to crawl across the bed before the machine picked up the call, I do have the strength to flip through online pages I have bookmarked for future viewing. Xtort.net was one of them.

It is an interesting site. My primary reason for going there was to look for a graphics file similar to pixia that could handle .GIF files. I was somewhat disappointed to find only a link to a Dell page featuring a discounted, ($500.00 instead of $588.00)version of Photoshop CS2 for Windows.

Then, the page filled out, listing a grand selection of free graphics programs with an index to the right of related program types ranging from animation tools to vector editors.

Further exploration of the not so adv. heavy site found a profound selection of singular programs for each and every need of the average and Lake Woebegone style user.

The Author’s claim to have each and everyone of these files on his computer for personal use may be a stretch. That they were tested by the author is more believable. Having all of these programs on one hard disk would be a tad top heavy.

I wanted to post this before I became completely lost going through the selections. I may be gone for days. Keep the search parties to a minimum.

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