The home page and original site for the Famous Grazing Blogs

There are more than a dozen Famous Grazing Blogs residing on the cybersphere. Some are dormant and some very active. They all link back here to the Granddaddy of our blogs, founding in May of 2004.

Saturday, April 30, 2005

Is it a multiple personality or backup?

As I was making my rounds through the various Grazing blogs I am running, it occurred to me that it would be much simpler to settle for one blog and put all of my entries there.

I was in that position with Home Grazing Number One. I called it the support blog for Belltower News, but it was becoming the blog to which I wrote the most.

Then the server crashed and all of the entries went south. That's when I went looking for all of the other methods of blogging. Thingamablog, the input program I was using for Home Grazing, was unstable, w:bloggar worked well enough for the Blogger based Bell Tower News. But I was eager to know what else was out there.

I found pLog and Word Press. I threw up a blog for each. I used blog-city TypePad, Tripod, Bravenet, WebCrimsom, Live Journal, Opera Journal, Apcal, BlogSpirit, ModBlog, MSN Spaces, Multiply, (an odd one,) Xanga, SquareSpace, and probably a few I tried once and gave up.

Most were free and web-based. TypePad and SquareSpace were pay services. pLog, WordPress and Thingamablog were server based and require a server with MySql database support.

The result of this quest has shown us that there are many ways to come to the same result, a blog. None of them are perfect. Each has just one or two things that doesn't make it the default blog. Blogger is the longest lasting of the online blogs. When there was blogger pro, I used that.

WordPress, so far, has given me the most satisfaction for the server based. Thingamablog crashed on me in an earlier version, the blog templates aren't stable, you have to republish the entire blog to bring them back into readable condition. It's link to the RSS news feeder, and your ability to post a news link on your blog is a nice feature.

Then there's Drupal. It seems to be a very popular program for the more serious bloggers. The program's writer left a comment to me on another blog with the promise that the interface will soon be more user friendly. I won't give up on it.

At BlogSpirit, I am using the free version. There is a subscription service here. I am reminded of it occasionally, like just now when it told me to save the entry, and then let me know if I had used the subscription, this would not have been necessary. It's a bit of a nag, but just a bit. I like the way the writing page is set up.

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Mowed the lawn

It's Saturday and it's going to rain later this afternoon, so we went out to get it all done. This doesn't seem like much of an event. It could be because it wasn't.

It was the first cut of spring. I use a hand powered mower. My neighbors on either side use noisy, obnoxious riding mowers.

We have one, but the noise rattles me. A push mower makes little noise, mulches the grass and makes you work a little. Riding a mower is about the same as a self propelled shopping cart. If you don't need it, why use it? To be less saintly, I will also say the price of gas is too high.
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The Old Graphics

This was the original graphic for Home Grazing:

Home Grazing Headng Graphic




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This was the graphic heading for Belltower News:

Belltower News origingal graphic


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Home Grazing reborn!

A server problem and glitches in the older version of Thingamablog put Homegrazing.com out of business for a while.

I downloaded the newer version of Thingamablog this morning and set it up before leaving for Boston. This evening I was able to tweak it a little here and there to make it look like a presentable weblog.

It is my plan to go into the archives of Belltower News to see if there are any of the older Homegrazing entries. I'll transfer them over to the newer version if found.
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Wednesday, April 27, 2005

These Things Happen...


Two friends of mine went to visit their mothers this week.

One to Arkansas and one to Manchester, U.K.

Today both of thier mothers died.

It is a coincidence, to be sure. Just something worth noting.
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Eyechart



Monday, April 25, 2005

Not as Bad as All That!

As Mondays go, this one wasn't as horrible as others I've seen. Everyone today seemed to be in a lackadaisical mood, a deadline was overlooked, what would have caused a caustic reaction resulted in mere admonishment, etc.

All in all I know there will be hell to pay tomorrow, when the narcotic of a Spring weekend in New England wears off and we all realized we have a job to do.
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Sunday, April 24, 2005

Home Grown Links

All of the links on the right are put there by me. Though this blog resides on
Blogger, the template was created by me. If you click on one of the links, the
one who benefits from it, is me, (and the company to which the click is linked. )

The UUA link is there just for the UUA.

The thought of including this tidbit came to me after visiting
our blog on the Lycos Network.

Every kind of possible advertisement, from pop-up to bug crawling, is on that page.
I'm sure it makes them some kind of money, but I know I can't stay there very long.

It is my attempt to keep it all simple here. No surprises. The pay links are to Amazon,
Bravenet and Google. That's it. I wouldn't send you to a link just for the sake of you going
there.

The links are placed in places pertinent to the subject at hand. No more, no less. If
I could, I'd wash your screen while you were visiting.

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Spam is Borg...

I opened a GMail account yesterday, today there were 84 SPAM messages caught in the SPAM filter and two in the Inbox. An email address can barely take a breath before it gets whacked. Where are the prosecutors when you need them.

As an aside to this, the email address I created at ICQ gets very little SPAM. Whether that is because it is a rather complicated address, or ICQ has an aggressive pre-filter setup, I don't know. It is the email address I give out when a form requires it, but I don't plan on engaging in any long conversations with the sender of the form. It's worked out quite well.
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The Curse of Google and the NYT (II)

To understand this, you will have had to read the previous post. Be forwarned: this is a Sunday morning, (now afternoon) meandering about habits changing around the reading of the NYT on Sunday morning. It's about as exciting as watching Astro Turf® grow.

Back to the saga: I mentioned the first two virtual piles of the online NYT. The third, the equivilent of storing the Book Review and Magazine for later reading is using Firefox's Bookmark option. I go back to most of the bookmarks about as much as I finally did get to read the articles in the Book Review or Magazine. But, at least they're there.

In a similar fashion to going back to read an older article and finding my wife has found a more practical use for the newsprint, as in recycling is to go to your bookmarks and find the page no longer exists. This would be true if you went to the Homegrazing blog I put up about a year ago. The server went south along with most of the content. I am much better at backing up the data I upload now.

On a good note, two comments were left on the Fieldgrazing blog wherein my comments regarding Drupal drew the attention of the folks at Drupal and a loyal fan. It's good to know all of this tripe I write is read by some, disgruntaled or not.
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The Curse of Google and the NYT

Every Sunday morning I do my best to get through the Sunday New York Times.
I used to do this by lugging the the ten or so pounds of newsprint from my front door to the living room. There I would strategically divide the paper and its content into three piles.

The first pile would be what I would attempt to read this morning and later in the day.

The second pile would include the New York Times Magazine and Books in Review and whatever other sections through which I may want to browse some time in the near future.

The third pile would go immediately into the recycle bin. This, of course was the largest.


Then I started reading the NYT on my laptop. This seemed so much easier, not to mention good for trees. Good for trees, maybe. Easier, yes and no.

The yes parts are mostly obvious. Let me go for the negative aspects:

Google.

I just read an article on self publishing.

It mentions several areas visitable on the internet. Thankfully, the NYT has a haphazard policy of including hyperlinks in their articles. I could see why. They don't want the read to change channels. However, those of us addicted to Google and Yahoo just go off to either of the two and look up the connection anyway.

The one hyperlink in the article, to the Books in Print-Professional site probably paid the NYT to be included in the article. I know I almost always go to any hyperlink they include, so it's probably a good investment.

At first, I would Google every little thing that I might find of interest. Then I found myself taking an enormous amount of time to read the smallest of articles. I now use a pile method for googling similar to my previous bulk paper method:

If I find a topic I believe I need to see to enhance the meaning of the article, I Google it into a tab on the same Firefox window. If it may be something I will find interesting later, I Google it to a new window and minimize the window. (Ooops! off to church. See part 2)

Expanding Content in Column!

Added Google's AdSence to the bottom of the column.
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Saturday, April 23, 2005

GIMP

medium_imagesbutterflyartdeco.gifOn the further recommendation from The Weblog Handbook, I have downloaded the graphics editor GIMP. GIMP was first designed for use on MAC based machines, but has been retooled to work on PC's

Photoshop and I have never been the best of friends. I act intuitively. Photoshop is for people who found learning the piano easy when they were six. I struggled with the plastic recorder and gave up music.

Back to the point! I started up gimp, opened a file and turned it into the log for the next blog I create, Butterflies Grazing. I don't know where I will put it, but at least now I have a logo.

Spell checker would be a good ad-on for blogSpirit.

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I just posted the small skull logo in the corner box of this blog.
I have been using it in other blogs as a sign that this too was a
grazing blog, when I realized it was not shown anywhere on this
the flagship of the grazing blogs.
Ghost Grazing has been created on the spirtBlog online blog site. It seemed the apt title.

The posting interface is very simple. Unlike Blog-City and Live Journal, you don't have to go through several menus to post an entry. Posting is what this is all about in the end. I don't need to be notified of new features, or be taken though the profile creation steps.

Just let me post!

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Another Online Blog!!

Going through the information found on the Weblog Compendium hosting page, I found another blog online site, similar to blog-city but not so full of itself. It's called BlogSpirit.

Using their simple interface I have created another Grazing blog called ghostgrazing.

Having discovered Word Press and pLog blog creation software, I have found it harder and harder to get to the online created blogs. Buy it's hard not to create one when a new offer appears. I will try to make a better effort at keeping the online blogs active.

The problem here is the time it takes to configure a blog entirely under your control, give or take a borrowed theme here and there. When you put your own blog on a hosting server you can't blame the whims of the online blog's set up and caretakers. It's yours and yours alone.
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Friday, April 22, 2005

Drupal no where near as easy to set up as WordPress and pLog.

In the Super Downloader section of CNet, the author with the enormous ego recommended Drupal as a wonderful server-side blogger-website software. All of the blurbs accompanying Drupal agree. I found it no where near as easy to set up as WordPress and pLog.

There is too much MySql set up for the average user. Even with the assistance of a third party database creator, recommended by Everybody, it was a royal pain in the tuckus.

Because of this, I have decided, for now, to put Drupal on the back-burner and stay with w::bloggar for here at Belltower News and ModBlog, and use WordPress and pLog for my proprietary blogs.

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Playing with Drupal

I've pretty much got pLog and MT down. Now I'm playing with Drupal.
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Wednesday, April 20, 2005

What's with all the Opera 8 stuff?

Okay, here's the thing, I was a big fan of Opera Browser. So much so, I even paid for it.

Then I got online banking and the bank was too stupid to make their interface compatible with the unique way Opera looked at the www. So, being one of those rare computer users with a love/hate relationship with those big guys in Washington, the State, not the Capital. I looked at ALL of the other browser choices out there.

I settled for Slimbrowser for a while, but knew it was merely window dressing for the Windows Explorer engine, I kept looking. I liked Netscape, but found it to bee too cumbersome in it's attempt to be all and everything. Then the folks at Mozilla came up with Firefox and Thunderbird. With names like that, how could they go wrong?

Very much like before, it was the bank.... For some still unknown reason, Firefox refuses to recognize that I have logged off the account and keeps causing me to call the bank to reset my password. I would worry about saying this in the public forum of a blog if there was every any money in this account past the day after I get paid.

The point to all this is when SnapfilesPro sent me an email notification of Opera 8, I had to go and see if it would interface with my bank. Lo and as they say behold! it did!.

Here's a tip: If you want to find out about the changes in the newest version of Opera, go to this site and take the Flash tutorial. It won't take long and I can almost guarantee, you will find out something you didn't know the unique browser did.

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Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Opera 8 has been released

In case you live in a vacuum, you should know that Opera 8 has been released. I was lured away from opera by Mozilla Firefox. But, Firefox started to get into a pissing match with online bank software. When I went back to Opera 7, the two sang in perfect harmony. Now that I've upgraded to Opera 8, I am afraid to see how they do. I'll let you know tomorrow.
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Sunday, April 17, 2005

This has been sent to me from seven different sources on both sides of the country and one in Norway.








I don't think it's overly funny, though putting Duke in there was good, I would have rather it be UNC because they did so well this year, but we acn't have everything, in Steven's words, where would we put it.

Okay, So Here's The Thing...

Okay, so here's the thing, people who spend the first thirty five or so of their years as cliff dwellers, urban hunters, city-folk so to speak, just don't get yard work. I spent a good part of the afternoon cleaning the winter debris from the front yard. I have blisters on my hands. This makes typing difficult. This is not a good thing for a blogger of such great importance. <G>

The chores in apartment life consist of take the garbage out, tip the super and pay the rent. If you want lawn, you go to the park where your taxes, sales taxes, not property taxes, pay the city workers to do what I just did for free.

Granted, home ownership is an American Dream. Underneath it all, truth be known, etc. we don't own this house. The bleeding bank does. So, I am doing yard work for the bank in exchange for being allowed to live in our house. There's a name for that, and I think an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution against it.

Don't get me going on Credit Cards, the real drug dealers of the 21st Century.


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She cut a ribbon

Once a day I read blurbs from my ethnic paper, The Scotsman. The highlight of today's news was that a Mrs. C. Windsor cut a ribbon with a pair of scissors.

This is a big deal in Scotland.

Her real name should be Mrs. C. Mountbatten or Von Battenburg, but for patriotic and self survival reasons, the previous generation had changed their name to be more anglicized. This is common with families coming from other countries. If and when Mr. Windsor comes to be head of the family business, he may change the last name back to Mountbatten. Not so much for the love of his father as for his late and beloved Uncle Louis.

That's the news from the maternal side of my ethnic identity. The news from the other side is that the QE2 and the QM2 were in town together. That's only the second time in both of their lifetimes the two, one venerable and the other new and big, ladies have been in town together. I have met QE2 and her ancestor QEI but haven't had the pleasure yet of seeing QM2.

The funny thing is, I'm not sure if the 2 in QM2 is because she is the second ship of that name or if there was a QMII in the family line. Not that important and I won't lose any sleep over it, just a thought.

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Saturday, April 16, 2005

Concrete Grazing

The pLog I created is called Concrete Grazing.

There are just so many combinations of the word Grazing that can be used before you start to get silly. This one is not that silly when you consider how many of my tender years were spent where my pedal interface was between me and concrete.

pLog, once you figure out the instalation and the interface editing methods, isn't that hard. It isn't Blogger, but it is very similar to WordPress.

I'm going back there now to see what else I can do to tweak it.
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Friday, April 15, 2005

If you are given a choice

If you are given a choice to be a manager, don't take it if you think it will be the job you're doing now only with better pay. Uh-uh! The pay is better, the hours are longer and the job becomes the act of managing, not doing.

Every once in a while you will find yourself doing work that should have been given to someone else. You may even know it should be given to someone else, but you do it anyway. Keeping your hands in the clay, so to speak.

MBWA, managing by walking around, is another thing you'll find yourself doing. It was a short part of an 'inspirational film' we have all been subjected to. Really what you're doing is pissing on trees. Marking your territory. Letting the minions see their own immediate bosses react to you as they feel they react to him.

There are some who will argue that managing is doing. They lie through their teeth. They are also probably fairly good mangers. I say fairly because lying is a cheap way to get things done.

In the military, a place I briefly occupied thirty or so years ago, we had a command structure. A pure pecking order where the general told the colonel, the colonel told the major, the captain, the lieutenant, the first sergeant, the buck sergeant, the corporal and then the floor got mopped. That's a chain of command.

In the business world we now have a thing called flat management. The CEO tells his SVP then the SVP's secretary sends an email and the floor gets mopped. A lot less middle management.

The floor got mopped today because a SVP's secretary sent an email to a VP's secretary and I was cc:'d. It is amazing how quickly one man's wishes can now move through the corporate tom-tom.

In my youth there would have been a memo, the memo would have wandered through the mail for a while then get stuck in an IN box, reviewed, forward, IN Box on another desk, sorted, and filed. No floor, no mop.

I just re-read the above paragraphs and came to an epiphany. My job can be very boring. It isn't all the time. Some times you have to pay with boredom. It's just another currency in the market of life.

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I wouldn't call it frost exactly, more like ice skating rink, as in a solid sheet of ice instead of lovely crystals reflecting the rising Sun's rays. This is a good thing. It means the bloody grass is growing slower. This is less work for mother. Mother in this case, being me. (See antepeel Avengers.)

It's Friday. In former days, when my work wasn't wrapped around the Mon-Fri 0800-1600 pattern, the glee of Friday, as in TGIF, was lost on me. Now that I have worked in this pattern for over two years, with only one week off recovering from broken ribs, I understand. I feel sad that I understand, but it's true.

Now that I've hopefully settled the format of the Field Grazing blog down, I hope make more of these inane morning musing entries than the "oh gee, look at this WordPress feature I have found!" This will bore you to tears, I know, but it is the nature of the beast.

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Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Crisis over--Stand down.

It's working. There seemed to be data stuck in the pipeline. When I published the last blog, the blog sent before it came though as well. Now I can go to sleep...

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I have been posting with Bloggar all day

And none of the messages seem to be getting through. I might have to reinstall this progam. This is very upsetting. When I find something that works, I would just like it to keep working for a change.

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Bloggar Not Working??!

For some strange reason, probably all my fault, w::bloggar stopped posting to Field Grazing. I want to see if it's also true about w::bloggar and Bell Tower News.
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Sunday, April 10, 2005

The review is posted

The promised book review of Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everythingas been posted on the blog at The Field Grazing blog at: http://www.fieldgrazing.com
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Saturday, April 09, 2005

PSPad

I am writing this with PSPad, a freeware programmer's editor. The promotion
page for this on Snapfiles, a great place to go for experimental, at the edge
software, said it can do just about anything you want it to do as far HTML
editing outside of a formal WYSIWIG editor, such as FrontPage.

This is not to put FrontPage down, even it is produced by the evil empire. I
just like to see what I can do in simple HTML editing, see the finished product
before I go to the big guy for help.

On the personal side, I have a wicked sore throat coming on. It doesn't hurt
yet, but it will by the morning. To make the plot a tad more interesting, I am
getting my teeth cleaned tomorrow as well.


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Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Been Grazing Elsewhere

fieldgrazing.com If you've been looking for me, this is where I have been in the last few days, eating waffles...

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Sunday, April 03, 2005

This is the book for which there will soon be a review here...

Sunday morning 8, no make that 9 am

For the first time in my over 50 years I let DST slip by me in the night. The good thing is I woke on my own early enough not to miss my morning appointment. It makes me wonder how many people in the rest of the world have had the same problem.
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