Avid Fans, all around

These three are very good friends of ours. Their son in the middle is an avid fan of the local AAAAA team. You can see the parents are avid fans of him!

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Smart Cat, that!

It’s been a while since I posted this picture. This is Mougli. We opened the door to let him out the morning after a Nor’easter.

Would you believe he decided not to go out? Smart cat, that.

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In my youth, this was the bed in which I slept. Of course it was the sixties, it was the “East Village” and the only other piece of furniture in the apartment was a highly used bean bag.

We expanded the decor by adding an empty cable spool on its side as the dining room table a few weeks later. It was even later enhances by two metal milk crates with seat cushions.

Ah the luxury of youth!
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They Sent Me Home.

It was mentioned in other Blogs, but for those of you who care, when they saw how swollen my face was this morning, work sent me home. Good work!
=3O=

powered by performancing firefox

Handy freeware programs to put on a USB stick

Don’t pass up reading the comments as well. There are listed several other sites that display portable applications.

For those of us old enough to remember dual floppy PC’s; where Drive A: was the operating system and Drive B: was the program, it proves every thing that goes around, gets better.
=3O=

============

A list of free programs that do not require an installation and can be used directly from your USB stick or any other removable drive

read more | digg story

NYT Article on The Bank of Mom and Dad

An article in todays NYT, called The Bank of Mom and Dad was an interesting read to the father of a child in Middle School.

It would appear we have the false notion that payment for college is the last big expense, (short of a wedding or new car), we‘ll face in the cost of rearing a child. It would appear this is not so.

Or, is it more unique for parents whose children decide to live in NYC?

Or... is it just true of the subjects of this article who fit the criteria of the article’s subject? Probably a little of all three.
=3O=

powered by performancing firefox

If You Can Believe It...

...I am going to work. I have a meeting this morning upon which the employment of another person depends. Otherwise, I would take today off as well. The swelling under my left eye is making it hard to focus. Perhaps a half day is in order.
=3O=

powered by performancing firefox

TWiT 51: Digg This

Kevin Rose explains how digg works in this TWiT epsiode. For all you people of the digg community, this podcast episode will answer quite a lot of questions. It's definitely worth checking out (and subscribe to TWiT podcasts!)
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To distract me from the pumping pain of today’s redux root canal through the gums, I spent the afternoon adding footprint messages to all of the surviving Famous Grazing Blogs and listening Kevin go on about digg. I am glad I listened to it because now the site makes MUCH more sense to me.
=3O=

read more | digg story

Calendar Dilemma Solved

I am sure you’ve been losing sleep on this, but fear not now that The Calendar Dilemma has been solved. I had to go back to PayPal  to find the receipt to get the name of the program for which I was seeking.  The program’s name is Yagoon Time.  Now why I couldn’t remember that is beyond me. The good news is I found it.
BUT THEN,
I went to my Thunderbird to reset the mail and remembered there was a calendar extension for that in the works as well It is called Lightning. This is not to be confused with Sunbird or Mozilla Calendar. Lightning is an extension for Thunderbird that can integrate the messages received with the calendar, similar to the feature on the new Google Calendar.

So, of course, I set up both. Google Calendar was subscribed to by both of the calendars with ease.  The added feature of Yagoon mirrors the feature in Google Calendar in that you can select the calendars to be displayed.  So far, Lightning doesn’t do that.  It is promised in future development, but who can wait!

If you do use Yagoon or Lightning, be sure to chose WebDav and not iCal when choosing the interface. That’s an error that took me a while to catch.
=3O=

A Disaster or a Cleansing? Computer Crash.

It would be a disaster if I had not bought the Workbook exterior hardrive and ran the included back-up utility the week before the crash. 

Ten years worth of writing and work would have disappeared like rust on plastic. I’ve made back ups to CD on several occassion but I cannot claim any organization to that.  To speak the truth, most of the stuff backed up on CD’s really was to take the information for use someplace else.

Now that I’ve returned the information, or most of what I need now to the recovered laptop; I am amazed about the amount of crap that had piled up. Going to my RoboForm toolbar, the database for which I had backed up on the NetVibes Box.net widget, I could see the pages and pages of sign-ons I’d collected while acquiring all of the junk.

Now most of it is gone.  I decided only to install software as the need for it arises, instead of doing a blanket recovery. The one I missed this morning was the CLOCX analog clock I kept in the corner of my second screen. It is a cute utility that displays an analog clock with many different faces available. It will optionally display the date and AM PM. It also has a calendar with reminders I use on a regular bases to remind me of things told to me over the phone.

What I am missing is the iCal compatible calendar I had installed to act in conjunction with google calendar. As with GMail, I have turned my life completely over the google calendar. Thankfully the crash had no effect on Gmail or Google Calendar.

The local calendar I had found worked perfectly with it.  I will spend the next half hour searching for in the places I go to find software.

Then I’ll do the laundry. It’s nice to have priorities.
=3O=

Emachine Died, Enter Gateway

When my almost three year old eMachine bit the bucket this morning. It does this, of course the day before I have a presentation due for the President and Senior VP's of the company.

I went to Best Buy looking to either repair the old laptop, or buy a cheaper but better one. Hence the Gateway MX7525 upon which I now type. The branding on the cover is different, but eveything else about this machine is just like the eMachine, only better.

Whoa! Just hit the wall. It is bed time!
=3O=

If you came over to see what boring is all about, welcome Jef!
=3O=

Todo Day

For several weeks now I have had a Todo List on my Airset and on my Google calendars, (went public today), that I was only able to nibble away, little by little. Working long hours makes it hard to do public errands. Today was a holiday, of sorts. My son and I got in the car to go to Chili's for early lunch. On the way there, we passed a Vavoline Instant.

I looked up at the Oil Change Due sticker, looked at the milage and realized I was almost a thousand miles overdue. We pulled into the empty bay, over the hole in the ground. They took some information regarding the registration and such. Less than 20 minutes later, we were in Chili's having a jacked up appetizer. While sitting there, I called the 877 number on the Vavoline Instant receipt to enter the $500.00 in gas - once a week sweepstake.

The major point here is I didn't feel ripped off. Not with this car, but with others, I have gone to quick oil and lube places and felt flamboozled by the time I left. This place did offer to replace the air filter, which they showed me. When I said it looked like it had a few more miles on it, they cheerfully returned it to its receptacle.

All of this is done while you sit in the car. You can see and hear all they are doing to your car. There is a franchise cadence where they overtly check each other's work. I liked that.

Over all, not bad. The good news is, it is on the way home from work, so the next time I need an oil change, I'll just pull in and get it done with less effort than putting gas in the car.

We went from Chili's, bought four pairs of shoes, two for him and unexpectedly two for me. Then we got our hair cut, gassed the car and picked up the dry cleaning.

All of this may seem mundane to you, but it cleared my domestic Todo file and my son and I did it all together. This is a good thing.
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Technorati Tags: Vavoline, Airset

I have a simple wireless router in an isolated area but still I get the error message there is an IP in conflict. If this message gets posted, I will not worry about that for now.  I am more worried about The new version of Firefox, which Firefox installed on its own.  I am sure, somewhere along the road of setup, I gave it permission to do that.  The promblem is, RoboForm, upon which I am totally dependent, is not working with this newest version, which is only .001 above the last.  It usually takes a few days for the two to sinq, but a person can go through withdrawal in that short a time.  This is especially true if it's a weekend with no substantial social obligation. =3O=

It was just one of those days.  A lot of talk with no accomplishment to speak of.  Three hours of staying at work to make up for the time spent talking.  Tired is the word of the day.
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Looking for an iCal connection between AirSet and Yagoon.  Haven't found one yet.
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Following Leo LaPorte's lead, I set up a NetVibes page as my home page.  There was a default module called NP, for Now Public.  It's a crudely set up page. 

It's content is jumbled, combining news clips with blog entries and Flickr like photo thumbnails.

I will leave it up on the home page for now.  I am exploring other options short of about:blank. 

AjaxWrite vs. Writely — Apples and Pears

This is being written in AjaxWrite 0.9. It differs a great deal from Writely. It is more like opening a single word processing page. When you hit the save icon, it acts like a file download. When you hit it a second time, it creates an entirely new file with a version number in parenthesis (2),(3), etc.

Writely is a much more sophisticated Web 2.0 suite. It has elaborate collaborator validation, folders saving the documents online, etc. AjaxWrite is barebones all the way.
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If you are just starting out with Firefox, it's a good idea to become familiar with the power of the extension.  Extensions are used to design Firefox to be your browser and do what you want to do.

This blog entry is being written with the extension called Performancing.  A large series of extension collections can be foun HERE at the Lifehacker website.
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CommandN, episode 40

For those of you who follow CommandN, episode 40 is now available. It's filmed at a converted church in T.O. Amber and Mike 's initial technews is given from the balcony with a little too loud music in the background. In episode 39 the presenters were competing with the wind off the water. (Still, we watch...)
It's a joy to watch Amber and her constant intelligent smile.
Her brother, Jeff is back from filming his documentary. He's as as interesting as usual.
Web Picks had Leo LaPorte as their guest - lot's of hugging.
No flub at the end of this one.
There was a cute flub at the end of Episode 39.
It's much easier to review a 15 Minute plog than it is to review a book or movie.
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When I got the root canal a dozen or so years ago, it was my
impression there could not possibley be any more pain from that
direction. My body disagreed with me this week and introduced me to
bone infection. This makes tooth aches feel like stubbed toes. Surgery
will be near the end of the month when the infection is hopefully
handled by the antibiotic.

So, if my entries start to take on a tinge of grumpiness, please forgive and understand.

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It seemed like yesterday it snow in western Massachusetts, and yet today the baseball season opening in NYC.  Wait, it did snow in western Massachusetts and the NY Yankees beat Oakland 15-2 in their season opener.  Alex Rodrigues hit a grand slam and it was up hill from there.  As Tyler Kepner said in the morning's NY Times, "It will not always be this easy..." Of course it won't; this is baseball. 

I am hopefully going into surgery sometime today.  I will report on that opening session later today or tomorrow morning.  It will depend on how I feel.
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Cross Your Fingers

For those of you using Performancing, and obviously, I am one of them, the following paragraph was in the help blog inside Blogger:

Performancing for Firefox

Saturday, April 01, 2006

Logging into Blogger using third-party apps lately is problematic. My favorite blogging tool Drivel can't login. I have tried Deepest Sender but just the same. I found a way to login to my Blogger account using Performancing for Firefox (the best browser in the planet :) ). Just create a custom blog account on Performancing, choose Blooger API for system type and use http://www.blogger.com/api for Server API URL. Hope this help you all :)

posted by Wakizaki at11:17 PM

I used it and if you can read this, it worked!!!
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Peforrmancing Working Everywhere But Blogger.com

This is a very sad situation. I found this new very helpful tool, Peformancing Firefox interface, as well as the great blog associated with it. As you can tell from previous entries it HASworked wonderfully before. And then poof! it the dreaded Atom Server Error #3 came down and struck it down.

The good side of that is it caused me to explore the interface further and hook it up with with two WordPress, a Livejournal and a MobBlog connections. It also sent me back to w::bloggar where I found the Firefox interface has been finished. So that's from whence this entry originates.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Scotland License.

It Wasn't Me

There are several threads running on the Performancing website about the Atom Server Error #3. At least it's nice not to feel alone. I am not going to use Performancing of for a while with the hope this problem is resolved sometime in the near future.

I guess it's another one of those too good to be true things.
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Be Careful With Passwords and Performancing

I was using Performancing merrily when I accidently slipped in the wrong password to blogger. Then it wouldn't let me in, even with the corrected password. Oh Bother!

We tried uninstalling Performancing, erasing the Launch Account Wizard settings for Blogger.com and reinstalling them. The confirmation window would pop up continuously even thought the correct information was being supplied. When I finally cancelled the efforts, the following error message would pop up: There was a possible error contacting the ATOM server: Error #3 [object Object].

I have gone to the Performancing website to seek answers. I will report them here; hopefully using Performancing.
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