Scribefire Upgraded

If you go directly to the ScribeFire website, you will see the features added and fixes to this version 1.4.6.

I have been using Live Writer for most of my blog entries but now that the one item that annoyed me (issue #40) has been fixed, you will see more Powered by Scribefire additions to the blog entries.

American Gods - Free to read on-line

Go this link:

Here for the next month you can read American Gods by Neil Gaiman courtesy of the author himself. He ran a survey on his blog as to which books his fans would like to see posted free on-line.

I voted for Neverwhere, but his more popular novel won. I liked it too, so everyone's a winner.

-30-

del.icio.us Tags: American Gods

Nobody Slipped.

The highlight of tonight's Academy Awards was the slippery floor on stage left.  This was THE most boring of the many shows I have seen.

It could be we had nothing invested having not been inspired enough to go to the theater to see any of these films.

Congratulations to each of you.  Whoever you were.

Never Made a Penny

You will see occasional links to books on these pages that will take to Amazon.com.  These links, if followed from here and purchase made allegedly will add change to my pocket. 
Never a penny.
I did set this program up for a not for profit web site where they have made a few hundred dollars having their members, all of whom are avid readers, make their orders through them.
Now Amazon.com is selling baby strollers and car seats. This is a 20% off sale on the Britax brand until March 2nd. 
I must admit I have never heard of this brand and my youngest is now taller than I.  
We do, however, buy loose tea from them on subscription. 
This allows for a major discount and free delivery of something I would've bought anyway.
Will baby strollers and car seats make me rich?
I think not.

LiveJournal Tags: Amazon.com

Inside or Indoors, Does It Matter?

The problem with shooting a plog North of Detroit in February that is normally shot out of doors, creeping down the alleyways, with exotic Canadian urban backgrounds is the poor hosts freeze their collective tookii.  It makes for good video, but may shorten their lifespan.

This is the condition commandN finds itself.  I personally like the man on the street feel of the blog.  Sometimes the sound is somewhat overwhelmed by the back ground noise, but this is part of the character. 

It is our fervent hope the weather in Toronto improves enough to allow our brave podcasters to return to their natural environment.  Or, as they did last year, to the MicroMini dealer.  I liked that episode so much I bought one.

LiveJournal Tags: commandN

Feel Like Visiting Someplace Urban?

The IHT blog list of its local color journalists is proving to be a relaxing read.  No heavy world crisis or political news.  It just tells you what is interesting about a place.  It is written by people who live there.

It did come to light for me a dozen or so years ago that the only way a native gets to know what is fun to visit in their native town is by showing people around who are not from there.  There have been many fascinating places in the cities wherein I have settled over the years.  It took a visitor for me to have reason or even the energy go there.

The rest of the time we just stand around waiting for things to happen. 

LiveJournal Tags: IHT,travel

Snow Changes Day Quickly

There were 5 things on my agenda for today.  The snow was scheduled for noon.  Someone forgot to verify this with the weather system.  I am looking out my office window at what would appear to be about an inch of snow.  Weather Dot Com showed that this is the northern edge of the storm.

As soon as the snow hit, my Blackberry started buzzing.  Not only is this snow, but it is Friday.  Combine the two, and the memory of the lousy commute home a month or so ago, and wham, the meetings get canceled, moved up or shortened.  I am waiting on news form my nine a.m.   

tick tick tick...

-30-

Bedtime musings

LiveJournal Tags: RSS,browsing,Shakespeare

After two hours of browsing using the RSS feed reader I opened the History column in Firefox and counted the number of sites I visited.   There were 25 pages on Shakespeare alone.  For some reason I was looking for the speech in Henry V where he speaks of Saint George, Harry and England.  Found it in the Shakespeare Concordance. 

The browsing went from the International Herald Tribune to a page on the Gutenberg free books site displaying a memoir of a Colonel in the American Army during the Revolutionary war.  I noted in the index it read that this was something from the Civil War.  I wonder if that index was created by an Englishman?

I downloaded a few programs.  I installed all of them and deleted all of them except the Foxit Reader.  I haven't had time to run it yet.  I am looking for something like the Kindle to display the free stuff  found on-line on the laptop . To view it easier it should be something other than HTML, text or PDF. 

What amazes me still is the amount of information that just pops out at you.  For some reason, when I started my newly installed VLC media player, a window popped up showing Jurassic Park. 

That spooked me even more when I stopped it and it started showing episodes of Stargate Atlantis from a few years ago.  I pretty much want a media player to open what I ask it to and not default to some European movie site.

Where I have it now is listening to on-line radio. The station is called Cryosleep, Zero Beat Guaranteed.  I am listening to this to drive the images of the alien beast that was being hacked live for meat on the last episode of Torchwood.

These are my ramblings before going to bed.  I am teaching a class tomorrow and need my beauty sleep.  Or, at the very least, I need a beauty of a sleep.
-30-

The Snow Leopard in Arlington

This link to the Sunday New York Times Book Review reveals a fact about the author of The Snow Leopard that was a bit of surprise to me.

I can't say it was unbelievable, considering the time and it was Paris, but still, is nothing corrupted?

-30-

LiveJournal Tags: corruption

Taking Sunday Off

That may sound strange, to take Sunday off, but after a very long week we have canceled all social obligations for the day.  I am sitting here in the home office, listening to Ingrid Michealson's The Way I Am to be followed by Stacy Kent singing Stardust. 

These songs came about with my discovery of Amazon.com's music download.  iTunes was just too complicated for me.  I am listening to the music on my laptop with the GPL Licensed  VLC cross platform media player.  It is the simplicity the interface to this programs full set of features that appeals to me.

Mark Knophler's Coyote (Album Version) just started playing.

This could go on all afternoon, but I would rather just chill, thank you...

-30-

...Stacy Kent is now singing I Got it Bad...

Technorati Tags: VLC Media Player,GPL

Simply Amazing!

If you have nine minutes you can spare in your day, you couldn't fill them any better than to go here and listen to Charlie Hunter and his guitar.

-30-

Thunderbird Gmail IMAP Drafts and Sent Errors

Technorati Tags: IMAP,GMAIL,THUNDERBIRD

If like most geeks in the world you have set your Thunderbird Gmail settings for IMAP, you may be getting unknown Drafts and Sent folder messages. 

It is an easy fix.  Go to this Lifehacker page for the instructions.  When you start to look for the Sent and Drafts folder in the boxes side menu, don't settle for the first Drafts or Sent folder.  Make sure you look for the [Gmail] first and THEN the Sent Mail and Drafts folder inside this folder.

That was the only part that confused me for ever so short a moment.

Good Luck!
-30-

Tiny Spell - Harmony or Disruption - Stay Tuned

Technorati Tags: Spellchecker

The tiny spell utility has been added to my laptop.  I already have two spell checkers, but I figure, could it hurt to have another?  Will they counter act each other, or show each other support. I am writing in Q10 now.

New boxes are popping up when I type words that are not in the tinySpell dictionary.

Will this be a war of spell-checkers or will it be peace and harmony on the writing screen.  Stay tune.
-30-

Live Writer Test

We changed the layout of the blog and the DNS to which the URL points.

Now we need to see if the original Live Writer setting still apply or do we have to reset the editor?

-30-

We Are Back.

The changes were subtle but significant. We weren't sure if we blew the blog off the Internet, but it would seem the DNS corrections took. It was scary for a few moments, but we had confidence it would work. Now we have to convince Live Writer.
-30-

Maintenance For Belltowernews.com

We are making some design changes early on Tuesday morning.  You may not be able to gain access to the site from 24 to 72 hours after midnight.

Meanwhile, go to Grazing Portal to keep up to date with the latest entries.

-30-

Bell Tower Disappeared

We've changed some of the setting and Bell Tower News seems to have disappeared. This is NOT a good thing!!

Chewing Gum and Soccer

del.icio.us Tags: Man City

It was in something I read on the Internet that said chewing gum made you smarter.  I am not so sure about that.  I rarely chew gum but a piece was offered to me during Coffee Hour this morning and impulsively I took it.  Normally, when people offer gum or a mint at a social gathering it means your breath might be on the brink of acting as a capable paint stripper.

But, as I am still chewing the gum hours later, I believe it has removed my ability to write at all.  Or it could be because of how little I know about Association Football? 

I do know that Manchester City has defeated Manchester United in a soccer game in the not too distant past.  I do know that is like the New Jersey Giants defeating the New England Patriots.  I do know that my friend, a new citizen of these United States, is a die hard Man City fan.  That's all I need to know to be able to say: Congratulations Man City!!!
-30-

Kindle Has No Effect???

Technorati Tags: Kindle,Sony,Kodak,Polaroid

One of last things I read on the web today was a comment by someone at Sony saying the Kindle has had no effect on the sale of books. 

On what planet is this guy?  The Kindle has only been out a few weeks, to the general public at least, they are on back order well into May and they are only available in the US.  Of course they haven't had an effect on the market yet.  They are, in all reality, not ON the market yet.

An independent thought occurred to me this afternoon while waiting on-line for a burrito with my son.  We had just left the local Borders where he depleted his birthday gift cards by half.  While he was browsing the stacks, I sat in the café reading a sample of a novel called The Sufi and Jinn.  The sample ended right after a fable told to a gathering of believers.  It took me less than a second to decide to read rest of the book.  I clicked on buy and before I could get back to the home menu to select it, the entire book was now on my Kindle.

There was a touch of guilt on my part buying a book from Amazon.com while sitting in the café in the back of Borders.  It didn't last long as I watched my son walk by with a stack of books.  Borders was getting its own.

The independent thought I dropped a paragraph ago had to do with Kodak.  When a boy, I had a box Brownie. 

It wasn't an antique.  Don't go there. 

The trick with the Brownie was they cost next to nothing.  When you were finished taking the pictures, you sent the camera, film and all to Rochester N.Y.  The photos were returned with a refilled Brownie.  The money Kodak was making was in the sale of film and development.

Polaroid made its money from the film as well.  They recently stopped making the film.  Could digital photography have something to do with that?

How much money would Amazon.com make if they gave away the Kindles?  Would the increase in sales make up for the cost of manufacture and distribution?  Then there's the cost of the Whispernet.  That book didn't appear on my kindles in the Borders Café by magic.  It was downloaded thorough what is really a sophisticated broadband cellular network. 

So, maybe not for free, but at a subscription, to pay for the phone perhaps.  The more I think about this; the more sense is made of their original business plan.

Can you tell it's late?

Good Night All.
-30-

Two Hours At Google Reader

Using the Firefox Extension, Read-it-later, I was able this morning to hold for later viewing all of the links below while browsing through the Google Reader .

What assisted me in copying these links I as perused them in Firefox clicking on the Read-it-later and the Read-it icons was the newest note taking utility added to the laptop, Quicknote. Quicknote was praised in an earlier blog entry.

The Read-it-later extension is not only for Google Reader. It copies to its bookmark any link you may encounter while browsing. Therefore, one or two of the links below may have come from browsing places like Technorati or commandN, but most come from Google Reader, whither there are feeds from both of these sites

I have loaded the complete link below the names of the sites instead of embedding them. This way you can see, before you click on them, exactly where the link is taking you. However, some links were so long, in the original entry, they went off the page. Those I have embedded in the name of the link.

Read-It-Later Links

What is Relativity?
http://www.livescience.com/mysteries/080208-relativity.html

Tinker
http://www.tiinker.com/

GMail Skins

WOT For Firefox
http://www.freewarefiles.com/wot-for-firefox_program_39708.html

The Draco Tavern
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0786159472/omnivoracious-20

Archbishop Defends Remarks
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7236174.stm

Google Map Mashups

Stephen King On Writing
http://www.amazon.com/

First Look at Firefox 3.0
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061212-8409.html

WiFi Sites
http://hotspotr.com/wifi

Photo Enforced
http://www.photoenforced.com/

The Elegant Variation
http://marksarvas.blogs.com/

eHub-Flexadex
http://www.emilychang.com/go/ehub/app/flexadex/

Duke of York Trashes US
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7227627.stm

Creative Swearing (This is very fast but funny)

Configuring GMail Imap in Thunderbird

Daylife
http://www.daylife.com/

Romney Exits (Herald Tribune)

Dignity Village

Smoke at Ansonia

commandN #121

Add Content to Google Maps

Create PDF Magazines
http://www.pdf-mags.com/index.php

Cram Magazine (PDF)
http://www.cram-mag.com/

Daily Dose of Imagery
http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/

The Tenant Who Wrote Macbeth

Word and OpenOffice Compatibility

How to Fold a Towel Monkey

Digital Camera Reviews
http://www.dpreview.com/

Blogger Buzz
http://buzz.blogger.com/

LiveJournal Tags: Read-it Extension,Google Reader,Quicknotes. Live Writer

Firefox Back Up

It should be mentioned that Firefox, though no manipulation of my own, is now back up and running. 

When it activated all of my add-ons, along with their associated websites.  I had to go in and turn off the add-ons not currently in use.  It did surprise me there were so many.  I am a taster.  When I find mention of something that may make the browsing experience more interesting, will try it.  Mostly the reason I turn it off as to do with loading time or its conflict with a already running feature.  I only delete the ones that have an obvious detrimental effect on my set-up.

I wonder if this huge patch, whose pending arrival was all over ZDNet news. (Google Read Feed), was a precursor to Firefox's version 3.0.

-30-

Technorati Tags: Firefox Patch

Contemplating Ashes in the Cave

Technorati Tags: commandN,Google Reader,Kindle,Q10 Editor

It was good to start the morning with my newly arrived loose tea now on standard order with Amazon.com and a podcast from snowy Toronto.

Work in the trenches has kept me from keeping the blogs in good working order. I would love to promise improvement, but there is this quirky eating thing to which I have grown so accustomed. The other two distractions are, as before, the Google Reader and Kindle.

Our Google Reader subscription list is now a ridiculous number. However, the shortcuts, such as the letters m and j as well as the space bar do let me browse at a quicker pace. There is literature out there that says the human attention span is diminishing due to browsing in this manner. I don't know about that.

When mankind had little more to do then contemplate the ashes from last night's fire, the attention span may have been longer, but now with the entire world coming to our face on the computer screen, we need to be able to triage the information.

The program Q10, a full screen editor that brings me back to my DOS 8086, with the blue back ground and yellow print it helps to remove the distraction of bars and pop ups. I am using it now for the first copy of this entry.

The sound effect of the typewriter also soothes my ancient soul.

On the Kindle front, I have discovered Samples. I have mentioned a comparison between the Kindle and heroin. The offering of samples is along the same line.

This morning, before anything else, I went to the Amazon.com kindle books Web site and chose a dozen or so books to sample. Of the dozen, I chose to buy Gore Vidal's memoir. I am toying with The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes but will decide that after finishing Gore Vidal's book.
If you go down the right column on Belltowernews.com you will see the Google Reader box. I am constantly adding links in that box even when not making entries to the blog.

So, if you come to Belltowernews.com or any of the other Grazing Blogs, and there are no new entries, it would behoove you to at least glance at the Reader links.
Some of this stuff is fantastic.

Back to Google Reader!!!
-30-

Firefox Upgrade Killed Firefox!!!

Firefox just updated itself.  It also updated all of the extensions-add-ons.  It activated all of the disabled extensions, of which there are many. 

For those of the extensions that have third party web pages begging for donations, it opened all of them  as well.  When I started to disable the extensions, FIREFOX HAS A PROBLEM box popped up. 

Now I can't get it to restart.  This is not good.  Not good at all.   
-30-

Belltower News and Grazing. What's the Connection?

A legitimate question was asked by one of our viewers.  "You constantly refer to Belltowernews.com as the original Grazing blog.  What connection is there between Belltower News and grazing?"

As I consider it, it's a wonder this question hasn't be asked earlier.  The answer is economics. 

A while back, when working as a solo development act, an establishment in Vermont asked me to help with the set-up of an on-line newsletter.  As was usual for back then, I created a domain name and a hosting site for the newsletter that was the same as its name, Belltower News.

The creation of this domain name was a bit premature.  They wanted the newsletter to reside on their own server as a link.  Haste makes waste.

Not wanting to be wasteful, I was looking for a place to link the newly created blog Random Thoughts Grazing.  I had found that the words Random and Thoughts in many variations were already used in many blogs.  So, I linked the blog to Belltowernews.com and changed its name  to fit the URL

Backwards engineering of a sort, but I like it.

There about a dozen or so grazing blogs still in operation. All of them do have the word Grazing in their title, just not this one.  It is in the subtitle.

--30--

BuzzNet Tags: Belltowernews.com

Twitter: What's Up?

The only one from whom I seem to be getting any information on Twitter is Leo Laporte.  He used the twitter email address to get his information from his visit to the Nile back to US.  Now, did the Internet connection for North Africa and India  collapse while he was there or after he left.  Hmm.

Then, in today's CommandN, Twitter add-ons were part of the weekly Tech-Tips.  Realizing I hadn't been on Twitter since last December I went in to see what I had left behind.  Pretty much nothing.

I let Twitter look at my GMail contacts only to find none of the several hundred people on my list seem to have Twitter accounts.  More likely, if they do, they're not using the official email address that would be found in my Thunderbird address book.

Jaiku makes much more sense.  That, and we have it as box on in the right column of Belltowernews.com

I need to read more about Twitter and see about the fuss.
-30-

Technorati Tags: Twitter

Google Spam Filter - Pretty Good, But...

Upon the advice of a wise computer guru, to fix a out of control SPAM problem, I started to divert most of the mail associated with the grazing blogs through a separate Gmail account with the SPAM filter set at high. When I opened the account this morning there were 1083 messages marked as SPAM.

I was prepared to delete the entire folder, though the advice was to leave it alone and let Google use its thirty day option. Then I noticed a few spots with colored labels at the beginning of the messages. I have friends set for a red tag. There was a message from a friend of the blog. Gmail allows the message to be removed from the SPAM list quite easily.

The lesson learned here is to use the color coding for your labels so the messages so marked stand out in long lists.
-30-

Powered by ScribeFire.