It’s Been a Long Week

Our Summer Vacation begins on Tuesday Afternoon.  To allow for that time off, I worked six & ½ days this week. 

Because of all of the above, I decided to go technological hermit today.  Here it is forty minutes from my bedtime.  The Sony headset is in place, Pandora is playing Norah Jones singing Lonestar. 

So much for free music.  This is the third song I’ve bought from Amazon Mp3. 

The question that just came to mind, is my mind.  Is it seeing this as a restive isolation from society?  Or, on the opposite side, does it see it as constant interaction with all sort of society?

A little of both, I suspect.

The day is over for me now.

The moon is gone, the rain has begun.

A good time to sleep.

-30-

LiveJournal Tags: Norah Jones

Fired up Firefox to Help Miro

Just installed the Miro Amazon.com application in Firefox. It was a request made when installing Miro. I haven't used Firefox for a while, but I figured it couldn't hurt to install it.
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Web Cycle of Discovery

Using the native RSS reader in Opera 9.5** I came across a reference to Evernote.  I had looked at earlier in beta and found no use for it then.  Reading the blog entry in RSS, it sounded as if the program, as well as its interaction with its online base, has become more mature, sophisticated and thereby useful. 

It is now integrated in my computer use, along with Texter and Spell Catcher Plus.  While exploring the RSS feeds further, in the blogs about AIR applications, I came across a reference to TweetDeck. 

This was another case of not being initially impressed but, through prodding and discovery, found many new and useful features.  It would take an entire blog entry to extol its many wonderful features.  Perhaps tomorrow.

What stood out the most was the ever changing cloud of Twitter word usage in TwitScoop.  Wanting to share how this looked with the rest of the world, I copied it to Evernote, created a public “book” and pasted a freeze-frame of the word cloud here.

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In between all of this I finally managed to finish William Russell’s first hand account of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-58 and the consequences of the British reprisal/revenge.    He was nearly killed during the Siege of Lucknow.

Tomorrow I pick him up at the beginning of the American Civil War.  He goes to Washington and is introduced to Lincoln by Secretary Seward.  What drama is about to unfold!
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LiveJournal Tags: Evernote

Aurora Demo Very Complicated

I just watched the series of vimeo demos of Mozilla’s Aurora interface.

Very clever and very complicated.  It’s shown as an interaction twixt what appears to be a Yuppie farmer and someone who predicts profits in agriculture based on loosely gather data on the Internet.

The strangest part to me was the graphic of usage icons diminishing in size to the horizon according to there place on the “Z” time line.  It has the feel of a galactic cloud of cosmic dust, only not as inspiring.

What was most interesting about the demo was the space station mouse the woman was using.  It looked like a globular wheel combined with an inter-lever joy-stick.

I have a feeling this woman runs a high tech winery.  If you have read the news lately, they are growing a lot more than grapes in some of these northern California boutique wineries.

Perhaps with hands-on experience I would be better able to critique the interface itself.  This is more a comment on the demonstration. 
I felt no connection with the characters used to represent the end-user.

Mr. Jobs does a better job of clearly showing how we may use a product in our day to day lives.  This demo did not.

 

LiveJournal Tags: Aurora

commandN Coming Along Nicely

In last week’s episode of commandN, there were a few glitches, especially in the sound.
 
All of that has not only disappeared in this weeks offering, the overall quality of the podcast has improved drastically.

 
It was not only the technical aspects of the podcast that improved.  The content was all of highly interesting quality.  This one definitely wasn’t called in.

While a topic was being explained a professional feel was generated by the embedded active video.

I was worried that commandN, one of my favorite podcasts, was starting to run out of steam.  This worry was put aside after view episode 143.

LiveJournal Tags: commandN

Has Twitterfeed Been Tweeting Blog?

We set up Twitterfeed a while ago and forgot about it.  Need to check back and see if they’ve loaded. –30-

LiveJournal Tags: Twitterfeed

Lightning Strikes – Groups of People Hit

In reading the news of late, there seems to have been many stories of groups of people conducting themselves in an unsafe manner.  Has common sense left the collective intelligence of the human race?

In a previous life I witnessed a woman clinging to a tree at a ball field get killed by a strike.  She was told by those around her not to hide under the tree during a thunderstorm.  She brushed them off with a comment about the low risk of getting hit. 

LiveJournal Tags: lightning

The Vinecast Has Returned – Ho Hum

If you want to waste an hour and half, listen to the inane conversation at the new Vinecast. 

This experience was similar to my recent read of the latest David Sedaris book. 

I unfortunately had just reread The Innocents Abroad.  Expecting to follow this with more wit and humor mixed with bitter irony, I was instead given the mediocre revelations of a mediocre life, the highlight of which was to go to Tokyo with the express purpose of ending a decades long smoking habit.

Twain wrote about quitting the awful habit several times.  Each time was with a combination of irony and humor that was totally missing from the Sedaris book.

I will compare TWiT with Vinecast.  On the TWiT podcast, intelligent and well informed people discuss issues surrounding their chosen topic.  With the exception of a fascination with Twitter, the talk mostly stays focused to the issue at hand.  It is moderated by Leo Laporte.

It would be correct to identify the moderator of the Vinecast here, but there really wasn't one.  It wasn't until the broadcast was several minutes old before the speakers were even identified.

It would be the right thing to say that I listened to the entire podcast.  It would be the right thing, but it would be a lie.  My email icon popped up and I decided to read SPAM instead of continuing with the podcast. 

That about says it all.

LiveJournal Tags: Vinecast

A Day For Trying Other Blog Editors

LiveJournal Tags: Blog Editors

It has been a while since we’ve tried blog editors other than Live Writer.  This is primarily because Live Writer does such a dang good job of getting the message out.  It is also because our blog writing has taken somewhat of a hiatus during the summer. 

The entry below was made with Zoundry Raven.  Of all of the editor we tried today, this came the closest to the convenience and design abilities of Live Writer.

Closest but not quite there.

Bleezer made all sorts of promises and delivered on none of them.  When I could get the interface to open, after several obscure “404” error messages, the final interface was almost as obscure as the error messages themselves.  It would appear that it is trying to be a standalone version of Scribewriter. 

I say appear because I couldn’t get it to load after the bevy of error messages.  On top of this, after closing it, it left its flash screen on my desktop.  This required a warm re-boot to remove it.  It is in version 0.96.  If I go back to try it again, it will have to be at least 2.0.

Off-line editor for VOX?

This is a first blog entry using the new off-line editor Zoundry Raven.

In the set up, it seemed to bring the settings for Trounce Ally in the VOX server with no problem. Considering the difficulty we have had getting a VOX based blog working in an off-line editor we will be very surprised if this works.

No bells and whistles with this entry, with the exception of the -30- HTML code.