A new boss at work and the family away

Two things have kept me from the blog, a new boss at work and the family away for the holiday.

With the family away for the holiday, and the new boss at work, I have spent an extraordinary amount of time at work with the understanding there was nothing at home to rush to from work.

Now I will be going away on abbreviated holiday and expect to be back sometime early Tuesday.
See you all then. =30=

Slipped to the bottom

Something about the previous post shoved it down the page. This is a test to see if this is a problem with the templates or just the unique way the last message was created.=30=

Almost Did It...

At 5:20 this morning I leaped out of bed, threw some clothes into plastic shopping bags
and was out of the driveway by 5:40.

I was on my way to a ceremony in NYC. A late dear friend of mine was having the street upon which she had lived for over 60 years named after her.

The ceremony is scheduled for noon today.

On the way to the highway, I noticed the “E“ on my gas gauge light up. I pulled into the Mobil station for a fill up and was blown away by what used to cost $14.00 now cost 29. That woke me up a bit.

As I drove further along on the local roads, I remembered my personal meds. If I had taken one pill this morning, I probably could have made it through the day, but by not taking it, I had to return.

On the return it dawned on me how many people I was inconveniencing by my truly spontaneous decision to go.

By the time I pulled back into the driveway, I had decided not to go. All of that in three quarters of hour and it wasnt even six thirty yet.

Now its 11:18 a.m. and I have accomplished much.
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Video Upload at Google

If you are considering the video upload feature at Google, I would read the legal document we never read when installing programs or agreeing to online service. I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, but that agreement looks to me as if you are signing away your soul.

This is not to say stay away from the Google Video Upload option. Just to read the agreement. It looks like a program that could be very useful to families to share the video of Junior taking his first steps. As long as they know their sharing Junior’s first steps with everyone who is signed onto the program as well as everyone who works at Google and to whomever Google decides it would be a good idea to display Juniors’ First Steps.

Though at the moment I don’t even have a digital video camera, nor do I intend to get one in the near future, it was the 70 percent paragraph that stopped me cold in my registration tracks and for the first time I think EVER did I click on the NO I DO NOT AGREE button. It felt weird, but it felt right.

Other weekend news will follow.

Read the News today, oh boy...

It was the tradition on Sunday mornings to break the Sunday NYT into its various parts, triage the parts and proceed to be informed.

Sunday mornings are now taken up with scanning the headlines of the various RSS and Atom feeds, going online to the NYT, Guardian, Scotsman, Yahoo! News, Google News. This is followed by opening Thingamablog and scanning the Tech News feeds.

The good side of this is my fingers don‘t have the weekly ink smudge, but my brain is certainly assaulted with information.

Reading papers online, papers I would‘ve had to go to the international newsstand in Times Sq. to get before, broadens the reporting on things in the US:

This morning The Scotsman had articles on McCain‘s plans of the 2008 presidential race. It was well written, insightful and from a non-committed point of view. This is refreshing.

Then there was the article on the airline the C`I`A is using to ferry its agents and customers around the world. I would say that article had a slightly paranoid slant, but that is common outside of this country, where they dont understand it really is no more than an extension of a Yale Fraternity.

There was another mocking article about the MoD losing a multi-million dollar unmanned submarine only to have it found by a Scottish lobster fisherman. At first the MoD refused to admit to its ownership of the vessel. This they flipped when it was pointed out to them the hull of the boat had MoD printed all over it.

When the ponied up to owning it, The Scotsman reported, the fisherman wouldn‘t give it back to them until they paid him for the expense of hauling back to port and getting it out of the water. They refused, so the wily Scottish fisherman hid it.

The Tyson Surrender and the Jackson trial were reported with the usual relish papers have for reporting the downfall of American Celebrities and the royal family with its many branches.

Bits and pieces of the tech news found to be interesting will be reported at Home Grazing.
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Firefox Locked In

If you go back a few months or so in this blog you will see several articles about Opera web browser and how much better it is that Internet Explorer. It still beats IE hands down, but...

There’s Firefox.

As a shareware/freeware junkie, I try everything for a few days and only incorporate the software into my routine when I find it either increases the speed, lessens the typing or increases the fun. Otherwise, I delete it. If you don’t do that you will soon find your hardrive overwhelmed. This is especially so for programs that assume you want them to start everytime you reboot your program.

Ooops, off soapbox, back on topic, Firefox.

With it’s themes and extensions, Firefox is extremely personalizable. (there’s a word SpellCatcherPLUS
didn’t like.) I tried a download manager extension for 15 days, it reminded me of this in fifteen days. I found it didn’t add to the plate in comparison with the default download manager. I when to the Extensions menu choice, deselected it and it was gone. That simple.

For Opera , not so simple. Opera is customizable to a point, but the ease of customization isn’t at all as simple as Firefox.
. As with any software designed to do a similar job, the similarities will always be greater in number than those features that make each program unique. The focus in comparison shouldn’t be on the bells and whistles, it should be on those features they share.

Starting quickly has always been one of Opera selling points. In this it is better than Firefox.
only if you have loaded Firefox down with a heavy theme and a truckload of extensions. Out of the box, it is as quick if not quicker starting up.

Time to go to the beach. Try them both, then choose Firefox.
because there are no adverts attached in the free version, in fact there is only a free version.
=30=

Gmail is back up!!

It was like a pusher withholding a taste. I told that to the support people at Gmail from my backup Yahoo account. They seemed very understanding and quickly readdicted me to Gmail. It was kind of them and I feel much better.... whew!
=30=

SpellCatcher Plus is the one!

I run a dozen or so blogs in a series called Famous Grazing Blogs. The sole purpose of this series is to set up a blog in everywhich way an end-user may try. Each of the blogs has no other focus than their mere existence.

The blogs were not just created and left hanging. We do our best to keep each as up to date as possible. As you can imagine this take a lot of typing. Though each of is a trained touch-typist, when typing as quickly as possible, mistakes happen. There are spell checkers in some of the media, but not all. This is especially true for the hosted programs, such as Word Press and pLog.

Here is where Spell Catcher PLUS comes into the picture. I have tried several shareware and freeware spell checkers. Each seems to have a glitch in one or two of the various interfaces used. Spell Catcher PLUS was the only one that has proven itself worthy to each of them.

When I registered the software, I included a comment in the bill of sale and received an email form the program’s author allowing me to promote the product on the blogs. This I am doing as I type because this will be the exact copy found in each of them.
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Gmail Shut me Down

They say it was only for 24 hours, but I am not sure why. We had to leave for an appointment and I left a pending message on the screen with Gmail open in another window. If that was all it took to get shut down, I will have to find another online email service because being slightly absent minded, I will probably do that again and again.
I will report here if there is any resolution to this.
=30=

Blogger is Free Service - Back Up, Back Up!

After reading this article at Wired.com, I went to my Blogger page and said I really need to do something to back this up.

There are several years worth of mindless ramblings there that some student of the crazed minds of bloggers may want to examine in latter years. Then I thought, most of this is crap. The only thing I wouldnt want to lose are the graphics. I lost a good deal of them when a server crashed on me last year.

Now I know well enough to store them at GMail, oops, another free service...

Oh well, I guess when we put down our thoughts in a storage media that consists basically of rust glued to plastic and the whims of magnetism, we really cant expect anything close to immortality.

There is always the cuneiform on marble option...
=30=

A Celebratory Dilemma

It is a dilemma when news arrives that is good news, to a point. There was the distinct possibility that it could have been great news, but doesn’t qualify. On the other side of the stick, it could have equally been bad or even very bad news.

An extreme example would be lottery news. You could have got all seven numbers and won 150 millions of dollars. But you only had six and won $100,000.00. The $100,000.00 is good news, but it wasn’t the very good news it could have been. The opposite side of that stick would be if you lost the ticket. The bad news would be you lost a ticket worth $100,000.00. The very bad news would be you lost the ticket worth the full amount of the prize.

Nothing that extreme has happened here. After initial elation the realization of what could have happened has set in, putting a slight dampening on the celebratory mood.

Don’t ask for the details, they would only bore you.
=30=

The Day Being the Last Day.

This has been an odd week. Because of the holiday, the week started on Tuesday. Tuesday was also the last day of the month. So the first day of the week was the last day of the month and it wasn’t Monday. Deadlines happened and projects started at the same time.

It was a confusing configuration of a day. Before things could get started other things needed to be finished but because of the juxtaposition of the end of the month and the start of the week, the order in which things needed to be done required less than the normal automatic behavior seen at the workplace.

It all worked out, of course, but it had to be done at a higher plane of consciousness than I normally allow myself to attain in the drone status of workday. It was probably good for me. For clarification of this Google Gurdjieff.
=30=

A Gardening Day at School

This photo is in the Flickr selection, but I wanted to put it directly on the blog. I took this during a gardening day at my son‘s school. For some reason beyond me the photo caused an emotional reaction beyond intellectual definition for me. =30= 

Darn Dandelions!

There is one day a week I can cut the grass. This weekend there were two.

Last weekend we were in the middle of a nor'easter, not a time to cut grass. What I learned this week is, if you let the grass and accompanying foliage grow over a two week period, in the Spring, in New England, when it has rained a LOT, the dandelion stems take on a woody quality.

This is a quality not very compatible with the manual lawn mower’s method of cutting. You know the dandelions have evolved when they jam up the revolving lawn mower blade. What they don’t know is my neighbor has a tractor, with a military size engine. I will get those suckers next Saturday.

If it isn’t raining again.

Happy Sunday.
=30=

You Would Think There'd Be More

Most of the blogging software that I have been installing of late does not come with a spellchecker, the way this, Thingamablog and w::bloggar do. In fact, I have been making entries, cutting them and pasting them into either bloggar or Thingamablog for spell checking.

I could have done it in Word, but I ususally have either of the two blog editors up and running and MS programs take almost as long to load as Adobe. Now, even though I am writing this in Thingamablog, the spellchecker I currently am running, Spell Catcher Plus seems to be adopting itself to my typing style.

This is a good thing.

I may keep it, I may not. That is the way with trial software. I also may have already paid for this. I will have to go and check my records but I think I may have evaluated it in a DOS version a long time ago. The interface looks familiar.
-30-

New Famous Grazing Blog

Starting with last Friday's showing of the Revenge of Sith, reviewed by me at Field Grazing,

there were many monumental bits of media this week that crossed my path. NCIS killed off a character. Raymond is no more, Charmed went off like it was leaving but the news on the web was that it was coming back.

Sadly it would seem that Andromeda is no more. It had a Mary Tyler Mo0re style of character exit that I found to be out of character. I thought the blowing up of the entire Earth when they finally get there to be a bit much. It was probably more the frustration of the Writers with WB that caused the explosion than the touted tectonic interactions.

Then there was Enterprise, the "last" of the Star Trek series. I can't see that franchise staying away for too long. SG1 is still on there air, though a new crew is promised for next years with one of the Nelson brothers as the leader. The last thing he led was the TV version of the C~I~A.

That's all for now. This is an inaugural review for the the new Famous Grazing Blog, Serene Grazing, based on the Seridipity Blog software.. There is a SPIP and a Nucleus version in the works. Watch your local Famous Grazing for their opening announcements.
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Greasemonkey

I have installed Greasemonkey as an extension to Firefox. I am not exactly sure what it does yet and how Platypus! is related to it.

It's just that once or twice a month I go to the extensions page on the Mozilla site and add the extensions I thought might enhance the Firefox experience. Then I sometimes forget they're there until the need for them arise.

Others I have removed for slowing down either the loading of Firefox itself or the slowing of the machine in general. One I even took off because it added money to the writer without adding value to Firefox.

These are Thursday morning thoughts as I get ready to go off to work.
=30=

DeadJournal

Following Leo LaPorte's recommendation, I went to DeadJournal.com to see what I could see. What I saw was a request for funds to sign up. I am not so profane that I need to pay money to join a blog host who encourages profanity and make you pay for the privilege.

The fact that it's a pay display site probably removes the portal from illegal sanctions based on comment.

=30=

Editors

Flashlights, large mugs, good pens and text editors. These are the four items I seem to have an awful lot of. The latest text editors I have down loaded from Snapfiles pro are called Syn Text Editor and GridinSoft Editor. The first is too busy when it opens and the second was obviously written by someone to whom Engish is not their first language. After quick review, I don' think either of these will become my default Notepad replacement.

For now I'll stick to EditPad Lite.
=30=

Do you Blog?

In a conversation overheard on the elevatorat work on Friday one
coworker asked another, "I just read Greeenberg's article on Blogging, do you blog?"

Of course I do, but not about this job, I blog about skiing." "Skiing in May?" Came the reply. The rest of the conversation was lost when the doors opened and the skiblogger left the box.

Feeling bold, I asked the original questioner, "Do you blog?" "Huh!"?" Then I realized the ongoing paranoia about blogging that involves your company and let it drop.

The thought I carried away from the semi-encounter was if I blog,
about what do I? If not about anything in general, there must be a
focus. Then it occurred to me, I blog for the sake of blogging . No
more, no less. In this Famous
Grazing series, I blog mostly about blogging itself.

On some, especially the older ones like Belltowernews.com, I will
wonder off topic and click on the Muse box instead of the Blog box.

In the case of this message, I clicked both.

Do you blog, or just surf?
=30=

WhatWIki?

I mentioned earlier that I was looking into the TidyWiki set up. It's a fun thing with which to play, but I am not sure if it's something I can use at the moment. I have loaded one up on the server and called it GrazingNotebookWiki. Another version is the Grazing Agenda. Kudos to those who have put the hours into this.

The lawn needs mowing, the oil needs to be changed and the rugs need to be vacuumed. WikiStuff is for the rare spare time for now.
=30=

Sith sucith

I Just returned from seeing The Revenge of the Sith. As soon as the
shock of the overwhelming special effects wore off, I realized I had
just sat through a really bad "C" movie with D-Grade dialog. Cut to the
chase - everybody who wasn't in Chapter IV dies. There, I saved you the
price of admission.

It was beyond violent. Children are killed, living bodies are burned,

people are haphazardly decapitated for sport. If there is someone with
the stomach for it, I would like to know the body count of just the
living creatures who are killed, never mind the 'droids.

The space battles in the original series where like a first generation

pacman game compared to the detailed carnage in this movie. I know in
real life, no animals were hurt, but will an eight year old child know
this? There were many of them in costume at the theater. I will not take
my son to see this.

I am a person who has known war and real battles in the street. I have

the scars and nightmares to prove it. People have died in my arms, real people.

From my point of view, Sith really Sucith.

=30=

TechTV Leo Laporte's 2003 Technology Almanac

his current volume

See All Sideblogs

Another Distraction

Don't know how I drifted over to TidyWiki, but once I got there I spent the next hour reading the HOW-TO files on putting one up. It isn't all that cut and dry, but I think it will be worth the effort once I get it up and running. Be careful if you go there, it grabs you if you are a blogger.
=30=

Leo Laporte's 2003 Technology Manual.

I was cleaning up the pile of books that have gathered in layers by the side of the bed. I found my 2003 copy of Leo Laporte's 2003 Technology Manual. Out of curiosity, I went the the chapter on blogging. In he mentions several interesting items; the one about the developer of Grey matter, Noah Grey and the condition that caused him to find Blogging a suitable way with which to communicate with the world.

ON the Monday, November 17, 2003 almanac Leo mentions several links. I wondered, all of a little less than two years later how many of the sites are still active. The first mentioned was glassdog.com. That's still there.

Then he mentions NoahGrey.com. It is a site worth visiting. Read the biography and don't miss this picture of a cat.

There are a few more paragraphs about NoahGrey. This is followed by a TIP OF THE DAY, which involves going to blogdex.media.mit.edu to see the a blog index mapping the entire blog related universe.

That's still there. There's an article on the opening page regarding the "Piano Man" from the BBC. I heard about him on the radio coming home. I hope he is for real, and if so, he is either from another planet or a loving caring family comes forth to support him.

Didn't find the index Leo mentions, but it looks like a fairly full site, I am sure it's in there somewhere.

The last blog related link mentioned on the page has to do with something called: "Cyberian. He is recommending you go to cyberian.tripop.com/blog.htm to download whatever it is found to where this link leads. NOPE, that's not there anymore.

Because that one no longer existed, Ill give you the first one from the next page, still about blogs: evhead.

The point I am trying to make here, is that even though the is the ancient 2004 Technology Almanac, most of the information is still up to date. imagine how way ahead of things are in his current volume
=30=.

Drupal

Okay, I read the installation instructions in detail, created a new
MYSql database at brdk.net called drupal, loaded the drupal database
instructions on it and finally got what looks like a version of a blog
up at http://www.brdk.net/drupal. Still not sure what I am doing, but
with few more weeks and translation of the user manual, I might get
something up that resembles this Thingamablog set up.

It is only the stubborn part of me that is working on this. The
personal note from Drupal's main developer which said in effect that he
would try to make it so that even an idiot like me could get it up, has
caused me to put more effort into it than I am yet to be convinced it is
worth.

We shall see.
=30=

Good Sunday Morning.

When I sat down and hit the icon for WinAmp Random selection the first choice was "I'll See You in Church on Sunday Morning." by Sonny Osborne. It was followed by Ella Fitzgerald singing "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off!" Should I read tea leaves in this?-grin-

Weather people predicted a totally wet weekend. With the exception of a few clouds on Saturday morning, it has been a perfect Spring weekend. I wonder how many plans, like the picnic Birthday party we didn't attend, were called off because of the forecast. Is there such a thing as bad prediction insurance? I am sure there is. See: Betty Grable's Legs...

Ella Fitzgerald's Voice is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.

Time for Breakfast!
=30=

Lost some entries here

While I was off editing Dragons Grazing, it would seem all of the entries between Thursday and today went south.

There is the posibility that I posted some things to Home Grazing and did not cc: them to Bell Tower News, but I don't think so.
=30=

bBlog

To do things like post this pBlog graphic with the imbedded link to the forum, you need to either speak HTML, or have a decent HTML editor. To quickly put the graphic and its link together, I used w::bloggar. Now I have to figure out how to configure w::bloggar to post to pBlog. It does post to Drupal and Wordpress, so there is a way.
=30=

---

Using w:bloggar to post to Open Grazing.

I have to come up with a better editor for Open Grazing. Its vanilla editor, with which it is packed, is for the pits. I could use the w::bloggar editor and cut and past, but that takes so much away from the spontaneities of blog posting.
=30=

---

(I will post this on Bell Tower News just because I should.)

Open Grazing Open

I just figured out the problem with my "mySQL" setup with bBlog, (not to
be confused with pBlog,) it was an arcane setting, but now it's
all up and running as Open
Grazing

=30=

The other grazing blog:

Home Grazing

Exploit code chases two Firefox flaws

By Dawn Kawamoto, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: May 9, 2005, 8:14 AM PT
--
Two vulnerabilities in the popular Firefox browser have been rated "extremely critical" because exploit code is now available to take advantage of them.

=30=

Saturday Morning Posted in the Afternoon.

We awoke this morning to the sound of an Electrical Transformer exploding down the block.

This, of course, caused all the power to shutdown for ourselves and immediate neighbors.
It is in situations like this having a laptop as your primary conduit, is a good thing. The house
PC was struggling to stay alive on the UPS. It did long enough for me to save everything and shut it down.

What was most amazing was the quite. No motors buzzing, no electronics humming or beeping.
There's a lively windstorm whipping up the neighborhood and it was easier to hear it as it blew
down tree limbs or caused various ventilation functions to kick in or hit back as the wind tried
to come into the house. I was able to sit on the couch in the living room and read a book by daylight.
Normally on a Saturday morning the living room is occupied and the sound of the Disney Channel
permeates the air.

The good news is the water and gas were still operating. I was able to put on the kettle and
have some tea while I read my book with the music of the wind in the background. Following
the advise not to open the refrigerator, I fell back on the Carnation Non-fat Dry milk for the
tea. Non-dairy creamers and tea don't mix. IMHO.

Enough for the Saturday morning notes to be posted when the power returns.

=30=

Have you ever been to BJ's

Berkley and Johnson, to be exact. It's similar to Costco in a lot of ways and in a lot of ways different. You need to be a member. The fee for membership is made up over the year in savings on things like two tons of catfood, 1,000 pounds of ground turkey, etc. The difference between the two is at BJ's there are more human sized packages available.

Our friend from Ossining calls it the Honey I Shrunk the Kids store. She got that from watching a young girl try to manoeuvre a huge box of Cherios into her mother's cart.

This is a suburban experience. When I lived in the big cities, you bought what you could carry back to your apartment. If you were going for a lot, you took your folding shopping cart and hooked it the front of the stores. I noticed there are no hooks in suburban stores. You take your cart to the car.

When I miss the simplicity of apartment living, usually this is when I am mowing the lawn or shoveling snow, the story of the bum on the park bench comes to mind. If you've heard it before, read it again.

There was a bum who slept each night on park bench across the street from a swanky high rise. A woman who lived in the high rise, who spent more in a week on her poodle than the bum spent in a year on food, walked by the bench each evening when she went out to walk her dog. The dog would always stop by the bum to be pet. The lady and the bum who exchange pleasantries and each would go to their designated corners.

On one very cold winter day, the lady noticed how the bum was shivering, with only crumpled newspapers between his thin cloth coat and his skin. In a sudden and uncharacteristic surge of charity, she invited him to come up to her apartment to spend the night in the guest room. He thanked her and took her up on the invitation.

The next morning when she awoke, the lady looked out on the park and noticed the bum was back on the bench, wrapped in cardboard. She checked her apartment to make sure nothing was stolen. Then she wrapped herself in furs and took the poodle out for a walk.

When the came up to the bum she enquired why he left. He said, "When I sleep on this bench, I dream of living in the lap of luxury and sleep soundly. When I was in you soft and warm bed, all I could dream about was sleeping on a cold hard park bench. I couldn't stay asleep until I came back out here."

Is there a moral here? I suppose the wise saying, as a thing is viewed, so it appears would apply.
=30=

Review redux

--The title of Bill Bryson's "A
Short History of Nearly Everything" does not sell itself short. It
is exactly that.

Don't be intimidated by either the scope or the size of the book. It is
engaging, entertaining, informative and an all round good read. As a
word of advice, don't say "ooh ooh, listen to this part..." to your
family. Taken out of context many of the tidbits are a tad arcane. The
part about the inventor of the Geiger Counter being a hard core Nazi was
a bit of a surprise...

=30=

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.

=30=

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:

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This was the graphic heading for Belltower News:

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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.
=30=

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.
=30=

Eyechart

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.
=30=

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.

=30=

---

---

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.
=30=

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.
=30=

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.
=30=

GIMP

On 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.

=30=

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!

=30=

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.
=30=

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.

=30=

Playing with Drupal

I've pretty much got pLog and MT down. Now I'm playing with Drupal.
=30=

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.

=30=

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.
=30=

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.

---

=30=

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.

---

=30=

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.
=30=

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.

=30=

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.

=30=

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...

=30=

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.

=30=

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.
=30=

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
=30=

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.


=30=

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...

=30=

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.
=30=

A blog from Maine

I was sitting at the Maine computer wishing I had
my w:bloggar software and it suddenly hit me, the
Belltower News is based on the Blogger server.

I just wanted to mention that there is still a
few feet of snow in the back yard here, the lake
is still frozen and the eggs are dyed and ready
to hide.

After lunch, we all watched a mature Bald Eagle
circling above the house. What a magnificent site.
Perhaps not to fish or fowl, but to creatures a
tad too large for its talons, certainly worth a
crick in the neck to watch.

Not finished with Bryson's book yet. It's just
too full and rich to take all at once. Also, the
older I get the quicker my brain overflows. A
review will come, as promised.
=30=

Okay, it is the fourth day of Spring

I thought my annoyance by the snow had passed
because, after all, it is the fourth day of SPRING!!!!

But noooOoooo! I get out of bed this morning, open
the shade and, Waaaaah! Again my car is covered with
SNOW!!!!
I'm going to Maine to get away from all of this!
=30=

A very tired Tuesday

With the family away, it seems to be much easier to be tired.
Perhaps it's because I know I will not be sent out on errands,
or have to respond somewhere on a rescue mission. I can just
sit in front of the set and not study for a very important, from
an employment prospective, test.

=30=

What was the name of that song?

Two absolutly valueless bits of information
haunted me for most of the day. The main
reason it haunted me was because I couldn't
find the answer at either Google or Yahoo! search
engines.

So, in case you ever want to know the name of
the song about New Orleans with the line:
"The air's so thick and free, it's
Like lovin' arms around me."

The name of the song is Border of the Quarter
and it's sung by Leon Redbone in his Red to Blue
CD.
=30=

When will the weather stop being my point of focus?

Probably when the grass is as high
as an elephant's eye.
=30=

Spring is a day and a half away

And there is still snow in my back yard.
Worse than that, snow is predicted for
tomorrow night.
You may have noticed many, if not most,
of the most recent blogs have been related
to this bloody snow.

This could be because I have had about
enough of the dismal stuff. I just can't
wait to start complaining about the
damn mosquitoes!
=30=

NO MO SNO

Someone has taken to writing "NO MO SNO" on the windshields in the local shopping mall lot.
I can't say I disagree with the sentiment. This is New England, we do get snow and should
learn to live with it much the same way the people in Florida have learned to leave with
hurricanes, and the people in Kansas have learned to live with tornadoes and the people
in California have learned to live with mudslides and earthquakes.

But...

Out of the the ten or twelve years I've lived in New England, this has got to have been the
whitest. In the last two months, I don't recall a day when my back yard was not covered
with snow.

"NO MO SNO" Perhaps we'll see more of that sentiment before March is done with us.

My Brother in Law. If you see him on Martha's Vineyard, stop him and say hello. 

As days off go, so far so good.

Just as I wrote the heading to this entry the Scot in me said,
"Bloody fool, you just jinxed the rest of the day."
Right after that my boss called to tell me my review was approved
and I'm getting a raise. So much for the Scot in me.

Perhaps I should listen more to my adventurous English side.
Then again, if I listen too hard I may get the urge to invade
a country and incorporate it into the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts.

Perhaps it's a good thing to have a little dour Scot in you to
curb the enthusiasm.

A Bright and Sunny Sunday.

This morning I was reading about the potential drought that will
hit London this Spring. Then I looked out of the window, down the
driveway at the three foot high walls of snow on either side.

I wondered what the London people would do to have three foot
high walls of snow lining their streets and filling the parks.

Having lived in big cities, I know they'd do nothing but complain.
When you live in the countryside, you look at that snow and wonder
how much it will charge the local underground aquifer, and how
that will effect the look of things in the Spring, and the availability
of water in the Summer.

Then you come back to today and wonder how the snow predicted for
the next few days will effect the ride into work. We are not farmers, we
are just city-folk living in the country.

I am reading an enchanting book at the moment. I will review it in the
next blog. Now it's off to teach on Sunday morning.
=30=

9:46:24 PM
Did I mention it was snowing, again? The theme for this winter seems to be 10- to 12 inches. Last winter seemed like an extended autumn compared to this year.
Before we left work this afternoon my boss said not to kill myself trying to get in on time. I'm not sure if he was saying get in on time without killing yourself, or was he saying, take it easy getting in, however long that takes? Either way, I will do my best to get to work on time.
Let's just hope there is no school tomorrow. Not the kind I teach, tomorrow isa perfect day for that. I just don't want my loved ones put in harms way for one day of school.
There have been so many school days this year, there will be no break for Summer. They'll just continue on until the next school year begins.
=30=

---

7:26:38 PM
Stayed up too late watching the Oscars last night. The big question in my mind is what happened to Mrs. Douglas? Like the people in the "other" theatre, I didn't see any of the movies.

The piece on CBS Sunday morning about the Sideways tour from Santa Barbara makes me feel like I've seen the movie.

Also because at one time in a former life, I did own a Saab. I think I will just watch the news tonight and go to bed. We shall see. Perhaps a second wind.

Quien Sabe?
=30=

---

.

09:53:21
A bright and sunny day! Uh-oh!!!!
=30=

---

11:59:07 PM
Is the blog a fad like the hula hoop?

In my pre-teens, everyone in the known universe had at least one hula hoop. This is the known universe of a ten year-old boy on the streets of a tiny mid-Atlantic island. Still, the point here is the apparent ubiquitous nature of a fad.

Is blogging a fad of similar half life?

On a comedy favored by my son, a father was teaching his two boys how to drive. One of the props was a green hula hoop. So, there it was, not being used for its original purpose, but still there.

I believe this will be the fate of the personal blog, the "journo-blog", the diary blog. It will become a way for people to announce to the world the birth of a child, the opening of a restaurant or the cure for the common cold.

People will tire of telling an unlistening world every detail of their drab and mundane life.
=30=

---

11:47:28 PM
Every once and a while, I click the Next Blog icon on the upper right. This time it took me to a blog, a mostly boring blog, with a link to this story . I have heard of the LIA before, mostly in reading the history of my family's hometown, London.

But this is the most concise explanation of it I have come across.
=30=

---

8:40:29 PM
We have a thing in MA called Excise Tax.

It's a creative way for the government to collect MORE money. It is a tax that is only levied on owners of registered automobiles.

Allegedly, like the state tax on gasoline, it is for the maintaining of road. This year they, the Commonwealth, that is, want $180.00 or so.

I don't think that's an excessive amount to be in a civilization with paved roads. I've been to places where paved roads are rare, like the Northeast Kingdom. Paved roads are greatly to blame for the spread of the Roman Empire.

Being that this country seems to be slipping down the same path, from Republic to Empire, (see Gore books,) it's a good thing we have paved roads.

Then again...
=30=

---

6:09:59 PM
If you're wondering why there haven't been a slew of entries here on a day when I am not on call, it's because I have been spending most of my online time over at Blog City at my grazing site there. Blog City has greatly improved their interface and control of the blog's appearance.

None of today's entries are of any great interest to anyone other than myself. They are all musings on what works for me there and what still doesn't.
The most exciting thing that does work is the w::bloggar link is operational. The most disappointing is the ability to upload photos to the photo album.

Oh, well, in the immortal words of Mr. Wright, "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"=30=

---

8:10:55 PM
It is very weird when you see someone you know on TV. Enough about that.

The ominous reports of the weather that was going to hit us last night was like a dream. Most of the snow fell while we were sleeping. It was about 10 inches of light stuff. It came easily off the car.

On the way into Boston, it completely stopped. When I came out of the Big Dig, I had to quickly change to sunglasses to fight the glare. By the time I left, it was like a chilly early Spring day out there.

It was still weird to see someone you know on TV. A friend I have know since 1979 is coming to visit next week. We've kept in touch, by various means for the past ten years. I wonder if Gurdjieff's theory about behavior with people from other periods in your life will apply here. I'll let you know.
=30=

---

In case you were thinking I was kidding about the snow on the car... 

10:15:49 PM
They weren't kidding, the snow has started to fall.
Tell me again why I don't live in California? Oh, yeah, I forgot, mudslides, earthquakes, forest fires, and the idiots who live in Malibu for the view.
If I want view, I get in the car and go look at it, say, "oooh, nice view." and go home. I spent a month or two on a naval vessel staring out at the Pacific Ocean. After the tenth or twelfth sunset it loses its charm.
=30=

---

6:46:07 AM I am already a minute late, so I will just note that there was no snow on my car this morning. This is a good thing. =30=

---

8:23:51 PM
I mentioned that there was no snow on my car this morning. It's sort of like the incident of the dog barking in Silver Blaze. The odd thing, of late was the lack of snow.
If The Weather People are to be believed, there will be up to and perhaps in excess of a foot of snow on the car's roof in the morning. Of course, tomorrow is a day I HAVE to drive into Boston.
The good news is in Boston, they're saying less than half a foot of snow. Here in New England, we call that a dusting.
=30=

---

6:44:46 AM
Fourth day in a row the car is covered with snow. Can't say more at the moment, time to go!
=30=

---

9:48:27 PM
Had a slight brush with a power that be today.

As I walked away from the encounter, I realized that two years ago, in my reality, this place and that person did not exist. If, for some reason the place and that person were no longer in my life, would it be something toward which a value, either negative or positive, would be assigned?

Or, more likely, will they just no longer exist in any part of my reality other than that part we sometimes call memory? In my small head, there is over a half century of memory. The longer the memory becomes, the smaller the parts become. One has no more importance than another, because, other than a small part of an organ that occasionally gets a spark of electricity to project them, they no longer exist.
=30=

---

11:02:29 PM
Okay, whoa. When did I get so damn Zen?
=30=

I hate mosquitoes.

5:34:23 PM The roads were better today. Work was a little different. This is good. If I had a job that was the same day after day, I would go nuts.

In high school I worked in a factory for two days. My brain went into repetitive action overload. There are worker bees and than there are not. My job allows me to go outside, drive around on occasion, and deal with people of all makes and variety. This is for what I was built.

Oddly enough, it is in Winter I find going outside to be the most refreshing. I am not into the sultry summer day or night. During the day, it's heat, at night it's the five local breeds of mosquitoes. I hate mosquitoes.
=30=

The painting on the right is for sale

In the photo display to the right of this message is a thumbnail of a painting that we have put up for sale. It's an oil painting that we've owned for quite a while. Things in our life have become more important than owning what we think will one day hang in a museum. It's called "And Then I Rest" by William Tolliver.Ü

The Mundane and Trivial

6:40:18 AM
Light snow, 27 degrees. It's President's Day. Most of the US has the day off. The President is in Europe making nice-nice with the polits over there. I have to go to work. I could've had the day off, but I am in the exact middle of a two week project. I would rather it end on time than have it end on an odd day. =30=

---

5:34:51 PM
Three people I know slid off the road today. Thankfully none of them were hurt.

It was a slip and slide ride into work this morning, cars to the left and right off the road. Made me wonder what the hell I was doing there. Supper's ready!! =30=

---

7:47:54 PM
In one of the classes I teach, the subject is The Mundane and Trivial and how important they are to the great scheme of things. Most of the things I write here will be about the Mundane and the Trivial. That is what this stage in my life is all about. This is a good thing.
=30=

End of Advanced Diary testing...

That's it for this Sunday day of play here at Advanced Diary.

The only thing I have found at all lacking here is a spell checker.
The good news is that there is one on w::bloggar .

Did I mention that is was found on Snapfiles.com ? Nope! It was.

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Advanced Diary playing

The default color I chose was blue. I wonder if I write in blue will it transfer to the w::bloggar with the color intact?
=30=

Today is the first day I will use Advanced Diary . I am not yet familiar with all of its features.

This like most things in life will come in time.

It appeals to me because I can make entries during the day that can be culled for blog entries at the end of the day. This should help prevent on the fly entries to the blog that later need to be deleted.

This is also could be a good replacement for the errant notes I make to myself and spread all over the various drives, both hard and removable.

The entries are written in HTML. To transfer them to the w::blogger blog interface only requires a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. All of the processing, short of the image, are transferred intact.

Okay, this is cool. Now to look at their organizer, (like I don't have enough PIM's...

=30=

Playing with Version 4.** of w:bloggar

The icon below is one of the dozen or so approved
for display by those of us who support and recommend
w::bloggar as a blogging interface for several of the
blog engines.

This blog sits on the Blogger server, owned by Google.

There are several oonline host sites out there. I have a
test blog on most of them, but Blogger seems to still be
the simplest to set up and run.

Onlike most Sundays, this is not a day of rest for me.
Starting in an hour I have this and that to do here and
there until dinnertime. Even dinnertime calls for social
interaction. This will be more exhausting than a 16 hour
work day.

Speaking of the same, I will be in work tomorrow, President's
Day. A two week project is a two week project, holiday or not.
What fun!

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