The home page and original site for the Famous Grazing Blogs

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

Thursday, August 30, 2007

MediaMonkey

MediaMonkey and I have had a hot and cold relationship down through the years.

My first media player was, of course, WinAmp, which is now owned by Time Warner. When Justin Frankel first put it out in the last century, there was nothing like it. It brought back the counter top juke box controls at Mel's on Lombard.

Then, with the advent of the iPod I was lured away to iTunes. It held me for a year or so, but the limits it puts upon itself were too much. It was then, through Google searching for an alternative, I found MediaMonkey. It puts no limits on itself. Ying-Yang stuff here.

It is this very same limitlessness that give me the chills. I let it look over my Laptop for media. Whoa! From whence came all that Crap??? How is it possible there were three copies of Heading for the light by the Traveling Wilburys on my C: drive when I keep all of my music on the J: drive?

If I didn't know of this, I could've left it there in peace. Now I had to do house cleaning. It took days to collect and cull. The good news is I cleared Gigabytes from the hard drive. But now everything is measured and indexed automatically by MediaMonkey's Library.

Was this good enough for me? It should've been; but NooooOOO! I had to press F1. Worse, after I RTFM, I googled and Yahoo searched for add-ons.

It was Firefox all over again. I learned that not every add-on is needed, or even good for the system. I still check out every Firefox extension, like the ScribeFire with which I am writing this blog entry. Like most of the Firefox extensions, the add-ons for MediaMonkey were to try them and disable them.

Then there's FoxyTunes. I am listening to Requiem Novus Mundus, as I write this with MediaMonkey in the background controlled by the FoxyTunes interface in Firefox. The banner at the bottom of the screen, telling me now it's Annie Lennox singing Money Can't Buy It.

The point here, is try Media Monkey, as the priest said when he put the purple ribbon around my neck over my protests, "It couldn't hurt."

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Wednesday, August 29, 2007

A Billion Blogs!

Well, more like a billion bits in many blogs.

The blogs to which I refer are the ones found at ZD-Net's blog tag.

If you are looking for something to read, a tip here a rumor there and you are geekish in nature, toggle along there and I'll see you in a week or two. -30-


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Breakpoint, a novel



Richard A. Clarke's novel Breakpoint was recommended to me because I have much in common with three of the principle characters. It may be because of that I found it so disappointing.

However, it was more the two dimensional, stereotyped characterizations of all of the people in the book that made me just want to get to the end, find out who did it and rid myself of the onerous task of reading the stiff and stilted prose.

Not a good review, I know. Perhaps it was because there was so much promise, for a geek, for a person formally in the military and government service. None of the jobs were explained in any detail, very important facts were either ignored or fluffed over, perhaps with the assumption you would know as much as the very experienced author knows.

It just didn't make it for me. Then there is the inane mention of alcohol brand names. This was, perhaps, an attempt at displaying the author's sophistication. It didn't work. It worked for Ian Fleming, but not for Mr. Clark.

Sorry, but speaking solely as a geek, I would not recommend this novel set in the near future.

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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Needed a Little Tweak

The photo uploaded directly from the FotoTabber interface didn't fit well into the skin we're using for this blog. The link FT and the words Annotated and Original were in "LARGEST" font size. The photo itself was slightly squeezed when viewing with Firefox.

But...

Going back into the Blogger Dashboard and editing it was very easy. I highlighted the link and the words next it on the top and scaled down the font size without losing the link. Then, in Compose edit mode the photo and it's matte were easily stretched to the left, removing the squeeze look. Wah Lah!

So, it wasn't as automatic as the spoiled brats we are have come to expect. The good news, the upload to Flickr option worked seamlessly, after the required authorization email from Flickr. To see the photo on Flickr, scroll down to the photobar on the left column of this blog.

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Tagged File

FTAnnotated | Original
June Jubilee 2007 Jennie Julie Emma Young
June Jubilee 2007

This is a picture taken at a picnic in June. I am testing PhotoTagger along with the new WordPro version 5.0. So far the two seem to be working well together.
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Monday, August 27, 2007

Doc Searls Moved.

I'll be teaching a class in Cambridge tomorrow.

This reminded me that I wanted to let you know Doc Searls has moved his blog to THIS new address.
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Yahoo Mail Subject Button

I was playing with the new Yahoo Mail that I've been in Beta for what seems like years. For some unknown reason, I clicked the button for Subject. A subject about being busy building a pig from a kit popped up.

That surprised me.

I clicked it again and the subject changed to "Sound effects sold separately". Okay, one more..."Darn...Probation denied again!" Be careful, some of the subjects are not in the mother tongue.

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Sunday, August 26, 2007

CommandN Still Kicking!

CommandN is still going strong. They've posted their 101st episode. Can you believe it? In the commercial television business that would mean they are set for life with syndication.

Leo Laporte is no longer with the show, having fled Toronto for reasons known, and the fella now backing up Amber MacArthur , Will Something, is a bit of a light weight, the show still packs a tremendous amount of information in its compressed format.

And then there is the 10% they can get you at GoDaddy.com.

-30-

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Friday, August 24, 2007

Domain Safe Until 2011!

There was some question about who exactly was hosting Belltowernews.com. If you've been following the RegisterFly thing on these and other pages, you are familiar with that debacle. All of a sudden, like mortgages, we found that Belltowernews.com was in the hands of the trustworthy people at GoDaddy.com.

It took a bit of this and a bit of that, but we finally nailed it down until 2011.

We feel much better because another of our domains was stolen right from under our noses. We hosted the domain and had it on auto-renew. Then the above debacle happened and somehow, unlike belltowernews.com, this other domain, which now has naughty links attached to it, slipped away. It was one of our first registrations that we've held since 2001.

Then the debacled outfit billed us for the hosting. Can you believe it. They give way our domain name and then try to charge us for its hosting.

It must be the day, but we also got a message from some other jerk saying we owed them money for the "nascar stuff" we bought on ebay. We don't even have an ebay account. Forwarded it to ebay and they confirmed it was a phish.

Perhaps... no, I won't even go there.

-30-

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Thursday, August 23, 2007

Vox Keeps Coming Back

The good people at Vox, where our Canadian branch keeps its now and again blog Trounce Alley, does something I haven't seen other blog hosts do as well.

It keeps its "neighborhoods" in good order. Perhaps that's why out Canadian compadres feel so comfortable there.

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Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Who Invented Tuesday?

I used to think Monday was my least liked day of the week. My mind has changed.

It is Tuesday.

On Monday you are still a little bit in shock, so the effect is lessened. However, on Tuesday morning you realize there is an entire work week ahead of you. Wednesday, the famous "hump day" foretells the weekend, Thursday might as well not be there and of course Friday, at Five, the weekend begins.

But Tuesdays are just not fun.

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Sunday, August 19, 2007

What a Quiet Weekend

I watch and read the news and it looks like there is nothing but violence and religious turmoil all over the world. This is not true of course, but merely the focus of the News organization. It's the "man bites dog" syndrome.

At the moment the most annoying thing in this area is the sound of high powered lawn mowers.

The question to ask is, why shouldn't that be the most annoying sound in the rest of the world?

It may seem a naive even simple question, but if you think about it, what is it all of these people are fighting about? Simple: My point of view should be your point of view. If it isn't and you say so, you are my enemy. This is stupid.

Just so stupid...
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And no it's not about oil...


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Sunday, August 12, 2007

Dreaded Blue Screen - Gaaaaah!

Do not install SoundTaxi if you have a machine running an AMD processor. I was going Blue Screen all over the place until I started uninstalling recently installed software.

It was SoundTaxi.

If you're in your sound software, in this case MediaMonkey, (THE BEST,) and you go blue screen, and you have been getting a weird message trying to install new hardware where you haven't added any hardware, and SndTDriverV32 is somehow involved, start


uninstalling software immediately.

I got Blue Screened twice. In the old days, that meant it was time to go out and get a new computer, new software and turn your old machine into a doorstop. This time it was just telling me something major was happening and I should fix it NOW.

Good night! -30-

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Creative Commons.

We just added this Creative Commons license to the site. If you click on the icon below, it will explain how this works.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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Saturday, August 11, 2007

Politics

It is almost time to pay attention to politics in this country.

Most of the candidates I have looked at on both sides are talking heads to me, except Ron Paul.

Without taking into consideration his tenuous ties to the Republican Party, he seems to be the only one who actually has his own, not yet totally canned personality. He reminds me in many ways of Eugene McCarthy.

Again, not in political or philosophical beliefs themselves, but in that he actually has political and philosophical thought unique to him and not a party line. As with Eugene McCarthy, he has strong support in the individuals and not the masses. As with Mr. McCarthy as well, this will, I predict, lead to his not being nominated.

I was in Chicago at the convention that threw Gene in to the woods for the wolves to devour with not so much as a please or thank you.

It was there I became apolitical.

I saw the machine of the "party of the people" choose its representative against Richard Nixon. I also saw Mr. Nixon win in a landslide victory. In the broader picture, this was Karma paying him back for JFK's father stealing the previous election from him, and not Humphrey being defeated, in my elderly opinion.

Ron Paul - The Caucus - Politics - New York Times Blog

This is not an endorsement of anybody. I am not even sure I will vote in the national election. These things are so fixed I don't want to waste my carbon footprint on the drive to the high school and back. There may be local issues on the ballot. For that, I will go.
I just put this here to get your attention. It's for those of you who scan blogs for pictures before you will read the entry. I am guilty of that as well. I believe we all are. I promise not to become a pundant and fill the entries with long winded attempts to influence you in any way. I am just here to speak my mind.
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Thursday, August 09, 2007

Let's See if This Works...

Luciano Pavarotti sings

[via FoxyTunes / Luciano Pavarotti]

Still playing with FoxyTunes...

I should go to bed.

-30-

Whoa, It's Amazing What Can Happen...

When you click on things in FireFox.

I have the FoxyTunes add-on. I was listening to the Traveling Wilburys Tweeter and the Monkey Man.

Just for the hell of clicked on the lyrics name traveling across the bottom toolbar. .

Bam!


Traveling Wilburys - Music on FoxyTunes Planet

foxytunes planet popped up with a copy of the album cover, links to You Tube and, best of all, a copy of the lyrics from LyricWiki.

With Bob Zimmerman singing, sometimes it's a good thing to have a copy of the lyrics handy.

There is also a link to Flickr, Google, somethings called Hype Machine, Rhapsody, Wikipedia and Amazon.

This is a very helpful feature.


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Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Another One Goes Down

A friend of mine, and fellow former Marine, died today suddenly from a blot clot dislodged from his leg. This was a man who loved to walk and has been known to do twenty to thirty miles a day. He was also almost exactly a year younger than me.

-30-
One less Marine down here, one more guarding the streets of Heaven.


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Monday, August 06, 2007

A Headline That Sounds Good, but...

House panel approves legal shield for bloggers | Tech News on ZDNet
Further down the story reads: the revised bill attempts to exclude the "casual blogger" from reaping those benefits by stipulating the protections apply only to those who derive "financial gain or livelihood" from the journalistic activity, Boucher said Wednesday.

That broad rule could, however, include part-time writers who receive even a trickle of revenue from Google Ads or Blogads.com.

So, it might be a good idea to sign up for one of the advert links that you
can add to the side of your blog, as can be seen to the right of the
Belltower.com messages. A lot of money is not derived from these
links, but now, if the bill passes both houses and is signed into law,
these links may be buying you added protection.

Wait a second,
do you remember The Untouchables? Wasn't "buying protection" something
rackets did to increase the numbers of their bottom lines?

Hmmmm.

Time to go to actual work and earn a living. -30-

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Spoko's Brain Younger than Belltower News!`

But not by much. His first entry, using a very similar blog style, was in July of 2004. Ours was in May of that year. Because of connection problems, we had no entries in February and March of this year, but we did carry on at Grazing Press until we could get this blog back up.

For those of you who haven't heard of Spocko's Brain, it's a blog that has made International news, most recently on Al Jazeera's English version web cast. The report can be found on You Tube.

This report tells of a David and Goliath struggle between Media Giant ABC and this poor Blogger. ABC won the first battle, but that win became a Cause Internet when EFF picked it up and decided to defend the blog. It's a story all bloggers should read, whether they agree with the tactic used by the blogger to get advertisers to pull out of financing the talk radio the blooger found offensive.

There are enough links here for you to fill out the story. I need to go to bed.

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Saturday, August 04, 2007

ScribeFire got better.

ScribeFire, the blogging addition for FireFox has become MUCH better.

There were a few glitches unique to the Blogger uploads that seemed to have disappeared in this latest version.(1.42)

It also isn't displaying the high ASCII code for double space when I do that out of habit between sentences.

This is a good thing.
=30=

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Did you see the latest?

Did you see the latest Dr. Who on SciFi? There is a scene allegedly shot from what was Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor. It is now called Liberty Island in New Jersey. If you saw the scene of New York Harbor in the 1930's I swear the boat in the picture I took from Ellis Island last month that caps this blog for now.

Almost as good as a Moleskine spotting...

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Hot weather sucks...

when the air conditioner in the bedroom breaks...

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