Is Twitter Draining Blog Content?

Listening to Amber MacArthur on last week’s Net@Night, I heard her make the remark that Twitter is draining content away from blogging.  I went back and looked at the number of Tweets that I’ve made in the past few months, 714.  

At least half of those comments would have made it into one of the blogs in the Famous Grazing Series.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I don’t think there is a judgement call on that.

Half of those comments  may have bloated the content of the Blog, burying the more important news and opinion.  Not that anything mentioned in any of the Famous Grazing blogs could be considered of national or international importance.

On a completely different note, tonight Tina Fey is scheduled to portray the current Republican candidate for VP.  The buzz around this reminds me of the way the nation felt each night the Show of Shows would come onto TV.

Perhaps the nation will come out of its slumber for a few moments and actually see what is being given to them as a choice in November.  It is a very scary thing that should not be entered into somnambulant .

LiveJournal Tags: Twitter vs. Blogging

Live Writer Updated While Away

I thought there was something different when I started Live Wire to make a blog entry this morning.  I noticed the Wave 3 translucent tag pop up and go away with the splash screen.

When Microsoft automatically updated the operating system, it seems to have updated the Live files I downloaded a while ago.  Now we need to look at Live Movie Editor and see if that’s been upgraded as well.

I guess this is better that finding quarts of sour milk on the doorstep under the newspapers.
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LiveJournal Tags: Live Writer

Off Vacation

We were on vacation for most of the month of August.  This time we wanted it to be a real vacation and not a “working” one.  To accomplish this we took ourselves mostly off the grid.

We’re now back and browsing with Google Chrome.  Tomorrow, after browsing a tad more you’ll get a better review, but for now, the only place we couldn’t get it to work was on the Evernote site.  It handled the drag and drop with no problem but locked up when trying to bring up the individual notebooks.

I guess we can say, no browser’s perfect.  -30-<a

href="http://technorati.com/claim/h4p5ps33z2" rel="me">Technorati Profile

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.

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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.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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.

The Other Distraction: Audible Dot Com

In an earlier entry I mentioned the distraction brought about by the plethora of information made available, most of it interesting, when using the RSS reader in Opera.

The feeds found themselves into the reader’s list because the original page was of some interest, the information flowing from their feeds naturally stays in that direction.

The VLC media player, combined with sites like OurStage.com,  Hulu.com   and AOL Radio bring an endless flow of entertainment.

The final distraction has become Audible.com.

When I first started using it, at the behest of Leo Laporte, it was with the intention of copying the recordings to my Kindle, and then to listen to the books in the car during the morning and evening commute.  Though this is primarily its use, I have discovered, because so much of my free time is spent sitting at a computer, the books can be listened to directly from the the Audible file manager.

While I have The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni playing on the Kindle for the commute, I am listening, directly from the manager,  Stephen Fry read Eleanor Updale’s  Montmorency.

LiveJournal Tags: Audible.com

Katie Sawicki – A Pure Talent

In my wandering through OurStage.com, once it had figured out my likes and dislikes the site sent me to a recording by Katie Sawicki. 

It is a rare thing for me to become an instant fan, but with this artist, this incredible all-there singer/songwriter, I can honestly say it was not something under my control.  I bought two of her MP3 collections on CDBaby,
Time Spent Lost and For The Quiet.

Then, I followed another link on her MySpace page to YouTube.  There is a good selection of videos that show how she performs, but you honestly need to hear her sing on one of her recordings to fully fall in love with this talent.

LiveJournal Tags: Katie Sawiki

First Opera RSS Reader – Now OurStage.com

LiveJournal Tags: OurStage.com

I thought the RSS reader in Opera would give me a plethora of material to bring to this blog, but instead it has dragged me into the bowels of the Internet. It is here I have fallen victim to the forest of cross references.

It was in that forest, first into VLC, then into AOL Radio and finally into OurStage.com where on channel 28, I have found off main stream blues recordings.

And in the Blues channel, (28), there I found Izzy & Chris.  Sweet blues guitar and blues harp in the delta blues style.  Click the above and let me know how you feel.

iPhone Hysteria

In an earlier tweet I mentioned that as I have avoided drugs all these years I have also avoided apple products. 

It isn’t easy living in the geek world.  Watching people sit in line for three days for a phone, one with many bells and whistles indeed, but a phone nonetheless, reminds of the people I see standing outside of office buildings in below zero temperatures smoking.

As a disclaimer I will admit being a crackberry. It is a drug of choice thing, I believe.

LiveJournal Tags: iPhone Hysteria

Mulberry Email Program

While reading one of the Opera 9.51 RSS Feeds, I came across an interview with the developer of the M2, the email handler inside Opera.  The focus he put on the email setup was to make it a cross-reference database.  This works.

With a short learning curve you will soon find there is no way, as long as you know something about the email and you haven’t deleted it permanently you won’t be able to find it.

The comment that the developer made was the Imap handling of M2 is good, but not as good as Mulberry.  Being the of the curious kind, and never having heard of Mulberry, I went to Google, found it and installed it.

It seems simple at first.  I loaded a Fastmail.fm and a GMail account into it.  The Fastmail account loaded easily.  The GMail required a / in the hierarchy field and SSLv3 enabled.  With those two minor adjustment, it worked fine.

For detailed instructions avoid Mulberry’s website. It is written by a code writer.  Instead, go to the Uof Va’s instruction sited HERE. This is especially true if you want add more than one account.  The method is not plainly put before you by the Mulberry interface.

LiveJournal Tags: Mulberry Email

What was with the umbrella?

We just watched, as we do every year, the Macy*s fireworks display on NBC. 

Did the professionals go home and let the interns run the show?  That was the most pathetic display of amateur production techniques I’ve seen since High School.

People are watching the show to see the fireworks. 

In the middle of the magnificent pyrotechnic display, for which I am sure Macy’s spent a fortune, they pop a singer up who is supporting a golf umbrella across her shoulder.

The umbrella blocks the view of the fireworks her song is supposed to enhance.  You could see the poor camera operator trying to get around her to the left.  And then some idiot of the highest degree decides to project stars onto the umbrella.  What was that supposed to do, make us less annoyed? 

Didn’t work.  It made us notice the umbrella even more.

I feel almost as bad as when NBC stopped showing Mary Martin in Peter Pan on my birthday.  Not as bad as when Dave Garroway left the Today Show.  Somewhere in between.

Happy Fourth!

Bozo Dead?

It has been reported that Bozo the Clown, or at least a man who is associated with the character, Larry Harmon, has died of congestive heart failure at the age of 83.

The pictures of the clown fish was used because most clown faces are copyrighted material.

LiveJournal Tags: Bozo Dead

Bozo Dead

ZOHO limiting usage after July First.

Zoho is limiting the number of applications that can be used with the free account to five.  They want to you to upgrade to the business account, which is still free but has a limited number of users that can be assigned to the same account and thereby share the services. 

 

I would like to see the business plan that came up with this idea of limiting entry level users.  Perhaps they are being overwhelmed.  That would explain the limiting of applications, but I don't see where registered users can overwhelm a system such as theirs.

 

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Opera 9.51 Fixed All

Opera 9.5 is an amazing, and now my default, browser, email reader and RSS reader.  

There were amazingly only three things that irked me:

1. When I mistakenly clicked on the RSS reader header the browser would crash.  The good news here, prior to its repair in 9.51, Opera by default remembers all your open pages and tags.  When it restarts it gives you the option of reloading them.  

2. Blogger wouldn't load without clearing the cache.  That was an easy work around, but with 9.51 it is no longer needed.  Blogger loades just fine.

3. IMAP double messages.  I had Gmail loaded to read in IMAP in M-2 the embedded Opera email reader.  It would download duplicate messages.  No big deal, but slightly annoying.  Now it's fixed.  

As with any software, I am sure there will be bumps here and there, but for now, Opera 9.51 works just fine.

Not Quite The Mall, But a Good Place to Visit

If you want to get lost looking at old photographs, the Smithsonian’s Flikr pages
will gladly provide you with hours of distraction.

LiveJournal Tags: Smithsonian Flikr pages

Ashlynd & Sean

Modern Art Museum by dumpr.net

Scribefire and FF 3.0

Just installed FF 3.0 and am using the Scribefire Add-on to post this short message to the Belltower News.

Belltower News is an AP Free Blog

LiveJournal Tags: AP Boycott

TechCrunch has reported in this blog entry that the AP, Associated Press, has taken on a heavy handed policy regarding quotes from its online service.

Though this blog, as far as I know, has never quoted the AP, we have decided to show solidarity with the Blogosphere, by continuing this afore unknown already existing policy.

Wikimedia POTD

Wikimedia has an RSS Feed called POTD, Picture of the day.

The pictures cover a variety of subjects, from fine art to close up pictures of insect faces.

I have yet to be disappointed stopping in my RSS browsing to appreciate the image selected for the day.

Consider it one of those stop and smell the roses pauses in your day that make it all easier in the end.

Happy Fathers Day!

LiveJournal Tags: wikimedia

A Sad Story

LiveJournal Tags: Aspergers

In this morning’s NYT there is a story of a man purported to have Aspergers Syndrome and is focused on the workings of the New York City Transit System.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/6ey3j9

He is an adult with a long history of behavior and non-violent confrontation with the NYC TA and their  employees.  He has driven busses and subway trains along their routes.  He has made an effort to become part of the system.

The fact that he’s been allowed to do this over and over again shows he has the skill and knowledge to slip right into the role.  It appears to me there has to be a way to make him part of the system in a controlled role so that his “obsession” as the NYT is calling it, can be used in  a positive way.

Rolling Along With the Breeze

Left to my own resources to day, I have decided to avoid all actual human contact.  So, what do I do, I click on the Leo Laporte Stickam presence. 
Beware of going there.

His voice is very soothing and he seems so real, you just settle right in and hang out.  He fiddles with the tech gear and the software that runs the show and connects with the three or four thousand people in one of three active chat rooms.

There  is building up in the chat rooms the myth of the Green Colleen.  She just appeared one day and started making things right in the  TWiT studio. Attributes are being associated with her not proven in fact.

Many subjects, all near and dear to the heart of Geeks are handled in each of these meetings.  Today it was The KFI Tech Guy.  Yesterday it was Net@Night, with Amber MacArthur.

Before that it was the show the gives the growing network its name, This Week in Tech, TWiT.

21 hours of continuous broadcasting. Live at TWiTLive.com

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It Has Been Very Busy

As the end of the school year approaches, the amount of administrative work has quadrupled.  Hopefully by the end of June we will able to give this blog more attention. 

We’ve gone from cool and wet for most of the days past Memorial day to instantaneously HOT. This doesn’t inspire work on a Saturday beyond doing the laundry and installing a new, hi powered rain style shower head.

And then, there are the parties.  If it isn’t a graduation, it’s a birthday.  Let’s do the math, June minus nine... September!  It is amazing. The beginning of the school year coincides with an increased birthrate.  Could it be, when Junior is carted off to school for the first time the parents find themselves alone for the first time since Junior entered their lives???

Makes sense to me.

Canoeing in the reed beds

The last time we were in the reed beds there was two feet of ice beneath our feet.  This time we were in the canoe.  Son wanted to walk on them as he had in the winter.  No way!!

Just a note from our mini-vacation spot in Maine.  Written on a borrowed laptop.
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Pet Loss Sadness

I’ve been one of those who has made comments regarding blogs devoted to cats and the photography thereof.  However, when a cat that has made its home your home for almost a dozen years meets its end from coyote wounds,
I believe it worth a public statement.

 

 

Today, along with the ashes of another long lived pet, we are rearranging the front garden in their honor.

 

 

 

There have been a large number of changes in the geek world: beta Thunderbird, First Release Firefox, one AIR desktop program after another, mostly, it seems, Twitter related.

Twitter itself has burped once or twice over the past week, causing the AIR programs to require manual resets, like old alarm clocks and VCRs.  You do remember VCRs?

LiveJournal Tags: Mourning

Plaxo sold out.

The people in Twitter are baling out of Plaxo now that Comcast is buying it.

Leo Laporte provided this link to cancel your Plaxo account: http://tinyurl.com/6rw2ch 

It is a tinyurl.com redirect so that you can tell if it’s a spoof address.  Click on the link, delete all of your data first and then cancel the account, if you are so inclined.

All I know is, if Leo Laporte says something is uncool, drop the knitting and run for the exit.

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It’s good to see that I can post to a...

It’s good to see that I can post to a blog while I am exploring the new features in Google Document.  For the past few hours I have been wrapped up in reading the intelligent Kevin Kelly’s writing and photography on kk.org. Just the fact that he has kk.org is coup enough for a geek.

There are great possibilities using this method for creating websites on the fly when not attached to my own laptop and its blog creating programs.

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Publishing to Belltower News using Google Docs.

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All & Everything Week

There have been few, okay, no posts to any of the Grazing sites for the paste week.  A combination of personal cycle of life to those around and near to us combined with a general ennui that comes with every Spring.  We hope to get up to speed in the coming week but will not guarantee it.

LiveJournal Tags: ennui

Social Networking 1921 Style

At this page in the Shorpy Historical Photos website, is a photo of a few hundred people standing  on 111 Street in the July 2, 1921 heat in Washington, D.C. They are reported to be listening to a radio broadcast of the Dempsey- Carpentier Fight.

To fully appreciate the wonder of this occasion, the photograph itself and Shorpy’s amazing website,  read the comments where a commentator shares an image of an old post card that displays the Harvey‘s Restaurant shown on the far corner in the photograph.

Next you need to see it full image.  There are a dozen or so social interactions, as well as example of mass behavior common for the time and place.  The most obvious is the proliferation of straw “boater” hats.  These were worn on hot summer days.  They shielded the head and face from the beating sun and its harmful rays.  The men are all wearing suits, the woman can be wisely found under umbrellas.

For the car buffs amongst you, look at the Ford Model T’s The motor bus covered with a fringed cloth top. There is the Capitol Burlesque house next to Harvey’s, the barber shop in the lower left corner on the same block with the YMHA.

See what else you can find in the larger photo and then read the comments on the first page.  A stroll though history caught naked in the middle of a hot Summer day in D.C.

LiveJournal Tags: Shorpy

Second Try @ Animoto

The last vestiges of Winter remain on the Porch.

Yesterday was May Day.

I heard of no local Mayhem.

With all of the bombs going off all over the world, it may have taken some of the steam out of Labor’s ardor.

Happy May!!