SquareSpace online editor & Firefox RC3

Image by sgtret via Flickr

We’ve discovered the cause of the problem we were having with SquareSpace online blog creator and manager and Firefox RC3. 

It was the LastPass add-on the Firefox.  I inadvertently, meaning clumsily clicked through a pop-up box without reading it.  LastPass was filling in fields I had mindlessly instructed it to fill.

Thus, every time I brought up the editor, it filled in the blanks and defaulted to the Fathers Day entry, during the creation of which the offending action on my part took place.

When there is a technical problem we always first ask, “Is it plugged in?”  Now when we have  Firefox problem, we need to ask, “Is it a plug-in?

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LiveJournal Tags: SquareSpace

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Firefox 3.5r2 Editing Problem with SquareSpace

-__________________

This is the page where the entry to be edited is selected. When I clicked on "edit" in the right column the Modify Post box would pop up.

Instead of the June 22 entry, the June 21 entry shown below popped up.

When I tried to edit the June 20 entry, the same Happy Father's Day window would pop up.

Through use of SquareSpace's excellent trouble ticket service it was determined that the proble was not with their editor but with the way the cache is stored in Firefox 3.5r2.

When we came to the online editor from Chrome or Opera, there was no problem. In fact, we edited the blog entry in Chrome quite easily.

Again, kudos to the support staff at SquareSpace for their insite towards the problem source.

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Summer? Seattle Now in New England?

Image by sgtret via Flickr

When Summer began yesterday we were ready to break out the shorts and sandals, check the ferry schedules and decided if we will finally make it to PEI this year. 

Then we looked out at the sodden landscape, put on our polar fleece and decided not to open the pool this year.

Seattle has exported its weather to New England.  I can recall one full day for the past few weeks that did not involve rain.  Even the day we all went to Martha’s Vineyard started with rain.  It faded as we approached the Oak Bluff ferry landing.

We were there for a graduation celebration held in the Methodist Camp.. Their magnificent open air meeting room simultaneously gave the feeling of a big-top open to the air and a cathedral dome. The sun this day did its duty.

We could see the storm clouds massing behind Cape Cod as we approached Woods Hole. Sure enough, the next morning, the grass was soaked and the car’s windshield was covered with wet droppings from the overhead red oak.

When the temperature rises above 100 and we look out at the unopened pool, we’ll return to this blog entry and understand our motive.  That’s right before we decide again, this is the year to visit PEI.

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LiveJournal Tags: Rain

 

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Happy Father’s Day!

Image by sgtret via Flickr

To all the fellow fathers out there, think not of today as your day.  It is the day for your children, your family, to show their love for you by doing things they feel you would like. 

It matters little whether any of these things are to  your liking.  You must show appreciation for the spirit in which they are given. Do this and you will be a good father.

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LiveJournal Tags: Fathers

Working Today

Normally on a Saturday we would be all over FeedDemon finding interesting links and commenting on the news of the day.  Not today.  Today we actually earn a living to put turkey bacon in the fridge. 

It is the way of the world. 

The good news is tomorrow's Father's Day. 

I get to relax and bask in the glow of admiration from my son before I do the laundry.  What could be better?
Candide eat your heart out!
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Firefox Search Box Font Problem!!

I am having trouble with the fonts on Firefox 3.5's search boxes. The font appears to be white with a

Image via Wikipedia

white back ground. This is very annoying.
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Reinstalled Firefox Add-on Scribefire

Haven't used Scribefire in Firefox for a while. Now that we have a new Famous Grazing blog, I thought it would be a good idea to set the Scribefire up to use it.
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Scribefire

Powered by ScribeFire.

Got to the end of the internet!

Image by sgtret via Flickr

There was a cartoon back in the nineties of a man sitting at a PC staring at the screen with a look of incredulity. The message on the screen says, “You have reached the end of the internet.”

That’s how I felt this morning when I had no more links on my RSS reader FeedDemon.  I had started with 521 pages to view.  This seemed an insurmountable task. But, using FeedDemon’s Newspaper View where you can choose between a list of headlines, the headline with a summary or a stripped down version of the entire page, with a steady use of the J & K keys and the spacebar, I bounced through it....

Note: Cross posted from SquareSpace.

Permalink

Union Reject Concessions

Image via Wikipedia

When I was a kid growing up in Manhattan, the news stands were covered with newspapers, not magazines.

There was the morning Daily News, Mirror and Times

In the afternoon the Journal American, the ...

NOTE: Cross posted from SquareSpace.

Permalink

Not Commenting on the Gilmore Girls

I will admit it was my intention this morning to join the mob and comment on the brouhaha about the exchange recently on the Gilmore Gang.  But  apologies from both combatants have been issued. The matter should now be dropped.

So, have you seen the flash games on Owen’s World? The flash based games can be a harmless distraction.  However, the ever so simple Tetris posted there brings back memories of my first computer addiction. What this version doesn’t seem to do is increase the intensity, but remains at the level started.  This could explain how I got to 1900 rows before I dragged myself away.

The fact that Tetris didn’t exist before 1984 is very hard to believe. It seems like one of those things that have always been there. Graceland was opened to the public two years before Tetris was invented, almost to the day.

This is all a geeks attempt at changing the subject.  It’s something like someone saying, “So what about those<insert sports team>?”

When an icon goes all potty mouth, what else can you do?
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LiveJournal Tags: Tetris

Note: Cross posted from SquareSpace.

Permalink

Clouds All Over the Place.

The latest cloud that has come up in the web chatter can be found at Oursignal.com -  It grabs it’s links from a combination of the aggregate  feeds generated by Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, hackernews and yahoo buzz

Hackers, geeks and geek-a-wannabees, will find their equivalent to gossip chatter in this cloud.

For those addicted to Twitter, there is Twitscoop,

 

Hovering over a word at the Web site will bring up a pop up of the latest tweets on the subject. A click on any of the words will take you to a running list of the tweets as they come in.

In TweetDeck, the  Twitscoop cloud is one of the many options you can include as content in the many columns a power user

deploys to keep up with the pulse of social networking.

Where Twitscoop depends on one dominant word expanding and diminishing the font size to reflect the traffic, Oursignal highlights a phrase.  When the traffic increases it too increases the font, but it also uses colors to show if the trend is coming or going.

Consider yourself standing in a crowd of people.  There is a buzz of general conversation going on around the room.

If you focus on the people closest to you, you can get the gist of their individual topics. But if suddenly you hear one word our phrase moving like a wave though the mass, it would be the same as the way both these clouds manifest the level of general interest.

It’s cute, but I wouldn’t depend on it to keep you informed.  That’s Jon Stewart’s job.
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LiveJournal Tags: Web Clouds

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The Live Writer Standard

In our old age, we no longer want to write code, edit HTML, check color wheels for the 000eee or 02h0011 for exact color settings.  We want to go online and set the blog up, with as many options and bells and whistles that will fit into the side bars, the carneys rows, to give the reader options other than the links in the message itself.

Listening to Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur on their podcast, Net@Night each of them mentioned SquareSpace as a great place to host a blog. 

We did try it when it first started and found it didn’t support off line editors.  We mentioned that to the owners and went on our merry way.  Thankfully, the people at TWiT also mentioned it in their weekly podcast as well.

So…

Being ever influences by this web-wise cadre of speakers, we popped back the SquareSpace and found a much more mature interface for the creation of the blog.  Not only that, we found it supports Live Writer. Bingo!!

So, Famous Grazing, a renewed name, will be the seventh active Famous Grazing blog.
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LiveJournal Tags: SquareSpace

 

Eighty Two Subscribers!!

On my iPod sits all of the Net@Nights for the year 2009.  They haven’t been listened to because I followed Leo Laporte’s advice and subscribed to Audible.com 

I just finished listening to a wondrous biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, which included recording of his own voice, (cool!)

Before downloading another book, I resolved to listen through first the Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me’s and then the Net@Night’s.  TWiT, I am leaving for the beach in Maine. 

In the first recording of the year, Leo and Amber chatted with Robert Scoble about Friendfeed. He mentioned a way to manage the feed using folders.  So, I went back in and did just that.

There were only 14 people listed that I have followed with no rhyme or reason.  Then I glanced and noticed 82 people were following me.  I felt like the guy on the Verizon Mobile commercials.

Here I was thinking the banal comments I was making might be seen by my friend Deven, only to find this group had wandered by to graze. A quick glance revealed almost all of them to be from my Twitter site. That was a relief. The same flock on a different branch.  This was almost nice.

I am not bothered by the followers at all.  What bothers me is I didn’t know they were there. That won’t happen again… maybe.
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LiveJournal Tags: Friendfeed

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Disc Space Warning

Image by sgtret via Flickr

I was surprised by a warning popping up that my 200 Gigabyte hard drive was near capacity.  As someone who started using a PC with two 360 Kilobyte floppies the idea that I could’ve loaded that much data was beyond my ability to comprehend.

I ran the default disc clean option in MS Properties.  This saved a few Megabytes here and there, but still not enough to guarantee optimal operation.  So, most naturally, I said, I’ll get rid of a few of my lesser used programs.

When I started the default MS uninstall utility it took, and I kid you not, almost one half of an hour to fully load the list of installed programs.  Hoo!

No Problem!  Right?  Errr….

The first program I tried to remove was bonjour from Apple.  It was installed automatically with Apple Safari.  When I deleted Safari, I tried to get rid of bonjour with it. 

After several tries, I gave up. That was then.  I tried again with MS uninstaller.  It still would not go away.

After some research, I downloaded Revo Uninstaller.

It deleted bonjour with no problem. Then I deleted digsby and ConceptDrawVI, both programs instead of which I knew I was using other software.

The fast reload feature of Revo Uninstaller allowed me to see the complete list of programs installed on my hard drive.  Like the TLC show where they come into your house and throw out or sell all of the ‘stuff’ you rarely or never use, I went though the list of software and noted all that applies to that formulae.

This is the list of what I have or will soon remove:

bonjour digsby dexpot copernic desk suite conceptDrawVI  doPDF 6.1 printer Easy DVD Copy eBay Desktop ENC TNT Screen Capture 2.1 ecto for Windows?? EphPod EPSON Printer Software EPSON Web to Page eReader Eudora Eudora (8.0.0b3) FastPictureViewer FastStone Image Viewer 3.6 FastStone Player FormatFactory FotoTagger 2.5.0.1 Foxit Reader Free Hide Folder Free Commander Fresh Diagnose FreshView Froddle Pod Futuriz Imager 5.9 FWD Softphone GCalDaemaon V1.0 HotspotShield IncrediMail Xe Inkscape 0.4.5 Jarte 3.0 Beta2 jExplorer 1.8.0.1 Joost (tm) beta 1.06a Karen's Replicator Launchy 1.25 Melon 3.03 mIRC Miro Moffsoft FreeCalc Mulberry Newzie0.99.9 NSIS FreePOPs Nvu 1.00 ooVooP2Edit 1.0.2008

P2SafeNotes PaintStar 2.70 Pandora PeaZip 2.2008 PhotoFiltre Photology PotoPerfectExpress PostBox (1.0b.10) PowerDVD Pownce Q10Editor QuickTime Alternatives Quotepad 2.0.2 RarZilla Free Unrar Registry Easy v3.00 Remove Empty Directories RSS Bandit SJPhone Skyhook Wireless WiFi Service Snitter Softdata Fax Modem sonic Encoders SpiralFrog Download Manager Spreadtweet 2003 Streamripper TechProWorldClock TetrisZone TextMakerView TweakUI Tweaker For Outlook Express Unix Utility for Yahoo! Widgets Video Enhacer 1.9.10 VirtualDub Filter Pack w.bloggar 4.2003 Wakoopa WheresJamesStartup Manager Whisher 2.0 Wildbit Viewer Winam Winamp Remote Winamp Toolbar for Firefox Wordpod WordToys WordWeb Pro Zempt 0.4 Zoundry Blog Writer ZScreen 1.10 ZuneDesktopTheme

Some of these I remember installing, but mostly not.

I considered using the new Bing search engine to look up each of these , but decided if I didn’t know what they were, I didn’t use them.

Of course, the Murphy laws of computer use will make sure the one program I do delete is crucial to the operation of this computer. 

Even knowing this; I plan to plough ahead and take them all out.

If this results in any adventures, I will be sure to report them here… If I can.
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LiveJournal Tags: Revo Uninstaller

We’re Not as Connected

To put all of this into perspective, I remember watching when Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs shared hosting in this  time slot. 

I absolutely loved Jack Paar. He brought wit and sophistication, the sort you hoped was shared by the intellectually elite rubbing shoulders with the socially perfected at legendary cocktail parties.

Then came Johnny Carson.  While he was in New York his show had a sliver of the class he inherited from Jack Paar.  On top of that he layered his everyman identity endearing him across this wide country.

He carried his bonhomie to Burbank when he escaped west.  Skitch Henderson’s big band jazz with Doc Severinsen carried over to Doc leading the band.

For Thirty years we were connected.  The Iranian Hostage crisis took us to ABC for a while but we always returned to say good night to Johnny.  His last show was a monumental event. 

Leno is a nice guy.  He can be funny.  But the connection was lost when he took over the show.  For me it has felt like we’ve had a guest host for seventeen years.

It wasn’t all him.  The media changed, the watching habits changed and, oh yeah, cable TV and the Internet happened.  If we felt we needed a touch of New York humor, we could watch David Letterman.  We still can.

When Mr. Carson left we all knew he was going to be gone from the air.  He was burned out and ready to retire.  Like Steve Allen and Jack Paar, Leno is moving to another time slot. 

I gave it some thought.  Carson leaving was like a beloved national leader riding his horse into the sunset.  You knew the next time you saw him would be at his wake.

Leno leaving is like the last curtain on a Broadway show.  The curtain will rise on the next show, starting at the same time and in the same place.
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LiveJournal Tags: Leno

 

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An Unscheduled Saturday

Image by sgtret via Flickr

With all of the planners, events, reminders and scheduled entertainment now in our lives; when we came upon a Saturday with no events planned it seemed very odd.

It was as if we did something wrong, forgot something important, left something out.  All negative thing  these days.  It took a few moments to adjust.  But the Internet will not let us be unconnected, unscheduled, left out of the loop.

We took some of this time to look over Belltower News and noticed that the Share box in the right column had not been updated in quite a while.  Further investigation discovered the reason.

Feed Demon.  We had left Google Reader for for the RSS reader FeedDemon.  It is a great reader that defaults to the feeds from newsgator. When we clicked on the Share icon we thought it was automatically listing the link on Belltowernews.com.

Not so, we discovered.  Where it was sharing these great links will never be known.

We found Nick Bradbury added Google Reader to the supported feeds for FeedDemon.  This gave us the best of possible combinations.  A rare thing these days with all of the specialization.

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With that done, we can sit back and listen to Mr. Lambert on Play Classical UK using  Nexus Radio.

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LiveJournal Tags: FeedDemon,Google Reader

 

The Town Meeting Went Well

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I resisted the urge to speak until someone said “Vernal Pool.”  Without thinking I was to my feet saying the question had not been answered.

Then it was answered and I was done for the night.

When the budget was moved to a meeting in June, this years New England Town Meeting lost interest.

I am sure they kept the quorum for the rest of the street acceptances and revisions and spell checks, but I could not stay knowing I have to travel out of State tomorrow.

For the safety of all involved, I retired from the auditorium knowing I saw my civic duty and did it.
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LiveJournal Tags: Town Meeting

Live Writer and Posterous

Still Trying to get Posterous on Live Writer

You would see more Posterous entries if I could get this on LIVE Writer.  As it worked out, I posted the original using the email method, loaded Live Writer and reopened the current blog entries for editing.

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Posted via email from grazing's posterous

LiveJournal Tags: Posterous

Hyperwords

Hyperwords is just about the most useful add-on to Firefox that I have seen in quite a while.  Most of the utilities that I have added over the past four years have either silently incorporated themselves into the browser’s basic function, or have been removed.

Hyperwords is an active add-on.  I translate, shop, instantly search, send to email, twitter, facebook, etc.  It will check the spelling, tell me how to pronounce something and, as if it didn’t do enough, convert currency.

What made me want to highlight it on Belltowernews.com was a conversation I had with an expatriate now living in Sweden.  He drifts back and forth from English to Swedish on Facebook.  On a whim, I used Hyperwords to see what he was saying.  It worked.

So, I wrote something in English, used Hyperwords to translate it and sent him the Wall-to-wall in Swedish. Bam!  He was sold.  I use the word sold figuratively because the add-on is free.

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LiveJournal Tags: Hyperwords

Town Meeting Tomorrow – Church Meeting Today

It’s meeting season in New England.  Everyone wants to get the business done before we all leave for balmier climes.

A decade and one half ago, I was fascinated by the pure, democratic process of the New England Town Meeting.  It had been memorialized by Norman Rockwell’s painting of the the rough hewn farmer wearing  his LL Bean blue and black checked shirt about to make a speech.

The late Tip O’Neil said that all politics were local.  This was about as local as it can get. 

Then I became deeply involved in the politics of the situation.  I learned the back story, the cliques, the ruling class of people who never missed a town meeting. 

This small percentage, who read the Town Administrators reports, who watched the Selectman’s meeting on the local Public Access cable station, these well informed individuals were making the decisions on how the town should be managed.

Until an “issue” arose.  Especially if it was a NIMBY issue.  Than the fly-by-night members of the Town Meeting would appear.  They certainly had the right, as registered voters, to come and have their say.

The wise Board of Selectman would recognize these issues and put them at the end of the warrant.  If they were going to fill the seat, they might as well do the work.

When I first attended these meetings, I was morally outraged by anyone who would move the question, effectively shutting down further debate.  I thought everyone should have their say.

Then, after a few years of hearing people speak just to hear their own voice, repeating issues and questions already handled and answered.  I might just have become the record holder on moving the question.

The New England Church meeting, attended by the same people who come well prepared for the Town Meeting, is the same in miniature.

The new roof, passed, the new boiler, passed, supporting important social issues, passed. What brand of coffee to use at the social hour after the service, one entire hour of a debate which includes South American Politics, global warning, quotes from Silent Spring and Atlas Shrugged sprinkled with a few war stories about how it was always done before.

Move the question! 

Thankfully the newcomers see the value of this parliamentarian lifeline, leave their moral indignation at home, and get us all out of there in time to attend tomorrow’s other meeting.

Welcome to New England.

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LiveJournal Tags: Town Meeting

Happy Mothers Day!

Image via Wikipedia

There are few spare moments between the breakfast my son made for his mother at 0600 and the dinner we plan to share with other mothers and their families.

In that spare time there are two ‘utilities’ I have started to use over the past few weeks worth mentioning.

Evernote is the first.  When we first started playing with it, I figured, as with most nice shiny things, it may last a day or two. 

Wrong on several counts with that guess.

It has become essential to my thought process because it has replaced the large portion of my brain where memory once lived.  It has also replaced the sticky notes that once decorated every dry surface on my desk and laptop.

Then there is Hyperwords.

This second, more recent of the two, was recommended in a tweet from @stephenfry.  In his message he said, “I don’t know how I lived without it.” Hyperbole was my second bad guess.

Especially when going over lists and comments left in several of the major languages, I have used Hyperwords to easily translate

to

translating is  one of the dozen or so selection that pop up by default when a word or phrase is highlighted.  The list disappears if you right click for the default menu.

It will define, search the engines as well as  Wikipedia and social sites, copy to notepad, and make tea. 

Okay, no  tea, but you need to visit their site to see what this jack of all trades add-on to Firefox, and soon Windows, can do for you.

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LiveJournal Tags: Hyperwords

Legacy of Laughter

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Dom Deluise recently died. 

That can be said to be sad, but he certainly left us a legacy of laughter. 

On the NBC Nightly News, shown through the Hulu portal, I found this clip: http://tr.im/CarsonNDD  of Dom Deluise and Johnny Carson.

Watch this all the way through - it gets funnier and funnier.

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LiveJournal Tags: Dom Deluise

H1N1, Where We Were Standing When We Heard

This is a photo I took to show the view from where we were standing when we heard the news that cases of the h1n1 Virus were found a few miles away.

The waiting room was an international petri dish.

It reflected in many ways, in modern dress, the crowds who once occupied Ellis Island, visible from where we stood.

They too were a petri dish, with public health officials waiting to shove tongue depressors into their throats.

No tongue depressors here.

The ferry upon which we sailed to Staten Island was fairly full.

They don't allow you to stay on board for the ride back. You need to leave and re-enter the terminal, so, it deposited us ashore directing us back around into Richmond County's St. George Terminal.

Just as we were settled back onto the same boat, with good perches for the photographers, we were told they were taking the boat out of service.

It was one more walk around where we joined the people gathered to take the next ferry. That’s when I took this snap. When the next ferry arrived from Manhattan, it spit out its human cargo, 2/3’s of which promptly walked around back into the terminal to join us.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia

What should have been a pleasant sail across Upper New York Harbor, with promised views of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and the churches of Brooklyn, turned into a dash for seats in the middle.

It was like riding on a wide body jet, in the center aisle.

When we spewed forth from the boat, I don’t know how many thousands of us, the crowd soon blended into the mass of tourists visiting lower Manhattan on this first really nice day of 2009.

If that many people suddenly showed up in our home town, it would be an event. Here they do it every half hour without a blip of notice.

LiveJournal Tags: Stane Island Ferry,Crowd,H1N1

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