Keely Smith Singing A Hard Day's Night

Keely Smith Singing A Hard Day's Night

On Songza: Moon River - Pavarotti & Gustafson

There had been a rumor that Luciano Pavarotti, (bless his soul,) and Nancy Gustafson had made a recording of Henry Mancini's Moon River. I didn't believe it.

I went to the site recommended by Will Pate on the latest commandN, put in Moon River as the search item, and there it was, item # 5! What a kick!!!

Geekbrief's Link to Woopra

Geek Briefs link to Woopra.

We're not a "top level blog" but we like the pure cheerfulness of Cali.

No gerbils were hurt in the production of this plog.

commandN # 128 Up and Running

My comments to commandN#128:

It is so good to see the windows in the background. The story about the video camera from Comcast checking to see who is the room to modify the programming offered. That sounds a bit like urban legend. Amber says she doesn't have a "huge presence on line." Little does she know. Washing machines eat socks. (See the plog to understand that one.)

The cacti behind Jeff are incredibly provocative I am sure, being you are Canadian, this wasn't done on purpose.

Three Blogging Utilities Settled In

LiveJournal Tags: RSS Grazing

In the past three weeks or so I have tested and then incorporated into my blogging/twitter routine three programs that reside either on the side, in the tool bar or in the background.  Each, in  a very short time, have become tools of the trade.

The most senior of the three is Jens Muller’s JC&MB Quicknote Ver. 5.4. 

There is a few pixels high and wide line sitting on the left side of the screen.  When I tap it, a customized note-pad materializes.  I write my note and tap outside the box and it disappears.   It has a password protected capability as well as almost unlimited room for expansion.  It has replaced my bringing up Notepad to take quick notes.

The second in seniority on my system is Read it Later from the Idea Shower.  I am a very fast reader.  Having to constantly stop and take notes as I scanned the hundreds of feeds in my RSS Reader slowed me considerably.  Once I installed Read it Later into Firefox, all I had to do was either tap the toolbar icon or right click and choose Read it later.  Then, once the feed has been milked, I can go back and peruse that which I was able to effortlessly glean.

The third and junior of the bunch is Texter.  There was another program I had loaded.  It was recommended as a must-have program for efficient writing.  I was convinced and installed the trial version.  It was okay.  Not spectacular.  In support I went to the home site to register a copy for home use. 

The price was OVER $50.00. It is being offered by a man with whom we found much in common.  We were ready to fork over payment when an added fee of $3.00 for use of PayPal popped up.  In pure emotional reaction, I canceled the order and scraped all vestiges of the program from the system.

Then Texter came to our attention while Twittering.  It does all that the other program did for me but is simpler to use.  It doesn’t wave itself around constantly reminding us of its existence.  It just helps create the script that cuts typing speed in half.

An Intelligent Conversation

I was listening to an intelligent conversation regarding the evolution of the internet and the methods of communication now used to convey news to people. One of the younger members of the conversation remarked that he had never read a book or goes to the movies or watches TV. There is too much on the net to worry about the "canned fish" that gets served up on TV.

He didn't say network TV, he said TV. He would rather have the personal interaction with the world that he has on places like Twitter, Facebook or places like qik.com and Friendfeed.
Is this where the geek inherit the earth? Or, was it the survival of the geekest?

Testing photoplow!

I am posting this badge here and other style blogs to test the link.

Snow in Northern WA

Two photos taken by our correspondent in Northern Washington state can be viewed at the Famous Grazing Movable Type test blog.

Check the junk folder in Gmail

Even though I have IMAPed the GMail account to be read in Thunderbird, I have found it good policy to go into GMail itself and scan the junk folder. This morning there were 486 messages relegated and deposited by google into the junk folder.

I don't read the message topics first. I read the From column. Occasionally I will see names that look familiar, me is a favorite of these basta cads, then I look at the message topic. Usually I want to sell myself V pills or lengthen various parts of my anatomy. No surprise there.

But, as happened this morning, I see the name of a friend. This morning it was the Chelsea Finch.

She had changed her email address and google decided it was a deception. I don't blame Google at all. What I like is, all I need to do is check the box next to the message and then tick off Not Span in the top GMail toolbar. Zing! It goes to the Inbox, where, just to make sure this doesn't happen again, I will add the return address to the Contacts folder.

Then, I go back, scan the rest again and delete all. I know there are some who let GMail keep the spam. It will delete the files in a proscribed time. The problem for those of us who scan it for real messages is that we get two to three hundred of the buggers a day. If we let 30 days pile up it makes scanning visually nigh on impossible.


Technorati Tags: GMail Spam

Pogue on The Flip

In today's review Pogue listed a link to this comparison of the $149.00 Flip camera and one costing over $3,000.00. If you are considering a Flip, this is a must look.
He also reviewed it in a previous article written on 3/20/2008. It was a mention The Tech Guy by Leo Laporte of this camera and on TWiT that brought it to our attention.
We've put it on our wish list on Amazon.com.


Technorati Tags: Flip Camera

ScribeFire Stable on FF 3.04b

Before testing the email program mentioned in the last blog entry, I need to verify that ScribeFire was still working on FF 3.04b now that the extension was upgraded.


Technorati Tags: Scribefire

Looking at Other Readers...

LiveJournal Tags: RSS Grazing

I was zipping though the 739 items on my Google Reader this evening, looking for bit’s and pieces to load into the graze this evening when the phrase, “The art of fake fiction,” flew by my eyes. Unfortunately I hit the space bar before getting into the message.  I just found the phrase fascinating.

In an earlier episode I was clucking proudly of all of the add-on that I’d divested of Firefox when using 3.04b.  Then they went and redesigned the Add-on page to make it easier to find extensions that WILL run with FF 3.##.  I’ve only added six so far.  I am waiting for RoboForm to catch up.  If I know them, it  won’t  be offered until a stable version is loaded.

Good news is that ScribeFire updated itself with my last universal update attempt.  This is being written in Windows Live Writer, but ScribeFire is the tool on the belt.

I am trying out Shyftr, an aggregator that may be better than Google Reader.  Let me give it a few minutes...

It took me about six minutes to get it all set up.  What I found was the Louis Gray blog.  It is for early adopters.  Okay, that’s us.  Have we found the mother ship?  This piece on Internet addiction is a worthy read.  The ironic part of it to me is that I found it browsing through an RSS Feed reading, I TWITTERED the author and saved the feed to Read-it-Leader.   I should read the article again.  There are six other links to similar articles.

Texter may have been mentioned in passing in previous entries  The Lifehacker article has a download button directly on it.  Watch the videos in this article as well to get an idea of the advanced features this seemingly small program has to offer.  It’s also free, meaning it doesn’t cost $53.00 US with a $3.00 PayPal  fee attached.

I love Thunderbird.  It is my workhorse of an email program. 

 

But I am also a test driver.  I recently installed an IMAP connection to a GMail account on Opera 9.#.  It worked fine, except to gain access to it, I needed to open Opera and all attached to it.  I am now trying a small email client I found on Feedburner called  eMailya - we’ll tell you how it works on first blush.

I just got carsick watching, from his coffee cup holder, Jason Calacanis drive home to Brentwood. 

Good Night Gracie.

Unfare Zemata Test

Source: WikipediaIt made no sense to me that Zemanta wasn't working on my blogger editor. I went back in for a second look and saw my No Script icon along the status bar had its red circle with slash markings. Once I opened it and set it to allow, wham the Zemanta bar appeared to the right of the editor. SO far, it has photgraphs such as this: L7 encircled. I think it's an album cover.

The articles listed below the editor are all about Zemanta, not surprising. They are from funkykaraoke.blogspot.com, fourstars.com, blogherald.com, readwriteweb.com, techcrunch.com, tadejhq.com. The first listed link is one day old and the last is two days old. Recent stuff.

If I change the subject to something like Leo Laporte, Petaluma, Sonoma, Marin counties California or the Democratic primary coming up in one of the midwestern states and Pennsylvania. If I mention the New York Times or the Guardian.uk.co then all of the choices on the bar suddenly changed.

Ah, I just discovered that when you click on the gallery selection, it changes, not adds a photo. I first had the L7 thumbnail, then a photo of Leo and then a photo of this clocktower in Petaluma.

Zemanta is cute, but, I don't see much use for it the type of blogs we publish.

Zemanta Posting

This is a post that is being written with Zemanta's firefox extension. There is a small brown window next to the Blogger.com composition window. It has done nothing yet. Could it be that this is Firefox 3.04b? So far FF refuses to install an extension that won't work with it. It did allow Zementa to install.

Oh, well.

We'll leave it and see if it works later on.

Short Thwirl Tips

LiveJournal Tags: Thwirl

When you hit the icon to the right of the remarks window, above the check mark, it brings up a window where you copy your long URL.   The first choice is snurl.com

If you click on the down arrow next to the box it offers a second choice, is.gd, five characters shorter.

Also, to see more tweets, the voice balloon to the left of the Timeline menu to the left of the remarks box, removes and returns the remarks box.

If you intend to reply, click on the @name in the tweet, it will open a new view with just the tweet from the person to whom you want to send your message.  It makes it easier to write directly to them.

Just a few short remarks.

Chat Rooms Rot the Brain

LiveJournal Tags: Calacanis.com

I never really saw the appeal of chat rooms. I was watching Jason Calacanis run a podcast on his site with with a chat running below. You had to register at UStream.tv to get into the chat. My normal sign-in there wasn’t working, so I created an alias.

With that alias I was able to get in to the chat. Near the end, Jason was so absorbed in reading the chat, or his feed, or conducting business, that he just sat there, humming to himself. I asked him to sing something. Some of the other chatters became a touch nasty, making Chris Pirillo remarks.

So, though Jason can be interesting when part of a discussion, as on TWiT, I don’t think I will go back to the Jason Nation anytime soon to watch him Plog.

Sorry, Hit The wall with nothing in the graze bin. Here's another Wikimedia.org picture

Wikimedia Commons

LiveJournal Tags: Wikimedia

Sunny and in the mid to low 40’s

That was the weather report today.  I optimistically rolled down the window while stuck in the left lane of the Interstate.  NPR was telling me about, wait, I don’t remember.  Driving in traffic can be so mind numbing.  I know they were telling me about Iraq and Afghanistan, this crisis and that crisis and how the government is either screwing it up or, no sorry, no or.

Now I remember, it was about the Supreme Court and some of the surprising questions the Justices were asking the nattily dressed Attorney General and how nervous he was.  How pithy.

Back to grazing.

Spring Break Graze

Everywhere I turn around I see, or hear Amber MacArthur. commandN.tv

LiveJournal Tags: Ambermac

is a must see online. She was on  Other than seeing her on Tech TV or hearing her with Leo Laporte, I realized I knew little about her.  Leo Laporte mentioned he would be on PlayCafe.com this evening.  I tuned in and there was Amber MacArthur.  This is one very connected woman. 

I Googled  her for the first time and found an eye opening Digital Journal interview where she wasn’t smiling or perky.  If you want to see the serious side of this very professional woman, go to this link to the Digital Journal interview.

@scobleizer was looking for a place to eat in NYC.  I sent him this link to a news about Typhoid Fever in NYC Restaurants.   He has a right to know.  This is from Digital Journal.

Speaking of Twitter, the T word on TWiT, (not related), this is a very informative article on the use of Twitter in Blogging from ProBlogger.  As with many other blogs, don’t forget to read the comments.  I learn more from the comments most of the time.

I’ve used several methods for text substituting going back to writing .bat files in DOS.  This little program, written by Adam Pash is described in a video on Lifehacker

Once you have it installed, follow this continuing link to an article, also at Lifehacker, on how to Save Time with  Text Substitution.

Last link for the night is to SyncBack (free version.)  Read the page, it will explain it to you.  I have hit the wall.

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