There is a low key Twitter update on this Blog’s sidebar, but, because so many more of my online comments are being drawn away from the the Blog to Twitter, I am thinking of removing the current script and replacing it with this one:
Twitter Updates
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And placing it higher up on the sidebar. This won't be an impulsive decision, so maybe you'll see and maybe not. Stay tuned.
I was trying to fit into the 140 characters allowed a comment about the CBS 60 Minutes interview we all watched last night with the President-Elect and his wife. She was referred to at least once as the First Lady-Elect. Not quite accurate. But really, who cares?
In comparison to the 30-minute infomercial produced for the campaign, I believe the Obama we saw last night was closer to the real product than we’ve seen in the past two years. However, what I would like to see is the previous interview, where Obama was filmed making a sandwich and walking down the street.
It was also noticed last night that flecks of silver are showing in his hair. A comment was made that he will be totally gray by the end of the first four years. We can only hope and pray.
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During the 1920’s, the nation had a choice between Herbert Hoover and Al Smith. Mr. Smith was a charismatic go-to Governor, a man of the people and well loved in his own surroundings. 
He was also Catholic.
It is generally believed by historians that he lost the election based on this one condition. Until John Kennedy, this could be called the Al Smith Effect, meaning Catholics should not bother running for President.
Now we have the Bradley Effect. That is what is believed to have stopped Mayor Bradley from winning the Governor’s office in California.
Will this effect the results this coming Tuesday? Yes. The question is will it overwhelm the chances of Senator Obama from winning? I hope to god, no.
This is not an endorsement for either candidate. It is a plea irrelevance not be a factor when each and every voter makes that final mark, flick, tick, twist or whatever other action that will be called a vote.
VOTE!
I won’t give energy by providing a link to the imbecilic ranting of a computer sub-geek who wrote that it would be a good idea to destroy the libraries of the world now they’re no longer needed. 
This is a person who most erroneously believes that all of the world’s knowledge and information can be retrieved from the laptop he brings to Starbucks.
Google and Wikipedia are the fonts of all wisdom in his small and stagnant brain.
Google and Microsoft, along with many school libraries are busy transferring information from books, but have barely touched the surface of the books held by universities. Even so, even if every book in the world had been scanned, would it still be a reason to destroy the libraries? Of course not.
If this person had bothered to visit a library recently he would have seen that public book stacks are the thin skin made visible. In geek language, they are the Favorites.
I won’t go into a long defense of an institution in its many incarnations, but will invoke the ghost of Andrew Carnegie and direct him to this man’s front door. I am sure Mr. Carnegie’s shade will know what to do next.
The point to make here is anyone who doesn’t use Opera Browser, now in version 9.61, is about as smart as an undecided voter.
You may have thought the Blog heading would be followed by a political statement. The only political statement I can make now is that undecided people should not be allowed into the polling place. 
There was a time you couldn’t drag me away from Firefox. Then one day I discovered I was no longer using Firefox as a browser but a place where I can store extensions.
More of my usage time was spent waiting for the extension to load and look for updates and then reading every RSS feed where newer and better extensions could be found.
Also, I was using Google Reader as my RSS source, Thunderbird as my email program and a variety of others to manage downloads. All of that activity can be conducted inside Opera loaded with its default features.
When I first started to reuse it, (more on that in another post,) I found myself looking for add-ons, widgets and the like. Than, epiphany time, every feature I used the most was already part of the program.
Dropping the extension addiction took a monkey off my back. Let Opera help you break your extension addictions as well.
People can be found in the weirdest places. I was looking for something about acoustic waves for my son when Amber MacArthur’s name flashed by my eyes.
It was in an article found it, of all places, a web page called Guitar Wave. It promotes itself with the phrase: A place for guitar enthusiasts with emphasis on equipment and tutorials
I am a large fan of Amber.
First seeing her along with the guru of gurus Leo Laporte on Screen Savers, I’ve watched her share her love of all things computer - right up to her present incarnation on commandN.
Each week I try to comment in the episode’s page.
Expect nothing profound in our comments. The episode before this found us commenting on the dog-tag style earrings. It also took us a while to get use to the low-key style of Will Pate, her current co-host. Before him was Mikey.
If you went out of your way to find a personality polar opposite of Mike Lazazzera, you must find Will.
I hope you come to commandN in a less oblique way than a search for information on sound waves, but when you do get there, expect yourself to start looking at older episode for no other reason than to watch the few weeks where her hair went native. This careful warning before you go there, it’s addictive.
In today’s NYT, Mr. Cohen brought together the written word of Rudyard Kipling and the quoted words of VP candidate, Gov. Palin.
At first, I thought this was going to be quite a thin stretch. However, it did connect, however tenuously. 
Each year, on his birthday, I read the poem If by Kipling to my son. Each year I ask him “Now, what does it mean to you?”
Each year he puts a different slant to his answer, showing a broader understanding of the world.
He will be able to vote in not this but the next Presidential election. Perhaps now I should have him read all of the poems, especially those quoted in today’s Op-Ed Column written by Mr. Cohen.
When you hear of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debate, you hear of resounding oratory, playing the emotions of the crowd, exciting them to condemn or support the issue at hand. 
This evening I watched two men who answered questions with prefabricated sound bites.
The only moment I found interesting is when the Democratic candidate said Warren Buffett would be a possible choice for Secretary of the Treasury. This exclamation was soon followed by a series of names and generalities that said, he would, of course think of other candidates for the job before appointing Mr.. Buffett.
I wouldn’t call it a bad taste, but I’ve a feeling it will take some flossing to remove the platitudes and sound bites from my brain.
What there was of it.
One morning all of the trees on the way to work were vibrant green.
Then the weekend passed.
The next Monday the colors changed; orange, red and still the constant evergreen.
Then the weekend passed and here on this Sunday morning we look out on the front yard as the glassy grass reflects the first rays of the sun, refracting parts of the rainbow with the blade’s ice crystal coating. 
The ice will melt and it will be shirtsleeve weather for most of the daylight hours, but with the sun’s setting the frost will once more slide down from the surrounding hills.
Then another weekend will pass and the frost will no longer leave with the sun, but be our guest for the long winter.
I have the original MS Movie Maker on my computer, but it is not working well with the AVI’s from my FLIP camera. I was hoping the LIVE version of it would have better luck. Unfortunately, though I went to the link from MS Live, Movie Maker and Clicked on install, when the box popped up, Movie Maker was not on the list of available programs.
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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 .
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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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
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.
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.
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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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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.
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.
We set up Twitterfeed a while ago and forgot about it. Need to check back and see if they’ve loaded. –30-
