Image via Wikipedia

After a short break on the Rocky Coast of Maine and a rather disconcerting encounter with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, we came back to find regulations unknown to us were waiting to remove a portion of our collective buttocks without properly filed documentation.

It was one of those things where everything in real time was done correctly but the documents proving that to the future were stuffed in a drawer, left open on a laptop’s desktop and not filed or were sitting in a briefcase in the trunk of car.

IOW, no big deal but the skills of an experienced file clerk were needed. That and a good, and scheduled, back-up program.  The second digital issue was fixed immediately. 

The surprise was that none of had every really done any filing. We lived in our laptops and Blackberrys.  A chart was drawn i.e.: get file cabinet, find room for it, get the proper size hanging green things and properly colored folders.

Once the receptacle was in place the next step was collection. It took only one very long meeting for everyone to figure out who had what and how to bring it all to one place.

The services of UPS and Federal Express were needed as well as a FAX machine.  There’s another blast from the past.  We weren’t sure there was a FAX machine until we noticed it was a feature in the mega-wattage printer in the backroom where no-one goes.

The collective angst was soon abated when all the pods were in place and a plan created to prevent its reoccurrence.  Part of the humor here is no one is probably every going to look at these files now they’re in place.  However,  the law of chance says, if they weren’t there, someone would ask about it tomorrow.

Believe it.

As an aside, my constant use of Evernote made my portion of this adventure much easier.  I didn’t need the FAX or the overnight couriers.  I brought up the program, signed in and, presto-change-o, there were all the files I needed.  A quick connection to a color printer and I was sitting pretty.
-30- 

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?

-30-

Related articles by Zemanta

Image by Denis Collette...!!! via Flickr

There still seems to be a problem with SquareSpace’s inline editor and Firefox.  The browser was upgraded to RC3 today.  We upgraded and then rebooted.  We deleted the cache in Firefox, but still the Father’s Day entry is the default edit screen even though we’ve deleted it.

It is still in the Windows Live Writer Library.  When this clears, I’ll reinstall it into the right Date/Time slot..

-30- 

Related articles by Zemanta

Image via CrunchBase

The Famous Grazing LiveJournal site has sat in the background absorbing information from the other six sites without complaint. Then a visitor came and complained the format was hard to read, the title made little sense and it seemed just plain neglected.

Now you will see we adopted one of the newly offered “green” themes sponsored by CISCO.  When we have time this week we’ll come back in and tweak it a little more.

For now, enjoy the change and I hope this is much easier to read.

-30- 

Image by *MizzEl* via Flickr

We thought we owned Famousgrazing.com but it would seem the hosting company has gone belly up and left the domain name parked in limbo. It feels like it is being held hostage. At the moment, to get to the new SquareSpace.com version of Famous Grazing go to grazingplanet.com.

-30-

Powered by ScribeFire.

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....

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 ...

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?
-30- 

On my iPod sits all of the Net@Nights for the year 2009.  They haven’t been listened to because I followed ...

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. ...

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.
-30- 

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

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

-30- 

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

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

Posted via email from grazing's posterous

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 high light 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 world sold figuratively because the add-on is free.

-30- 

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.

-30- 

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....

Read full article