Note: Cross posted from SquareSpace.
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If you are a parent, you probably have read the children's book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. 

We need to replace a damaged front door, frame and all.  For that purpose we rented a dumpster.  The door was fixed in a few days but we have the dumpster until Monday. ...

Note: Cross posted from Bell Tower News.
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This is the day we remember those who have left us over the past year.

We have Memorial Day and Veterans Day and Pearl Harbor Day and September 11 to remember the monumental tragedies of war and terror. Today we remember the people around us, who lived and died living what some call the normal life.

We visited Battleship Cove in Fall River, Massachusetts yesterday.  There are monuments to that same Pearl Harbor Day, to the Cuban Missile Crisis and to September 11th as well. 

What I found most touching were the looped videos being played at each station showing interviews of those who once sat in the same chair when the ships were in harms way.

Whether these people are alive now or dead, these videos serve as their ghosts. 

They don’t speak of heroism, but of their daily attempt to to live normal lives while on a ship where over two thousand men slept stacked deck to overhead and side by side with a volume of explosive death whose job it was for them to deliver to other people who too were attempting to maintain their normal lives living on similar vessels or crunched into lava tunnels defending islands they were commanded to steal only a few years earlier.

When we visited the Alamo, as we walked around the quite church surrounded by highways and warehouses; we saw the room where Jim Bowie was bayoneted. I wondered then how a modern war interview with combatants from both sides would have played. Did the Mexicans see this as a pursuit of terrorists from another country? Did the Texicans see this as their struggle to break free from a greater military power determined to crush the spirit of freedom they so recently won from what they saw as another dictatorial foreign invader?

What would videos of the normal people on both sides, thrust into this short usurpation/revolution say? Would they complain of the close quarters, the long walks, the noise of the cannon, the poor cooking skills on both sides?

Then I think of a the forlorn picture of a Pakistani musician in Boston.com’s recent Big Picture spread of the current conflict.  When you look at that sad and confused face, was he thinking of lines of battle, strategy for the supremacy of one mode of living over another?  Or was he thinking of the seven children that he needs to feed, of the instruments he needed to earn a living left behind, of the gigs he would miss?

While all of this continues, I hope we can still maintain this illusion of living normal lives.  It is the only way to survive.

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We’re using Windows Live Writer for most of our blog posts.  Inserted into Live Writer we have the xPollinate plug in.  This plug in has primarily been used to post blog entries made in one Famous Grazing blog to the others in the series.

There are a few of these blogs we couldn’t connect with xPollinate. We’re going to try its Ping.fm feature to connect the stories to Posterous and Vox when we post this message to Random Grazing Space.

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Note: Cross posted from Grazing Press=.
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When I write a blog entry I never expect anyone to read it.  That is why it was a total shock to find one I had recently written while in a philosophical mood on Belltowernews.com.

It was seen by me as mostly an historical observation.  The almost instant remarks referring to me as a person of opposite political opinion of the commenter but using words that require the vocabulary of a school yard bully were a surprise to say the least....

Note: Cross posted from Bell Tower News.
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It was almost a year ago when I took this photo in Croton-on-Hudson, NY.  The weather was the same, but the country certainly wasn’t.

On that day the ascendant party in power was full of hope and the defeated party was licking the wounds of a sounding defeat....

Note: Cross posted from Bell Tower News.
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The local governing agencies have established new rule regarding the behavior of bloggers.

“No more Wild West” was one of the comments that drew out attention.

We will be reviewing this information.  At the time, being not affiliated much with anyone, we need to review our commenting policy to make sure it is with in the guidelines of the  the whims of the powers that be....

Residing on the East Coast of the United States I can feel the tide of content flow over my head in the morning coming from the east.  I monitor my RSS reader, FeedDemon from around 0600 until usually past midnight....

Note: Cross posted from Other Journal Grazing.
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The days are getting shorter and the first week of school is done.  It’s won’t be long before the leaves turn gold and red and them become so much litter.

Though we all know Summer has a few more weeks to it as the world tilts, but, tilt be damned, we have created this day in September, Labor Day. 

It was originally designed to celebrate the working man and later woman.  Now it is seen more of seasonal marker.

The fun is over, the business begins. At least in the US of A.

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There never was a summer vacation that I recall that ended while it is still August, but my son is expected at school tomorrow, August 31, 2009.

I know it’s only one day, but it is still August. 
I know there is the Swine Flu Thing, but it is still August.

It just doesn’t seem right. To me.  My son seems to care less. 

He is actually looking forward to going back to school.

What has happened to kids today???

Back in the day we would have organized committees, tacked signs to sticks, prepared safe houses and decided what to do if the police came. Now, they get on the bus, plug in their iPods, put on a happy face and go to school.

But, it’s still August!!!
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There never was a summer vacation that I recall that ended while it is still August, but my son is expected at school tomorrow, August 31, 2009.

I know it’s only one day, but it is still August. 
I know there is the Swine Flu Thing, but it is still August.

It just doesn’t seem right. To me.  My son seems to care less. 

He is actually looking forward to going back to school.

What has happened to kids today???

Back in the day we would have organized committees, tacked signs to sticks, prepared safe houses and decided what to do if the police came. Now, they get on the bus, plug in their iPods, put on a happy face and go to school.

But, it’s still August!!!
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Looking down at the application bar on my laptop, I see FeedDemon, Google-Chrome, RocketDock, TweetDeck and LiveWriter open.

A few minutes ago, I answered a Tweet on TweetDeck sent by an American expatriate in Dubai regarding Skype CSV – FSV transfer.  While I was sending it, in the News column I have on TweetDeck, a flash popped up about a building collapsing in Dubai.

Before the Gulf War it can honestly be said I never heard of Dubai.  I was still stuck on the Ottoman Empire and Lawrence of Arabia. Now here I am communication with someone there while almost simultaneously reading relatively local news about her home country.

While this is fascinating, in truth the laundry isn’t getting done, I haven’t finished a conversation with my family about a new car and it is past noon an I haven’t had a meal yet.

Granted, it is Sunday.

On a normal day, I would now be at work doing this or, more importantly, that. Still, shouldn’t Sunday’s be a day to chill from the cloud?  Perhaps but it won’t happen here any time soon!

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A friend in Sonoma just commented on noticing how it isn’t as light now when she gets up at 0530.  Why she gets up that early in Sonoma escapes me, but I am sure she has her reasons....

Note: Cross posted from SquareSpace.
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After a very long workday, I knew I was coming home to an almost empty house. (see: cat)  With no one here, I only turned on the lights I needed to get settled and didn’t notice the square white postal box sitting on the Chinese apothecary in the ...

Note: Cross posted from SquareSpace.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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We’ve been trying to define each of the Famous Grazing blogs, to have a separate identity or purpose for each one.

Belltowernews.com has its place as the anchor blog.  We gave Grazing Press= a place to discuss news.  Other Grazing was designed to be the index for all of the blogs.  We were and I guess still are concerned for the future of of Live Journal as a blog host, so it was decided to start spreading the content around all of the blogs with the hope at least one would survive.

A general post was published this morning regarding the ‘thing’ with Leo and Mike Arrington but I felt I needed a place where I could say a little more or at least point to the ongoing conversation without editorializing or promoting rancor.

The conversation seems to be going on full tilt in both camps.

<<-- This is a copy of the Friendfeed conversation where, as of this moment, there are 1182 comments, nope, make that 1184.

Each of the contributors probably follows Leos Friendfeed comments.

From another point of view is the conversation going on at TechCrunch.

There the conversation has, as of this moment, 255 comments. As with any list of people who leave remarks, some are just so much noise.  If you take a few moments to sift through them you will find both Leo and Mike being castigated and supported by their interlocking fanbase.

Everyone at Famous Grazing certainly follow the information coming from the TWiT franchise and we read all that the TechCrunch aggregator produces.

There have been times with both, besides this one, where I have been disappointed.

At TechCrunch it was when they decided to get political during the campaign.  With Leo it was when he came close to calling the geek saint Cali Lewis  stupid for expressing her opinion.

To err is human.  To comment on it is the web.

Now let’s get back to worrying about Korea and the Middle East.

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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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Note: Cross posted from SquareSpace.
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