Grazing Press=

My first visit to Chicago was for the Democratic Convention.  This was the convention where tear gas was all the rage in Grant Park.  I was so pleased when I saw the same park packed border to border with happy, joyfully tearful people on Election night.

We thought Illinois had become the place of light for the nation. 

But then…

The governor was rudely awakened and dragged from his home in sweat pants to be brought before a judge and charged with a variety of counts having to do with the sale of a Senate seat.

There were no charges for bad hair, but of that he seems obviously guilty.  The rest is still to be worked out in the Federal Judicial system.

However.

According to the news this morning he still has the power to appoint the Senator.  What’s wrong with that?
Will hubris prevail?
Stay tuned.

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Windows Live Writer and Calendar have been updated

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Why are users registering for this site?  It is not a social blog.  It is used to comment by the authors on the news of the day.

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.

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.

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 itself.  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 reading the news of late, there seems to have been many stories of groups of people conducting themselves in an unsafe manner.  Has common sense left the collective intelligence of the human race?

In a previous life I witnessed a woman clinging to a tree at a ball field get killed by a strike.  She was told by those around her not to hide under the tree during a thunderstorm.  She brushed them off with a comment about the low risk of getting hit. 

If you want to waste an hour and half, listen to the inane conversation at the new Vinecast. 

This experience was similar to my recent read of the latest David Sedaris book. 

I unfortunately had just reread The Innocents Abroad.  Expecting to follow this with more wit and humor mixed with bitter irony, I was instead given the mediocre revelations of a mediocre life, the highlight of which was to go to Tokyo with the express purpose of ending a decades long smoking habit.

Twain wrote about quitting the awful habit several times.  Each time was with a combination of irony and humor that was totally missing from the Sedaris book.

I will compare TWiT with Vinecast.  On the TWiT podcast, intelligent and well informed people discuss issues surrounding their chosen topic.  With the exception of a fascination with Twitter, the talk mostly stays focused to the issue at hand.  It is moderated by Leo Laporte.

It would be correct to identify the moderator of the Vinecast here, but there really wasn’t one.  It wasn’t until the broadcast was several minutes old before the speakers were even identified.

It would be the right thing to say that I listened to the entire podcast.  It would be the right thing, but it would be a lie.  My email icon popped up and I decided to read SPAM instead of continuing with the podcast. 

That about says it all.

This is a first blog entry using the new off-line editor Zoundry Raven.

In the set up, it seemed to bring the settings for Trounce Ally in the VOX server with no problem. Considering the difficulty we have had getting a VOX based blog working in an off-line editor we will be very surprised if this works.

No bells and whistles with this entry, with the exception of the -30- HTML code.

In an earlier tweet I mentioned that as I have avoided drugs all these years I have also avoided apple products. 

It isn’t easy living in the geek world.  Watching people sit in line for three days for a phone, one with many bells and whistles indeed, but a phone nonetheless, reminds of the people I see standing outside of office buildings in below zero temperatures smoking.

As a disclaimer I will admit being a crackberry. It is a drug of choice thing, I believe.