Grazing Press=

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.

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.

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.

This is a wonderful book for children.
Published for $5.00 on Lulu.com

The Brave Brothers

While putting together this nightly, somewhat, grade, I am listening on lone to Stephen Fry’s Podcast.  The point he is trying to make is a verification of the River Phoenix line regarding classical music. "You can’t dance to Beethoven."

Mentioned in one of the Twitter messages from SxSW is this link to 20 Websites That Made Me a Better Web Developer at Six Revisions.  There are many comments that go along with this list.

Another, entirely scientific, by British standards is this list of the 50 most influential blogs.  Be aware this list was compiled by the British website  for the Guardian Newspaper.  I used to get the Manchester Guardian delivered to my door when Malcolm Muggeridge wrote for them.

Wanting a desktop feature to cover Twitter, now that I am addicted to it, I found Thwirl.  It says it simultaneously put your Tweets into Pownce and Jaiku.  I set up the information into it, but haven’t seen the reproduction into each of these other miniblog online.

Not being fond of Outlook or its mother ship, I was pleased to find this link that syncs the Google Calendar to the Blackberry.  It took no brain energy to set it up.  It now works very well.  Less work for mother.

Now for one more cute link before toddling off to bed. 

This is a Boing-Boing link displaying a Corning Glass Museum piece about the Prince Rupert Drop.  I don’t know why I found this so fascinating, but I did. 

If you are a fan of Cali Lewis, her Flickr page may be of some interest.  If you aren’t a fan, on what planet do you reside??

I just went through 55 Boing-Boing  RSS feeds and found nothing worth linking to this evening.
This applies, oddly enough to Lifehacker as well. 

There was a piece saying the product Airborne Cold prevent-er was really crap. I knew that already, but wasn’t sure on the veracity of the reports source, so, no link.

Twitter in Plain English somewhat explains the way Twitter works.  I just haven’t figured out how to add URL’s to it yet.  Give me time, I will.  I know I can post a URL naked, but I want to make it as a link, the way we do on this blog.  I looked into the hash mark (#) linking, but that’s not what I want right now.

Windows Fanatics has a message about the Top 5 Music Web Sites. I have been to each of the sites listed.  My favorite is AccuRadio . LastFM starts when I start MediaMonkey.  Pandora puts you on a Junk Mail List and is very annoying for that reason alone.

There is a lot of traffic about the Google Calendar synch with Outlook.  But the Robert Scoble is asking why aren’t you using Plaxo?

Switched from AccuRadio to Net@Night. 

Here’s a surprise: Ziff Davis applies for bankruptcy. (New York Times)

If you use Picasa here are 10 tips to improve your photos.

The conversation on Net@Nite is covering a site called DropIO.  I just set up an account there.  I think this will be of great us to us.

Goodbye Chef Irvine.

I thought I would listen to the latest net and night with Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte.  I expected geek talk. 

Amber mentioned a YouTube video with Jimmy Kimmel and Ben Afflect declaring their love for each other. It is genuinely funny.  The Sara Silverman video that lead to the creation of this video is not as funny, more vulgar.

Though we’re not sure we’ll use it much, we installed Pidgin after reading this Lifehacker page.

It is very hard to go read my RSS pages while listening to Leo and Amber because they are going over and over about this and that link.  I need to pause the show to get his page finished.  DISTRACTION!!!

This Lifehacker page listing 157 of PC Magazines favorite something or other is not worth going to for the link to PC Magazine, but to read the ranting of the commentary trashing PC Magazine.  Whoa!  I thought most of this sort of ranting was preserved for Microsoft and the Royal Family.

If you haven’t read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, this is the last time I am putting up this link because the free on-line version will not be up that much longer.  I love this book and have three copies of it.  One to keep and two to lend out to friends.

I thought I would post the page on Speedwords, but found it boring.  Google it if your are interested.

If this article was available to me months ago it would have been easier for me to settle down to the two blog writers I use most, Scribefire and Windows Live Writer.

Again, as with most pages like this, read the comments. w::bloggar is mentioned.  I think that was my first blog writer.

Quick Links before bed.

Ashampoo Clipfinder

Those Inexplicable Traffic Jams

Free Starter Kit Give Away from Seventh Generation

Say Goodnight Gracie!

As I sit here listening to the Tech Guy from 2-24-08 cover on-line addiction, I have added Twitter Remarks to the sidebar of Belltowernews.com.  I still don’t quite get Twitter, but I feel I will use it more now that it is on Belltowernews.  The same additions are made with the Google Reader link right above the Twitter Remarks.

Matt Richtel spoke to Leo About his book Hooked.  I went to Kindle on Amazon.com and downloaded the sample.  I have feeling I might buy the entire book.  This is the good feature of the Kindle.  You can download the introduction  and first chapter and then decide if you want to buy the entire book.  I consider it virtual browsing.

The first item on the graze list is the Lifehacker article on synching the workflow twixt  Picasa and Flickr.

Lifehack.org, not to be confused with Lifehacker.com had an article on how to find anyone on-line.  It isn’t about searching for a particular person but about finding someone of the type with whom you may want to communicate.

A second link to Lifehack.org has to tips about the most effective way to use email.  You may think you are savvy about email, but reading this short article may surprise you.

Here is a good one.  A person who had may job two holders ago saved a lot of files in the wps format.  To open them I went to an older compute with MS Works installed.  Here is a link to the eHow site on the easy way to convert the .wps file to .doc files.

Another recommendation from the Tech Guy podcast is the program Audacity for recording single microphone podcasts.

An add aside:  I am not sure what combination of keys I just hit, but for some reason Dreamweaver just started up and loaded downloading.php.  How Odd!

The last link for the evening is to this photo of Babe Ruth in a Boston Red Sox Uniform taken in 1919, before the curse of the Bambino.

Good Night!

Go this link:

Here for the next month you can read American Gods by Neil Gaiman courtesy of the author himself. He ran a survey on his blog as to which books his fans would like to see posted free on-line.

I voted for Neverwhere, but his more popular novel won. I liked it too, so everyone’s a winner.

-30-

That may sound strange, to take Sunday off, but after a very long week we have canceled all social obligations for the day.  I am sitting here in the home office, listening to Ingrid Michealson’s The Way I Am to be followed by Stacy Kent singing Stardust. 

These songs came about with my discovery of Amazon.com’s music download.  iTunes was just too complicated for me.  I am listening to the music on my laptop with the GPL Licensed  VLC cross platform media player.  It is the simplicity the interface to this programs full set of features that appeals to me.

Mark Knophler’s Coyote (Album Version) just started playing.

This could go on all afternoon, but I would rather just chill, thank you…

-30-

…Stacy Kent is now singing I Got it Bad…