Hey! I'm not remotely interested.

Have you noticed the subtle radical changes to our lifestyles since the iniquitous "Remote Control" device appeared some years ago?
No longer do we have to struggle from our comfortable Chair/Bed to bring about some miraculous change in what we are watching/listening to or even the temperature at which we do it.
The problem as I see it is that these little bastards have learned the seceret of reproduction and are breeding at an alarming rate while we blissfully  sit/lie back and let them take over our lives.
The selection shown below is a sampling of those that have invaded/taken over my home, the 11 on the top row are to the best of my knowledge all hybrids that have come from their own breeding plan, whatever that may be... world domination??? I say this because I have no recollection of ever owning any piece of equipment bearing the name shown on most of these remotes.
The middle row shows the 8 units that inhabit my living room, I have made a sincere effort to combat the spread of feral remotes by purchasing a "universal" remote from which via the oft mentioned in this blog technology wizardry, assumes the functions of 5 of the other 6, this little genius is 5 from the left of the middle row.
The bottom row are the units that live in my bedroom/office and as far as I can tell are of a different feral tribe as they appear to have cannibalized one of their kind... no trace can be found of the small remote that used to live with my DVD player.
I have another small colony that live mainly in my car "Frank" of whom you shall be hearing more soon when Wazza and I take of for an epic trip covering more than half of Australia... stay tuned, meanwhile back on topic this colony perform tricks with Franks sound system, the camera equipment that lives there if there is a trip on, the clever little fellow who pays for my use of tollways... he uses MY money of course, not his own, as well as the known ones I have forgotten to list and the new crop of feral's that have undoubtedly occurred recently

I have published this information as a public service to warn any readers who may not be aware of this potential invasion on their lives by the "Remotians"

Toys for Boys

I'm beginning to think that my brain is... Uuumm... a little too "mature" for
all the new technology I'm trying to squeeze into it, let me explain.


I upgraded my trusty Finepix point and shoot camera to a Nikon D5000 SLR,
I use d the term "upgraded" but in effect I may just as well have launched a
climb of Mt Everest instead of my usual stroll in the park.
I chose to go with a single lens instead of the fairly normal twin lens kit, to
make this a usable combination I chose a 28 - 105 mm lens which I think
will allow me to do all that I want to do, it has a neat feature built into it
also, it is a VR lens (vibration resistant) which is very handy for us older
folks who tend to have tremors that weren't there years ago!!!!


This photo (taken with my Finepix as were all the photos showing the new
Nikon shows it mounted on its new tripod all set to take a self portrait.

Because my eyesight is not as good as it used to be I chose this camera
with its large "live view screen" for when the lighting conditions are less
than perfect

It has a very neat feature in that the viewing screen can be swiveled
through a full 360 degrees if need be, of course there is the normal eye
level focusing as well.

As evidenced here, provided I read (and correctly interpret) the instructions
it has the ability to take a self timed photo... even a Nikon can do very little
about the subject matter in front of the lens however.

I began this post with a comment about my brain being taxed to (or over)
its limit, the photo above is of the screen of my iMac computer, the black
area surrounding it is a good impression of the state of fog/darkness
that my brain is in most of the time when I sit in front of it.
I love my iMac and have reached an understanding with it, that provided
I don't try any more than 2 or 3 new things per day it will let me tinker
around to my hearts content, for example it has shown me many things
that I was unaware of with the storage and display of my photos.
Speaking of photos, I hasten to add that I also love my Nikon D5000 and
confidently expect that my photographic ability will improve when I finish
reading the 300 page manual that came with it.
There has already been one funny incident with it.... I fiddled for about
3 hours on Christmas Eve, taking only a few photos but testing every new
aspect as I read about them... come Christmas Day and dinner with good
friends Ken and Jackie and Margaret I rattled of 4 shots before handing
it over to Ken (who is a photo whizz) for a tinker, only to find that the
battery was flat from the previous days exploring... better luck next time.

Slides by the thousand!!

This is what has been eating my time up lately.

My slides are stored in 10 of these wooden cases which hold about 500 slides each, as well as these there are numerous slide trays which fit into the projector, so as I said before the storage conditions have been close to ideal.

From the cases they go to the Canon MP980 where 4 at a time they are scanned, this takes about 3 or 4 minutes a batch so you can see where the time has been going.

This fortunately is a fairly rare case, the red blotches are a fungal growth that I have been unable to remove, just why some slides are affected and others from the same batch and case are not I have no idea.




A far more common case is where there are only a few spots which I have been able to fix.

Here the bottom of the photo has been cropped and some minor spots retouched.

We spent a day at the 1977 world parachuting championships (that's 32 years ago now) the photos from that day vary from over-exposed to under-exposed again for no reason that I know of.

An example of a photo that needed work on it

While this is far from perfect it is certainly better than it was above.

Pretty much a dark unrecognizable image here.

It becomes a lot better when tidied up a bit.

This sort of discoloration really spoils a photo.

It can be improved a lot by spending some time on it though.



Like the photos above these were taken on the same day with widely varying results, this one not too bad.

To this badly over-exposed one (none of the photos were stored in that condition BTW).

Fixable to some degree at least., but as I said ,it all takes time.

Another peculiarity using the Canon, each scan is referred to as a "crop" this in lots of cases results in the effect shown here.


When further cropped to remove the dark border the resultant slide becomes almost square instead of the original rectangular shape, now I'm gonna have to learn to speak Canonese as well as digital!!!

Christmas 1977 crossing the newly finished Westgate Bridge in Melbourne.

A lot better image here, I have since cropped the front of the F100 and bullbar out of this photo.

Hope that wasn't totally boring, I'm enjoying the project even though it is very monotonous at times.

Aussie Culture

A Kiwi (New Zealander) friend, Robyn, sent me this recently so I thought I should pass it on, while you will have seen similar lists before this one has a distinctive Australian flavour. (and a u in flavor which my "American" spell checker doesn't like)

Rural Australian Computer Terminology
A little bit of Aussie culture.....

LOG ON: Adding wood to make the barbie hotter.

LOG OFF: Not adding any more wood to the barbie.

MONITOR: Keeping an eye on the barbie.

DOWNLOAD: Getting the firewood off the Ute.

HARD DRIVE: Making the trip back home without any cold tinnies.

KEYBOARD: Where you hang the Ute keys.

WINDOW: What you shut when the weather's cold.

SCREEN: What you shut in the mozzie season.

BYTE: What mozzies do.

MEGABYTE: What Townsville mozzies do.

CHIP: A bag snack.

MICROCHIP: What's left in the bag after you've eaten the chips.

MODEM: What you did to the lawns.

LAPTOP: Where the cat sleeps.

SOFTWARE: Plastic knives & forks you get at Red Rooster.

HARDWARE: Stainless steel knives & forks - from K-Mart.

MOUSE: The small rodent that eats the grain in the shed.

MAINFRAME: What holds the shed up.

WEB: What spiders make.

WEBSITE: Usually in the shed or under the verandah.

SEARCH ENGINE: What you do when the Ute won't go.

CURSOR: What you say when the Ute won't go.

YAHOO: What you say when the Ute does go.

UPGRADE: A steep hill.

SERVER: The person at the pub who brings out the counter lunch.

MAIL SERVER: The bloke at the pub who brings out the counter lunch.

USER: The neighbour who keeps borrowing things.

NETWORK: What you do when you need to repair the fishing net.

INTERNET: Where you want the fish to go.

NETSCAPE: What the fish do when they discover the hole in the net.

ONLINE: Where you hang the washing.

OFFLINE: Where the washing ends up when the pegs aren't strong enough.

A Wordle in your ear

Just a quick post about a cute little program given to me by my Sister-in-law Sue, it's called "Wordle" and is available via this link.

Sue teaches autistic kids and is always on the lookout for teaching aids that will hold her classes attention, the little gem below was created by having Wordle assess the word useage on my blogg.... the bigger the type the more frequent the word!!! Bloody seems to be the runaway leader which I couldn't quite work out until I saw the poem Oodna-bloody-datta listed... nuff sed.


I'm not sure I'm going to thank Sue for this idea.... it has taken the combined brain-power (not an inconsiderable resource) of Holtieshouse and Wazza's Place hours to work out how to get this onto the blog.

For any one so inclined you can have some fun with Wordle, so have a play around.

I will be home later today and may even resume normal service fairly soon, for those who have not seen it before here is a rerun of Oodna-bloody-datta.. a tiny outback settlement in SA.

Oodna-bloody-datta

The bloody town’s a bloody cuss,
No bloody trams, no bloody bus.
And no-one cares for bloody us
In Oodna-bloody-datta.

Just bloody heat and bloody flies,
The bloody sweat runs in your eyes.
And if it rains, what a surprise
In Oodna-bloody-datta.

No bloody fun, no bloody games,
No bloody sport, no bloody dames.
Won’t even give their bloody names
In Oodna-bloody-datta.

No bloody clouds or bloody rain.
No bloody curbs no bloody drains.
The bloody council’s got no brains
In Oodna-bloody-datta.

The bloody goods are bloody dear’
A bloody buck for a bloody beer.
But is it good, no bloody fear
In Oodna-bloody-datta.

The bloody dances make you smile,
The bloody band is bloody vile,
They only cramp your bloody style
In Oodna-bloody-datta.

The best place is in bloody bed
With bloody ice upon your head,
You might as well be bloody dead
In Oodna-bloody-datta.

Author unknown

This is only a pretend post

My most frequently used key.

I know a lot of this was in my previous post and that it’s all pretty boring anyway but I had an offer of help from a blog buddy “Connie” and as I wrote to her about my experiences I was reminded of similar incidents in the past that became funny with the passage of

time, besides it will give all the clever IT people and the smug Apple Mac users something to chuckle about.

Now that's what you call a computer crash.

My lengthy email to Connie;

Hi Connie, thanks for your comments on my new laptop, it’s a Satellite Pro M200 different to most companies the Pro model from Toshiba comes with less features than the normal Satellite, no web-cam, fingerprint sensor, just the Pro style working gear (which was what I wanted).

It has a 14 inch widescreen display, 2GB of Ram, it has a 32 Bit dual core OS, it came with only an 80GB hard drive (ONLY!! My first computer only 5or 6 years ago came with 1GB) and has a VISTA Business installed, you now know more about it than I do because you probably understand most of that.

Just to complicate my life a little more I also bought and installed Windows Office Student and Home Edition, which can be installed on up to 3 computers, this also is pretty different to my old Office 2005 so I’m learning all the time with it too, I’m not sure whether its just that I’m dumb, but it took me at least 10 minutes to find the Select All feature!!! (This is starting to sound like one of my posts Hmmm??).

OK, the problems that I know about to date;

I have 3 flash drives that work fine on XP but will not work on VISTA, they are a 256MB EasyDisk, a 512 MB Rundisk, and a 1GB Sony, I have visited all the manufacturers web sites in search of up to date drivers without success, so yesterday with a burst of brilliance I bought yet another Sony 1GB drive which was clearly marked VISTA compatible, joy of joys it worked, so I copied all the driver files from it to the old Sony.... and it bloody well won’t work!!!!

Enough with the flash drives.... at least I got my Maxtor 250GB external hard drive to work although it took updates from both Maxtor and Windows to get there, no such luck with my Canon pixma ip3000 printer after hours of re-loading and downloading from Canon and Windows it loaded.... well it said it did anyway but I can’t print with it!!!!

I think I may have mentioned the joy of Loading some 13,000 photos on to Windows Photo Gallery file by file as I tagged them (whatever that means) I read with some alarm your comment about not being able to install Nero which is a program I use a lot, so I haven’t even tried it yet.

I do so look forward to the day that you alluded to when VISTA becomes easier to use than XP, I am inclined to believe that security has been tightened up a lot, not that I ever had very much trouble but to date none of my security programs have found any problems.

I had anticipated problems with my Quicken Personal Plus program and my genealogy program Personal Ancestral File but both worked with a minimum of fuss ( a couple of strange differences with Quicken but nothing I can’t get around, on yet another lighter note I looked for the defragmenter for a looong time before I found it and when I finally found it I found that it worked behind closed doors so there is no indication of what stage it’s at... frustrating rather than a problem, I had 6,000 photos and files in the rubbish bin at one stage so I knew the files were gonna be everywhere... and they were, it took about 5 hours for a week old hard drive to be defragmented.

We haven’t touched on my favourite subject yet.... the internet... I got my wireless broadband connected without much trouble (ie about half a day) but to date still have had no joy getting my Computers networked, as well as all the above I have downloaded heaps of stuff and got it installed and working so there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, I just pray it’s not the tilt train zooming toward me at 150 KPH.

As to your last line about offering help, short of being able to sit at my desk and physically do some of the things that elude me, I thank you for the offer but I’m guessing that from a distance there isn’t much anyone but me can do.

I do feel better having got all, or most of it, out of my system though.

Kind regards, Peter.

What a week

I can't wait for Friday to come


HooBoy, talk about Fun Monday, what about fun Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday!!! I think I might just have got my head above the shit waterline at last, what on earth could have tied me up so completely you ask?

I bought a new laptop computer, complete with the latest and greatest that Bill Gates has been able to torture amaze us with..... VISTA.... now I’m not going to say that there is anything much wrong with VISTA except its total inability to get along with both software and hardware that has been functioning perfectly.... well, alright at least, with the old XP system.

I toyed with the idea of switching over to a Mac system but decided against it as there would be too many compatibility issues... sure there would have been things I would have had to replace with Mac compatible products but I doubt there would have been more problems, (read swearing.)

This beautiful Toshiba (yes my old laptop is also a Toshiba and will now become my home PC, complicated isn’t it) still refuses point blank to talk with, or even recognize, my lovely little Canon ip3000 printer or any of my three flash drives, I’m beginning to think SHE is stuck-up.

It took a day, 8.30am until 3.30 the following am, yeah 19 hours with meal-breaks of perhaps 90 minutes, spent downloading updates and drivers to allow installation of or use of programs and products, until I found an update buried in the files it wouldn’t even recognize a Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse!!!!

It took another day to find a driver that VISTA would use to install my 250 GB Maxtor external hard drive, its all of 6 months old BTW, and then transfer my photos, folder by folder, from the wonderfully simple “My Pictures” to their new home in the not so wonderfully simple “Windows Photo Gallery”, this day wasn’t as bad though, I got to bed at 2.45am!!!!!

There have been a couple of pleasant surprises, like finding that my genealogy program Personal Ancestral File is compatible with VISTA, I had serious doubts on this one, thanks to “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” BTW this is by far the best genealogy program that I have used, don’t be put off if you aren’t a Mormon (I’m not) the program is free and excellent, (and it works with bloody VISTA too).

Connecting to the internet wasn’t too bad (a couple of hours) but getting my wireless network to work is still, shall we say “A work in progress” if you have already formed the opinion that “he should be kept far away from all technology based products” I can only agree with you, I’m sure that an expert would have had all this stuff fixed in... Oh, three days!!!!!!!!!!

This will be the very first post to be launched into cyberspace from the new Toshiba so I sincerely hope that it comes to land at a computer very near you very soon... pressing publish with fingers crossed.

Nature study and a Scam.

Make what you will of this picture............................................ Well, I'm shocked I tell you,















Don't look at what is going on up there children.... Ooooh my goodness!!!




One thing seems abundantly clear and that is that there is some #$&&*# out there just
itching to work us over the minute we let our guards down, I received tis notice
supposedly from my ISP, Internet Service Provider, asking, almost demanding, that I
complete a form giving them my internet password, GEE WHIZ I would have thought
they would know that already!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can only guess at the consequences had I supplied them my password, I'm pretty sure
that I wouldn't have been the one to gain from it.... PLEASE be alert and query any
requests you receive that don't make sense to you.

This was the email I received, but didn't respond to.

Dear Netspace Subscriber,

To complete your netspace account, you must reply to this email
immediately and enter your password here (*********)

Failure to do this will immediately render your email address
deactivated from our database.

You can also confirm your email address by logging into your
netspace account at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Thank you for using NETSPACE.COM.AU !
NETSPACE.COM.AU TEAM

Truth on the Internet

You can look on the net

But often all that you’ll get

Is a screen full of adverts

From hustlers and perverts

All with something to sell

They keep it up till you yell

I can keep it up by myself

Put Viagra back on the shelf

Just leave me to blog

And I’ll work through this fog

Without sweat or strain

To my ever lively brain

You can keep all your s**t

I have no need of it

Just leave me in peace with my bloggin’



Is this the new Spam?

I can’t help but wonder about the folk at Kmart, (we do have Kmart stores in Australia) they are running a promotion for health and beauty, in conjunction with “M80”, who I’ve never heard of, called “New Day Your Way”.

This NDYW is based on a weight loss program, which lord knows I could use, and anything that could help with my beauty would have to be welcome.

It’s not yet mid-day on a Tuesday morning and I have received my second invitation to join NDYW, I was really starting to get very excited about the prospect of a slimmer, more beautiful me, when I discovered that these good folk believed that Australia was in one of 19 select US markets.

I was suddenly hit by tragic knowledge that because of an accident of birth (not being American) I was fated to spend my days in my overweight and un-beautiful form as it now existed… Sigh, I wonder when this will dawn on dear Nikki who has sent me the tempting emails today.

Some of you, who know me best, will realize that I am writing this post with my tongue wedged firmly in my cheek, others, perhaps like Nikki, may think this new (to me anyway) form of spam is working, I have news for those who fall into this category, it ain’t.

The link below was used to select me for NDYW inclusion, I thank them for the opportunity to once more bring this post to your attention.

http://holtieshouse.blogspot.com/2006/12/week-after-christmas.html.

Spam appears to have come a long way from it’s Viagra promoting days huh?

Extracted from the emails I received.

The New Day Your Way contest is open to those living in 19 select US markets,
with registration taking place 01/07-01/20.  10 finalists will be selected from
each of the 19 markets to participate for the grand prize - $10,000 Cash,
Total Beauty Makeover in NYC, $1,000 Kmart Gift Card, a 3-Year Membership
to Bally's Total Fitness (including 10 personal trainer sessions), and Treadmill.  
For more information, or to register for the New Day Your Way contest go to
http://www.kmart.com/newday.

Since you are interested in overeaters anonymous I thought that you might
check out the program and then post more information, such as a banner,
some before and after pictures, a video, or a press release on your .  
These assets are available at
http://assets.m80im.com/webmasters/kmart_NDYW/ndyw.html

For your help or review I’d be happy to offer you a prize pack of exercise
and weight management essentials from Kmart* along with a chance to win
a year membership to Bally’s Total Fitness! 

What’s with the html code instead of apostrophes??

Wazza sent me this one (blame him if you don't like it) I should have
used it yesterday with the State motto's.... can't win 'em all !!

The Cow.

Ole is a farmer in Minnesota.

He is in need of a new milk cow and hears about a nice one for sale over in Nordakota (that would be 'North Dakota' for you non-Scandahoovians out there).

He drives to Nordakota, finds the farm and looks at the cow.

Ole reaches under to see if she gives milk. When he grabs the teat and pulls...the cow farts.

Ole is very surprised.

He looks at the farmer who is selling the cow, then reaches under the cow to try again.

He grabs another teat, pulls, and the cow farts again.

Milk does come out however, so after some discussion with the cow's
current owner, Ole decides to buy the cow and take it home.

When he gets back to Minnesota, he calls over his neighbor, Sven, and says, "Hey, Sven, come and look at dis here new cow I yust bought. Pull her teat, and see vat happens."

Sven reaches under, pulls the teat - and the cow farts.

Sven looks at Ole and says, "You bought dis here cow in Nordakota, didn't yah?"

Ole is very surprised since he hadn't told Sven about his trip.

Ole replies, "Yah, dats right. But how did you know?"

Sven says, "My wife is from Nordakota."

Beta Blogger

Beta is Better.

Blogging Matters.

For my local readers, you may have noticed that my
“Days Till Christmas” banner doesn’t always show the right number
of days to go.

This is because the code I used was written to suit the Northern
Hemisphere, now as the time gets closer to Christmas the error
becomes more obvious, but I like the gentle reminder so I’m
leaving it there.

While we are talking/thinking about blogs; most of us will have
had an early Christmas present from Blogger, I am speaking of
the problems associated with leaving comments on other
blog sites.

It seems this is very prevalent with those of you who haven’t
yet changed to Beta trying to comment to those of us who have,
we had a problem with this a couple of months ago and it seems
to have popped up again, some of you have been able to
comment anonymously but even this doesn’t seem to work
all the time.

Patience is one solution, Google will fix this as quickly as they can
I’m sure, the other solution is to change over to Beta if you can,
this is the system that Google will be putting their major efforts
into, so it seems to me to be the way to go.

I have heard all the stories about using the alternatives,
“Wordpress”, “Squarespace”, “Typepad”, “Myspace”, etc.
I’ve looked at them all, even opened accounts with some,and I
believe Blogger offers the best deal and features.

For anyone using the Beta system already, or for those who
change to it, one of the best features is the ability to customize
your blog page with the “Fonts and Colors” feature, just what
you can customize varies with the template you choose some
offer a greater range than others, don’t be afraid to experiment
and have some fun.

The range of “Sidebar” modifications and the ease of making them
make Beta a pleasure to use, posting also becomes almost
instantaneous.

It's a great pity that problems have popped up at this time of the
year, who needs more stress right now? whatever you do though
don't give up on blogging.






I don't know who invented high heels,

but all women owe him a lot.

A Desperate call for HELP

Please help your assistance is needed desperately.

There has been an even more serious loss here in Australia, I'm only
joking!!! my Sister Merle's much loved blogsite Heronsnest has gone
whirling off into the vast emptyness of cyberspace, she is desolate
and inconsolable, or wait, is that uncontrollable?

Anyway I opened up a new site for her called heronsnest2 but sad
to say nobody but me could comment on it so there is YET
ANOTHER this one appropriately called Third Try, the link should
take you there, please call in and say hello, it just might get me
out of the dog house.

Beta Blogger

Update;

No it's not bad news, I have been playing around with all the bells
and whistles that I like to put on my sites, you are warned by
Blogger that you will loose the extras that you may have saved,
things like counters, blog rolls, calendars, clocks, etc don't worry
there is a work-around for this.

If you intend to swap over, and my recommendation is to do it,
before you start the change over, open your template, scroll down
to near the bottom and locate "Sidebar begins" and save ( ctrl C )
everything between there and "Sidebar ends" to a Word doc, now
when you make the change to Beta Blogger you can reinstall your
extras through the new "customise" and "add a page element" and
finally "add HTML" copying the code material (one piece at a time)
from your saved Word doc and adding it to Blog, click Save,
(where-ever you see it) and your old coded blog roll or whatever will
be on your new sidebar.

There have been questions in many of our minds about the new
Beta Blogger; I also had read a bit about it and was then invited
to guest post on a fellow bloggers site so that I could have a
look around the new layout my thanks to Kelvin who is a Kiwi
from across the ditch, as he puts it, in New Zealand.


The front page doesn't change very much, there is quicker access to
some elements but it all looks pretty familiar, it's when you click on
customise and add a page element that the differences come out,
you now have a series of choices that you can make to set your blog
page up as you want to, largely this is done in straight text form,
no longer do you need to battle with that mysterious HTML code.


Some time ago I set up a blog, "Home At Duke Street" for the
purpose of experimentation with new ideas that I want to try out
without the risk of corruption of my other sites, this one I have gone
the full monty on while at holtieshouse, peters pictures and poetry
galore, I have changed to the Beta Blogger format but have yet to
implement all the changes on all sites.


Should anyone wish to visit Home At Duke Street it can be accessed
from my profile and the listed blogs, I did mention that this was an
experimental site, please note that no young ladies have been
injured in the Bouncers section!

My reaction to Beta Blogger has been very good so far, the only
problem I have encountered is in setting up the sub-sections to my
blogroll, and with a little more time and effort that may be doable.

The other aspect of Beta Blogger is that it seems Google, who own
Blogger, intend to make Beta the only version of Blogger in time,
no one is saying how much time, so it's good that it appears to be
a change for the better, on a personal note I believe that their
concentration on Beta is a probable cause of some of the problems
that have plagued us for months now, I'm just sayin'

Attention Photographers

To all my friends out there who have an interest in photography,
I'm going to suggest you have a look at this site.

It just so happens that Ken and Jackie are good friends of mine,
but all that aside Ken is putting together an extremly well written
series about the art of taking photographs, as opposed to snapshots.

These articles will perhaps be too heavy for some but have been
written in everyday language, very much a place to go for a look and
I'm sure Ken would like to know your thoughts on it.

Ain't Blogging Fun?

More drama with Margarets blogsite.

We interrupt our normal transmission to bring you this
……………….news update…………………

Due to circumstances beyond our control, (or understanding)
this site has had to undergo a complete rebuild, sadly this
has resulted in all the comments that have been received
being lost in cyberspace.

The existing material has been reproduced as nearly as
possible to the original but the rebuild has meant a slight
name change had to be made, for anyone who had book
marked the site you will need to save it under the new
name;

http://maireadsmemoirs.blogspot.com/

20,000 Visitors! I can't believe it.

Update; Only 7 to go at 6.30 pm (our time)

I find it very hard to believe that my lil-ol-site is about to get
it's 20,000th visitor, from such humble beginnings an even
more humble site has evolved.

Please accept my thanks for the many visits you have made
here as my cyber-friends, and keep comin' back 'cos I love ya all.

Spam

I'm sorry to say folks the spammers have had a victory, I've turned
the dreaded word verification back on, I could cope with 4 or 5
visits by "Anonymous" per day but suddenly it's 130 messages per
day at any one of my three sites, time to call "time out."

If you haven't tried the little wheelchair icon it's better than trying
to decipher the weird hierogyphics WV uses instead of letters, here
they have a team of partialy trained monkeys read you some
numbers to type into the window.

Here Is A Special Treat

G'day, I hope you are not getting sick of me recommending that you
visit blogs that I like, but PLEASE go and visit this one, there is a
treat in store for you here, I just know my son Marcus from
holtpress will enjoy it.

I have just been talking to Warren about this post and he told me
he didn't know why I'd posted it as nothing happened when he
visited, you need "Quicktime" on your computer, I hope all/most
of you have that installed.


In my mind this is cutting edge technology that I can't wait to be
involved with, and the subject matter is very close to my heart.

Blog editing problems

Am I and my select band of blogging friends and family the only
ones experiencing editing difficulties, somehow I doubt it.

Do you get sidebar intrusion? sidebar slipping to the bottom of your
page? HUGE print in compose when you are trying to edit a post?
does the finished post look like your preview showed you? no?
I thought not.

I have been experiencing these sorts of problems for about a year
now; in this time I have come to some conclusions that may help
others to overcome some problems.

First up though, let me assure you I am not a qualified Geek, I
stumble around the cyber world, often in a daze, but I am
reasonably persistent and on that score alone I have found a few
solutions that work for me, that’s not to say they will work for
everyone though.


First let’s look at sidebar problems;

Mine started to become more prevalent as I added more little
trinkets to my sidebar, but hey, it’s my blog and I wanted to keep
the things that made it mine.

That seems to work fine unless you try to include something that
exceeds the allocated width of your sidebar, (this is preset in your
blog template), often I have found with things like digital clocks
there are various widths available, choose small !!

Even something as simple as a line of characters like **********
(these will not word wrap as there are no spaces to seperate them)
can be a problem if they exceed the width of your pages boundaries,
(also set in the template.)

The content of your post can also impinge, I had a case in point with
the post containing the cartoon The Seven Dwarfs of Menopause, I
had cut and pasted this from an existing file which I failed to notice
needed to be cropped to fit my page, this caused sidebar intrusion
in some cases, Thanks for pointing this out Raggedy, BTW when I
cropped the cartoon and reposted it I lost the comments that had
gone with it…. Sorry.


Editing of posts;

When I cut and paste text from Word to my blog I find it’s essential
to ensure that the print size and font is the same for all material, I
sometimes use stuff I type with bits of an article or an email etc.
these may not be all the same size and font, STANDARDISE THEM.

When editing if you find the type has become HUGE in the compose
window, but not in the preview, highlight all the oversize text, then
go to the size icon and select “tiny”, now select “normal” again, you
may need to repeat and select a different font as well, should work.

If you are getting a word or two on a separate line of your post, go
back to edit, then preview note the word that ends the line in
preview and change the line in compose so that it agrees with
preview, as you scroll down while in compose anything that exceeds
the line length of the one you’ve changed should be changed too.


Posting photos;

I have a preference for selecting, “Center” and “Large” for my
photos, even though I would select them in the order I wanted to
display them blogger would often mix them up, I now find that,
provided I create a space above or below a photo I want to move,
I can drag a photo to it’s correct position, thus resetting my chosen
order, (if you happen to lose a pic doing this, hit the recover post
button and you should get it back, I did say should.

Difference in browsers;

I don't know whether this comes under the same category as "size
is important" or not, but different browsers read things differently
I use Mozilla Firefox and very much prefer it to Internet Explorer,
one of the main reasons being that it has far better protection
from the gremlins that just love IE.
Having praised Firefox I must admit there is one site on my links
that opens much clearer with IE, that's Mikes don't ask me why??
My advice would be, if you are using IE and having trouble, try
Firefox, it's free and it's good.


Text too small to read easily in a favourite post?

Go to “view” - text size – increase, repeat if necessary, as an
alternative use Ctrl + or ++ if necessary. these only work on web
pages by the way.


There are many more tricks of the trade out there I’m certain, if
anyone has found these helpful I am pleased, if anyone can add
more to them I will be delighted to host a forum which just might
make our blogging lives easier.


Any good ideas?