Book Commercials & Misanthropic Observations

Went to the vet today

Well, yes, the vet confirmed and actually described back to me what it’s like when your sweet little dog has a seizure. How is this comforting? Because it means he knows what he’s talking about. And we’ll just monitor her from now on. And we know a little more about what we are facing, information is truly comforting power. We’re not going to treat them unless it’s a brain infection (we’ll know that by tomorrow- took some blood today) or she has them more often than 3 months apart. We will, however, keep the basement door shut because if she’s at the top of the steps if it happens again she would get very hurt. The other concern is that she has somehow dropped 10 pounds over the summer. – 1/3 of her total weight. So all Spud knows is that she’s getting more food. I bet she thinks this is a good thing.

Because I took only Spud to the vet today and Hannah was home she got to experience how Frito reacts when Spud is not around. She literally doesn’t stop wimpering.

Sweet little Spud dog

Just had a seizure. We are worried for her and just want to sit quietly with her now. Hannah is with her this afternoon and Paul will go home when he can. I hope to work from home tomorrow.

Hannah called me right away and I called the vet. They don’t want to run tests right away because they think the seizure will throw off the blood work. They’ll run a full round on Monday. In the meantime we’ll just stay home with her and keep her calm and comforted.

Done.

Yes, the project I began on May 29, 2007 was finished at 8:46 PM last night. All our books are classified, labeled, and placed on bookshelves in order. I can find them. It’s so good.

Final Tally: 132 books pruned from the pile. 457 survived and catalogued.

Subscribing to blogs

This is for Erin and Mark and anyone else who was interested.

I use the RSS feed reader in Outlook 2007 – which I really like and highly recommend, much to the dismay of the rabid anti-microsoft lobby. Just don’t enable the computer wide instant search feature if you are running an XP machine, and you’ll be fine. That’s the one thing that will dog your computer down. The other features are oh, so wonderful.

For those that don’t have this, I’m going to give a list of email based Aggregators. What’s an aggregator?

Why email based? That’s my method of choice. I prefer to receive an email when one of my favorite blogs gets a new post. It helps me to get more work done and go about my day – I don’t waste time checking blogs that don’t have anything new that day.

There are plenty of other methods- see the section “Varieties” in the What’s an aggregator? link. Choose the one that works best for you.

But first: if the letters RSS mean nothing to you, click here.

Learn to find RSS feeds. It’s simple. look for this icon or a little orange button with the letters RSS or XML in it. Go ahead, click on it- the page you end up on is the feed.

Alternate method: if you are using Internet Explorer, (which I also do not consider to be evil) and you are using version 6, go ahead and upgrade to 7. You will like the tabbed browsing, something Mozilla has had for a long time now. It also reads CSS better, meaning that some websites that look all wrong to you now will suddenly seem to work. (like Paul’s blog before he added some tables in deference to you IE6 users). Ok, so lets assume you are now using IE7.

When you are on a blog site, look over by the printer and home icons on the top right. The RSS feed icon is now active; this site has a feed and you can subscribe. Click on that icon to see the feed. It will look like this:

Mozilla Firefox also auto detects feeds. You’ll see the orange icon in the bottom right part of the Mozilla Firefox browser window (the status bar), or if you are using version 1.5 or newer, in the right most part of the address bar.

Email based aggregators
These are sites that aggregate feeds and email them to you.

Blog Alert
FeedBlitz.com - scroll down to the section titled: Subscribe to any blog by mail
RssFwd
R-mail
Yahoo! Alerts

Have fun!

Saved by Easy Worship file incompatibility

Since I chose to switch to Photoshop, and Pinnacle, my movie making program of choice since 1996, is often a little dicey I plunged ahead and went over to the whole adobe family, including Premier, their movie making program.

So here I am, eating humble pie, knowing it’s a good move but wanting my old software back, and Tom Abel, my partner in crime with Pinnacle comes into the office and says “Don’t upgrade to the new version of Pinnacle. It’s terrible. All kinds of patches and instability”

Thank you file incompatibility! You do me more good than harm.

This one’s for you Pat Stream

Why do farts stink? So that deaf people can enjoy them too!

Dear Hannah

I miss you.
Have super fun, play with dogs and kitties and siblings. Then come home. Ok? ok.

New look

Not even close to done- look at that nasty dividing line… But that’ll do for today. I gotta get some laundry done!

A little humble pie

After years of self taught image editing and website building I began to think I was all that. You wanted it, I could figure out a way, or so I thought. I am now back to the level of complete beginner. Here’s why:

I have been using Paint shop Pro all this time. Why this instead of the industry standard Photoshop? Paint shop pro is plenty powerful in its own right, and – the price. You can get a new full seat of Paint shop for $80.00 – $100.00. Which made it seem like little skin off my back the first time just to try it, and I just got used to it. It does layers and much the same things as Photoshop and I would STILL be using it if it were not for this one little snafu.

The recent versions of Paint shop pro, for some reason, steal all file associations from Easy Worship

- my wonderful, super powerful weekend worship file program. And when I re-set the file associations Easy Worship still will not show thumbnail images. Unless our volunteers know file names by heart, an unreasonable expectation, they will not be able to add images or videos on the fly to a weekend worship service.

No big deal, you say, just don’t have those two programs on the same computer. Not so easy. Image editing is one of the major things I do for a weekend, and while I often have multiple computers going at once, I need to do final editing on the computer that will be projecting the images – lightness, darkness, and contrast are important to a well done weekend - and worship services trump all else on my computers.

Easy worship support has been very open to looking for a fix and has contacted Paint shop pro. Paint shop pro, not so friendly. Churches don’t seem to be a market they cater to. So after months (I’ve been dealing with this since February) I have sucked it up and made the switch. I know myself, I will go back to Paint shop for easy tasks and consequently never actually learn Photoshop, and so I have gone cold turkey and actually uninstalled Paint shop, forcing myself to use Photoshop.

Now, after seeing Paul’s new blog, I want a makeover of my own. I’ve never really bothered to make this blog pretty. I have a wonderful design in mind, but I can’t even make a basic tileable image in Photoshop. Augh! When you see a new style on this blog, know it is a major victory for me and that I worked hard to learn how to do it.

Paulers is at it again

I, for one, loved reading Paul’s blog entries. But it’s been so long, I had given up even checking on it. He’s taken up writing again.
http://www.dopkins.net/paul/blog/index.php