July 10, 2012

• News and Notes: July 2012

  

   I prepared to post something on Friday, and then closed the editor without typing a word. Over the weekend, I opened up Xanga about three or four times, had too little, (or perhaps, too much) on my mind, and closed the website without making any visits or posting anything. Opened some images in my image editing program in hopes of getting inspired to create some great graphic oriented post, and decided it was all too much trouble, after experiencing the computer crash twice.

  It’s Monday morning now, a bit after 6am. I just opened up our workplace. Nobody else is here yet. I just turned on my computer, opened my internet browser, steered over to Xanga, and here I am at least typing a few words. Will they mean anything? Do I really care anymore? The worst type of blog entry, for “Mr. Preparation” here is the type where I just “post for the sake of posting.” What better time, I guess, since I haven’t posted one of these in at least a couple of months, for a News and Notes column!

  It’s MALWARE MONDAY! Where you able to get on the internet this morning?

  HEALTH: No change really. Still breathing. Still exercising. Still keeping my weight and BMI stable. If I reread my last column, I’ll probably find that I’m just repeating myself from two months ago. Seriously, I’m  maintaining my power walks almost every day, and I’ve been using 5 pound free weights on my walks for over two months now! I have been spending quite a bit of time “down by the pool”, so I’m tan, pretty buff and muscular, and am up to five laps across the pool. (Not at one time. I swim across pretty fast, then hop in the hot tub and catch my breath, then out and into the pool for another lap etc.) I promised a short video taken at the pool last time I wrote one of these News and Notes columns, but haven’t made any vids since Catalina in May. Didn’t spend any time at the pool this weekend. Nice days, but a bit too windy. And there seems to me more kids at the pool than I care to see. I sat out in the sun in my yard on Friday evening and on Sunday for a bit, tanning and reading. I’m almost finished with my first summer book! (Began Shirley Temple Black’s autobiography “Child Star” on my birthday May 1 on vacation.) I even have another in the queue. (A Jack Finney novel, “Time and Again.”) This section is about health, not summer reading, however. My rosacea seems to be getting worse. I haven’t renewed my prescription for the creme in a while. It’s an antibiotic, and if I don’t use it, then the redness in my face comes back with a vengeance.

  WEALTH (WEBSITE): Still treading water. My subscription for www.allthingsmike.com is up for renewal again, and I really can’t afford it. I’m kinda getting itchy about the fact I spent money I really didn’t have on my Catalina vacation, and now I seem to be using overdraft accounts again in order for everything to even out on my budget. The website subscription costs about $150.00 a year. Last time I used a credit card, but I haven’t even ftp’d anything to my main site in over two years! (The ElectricPoetry site hasn’t been updated since 2009 and all poetry since then is pretty much stored here in the #ElectricPoetry tag on my Xanga.!) I’ve investigated other site hosting companies. It would be nice to find somebody who would provide a place for me to keep my overblown personal website, and also provide an onsite editor so I don’t have to attempt to install my old Dreamweaver program on my puter again.

  The editors I’ve seen all use “templates”. Can’t someone just start out with a blank page, so to speak, so I can insert my own HTML? Don’t want to get all nerdy here, but I’m at a point in webmastering that I don’t want to spend any more money on programs. (Dreamweaver cost me over $500.00 back in 2002!) Yet I want to be able to modify the site I created on Dreamweaver without having to recode into another editor. $150.00 is a lot less than it used to be to keep my website online. (Paid $60.00 a month at one time not too long ago!) And all the hosting companies pretty much are offering the same thing for the same price.

  WEALTH (AT&T): My internet problems were supposedly solved (except for the reinstall of Windows XP but that’s another story) when I switched to UVerse internet from DSL in December of 2011. My discount ($25.00/mo for the $48.00/mo service for one year) was supposed to kick in after three months.  Phoned last week, and AT&T didn’t have a record of the transaction. (This ceases to surprise me, of course. They’re AT&T) I’m getting my discount next bill, and I believe they’re sending me a check for $144.00. That should come in handy next month to pay back some of the money I borrowed from my overdraft account)

  HOME THEATER: Came in the house Friday afternoon after reading a bit, turned on the 60″ 3D HDTV in the living room and saw vertical lines on the monitor. Tried not to scream too much in agony when I didn’t get a picture. After pushing a few buttons and maneuvering around the settings a bit, I see I am able to get my progressive HD signals but not any analog signals. I bought the TV in 2008 and upgraded to 3D last December. What to do? I called Best Buy. Good thing I purchased a Geek Squad Insurance plan on the device. They’ll send a video card to me this week via FedEx and will come by my house to install it in the TV next Saturday. I only watch HD channels, so anything on 1080i I’m watching in 720p right now. I also called  DirecTV and modified my subscription so that I’m going to get Starz for free for the next three months, and got $5.00 deduction on my bill as well. When I asked the nice lady at DirecTV what that discount was for, she just said….”because…” I’m still trying to get as much as I can in the way of content, and pay less than $100.00 a month.

  MY CAR: I’ve owned my Lancer for over six months now! How time flies. My Christmas present to myself this year will be to “upgrade” my car. These items have been on my wish list almost since I bought the car. 1. Evo type rear spoiler ($300.00) 2. Stainless steel Racing disc hubcaps ($75.00) 3. Subwoofer and amp for the sound system ($300.00) and 4.  Window tinting ($60.0

  MOVIES: I recommend a “small” film called “The Big Year”. On HBO (if memory serves, since I record everything on the DVR). It’s about the “sport” of “birding”, and stars Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson. No special effects. Small budget. Didn’t make a lot of money or win a lot of awards. Just a great film.

  POLITICS: I am amazed that on the one hand, the whole world seems to be on the brink of bankruptcy, yet there’s always a bunch of money available for politicians to launch expensive attack ads on each other. In American politics, Obama has “raised” over 255 milion dollars, and Romney over 120 million for the 2012 campaign. (SOURCE) I understand this. I’m just amazed.

  INTERNET ADS: I subscribe to the Los Angeles Times. I’m a paid up “lifetime” member of Xanga. But increasingly, on both websites, I keep getting “Internet Explorer” has closed your browser to protect your computer notices as my browser either slows or crashes. Instead of “popups” these days, we have “popins” which take over parts of a webpage. Malware is spread through Google adsense and other seemingly innocuous adverstising strips which nobody looks at anyway online. The whole internet seems to be slower these days,  because of all the unwanted adverts and malware being spread around cyberspace.

  I’ve spent far to much time writing this column as it is. Got to get to work now. I recently switched to the latest Xanga editor, and can’t figure out how to insert a plain background color code on my entries. Any inserted HTML just disappears. The more I know about anything, the more things keep changing, and I’ve got to figure out how to do something over and over again. Such is cyberlife.  Now to go check my bank’s website and see if there’s anything I should REALLY get worried about as the week begins!

  ONE LAST THING: I’ve been a fan of the Internet Archive database for a long time. Check out the WayBack machine sometime! You type in a website, and you can see what that site looks like going back to the first time it was “crawled” by the archive. I like to “find” old pages from my “original” (1999-2003) Homestead website which was taken offline in 2007 or 2008. EXAMPLE from 2004. I also love to type www.xanga.com and check out the history of Xanga. As the years pass, a lot of the secondary and tertiary links which didn’t work initially are able to work now, so you can actually read blogs which have been offline for ages. Thanksa to the archice’s Wayback machine, I can visit the internet back before it was overtaken by Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. (It always makes me smile to find that the same things Xangans complain about now were complaints back at the turn of the century too! Wanna see the front page of Xanga sometime in 2002?

  Posted: July 09, 2012 7:46 AM

  • 10:38 am
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