blief

Ever heard those words before? For me it started like this:
Abby and I were out in the yard and she looked bored with my tired self and her soggy stuffed doggy, so I said.

You need a real friend don’tcha?
yeah […a long pause] but I can’t.
Why not?
cause you’re allergic.

I didn’t even know she knew that word.

Yeah, but I didn’t mean an animal friend I meant a person friend [I was thinking of the fun she had with Bella last weekend.]
yeah.

Later, when the opportunity to shed myself from some histamine induced regret over my daughters inability to have a puppy, I pounced…rather literally.

I didn’t mean for it to become a pet, I didn’t even think we could maintain it’s little frayed ganglia of an existence beyond a night but Mandragora, the grasshopper, is now a pet. She has lived for two days in a wire-mesh bug catcher. Wikipedia informed us of what she was, and the rest of the internet provided a diet.

She seems to be doing well…well except for today when Ang caught Peanut swinging the Bug Catcher in a 3G, 180 degree arc from front to back.

Honey?! What are you doing?

She likes it Mommy! She calmed right down! I think she likes it!!

We may be the only family on the block preparing a grasshopper for spaceflight.

Even IM clients are not immune I guess.

I got my first one just yesterday. It is the first I have ever received, live, while I was online.

I have received email-like messages to my IM client before but this one
looked and “was” just an IM message that popped up like anyone who had my IM account in their bookmarks.
It mentioned something about loans on a mortgage website and gave a URL I could have clicked on. The ChatID was something like xy78sajfdks8d9f9dd9f989dxzsd@hotmail.com

Pretty nasty. Have any of you had IM SPAM like this before?

I spent an hour monkeying with Emma’s toes picture. It showed as uploaded but wouldn’t resolve in my blog. I couldn’t see it online, but I could see it in my FTP client.

Turns out when powweb migrated things they removed the ftp##.powweb “legacy” enumeration and now it is just ftp.powweb.com.

Again, it spoofs like it works but it doesn’t.

An unexpected benefit of my new position in Seattle was finding a piece of software that has quickly become indispensible for me.

It is called Freemind.
You can find it here : http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

It is called mindmapping software and it allows the user to create an outline of sorts in a graphical way. If I were reading this I would be skeptical. Can it really be all that?

If you have an idea, a project, a book, a plan, or a schedule and you would like to organize your thoughts it is well worth a try.

It is better than excel for keeping to-do lists.
It is better than word for outlining papers and taking notes.
It is better than flashcards for studying.
It is better than any other software I have found or used for no-frills organization.

Oh yeah, and it’s freeware.

All that and you can export the “map” into text/html/javascript-clickable-outline/pdf/jpg so that once you have everything arranged as you like it ANYONE can reference it.
The learning curve is pretty small, I spent about an hour reading and using it and I was already productive. The next two hours put me into what I feel is “expert” mode and I am going crazy with it. I am searching for things to ‘map’.

well many of you ZeeWise dot org email folk may wonder why your email has tapered off a little bit recently.

It isn’t the good weather.
It wasn’t sun spots.

It was our hosting service (new owners) that decided to perform a migration to a new mail server. Tragically, their old one didn’t report back to my mail client as a non-functioning server because it is still probably being used as a valid…whatever…for customers who have yet to be migrated. My client just didn’t find any email for me there.
So…if you use an email client on your home machine to access your ZeeWise email server you will need to make a change.
This page on powweb.com (our hosting service) will give you the right information.
If you still have questions, let me know. I am GETTING my email now.
http://www.powweb.com/info/systemnotice.bml?id=2721

In my case I only had to change the incoming mail server because I use my ISP host to send my email.

Oh yeah, and go ahead and be smug Jame. I am starting to be swayed and convinced that gmail is the way to go. 🙂