It's News to Me

Keep reading →

The Pellissippi State Balloon Festival turned out to be little more than a bunch of hot air.  Mother Nature did not cooperate; it drizzled rain most of the night.  The advertised Balloon Glow did not occur.  Only two of the balloons were inflated at all on the first evening of the event, and because they were tethered to the ground, they never got more than a couple of hundred feet off the ground at most.  The nice lake beside which the event was scheduled was apparently the happy hunting ground for all the mosquitos in Knox county.  All-in-all the event turned out to be disappointing.  It was a nice idea that just didn't turn out as well as Mike and I had hoped it would.

Keep reading →

Keep reading →

Do you own a camera? Want a good photo op? This weekend might be just the ticket.

Keep reading →

Tonight at 7:00 p.m. the KnoxBloggers group will meet for the second time at Mike Neel's home (directions available upon request), and we'll have the pleasure of meeting John Fields, who will speak to us on the subject of Podcasting.  John does a regular podcast on the subject of College Football.  In preparation for attending tonight, I listened to his most recent podcast and was impressed.  John does a nice job of giving one man's opinion of the big games of the upcoming weekend, gives his prediction about the likely winners of some important games, and discusses the implications of all those games on the national standings.  Like anyone else who makes predictions about the future, he is fallible, but he has a reasoned basis for his predictions, so he can be forgiven for not being perfect about predicting the future.  I appreciated hearing a show like this that isn't just another call-in show for fans.

Keep reading →

The social bookmarking service, del.icio.us, turned three years old yesterday.

Keep reading →

About a month ago, Microsoft released the beta version of their Windows Live Writer, a blogging editor that can be used with existing blogs as well as with Microsoft's own blogging service, Windows Live Spaces.  I have downloaded a copy of it, installed it, and this post is being written with it.  Because I have written a part of only one paragraph with it that means I am just at the starting point of playing with the program, so any significant evaluation will have to wait until I've used it more extensively.  However, I can say the installation and setup of my blog with it went smoothly and without incident.

Keep reading →

I've said many times, I would have loved to have had a laptop computer available to me when I attended college back in the dark ages (1959-1963). Back then my tools were a spiral-bound notebook and a Bic pen for class notes, a manual typewriter, erasable bond paper and White Out for term papers, and doing research in the card catalog and the stacks of musty-smelling books in the school's library. Don't get me wrong. A fellow can learn a lot, and even demonstrate it, using those tools, so my lament that I didn't have the laptop, access to the Internet and search engines to aid me really isn't a complaint about how hard I had it as it is my way of marveling at the changes that have taken place in the last 50 years.

Keep reading →

As you can tell from the couple of updates I made to yesterday's post, there were some glitches initially.  I found that using the tracking component of the podPress plugin caused a glitch with the player and resulted in people's getting an «error loading file» message.  In fact, I got that myself after having turned on that tracking.  So I've abandoned using that feature and will for any future podcasts I post (which I hope won't take another year).  I also think this glitch with the tracking may be related to the fact that both yesterday and today I was unable to reach the podPress site, even though the link I posted to it is correct.  Since the tracking relies on that site, that's probably why that wasn't working (though I admit that is just a guess).

Keep reading →

Although there will be many tributes and commemorations of the events of 9/11 today, I wanted to use the occasion to get back to podcasting and to test a couple of new tools I've found. The first is a plugin for WordPress called podPress that makes it easier for me to add a podcast to my blog posts and the other is Hot Recorder, mentioned previously, that permits me to record Skype conversations.

Keep reading →