It's News to Me

On the 24th of last month, I blogged, prematurely it turns out, about the website, called KnoxBloggers, that Daryl and Mike and to a much lesser extent I were creating for our group of bloggers here in Knoxville. The problem was that we were trying out a variety of different looks and features and hadn't yet settled on the ones we liked best. However, we've now reached consensus on such things, and last night we took down the temporary page and opened the doors.

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Some might say I'm easily pleased, and I'd find myself hard pressed to disagree. Take a look at this video first ...

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First Daryl then Mike summarized their impressions and assessment of last night's meeting of the Knoxville Bloggers group, so there's no point in my posting a «me, too» post about that, although if I did post anything, that is essentially what I would say. I had fun at the meeting and am ready to attend the next one, if/when it occurs. I expect I'll continue to learn from the others and maybe even be inspired to extend my vision of what role my blog may play in the «great scheme of things» because of these associations. So all-in-all, last night left me with a good feeling and the impression that we got off to a good start.

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Thanks to Mike Neel, a community of Knoxville Bloggers has been created on orkut, a Google social networking service.  His goal, apparently, is to make it easy for us bloggers in Knoxville to coordinate our activities and meetings and to benefit from sharing what we know and what we want to learn. 

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The title of this post might be the headline if the Knoxville News Sentinel chose to cover the August 23rd meeting at 7:00 PM in South Knoxville of the nascent Knox Bloggers group.  Bloggers, after all, are a solitary breed, eschewing as they do associating even with editors, so the secondary goal of determining whether to meet on a monthly basis is a bit like skiing uphill.  Still the first gathering could prove interesting enough to warrant a return engagement.  It, I suppose, remains to be seen.

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For the last several days, I've been evaluating several new pieces of software.  As I mentioned in my Lessons Learned post on the 22nd, I needed to explore an automatic backup program that gave me an option for offsite backup.  The next day, Tom Simpson posted a piece called «Backups Should Be Automatic» that was, at least in part, a response to my post.  In it, he recommended a backup program that he had found recently called Handy Backup.  It provides the features that I need.  It can be set up to be automated, and it provides the option of backing up with FTP to some remote location, among other options.  It also provides the ability to backup to DVD, but since I don't have a DVD burner on this computer, that option doesn't do me much good.  Though you can backup to CD and though the program is smart enough to span multiple CDs if your backup is too large to fit on just one, that option, while viable for me, entails attending the backup so that you can swap the CDs when one fills up and another is needed.  Better than not backing up at all, of course, but not ideal.  So I am choosing to experiment with the FTP option to backup to my hosting service's servers.

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This morning I've been experimenting with Flock. For instance, here is one of my experiments.

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Last night, the first official beta of Flock (version 0.7) became available for download from their web site.  Because I have been referring to Flock here at my blog since late last year, most of you regular readers have at least some inkling that it is a web browser that is based on Firefox.  This morning I'd like to recommend that you get some first hand experience with it.  And even though this is a beta release, my own experience with it since last October indicates that it is certainly stable enough now to take for a spin so you can discover some of the conveniences it offers.

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There are lots of ways to get your news, more now than ever before.  One of those ways is RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, that I've written about before. 

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Have you ever experienced the panicked feeling that comes from dreaming that you were naked and exposed in some public place like the town square? I have, and I have heard from others who say they have too. I'm sure many a psychiatrist has been able to pay for a yacht or put braces on his children's teeth by interpreting such dreams, usually by making such clever observations as «You feel exposed.» Well, the field of psychiatry may soon experience a rennaisance, because a lot more of us are destined to «feel exposed» due to what I choose to think of as the dark side of connectivity.

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