It's News to Me

Back in May of last year I decided to relinquish the email account I'd been maintaining for more than 10 years and to rely solely on Gmail as my email server of choice. That choice saved me $21.95 per month that I was foolishly spending with an ISP just to keep that email address alive, and with the freed up money from that, I began spending $6.00 less per month for a web hosting plan with Dreamhost, which hosts this blog and a couple of others and which has enough space for many more projects. It was a wise choice that I should have made much earlier.

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As I indicated I was going to do, I didn't turn on my computer at all on Saturday the 24th, and by so doing I observed Shutdown Day 2007. In general, I'd have to say that the day was very pleasant, quite productive and surprisingly easy to do. Some of you who commented on my interest in this day didn't see what the point was. For me, it was to see what kind of reaction I had to the self-imposed restriction not to use of my computer for one day. After awaking at 5:07 AM and going strong until about 11:30 PM, I can say that the event impressed me enough that I may just make it a regular monthly practice.

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My blog has always been just a place for me to test whether I could put things on the Internet and a way for me to comment on things I find interesting as I surf and experiment with them. Although I've been blogging now for about 5 years, I've never added advertising to this blog to make money from it because I didn't anticipate having much of a readership. However, I've been pleasantly surprised to have gained more readers than I would have ever thought possible. And those readers are gradually becoming accustomed to commenting here occasionally. For that, I'm grateful.

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I described the problem I experienced in finding a place to upload a large AVI file in this post the other day. This morning I've discovered another alternative.

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This morning I visited with my friend Tucker Childers at the hospital where he had to go this past Thursday because he had pneumonia. While there, I shot a video message from him to share with some of his concerned friends online. Using my Canon Powershot S2 IS, I shot 57 seconds in an AVI format that turned out to be 115 MB in size. Most of the free hosting or sharing services online such as Mediafire, where I have an account, everybody's favorite, YouTube, and Netscape impose a 100 MB upload limit. So my video was just above their limit, and I had two choices of how to proceed.

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This post will probably be temporary because I am making it only to test whether I can activate the lightbox component of this template. If successful, clicking on the graphic below should use the lightbox javascript to display an enlarged version of the image «above» the post with the web page still in the background.

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The simple act of forming a question in order to ask it sometimes reveals the answer. And that is a meaning of Jesus' saying, «Ask, and Ye shall receive,» that I had never thought about before.

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On Monday, I spent a bit of time helping a couple of friends with their computer issues.

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Life should be as simple as possible, I think.  That's why I love the keyword feature in Firefox. 

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A few days ago, I talked about Face Recognition that was available from this site. On that same date, I downloaded their free genealogy software, called Family Tree Builder (FTB). And in subsequent days I've gone through their 56-page tutorial, an optional but useful exercise that helped me understand the software and maybe avoid some decisions that might adversely affect my options further along. (I'm probably one of the few people in the world who bothers to read the documentation for a program, particularly if it is good as it is in this case, almost as soon as I pick it up. I know many others, most people in fact, who just jump in and turn to the documentation only when they hit a wall and don't know how to do something. But the difference in these two strategies is possibly the topic of a worthwhile discussion in another post, so I'll save any further observations about that for then.)

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