Yesterday I learned another two-part lesson. I was trying to figure out how to change the stylesheet for one of the blogs that I administer so that it would indent the first line of all the paragraphs in a post.
I spent much of yesterday trying to help my son Mike free up some space on his laptop. He has an old HP Omnibook XE3 that only has a 20 GB hard disk and suffers from a defective DVD drive so that he can't use it to burn CDs. Hence, he doesn't have any means of archiving the material he has on his HD. His new Canon Digital Rebel XTi is a 10.1 megapixel camera so when he offloads his pictures onto his computer, the hard disk fills up pretty quickly. Because he had used about 99% of his available space, I brought the laptop to my house so I could copy his pictures to my system and burn them to CD for him. As I've written before, copying the pictures over to my computer takes a long time and is tedious.
The other day when I was talking about Google Notebook, I mentioned that I searched for help on this new tool but couldn't find any. I don't know whether it has just been added or whether I just discovered it, but now I see it does have a Help section. There is also a Tour that you can take for a good overview of the service.
My son Mike has frequently called me while driving around and asked that I look up some business on Google and give him the location or the phone number. We've jokingly referred to that as his connecting with «Dear-Old-Dad Central» or «the Mother Ship.» However, now such calls are no longer necessary.
Spend the 10 minutes and 24 seconds it takes to watch this video for an excellent overview of what the issues are surrounding Net Neutrality. (Thanks to Paul Stamatiou for the link to the video.)
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.
Today at 9:30 AM I turned off the computer with the intent of leaving it off for two hours. Actually, however, I left it off for 2 and a half hours. It wasn't so bad. I didn't get the shakes or suffer severe anxiety. I'm sure that I'll be able to manage the 24 hour shutdown on Saturday; in fact, I'm looking forward to it.
I visited with my son Mike last night, as I always do on Tuesdays when he is working late, and he noted that when he read my post about Shutdown Day he thought to himself that I might had better try a few shorter, trial runs at this thing before going entirely cold turkey for a whole day on the 24th. I suppose he thought that the shock to my system might be too much for me, much as a doctor would advise a man my age to come in for a checkup before initiating any serious exercise program, lest I precipitate a coronary. I think he said it mostly in jest, but in some ways I think he has a good idea.
I don't know what it is about us old farts, but the older I've gotten, the less sleep I seem to need. Again this morning I awoke at about 4:30 A.M., so I tossed and turned for a little while and then decided to give in and get up. I started the coffee, which was set to come on at 6, settled in with a cup of Joe and began surfing the 'net, as is my usual custom. I find that my mind is unusually active early in the morning. If I were a real writer, I suspect that this is the time when I'd do my best work because for some reason I find it very easy to get lost in thinking about a topic during these early morning hours.
Recently I blogged about the free genealogy program called Family Tree Builder that you can download from MyHeritage.com and how I had gotten involved with it because I wanted to see how the program worked and how easy or hard it was to enter information in it. Now I guess I should acknowledge that I am finding it hard to put aside.
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