Procrastination… or Just Pure Laziness?

I have espoused the wonder that is LiveWriter before, and probably will do so again. Anyone who is blogging should at least give this FREE program a try. It not only gives you a WYSIWYG interface, it allows you to post to more than one blog with ease and the touch of the mouse, and it makes the handling of links, catagories, pictures, etc simple and requires absolutely zip knowledge of HTML, CSS, or any other acronym.

With the above paragraph fresh in your mind, you would think that I would be using the newest version of my favorite program, especially since (as before mentioned) it is free. You would be wrong.

I recently turned a returning Blogger on to my very favorite posting miracle and when she had questions, I promptly answered them…. only to have her e-mail back that her version didn’t have a button or some such in the spot I said it was. Turns out that I had an older version of the program on my machine and that the older versions do not check for updates on their own.

So…. the moral to this story? If you have (and love) LiveWriter, you might want to pop over and make sure you have the newest version. The version I have now has a ‘Check for updates’ option under the Help menu. Something that my previous version did not.

End of Public Service Announcement – Oh, and if any one from the government wanders across this endorsement, let it be perfectly clear that I receive nothing from Microsoft for endorsing their product… although I am open to any monetary recompense they would like to pass on to me at any time and for any reason……

Veteran’s Day—2009

Have you hugged a Veteran today?

For this or any previous years official poster click here.

Very Cool Hand Paintings...

I've seen several of these before, including the 4 I have included here. They never cease to fascinate me. The time and artistry that goes into them is amazing. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. Click on this Link to go and see more….

Just in Case You were Worried about 12/12/2012

I love when the doomsayers and fanatics grab onto a specific date and start predicting the End of the World. Let’s see, there was the Y2K bug. Uhuh.. computers continued to function, more or less, even until today. Then I remember the world was supposed to end on Jan 1, 2000, even without the Y2K bug (which was only going to destroy technology after all), then when that didn’t happen they realized the new Millennium actually started on Jan 1, 2001, so they changed the day… and still the world didn’t end. This is not a new thing, there have been doomsayers for all of human history, and probably before. I can picture an early human, soon after words were invented, “Ugh! World go away if too many people” or some other such nonsense.

The current End of the World scenario is based on two very different theories. One being the end of the Mayan Calendar. Uh, No! It is only the end of the current calendar cycle, and the Mayans aren’t happy you are trying to make disaster movies out of it. LOL! The second is the ‘discovery’ of a planet that wanders around and is set to crash into ours. Again… Uh, No!

Curious about where these ideas all came from and what the actual scientists have to say about them? Check out this Link from NASA. I think they may be a little more reliable than the guy standing on the street corner wearing the sandwich board and telling you to sign over all of your worldly goods to him before the world ends and you are considered a sinner!

A Public Service Message for the NaNoWriMo Peeps…

I don’t know how many of you out there are doing the NaNoWriMo thing, but I DO know a few of the people who occasionally pass thru here have written a novel or two. Some of you don’t plan to ever publish and only wrote for fun and your own satisfaction. (Pat)  But others have written in the hopes to someday publishing. (Karen) Still others have probably written things I don’t know about.

This link is for you. It’s a link to a Kim Komando article in the USA Today on self-publishing. You may already know of all of these places, there may be a few surprises, or you may never have heard of self-publishing at all. Still, I thought it might be a help to someone, so I’m including it here!

If anyone actually uses this and publishes something, be sure and let me know so I can pimp you!

I Would Walk 500 Miles

I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) Lyrics

Chorus:

But I would walk 500 miles
And I would walk 500 more
Just to be the man who walked 1000 miles
To fall down at your door

**preformed by The Proclaimers**

I don't know why but when I hear people talking about walking their 10,000 steps it makes me think of this song. If you want the full lyrics, just click on the link.

That seems like a lot of steps... 10,000. And, you are supposed to do them every day. Supposedly if you do that you will lose weight. Just by walking. That sounded like a great (read easy & cheap) idea to me, so I checked out a couple of sites to see what they had to say. The first thing they recommend is that you get a pedometer (you can get a very inexpensive one almost anywhere) and track how many steps you take in a day.

O.k.... easy enough. A quick trip and about $10 later I was in business. I clipped that little guy to my pocket and proceeded about my day. I was ready to find out just how few steps I actually took in a day and then I would know how many more I needed to add to reach the 10,000 step goal and to combat and hopefully get rid of that 7-10 pounds the evil scale says I've picked up recently.

Phhhhtt! I checked it after doing my morning chores and I already had over 5000 steps! I don't even wear the silly thing when I am in the house, and I've done more than 10,000 steps on every day I've worn it. Sigh! So maybe I'll have to do something waaaaay more drastic, like give up chocolate food to keep from getting fat.

Seriously though, the good thing about choosing walking as your exercise is that it is cheap, easy to do, requires practically no equipment other than a pair of comfortable shoes and a little bit of time. I'm working on adding about 2000 more steps to my day starting tomorrow by going for a walk in the evenings. I'll let you know if it actually helps. LOL!

 

No Brainer...

Tonight's entry is a no brainer. I was wondering what I would do for an entry tonight when I realized that I was about to finish Extras by Scott Westerfeld. This is the fourth, and currently last, book of the Uglies series. I have enjoyed these books so much that I am actively seeking out the other things Scott has written, including his newest steam punk novel, Leviathan.

The first 3 books of this series followed Tally Youngblood as she discovers that her society, based on Uglies (unaltered children under 16) and Pretties (people over 16 who have had surgery to make them 'pretty'), has a major flaw or two in it. We followed Tally from a young 'tricky' Ugly, through her discovery of what a Pretty really is after surgery, and finally as a Special as she discovers the scary flaws behind her world and watch as she tries, in her own way, to make it better, and in the process changes her world completely.

The Fourth book, Extras, opens with a new set of characters, in a world that has been altered almost overnight. Each citystate is trying to find it's own way of dealing with the changes, and we enter the world of Aya. In her society, it's all about being famous, and Aya thinks that, if she can only raise herself up into the top face rank and quit being an Extra, she will finally be happy. The first half of the book is all about Aya chasing a story and finding more than she bargained for. Just as Aya becomes the famous story Kicker that she has always dreamed of, it all starts to go terribly wrong.

The second part of the book finds Aya discovering that the world is not always as it seems, and maybe, just maybe, there is more to the world than having a high face rank. With the appearance of one of the most famous 'Faces' in Aya's world, Tally Youngblood, Aya finds herself caught up in what she thinks is an effort to save the world, but turns out to not be quite what she thought it was.

I enjoyed all four books in this series and would recommend them to anyone, young or old. I'm also hoping that this won't be Scott's last foray into this fascinating world. If I had a teenager on my holiday list, this set of books would definitely make a great present.