Judy

As if Social Media wasn't confusing enough...

Sep 022010

…have you seen all the social media management tools out there? Sheesh. If you have more than one social media account, you can use one of these “buckets” to keep them all on the same page — or screen, if you prefer that term. These are just the ones I’ve used.

TweetDeck — I used this one before I ditched my Windows and went Linux. You have to download and install it on your computer. It also requires Flash, which you also have to download and install, and I haven’t figured out how to do that on my version of Linux yet, or if I even want to. So, for me, TweetDeck is out. But it was handy, while I had it, to be able to see my Twitter and FaceBook pages side by side and send one update to both at the same time.
HootSuite — This one is all online. You just sign in to your dashboard like you do with your FB page, or your blog, or Twitter. Supposedly you can have a bunch of “streams” going at once. I have yet to figure out how to get FB and Twitter open in the same tab. At present I can see one or the other, and I can do that in Firefox. HootSuite lets me post one update to FB and Twitter at the same time, like TweetDeck did, and it has its own URL shortener, and you can also schedule an update to be posted at another time. I tried it yesterday and the update didn’t show up, so I don’t know what I did wrong. That’s what I get for not reading the “how-to” before I try something new. My standard operating procedure doesn’t always work, but hey, sometimes it saves me a lot of time reading instructions when it’s just as easy to figure out how something works by actually using it.
Gwibber — This is my Linux-specific version of TweetDeck. I think it’s kind of new. It seems to have “issues.” Some days it works, other days it won’t even open. No rhyme or reason, it just won’t awaken. When I can get it to open and work properly, it shows my Twitter and FB streams merged into one timeline, which I kind of like. It’s kind of like mixing your peas into your gravy and mashed potatoes. You can still clearly see the peas, but the other stuff makes them stick on the fork better. But some people object to that much proximity among things on their dinner plates, and so may not like what Gwibber does. But you can choose to just see one stream at a time on Gwibber. It’s the “home” feature that blends them.

There are others. I don’t even know what their names are. And there are apps for various smart phones, iPad, netbooks, and who knows what all else. Of course, I only use Twitter and FaceBook, but with these things you can add your WordPress blog, Flikr, MySpace, Tumblr, Linkedin, and a whole slew of other social sharing networks. Whatever floats your boat.

I often feel like I’m being left in the techno dust by the younger generations. I know that using all this stuff to its maximum potential is the way of the future way-of-the-future wayofthefuture (obscure movie reference), and I really wish I could get a better grasp on it. It appeals to my creative nature. Even though I always maintain that I really still see my computer as a typewriter on steroids, it’s way more than just a writing tool. It’s a whole Alexandrian library, a Post Office, and a news desk (and at times a massive time waster). I would much rather have all these options and be able to use only a fraction of them at some minimal level, than not have them at all, and miss out on some of the things I’ve discovered in the past several years.

Nest-building in Basenjis

Pets No Responses »

Aug 232010

A not-so-scientific study.

I sometimes wonder about the effects of domestication on dog behavior. I mean to say I wonder idly — not seriously. Because seriously, sometimes dogs are so funny, I wouldn’t want to change them. Mine have always been invaluable boredom-alleviators, as well as entertainers and anti-depressants. Speculating on why they do the things they do provides me with hours of amusement. Reading a book on dog behavior by some expert would just spoil the whole exercise.

Take nest-building. The Old Guy, of course, was Chief High Nest-Builder and Blanket Wrestler. He would scrunch his blanket all over the living room floor in an effort to get it wadded to his exacting specifications. I never knew where he would end up — I always had to just go out of my way as much as necessary not to disturb him when I left the room.

Now it’s The Puppy’s turn. He used to be satisfied with his blanket folded neatly on the floor next to the sofa — truthfully, he used to be satisfied with curling up on the carpet, but the end of winter was pretty chilly here, so I thought he might like a little more insulation. (And, yes, I may be the only person on the planet with basenjis who don’t live on my furniture. When I moved in with my dad and brother, the dogs had to learn a whole new set of rules — The Puppy, of course, grew up as a floor dog.) After months of curling himself up neatly on the folded blanket, said Puppy one day started channeling The Old Guy. He wasn’t happy with a merely rumpled blanket. He had to get it all the way into a tight little wadded-up bundle. Which got me wondering — do dogs in their “natural state” go to such extremes? You would think that beyond a certain amount of “fluffing,” the return on energy expended would bottom out. But I don’t know. Or maybe I’ve just had some especially particular nest fluffers. Or maybe the domestication process — all that selective breeding for being nice to people and not eating them and all — sort of shorted out a few circuits and now they just don’t know when they’re “finished” with their nest. I wonder if I could get funding to do a study. Hmm.

The Old Guy in his "bankee"

More wonders at HMNS

Collections, Leisure 1 Response »

Aug 122010

What with all the blogging and tweeting about last Saturday’s WordCamp at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS), I suddenly realized that I had never written an account of my trip to Houston last September to see the Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit at HMNS. I was spending a hell of a lot of my time back then firing off job applications, and the rest of my time I spent wringing my hands and wondering how long before I’d be living on the street if I didn’t find a job. Not exactly conducive to generating the kind of energy to write a bunch of upbeat blog content. Nevertheless, I knew I would hate myself later if I passed up the chance to see that exhibit, in spite of how much it might set me back in groceries.

While it didn’t register in my mind at the time that there was any particular significance to the date, I went to Houston on a Wednesday, September 9 (yeah, 09-09-09). (Oh my, oh my, oh my. If stuff like that is supposed to mark significant changes… well, we got some rain here a few days later, after several months of drought. But my job drought continued.)

I took my brother’s camera, and then found out I couldn’t take pictures in the exhibit. I don’t know if taking pictures would be harmful to the terra cotta figures, or whether there are just different policies set up by the owners of each exhibit (I would have been allowed to take pictures of the fossils in the Archaeopteryx exhibit if I’d had the camera with me then). There was a whole little shop full of T.C. Warrior merchandise at the end of the exhibit, so that might have been the deal — don’t let people take their own photos and they’ll buy books and miniature figures, etc. However, there were two figures at the entrance to the exhibit that it was okay to photograph, so I did. Then I proceeded to go around to other parts of the museum and take some more pictures, which I have been meaning to share.

I failed to write down the scientific names for the stuff I was taking pictures of, so we’ll all have to be content with names like “really big geode,” etc. Sometimes I get caught up in being an enthusiast/tourist and forget to be anything else (like scientist, journalist/photojournalist, whatever).

Kneeling archer in front of a scene from tomb

Close-up of one of the "officials"

Small predatory dinosaurs attack an armored dinosaur

"Good luck" to these little guys

Really big 'dillo

Imagine if you will a snail the size of a six-year-old

I love seashells. The more the merrier

Really big fish

I also love pretty rocks

Really big geode

A Glitch

General No Responses »

Aug 112010

I have taken down my contact page temporarily. I’m having to rearrange my email boxes and will reinstall the contact page when I can be sure it will send the messages to the right account. In the meantime you can send email to judy at crazybasenji dot com if you need to contact me and don’t want to leave a comment.

WordCamp and Archaeopteryx

Computer literacy, Science 2 Responses »

Aug 082010

WordCamp was yesterday. As I mentioned elsewhere, I planned to be there, and I was. I drove down in the early morning (had to be there a little before eight to start serving kolaches and coffee) and didn’t get unduly hot on the way, in my un-air-conditioned car. I was able to listen to the keynote address by Matt Mullenweg, one of the founders of WordPress and native son of Houston (although he lives someplace else now), and it was quite entertaining. I got to talk face to face with Houston blogger Shawn Quinn. He and a few other Houstonians started following me on Twitter after I posted the first bit about WordCamp, and I started following them, too. So it was cool to meet Shawn.

The first session I went to was about WordPress 3.0. And why did I think I’d understand any of that? It was in the “Developer Track,” which is that whole other country I mentioned in the earlier post. But the speaker, Stephanie Leary, wrote a book, and if the sample chapter I downloaded as a PDF is any indication, I think I could learn a lot about that country from the book. After that I wanted to sit in on one of the “Blogger Track” sessions, but the room was overflowing with people, so I thought if I was going to have to spend an hour on my feet, I would go see the Archaeopteryx fossil that was on exhibit only for another month (and was the other reason for me to be there in the first place). So I went upstairs to get my ticket. And let me just say how nice it is to have a membership in the museum and be able to go over to the ticket window just for members, where there was no line, and then get the discount on the ticket itself. Sweet.

For those who aren’t fossil fanatics, paleontology buffs, or evolutionary biology groupies, Archaeopteryx (“r-kee-OP-ter-iks”) is one of those precious “missing links” between one major ancient form — in this case dinosaurs — and a more modern one — birds. The first one of these fossils was found in a quarry in Germany famous for it’s limestone – and it’s fossils. In fact, fossils often occur in limestone because limestone is formed in marine environments (or formerly marine environments) and objects can become entombed in marine sediments and remain there as the sediment turns to stone. Anyway, the German quarry is at Solnhofen, and in 1861, just a few years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a single fossilized feather was discovered. Later, a complete fossil of an animal resembling a lizard but covered with feathers was found in stone of the same age — approximately 150 million years. Eventually nine more fossils were unearthed, and debates carried on for decades over whether they were true birds, true dinosaurs, or a true transitional form from one to the other. There’s not much argument that they are some of the most famous fossils around, though. The one visiting the Houston Museum of Natural Science normally lives in Wyoming, and it was sharing the exhibit with an assortment of other fossils from the same limestone quarry at Solnhofen, Germany.

A lot of the fossils were of fish, which makes sense if the limestone started out as ocean bottom sediment. There were even fossil Coelacanth (SEE-la-canth), a type of ancient fish belonging to a group called the “lobe-finned fish,” which were thought to be the transitional form between fish and amphibians. A few living Coelacanths (the scientific name of the surviving form is genus Latemeria , with two distinct species) were found in deep ocean environments off the coast of South Africa in the late 1930′s, and Indonesia as late as 1998. Hanging on since the Cretaceous Period, when they disappeared from the fossil record.

After I worked my way through the fossil fish, turtles and lizards, a few plants, and some surprising insect fossils, and some truly gorgeous brittle stars, I arrived “in the presence.” The “Arky” fossil was grouped with some other fossils I wasn’t expecting, and the planners of the exhibit had truly saved the best for last. Pterosaurs! I went to see Archaeopteryx because it’s a beautiful fossil with a unique place in the fossil record, but I was always nuts over pterosaurs — the flying dinosaurs. I have a book about them. I have a… well, let me illustrate.

"Swoop," with a Cretaceous friend

Yes, it’s a Beanie Baby. Yes, there were Beanie Baby dinosaurs. Yes, I had to have the pterosaur. Funny thing, too. The first pterosaur fossils, of Pterodactylus, were not a whole lot bigger than my beanie baby. They were about the size of sand pipers, according to the labels next to the fossils. As a kid I had imagined them as monstrous huge, which maybe said more about my imagination. But I kind of like the idea of little flying dinousaurs that I could hold in my hands. Okay, more wild imaginings.

Maybe I’ve picked up a bit of computer geek gloss, but I’m still a science nerd at my core. This is still the stuff that rocks my world. I only wish I’d had my camera with me, because they were allowing people to take pictures — something I couldn’t do last fall when I went to see the Terra Cotta Warriors.

Oh, well. I went. I saw. I marveled. Then I went back to Camp.

Alien Planet

Computer literacy No Responses »

Jul 262010

It didn’t look that different from my previous home. I could breathe the air. The sky was blue, the grass green (except where it was starting to turn a dry, crispy brown), the temperature hot. I could find my way around okay. Places I visited looked much the same. And like it or not, I was here to stay. Might as well start moving in the furniture.

I thought I would start with my music. It was no trouble to download all the albums into the shiny new audio player. None of the titles looked mangled — “Let It Be” downloaded as “Let It Be,” etc. Excellent. I wasn’t sure whether I got the volume controls set up correctly, but figured all I had to do was press “Play” and find out if any sound came out. Woops. Got a pop-up. “You do not have a decoder installed to handle this file. You might need to install the necessary plugins.” Gah. Like suddenly finding myself on the wrong street where I don’t understand much of the language. How the hell do I find out where to get the decoder and the necessary plugins???? (And could it be a decoder ring? Because that would be very cool.)

Okay, this is not the opening of a science fiction story. But it could be. Here’s what happened. I’ve been a non-fan of Windows since Windows was invented. I’ve used it plenty, always on computers “at work” that were hooked to great big servers and had a lot of RAM and everything else necessary to hurl that top-heavy operating system around with a fair amount of speed. At home I had Commodore computers, then Amiga, then Mac. They all had their own issues, but they didn’t need to have frakking Windows installed for me to do what I wanted to do on a computer. Then I got this laptop. I got it used, and it had Windows XP Pro installed on it already. I was planning to take an online course that required use of a Windows computer. Ugh. My frustration reached new heights. Opening a program required the patience of a saint — of which I am not one. It got to the point where I would click to launch Firefox, and then go fix my coffee, or start a load of laundry — and then maybe my browser would be open when I came back.

After about a year and a half of this nonsense, I was about to crack under the strain. I ended up not taking the course, and just kept using this laptop because it was a little newer and a bit faster than my old iBook laptop, but not that much. It seemed like I spent half my time at my computer waiting for it to decide to do something. Going back to using the iBook wouldn’t solve anything, because it is too old to update to the newer Mac OS. Then I remembered Linux.

My second ex-husband was a virtual bigamist the whole time I was with him. His primary relationship was with his computer. But I probably learned more about computers just living in the same air-space as him than I would have taking classes from anyone else. Of course I didn’t learn it in any sort of logical sequence. But Linux. He talked about Linux. An operating system (was my understanding, at any rate) that didn’t belong to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs and would never put money in the pocket of either. I could live with that.

I did some reading on line about Linux, and found out that a lot of applications can be hung on the Linux “kernel” that make it easier to use for the less technically inclined. Great, I thought. Sign me up. I asked a local web design guru, Cody Marx Bailey, for some recommendations, and he said, “first, back up all your files.” And he meant somewhere off my computer. I already have a lot of stuff backed up on flash drives, but I got a two GB storage locker “in the cloud” at a site called Dropbox. Two GB is free, so I figured that should be enough for most of my stuff, especially if I zipped some of the folders. My music folder was another matter. All the music files were piled together with iTunes files and iPod files and whatnot, and rather than try to separate them, I just loaded the whole mess onto another flash drive. It was over seven gigabytes. It would have overloaded my Dropbox like Mr. Creosote.

Long story short, Cody also recommended I look at the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, and after a bit of mucking about, I downloaded a “low over-head” version called Xubuntu and burned it onto a CD. To make sure it was going to work properly, I ran it from the CD the first time and had a look at the desktop and some of the apps that came with it. I had just recently started using Thunderbird to handle all my email accounts, so I was happy to see that Thunderbird was part of the package. And it’s fast. Think Porsche 911 vs. ’64 Volkswagen bus.

However. Apparently the Exaile music player doesn’t line up with iTunes without some kind of additional gadget, which I don’t have or know where to find at the moment. But. I can put one of my music CDs in the drive and it will play just fine.

I am not worried. I like my new home. I may forget in what box I packed my favorite knick-knacks, but soon I’ll have them all around me once again. And Windows can bite me.

Of chocolate, ScienceBlogs, and Pepsi

Reading, Work, Writing No Responses »

Jul 152010

I recently came to the sad conclusion that I must give up eating chocolate. In all its forms. Entirely. That’s a whole food group kicked out of my diet. Because I tended to overindulge, and it started making me sick. I won’t go into detail. Let me just say that the consequences of eating chocolate became increasingly unpleasant over the past several months, to the point of some acute pain. Poor, pitiful me.

It is often the case with addictive behavior, that what you crave will kick your butt sooner or later. It’s why there are twelve step programs for so many things that so many of us do in non-addictive ways. I mean, we all eat (stop and you die, in fact), but food addictions are not healthy, hence, Over-eaters Anonymous. Then there are the alcohol addicts, drug addicts, sex addicts, solar eclipse addicts (I don’t think the last group has a 12-step program yet, though). People recognize and get help for their addictions or they don’t get help and they get in trouble with the law, or with health issues, or in car versus tree arguments, or they develop some kind of physiological symptoms of substance rejection like mine. My stomach started saying “no more chocolate, or I will make you pay, and pay, and pay!

For a while after I discovered Science Blogs, a site maintained by Seed Magazine that hosted a lot of great blogs about all kinds of science written by scientists, I was an addict. I could burn up an entire day reading the different blogs, the comments — and some of the comments were like blog entries themselves. And then I’d kick myself for not spending that time doing something worthwhile in the world.

I tried subscribing to the combined RSS feed for ScienceBlogs so that I’d get a chance to read samples from all of them. I was overwhelmed. I skimmed some, skipped a lot. Then I learned how to “mark all as read” so when I found 400 articles waiting for me (which would sometimes happen if I didn’t check in for a few days), I could just deal with them with a mouse click instead of the endless scrolling and scanning. I felt bad about not actually consuming more of the content, but there was just too much.

As with chocolate, I finally had to just stop cold. I started following a couple of my favorites on Twitter and Facebook, so that I could follow links they posted to articles that looked interesting. Because at the time I was trying to figure out how to make blogging profitable for ME, at least a little; I was trying to find a “day job” so I could keep it while I learned how to make a living doing something I love, because “they” always say, “keep your day job” when someone expresses an interest in trying to make a living in a way other than the accepted norm. It always helps if you actually have a day job that you can keep. Duh.

What I eventually found was in fact an evening job — or at least a late afternoon job — and is only part time, but could actually work out better in the long run because it leaves me with enough energy to work on my other projects. But I digress.

Last week, I read a tweet by Laelaps, one of the Sblings I follow, to the effect that “David Dobbs is leaving SB, and I’m thinking I will, too.” What? So I went to David Dobbs’ Twitter page and read a few tweets, and then I followed a link to a Science Blogs article about how there was going to be a new nutrition blog on SB, authored by employees of Pepsico. And many bloggers were up in arms over it. They questioned the logic of their blog administrators in allowing what they called “advertorial content” on the site, which would lower the credibility of all the other writers. I followed the arguments back and forth for days. It didn’t take long, after ten or more writers left as a direct result of the decision, for the SB overlords to cancel the Pepsico blog (or Pepsico pulled out to avoid more negative press).

I spent more time on the SB site in three days than I had for the past year. I was on a binge. Sad thing is that the surge in readership for the site as a result of the controversy still brought in a lot more readers. And some people will say there’s no such thing as bad advertising when the results are more sales — or more interest. It certainly worked with me. Now I have to be smart and start doing my own work again, hoping I can make something that will matter not just to me, but will affect others the way chocolate and Science Blogs have affected me. LOL

I write like...?

Uncategorized No Responses »

Jul 142010

Seriously, this is too bizarre. These people must have a limited selection of “write like” examples. Or maybe I should read more Lovecraft. Sometime, when I have a reason to want to not sleep for several days, I’ll do that little thing.

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Site updates

Computer literacy 1 Response »

Jul 112010

Nothing stays the same. Especially in the cyberverse. Not only does WordPress update the blogging platform, but authors of the various themes make improvements changes that they publish to the WP site, which sends out little nags to those bloggers using those themes. So I got a couple of updates to this theme. Now all the navigation is in one place, on the sidebar. Click on a tab and a dropdown menu opens, where you can click on the page title, tag, or category or whatever, to take you where you want to go. Text links now show up as orange, making them easier to see (unless you’re colorblind — then I don’t know what to tell you).

There is a new tab on the top navigation bar to link back to the home page. I had to add this because whatever functionality used to tie my logo to the home page went away. You can’t just click on the picture of the dog to go back to the home page. Maybe that will be fixed in the next update. I know it’s possible to add some code to a file to make it work in spite of the update, but these things are a lot more complex than the files I learned to work with way back at the turn of the century when I was learning HTML. I’m such a dinosaur.

Word Camp, and the whole blogging adventure

Computer literacy, learning curve 1 Response »

Jul 082010

I signed up to go to this thing as soon as I heard about it. It’s going to be in Houston (not that far to drive even in an un-air-conditioned car), at the Houston Museum of Natural History (one of my favorite places on the planet), I could afford the registration fee (a considerable consideration), and I figured I could learn something from it (if I record absolutely everything and listen to it over and over and over and over…). Well, you get the picture. Because I feel like a lot of what I’ll be listening to is going to be way over my head, in a language I don’t savvy, spoken by people less than half my age. WHAT WAS I THINKING??

WordCamp, in case you’re wondering what it is but aren’t curious enough to go to their site and check it out (the picture is a link, by the way), is a one-day workshop on August 7th, devoted to all things WordPress, which is the software supporting this blog. It is big time computer geekery. It’s like a whole other country. Or species. And I’m going into the middle of it. I have volunteered to help set up the breakfast and lunch so that I’ll be forced to interact with people. Light-years out of my comfort zone.

Well, okay, here’s the deal. I’m serious about my blog. I post a lot of nutty, fluffy, frivolous stuff on here, but I’m still learning and evolving as a writer, and as an artist, and planet maker, jewelry designer, basenji wrangler, and even maybe as a web designer. So I’m thinking that whatever it takes for me to up my game in any of these endeavors is worth a little effort. Even a huge effort in some cases, as may prove to be the case here. Time will tell.

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