baldilocks

New Territory

I'll be filming an episode of Pajamas TV this afternoon. Live for the very first time! Please no fat jokes (I'm working on it.)

BTW, I'm riveted by the political and economic goings-on as the next American over and, at some point, when I think I can contribute something useful to the conversation, I will. :::Yeah, I know. That's never stopped me before.:::

UPDATE: If you watched, you saw me freeze up a couple of times. Maybe I ought to have a shot of vodka before the next time, should they invite me back. Hey, it always works for the Russian oral DLPT!

Coolness factor: I got to sit next to Bill Whittle!

Thank you so much, good folks at Pajamas Media.

Slow Start

Not me (well, not just me), but my computer. It was so slow this morning that I restarted it in safe mode and am posting/browsing from there, where I'm having no problems. I'm getting a lot of traffic right now for various reasons. A fine time to seize-up on me, no?

The problems: my programs are slow to open up (especially the browsers) and become intermittently non-responsive, occasionally crashing. I've performed disk clean-up and defrag several times.

What I'd like from you are detailed suggestions as to how to fix these things--besides throwing the tower out of the window--or recommended software. Windows XP SP3.

Help me, geeks, you're my only hope!

UPDATE: The Spybot program made things easier and quicker. Removed 147 foreign bodies from my hard drive. I tip my not-wig to Casey and to all of you.

AT&T is On My List

My broadband link has been intermittent since Saturday.

I have plenty to say about Reverend Jeremiah Wright's appearances--especially this morning's horror show--but I just wanted to put up this quick blurb to explain why I hadn't said much about these things in the past few days and why it might be tomorrow before I do.

UPDATE: I hate being wrong--and wrong/right and right.

(Thanks to Phelps)

Back On

Twice in the past year, I have awakened to a non-functioning/improperly functioning computer with one of those times being yesterday morning. To make a long story short--after being patiently walked through the trial and error process by a Microsoft guy via the telephone, we finally hit upon the solution.

A benediction: may the country of India remain fertile and evergreen and may its tribe(s) continue to increase.

Old Problems, New Solutions

Kenya Bloggers White African, Kenyan Pundit and Mental Acrobatics have created a technical tool with which witnesses to violence in Kenya can report the instances to the world.

It isn't 1994 anymore.

And don't have a cow about the name "Ushahidi." You know who you are.

UPDATE: Separately, Kibaki and Odinga met with Ghanian President and African Union Chariman John Kufuor, which began the mediation regarding the election results.

The talks came in the shadow of protests from the United States government after President Kibaki named part of his Cabinet.

Upset the US

The timing of the Cabinet announcement appears to have upset the US, coming a day before the launch of mediation by Ghana’s President John Kufuor, and resulted in an unscheduled meeting between President Kibaki, on the one hand, and the US assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, Ms Jendayi Frazer, accompanied by [US] ambassador [to Kenya] Michael Ranneberger. [SNIP]

President Kibaki was referring to the invitation he sent three days ago to Mr Odinga and unnamed ODM leaders to go to State House Friday for talks on the situation in the country alongside leaders from the Christian and Islamic faiths. [SNIP]

“To hasten national healing, the President informed (the mediator) that he had embarked on consultations with all Kenyan leaders of goodwill aimed at promoting political dialogue and reconciliation — with a view to ensuring a united, stable and peaceful Kenya,” said PPS.

Mr Odinga has rebuffed the invitation describing it as a sideshow meant to cloud international mediation efforts aimed at ensuring that Kenyans have in place a government of their choice. “We want him to focus on the mediation efforts by President Kufuor,” he said.

PREVIOUSLY:

Pull Your Head Out

Typepad

By now everyone knows about the Typepad outage that happened today. Though the posts that I had made since December 11th are now up again, not all of the comments made since then are available. (I know because I get the comments in email.)

I'm sending a 'Help' ticket to find out whether they will be restored or whether I can restore some of them myself--those which haven't been deleted from my mailbox. Sorry for the problems.

:::thanking God for the foresight to save all of my long posts in Word:::

UPDATE: Thanks to Rick, all of the above-mentioned missing comments should be restored.

:::note to self: read the directions::::

Tech Help

I want to leave the Project Valour IT post at the top and post below it, but don't know how. Do you?

UPDATE: The scales have fallen away!!! Thanks, Cal Tech Girl. (And sorry, Anchoress!) :-)

Down Intermittently

Typepad has been doing maintenance for a couple of days, so bear with me.

Technical Issues

What does it mean when your computer shuts off spntaneously, when you have to shut the power strip off for ten seconds to get it back on and the computer is on, you get a stinky, burnt plastic smell?

Typepad Upgrade

You may have noticed that commenting here now requires signing in. It’s part of Typepad’s latest upgrade and the sign-in line appears automatically. I have a help ticket in to see if there is some way it can be disabled. We will see.

How Long?

Come on, Typepad. This upgrade has lasted long enough.

Question

How do the photos in this post appear to you ? I'm getting various appearance complaints--from their alleged size to some flatness--but they appear perfectly normal to me, both in size and in proportion; and they load just fine. I need some feedback.

Great Firefox Search Engine

All of you computer geeks geniuses who use Firefox probably already know about this great 'wild-card' search engine. But Stumble Upon It! is a cool tool for us normal people.

Here's what it does:

StumbleUpon lets you "channelsurf" the best-reviewed sites on the web. It is a collaborative surfing tool for browsing, reviewing and sharing great sites with like-minded people. This helps you find interesting webpages you wouldn't think to search for.

And how cool is that? One problem: not enough hours in the day to peruse all the interesting sites that pop up.

Curious Link

Found a link in my referrer's log from The National Council for Research on Women: The Misinformation Clearinghouse, but couldn't find a link to my site anywhere. Do you have a problem with me or my opinions, ladies? If you do, don't be shy. Make it plain.

Tech Note

As mentioned in an earlier post, Typepad has some cool new editing tools.  There are some annoying bugs, however.  For example, the program will spontaneously alter the HTML of images and insert unnecessary placename tags, which alter the line spacing.  (Many minutes have to be spent deleting these last.)  I have a pending ticket with Typepad's outstanding Help Service, however, so I'm sure they'll iron out the bugs quickly or assist this HTML novice in a work-around.  In the meantime, if you notice FUBAR image dimensions or line spacing here, you now know what the deal is.

In Order To Serve You Mo' Betta

DSL will be installed around here; by 12AM at the latest. Speed, gotta love it.

Typepad, What's Up?

FYI: For some reason, my photo album is inaccessible. I sent an SOS to Typepad hours ago, but still no response.

UPPDATE: Fixed it.

Mozilla

I’m loving the People’s Browser. Спасибо for the tip, Commissar.

BlogRoll

No, I haven't deleted some of you, good readers. Since my main blogroll was getting rather large and unwieldy, I decided to shorten it and set it to display at random.

It Really Was There

Some may have noticed that there was a post that momentarily existed here. It had a (shoddily edited)screen shot in it, so I deleted it. I'll try such a thing again after I hone my image editing skills.