Save Our Dogs, a grassroots effort to save working dogs from CA AB 1634/Now SB 250, mandatory spay/neuter
Visit Save Our Dogs
Dog & Cat Owners Say No to AB 1634 SB 250 ~ ROUND 18plus!
See SB250.org for FACTS on SB 250
Love your Pets? Read my files on Label Animal_Control.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Puppies, Puppies, Fun and Freebies!

Isn't he gorgeous!
This is Giant Dog Ranch Polar.
OFA Good. UKC registered.
He currently has a litter of puppies available born March 11, 2009.

If you want info on these dogs, here's a quick page with pedigree and contact information details.

Playing the 'my mouth is bigger than yours' game. :o

Lucky Carolyn gets to enjoy the puppy breath. I just get to see the pics. :)
The pups are gorgeous. Now you know when averages are supposed to be half girls and half boys, and the color genetics are thrown in, you sorta have a guess on what to expect. Well, in this case, the average distribution in the litter didn't happen! It's mostly boys, and most are white like their dad (one white girl), and one pinto (a boy) colored like their mom. Funny! So much for random chance, math, science and Punnett squares!

Mom is Semavi Kale Shadow from my bloodline and is a pinto full sister to Ruya (the pretty girl at the bottom left of the screen).
This is a repeat litter between Shadow and Polar producing tall dogs with nice bone and one of their older boys now works for Boone's Animals for Hollywood. For Helmut fans, Helmut's an uncle to this litter.

Now... on to things going on over here... I finally got my video card upgraded and added a new power supply. The power supply is pretty cool. It has a plexiglass case and lights up in a pretty blue. Since I have case with a see through side, the arrangement makes a nice night light to blog by. The reddish light below is for an auxillary fan.
The video card installation (NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+) went well but the semi-compact motherboard and its architecture (various slots) resulted in a very tight fit of some things jammed against each other, agh. The wide load video card takes up two slots as well as most of the length of the semi-compact case--thereby abutting the hard drives so tightly, stuff was hard to plug in without rearranging things. I will need longer cables (cheaper solution), among other things. Actually a NEW full sized mainboard (ugh $$$) might be the way to go as well since the video card majorly crowds the SATA hard drive connections. Bah. I think I'll wait on that.

On to fun things and freebies!

Here is a blog entry which has a cool historic computer chat dialog which (most probably) lead up to the establishment and purpose of the first ever internet smilie. Yuk yuk, trivia we don't usually think about. ;)

I ran into an interesting page which shares brief commentary with a "Favorite Food" recipe box featuring celebrities. See the entry for Dave Berry, and isn't it just like him! :D

A list of the most heartbreaking songs of all time--fun read that both James and I got a kick out of.

What's in a name??? I want a Foof!
And speaking of foof, that takes me back a bit another bit of foofish history, ---waaaaay back to TinyTim MUSH, a MUD that's still around today.


And FREEBIES!!

Free Magazine subscription. Go to Costco.com then in the search box at the top, enter FREEMAG and you'll be taken to a page where you can browse, preview within, and select ONE free digital magazine subscription via Zinio.com. I'm a big fan of Zinio! If reading from your monitor doesn't drive you nuts, you'll probably enjoy digital magazines too.

Give Away of the Day features free software, every day. If you visit the site every day, sooner or later you'll see something you want or you could go crazy and download the free stuff every day and fill up your hard drive. If you go for any of the freebies--download it right away and install it. There will be an unlock code or key that allows you to use the software without having to pay for it. As a freebie user, you don't get support from the vendor, but it's still a great deal. You must install and unlock the download before the 24 hour offer expires. You snooze; you lose! They also offer a free game with the same general download/install protocols at intervals (#update: usually Saturday and Sunday) per week. I've added their software link box to the left panel of my blog.

Okay, that's it for now!

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 4/22/2009 03:07:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Pegasus Mail, Comcast and funny vid on ... well, you look. :)

My favorite email program for over a dozen years... Pegasus mail, now has a Wiki. :)

We had an interesting evening Monday night. Apparently Comcast, our broadband company had local connectivity taken out due to the local storms. Well, I could have used dial up if I felt hard-up to connect, but pages load soooooo slow that way. The thing that really got hubby was the fact that our Comcast service for TV connection was taken out. I was watching him listen to TV -- although video reception was a joke, he could still listen to some of his favorite shows. Later, he was watching one of our smaller old TVs with the rabbit ears, which did a reasonable job picking up TV video and captions. I've worried about how so much of our lifestyles depend on electricity, and typically in my area, there are usually about 3-5 days a year where we might not have any power at all for half a day or more. Just one night of not having Comcast connectivity was interesting in its own way. And speaking of wikis, I noted that there is a section regarding customer satisfaction on a Wiki, about Comcast.
In 2004 and 2007, the American Customer Satisfaction Index survey found that Comcast had the worst customer satisfaction rating of any company or government agency in the country, including the Internal Revenue Service.
Believeable. There were entire weeks last year when we had little to no reliable internet connectivity at all. (We buy local TV channels and the TV service was fine during that period.) I won't even get into some of the strange mis-aliasing that I've seen taking place on Comcast for their email customers who were subscribed to any of the forums I administrate. :p

Now something a little bit different.
I keep laughing every time I see this captioned video. :D

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 2/24/2009 04:47:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Crufts 2009 goes online.

Crufts online! The biggest dog show in the world will now have an online presence. I think this is a great step for Crufts! Their website will be the place to visit.
From an announcement:
The live webcast will follow all of the events in the Arena program, from Heelwork to Music and Agility to the Best in Group and Best in Show judging and the ever popular Friends for Life competition that rewards our dog heroes. There will also be a new element to the Arena program where the winners of the We Love Our Dogs competition - which invited all dog owners to send in video clips and photographs of their happy, healthy dogs - will be announced. Peter Purves and Frank Kane will provide commentary for the live web stream, which will be interspersed with features showing the interviews and action from outside the Arena.
This is a great thing for them to do as they in UK (especially recently) are awash with so much anti-animal, anti-purebred dog extremism. I'm finding that the public seems to be too often presented without 'balance' on issues of extreme breeding, puppy mills and attitudes of elitism about purebreds, that more in the way of balance in media is needed to help show the positive side of the world of dogs.

If the only vids, news and tv shows we saw about teenagers, showed only gangsters, druggies, teenage pregnancy, clique snobbishness, risky behavior, vehicle accident deaths, alcohol abuse, suicide and other low-lights of teenage life -- we do (I hope) still have yet enough common sense in the general population -- that any such flooding of bad news about teens doesn't create campaigns, websites, haters, and legislation to destroy ALL teenagers at birth, lol. ;)

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 2/24/2009 11:37:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Monday, February 02, 2009

Blogrolling news, etc

Blogrolling is still not quite ready to roll. I know it's been frustrating for many that were using the rolling updater. A few of the blogs that were on the Anatolian Blogroll have changed or discontinued, and some need to be added.

According to Blogrolling which currently still redirects to their status page - they are still broken (it's been a couple years now due to massive overload of auto-pings by spam sites). There's hope. See a recent post dated mid January...
Hardware was installed and tested the week of January 5th as promised, now we’re just waiting on delivery of the final code. We ran into some UI issues and made a decision earlier this week to simply go with the old UI rather than try to jazz things up and protract the outage.

Our developers are working on the migration tools now to get your old data into the new system. With some luck, I’ll have a concrete relaunch date Friday coming, or possibly Monday at the latest.

Keep your fingers crossed with me, I will post more as soon as I get word back from the team.
On to other network related things, I started logging onto my neglected Facebook account. Daily. Simple enough. Whenever my browser is up, one browser tab is usually active on FB even if I'm ignoring it, lol.

Like other networks, I initially joined Facebook just to have access to some material which this or that member invited me to see.

Since revisiting it mid January, and actually poking around within, instead of logging in and zipping out as soon as "mission accomplished" -- I have found the interface more immediately interactive, integrated, simple and appealing to me than the interfaces found on places like MySpace, LiveJournal, Multiply, MSN, Dogster, 360Yahoo, -- places where I never really 'hang out'. For grins, I recently found what seems to be an application that allows pets and human babies to have their own Facebook networks. Amusing. :)


My main computer is pretty well behaved these days, now that I've got tons of diskspace again. Yay. I'm still stalling on putting in a new graphics card due to some upgrade I think I'd rather have. And, oh bother... my Vista notebook has turned into a slug and is driving me batty. Bleah. Anyway, that's all for now.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 2/02/2009 11:36:00 PM | Permanent link | (1) Comments

Blogger jan sent us a woof // February 03, 2009

I've been wondering where you were, but I knew it was busy.   

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

First week of the year...

I got some fun pics of Helmut, the Beachboy in SoCal, enjoying the beach. I always get a kick out of these blackberry pics from Geno! This is one Anatolian boy that is sure getting a lot of socialization. :)

And here's one a bit so close, he didn't fit into the frame. Looks like he's having fun with a cute golden retriever.

Late at night, trying to sleep, I can't sleep and trying to keep out of range of hubby who is coughing up a storm (he's the one that got the flu shot!), I ran into a cool logic and problem solving game called World of Goo. Intrigued, I downloaded the demo to my bedside notebook and get a kick of it so far. The opening screens, the humor and some of the graphics are so weird! The game is designed primarily by two guys rather than a whole army of programmers. If you like what Wiki has to say about it in the first link, check out its homepage at http://2dboy.com/ and download the free demo there.

Must be the doggie person in me but when I saw these rugs over at Weburbanist, I was sure some of them would make great beds for a snoozy Anatolian shepherd. I just don't get the one that looks like the aftermath of a sheep shearing event but there's plenty of oddness to be had there.

Hat tip to Diane who shared a very interesting blog post about service animals, particularly the alternative ones. The movie showing Panda the minihorse being clicker trained is amazing! No captions but if you have some familiarity with clicker training, it's easy to see what is being targeted and how well Panda is doing in this training. The NYT article linked in post is a long and interesting read that might annoy some of my service animal associates but the whole matter is probably a 'do not miss' for most!

Not the least of it all, tonight while resetting a license for some publications I get from Zinio, I ran into Arabian Horse World! Check it out. If you like horsey eye candy, take a look at what is available. You can get the sample copy for only 99c (Nov 08). I was a long time subscriber of the paper version which was a very heavy, glossy paged quality publication that would fill up a rural mailbox in its cardboard box back in the mid eighties. Well, now you can see the stunning photography and beautiful horses but in lighter-than-air digital format. What's not to like? Check out the link.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 1/06/2009 05:47:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!! :) :D



Over the past couple days, I installed my new hard drives. My goal was to clone/remove my old IDE hard drive and end up with two SATA hard drives and two optical IDE drives.

My newest hard drive is a Seagate SATA internal, 750 Gig Barracuda (refurbished), whose namesake is a ferocious fish. Something like the fish in the picture. I figured, since SATA drives aren't jumpered and would default to the order that they are plugged into the mainboard, I didn't expect a problem connecting them. According to the plan, the Barracuda was going to rip all the files out of the old Caviar IDE and become my main drive. The Barracuda would then run with a SATA Caviar drive which would provide additional storage. Theoretically my SATA system could be 4 or 5 times faster than with the old style IDE hard drive. Sounds good to me!

Well my Caviar drives are made by Western Digital (WD), a different brand than the Barracuda, and the WD models are named something delicious, Caviar. Mmm, yummy. Supposedly the two SATA's, the WD Caviar and the Seagate Barracuda could share the same tank!

Erg... With the three drives plugged in, installing the new Barracuda created some odd glitches. The two Caviars were conspiring!

When I used the WD software to find the Barracuda in order to clone my soon-to-be-retired IDE working drive, the software never recognized that the unformatted Barracuda was attached. Bleh... When you don't stick with a brand loyalty, sometimes it gets weird, at least until the drives are all formatted. It was the Barracuda that needed formatting. The pair of Caviar drives together didn't want to talk to the Barracuda, even with all sorts of BIOS settings and with me wearily changing the mainboard cable connections. It took me a while to work through my list of ideas and I finally found the trick that would work. I temporarily disconnected the SATA Caviar then booted only with the old IDE Caviar and the new unformatted SATA Barracuda. Finally the software realized I had an unformatted Barracuda to install. I was able to format the Barracuda and clone the old IDE Caviar over to it.

Now that old Caviar is retired from my system and will gain a loving home in another of our machines.

If I sound like I'm babbling, chalk it up as a weird techy fishing story and the late hour! ;) (In the meantime, I had also discovered the old versions of DOS I had, could not cope with the chipset of such a huge drive. Remember when HUGE was something like 3 Gig?)

Anyway, I used MaxBlast (which is Seagate compatible now) to do the cloning. My goodness, it took about a day to clone the old drive over to the Barracuda. It seems to have gone very well despite the quirky fishy start. Now in place of the old IDE hard drive, the old IDE cable is now attached to a DVD and also to one CD drive (master/slave). My SATA Caviar and Barracuda hard drives are sharing the same tank and sharing files. However, I'm not yet sure if I'm all that much faster yet!

I still have to deal with some registry issues that happened when my main board died in December, but I feel pretty good about this machine so far. Hopefully I can get by without doing a fresh install of XP Pro.

TADA!!!
Together, they can make a difference. Caviar & Barracuda sushi anyone? ;)
(it's a generic picture; not barracuda sushi. most likely salmon with salmon eggs)
For some reason, I have a hankering for sushi.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 1/01/2009 12:21:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Happy Holidays!

A pic from Geno!
Dom with a NICE whopper of a Christmas present -- and Helmut, the Anatolian, up close in a sweet holiday blackberry picture.

Here's a Christmas pic from Rebecca showing Helmut's sister, Jasmine. Jasmine has happily adopted Rebecca's daughter's pug puppy for a bud. :)

Holidays and the end of the year can be such a mix of celebrations and losses. We've had great sadness over the untimely passing of several Anatolians and of other dogs belonging to friends and acquaintances in recent months. Two of these Anatolians were littermates to Ruya. One died after spay surgery and the other appears to have died in her sleep, cause unknown. :(

I also finally discovered the reason for the recent weird computer behavior and keyboard malfunctions when my motherboard suddenly failed in the middle of December. So apparently it had been gimping along and causing illogical patterns of malfunction. The good news is that despite the fact we couldn't plan a budget for this unfortunate event, the rebuild of this desktop machine is coming along nicely, albeit, a bit slowly. But it will be a pretty nice machine soon enough. Here's a useful page that was very helpful when I discovered a crash and a bad driver install had corrupted networking services in my registry.

Sending belated Christmas and holiday wishes for all. May the new year be brimming with the good things; with happiness, health, good luck, prosperity and success for us all. :) There is so much for which to be thankful.

Couldn't resist posting a fun video of Lucy tackling a job at a chocolate factory. Captioned, of course!

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 12/28/2008 04:16:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Friday, December 05, 2008

One thing after another...

I love my doctor. Which is saying a lot when one is deaf and one is usually used to short notice appointment doctors that seem to be a little clueless with communicating with the deaf (duh, write it down Doc). My regular doc (no random one for me, thank you) made time for me this week and the short of it is that I'm on a round of antibiotics and have a thousands of bucks worth of scans and tests to come once a referral goes through. (sigh)

Computerwise, I've accumulated some hardware over the past year from various sales that I need to plug into this main machine. For the most part I'm just running out of drive space (blame it mostly on digital cameras, archiving digital pedigrees, also some movie clips and lots of music that hubby wants on the main network drive). Sometimes when space gets tight, weird annoying things happen. I'm still quite comfortably up to specifications for use of my various high resource, hardware hungry programs, and so nothing needs upgrades in that direction for at least another year or so.

I am however, still using IDE hard disk drives and am finally going to go all SATA when this update is done. Unfortunately I don't have all the cables I need yet. Plus, for the past several days or so, my cordless USB keyboard has suddenly started behaving oddly (again). It'll quit working (like totally dead, requiring reboot sometimes within minutes of a reboot) or will lag in bursts, sometimes skipping some keys as I type, or inserting some in multiples (ittttttt likeeeethiii) and function keys going bonkers at any time. argh. That is really irritating when trying to answer emails - makes the replies incoherent so I have a bunch in my draft boxes to get to. Without a keyboard it's difficult to do anything else! (the built in MS keyboard is just too slow for the amount of typing I have to do) I've tried different driver rollbacks and upgrades. Most of the keyboard errors reported online seem to have no fixes. I'm using an old fashioned, newish wired keyboard (PS2) for now but this may or may not be the fix since I had this problem with a favorite PS2 wired keyboard earlier this year - and NOW this kb is occasionally randomly inserting numbers into some w4ords as I type. BUT I need to be able to type to get any computer/internet stuff done!

One of the hard drives I'm installing is a refurbished (like NEW! lol) 750 gig Seagate Barracuda for which the right serial cable doesn't exist in my home, yet... So another delay in the making. But while looking for info on the cable to order or buy, I ran into this picture on google images ---
You can find the rest of the story at this link. If you just want to see the pictures scroll around the whole thread. I always enjoy seeing cool systems people put together and the stories behind them! As it provides useful information that can come in handy. Actually it's a great thread, if you start on page one where the computer-to-be is still in 20 zillion brand new exciting boxes. If you're like me or any of us nutters who need a machine customized to fit specific needs, and like to save money (and get premature grays) by 'rolling our own' computers -- the whole thread will remind you of the gamut of the silly mistakes, the bigger ones, the angst and gnashing of teeth that one might be able to relate to. ;) (btw, the photos of xipotec's new system are really cool... my main machine is not near as 'pretty' any more and I just removed enough dog hair from the bottom of the case to build a small rodent -- :p And notebook computers are just plain boring, I won't even mention them.)

Speaking of dog hair, why is it that two of my Anatolians (Boone and Ruya, born a month apart, January/February 2003) are fully molting their undercoat when the temperatures here are turning so chill!? (Night temps are in the mid-thirties fahrenheit, which converts metrically to about 195 kilometers -- thank you Bintie!) Bella, Coco (both the same age, Oct 2006) and Molly (rescue) are all in full coat with their winter insulation fully installed.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 12/05/2008 09:45:00 AM | Permanent link | (1) Comments

Blogger Diane sent us a woof // December 06, 2008

lol re: kilometers!

We just rebuilt my desktop pc over the last couple of weeks so I can relate to tales of construction and crisis. A nice feature my new case has is washable air filters - I just have to remember to do it once in a while :/   

Friday, November 28, 2008

Text tricks... and some Bill Cosby

Silly stuff - Making my own picture font....

How to make your own font character in XP. The link gives the basic instructions.

I tried it out a couple months ago. The doggie image is based on an old gif I made when I first created my Semavi dog, Anatolian icon. Actually, it was in PCX format back when and the original didn't have a spike collar -- I just added the collar for this exercise. The dog is not a very good likeness of any of my dogs, but at the time it was all done dot by dot twenty years ago on an old XT computer with an old DOS computer, no Windows! I just hang on to the pic, never sure how I'll torture the thing next time I run into it. The odd thing about it is that over the years with different base image rendering programs, the proportions of the leg and body length changes depending on the program and font that renders it. Sometimes the image is very square and other times it is stretched left to right. I haven't tried to figure that out.

In this image for this font creating exercise, below, you can see what I mean about the changing proportions. :)
You can see it rendered above in Wordpad, along side other decorative fonts for fun. Real useful, ha, I know!

Give it a try if you've got a logo or evil little icon you want to mess with.


Now for ---
Something less intensive...

How to type upside down. (- go to the link which requires javascript)
I'd put a sample of what this ɯɐɹƃoɹd can do, it's so ʎןןıs, but you can go ʇno ʇı ʎɹʇ for yourself!


I found a wonderful captioned Bill Cosby video. Enjoy!

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 11/28/2008 11:05:00 AM | Permanent link | (2) Comments

Blogger yetipaw sent us a woof // February 09, 2009

Love your site.
Please check out my Anatolian site here...

http://utahpaw.blogspot.com/

I'd love to be added to your blogroll.
thanks   

Blogger Semavi Lady sent us a woof // February 09, 2009

Oh, your blog has a really cool header. Sure, will add you to the blog roll. It's still 'broken' as I write but soon as it's fixed, you're on!   

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Bookmark & Password Sync (Firefox) and HS Girls in Trouble

Discovered some very useful (free) tools for maintaining my bookmarks across several computers. I also needed a temporary solution for password storage. Found it all here.

I was amused to learn that Denofrio [sic?] "retired his license to practice law to become a professional poker player".

In something that sounds a bit completely different in a casual game, there is "Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!" which you can read about at the link. What an intriguing name for a game. As is typical of most casual games, you can try before you buy. You get the first 60 minutes of gameplay for free, then you can choose whether or not to buy the game so you can have more time to complete it and replay as desired. :)

A bit from the description given in the review at Gamezebo:
As it turns out, high school girls in the 1920s got into about as much trouble as they do nowadays - they just do it with flapper-style flair and scratchy swing music playing in the background. The game does a superb job of immersing you in the Roaring '20s, and the biggest treat of all is the irreverent dialogue. This isn't one of those games that you can just click through on your way to the next puzzle. Each sentence is dripping with wit, and – parents be warned – healthy doses of innuendo. ("I lost my cigarette lighter. If I don't find it, I'll have to ask a boy for a match. Who knows what he'll want in return!" or "Myrtle is an ignorant amateur at the art of passion. Why, last summer in India, I satisfied a Raja, while remaining full flowered.")
That's all for now...

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 11/22/2008 05:42:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Monday, November 17, 2008

CaptionsON - advocate & Captioned Bolt Trailer

CaptionsON.com's video (clicky!) has a very nice video, briefly discussing and demonstrating the benefits that can be had with captioned video for the diverse population of people (many who are not deaf) that are inadvertently forgotten, when people create online video without captions. Click the movie above to see!

Below are some of the points that make captioning so important, as listed on CaptionsON.

Captions matter because captions are.

  • Free to viewers of television and the Internet.
  • Accessible to individuals living in nearly every household in the United States.
  • Professionally produced in the US by highly skilled stenographers and offline captioners. Stenographers transcribe the audio portion of a live program as it is being aired and send the captions across the country in seconds. Offline captioners transcribe prerecorded programming with 100% accuracy before it airs.
  • An essential service for the over 31 million individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing, giving them access to the audio portion of programming on TV and the Internet.
  • A tool that improves reading and listening skills of children and adults by visually tying words with sound.
  • A way to strengthen language and comprehension skills for those learning English as a second language, marrying the spoken word with the written word as well as reinforcing grammar and sentence structure.
  • A great way to engage and exercise the mind by challenging the viewer to focus on reading, listening and comprehending in real time
  • Able to enhance family time by not only allowing all members of the household to enjoy programming at lower volume levels but also knowing the added benefits captions are bringing to everyone – regardless of age.


Pixar began working on an animated movie about an German Shepherd a few years ago. Disney wanted it and but not in the four years that Pixar would normally take. Disney has changed the story a bit, and the doggie hero is called Bolt. Bolt will be coming out this Thanksgiving holiday. I initially thought it was a Pixar movie, but in its current form, it is not. It is a Disney movie. I won't be able to watch it in theaters but look forward to seeing it when it's out on DVD. Here is a trailer that was captioned by Bill Creswell. Yay Bill! :)

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 11/17/2008 08:29:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Ad Age's Marketer of the Year - Obama Wins 2008!

Resistance is futile.
LOL, pic. Funny geeky stuff.

Marketing --
On techy stuff... Popular media is always changing. Newspapers in printed form aren't doing so hot any more. Live video or TV seems to do much better. There's a lot of good to be said for finding ways to get citizens involved with their choices in government although it is sometimes an analyst's minefield, and all resort to some amount of flakey propaganda. The goal, of course, is to successfully sell the strategist's candidate. Presidential debates (see link for history) for example, are somewhat like today's real time reality shows. How much longer will be before you can pick up a cell phone and vote on such performances? It could be a cool thing because it keeps the heat going because people can be interactive in the selection of candidates for their strengths.

In light of that, I found the following very interesting...

Obama Wins! Ad Age's Marketer of the Year - 2008
From unknown to presidential nominee
"I think he did a great job of going from a relative unknown to a household name to being a candidate for president," said Linda Clarizio, president of AOL's Platform A, the sponsor of the opening-night dinner attended by 750 where the votes were cast.
For another look at how technology enhanced this election and how the times, they are a changin' <-- check out the link.


Not entirely a total non sequitur to above material on marketing a candidate, the following Google video is an interesting lecture which has concepts which tie into marketing strategy, technology and choices. Certainly contains material for reflection for analysts, or those that are involved with developing and understanding stratagem. It is 64 minutes long.

The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less, by Barry Schwartz.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 11/16/2008 11:11:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Anatolian Rescue Blog and some MMORPG video fun!

A couple days ago I discovered NASRN's blog. (National Anatolian Shepherd Rescue Network.)
I'll be adding their blog link to the Anatolian Blogroll whenever Blogrolling is back up again. Blogrolling is reportedly undergoing a rewrite so it might take a little time. Anyway, I'm linking to it here for now.

Unrelated: Note to self... get a replacement box of baking soda next to the stove to quickly put out cooking fires.


Okay, I ran into some really funny video a few days ago and the best part is that not only is it really hilarious stuff, but it is captioned!! :D

The Youtube homepage for this series of movies is WatchTheGuild, and they have Season 1 available here. I will embed the first clip of Season 1 below so you can get an idea what it's about. It really is hilarious. I haven't played any of these massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) but I know dozens and dozens of people that do, -- some with almost entire families in different locations around the world meeting and playing a game periodically. Some people really get into it (maybe too much!) and others play off and on. Being reliable with your group is important to the gaming and social success of a guild or group. For example, it may take a team of players with a wide variety of skills to kill a virtual dragon. This sort of game play isn't my thing, but the fun thing about these clips is how realistically they depict or parody real time social network individuals. If you like this clip below, head over to the homepage linked above and watch more as you find time. :) Fun!



A week ago, I mentioned a couple free anime styled MMORPGs. If you just want to check them out, go here for "Winterland Online" and also check out the drop down menu for a list of their other virtual worlds at the topmost right.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 11/13/2008 01:34:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Friday, November 07, 2008

Surfing add on - Snap Shots

Weather changes sometimes bring me migraines. ugh... I decided to explore Snap Shots and try to figure out how to implement it in different parts of a domain including on this blog. I've admired Snap Shots on some blog pages for the past year or so but never got around to checking it out. I actually installed in this blog template then realized how annoying it got in nothing flat due to all the exploding links... unless I found time to do more tweaks to the blog template. But whoa and YAY... I discovered that some tweaks can be made within the settings of the Snap Shot tool without doing anything else to a page template.

I like the changes so far on my long standing test page, the Anatolian Blogroll page which I occasionally torture with various javascript and dilapidated nonsense. If you're not familiar with Snap Shots, that would be a place to go to see what tweaks I have done with my version of Snap Shots.

So....... what to look for -- See the blogroll page above. If you are not blocking javascript (which this depends on) there will be a little box icon next to a link... you put your cursor over the box and it will give a little popup snapshot of the link to which it is pointed. You can preview the link before you go there. I've also customized it on my test page with a little icon of an Anatolian and the words "Semavi Dogs". (pats self on back) :) Pretty cool if you want to see if a blog was updated before clicking the blog links.

Btw if you like seeing those sort of previews to links, you can install an add-on for most browsers. This little tool will let you customize what you see on your own browser. Go to this page and choose the link for the End Users.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 11/07/2008 07:06:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Vote 2008! and this and that... (UFOs and Anime Pirates?)

Hope you all get out there and vote if you already haven't!

I've started playing around with Google adsense and other ads on this blog. The pages drawing the most visits are usually the game pages or special interests posts (like the python that swallowed a sheep, erk) or random stuff I have on science and genetics. Will be kind of fun to see what clicks generate for the site.


A really popular image on my site is this Sims 2 Space Port by SimMaster Ralph.

It's just too cool looking. Has UFOs hovering above the house, one of which UFOs is actually the main entry into this Sim household. There is a transporterlike 'stair' into the UFO from which your sim can then enter the house proper. I'm going on memory. I don't think I have taken a sim to that house in a couple of years now and other than a short visit to observe its coolness, I haven't actually played it! It might be interesting to see how Seasons affects it with the snow, ice and thunder storms... hrm.

I like to collect oddball Sims creations, sort of like the way we all used to collect hundreds of fonts for computer word processors. I generally end up keeping all the fonts (lol) but some of the Sim 2 creations are just a brief curiousity and then they go byebye. If you have the game and want to check out the Space Port -- the link to it is on an old post here. The image on that page is scrunched. I don't know why I never fixed it. Oh well. The Space Port is suitable for all base Sims 2 (computer) games. You do not need to own hundreds of dollars in expansion packs to use it. :p You do need to have a registered Sims 2 game in order to download the house at the official EA Sims 2 homepage.

Much newer oddness, and FREE -- that I ran into a few days ago are a some online games where your character is in the form of a stylized Japanese cartoon art form called anime. The games are MMORPG - which is a multiplayer online format. Flexible, it can be a sort of interactive 'chat room' if that's all you want. Or you can go exploring or play it as a skill game -- be a warrior or whatever. You need to be able to download the main program tho. So if you're on dialup, that could be rather piggish since I think the file sizes are close to a half or 1 gig (I forget) but it comes with a pausable, resumable downloader if you are determined to try for it on a slow connection. The homepage screens are beautiful. See "Wonderland Online" or "Tales of Pirates" for examples. Or after landing on either page, just click on the Free Online Games menu at the far top right corner of the page where you can select other choices. The software is free and so is playing the free versions, but some of the more enhanced games in the menu require a paid membership if you decide to keep playing.

I keep feeling vaguely confused... daylight savings time changes sometimes do that to me. When I'm feeling really tired, I can't remember if we're supposed to "Fall forward and Spring back", or is it "Spring forward and Fall back"? I'm still looking forward to seeing Apple Hill and getting a bushel of fresh apples (I love Fuji, Braeburns and Winesaps!)... we haven't found time to do that yet. But soon... yes! Anyway, adios for now.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 11/04/2008 01:55:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Friday, September 19, 2008

Be Vewy Vewy Quiet! I'm Bork, bork, borking!

Okay, this is short.
I originally started posting this on "Talk Like a Pirate Day" (Sept 19th, Friday). While trying to tweak a Google setting for languages and while looking at Google filters, I ran into the screen above - click it to make bigger and see the language choices.
Surprise eh? but humor can be a welcome thing. :) -- and makes for interesting searches!

I do have a link to Rinkwork's dialectizer, to see this page dialectized in redneck speak, just click this link. :)

To dialectize another page, just go here and have fun! (or play with your google language setting options, there are several surprise languages which don't change the pages you find, but change the google search interface!) LOL B)

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 9/19/2008 12:07:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Zinio!

UPDATED: 17Sep2008- see at the bottom.
If you're not already familiar with it, there is way to get some popular magazines in digital form downloaded to your computer, which can then be read without an internet connection, or if you are roaming, you can use your internet connection to log into your account and read your stuff in online mode.

Above is a browser enabled peek at a beautiful magazine, click image to read the teaser while it is still available, and check out some of the recipes and glorious pics! (TIP: maximize the window that opens, click to toggle an individual page to maximize. Click and drag around pages & check out the hyperlinks that jump to articles/recipes or that hyperlink to a website).

Zinio's free proprietary software has more bells and whistles, requires a download, but you don't have to buy anything to check out complete issues of free sample magazines on your computer - and the freebies do change from time to time. Fun for grazing in foreign magazines and checking out book samples! The only fees you pay are just the subscriptions to the magazines you want and payment for ebooks that you download. I know, this is sounding a lot like an ad!! But honestly, I love this service because I get magazines and other stuff I want to read while reducing bookshelf and table clutter. The software remembers your last open page in each magazine, and by using a built in virtual highlighter and virtual sticky notes, it is that much easier to find that 7 month old Reader's Digest article or re-find a bunch of recipes that I thought I might adapt. Some people think using digital magazines is 'green' (is it?) but it certainly reduces some waste of trees.

A drawback in using digital literature include some aspects of computer portability -- like you probably won't be taking a digital magazine with you for a relaxing bubble bath (but you can print out most articles, oops- goodbye trees!). Also, occasionally there is a software security glitch and you can't open your stash of literature, so you have to go online and get another certificate. This doesn't happen often. I had more trouble with it when I was switching between computers, upgrading and setting up new ones -- and first learning the ins and outs of this kind of media. Of course it takes a bit of hard drive space. I have a few books downloaded and about 70 some magazines, so far it is taking about 2 gigs of space. But it's still cheaper than doing a room addition and battling with the local government for a building permit! Plus, you can always delete stuff, redownload and as of now, just read your stuff online.

If you scroll around some of the Zinio pages, you'll also find a link to textbooks. One fantastic freebie that as of this posting is still available, is a free genetics textbook download. The license allows you to have only one machine with a copy, but you can read it online if you are roaming.

Given my current budget
...anyone that feels awesomely generous is allowed to buy me a subscription to what looks like a fabulous New Zealand foodie magazine called Foodtown. Gosh the previews look fantastic, packed with eye candy and lots of ideas!


UPDATED: 17Sep2008 - WOW update!!!
YAY, Whee!! I am now getting Foodtown! Thank you!

Here are a couple more FREEBIES! VIV Magazine and classic literature!

1. There's a free subscription to an amazing digital magazine for women called VIV available at the time of this posting. It runs on the Zinio reader (older versions of software may need to be updated). You can sign up for for a free subscription at the magazine's homesite VIVMag.com. This magazine is quite a unique experience for the magazine lover. There are slideshows, animations and even short movie clips included as part of its medium. It covers topics of women's interest, health, exercise (with animated demos!) and there's cooking, recipes and fashions among other things. It seems to have a little bit something for everyone. It's free, so check it out.

2. The final Freebie that I want to add for this Zinio posting regards a least a hundred classics that can be found here. Some of you might remember Project Gutenberg, which is an ongoing effort to textify classics that are not copyrighted so anyone can read them online or download them. Zinio has "over 100 literary masterpieces, digitized and bound in the finiest electronic leather" hosted on their site for people to read in their browsers. Zinio customers can store the books in their online library (for roaming) or download these books to their own Zinio Library. Using the Zinio reader software will allow one to annotate and sticky note the classics. That is just so cool! I downloaded Edgar Alan Poe and also The Picture of Dorian Gray. Woohoo! :)

Thank you to Zinio's Adam Kadleck who answered some of my questions and was helpful to me in locating the Classics.
He mentions in comments to this post that Zinio has a facebook group. Check the comments!

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 9/16/2008 02:53:00 AM | Permanent link | (2) Comments

Blogger akadleck sent us a woof // September 17, 2008

Thanks for the great article about Zinio - we share your enthusiasm. I'd like to invite you and your readers to visit us at www.zinio.com to try a free sample magazine or check out our library of Digital Classics. Feedback from our customers is critical to optimizing the Zinio experience. I also invite you to join our Facebook group, "I read, therefore I Zinio."

Read on,

Adam Kadleck
Director of Customer Service
Zinio, LLC   

Blogger Semavi Lady sent us a woof // September 17, 2008

Haha! I love the catchy tagline, "I read, therefore I Zinio."
And for me, this is so true!

Thank you, Adam! :)   

Thursday, August 28, 2008

YouTube gets closed captioning support

Woo HOO!!!!!!!
YouTube gets closed captioning support



YAY!! OMG, yes!!

In a move to make videos easier to understand without volume or for the hard of hearing, YouTube has given users the option of embedding closed captions that show up as semitransparent overlays.
The news link above has a link to a Closed Caption (in English) Japanese clip. It looks pretty awesome so if you want to see an example, go there and look.

Here's what the controls on a real Closed Captioned video on YouTube looks like note the far RIGHT hand side:

There are volume control, the control to expand to full window, and finally the NEWest control! The Closed Caption control is on the far right hand side and expands on mouseover to gives you the option to hide or show REAL Closed captions!!


Well...
I did search on YouTube on the keywords "closed captioned" but just end up with all the usual clips that don't actually have captioning at all, or are at least, OPEN captioned, by having text inserted into the images in the clips (which I do appreciate!).



Above video is linked to Harkle.com. See Harkle.com for their collection of found CC online videos - Chad Vader is pretty funny. :D

Well it is NEW, and I hope people using Youtube will take advantage of the CC tool.
For example: I hope some of the National Geographic clips will start to utilize them too! (you can lead a horse to water but... )





And on other news......
Comcast to cap monthly consumer broadband
... hrm

Surprisingly the company is not providing any tools to help users monitor their current usage. An FAQ on Comcast's support site simply suggests that customers do a "Web search" for bandwidth metering software that will track this amount for them. Going forward there may be plans to set up alerts over certain thresholds, or bundle some official tool as part of the company's starter software.


Very likely, a sign of the times.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 8/28/2008 07:29:00 PM | Permanent link | (1) Comments

Anonymous Anonymous sent us a woof // August 31, 2008

Oh no. That means you will understand more of these? Eep. Now how can we hide the cool stuff?

*ducks*

Mark   

Friday, July 11, 2008

This and that...

Zonealarm is brokenOn the date in the image, a routine Windows Update presented some ZoneAlarm users with a present... OUCH. James had some choice words about this sudden mysterious inability to get onto any accounts he was working on. ZA homepage had the above yellow alert, and contained a clickable link to get the new ZA fix.

Our internet service with Comcast was pretty unstable back in June, with some days for at least a week, where there was no internet connection at all and weeks around that period when it was too much a bother to try to do anything on line at all. Things have improved although there are some of the usual bouts of disconnects throughout the day. I did find out that Comcast had apparently been attacked successfully by hackers, which might have been early in May and likely may have little to do with the problems we had in June. In June, even ICANN had been hacked.

Mary Landesman over at antivirus.about.com mentioned Secunia as a useful tool to help with security issues on Windows PCs. I'll be giving my machines a run with that when I get a chance.



Every once in a while I see a photo that just blows me away.
This tornado pic is a recent one.
Tornado, too close for comfort
Saw this on Yahoo photos early in July (a month late!) during attempts to catch up on internet related things.

The caption on the image:

A huge tornado funnel cloud touches down in Orchard, Iowa, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 at 9:04 p.m. The Globe Gazette and Mitchell County Press News reported that Lori Mehmen of Orchard, took the photo from outside her front door. Mehmen said the funnel cloud came near the ground and then went back up into the clouds. Besides tree and crop damage, no human injuries were reported. (AP Photo/Lori Mehmen)

Awesome image from ExtremeInstability.com
My current mesmerizing wallpaper is from my favorite storm chaser site, ExtremeInstability.com.
These massive swirling clouds are scary and facinating. I tend to hold my breath when looking at these pics!
If you visit the site, scroll down the homepage and check out the book where some of his storm pics are featured, "Adventures in Tornado Alley: The Storm Chasers". Awesome storms and photography, I can hardly wait to get my hands on a copy. :)

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 7/11/2008 01:39:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Play a Game and Win a Nobel Peace Prize?

I read a NewsBlog on The-Scientist.com about a protein folding game called Fold It.
I thought that was mildly interesting at first and somewhat amusing, but particularly because it combines science, puzzles and games, I became intrigued had to check it out!

My first laugh... It was amusing to find that they chose a domain name of FOLD with the country code (IT) of Italy. But you know how geeks can be. :D

Proteins are complex molecules in long chains that spring themselves into curly folds... and look like messy jumbles of utter chaos. The thing though, is that proteins operate like hardware or software in the body, depending on what the protein is and how it is folded, as well being affected by its environment. It is this manner in which proteins are structured that gives them the ability to react variably in their environment and do such things as keep us healthy, to make us sick, or to cure us of something. :)

I haven't tried the game yet but the ideas behind it are intriguing - as you can see from the beta version of game and site icon at the left.
"Solve Puzzles for Science".
Hrm...
"We're hopefully going to change the way science is done, and who it's done by," said Popovic, who presented the project today at the Games for Health meeting in Baltimore. "Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize."
Hey, that Nobel Prize sounds a little far fetched but there is truth in the fact that some of us are strong on various types of puzzles. Some people are pretty genius at recognizing abstract patterns immediately in bundles of chaos and others have different strengths in problem solving, which together can crystalize innovative approaches. I see that the game is online and free. Apparently they are keeping track of how the game and its puzzles are played by its players.

The homesite for Fold It is here and more about the science of the game can be read in a FAQ. Here's a question from part of the FAQ...

How does my game playing contribute to curing diseases?

With all the things proteins do to keep our bodies functioning and healthy, they can be involved in disease in many different ways. The more we know about how certain proteins fold, the better new proteins we can design to combat the disease-related proteins and cure the diseases.

A short YouTube movie showing the game in action.


Last minute add, a writer on Gamezebo mentions how games can be more directly helpful in healing and therapy.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 5/28/2008 12:11:00 AM | Permanent link | (3) Comments

Blogger euthymic sent us a woof // May 28, 2008

i think it is a nice idea to make games that also teach science in such an interesting way. i also like your 2 er... little? dogs   

Blogger Semavi Lady sent us a woof // May 28, 2008

I agree about games that inspire and motivate.

Haha, about the little dogs. The pics of the dogs with Natalka are certainly impressive!   

Anonymous Anonymous sent us a woof // May 30, 2008

Do you think they would send my Nobel Prize in a bubble gum wrapper?

Mark   

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Critical Thinking, Mandatory Spay/Neuter, & Computer Security

A little of everything in the above subject.

A few good articles that got my attention this week.
Thinking outside the box. Here's a read on that at Ishmael.org

After reading that; the concept of critical thinking and lucid comprehension of issues take focus again with the reader -- Yet, back to real life, we continue to witness the the most juvenile and fundamentalist/extreme thinking that is driving MSN proponents everywhere (mandatory spay & neuter). Including California's truly UNHealthy Pets Act. So focused on their own limited perception of reality that they do not see, for example, how this type of legislation adversely affects grassroots efforts at wildlife conservation, the production of food and natural fiber on the farm and issues of population genetics in our pets. Health issues in animals are simply written off as well with broad blanket assumptions, with these people blowing off the experts, as if they have degrees in veterinary science and realize the difference between long term prospective and short term retrospective data. Furthermore, these bills will NOT affect the popularly demonized, commercial mass pet producers, yet the MSN proponents continue to make disingenuous references in that direction. And the sheep continue to follow.

Somewhat related: Newsweek on PeTA and Euthanasia: http://www.newsweek.com/id/134549. Euthanization is actually the cop out of MSN proponents to address the shortcomings in their logic and both HSUS and PeTA encourage killing animals rather than rehoming them. Since they are so busy killing animals, analyzing the status of the problem as encouraged in the first link is simply beyond their acceptance. I highly recommend Nathan Winograd's book, Redemption - a good take on it is here. It does encourage facing the history and issues that have compounded the lack of progression on logical solutions.


Getting away from animals for a bit... and along the lines of perhaps encouraging a new way of thinking, see this article about some indigenous people of Mexico who "live forever", from which article I gained the idea that many of our modern foot and leg problems seen in our society could be benefited from taking some core ideas regarding letting our footwear be more natural, so that leg strength and flexibility are natural benefits.


And tonight, I just discovered a new blog which covers issues that affect everyone using the internet - see Spyware Sucks. I've found that many people continue ignore the serious implications of HTML in email - especially as malware gets more sophisticated and do not understand that surfing and reading web pages results in thousands of downloads to their computer. From another source, Scott Dunn writes about security, "Visitors to USAToday.com last Thursday got more than they bargained for. A hacked Flash advertisement meant that merely viewing a page in your browser was capable of triggering a malware attack on your PC. According to an alert on the security site Websense, the ad can take control of the browser without any user interaction at all."

I'm using Firefox as my principal browser with "NoScript" which stops scripts in their tracks and another extension "AdBlock" that blocks ads which can sometimes be malicious. The combination makes some busy pages download for reading quicker since I am not getting all that garbage and it makes pages look a little different too. For example, ubiquitous links such as 'google ads' just do not show up on my Firefox browsing. NoScript does allow me to choose which sites I trust as does AdBlock.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 5/08/2008 01:23:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Friday, May 02, 2008

Ah, Stress Relief!

A Paint Shop Pro creation featuring two of my favorite games. (yeah, I did that PSP in a hurry and you can tell although I might just get around to fixing that)

Above, a Sims 2 family guy, playing Big Kahuna Reef 2 - Chain Reaction on his free gaming computer. (Sims 2 Free Time features new hobbies that Sims can have, including gaming! ...a sort of "infinite picture", game creations playing a game)

Recent days without much internet access, various stressy issues and an ailing family member have me turning to my very useful and portable laptop for communication aid (nextalk.net deaf relay), ways of keeping myself from going nuts or being utterly bored in quiet moments, and if I have a space of time with no interruptions, some momentary stress relief in the form of DVD movies or casual games. Beats TV to death, as I have never been one to just turn it on and veg.

Tonight, I learned of a study documenting that computer games give stress relief ...and it even comes with a slide show. Check out the title, I love it! "Study: Casual Video Games Demonstrate Ability to Relieve Stress, Improve Mood: Potential Clinical Significance Highlighted. First-of-Its-Kind 6-month Research Project Establishes Effects of Puzzle and Word Games on the Human Body and Mind" :)
Methodology

The study was conducted between October 2007 and April 2008 and included a total of 134 subjects. Thirty-one subjects served as members of the control group, tasked with surfing the Internet looking for journal articles. The experimental groups consisted of 31 subjects who played Bejeweled 2, 29 subjects who played Bookworm Adventures, and 36 subjects who played Peggle. The study included the collection of physical data (based on Heart Rate Variability (HRV) measurements) and psychological data (based on POMS (a profile of mood states pre- and post-activity) and electroencephalography (EEG) measurements) during a 5-minute baseline period and 15 minutes of game playing or (in the case of the control group) Internet surfing.
I haven't played the three games featured in the study but anyone that is curious can get them as free downloads from any number of places including the creators site, Pop Cap games. Once you have them, you can play them offline. The trials are usually for an hour but if you like to play longer, offline and not buy the game, you can try the Wild Coins method of game trialing and playing. The way it seems to work is that Wild Games gives you any game you want as a freebie game which you can play for up to a 24 hour period with periodic 20 minute breaks. If your break gets too long, then if you want to resume the game, you will need to insert virtual coins, called Wild Coins. Depending on the complexity of the game, the number of coins varies and can be four to six coins for the fancier games. The coins can be bought in different plans or even acquired by purchasing other goods from magazines to coffee and fashions and other things. Some games are completely free however, and I get a kick out of Crickler which you must be online to play.

I didn't know anything about Wild Coins until I got my "new to me" refurb Gateway notebook which included a download for games, "Gateway Games". My nephew clicked on it (after asking of course) and I was so impressed with the graphics in the game of Fate he was playing and how quickly he learned the game, I had to learn about the game system that Fate was offered on. It's cute. The little guy battles bad guys and has a little dog that reminds me of a small spotted Terrier. I haven't played it yet but it might be the first game of its genre that I try.... eventually.

Had to stick this Sims 2 video on. I wish I could hear Natasha Bedingfield sing in "Simlish" but the video is beautiful (a nicer high res version is on youtube and you have to select it on the rating meter that has the stars).

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 5/02/2008 09:39:00 PM | Permanent link | (1) Comments

Anonymous Anonymous sent us a woof // May 03, 2008

That was fun! And the music in SIMlish was cute.

Mark   

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Software Telephone for the Deaf

My old copy of NexTalk has been getting a lot of use in the past few weeks and suddenly it kept crashing or just truncating my phone sessions - requiring a reboot to resume a call. Ugh! So I decided to uninstall and clean out the registry and file folders of the program and then reinstall an upgrade. I went to download the program again and was happy to find that the newest version is designed so that it also works on Vista now and has a FAX option. Interesting. Anyway, with Vista capability, now I can install it on my (new to me) Gateway notebook which has Vista installed. :)

The link for NexTalk is here. This is a free program that enables a deaf person (who wants to use the computer interface) to call a person who can hear. An operator types text messages back to the deaf person, typing out whatever is being said at the hearing end. It works a lot like using a real time instant messenger. Thanks to all those wonderful relay operators out there that make these services possible. :D

Now here's a wonderful video with text, showing a sweet dog named Cowboy learning something new. :)

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 4/06/2008 05:44:00 PM | Permanent link | (2) Comments

Anonymous Anonymous sent us a woof // April 07, 2008

Oh. So the deaf can call someone that hears. I thought it would help the deaf hear. ;)

(((Hugs)))

I am so glad that technology is at least helping you remain part of the world at large, kiddo!

Mark   

Blogger Semavi Lady sent us a woof // April 12, 2008

You're too funny, Mark! I wish it could help me hear tho. I'd probably want the person on the other end to play me music that I miss so much.

SHUDDUP, just play music for me!!! heehee ;)   

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

It's the Age of Discovery (or something)

. . . Because people who love you sometimes want to use your laptop computer to make use of real or imagined, undocumented but desirable features. Two videos below with the second one being loosely applied to laptop computer technology that doesn't exist (yet) -

Tech Support in the Middle Ages
(things haven't changed much!)
Video with English subtitles.
If you haven't seen this one before, be sure to watch it to the end. ;)


A Cell Phone that does everything!
(ewwwww...)
No captions on this one but it's pretty self-explanatory.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 2/19/2008 04:46:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Friday, January 11, 2008

Success! Getting the Laptop Back Up To Speed

Eureka!!!

My goodness. Months of frustration since October 2007 -- finally I've resolved the problem.

Back in October, James was using my MX7118 Gateway notebook to do some computing tasks while his desktop machine was shot (crashing hard drive); getting rebuilt by moi. This Gateway's got a dual core processor (more up to date than our desktops at the time) and was adequately speedy even with the factory level of 512MB of RAM. At least more than adequate for the rare use it got for the previous two years. (It even did an admirable job introducing the resource intensive game The Sims 2 with a few expansion packs =with no custom content= for visiting friends. -the key was, no custom content!)

Cave people that we are in computer gadgetry, once we obtained a wireless router and networked all our machines, at last using the Gateway to access the network became practical because now it was easy to move files between the machines and go online without miles of cables. :)

How slow did the Gateway get in October?! I'm not talking about a five or ten minute boot up time start to finish, but it was taking 20 minutes from boot to the login window, and by December, after login, another 10 to 15 minutes for the few things on it to finish loading at Startup. CPU usage was 80 to 100% almost constantly. Frankly, if you need to wait half an hour just for a machine to boot up, there isn't much point in using it any more.

It had great security and was clean, no viruses or spyware. Using hibernate to speed up its readiness for use, still took about ten minutes in loading time. But no matter what, every time a new program was started (a browser window for example), it took three or four minutes before the window loaded on screen. Windows Media player kept crashing. Typing into form boxes like the location bar on a browser sometimes delayed more than 10 seconds between keystrokes. No duh, something was wrong! Since the machine was clean, I was convinced that some of the hardware was dying.

Tweaking and disabling some Windows Services and slogging through the Event Viewer was interesting but provided no joy and is how I ended up discovering Wiki-How and posting about it. ;)

Then insight finally arrived! A few days ago (yep, January 2008 already), I discovered something called Process Explorer, free, made by Microsoft, which showed me more detail on running processes than is usually seen on Windows Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del). I discovered that hardware interrupts on the machine were the source of bottlenecks. So something was indeed wrong with the hardware, but it turns out, easily fixable! Yay!

I found a forum which presented the solution. Apparently due to some glitch that occurred in October, the hard drive converted from DMA mode to PIO. Having some clues now, examining hardware configuration in Device Manager for the primary IDE revealed that even though "DMA if Available" was in the "Transfer Mode" settings for the hard drive, my laptop was actually in PIO mode for the drive and it was this that was creating all the bottlenecks. Apparently this is a known bug in some setups according to Microsoft.

So the solution was -- uninstall driver for the primary IDE, reboot (Windows then self reinstalls the driver in the correct configuration), reboot again, and voila, the notebook was booting up in less than five minutes again as of last night!

Whee, happy happy! Dancing Banana Dancing Banana

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 1/11/2008 02:56:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Thursday, December 20, 2007

How to Make a Yule Log, Become a Hobo and Other Trivia...

If you haven't discovered WikiHow, take a look at it sometime. You may find some of the most odd (!!) or useful How-to files over there. I found some useful tips on tuning up a Windows XP computer such as which Windows services I can disable to speed up my notebook.

Just so you don't get swept away on a tip that seems too good/weird to be true, check out the tab labeled discuss which goes with each topic. Remember Wikis are built by contributors (even pranksters) who may or may not have any expertise. Some are really useful and accurate, and others are... something else all together! :D ;)

To get you started, if you want to get into some degree of the Holiday Spirit (even if you never cook), check out the image that goes with making a Yule Log. I think I spent about five minutes laughing nonstop on that one. :) EDIT - Dec 21, 11AM: Just my luck, someone changed the image today, but you can see the image that I saw right here. Or how about making a necklace out of fish hooks, or how to become a Hobo.

Of course there are so many interesting files there that in order to find more time to browse, you might need some tips on calling in sick. :)

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 12/20/2007 10:27:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Friday, December 07, 2007

Heart of the Internet - Hungry Beast

I've sometimes thought about how dependent we are on electrical power. I am awed by the massive sizes of the server farms around the world which make possible our internet as we know it.

BldgBlog, a fascinating blog with focus on architecture and design, has had a recent post on this subject with impressive photos and thought provoking links.

When connections are hinky, when huge domains and internet businesses are down, sometimes there's just a really interesting story just waiting to be told. But then again, maybe not. ;)

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 12/07/2007 06:11:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

One Laptop Per Child -Revisited

Photo from OLPC - Laptop.org
I initially wrote about the "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) project over a year ago.

Right now, the project is still a charity, and there are still many questions I have on the program and will it sink or swim, but I have a lot of faith in the kids. The use of the computers works something like homeschooling, where kids are naturally motivated because of the nature of the medium. The project has a December 2007 "Give one, Get one" incentive which provides machines at a discount and people are buying and donating both machines to the project. :)
OLPC has asked affluent American individuals and charitable groups to buy machines and donate them to children in poor countries. Participants in the Give One Get One program pay $400 for two of the machines - one for their own use and the other to be donated. Participants also receive a year of free wireless Internet access at hundreds of public hotspots operated by T-Mobile. A separate program, called Give Many, encourages charities to pay for hundreds or thousands of OLPC laptops. (source Boston.com)
The design of these little laptops has changed somewhat since the original pics I saw over a year ago, and the interest in the project as demonstrated by foreign governments has been a bit... reserved. Boston.com has a report on it, and mentions some of its problems (the Nigerian criminal that is trying to sue the charity project has a lot of #&^@^%!). Those who can, probably will if they are aware of the program, for the rest of us, if donating some machines is within the scope of a charity that we know, maybe suggest the charity to donate? According to OLPC, donors are able to designate where the machines they donate are to go.

And, of course, the homepage of the project is worth a visit!

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 12/07/2007 03:03:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

iTunes headache with iTunes.msi

iTunes has been trying to upgrade itself on both my laptop and main machine. Each time, there is a failure because iTunes.msi which comes with the upgrade installation, isn't recognized. Even if you find it (via Browse) ... no dice. grrr. I uninstalled it, thinking a clean install would fix it. ...but nooooooooo... bleah -- I'd rather not be wasting my time on iTunes! (I can't hear anyway) But hubby needs it, so that's that!

Anyway, here's the trick to fix that and it takes only a few minutes after you get the download.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 11/27/2007 03:52:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Friday, November 02, 2007

"Get one step closer to being a master BBQ chef"

Today's big laugh!

Troubleshooting weird computer problems sometimes involves online searches for solutions. While I was looking for a solution, one message board suggested a Radio Shack product and gave a link to the item. Unfortunately the link was broken because the item is no longer offered, but I started to look around the Radio Shack offerings in the same category and found an item that had me laughing. It is a USB powered coffee mug warmer which acts as a useful hub, offering four additional USB ports.

"Keep your drink hot and your accessories connected."

accessories

While this wasn't what I was looking for, it still had me laughing, partially because of the frustration I had for the problem. But here's the real kicker for me... I noted there were tabs, one offering 'accessories' for the mugwarmer.


Okay, so, what sort of accessories does a USB mug warmer suggest?

I look at the accessories and find the first item offered is a Digital BBQ Thermometer.
accessories

fullsize screen capture

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 11/02/2007 02:13:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Convert your Kodak Camera MOV files to AVI for Free

As of tonight, converting MOV files from my Kodak cameras to a format that can be handled in Windows Movie Maker is no longer an issue.

I found a free program at SourceForge.net, called MP4Cam2AVI, and it does the conversion beautifully without increasing the file size and distorting the video output. There is a slight difference in full screen depth of color with the new output being a little darker in my clips, but the normal window size viewing is quite similar and crisp (given the camera and the user's shortcomings).

file comparison
Compare file sizes of original MOV and the new AVIs.

I don't know quite what all the bells are whistles are on this program but if you have a digital camera that shoots still pictures and can take movies in MOV format only, then you might be intereted in this free and small download. Get it here and see the info and screenshots.

Yeah... I know about Quicktime. I had purchased QuickTime Pro Version 6 a few years ago and found it very helpful for the few files from my Kodak digital cams that I had to convert (files ended up fuzzy and way big tho). I had only used it for a couple conversions which quality I didn't like aside from the hugeness of the new files. These could have been issues peculiar to that one camera tho. However, QuickTime movie editing and splicing is something which it did well. Unfortunately I used it only a couple times, not $30 worth of work IMO!

Back when, I was still on dial-up so the entire idea of putting movies online seemed crazy. Broadband is more common now although not everyone has it. Sometimes I have to connect at dial-up speeds when my cable connection goes nuts. That bites! Speed definitely spoils us when we get used to it!

Hubby wanted me to install iTunes on my machine and when I did that, I had to make the decision to overwrite my old QTPro version then with the freebie version 7 because iTunes refused to install unless QT was also upgraded. ...thus losing my MOV editing capabilities on this machine. I still have everything I need to reinstall my version 6 QuickTime Pro files -- as old as they are now. I installed the files on my laptop just in case I wanted to edit Kodak digital camera movies again, but that didn't last long! James needed iTunes on that machine too. Oh well!

Anyway, thanks to SourceForge, I now have a conversion solution that is practical for my use. After conversion from MOV to AVI, the clips can be edited in Windows Movie Maker. Now, to find the time to do THAT! I took some (not very good) movie clips of the dogs playing in the small corral. I discovered at the time that unfortunately, the camera I have cannot ZOOM while in video mode. Not great, since the Anatolians were playing, chasing and running around our 1/4 acre corral enclosure. Nevertheless, I will get them online when I can, now that I can edit the clips if needed.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 9/30/2007 01:45:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Some Highlights from Symantec Internet Security Report

Some interesting highlights on current internet security issues. I bolded the point at the end of the list but much of the report has elements that may be of particular interest to others. I looked at the PDF version which is rather dry reading but there is a flash, video style presentation that others may prefer to review.

I think many people are aware of some potential risks that there may be online, but seem to feel reasonably sure that the problems only happen to other people because they feel their ISP, their browsing habits, and software are sufficient protective buffers against security threats.

Healthy paranoia can't be a bad thing in light of the increasing sophistication developing every day with internet related threats.

Symantec Internet Security Threat Report
Volume XII: September, 2007
Attack Trends Highlights
• The United States was the country targeted by the most denial of service (DoS) attacks, accounting for
61 percent of the worldwide total in the first half of 2007.
• The United States was the top country of attack origin in the first six months of 2007, accounting for
25 percent of the worldwide attack activity.
• During this period, the United States accounted for 30 percent of all malicious activity during the period,
more than any other country.
• Israel was the country with the most malicious activity per Internet user in the first six months of 2007,
followed by Canada and the United States.
• Four percent of all malicious activity detected during the first six months of 2007 originated from IP
space registered to Fortune 100 companies.
• The education sector accounted for 30 percent of data breaches that could lead to identity theft during
this period, more than any other sector.
• Theft or loss of computer or other data-storage medium made up 46 percent of all data breaches that
could lead to identity theft during this period.
• The United States was the top country for underground economy servers, accounting for 64 percent of
the total known to Symantec.
• Credit cards were the most common commodity advertised on underground economy servers known to
Symantec, accounting for 22 percent of all items.
• Eighty-five percent of credit cards advertised for sale on underground economy servers known to
Symantec were issued by banks in the United States.
• Symantec observed an average of 52,771 active bot-infected computers per day in the first half of 2007,
a 17 percent decrease from the previous period.
• China had 29 percent of the world’s bot-infected computers, more than any other country.
• The United States had the highest number of bot command-and-control servers, accounting for
43 percent of the worldwide total.
• Beijing was the city with the most bot-infected computers, accounting for seven percent of the
worldwide total.
• The average lifespan of a bot-infected computer during the first six months of 2007 was four days,
up from three days in the second half of 2006.
• Home users were the most highly targeted sector, accounting for 95 percent of all targeted attacks.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 9/23/2007 10:35:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Crimeware Addendum TWO - Your System WILL Be Compromised

Although I've had it installed for a couple days now, I haven't started getting familiar with LinkScanner. This was recommended by Robert Vamosi in recent security alerts. I have two other postings on this matter, here and here. The latter link shows what happens when a recording is made of Internet Explorer visiting a banking site. These attacks can happen to anyone.

Since I wanted to see what a red alert would look like, so I did a few keyword searches that are most likely to hit some compromised pages. The image above shows the alert or clear icon (a green checkmark) on a sample search. Above is using Google search but you get similar results on a few other search engines such as Yahoo below. Linkscanner doesn't run with Altavista so be sure you use a search tool that LinkScanner works with.



If you mouseover the red x marks, below is sample of a warning you get when the site is positive for threats.


Keep in mind that you do not have to go to a risky site to be exposed to malware intended to be used in identity theft. :(


Please realize that Sponsored Links on search engines can be dangerous too! These guys pay to make their sites highly visible, so that they can infect more people. Steal more identities. People who just click to visit their sites will load the page, just like in the video of the banking site above! Then the malware starts to write to the person's hard drive.

If I did not have LinkScanner installed, I would not have seen the red X before I visited the site. (this was an experiment, grin)

I'm safe! Since I am using NOScript on Firefox, when I clicked on the page, NoScript informed me that scripts wanted to run on that site and did I want to give permission? Of course not! However, if I had not seen the Linkscanner warning, I might have assumed that maybe some little harmless tool wanted to run.

Practice safe Hex! :)


LinkScanner Links

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 9/11/2007 04:22:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Karen Kenworthy is Back!

Karen Kenworthy is back!

And she's talking about the olden days, back when we made keyboards out of wood and had to capture and tame our own mice.

Karen has made some of the most useful free utilities for Windows users for well over a decade. Check out her latest newsletter. :)

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 9/11/2007 02:04:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Monday, September 10, 2007

Crimeware Addendum - Video

The video is rather chilling if you missed it. :(

http://wormradar.com/boi.mov

See related posts on the label crimeware

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 9/10/2007 05:35:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Internet Security - The rise of crimeware

It has now come to the point that you cannot safely surf even your bank's site or popular commercial sites, or any other site without having all of your security software, your browser, and in fact everything active on your computer -- all up to date.

No, I'm not talking about phishing, where a site pretends to be what it is not. Phishing relies on people not realizing they have clicked on something that is spoofing a legitimate site.

Yikes! No... it's different now!

Now, it looks as though it may be a good idea to also have a link analyzer to ensure the safety of any site you visit, including YOUR BANK or anyplace you do online shopping or even Petfinder or your trusted friend's site! Why? The servers that host the sites could be compromised, if only for an hour, it could be the hour you are logged on. :(

I have antivirus, spyware scanners, and firewalls. These generally test for things that are "obvious" to the technology of these types of software. I use Firefox for my principal browser, have an adblocker on and also use NoScript. I only use IE for troubleshooting and testing web code. Also, all the email I do is done from plain text, and I read email headers all the time. Healthy paranoia, I think! None of this slows me down, as it's all rather habitual.

However, new malicious technology is growing all the time. There's tons of money in it for criminal types and they are so motivated. Taking Robert's advice in the article below, I installed Link Scanner, as a test for now.

If you want to understand more about the nature of this crimeware threat, go and read Robert Vamosi at CNET, writing about The rise of crimeware and give consideration to his recommendations (behaviors and software to install) for safety on the internet:
"For a few hours late last week, visitors to the Bank of India Web site had their browsers covertly redirected to a site hosting malicious exploits. Increasingly, criminals, often without any technical experience, are defacing popular Web sites with code that allows them to direct your browser to download content without you even knowing. (click to go to the rest of the article. . .) "
The nature of security issues on the internet changes constantly. Keep it safe and fun. Stay informed, subscribe to internet security newsletters. CNET, with Robert Vamosi is a favorite. About.com has a newsletter too, I have an RSS feed for it on the left hand column in one of the two grayish boxes.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 9/10/2007 03:00:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Self Control or Spaced Out?

I'm not going to blame this on anyone in particular, especially a certain someone whose name starts with "D", but as you all know, I haven't spent very much time with Google Earth recently -- no really, I still haven't finished checking out the rest of Easter Island and certainly you understand that such a thing is a clear demonstration of the epitome of self control? haha

Well, because of D's tip, I had to check out Google Earth's Sky enhancement and found this video at google:


Okay, fine. I'm busy, I'm not going to download Google Earth v4.2(beta) today. (said I to myself). uh-huh

umm... and I need to work on the backlog of emails and other stuff I have.

Then I check out my own igoogle.com page (this link will go to your own igoogle page) where I incidently uh... happen to have a google gadget for Google Earth, and I saw an intriguing small picture of something to do with astronomy, so I clicked on it and OH BOY, my copy of Google Earth phoned home and updated itself pronto! (wink wink wink, I may have had to agree with something and click, but I don't remember!) Then Google Earth opened up with it's renewed interface with little WMAP images scattered around the globe.

Okay, I do still have some semblance of self-control and didn't click any links. Just shut down Google Earth with a sigh. "I'll get back to you later," I tell my eagerly responsive and newly updated Google Earth.

BTW, was too tired last night to stay up for the lunar eclipse. We usually have trouble seeing them from the yard due to all the oak trees in the neighborhood. Too late to go for a drive.

Glitter graphic, courtesy of CommentHaven.com

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 8/28/2007 09:22:00 AM | Permanent link | (2) Comments

Blogger Diane sent us a woof // August 28, 2007

Why, I have no idea what you mean. Leading someone astray is the last thing I would ever do!

Or, consider it payback for that Tetris-clone you linked to. Grr.

As for the eclipse, it happened around sunrise here, and I didn't see it but my husband did on his way to work. Guess I'll have to wait for the next one!   

Blogger Semavi Lady sent us a woof // August 28, 2007

What are friends for? heehee   

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Google Earth & The Scientist : A summer of statues


Fascinating!

Easter Island is such a remarkable mystery all on it's own, but a recent article in The Scientist really got my attention when it linked to a site that utilized Google Earth to wonderful effect -- showing information about an excavation project at Easter Island.

If you're not familiar with Google Earth, you're really missing out. It is freeware that lets you explore our planet and pinpoint and bookmark places of interest. I downloaded it a couple years ago (2005, this month, has it really been that long?!) and immediately set about locating places I have visited, dream of visiting, and places I lived abroad including within view of Mt Pinatubo, Mt Fuji, places in Taiwan and more. I located some of the houses I lived in while abroad or at least the areas they would be if still standing (some have been demolished for new developments). Not all countries have so much detail in different areas. But the cool thing is that once you have bookmarked these and want to go on a trip, the Google Earth experience is pretty awesome.

First, be sure you have installed Google Earth on your machine (I hope it runs on your machine!). Next enjoy the following introductory (standard webpage) article to help put context into your trip. Then take the link at the end of the The Science article to the public database that is mentioned at the end (database is at www.rapanuidatabase.org/).

The Scientist : A summer of statues

EDIT: 24 Aug 2007... the article keeps going offline. Here's the essential text and the link to the database featuring the Google Earth file.
On one side of a quarry roughly two-thirds the size of a football field is "El Gigante," a half-finished stone statue seven stories tall, and weighing almost 300 tons. Prehistoric tools lie scattered nearby. Whoever made these head-and-torso statues, known as moai, seemed to have decided one day to drop their tools and disappear into history, leaving behind a harsh, barren landscape. It's one of the mysteries of Easter Island, which budding scientists have flown halfway across the world to solve.

During an excavation project last summer, Jeffrey Boutain, who graduated from the University of Michigan, Dearborn, in May, routinely woke up at 7:00 a.m. and rode a jeep 10 miles to reach an excavation site at Anakena beach. The team was digging for signs of the prehistoric civilization, such as animal bones, charcoal, and cooking implements. Boutain also used GPS to help survey the island's archaeologic features, including ancient roads and buried fireplaces, and helped catalogue all 800-plus moai on the island - the most comprehensive attempt to date.

Last summer, Boutain was one of 26 college students who flew to a South Pacific island no bigger than three Manhattans to do summer fieldwork. Although all 20 enrollees this summer are new to field science, they've helped turn some theories about Easter Island upside down.

The traditional view about Easter Island, popularized by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book, Collapse , is that the people who settled on Easter Island destroyed the island's once-lush tropical forests; it is one of the supposedly clearest examples of humans wreaking havoc on their environment. Some of the data that the summer students gathered helped two researchers - Carl Lipo at California State University in Long Beach and Terry Hunt, director of the program and an anthropologist at University of Hawaii at Manoa - propose another controversial theory on what leveled the landscape.

Based partly on charcoal records found at Anakena beach, Hunt and Lipo suggested in a Science paper last year (311:1603-6, 2006) that the early Easter Island settlers colonized the island around 1200 AD, at least 400 years later than previously thought, and around the time the forests began disappearing. It would be hard for humans to systematically destroy vegetation that quickly, they reason, suggesting there may be another culprit to blame, at least partially - rats.

Ancient rat bone DNA evidence from the beach suggests that a few rats stowed away with the first settlers, then exploded into a population of two to three million, and quickly devoured the palm seeds. Without seedlings to replenish the aging stock, the palm forests eventually withered away.

This summer, Hunt's group worked on excavations, sifting through sites for rat-gnawed seeds and nuts to bolster his new theory. He has already found evidence, in the form of hundreds of rat bones deep in the sands at Anakena beach and half-eaten palm seeds scattered across the island, suggesting that the rat population grew much more rapidly than did the human population. Hunt hopes to find signs in pollen embedded in the sediment from the lake near the quarry, showing that the forest started declining before humans began any widespread clearing. "Diamond blames the natives for destroying the island," says Lipo, who also helps run the field school. "But maybe they weren't crazy, and it is us who have lessons to learn on how to coexist with nature."

Well-known in archaeologic circles, the Easter Island field school of the University of Hawaii at Manoa couldn't be more remote. Located 2,300 miles from any sizable land mass (South America), temperatures on the island, known as Rapa Nui by locals, hover at around 65° F (18° C) - on a good day. Sudden rainstorms aren't uncommon. Flights from the United States can take as long as 24 hours, not including delays.

It's worth the trip, says Boutain, who is about to enroll in UH-Manoa's botany program for his master's degree. "I would do it again in a heartbeat." Last year's surveying efforts, including photos and descriptions of 650 moai, can be accessed at www.rapanuidatabase.org, the public database for the mapping project.

"There are field schools all over the world, but to be this isolated in such a spectacular little place is pretty unusual," says Hunt. "It's one of the last places on earth you really have a sense of being remote."
...


If you're anything like me, you will really get a kick out of the Google Earth downloads (kml files) :) :)

Detail on Easter Island is pretty good; I could see shadows of some of the palm trees. Many photos of the mysterious statues were huge! I'd forgotten how to use the various hot keys and configurations of Google Earth and haven't had the time to see more than a few minutes worth of the files, but I'll be back!

If you want to take other virtual trips, be sure to check out Google Earth Cool Places and you can visit palaces, mountains, amusement parks and assorted aerial weirdness around the world. PC Mag has a download with lots of odd things like a car parked on the side of a building, crop circles and other madness. Of course, googling around brings up fun hits. :D


Related:
Easter Island Guide (short)
More on Easter Island (long)

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 8/18/2007 09:40:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Duct Tape Server - You Know You're a Redneck When...

Check out the Duct Tape Server.
From the site, a little about the server's practicality.
Recent Action
Duct Tape Server was on server row at MillionManLan 6, June 21-24th. It hosted a Ventrilo server and a 15 person Armagetron Tournament. Performance was flawless over the four days of continuous operation. Core temperatures hovered around 32 degrees C!
I thought the insulating ability of duct tape would make it difficult to keep that thing from running hot, but that runs cooler than my desktop which has one side of the case removed to help air circulation. (I don't use air conditioning in the house).

QuackA little on the history of duct tape:
From Forbes: Invented in the early 1940s by scientists at Permacell, a division of the Johnson and Johnson Company, duct tape was built to fill the need for a strong, flexible, durable tape that could help the war effort, according to Avon, Ohio-based Henkel Consumer Adhesives, one of the world's largest makers of the stuff. Early versions consisted of medical tape laminated to a cloth backing, covered with polycoat adhesives and a polyethylene coating. It was colored Army green and nicknamed "Duck Tape" because it repelled water.
And similar alternate (amusing!) version.

A little image googling on duct tape and similar permutations is bound to turn up some interesting hits. One of which brought me to interesting photo log of hypnotism (no duct tape on that portion of the log) that occurred at a 2006 QuakeCon (game made by id Software), and a series of pics of a giant Sumatran Corpse Plant (Amorphophallus titanum) which has an interesting and stinky sex life.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 8/09/2007 07:51:00 AM | Permanent link | (2) Comments

Blogger cdlcruz sent us a woof // August 09, 2007

Janice - you sure come up with some interesting way to spend time on the internet. Much more fun than working!

Catherine   

Blogger Joan Sinden sent us a woof // August 10, 2007

hahaha! I've seen duct tape dog booties - but I've never seen duct tape computer equipment before! hahaha!   

Friday, July 06, 2007

Assorted Distractions- Explosions, Computer Cooling and the Best Springfield!


A literally COOL idea.
Mineral Oil Submersion Cooling for a computer!
Watch the movie to the end and check out the bubbles!





Best Springfield?
Also until July 9, 2007, 11:59 pm (Pacific), you have a chance to vote for the best Springfield in the country. In the Springfield Challenge... The winning Springfield gets to host the hometown premiere of The Simpson Movie. I guess this is especially exciting if your state has a Springfield. :)
The Simpsons Movie
While I'm not much of a TV watcher nor a huge fan of The Simpsons I have to admit I've gotten more than a few laughs from the sharp wit of the story writers who have given a sprinkling of just about every kind of humor in the show. General kookiness, sneaky bits of decidedly (nearly innocent) adult humor and political commentary sometime has me (sometimes almost disgusted yet) transfixed for the next lightning speed quip that one could almost miss. Thank goodness for closed captions!
Go here and choose the best Springfield.


Confessions of a Pioneer Woman
And one of my favorite funny and beautiful blogs ever, Ree over at Confessions of a Pioneer Woman has her annual Fourth of July and celebration to be enjoyed if you haven't seen it already. Pyromaniacs and they curious may enjoy these different permalinks here and here. And foodies and cake lovers... don't miss the guilt and advice, complete with sneaky repairs to a wee bit of damage to a gorgeous red white and blue berry cake! (recipe included on her site) :)
What else can I say? Love horses? Love photography? Country life? Mischievous humor? Calf nuts? Vignettes of life with kids? If you've got something of a rural background, you can often get a kick out of the comments section below each entry alone. :) The photo captioning contests are often hilarious and feature unpredictable prizes for the winning captions. Okay, I'm starting to sound like an advertisement. Anyway, as you can see, Ree's blog is a favorite.


Related links:
The Simpsons website
Confessions of a Pioneer Woman - Go see what Ree is up to! and what she's cooking!

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 7/06/2007 06:27:00 PM | Permanent link | (2) Comments

Anonymous jan sent us a woof // July 07, 2007

I have a link to one of your posts on AB1934. It is a very thorough treatment   

Anonymous Anonymous sent us a woof // July 10, 2007

I want a new computer, kiddo! Mineral spirits, eh? I don't think I'll use it on my computer yet.

Mark   

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Mac OS X vs Windows Vista

Battle of Operating Systems with an interesting twist!

Even if you're not interested in a baron, a count and a guy in drag yet another Mac vs Windows duel (almost literally?), it is sure to bring some grins ...or groans.

Mac OS X vs Windows Vista:
What better way to end the age-old OS X vs Vista debate than to set the two up for a traditional Elizabethan duel? Prepare yourselves for one of the bloodiest battles your eyes hath e'er seen...

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 5/06/2007 05:30:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Top Windows Antivirus Software

From About.com-

8 Top Windows Antivirus Software
Internet Security Suites can sometimes burden older systems and cause conflicts for gamers. Standalone antivirus scanners (used in conjunction with a firewall) are a viable alternative.

Here's a list of the top 8 standalone antivirus scanners for Windows.

Speaking of games, I wonder if I'm ever going to find time to play The Sims 2 any time soon.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 4/25/2007 02:12:00 PM | Permanent link | (1) Comments

Blogger Diane sent us a woof // April 26, 2007

I haven't played The Sims in so long, and now there's *another* expansion pack that I don't get to try :( I have a huge list of "rewards" for when I finish my field work this summer, and that's one of them. Can't wait!   

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Google Turns Hard Drive "Facts" into Urban Legend

From StorageMojo » Google’s Disk Failure Experience, the subjects of hard drive wear from heat, age, workload, hard drive specs, and software monitoring of your drive are covered. It is a review of Google's report on "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population".

Having used many hard drives over the years, the smallest ones of which went out of service for me in the past few years due to the advent of broadband, megapixel images and humongous email attachments (the drives were too small for storage of important stuff) -- I'm always interested in things that will help alleviate my paranoia about hard drive failure. I found the summaries at StorageMojo very interesting. Now to find time to eventually read the whole 13 page PDF... :p

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 4/11/2007 01:24:00 AM | Permanent link | (2) Comments

Anonymous Anonymous sent us a woof // April 12, 2007

Yer just paranoid, Semavi Lady! Hdd's are good for paperweights!

Mark   

Blogger Semavi Lady sent us a woof // April 26, 2007

Or door stops!
;)   

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Don't be Scammed

Mystery emailJust about everyone with an email address gets spam and just about anyone with an email address who also offers things for sale online is targetted by scammers at some point. Surprise!

Scammer!Money!If you have anything for sale online, be it a boat, a computer, an exotic kitten or an alpaca, sooner or later you'll probably get a somewhat vague message that doesn't specify much about your item but indicates that someone acting as an agent wants to buy your item for a client -- and a cash advance (actually fake money) is being offered and they'd like for you to make change (with your real money) and send that substantial bit of real money to them. Some people with several items for sale get the same message for each item. B)

Of course, absolutely none of us are going to fall for that. :) Of course, of course!

An entertaining site along those lines is BustedupCowgirl's scampage.

As you can see, every once in a while I just need an excuse to play with some clipart.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 12/27/2006 12:37:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Sunday, September 17, 2006

One Laptop Per Child - So Much to Ponder

The $100 Laptop.

One Laptop Per Child
Cute machine! A prototype from "One Laptop Per Child" Project

Julie at DeafDC Blog writes on the subject of One Laptop Per Child… Possible? The cultural questions she poses are among the first things I pondered when I first found information about the project at MIT site last year. Deafness & disability combined with a fascination with science, technology and fondness for animals created ready misunderstanding and rifts where my own family did not always understand nor tolerate my differences in whatever they felt was the 'norm'. It was easier for me to focus on things with which I could be skillful and truly it was the only way to go because as a handicapped child, things others took for granted were difficult for me and often others had no point of reference for understanding.

Browsing and reading from a junior encyclopedia or piles of National Geographic magazines was far more interesting to me than watching TV with my mother and siblings when I could not always hear well enough to understand the words spoken on the programs. My mother's frustration with my differences when I was in grade school included the fact that at one point, I had read every single horse story available at the school library during one of the genre binges I entertained at the time - My instructor had no idea what grief this would cause me in my family when she shared my delight in reading with my parents at one PTA. My father was delighted, but I could not understand why that was such a problem for her -- I had the longest list of 'books I read' among my classmates. :D My sibs didn't have much interest in reading and that just seemed more 'normal' to her. :)

So it is with that background, I wonder about conflict within families, even if the conflict has something to do with better education. There are cultures where females are just not expected to expand their worlds and when they do, they become alienated. Children are quick studies in accepting and seeking new technology, but how will it affect their relationships with their families in third world countries? Will the kids be safe with this technology, could something happen to them if they are alone with one of these machines and another person wants it? It's very easy for me to imagine how technology or pursuit of it could backfire in some ways, while on the other hand there are benefits and advancements to be had.

Will it be welcome? You can find stories such as this one in India providing another aspect of food for thought.

Parents usually are role models and provide guidance to their kids, maybe more so in some cultures than they are in some modern cultures. Kids that understand things far beyond their parents at much younger ages may lose the guidance that they need due to a widening communication and cultural gap between the kids and parents. Painful memories... Parents that didn't get an opportunity at a good education are not always supportive of the achievements of their children when they don't understand those things.

Anyway, the technology is promising. Problems to come?
For now, it's all speculation.

One Laptop Per Child
The first prototype I saw last year

One Laptop Per Child
Another prototype

I think education is a good thing and I hope that in communities receptive to the "One Laptop Per Child" program, that great advancements can be made by first opening up the minds and curiosity of those who will benefit most.

To read more about the project, to see a FAQ and more images, go here to laptop.org

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 9/17/2006 09:36:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Monday, September 11, 2006

Overclocking and Hard Drive Backups

Need to do some routine computer maintenance - some cleanup (software and air can), some backups, some software updates & some system tweaks. Ah, all routine enough enough for me. But while I had the case open, I decided I would try overclocking my system.

Get it? Overclocking... that's new stuff to me.

My motherboard is not terribly new (2003) nor optimal, but I managed on second try, to do a successful overclock that got it to 1.67GHz over the previous 1.2 - yet that felt a little disappointing . I naively figured I could tweak it more! and why not?! I wanted to get at least 2 GHz out of it, dang it. ARRRR!! Yes! Go get 'em!

Sunday night -- OIF... :X I ended up spending a couple hours trying to fix CMOS checksum errors after an overly ambitious (OOPS!) overclock setting gone bad - Where computer boots up to a blank screen (no POST) but steady lights on front panel (I think that means, the lights are on but nobody's home :p ). Not too hard to fix once I figured out the quirks of my motherboard. Everything's running okay at 1.67GHz for now and just need to do routine backups. Note to self, reboot to POST after resetting the CMOS jumper (toggling it for a few seconds is not enough). Then toggle the jumper back to normal and reboot to POST again. Now go into BIOS and pick "Optimal" settings - save and exit. Rinse repeat for other insane tweaks that result in a near-dead computer. sigh...

Then again, I need a new thermal pad for a spare heatsink and then I will give the overclocking a try with a different CPU chip, maybe on a different motherboard -- maybe in a couple more months. ... :) :D

Vrrrrrroooom.....

Anyway, I'm still learning this stuff.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 9/11/2006 08:21:00 PM | Permanent link | (1) Comments

Blogger Ron Southern sent us a woof // September 12, 2006

Oh, piffle! (Know whut I mean?)   

Thursday, August 24, 2006

The Power of Google

I've no idea why the HTML title of this article at the moment is Sept 1, 2006, but it's still a good read. Get right with Google - September 1, 2006

Thanks to hubby for sending it on to me. :)

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 8/24/2006 04:08:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Reading Email Headers

This appears to be a very helpful page for those who find a need to learn how to read email headers. Go here - Reading Email Headers

This is an area for self paced homeschooling for all. Knowing more about the origins of messages is a very useful skill. It can help prepare you to protect yourself against forgeries, as well as helping you to work out internal problems of email delivery. It helps to go through your old emails from friends for practice. Also if you have more than one email address, send a message to yourself from the other address and add perusal of its headers to your self-paced study.

There are many places to look up IPs. One (of many) that I often use is here - Geobytes

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 8/02/2006 10:49:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

The Importance of Net Neutrality: Save the Internet

I'm one of those people that like to be able to get on the internet and look for and read about almost innumerable topics. Sometimes I share the links I find with different people. And sometimes they end up not getting the link. Sometimes there is an error message that comes back to me saying that other users of the system have complained about that particular link, so my recipient is not allowed to see it. Sometimes the link is about a shortcoming of that ISP, so I can only imagine who the users are that are blocking that email. Other times the message is completely removed from the recipient's mailbox - supposedly treated as SPAM although messages immediately before that one and following ones are received okay.

The situation is not getting better. Some companies with big bucks want to control what you can see; if you can see it all and how fast you can see it. Some major changes are going to take place without most of us knowing about it.

Now is your opportunity to get familiar these and with some of the other issues, check out this link: Save the Internet : Join the Fight for Internet Freedom. Net Neutrality issues are complicated...

Read the FAQ to get familiar with some of these issues.

If you support Net Neutrality, do take the time to sign the petition at the site.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 7/04/2006 01:22:00 PM | Permanent link | (1) Comments

Anonymous Leigh-Ann sent us a woof // July 07, 2006

WIth people like Senator Ted Stevens in charge of regulating things like net neutrality, we should probably all be concerned:

http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/index.blog?entry_id=1512499   

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Canceling AOL - on MSNBC.com

I've spent over ten years as an administrator of several types of forums and continue to be involved with many online projects requiring internet communication, so I'm rather familiar with many of the mobius loops by way of challenges presented by America On Line and its customers as it regards connectivity.

So I got a kick out of this report at MSNBC Canceling AOL can be a tough call and its related links this morning! :)

I had AOL in the early 90s and my opinion is that it remains a nice BBS sort of community, its own sort of Planet AOL -- but AOL is simply not true internet connectivity. That said, there are many ISP which really do not live up to the name of Internet Service Providers, in the sense that "Service" was once intended to mean!

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 6/22/2006 10:38:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Monday, June 19, 2006

Computer Security - Download Nightmare

One of several internet security newsletters I get featured this story of how an innocent seeming download turned out within seconds to be a Security nightmare.

Anyone that downloads anything from the web (including web pages to be viewed like this one!) should take heed. There are many stories in the category of "Most Recent Horror Stories" at the C|Net site. I've read several accounts on various other sites as well, where merely clicking 'no' when prompted with the question, "Download now?", may actually trigger the download regardless of your selection. -- Perhaps, closing the browser window entirely may be safer in some cases.

There are increased warnings regarding potential for malignant and invasive javascript worms. Possibly the only way to be immune is to disable javascript in all one's browsers, except perhaps tweaks permitted for trusted sites.

A lot of webpages are built with bells and whistles that use relatively innocent javascript, such as blogrolling tools which let you know when pages have updated to tools that figure out which browser you are using, in order to present that web page correctly.

Malware developments along these lines could get very interesting as more people may once again decide to turn off javascript. It wasn't long ago that we often disabled javascript because it didn't always work properly, and now, perhaps javascript is enabled so well, that it is just about the most unsafe way to surf. If disabled, elements of fancy web pages with javascript (including navigation) will not load and will need to be rewritten -- if plain text HTML links are not already included.

Related Links:
C|Net - Antivirus and Internet security information
About.com Antivirus
F-Secure - News from the Lab
Information Week - Security

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 6/19/2006 03:57:00 PM | Permanent link | (2) Comments

Blogger yawningdog sent us a woof // July 07, 2006

I just heard about 'negative' agreements. If you hit the X and close a pop up, you may have justed negatively agreed to the service. I guess this is really appearing in pop ups that show up after you make an online purchase. The company you are buying from gives your credit card info to the pop up company. (That would be the last purchase I did with such a company.)

Hit F4 to close out pop ups.   

Blogger Semavi Lady sent us a woof // July 08, 2006

I do a lot of research online and sometimes end up on spammy sites that try to install things or give weird javascript pop ups. Sometimes I have such a bad feeling about the site, I shut down the browser entirely. Then enter the site into my hosts file as a 127.0.0.1 (localhost) which means that next time I end up going to that website, my computer points to itself instead of going there. Pretty useful since I'm not ready to entirely turn off javascript for all sites.   

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Safety of Internet Search Engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask....

When you do a search on a search engine, you normally don't worry much about getting your computer infected for merely clicking on a site in the search result and merely glancing at it. However infection vectors have become very sophisticated and exploit known and unpatched bugs in popular software.

The Safety of Internet Search Engines is a brief summary by Mary Landesman at About.com of a report by McAfee regarding the safety of Search Engine use.
. . . the researchers point out that with an estimated 5.7 billion searches conducted in the US per month, that "even a 5% incidence of red/yellow sites would mean 285 million clicks to these sites every month from search engines." This makes search-scanning services such as the recently debuted Scandoo all the more attractive.

Check out the link above and check out Scandoo. You may want to bookmark Scandoo and begin using it for all your searches. It is not a new search engine, it is a realtime link evaluator of search results from Engines that you probably already use. From Scandoo, you pick the engine you want to search.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 5/16/2006 02:51:00 AM | Permanent link | (0) Comments

Sunday, April 30, 2006

Neighborhood Phishing Watch - Fried Phish!

CNET News.com reports on PIRT, a Neighborhood watch for phishing launches.

CNET writes:
Despite industry efforts, phishing is still on the rise, and experts predict that scams will become increasingly sophisticated. A record 9,715 phishing Web sites were spotted in January, according to an Anti-Phishing Working Group paper (PDF here). The PIRT group aims to get consumers more involved in the phishing fight and bring down malicious sites more quickly.
In that PDF is included this interesting bit:


Highlights
• Number of unique phishing reports received in January: 17,877
• Number of unique phishing sites received in January: 9715
• Number of brands hijacked by phishing campaigns in January: 101
• Number of brands comprising the top 80% of phishing campaigns in January: 6
• Country hosting the most phishing websites in January: United States
• Contain some form of target name in URL: 45 %
• No hostname just IP address: 30 %
• Percentage of sites not using port 80: 8 %
• Average time online for site: 5.0 days
• Longest time online for site: 31 days


Many phishes were not being reported by anyone so the sites remained up and remained as sources of potential identity theft. In some ways, this is like turning the other cheek when you see a crime in process.

One of the most amazing and simple things to do, is that if people would just turn off the HTML in their incoming email, they would immediately be able to see phishing mails for what they are.

There's really not much one can do when people want their email formatted like a webpage with hidden code and scripts underneath! People who read their email in plain text are less vulnerable to hidden code in their emails.

Some links that explain this and show how to turn off HTML in many email programs:
• About.com Security with plain text email
• More Whys, and How to fix most email programs

My interest in Internet security is quite high because of many aspects of the jobs I do online.

On my sidebar, I always have a link to the About.com Antivirus site and a feed for the latest news. I also include a feed for Internet Hoaxes because not only are many people susceptible to security breaches, but there's a lot of forwarded nonsense from the nicest people who forward things just in case it might be true.

I'm finding it a lot faster for me to submit the phish URLs to the PIRT Fried Phish site. Hopefully they can make a difference, but I trust if the job gets overwhelming, they will also turn the problem URLs to the appropriate authorities who may have more resources in this battle.

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Semavi Lady woofed at @ 4/30/2006 03:28:00 PM | Permanent link | (0) Comments