Firefox Catching on.. Readership up..

ron thomas

From our statistics page...We had the most people loading the page yesterday than we have ever had. Also, the most foreign country downloads. About 130 page loads yesterday.

When we first extoled the virtues of Firefox we saw that three people started using it... Our statistics now indicate 20 people.

This gives me feedback into what folks like ... I think that you all like pictures such as the Spring time photos because that is when all the activity started. We need more photographs..

How About That Tree Picture?

RSS

ron thomas

What? What? What the heck are you yaking about now? Well you have been following my new trip to the computer to read the newspaper... Well, hardly any time at all goes by before you start hearing the initials RSS... That's computer geek speak for "REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION".

So we signed up for a free RSS FEED to see what all the hullabaloo was about. Well now, turns out this is a dandy for news readers. You select from the huge offer list of things that interest you and then they give you your own personal web page with gobs of stories from different sources. There is a discrptive sentence with each headline so that you can decide if you are interested. If you are just click and read. Your RSS FEED page is updated continuously throughout every day which means the news is current and upto date as it happens and is reported.

Sources that are offered are national such as the New York Times, wire services and a host of others. There is even a part with some of them that put your favorite blogs such as this website on the feed and everytime there is a new post it shows up on the RSS.

I am a neophyte here and like Alice in Wonderland have fallen down a fascinating rabbit hole.

Start a new club...

ron thomas

Hey what kind of a club meeting would you like to see formed? I like agates, finding, tumbling and polishing them. Fossil collecting is neat too. Any interest in calling a first ever Rock Hounds club meeting?

Tuesday computer club meeting..

ron thomas

If you are coming and you have a laptop computer bring it... It makes it easier to share stuff or troubleshoot problems. Yes Wayne bring it. Still no structured meeting... Just talking and sharing... Seeing if this a good start up club. If we have ideas and there are enough of us we can ask the Social Club to help our start up. If not , well there is always coffee and doughnuts and good company..

We would like to know (taxes)

ron thomas


We have heard around the park an interesting idea from about 3 sources now that folks are deducting that portion of their (lease rent) that is added on by the park's owners as their tax increase each year. Our folks are counting it as property tax passed on to them by the owners. This certainly seems fair to us but the IRS and state do not always share our opinion of what is fair.


So, if you have information that we could look at or someone with the tax authority we could call to get information on how to do this we would appreciate a tip. If we do find out anything that shows how to do this we will certainly let everyone know about it.

Here is Jim Rose's first picture using Picasa...
I put it here this time but soon he will be doing it himself!!

We will be talking about Picasa at the computer club meeting on Tuesday at 1:00pm

the Newspaper.. Goodbye....

ron thomas

Today I said goodbye to an old friend... The morning newspaper. I am completely using the internet now for a newspaper and it is better than it ever was. Also, it is free.. That most favorite word of the senior lifestyle.

Since a lot of people have a laptop computer it can go with you when you are traveling and you can access your favorite newspaper anywhere whether you are in Miami or Phoenix.

Now I tried this once before with Internet Explorer as a browser and it was cumbersome..But with FireFox as a browser it is a breeze and indeed easier than a paper news media.

Firefox let's you easily adjust the type size so that it fits the page and doesn't go spilling off the sides like Internet Explorer does. This means you don't have to scan left and right with the mouse as in Internet Explorer. If you need reading glasses to read the newspaper you can toss them. Firefox easily expands the type to the size that is comfortable for you. Just go to the view menu and select Type Size and increase it until you can see it just fine.

Next Firefox has this neat feature that put your very favorite bookmarks in their own private toolbar across the top of the page. Here I put the links for the Oregonian and USA Today and a super bonus we found during this setup process a full comics page that you build with your own choices of over 100 daily cartoons from a Texas newspaper.

This morning was my launch date and I am well pleased with the result. Refinements that I will shortly include are links to my favorite national columnists. With that tool bar, when one article is finished you move on to the next. Use your mouse wheel to scroll or the down arrows on the Keyboard.

If there is interest in the comments we will definitely talk more about the how to do it.

Meanwhile I expect to show this off at the Computer club meeting at 1:00 PM on Tuesday.

Spring begins on the hill...

ron thomas

Left click a picture to enlarge it.... then come back here by using your browsers back arrow.

To save a picture ..Right click it and select "SAVE IMAGE AS" .Then give it a name and tell it to be saved in MY Pictures on your computer.

To make it your desk top picture ... right click on it and select "SET AS WALLPAPER"

Blogger..

ron thomas

I have an idea... It might work... At the very least if you have about five minutes... Well, have a look at the following link. This is the link to Blogger... The folks who make our web page possible. If you go there you are going to be able to take a tour of their site and see how easy it is to do this.


One other idea such as how to send pictures directly to our website by yourself is discussed there too. Fortunately for me my trustee side kick, Jim Rose, is always ready to try something new on his computer. He has mastered Picasa, the photo program that we have touted in several articles here on the site... He loves it. Picasa is an integral part of putting pictures on the website... Now I have asked him to download HELLO which is the next step... That also is free and has a link on the left side of the page. You will find these programs discussed on the Blogger site too.


At any rate I expect to see Jim Rose's pictures here any day now.


Just give this link a look... I'm thinking many of you with those new digital cameras are going to love this... A new hobby is waiting... I promise... We will probably be discussing stuff like this at the new computer club meeting at 1:00 pm April 12th.


Now the link:

BLOGGER

JIM DODDS SAYS..

in an email from Jim Dodds

Thursday I will be placing an order with Tiger Direct, they have some really outstanding offers right now. 120 Gb hard drives at 69.99, moitors, free cd-rw, free wireless routers, etc. DDR 1 Gb Memory, $500.00 IBM Think Pad notebooks, 4 Mega Pixel with
3x Optical Zoom $99.97
the likes. If anybody wants to be included in the order it will save on frieght over everybody ordering individually. Their site is of course www.tigerdirect.com

Today a concerned resident spoke about ...

ron thomas

Some folks stopped by to speak to me about the fact that you can enter your phone number into the Search Engine... GOOGLE. It will then tell the name and address of that phone number and draw a map to your front door. This panicked them as they had never heard of it before. They immediately contacted Google and had their information removed.


This has been around for quite awhile. As time moves forward you will know more and more about each other. Every bit of knowledge in the world is easily stored on a computer. Your particulars make it to some data base somewhere every time you fill out any kind of form... Whether it is on the internet or at a local store. Your information is a matter of public record on many government data bases.. In time someone will sell information about you to some advertising company... And so it goes... This has been referred to as the age of information and they (whoever they are) have an insatiable appetite for knowledge about you.


Personally, I don't think you can avoid having information about you on the net... Take our tiny little web site for instance. Probably several times a day or at least every two or three days everything written here is digested by scanning robots looking for names and facts and then categorizing them and then passing it on to Yahoo or MSN or Google or hundreds of other search engines. Later a person may do a search for that name or fact and it will show up. Over time our entire civilization will be at your finger tips. The only way to stop your information from reaching the search engine databases is not to give it to anybody ever.. And that is just not going to happen in my opinion. We've opened Pandora's Box and now we have to live with what came out. Just keep in mind the smallest request for information on you for whatever reason is going to go on a computer and from there it's an easy step to some company's data base.

How to keep the Gini bottled up and use her for our wishes...

ron thomas


We have this powerful gini locked up and she is forced to grant many of our whims just because we have put a lot of restraints on her. Let her loose on her own and she will wreak havoc and cause serious injury and destruction without a second thought.


Because of what happened at the clubhouse during the breakfast preparation I thought you should know more about Jeanie and how she works.. If you knew that you would know what to do next time plus you wouldn't be prone to make a mistake like I was hearing from several different directions that would just remove her constraints and let her run wild.... Beleive me you don't want to see that happen... I have and not only is it dangerous and ugly it is very scarry.


Our Jeanie has a second name... perhaps you know her by that? It's Electricity...


While cooking up the breakfast the ladies were getting pretty frustrated with the electricity because the circuit breakers kept tripping out and interrupting the cooking. First it was on then it was off... Our ladies were upset.
"Couldn't something be done?" "This wiring stinks!" "The breakers must be bad!" "They need to do something about this!" "Why don't we just upsize the circuit breakers 5 or 10 amps?"


Let's take a break here and talk about what happened and why it did. First, what is a circuit breaker and how does it work in simple language? Ever look down inside your toaster and see those glowing wires(elements) while your bread is baked into toast? Well that is what a circuit breaker does. I know you think that's crazy a circuit breaker looks like a switch it even says "ON" and "OFF" on it. Well, you are right it is a special kind of switch. Inside this circuit breaker there is a precision wire that heats up just like the toaster wire does as electricity flows through it. The more electricity that flows through that wire ...the hotter it gets. The wire, in this case, is designed to reach an exact temperature and then trip the switch off. That is what was happening. The circuit breaker was too hot and so it turned off the electricity.


Each circuit breaker is sized to trip before the wire that goes through the walls to the outlets from becoming hot enough to ignite and burn the kitchen, house... whatever ... down. So, you can now see why we don't want to increase the size of the circuit breaker from say 20amps to 40 amps? Well if you don't, look at it this way.. At 20 amps the wire is as hot as it can get... At 40amps it would be cherry red and it would be in your walls heating things up.... Not a good thing.


OK ok ok.... Why did the circuit breaker heat up then? Simple... Look at all the cookers and fryers and ladies with plugged in thing a ma jigs making that mamouth breakfast. Each one has a current rating and anything that cooks stuff uses a lot of electricity (amps). Too many high electricity users on the circuit at one time.... circuit breaker heats up and trips.. Praise be that the circuit breaker worked or we would have burnt the place down.


What can be done? Well, we can see when a breaker trips it has too many devices using its wire. What you have to do is go to a remoter location (which will be on a different circuit breaker) and run an extension cord from another outlet to the kitchen and plug some of the stuff into that. That way we share the electrical load around.


Now if we used the kitchen, like we did on that day, on a regular basis it might pay to have new extra lines from new circuit breakers wired in permanently.


One other cause of this electrical problem was loose fitting recepticles. You know... That's when you plug a device in and it falls out of the recepticle. that causes a high resistance connection which... causes more electricity to be used. There are a number of them in the clubhouse and they should be replaced.

A joke ...

from kim kommando's web site...

A mushroom walked into a bar and bought everyone a drink. Said one
person at the bar,
"You're a fun guy."

This is a joke... you may have to think about it for a bit.

EAsTer Bunny is alive and well @ LVH!!

ron thomas

For all those that are young at heart. Don't dispair the Easter Bunny is alive and well at LVH. The Easter Bunny is an idea and as such does not live a mortal life such as ours but remains as long as those that think about it wish. And... folks here do wish it to be so. Conversations with many people in the park indicate they still want to beleive. Privately, some have offered to help with the gathering and distributing of those colorful plastic eggs for next year.

Perhaps that is the true, positive, legacy that JoJo Rabbit left us ... that her example will continue to be emulated in our community and the Easter Bunny will continue here.

Now we see that the JoJo Rabbit had to work way to hard showing us the way ... We are hoping that future rabbits and rabbit helpers come forward to volunteer to keep this fine traditon.