Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

Now where did I leave my linkage

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I almost never use URL shorteners except on Twitter. I like seeing the domain that a link is originating from, and as long as character count is not an issue as it is for Twitter or SMS, I do not want to click on a shortened URL and take the chance that it is not what it is advertised to be. I really like that TweetDeck gives you the chance to see the long version of the shortened URLs, and that FriendFeed expands the URLs for its feed. Sorry. Just paranoid, I guess.

So the closing of Tr.im won’t affect me much, if at all. Most of the shortened URLs I’ve used on Twitter, regardless of the shortener, are links to time-sensitive news stories and will probably expire within a few months even if I had used the full URL.

This did, however, make me think about linkage in general. It led me to backup my Delicious.com bookmarks, which I have not done in a very long time. I also scheduled some time to check my blogs and journals for dead linkage.

Of course, the big social media news of the day was that of Facebook acquiring FriendFeed. I’m still deciding what I think of that, probably because I don’t use either Facebook or FriendFeed to best advantage.

I am so sick of all the games and apps on Facebook, mostly the fact that game scores and quiz results are considered “news” for the news feed, that Facebook is mostly unusable to me. By the way, if you are a Facebook friend and have actually posted real news or better yet, photos, you might want to go old-school and email me or call me so I know that it’s worth digging through the so-called “news” to find whatever you’ve posted!

I joined FriendFeed a while back, but I haven’t quite figured out how it fits into my what-I-do online. Same with Ping.fm. I don’t currently use the social aspect of Delicious.com at all right now. I use it simply to make my most-used bookmarks available to me at any location. I suppose I should look into the sharing and social aspect as well. I guess I should take some time to update my social media social life in general. Talk about demented and sad, but social, huh?

(NaBloPoMo | August ’09: 10 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 198 of 274)

How did they know?

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Somehow the folks at Copyblogger knew exactly what was going to be in my head tonight when they published “The Most Horrible Blog Post Ever” today.

And I will take the advice to just go ahead and write something anyway.

I’ll still have at least one thing from today to push off into tomorrow, as I am just not getting a look that I’m satisfied with for the photo web page I mentioned yesterday. The other website update is finished, and while I didn’t make a large dent in the photo and movie archiving, I did make at least a little headway on the photo archiving.

I didn’t use my practice rally courses this evening. I wasn’t sure if the rain was going to come back (so of course it did not) and didn’t want to set up the signs if it was going to rain again. I did practice several exercises with each dog, though. Our fronts and finishes are very sloppy. I should have taken more time to teach accuracy from the get-go. Lesson learned, or perhaps that should be lesson forgotten from the days of the original Rottweiler wrecking crew!

I’m not sure yet what to plan for tomorrow, other than hoping my muse comes back and helps me to finish that photo web page. Dog training is a given, even if it turns out to be just 10 or 15 minutes for each dog. There are some new class sessions starting up in August, so I will put it on my list for this week to get the start dates and get us enrolled in one.

(NaBloPoMo | August ’09: 3 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 191 of 274)

Still in need of a more effective routine

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Here we are at the end of NaBloPoMo for July 2009. I didn’t write much on the month’s theme of “routine” although the struggle to establish an effective routine is an ongoing concern.

At the beginning of the month, I had hoped to establish some better routines for blogging, dog training and computer maintenance. I think I succeeded in one area only, that of computer maintenance, and particularly if success is equal to having current backups of everything important.

NaBloPoMo has gotten me into the habit of writing daily, but unfortunately I’m having difficulty shifting my writing time from extremely late night to early evening. Early morning was considered and rejected as a good time to write. One must be awake and alert to write. That is not me in the morning.

The dog training routine is now high priority. Freya and Axel both need to be ready for rally obedience trials in October or November. I’ll be training very few totally new exercises to either dog, so the challenge is to keep them (and myself!) from getting bored and sloppy.

(NaBloPoMo | July ’09: 31 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 188 of 274)

Things I want to talk about

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I’m running on empty for no apparent reason, so I’m just going to make a few notes about some topics I want to talk about, before I forget about them entirely.

  • I got my invite for Google Voice last week. I did set it up, but haven’t had a chance to play around with it much, nor have I tried to set up its BlackBerry client. I’m sure at least a couple of you out there might like to hear about it!
  • I wrote a little bit about WordPress for BlackBerry when it first came out, but I should probably do a more complete review. There have been six updates since then, over the space of less than a month, so the developers really are working hard on bug fixes and enhancements.
  • As you all know, Freya is working on her rally obedience titles. When Axel goes back out with Julia this fall, he will also be working on rally obedience titles along with his AKC championship. That is, if I make sure he knows all of the Novice stations before he leaves. With about two and half months to go, we should definitely be able to do that, and get some training posts out of it, too!

(NaBloPoMo | July ’09: 30 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 187 of 274)

Finally! WordPress for BlackBerry is here!

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The long-awaited WordPress for BlackBerry is here! I’m using it for this post, which will be rather short to prevent thumb cramps. So far, so good. It installed with no issues on my Verizon BlackBerry Curve 8330 running OS 4.5.0.131. I already had XML-RPC activated for my recent test of MoPress, so adding my blog and logging in went smoothly as well.

(NaBloPoMo | July ’09: 7 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 164 of 274)