Test of Open Office with Weblog Publisher

In preparation for my trip to Patagonia in a few weeks, I've been making preparations, including buying a cute little netbook to write my blog entries with. It's a big step up from the IPAQ and Bluetooth keyboard I used on the Alps trip a couple of years ago. This device, while heavier, runs real Windows, has a real hard drive, has much more battery, and enough screen to read Web sites on.

In order to keep costs down, I've opted to use Open Office. So far, I find it quite good enough for documents – and the price is right. So, this is my test for easy updates to my blog, using the Sun Weblog Publisher. If you see this, the test was successful.

Here goes!

Hurray! Fafblog! is back!

Fafblog! back to save the universe.: "So for the last five years all the liberals and the hippies and the nattering nabobs of normalcy have been coming up to Giblets and going 'Was the war a mistake Giblets?' and 'Are we losing the war Giblets?' and 'Oh look at all the dead people Giblets, maybe we should stop the war.' And the correct answers to these questions have been 'Shut up,' 'Shut up you traitor,' and 'We'd be winning already if you'd just shut up.'"

Test Post via mail-to-blogger

I've been trying to test the mail-to-blogger feature for months, now, but haven't been able to actually create the e-mail address needed for this. I read the support forums, but didn't see this problem. So, I sent a message to support and got a reply back (which I inadvertently deleted) which promised some action. Didn't hear for weeks and, as of last night, it still didn't work. So, I looked at the support group forums again. Still nothing useful, so I posted again and I sent another message to support. Still didn't hear anything, but now I can define that secret e-mail address. Don't know if my messages had any impact, which is not a good kind of support experience, but I'll take the functionality.

So, here goes...

Back, Though I Haven’t Been Gone

I don’t have a good explanation for the hiatus, except that time passes whether we blog or not. So, here we are, two months gone.

I wanted to start back in with a shout-out to those writers that keep me coming back to the Web, ‘cause I have been reading, even if not writing. These are the ones that give me a little frisson when I see a new entry in my blogroll.

I welcome my son’s new blog. It took me a couple of entries to get over the annoyance of needing a MySpace id to comment. I’ve always liked his writing and am glad to see him exercising it again. By the way: Happy Birthday, Allen!

I appreciate how much Karan at Flummel Flummer Flummo is able to share and how clearly and cleverly she writes it.

When Neddie Jingo writes about the local history he finds in his back yard, I find myself looking around my own place and wondering what might be buried in the local mud flats. I can’t usually keep up when he writes about music, but I love the ride when he cuts loose on one of his shaggy dog tales.

Spc. Freeman has a poet’s heart and a job in one terrible place. I appreciate both his writing and his commitment to the task in front of him.

Christopher Soghoian writes interesting posts about security issues -- not a trivial achievement. I learned of his blog when he hit the computer trade press for writing an airline boarding pass generator as a way to illustrate the thinness of the protection that our airport security system provides.

Blue Wren writes long, passionate, political harangues and deft, closely-observed descriptions of her own corner of the world.

Avraham amazes me with his testimony from Mogadisho, though it’s been a month now since his last posting (and, of course, there is reason to worry).

Meta: Back in the Blogger

The work project I was bending all of my energy toward through the fall has, more or less, been completed. (When is an application development project ever finished?) It’s taken me this long to recover my energy from that push (and to get over my irritation over how under-appreciated it was).

I’ve converted my blog to New Blogger Beta a few weeks ago and I’m going through my old postings and tagging labeling them.

With the exception of that last quarter collapse, the first year of blogging has been interesting. Not much of a readership, only a few comments, but I find it interesting to make myself write and to do so publicly. I try to actually write something, rather than react or just post something someone else has written. That means it takes some inspiration and some energy. It also means I try to stay close to what I know, which limits me considerably, and calls for even more inspiration. I think I’ll keep it up.

Meta: Remote Blogging (Return)

I meant to revise this entry, but decided to leave it there and just complete my thoughts here. In adding the links to that earlier entry, I see that it illustrates some of the defects of “real time” posting – most of the post was spent setting up the point, too little time to develop my thoughts, and no chance for revision within the limited time available on the public equipment. So, here’s my attempt to be more thoughtful.

The first issue is the practical one of how to actually draft the entry. In Ashland, I attempted to use public Internet access, but it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I know that there were more public machines a few years ago than I found last weekend. More and more, “internet café” is coming to mean “wireless.” There are obvious benefits for a business to shift from providing computers to providing wireless access (less equipment expense, lower support costs, fewer security issues, and less space required). What that’s meant for Ashland is, besides the public library (which has quite a few free, public terminals), there are three public machines that I could find. Two are in a couple of coffee shops and are available for free and the third is in a copy shop, available for a minimal fee. None of these places were open on Sunday and demand was high for them all (although I didn’t try to copy shop this time). It may be that the days of relying on public machines for anything more than a quick e-mail or blog entry during business hours are over.

A personal laptop, then, fits the new world of wireless. There are a couple of other readily-apparent advantages: it’s available for writing whenever you are and you can take notes, draft, revise, and store for when you can upload to the ‘net. It really helps with the immediacy. It also has all of the tools that you are used to. (That was one of the obstacles with the two Macs in the coffee shops. Not complaining about Macs, I’m just very much less familiar with them.) It’s unlikely that I’d ever take a laptop on a hike, but it could work on a boat trip (as long as I had good protection for it). Drawbacks? More to carry, more airport trouble, one could spend too much time on the computer and not enough observing where one is, and the expense, of course.

For this trip, a laptop would have been nice, as I didn’t actually meet my objective of blogging what we were doing or seeing. It was just too hard to get the writing done in the limited times I had on the machines. A laptop back at the room could have met the need for drafting in closer-to-real-time and also allowed for a chance to review the entry before I post.

Italy in October? I dunno…

A good entry written on the day that something happens has a freshness that the more thought-over posting a few days later doesn’t. And there’s no freshness comparison at all with the entry written a week after returning from the trip. Each has its strengths: immediacy, perspective, and mature consideration, respectively. The real problem with me, though, is that I tend to wait too long for that mature consideration and other things arise to interfere and normal life returns and then I’ve got nothing. Or, at least, nothing that seems very important, anymore. Better to have something, perhaps, even if it reads like the superficial drivel of the sunburned and novelty-sated tourist.

I dunno…

Meta: Remote Blogging

I'm writing this from the public library in Ashland, Oregon, where my wife and I have made our annual pilgrimage to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We'll have our usual grueling theatrical two-a-days, interspersed with good meals and other lounging-about-type activities.

I've not blogged from the road before. A lot of the trips we make are not well suited to taking the time to do this. Either that or there is no possibility at all, such as when I'm off the grid (thankfully) on a hike or on a small boat. This trip offers more chances, though the clock is ticking on my 30 minutes here in the library. (So, I'm going to focus on the text and will come back later for an update and some prettying-up. Accomplished 8/13/06.)

I find it hard to write well about a trip after it is over. You can see some evidence of this from the abortive attempt to write about our January British Virgin Islands trip. Still, there is some advantage to writing after the event, for the perspective that reflection brings. Unfortunately, the energy the trip brings wanes once I've been plunged back into the workaday routine. So, we'll see what immediacy brings.

We drove straight down I-5 for almost 400 miles without mishap yesterday. Made it on one tank of gas, too, thanks to Prius. It's warm, even hot, with temperatures in the low 90's predicted for the weekend. There's a bit of a breeze and the air is dry, so it's not oppressive. We wandered around town a little this morning, making dinner plans and talking about what we want to do over the next few days. This activity is my plan for the morning and early afternoon. Then, we'll have a matinee of King John in the New Theater.

Thirty minutes is up...

Messy Desk Contest

In response to Blue Wren’s challenge, here’s what on my desk, right now, besides an irregular, but noticeable layer of dust:

1. An older, but serviceable HP Deskjet 895Cse which needs a new color cartridge (it doesn’t print green anymore).

2. A Mountaineers Go Guide, July 2006 issue, and a stack of printouts (lacking in green) from the ConsumerReports.org Car Buying Kit (it’s a bit of a sore subject).

3. A stack of Grand Circle Travel (Small Ship Travel 2006, Travel Favorites 2006, and Europe 2006) catalogs my parents gave us. On top of that, a sheet of notes about airfare to Italy, which we’re visiting in October. That’s capped by my oldest nephew’s graduation announcement.

4. A small, wooden, decorated box with a very intricate inlaid top that my parents brought us from their last trip (on Grand Circle Travel) to the Middle East.

5. This computer’s monitor and speakers, which are usually turned off.

6. A plastic puzzle, which supposedly can be manipulated into a Rubic shape from its current misshapen, pointy blob of smaller cubes strung together with elastic. I’m beginning to think that I’ll never solve it.

7. A couple of note pads. Three Mountaineers release forms that I’m really supposed to send in. Three pens and a mechanical pencil. A white rock and a piece of green glass that I picked up off an Olympic National Park beach in the first weekend in July.

8. A stack of books, from the bottom:
Photoshop Elements 3, the Missing Manual edition (O’Reilly)
Mediterranean Europe on a Shoestring (Lonely Planet)
Venice (Lonely Planet)
Tuscany and Umbria (Frommer’s)
Pocket Rome (Fodor’s)
Rick Steve’s Italy 2006
Olympic Mountains Trail Guide (Mountaineers)
Backpacking Washington (Wilderness Press)
100 Hikes in Washington’s South Cascades and Olympics (Mountaineers)
Baedeker Rome (Macmillan Travel)

9. A Non Sequitur leaf-a-day calendar, with today’s offering titled “Birth of the Atkins-Shmatkins Rebellion.” Sometimes I don’t get Non Sequitur.

10. And, in the corner, a four-bin stacking file, which isn’t as full as it usually is. My stack, which is on top and often over-flows the top and will even, on occasion, spontaneously slide off into the paper recycling collection below it, is less than half full, though some of the items have been there a long time. On the bottom: a pamphlet from the Olympia Community Yoga Center titled Yoga Basics and a pretty goofy 8 x 10 of me in my friend’s boat. The next bin is my wife’s. It’s more full that mine, but less full than it usually is. I’ll leave its contents to her consideration. The bottom two are quite sparse – they were for my kids, but they’ve pretty much stopped getting mail here.

11. The odds and ends: a plastic coaster, an Oregon Shakespeare Festival bookmark, an extra mouse pad, and a small note with a list of things to remember to take to the beach house.

Break Too Long

No good excuse for the long break. I’m sorry to have disappointed my reader, but I’m ready to go again.

Meta

When I started this, I resolved to do as little writing about blogging as possible. I could go on and on about how this might work, or should work, or could, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do here. And, yet, here I am, dissatisfied with what I’ve been able to do: only about an entry a week.

In the first place, I do this at a time of very low energy for me. I can’t say I have a very hard job, but it takes a good part of my creative energy. Most evenings, I don’t feel that I have the push to finish a useful post.

Second, it turns out to be harder to do this in what feels like an empty space. In my other writing, at work, it always feels like I’ve an audience, even when I don’t get any response. I know the people I’m sending whatever it is to. It keeps me on my toes.

Finally, this is just plain harder to do than I thought, going in. It doesn’t help when I read something smoother, funnier, more eloquent, or better informed than I can muster. Thinking it through in preparation, I always imagine the results as so much more effective and interesting than I find when I write them out.