Sharing photos, videos, vintage images I've discovered, and -- occasionally -- commentary and thoughts from retired life and travels.

writing

A reconstructed history of my general purpose blog(s).

February 26, 2011

imageToday, I found and recovered my very first blog post – and have posted it here on the date it was originally published, September 14, 2004.  It was recovered from the Internet Archive’s WayBackMachine.

As best as I can tell, I abandoned Skedaddle’s Log after only a very few blog posts.  During the next month, I established 3 niche  blogs and North Farnham Freeholder, with all but that very first post moved to it.

I had been trying to make some income online for a while. At the time there was no way to place ads on blogspot  (which was also known as blogger).  After looking at several different blogging platforms, I decided to self-host and use WordPress, moving North Farnham Freeholder to the web host I had been using for a while.

A couple of years later, Exit78 was established, with many of the old posts being moved to exit78.com/weblog.  Then, in early 2009, my blogging at Exit78 was moved to the root directory, exit78.com.  Unfortunately, I made a change that wouldn’t let me access the original Exit78 location and, when I tried to fix that, I ended up losing many of the older posts.

imageI’ve been able to recover quite a few over time and, yesterday, found that many that hadn’t been recovered were available on the Internet Archive WayBack Machine.  I’ll be recovering those, republishing them here on Exit78 at their original publish date.

Do remember when you first started blogging?

Do you still have or can you find your very first blog post?

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Windows 7, Christmas and a long range project

December 30, 2009

The only program that I’ve found so far that I wasn’t able to install on Windows 7 was my OmniPage 14 OCR program.

For those who don’t know the term, OCR stands for optical character recognition – in other words, a program that recognizes text in a scanned image and turns it into editable text.

For Christmas, I received a copy of OmniPage 17.  I plan to use it in a long range project that involves old public domain books.

Like any other processing software, an OCR program will to some degree be limited by the quality of the data, or, in this case, images, that is provided as input.

For my first test of the program, I loaded a pdf file of a 440 page book published in 1913.  OmniPage 17 was able to load and process the entire book, unlike previous versions of OmniPage and other OCR software that I have used, though  I’m sure that, at the time, they had also been somewhat limited by the operating systems and computers.

During the processing, OmniPage 17 flags text that it is not “certain” of and provides the user with the opportunity to correct or ignore the text.  The percentage of flagged text is far lower than I expected.

After the book was processed by OmniPage, I saved it and proofed it in Microsoft Word.

The proofing was, by far, the hardest part of the process.  I read the entire book, with much more attention to detail than I would have if I had just been reading it for pleasure, in order to correct any errors that the OCR might have made as well as to italicize words that were in italics in the book.  Again, the number of corrections needed were far fewer than I expected.  I suspect that there were be very few corrections needed when converting modern documents from image to text.

What was the book that I converted, some might wonder?

It’s part of the long term project, so I don’t want to be too specific at this time other than to say that it was a diary of a lady who had been raised in privilege.

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Windows 7 isn’t bad at all

November 8, 2009

windows7

So far, my experience with Windows 7 has been positive.

All of my files on the old computer, including images, copied over to the new computer painlessly through a wireless connection using the “Windows Easy Transfer” wizard.  Of course, most of my files are on three external hard drives – photography files replicated on each of the three –, so there was no need to transfer most of them.

Still, there was 13 gigabytes to transfer wirelessly, and that took several hours.  I spent that time reading, watching TV, and sleeping, since it wasn’t done by bedtime.

There are a number of ways that Windows 7 is significantly different from XP.  It’s going to take a while to get used to some of the ones I’ll be using.

I realize, of course, that most of the features of Windows 7 first appeared in Vista.  In fact, one article I read complained that Windows 7 was little more than a service pack for Vista.  The argument was that, for the price of Windows 7,  there was no reason to upgrade Vista to Windows 7 and that the only good reason to go to Windows 7  was if you were buying a new computer.

However, going from Windows XP to Windows 7, many Windows features are very new to me.

The biggest change is the way the task bar at the bottom of the screen is used.

I usually have a lot of windows open at one time.  In XP, I would have the entire bar filled with  application icons and I would use the bar to navigate between them.

In Windows 7, a newly open application’s icon will appear on the task bar if it’s not already there. In this instance, when you close the application, its icon also closes.

One of the features that I like is that you can “pin” useful applications to the task bar.  Then, to open the application, all you have to do is click on it’s icon on the task bar.

When there are multiple windows of an application open, holding the mouse’s pointer over the application’s icon in the task bar displays all of the open windows for that application, as shown in the image below, which shows 7 open Firefox windows .

windows7-2

Microsoft has had some real flops over the years and I understand how a lot of IT professionals are going to be hesitant to move to Windows 7.

Large companies, though, are often slow to adopt new platforms.  The company I worked for had only just moved to XP about the time that Vista was coming out.

I still have not loaded Office on to my new machine, though I probably will install Office 2003.  I have installed Open Office and want to play with that for a while before I decide.

This blog post  my first WordPress post written using Windows Live Writer.

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Journaling, blogging and traveling — with a new solution

September 22, 2009

On my blogs, I like to share some of what we’ve seen and done while we are traveling.   I always seem to get behind and come up short with what I had planned hoped to do.

The same thing goes with my photos, but then, perhaps, that’s part of the problem.  I’m doing fairly well this time with the photos.  I have 3 1/2 days worth of images to go through.  Unfortunately, I’ve not finished with going through the photos from several prior trips.

I have a new solution that I think will work rather well.

Instead of trying to keep up with blogging while we are traveling, I will be journaling and photographing as we go.  The journal will be a pocket-sized moleskine notebook, where I will keep both brief notes as well as extended entries.  These, along with photographs, will be used to develop blog posts with “Commentary and images from the road.”

I started doing some of that this time, which is what enabled me to finish the trip with most of the images processed.  I will pick back up with the travel journal blogs from September 5th.

I am publishing all posts specifically related to our travels on two blogs, Exit78 and Haw Creek Out ‘n About.  Apart from our travels, these two blogs otherwise have different focuses.

Some of the days of our trip warrant  more than one blog post.  I will be mixing mostly topical posts with mostly pictorial.

We got back home on Friday and Karen headed out today for a week in Wisconsin where she will be taking care of the grandkids while our daughter goes to New York City with her husband on a business trip.

I get to stay home and go to work.

__________________________________

This post is being simultaneously published on Exit78 and Haw Creek Out ‘n About

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A list of 35….

July 8, 2009

The number 35:

Year 35 (XXXV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar.

Year 35 BC was a common year starting on Thursday of the Julian calendar.

35 mm film is the basic film gauge most commonly used for both analog photography and motion pictures
In years of marriage, the coral wedding anniversary

imagesThe designation of Interstate 35, a freeway that runs from Texas to Minnesota and the only freeway to have East/West divisions (in two places, the Twin Cities and the DFW Metroplex)

In Ancient Rome, the age of a man in his prime, at which he was eligible to become a consul.

The minimum age (in years) of candidates for election to the position of President of the United States, President of Ireland and President of Poland

Convoy of 35 Israeli soldiers, who were killed in the war of independence in 1948

The retired baseball jersey of Randy Jones

Lockheed Martin X-35_Lightning_flight-4_opt600x391_usafLicence Plate code of Izmir/Turkey.

The number of the French department Ille-et-Vilaine

The passing grade in many Indian Colleges (out of 100). Scoring a 35 is known to many students as getting a “Stamp”

____________

Sometimes creating a posts can be a simple as taking a hard left “out of the box.”  This post was completed and posted in less than a half hour.

day 35

note: information in this post is from Wikipedia

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Mea culpa on replies to blog comments

June 7, 2009

olbrich botanical gardens walk

I’m terrible at replying to blog comments.

It’s not that I don’t intend to do it, because I really do.  I think replying to blog comments is  important unless the number of comments is significant.

I’m just not very good add it.  It’s something I need to work on.

I even have filters set up on my gmail account so that emails notifying me of comments are “starred” — and, for me, “routine” email deletions are only of those that are unstarred.

So now I have a bunch of starred email going back to sometime in May reminding me that there are all of those comments that I need to reply to.

I’m going to do it.

I really am.

But first, I want to just say thanks to those people who have taken the time to read my posts and make comments — and I’m going to list all of those from blog posts that I have not replied to.

The first starred email for an unanswered comment is Virginia!. While I replied to most of the comments, one from Friar snuck in on  May 21st. It took me a while to figure out why I couldn’t post a reply and then I realized that my “window” of 14 days for comments had expired. (I’ve removed the automatic closure of comments for now.)  Others who commented were Vered, Michelle Gartner, Debo Hobo, Leslie, and teeni.

The next post with unanswered comments was totally unanswered.  It is Those Vultures on the Potomac and received comments from Dot, Betsy, Vered, XUP, Jean Browman, rose, teeni, and LisaNewton

For Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho …, again …, maybe …, probably, I receive 9 comments, from Betsy, Dot, Vered, Patricia (2 comments), rummuser, Debo Hobo, Michelle Gartner,and  Jean Browman.

Vered, rummuser, and  Debo Hobo commented on my Wednesday Weigh-In update for May 27.

THAT isn’t news! garnered 7 comments from Bob (no URL), Patricia, Davina, rummuser, Dot, Debo Hobo, and Natural.

That brings me up to after the beginning of the month.

So now I’ve done a little penance:  I’ve given a little link love, I responded to all of the comments mentioned here, and I’ve written a fairly long post for today.

Now, I just need to reply to the rest of the comments that are outstanding and keep at it — unless, by some magic, a post goes viral and I’m overwhelmed by comments…, or I start getting dozens of comments for each and every post…, but that ain’t gonna happen.

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