Krazy Celtic's Hideout

Belonging
My older sister's blog

Blibby's Blog
My little sister's blog

Gixxer For Christ
My brother's blog

Grantian Florilegium
Dr. Grant: literary, bibliophile, wordsmithy, and professor

Blog and Mablog
Pastor and professor in Moscow, Idaho

A Proverb A Day
Short daily expositions and applications of a Proverb

The Evantine Abbey
My former landlord, self-proclaimed futilitarian

Roots by the River
The elder Wilson, providing practical encouragement to Christian living

Christus Rex
He's masculine during the week and feminine on Sundays

Trozzort's Tales
Got married, cut travel time to church by 75%

Blog of Nash
The Nashes like football and their kids

Joy in the Journey
Has cute kids.

Pointyshoes87
Those funny stories aren't made up

Filled With Truth
Adventures and thoughts of a Christian country girl

Danger Blog
Seeing the glory of God in the ordinary

Sacra Doctrina
Theology and family of Joel Garver

A Minor
Community-oriented blogger

This Classical Life
Young family living the classical life

A Cup of Rich
Fellow Celto-phile

Sir Jake
He's happily taken

Unriven
The writer, student, and Chicago style pizza lover

Gulf Coastal
Beside the sea

The High Post
Clever Christian chaps, triumvirate of family men

Wittenberg Hall
Discussing Christianity and beer

Weighing Glory
Somewhere chasing his hat

Down To A Sunless Sea
When Florida and Minnesota collide

Crash Into Me
No problems with authority

9:57PM | Google Grows On Me

or several years now, internet users from the casual to the devoted have used and favored Google to the extent that Google and The Internet are (erroneously) almost used interchangeably. I never really had any preference for using Google over Yahoo as my search engine, and certainly not for a home page. This was no knock on Google's search capabilities; my reason for not liking Google as much as Yahoo was Google's minimalistic website and features that were hidden a layer deeper than Yahoo's. But with Google's expanding "My Homepage" features and add-ons, and their choices of visual themes available to me the user, Google finally provides the main page content and all the news, entertainments, pithy quote generators, and tools that I want to see when I go to a website or my internet home page. In fact, Google's My Homepage look and feel and its quantity of features now so far outclass My Yahoo that for me, Google is to Yahoo as Firefox is to Internet Explorer in web browsers.

Speaking of these two web browsers, I am now probably 80% a Firefox user. I still have to use Internet Explorer for things such as MLB.TV (enables me to watch major league baseball games in streaming live broadcast over the internet) until I figure out why it is not working in Firefox. But for ordinary everyday browsing, Firefox is now my browser of choice. Again, just as with Google, Firefox is another trendy web choice among today's savvy users that I am only recently embracing. What separates Firefox apart is that is crashes less, and, best of all for frequent and curious internet users such as myself, is highly customizable. Firefox sports easily installed Add-ons, things which make surfing the web more tailored to the individual doing the browsing. For example, one of my favorite add-ons takes unclickable text links such as http://news.bbc.co.uk and automatically recognizes that text as a URL and makes it clickable like http://news.bbc.co.uk. There are hundreds of other Add-ons, some more advanced and specialized than others, such as community file sharing run through the browser, FTP clients built into the browser, and an add-on that enables you to use all that humongous storage space on your G-Mail e-mail account as an online hard drive. Another open-source (i.e. source code is freely available and the product is developed by teams of volunteers as a hobby) browser worth keeping an eye on is Flock, which is being engineered to be a "social browser", geared at making it easier to upload and share photos and other multimedia and build community with people of similar interests.

While trying to keep up with such things as baseball news, PHP, online web design journals, and web initiatives such as microformats (not employed on this blog, as is the case with so many techniques I am learning and practicing), I have sadly been unable to keep up with the dozens of blogs in my RSS Feedreader. I think I have 160 unread articles to sort through right now, and it is a losing battle. There are several blogs I could probably remove from my list though, to make keeping up less intimidating.

In the office at work I work off of two monitors side-by-side, linked into the same computer. I need that here at home.

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F r i d a y , M a r c h 1 6 t h

8:22AM | Geek Interests

haven't been a Star Wars geek in a while, but I like the United States Post Office's makeover of 400 of their blue sidewalk mailboxes to look like Star Wars robot R2-D2. This makeover is in commemoration of the 30-year anniversary of the first Star Wars movie release. The USPS website even has R2-D2 running around its screen. On March 28 the USPS will also release a commemorative stamp.
Story | USPS Website | Teaser Trailer

It's a little clunky at this stage since it has to be run on a tablet PC rather than a dash-mounted built-in car navigation system, but visually this looks like an advanced mobile GPS system that could be used in the car: GPS and Google Earth solution.

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M o n d a y , M a r c h 1 2 t h

8:23PM | An Update During The Passing Of The March Winds

ust a brief update so that I can say I made one. I am writing by the light of an ill-placed lamp, which may contribute to the terseness of this entry. The lamp of untoward placement is stationed where it is, only temporarily, because for the past week I have not felt like changing the light bulb in my bedroom's ceiling fan light. To show that connections can be made between anything and everything, I will demonstrate how the placement of this tall lamp is related to ET (the extraterrestrial not the television manure-sack of a show) and to my childhood. When I was particularly young, one of my worst fears at night was that perhaps when looking from the top of my bunkbed beyond the footboard of my bed, I would see ET's face staring back at me (he never showed up). Now when I wake up during the night, in the moonlit dimness of the room I might see a very real shape that could kind of resemble ET, just a skinnier version.

Well that president of ours finally did something to screw with me, just as he has for elderly folk, Mexicans, Iraqis, terrorists, and Cindy Sheehan. He sneaked a tricky one in there, springing the "spring forward" clock thing on me a few weeks early. Hence my alarm clock chirped at its regular Sunday morning time and I woke up with my regular list of Sunday morning things to do. Having taken extra time to prepare a nice hot breakfast, I soon discovered that I was an hour late in my schedule, only because my computer, which is privy to information that I am not, or at least has more memory (512MB to be exact), informed me. So I missed church, but even then the prez was not entirely victorious. No, Mr. President, your attempts at afflicting the earth with global warming were to no avail as the weather turned in a fine appearance yesterday, and I spent a second straight day outdoors - except when watching an excellent run by NC State in the ACC basketball tournament.

I have not been blogging but I have been behind the scenes, admittedly non-regularly, as I practice applying and practicing some new (for me) tricks and techniques to my server and webpage. I am trying to automate everything and make my blog more dynamic in function and database-driven. In other words, I am trying to create my own personal Typepad or similar service (only for myself), only mine is sure to turn out quite clunky. How's that for aspirations? I'll put that in my business model.

Baseball season is almost in full swing and in every spare moment at work I am giving myself to reading up on all the baseball and Phillies news that I can find, which leads me to reveal the blog of a good friend of mine, pitcher Curt Schilling of the Boston Red Sox, at http://38pitches.com/. This is an excellent blog and look into the mind of one of the greatest baseball pitchers who is nearing the end of his career, and is a recommended read for any baseball fan.

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