what's up

Lately it's been all book reviews, Thursday Challenges and classic poems here at promptings.This is just to let you know, there is a real person behind all the words - and photos, and here's what's up with me lately.

Wild bleeding heart - April 4, 2010 at Elgin Park in Surrey

(Click on any photo to enlarge)

I'm loving spring. It's early this year and so welcome. The trees are already in leaf. Daffodils are finished, tulips still opening here and there, the azaleas and rhodos,
the latter especially usually reserved for May, are popping all over the place.

Shield your eyes! Just had to capture this pink explosion of azalea color.

April 14, 2010 in Langley

I had some fun with my computer just over a week ago when I upgraded from Mac OSX 4 - (Tiger) to OSX 6 (Snow Leopard). I  always find installing software stressful no matter how easy it's supposed to be. Fortunately the install went smoothly, though I lost the ability to print for a few hours, until I got in touch with one of the boys at Simply who told me to 'simply' delete my printer, then add it again. It worked!

I also noticed, after a few days of the new OS, that all my applications were loading very slowly. Mail was positively spastic. Since Snow Leopard is supposed to improve speed, I wondered what I had done to make old Newton the exception. When things got ridiculous, I had visions of $$'s worth of repairs / memory upgrades etc. Before I did anything drastic, though, I tried the trusty old cure-everything fix from PC days: shutdown and restart. Voila! Just like that my computer was back to its zippy old self. What a relief!!

One of the main reasons I upgraded was for the Time Machine backup feature. Now I'm backed up daily - actually hourly as long as I leave it on - a good feeling. (A few days after I upgraded, hubby saw a feature on the evening news on another backup system - an external hard drive called Click Free. It looks interesting too!)

Creamy magnolia blossoms - captured on 

one of my walks around Langley this week.

Volunteer-wise the Alpha season is over. My job as kitchen setup and cleanup coordinator is done. It's nice to have Tuesday nights free again.

Writing-wise I've given my notice for the Poet's Classroom columns at Utmost. Two more and my columnist days there are done. I enjoyed writing those and learned so much. But after almost two years' worth of monthly articles I'm squeezed dry. It's time for someone else to take up the baton.

Tulips just outside our front door

I still write though - a poem a day so far in April using Robert Brewer's prompts at Poetic Asides. And I still blog daily at Other Food: daily devo's. Writing daily devotions is probably the most challenging and significant writing I've ever done - and I love it! What better subject to write about than the Bible, God, His relationship with us and ours with Him!

That's what's up with me. What about you?

of worms and websites

f you've been listening to the news this weekend, you've probably heard of the Conficker worm - an internet virus that has apparently infiltrated the bowels of thousands of Windows computers and is just lurking there, waiting for its next assignment. That could come as early as April 1st.

60 Minutes did a segment on it last night. Lesley Stahl didn't seem to have a clue about what its next move might be. The NY Times bits blog claims a bit more knowledge:

"Given the sophisticated nature of the worm, the question remains: What is the purpose of Conficker, which could possibly become the world’s most powerful parallel computer on April 1? That is when the worm will generate 50,000 domain names and systematically try to communicate with each one. The authors then only need to register one of the domain names in order to take control of the millions of zombie computers that have been created."

The Symantec article on Conficker tries to sound like they have the situation well in hand - of course: "If you’re worried about the Conficker worm striking on April 1st, don’t be." Of course, the spiel after that is to use their software to purify your computer.

Here's PC World's "Protecting Against the Rampant Conficker Worm."

(It's times like this I'm really glad I have a Mac, she whispers, trying not to sound gloatish.)

On another topic, find out how your website rates marketing-wise by putting it through its paces at WebsiteGrader.com. I did for my various blogs and website. I can tell you right now, yours won't have any trouble rating better than mine! It's obvious I'm fairly baffled by the process. Every single site I checked is missing meta descriptions and meta keywords. What are they, and how/where does one attach them?

is the internet messing with your head?

Do you think and read differently since you've entered the era of internet grazing? Nicholas Carr (The Atlantic Monthly) is wondering what's happening to his brain:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.

Read the rest of "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

And regarding an item about Kindle and the end of books and that I blogged about a bit ago, a writer on Slate begs to differ.

We'll do more and more reading on screens, but they won't replace paper—never mind what your friend with a Kindle tells you. Rather, paper seems to be the new Prozac. A balm for the distracted mind. It's contained, offline, tactile. William Powers writes about this elegantly in his essay "Hamlet's BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal." He describes the white stuff as "a still point, an anchor for the consciousness."

Read the rest of "Lazy Eyes - How We Read Online"

What about you? Can you still wade through dense writing on paper? Do you have the patience? Or do books actually calm you down?

Personally, if books really do have a Prozac-like effect, that may be just the reason I need to resist getting a laptop. Now when I'm away from the computer, I'm away. For the foreseeable I should probably resign myself to keeping it like that - to preserve brain normalcy if nothing else.

redeeming a bombed afternoon

My ventriloquist friend Maralee signed me up to take an Apple class with her in Vancouver yesterday. I took her word for it that it had something to do with i-photo (though I should have known to check it out online - she's new to Apple). It ended up being a seminar introducing Final Cut Server ("Meet Final Cut Server, media asset management and workflow automation software designed for the unique needs of film and video professionals." All for a meager $2000.) Thankfully the seminar was free!

It didn't take us long to realize we were well out of our depth.

So at the break we left the world of assets, proxies, metadata, productions and jobs. Before heading for home we drove around Stanley Park, and stopped at the Prospect Point Restaurant where we had ice-cream, then walked down to the lookout. That's one ok way to redeem a bombed afternoon.

frivolous friday

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

...and today I have one more thing to add to the conglomeration above - an exterior hard-drive which I bought yesterday and must now learn to use so that I can back up my computer, which hasn't crashed to this point, but a faint and steady beep from the CPU the other night had me a little worried.

passwords - strong like bull

If a new computer is part of your life since Christmas, new passwords will be too. How are you at making them up? With this password checker you can test any proposed password before using it.

Though it proves I've been pretty pathetic at making up passwords in the past, there are all kinds of articles with hints about how to make strong ones. Even I was able to concoct such a thing after I'd read these articles. Trouble is, those strong passwords don't only test the ingenuity of a potential hacker or thief, they also tax the memory of their owners. So what's worse - a computer that's been hacked into, or one that you thought was your friend but has just locked you out?