Fragments From Floyd

Since most of what I do that matters to me these days is either composing with words or with light images, the computer is central to the way I organize, create and express myself. So the recent (end of January 08) transition to Mac has been more than a mere technological transition, and consequently, has altered my workflow off and on for several months.

Do I feel like I’m completely over that particular hump? Yes. Mostly.

But with the fact that computer techology, software and culture are constantly changing, I don’t think anyone ever gets to DONE. Even so, I’m finding some tools that at least for a while, seem to help in that regard. One step in that direction…

I paid for the recent MacUpdate bundle, and from the mix, now have a few programs I’ll use every day–and a few I’ll rarely use.

LEAP is a beefed-up finder. It is running in the background all the time, and lets me easily find my blog images, most recently edited images, pdfs, and applications or any other file in a flash. It allows tagging but I haven’t gotten into that habit yet.

TYPINATOR is a word-correction and phrase typing utility that is always on.  All the phrases and urls I used to type out now come automatically with a few letters. Words I frequently screw up are corrected no matter what program I’m typing in.

MENU-CALENDAR-CLOCK is another program that runs in the Mac Menu Bar with a pop-up calendar connected to iCal, with a drop down of calendar events and tasks. I actually use it often. In fact, I’m coming around to the wisdom of using the calendar and email that comes with Leopard, including To-dos within mail.

I was about to pay for a $40 sound editor but the bundle package contained the $80 program SOUND STUDIO. The bundle costs $69. So I think I came out pretty well. I hope to start doing some podcasts using this latter program soon.

Later (now that you’re on the edge of your seats) I’ll mention some freeware I’m using with good gains in efficiency in my workflow.

Bad news: Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope released on May 13 is something I’ve been looking forward to for almost a year. Today I downloaded it and it won’t run on my Mac Pro without an upgrade to at 3D video card. Program uninstalled with much regret.

** I brought home a flat of a half dozen things yesterday and planted them before dark. This morning the temperature was 39 and I wonder if the “tender plants” made it. A fancy fence won’t keep out the cold. Or crows. Or moles. Or cutworms, potato beetles, bean beetles, flea beetles. A garden is a hard and fickle master.

** We walked pass some pokeberry yesterday on our accustomed path around the field and I reconsidered it briefly as a free wild food. I came back to the house and reviewed exactly WHY three boilings are recommended, and have decided the toxic risks are not worth the questionable nutrition. I did learn, however, that the Declaration of Independence was written in fermented pokeberry juice, so I am thus enriched.

** The escaped cows (just remembered I took a picture, still in camera) were in our pasture for two days before the owner just happened to drive by Monday afternoon. “Figured they were just up in our woods” he said, and that he would come back the next day to fetch them home–by which time they were nowhere to be found. Hamburger, anyone?

** Image above: Yellow Mandarin, a common lily of the Mt. Rogers area. Ever seen it? Tiny spidery pale yellow flowers hang underneath the arching plant that looks superficially like another lily common in the same habitat, Solomon’s Seal.

**Bending and twisting (translate: gardening) often flares up my lousy muscle condition called Myofascial Pain Syndrome. I was just getting over a bad flare from unloading the donkey poo with a shovel a week ago when we rushed to get yesterday’s nursery plants in the ground. Usually takes a day to catch up with me. Wish I knew a good physical therapist.

** We’re in Netflix Crisis and may end our run of mostly disappointing attempts to find movies both of us will watch from start to finish. I’m easier to please (or at least distract) than she is, but the very descriptive Super Bad was not just the name of the “coming of age” movie I’d expected was more of a guy thing. After fifteen minutes I decided it was a utter waste of time without redeeming moment one. I’m going to look for some recommended movie lists out there, but our tastes are apparently way off the “expert” opinions that make movies into blockbusters for the hoi polloi.

** Words I never imagined I’d hear in one phrase in my lifetime: Platypus Genome Project. My first impression was geewhiz! how neat to know all these interesting phylogenetic facts about the history of this vanishingly odd and rare creature. My second reaction was to rankle a bit at “science for science’s sake” in a time when the world is going to heck in a hatbox. But then, pure science often leads to practical science that makes a difference where people live.

I will have to confess, as I head toward the end of my 90 days of Apple free tech support, I still have problems. Unfortunately, they’re not the mechanical kind that Macintosh can help me with. It’s sort of like when the department store clerk asks “May I help you?” and all you can really say is “Yes, help me make up my mind if I really need (sought item) and should I pay this much for it and should get it here and get it now.”

Apple can’t help me get my blogging and web research mojo back. I just have to settle down and catch the rhythm, but I am having the devil of a time doing it.

When I realized how much of my 2 Gb of RAM gets called on simply by calling up Parallels to run a single PC program (almost always either OneNote, EccoPro or Quicken) I’ve started trying even harder to stay inside the Mac environment. And I’ve met with partial but not complete success–some coin spent, some freebies tried and discarded, a few kept. But the search goes on.

Issue du jour: OmniOutliner (trial download) allows the quick and flexible brainstorming of EccoPro. But it does not allow alarms to be set. ReminderFox extension, IWantSandy, BackPackit, Remember the Milk, and/or ToDoist have alarms, some only in paid versions. (I haven’t settled on a program for this function, either). These apps don’t speak to OO which doesn’t speak to iCal or Google Calendar so there is duplication of effort using it for task creation.

For text storage and searching and inter-doc relevancy linkage DevonThink Pro is great and paid for. However, it doesn’t do a very easy job of recording clips from FireFox (and I’m unwilling to give up Diigo, InterClue and a few other FFx add-ons and go to Safari or Camino). Plus, I don’t want to trash DTP’s text database with a lot of temporary or trivial blather associated with blogging and my random thoughts. Enter Evernote.

The recently released (still beta) Mac version of Evernote is far superior to the “endless tape” approach in the PC version I tried to love but never did. It will capture from any app and store it is such a way I can access it from the desktop or from the synced web version of my notes. I’m writing this post in Evernote and have a “blogging” notebook whose entries I can sort and search and transfer to DTP if it seems worthwhile. OmniOutliner I think could work well for daily writing, and I like being able to collapse “levels” of my work and quickly resort paragraphs by idea line. But the free Google Notebooks does most of this, and captures live links and the url of clipped pages. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, there are persistent rumors (that might just be wishful thinking) that OneNote for Mac will happen, perhaps this year. So I’m reluctant to spend $70 for OmniOutliner Pro and will grudingly open Parallels once or twice a day until I get my Mac mojo workin’.

Seems fitting that this seasonal story be retold just now as the same set of characters and props congregates on Goose Creek: a mailbox, a writer with a gun and a phoebe intent on defacing a front porch lintel with moss and poop. Here’s how the story ends:

I slapped the handcuffs on the criminal’s wrists and wisked me away, sobbing. I am incarcerated now in the white clapboard house near the damaged mailbox, and will be serving a sentence of three hundred thousand words to life. I am counting on early parole for good adverbs. Please send e-cards (and if you could slip a small file in as an attachment, it’d be muchly appreciated.)

Read the rest of True Detective from Fragments ~ June 2003.

And I should add that we have solved (we hope) the lintel problem by covering it with aluminum foil that both protects the paint and confuses the bird. So far this year, no nests.

Just a couple of pointers and housekeeping updates on this (thankfully!) rainy day in near-spring on Goose Creek.

DO make note of the sidebar image for Floyd Earth Day (April 19) and the web page it points to (thanks, blogger David St. Lawrence). Note that on the page is a form to use to let the organizers know of your plans to attend as participant, vendor (info and free samples only) or as an interested “resource”. For the latter, you can leave the name of your company, a link to your web page, and some indication of your relevant experience, expertise or interest for the Water and Floyd theme that you can share in the general exchange and discussion on April 19.

Also, a couple of invisible changes of small note at Fragments: find the new “home page for info” link (sidebar) by way of squidoo to information about my various photographic and literary goodies. On that page, the “bio” link is currently to my info and mug shot at the Southern Nature Project page which I recommend for your perusal. Lots of good southern nature writers in the resources there you might not have been familiar with–plus those like Silas House and Rick Bass you probably already knew of.

And I got word this morning that my blogging buddy Jane P (Melinama) of Pratie Place blog will be part of a performing duo (the PratieHeads) at the historic 1908 Courthouse in Independence, Virginia on Saturday night, March 15th at 7 pm for the St. Patrick’s Day celebration. Heck, I may just wander over that way myself, see some friends in Galax for an early dinner (I haven’t warned them yet) as I’ll be a bachelor for a few days about then.

Oh, and speaking of the weekend, you might make a note NOW to change your clocks ahead an hour Saturday night–comes early this year, seems like–for Daylight Savings. Longer Days artificially induced on top of that nice thing the globe does this time of year, showing more of the northern hemisphere for longer and longer until the summer solstice in June.

Okay, I’m seeing why I might want to go back and reconsider Twitter. I can envision several populations of “friends” I might want to become or stay connected to:

• A group of people who share my environmental/sustainability interests.
• A group of folks who will find my next book topic of interest (the nature gap for adults and especially children) and be able to offer suggestions and links and maybe some early edits or previews.
• My graphic design collaborator(s) for Book Two
• Blog Readers to FFF who could find “tweets” on the blog as updates rather than entire posts.

I have a few resources (EduBLogs, EduCause pdf) I’m looking at as Twitter Primers. I’m open for being educated here. And if you know of groups to join or Firefox Plugins related to Twitter, please let me know.

Old dog struggling hopefully to learn new tricks.

This is sort of a fun way to waste an hour: put pix of your family members on various magazine covers.

You will have to fish around to find an image composition that accidentally fits the uneditable magazine cover from the somewhat limited (but expanding) selection of magazines at MagMyPic.

More often than not, in any people pictures you have, their head will get cut off by the magazine banner, so experiment until you find something that just happens to work. Be warned: because of this inflexibility, the best shot you have of your dad will only work on the cover of Cosmopolitan or Seventeen. Might send him and the world the wrong message.

Yes, that’s me: Farmer Fred (a.k.a. The Foolish Farmer of Erewhon–an allegory from the first year of blogging.)

Blogging has changed, this blogger’s life and world have changed in the past five years since Fragments began. I miss the way it used to be those first years. I look forward to the way it will be next year and the next, as small voices join in the growing sea of self-expression, information and ideas that is the expanding world of internet self-publishing.

Yes, I feel cut off from an energy that once existed on both sides of this computer screen back in the early and uncertain days of exploration, experimentation and innovation. I remember the Ecotone–a collaborative group centered around writing about place, for which I was a founding member. I remember the first bloggers’ Carnival of the Vanities (first among the aggregating carnivals and father of subsequent themed postings on trees, birds, nature, cats…) where the first “issue” had maybe a dozen contributions of which mine was one. I remember the first meeting of another “live” blogger on my front porch, while that list has grown to more than a dozen now.

And while I feel “left behind” in many ways online (I haven’t caught on to Twitter or Facebook yet) I also sense the ways that the medium is changing for the better. I have three examples from just this week, and since they include me in some small way in their efforts and activities, I feel included in this evolution towards whatever it is that blogs and blogging will become.

First, I was happy this week to learn of Whorled Leaves–a site that is “an experiment in blogging book communities, web-based friendships, and more inspired by a common love for the natural world.” That group has chosen for this month’s selection to read my book. So our words do live on, and even when they have grown faded and distant to us, those reading them for the first time can make the moments, places and sensations they depict live again.

Blogs that become books (or “blooks”) is a phenomenon that of course didn’t exist in 2002 when FFF began. Now the list is long and growing, and you may have visited Lulu’s Blooker Prize site where over 100 entries from 15 countries competed for the $10000 prize. (Amazingly, I did not win!) Cheryl Hagdorn has created “Blooking Central: Examining published blooks to discover what makes for a blookable blog and how you can turn your blog into a blook.” She gave a mention this week of Slow Road Home in answer to someone asking “if you can read it on the blog, why have the book?” SRH, she said, is “the sort of thing you want to curl up with on your lap in front of a fire or sitting in your glider sipping lemonade. Hard to do that with your lap top and still smell the pine in the Blue Ridge mountains.”

And finally, from amidst the angst and ire of blog-pundritry and the babel of mundane and quotidian blather that composes no small portion of the blogmatter in the universe, Sheila Cason from Guam has created Beauty on the Web, a site “…all about beautiful things found on weblogs.” Here’s another example of how bloggers, blogs and creative energy can work together for good. She asked for and I sent a contribution. You may have something to share as well. Sent it her way.

My writing life no longer is limited to my weblog. But I won’t abandon it, even in its diluted and enfeebled state, because there is still energy to tap into, to add to, to learn from. I don’t think, even as long-lived as I am among bloggers (and among my fellow seniors, for that matter) I don’t think I’ve seen it all yet. There is more to come in my life as writer and photographer, and this blog will somehow be a part of that growth.

How does your blog fit into your life, past, present and future? Do you think of it as obligation or opportunity? As an inspiration or a drain on your creative energies? Is it time for a change in your voice, your brand, your direction that might enliven your time in the edit-box of your blog platform? Now’s a good time to be considering where to go from here. The New Blogging Year is approaching fast!

To never stop and ask directions–even when you are lost: it is everyman’s dream. For Gary Boyd, the dream has come true in the form of a laptop, Delorme maps software and GPS. And yesterday, the ultimate test: finding Fred. It is actually harder, they tell me, than finding Waldo.

Thanks to Gary and wife for making the effort to wind around our slow and crooked roads and get to know Floyd after reading about the county and its events and personalities now for some little while. I hope he returns to Texas with good memories of the county, the commonwealth and the folks he met along the way…and all the wrong turns made right. Safe travels on the way home today!

And speaking of travels…the image here is from a visit to Chateau Morrisette Winery last week that gave me an opportunity to travel a bit of the Blue Ridge Parkway. There is still some color on the ridges, and as you see here, the Friends of the Parkway crews have been busy repairing the rail fences that add so much to the rustic character of the drive.

I jumped the gun a few weeks back in my attempt to show you all three sets of notecards by way of an attractive webpage creation site called Pagii.

What I didn’t know then was that you couldn’t view the page I’d created without joining. I whined about this to the crew there, and they assured me they were working on a public version. Sure enough, now anybody can see anybody else’s page in Pagii.

So do take another look–at both the Photo Note Cards AND at Pagii. You might find some uses for your own creative urges.