RSS Feeds - aghhhhhh

RSS Feeds – I have become stuck on them and I have decided to move on. I no longer care if I know how they work. I have read and read and still I do not understand. I signed up for them and waited eagerly for them to arrive. But nothing. I read about Feedstar and copied a link to my home page and zillions of feeds arrived but that was not what I really wanted. I am sure I didn’t ask for anything to arrive through Feedstar I was just experimenting.
RSS Feeds. I know what they are and I kind of know how they work BUT how do you get them to where you want them and the ones you want?
I still have some of the now generation living at home. I know they still live at home because the fridge empties and the laundry basket fills at a scary rate. I just have to time it right and find a time when one of my now generation and I are in the house at the same time and we both have 5 minutes to spare.
Tonight was my chance. I came home to the smell of food cooking and what was more not one but four of the now generation were congregating in my kitchen. I cornered the youngest thinking that I would have the best chance of help from him but when I mentioned RSS Feeds he just looked at me blankly. Time to get serious here, this time I go for the leader of the pack.
Oh not a problem. Lets have a look uh huh uh huh uh huh OK where do you want them to go and how many headlines do you want? Where do you want them to come from? Now this is all you need to do copy this we’ll delete Feedstar put the link in here and done.
OK so what has taken me 2 weeks to try to understand the leader of the pack has just done in 10 minutes. OK I can live with that, I am just glad it is done. Now I can finally move on but will I remember it tomorrow?

They call him Flickr

They call him Flickr, Flickr, faster than lightning

No one you see, is smarter than he

And we know Flickr, lives in a world full of wonder

Flying there, right there, right in front of me

Now I am not the most technologically adept person and I prefer to be shown how to use something rather than have to read the instructions. (OK I’m lazy) but I was surprised how easy it was to get a grasp of Flickr. And it is a wonderful program.
I must however admit to a bit of a drama as far as copying my photos onto Flickr went and it was due to my stubbornness (my mother would have called it pig-headedness) that it was such a drama.
My friend David had taken some wonderful photos of a rainbow on our way back from a trip to the country and I was determined that these were the photos I was going to use in Flickr and then also add them to my blog.
David burnt the 60 odd photos onto a cd - so far so good - and I brought them to work in anticipation of a five minute job. Uh uh. I couldn’t manage to get just four of these photos onto Flickr and I didn’t want to load all 64 photos onto the computer. To cut a long story short nothing worked. I then decided to do it from home only to find my computer completely outdated for these files. Once again I took the cd to work and drama after drama I abandoned my attempts. Being a bit more determined the next day I returned armed with cd and decided on a different tact. Wonderful this time I was able to upload the required files into a folder on the computer. I then tried to transfer these photos into Flickr only to finally find that they were TOO BIG. Ah that must have been the original problem. They were all over 5 MB and to use files over 5 MB you need to upgrade your membership with Flickr and pay for the privilege. So it was back to David’s computer to make the files smaller which I then emailed to myself and easy peasy, job done.
Now yes I could have used other photos but I did learn a lot. I’m not sure if I really needed to learn what I did but learn I did.

cactus

The photo to the right of the beautiful cactus flower after rain is a little deceiving. The cactus looks and is harmless enough. There are no spikes or thorns and the flowers and their buds are just so appealing. After the rain they looked fresh and inviting. Full of anticipation I walked towards the beautiful cactus flower and took a deep breath. The stench of rotting meat hit my senses and had me reeling backwards choking and gasping for breath.

When I heard about the learning 2.0 program it sounded wonderful. Learn about blogging (which I had always been tempted to try to use but just never knew where to start) learning about Flickr, Podcasting, Wikis and RSS of which I knew nothing about but it all sounded just so appealing. Learn in a learning environment, there didn't seem to be any spikes or thorns there. Seemed straight forward enough a fresh and inviting atmosphere. I sat down at the computer full of anticipation of my huge learning curve. Then reality hit me and had me reeling backwards.

I'm not really comparing learning 2.0 to rotting meat but guess I am saying that they both had the same effect on me. Though unlike the cactus flower which I now know to stay well clear of I kept coming back to my computer chair and the result has been very pleasing. I am enjoying playing with my blog and I am finally getting a good grasp of Flickr even though I am amazed at some of the things that others have done with it.

sick leave

I haven’t been online with my blog for quite some time due to a virus. Now I think I may have contracted this virus from my computer as it was only a couple of days after I set up my blog that I started feeling unwell. After that is was a steady decline until I finally crashed and didn’t work for four days. When my system started coming back up again it was a very slow process and it wasn’t until I was back up and running (well walking anyway) that I realized that I had missed a golden opportunity. When my friends’ computer crashed due to a virus she had it completely revamped. She decided against getting all of the old programs put back on and instead they were replaced by super dooper new ones.
Now just thinking about how I could have improved myself makes me regret the missed opportunity. My biggest fault is that I am completely unartistic and uncreative so that would have been the first program to be installed, then as I have always wanted to be able to speak another language so a language or two would have been wonderful. To top it all off I could have turned myself into a creative chef with a recipe for any occasion. Oh the possibilities are endless with the wonderful programs now available. Of course there would have been one small drawback to becoming the new improved me and that is where on earth is my cd drive.