Movable Grazing

Through the magic of Twitter @DanielSharkov brought his blog REVIEWS ‘N” TIPS to our attention.

We want to compliment him here on the timeliness of his clearly written pieces on the joy and science of blogging.

In just a few pages he went from technical to social lists.  (We are suckers for lists.)

We were drawn with the lead article about reasons to get of social media for a few days and were hooked  with

8 Things You Can Do to Improve Your Sidebar’s Effectiveness .

If you read the Famous Grazing blogs you have an interest in the mechanics of blogging.  Mr. Sharkov’s site is worth a visit, a browse and probably a subscription.

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In a day and a half over half a million people have watched this talk, at the TED website and on YouTube.
I am so proud of her.

The Art of Asking
Neil Gaiman
Sun, 03 Mar 2013 10:59:00 GMT

Above is the beginning of Neil Gaiman’s latest blog entry.  I have great empathy for him because I am as well very proud of my wife in the good work that she does in supporting children and the families of children with special learning needs.

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So far this well touted blizzard has been very well mannered.  Two PM was its scheduled time.

I find seeing questions on the various weather related sites as to the “scheduled” time for this natural phenomenon to arrive.

We are so attuned to seeing the world through the eyes of one lens or another, and there are SO many more lenses out there of late, that we have come to see the world as a scheduled event. 

The close-by passage of an asteroid in the very near future is being posted with the times it will be visible with hand held magnification.

It takes away a little of the wonder, a little of the mystery of the world. Consider the mythology that would be written if our less electronically connected ancestors looked up and saw a rock flying really close to the earth. Now our reference point is it will pass inside not only the orbit of the moon but inside the orbit of communications satellites.

The glad tidings reported is that it isn’t “scheduled” to hit either the earth, the moon, and most important, any communications satellite. And we go about our business sure in the veracity of that information.

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A hashtag on twitter is an indexing tool that allows users who don’t normally follow each other to open a discussion, add to a poll, or just add to the graffiti/noise. Don’t get me wrong here. Graffiti can be art and noise can be music when mindfully created and presented.

Paper.li is promoting the ongoing hashtag #Blogchat on twitter this month. They’ve broken the topics down starting each Sunday. The one beginning this Sunday  is” Email + Blogging – This is always a fun topic, we’ll explore ways that email can help us grow our blogs.”

The one thing this hashtag has done is inspire us to take a poke at setting up a Paper.li newsletter.  We did that at Belltowernews Daily.

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Watching the election results come in last night was very similar to watching the NE Patriots play this year. Too many of the games were down to the last minute, one even in overtime, where the game depended on the completion of a field goal.  The whole cancer thing had me a bit whipped so I went to bed as soon as Jon Stewart declared the winner.

It is of course monumental to the HS Senior, the last June of his Secondary education. But is it more so to their parents?  In this culture to advance to adulthood really starts when one leaves High School, whether by graduation or quitting. 

My three brothers all left early, each for their own reason. It is without doubt their adult lives began at that moment,  They needed to find work or go into the military.  One even started his family upon leaving.  I stuck it out and finished before going into the military.  I know I, and am pretty sure my brothers, didn’t think for a moment how our leaving school mattered at all to our parents. They were done parenting us.  Very done.

That was 43 years ago. Things have changed.  Though we’ll be attending a graduation in two weeks, or so, I don’t feel there will be that abrupt disengagement.  No “Thanks for all the fish” song.  But still, there will be the change.

Neil Gaiman’s recent speech was to a college audience.  I think this recording of it should be mandatory viewing for all High School graduates as well.

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I received 111 emails today notifying me of comments made on almost all of the 119 entries I have made in this blog. They were all from the same person/company/clone.  

When we fall back an hour tonight, don’t for get to change the batteries in you smoke detectors!

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Using a new computer I had to reset all of the Famous Grazing blogs in LiveWriter.

It was deja vu all over again. I have my encrypted passwords and naturally none of them worked. 

I KNEW that LiveWriter was used before with this blog. Why was it not working this time?
Usually when something like this happens I leave myself a note.  I looked hither and yon. Not there.

Just when I had given up, I decided to review my previous messages. There it was!  I left myself the note right here on the blog itself on July 5, 2010 12:44 PM.

Now the real test is will it publish?  Will it publish with an embedded link and a photograph.

We can only find out if we hit PUBLISH.

Let it be, number one!\

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Android App. The lack thereof.  SquareSpace, LiveJournal, Blogger and especially WordPress all have very good Android Apps.  Hence the number of blog entries in the Famous Grazing blogs hosted there have been much steadier than here on Movable Type.