More on the Gulf Oil Spill

Though things are becoming far better regarding the Gulf oil gusher, There is still a long way to go.  That is because a lot of bad things have happened.  Here, hat tip to my regular contributor - Jon, is a news item roundup of a few things you might have missed:
"Rig's Final Hours Probed#," is from The Wall Street Journal (7/18/10). Summary: Spill Investigators Focus on 20 'Anomalies' Aboard Doomed Deepwater Horizon.
"BP Ran Magazine Article Extolling Relations With Libya As It Secretly Lobbied For Terrorist's Release#," is from Think Progress (7/16/10).  Jon has a question: "I wonder if 'Smoky Joe' Barton would still apologize to BP after knowing this?  If so, than he SUPPORTS TERRORISM!"
"AP IMPACT: Gulf awash in 27,000 abandoned wells#," is from Yahoo! News (7/7/10).
"Marine biologist claims US Coast Guard involved in Corexit spraying#," is from The Raw Story (7/5/10).
"Millions of birds set to fly into Gulf oil mess#," is from MSNBC (7/1/10). Summary: 'They won't be safe on their fall passage,' says Audubon official.
CBS: Jindal holds up deployment of National Guard to fight spill is from Daily Kos (6/25/10).
"Reasonably high chance BP files for bankruptcy,# is from The Atlantic. (6/22/10).
"Judge held stock in rig owner#," is from Politico (6/22/10).
"BP burning sea turtles alive#," is from The Raw Story (6/20/10).
"Republican candidate: Obama, BP ‘colluded’ to make oil spill happen#," is from The Raw Story (6/18/10).
"The Environmental Legacy of the Gulf Oil Spill#," is from Newsweek Magazine (6/17/10).
"Texas lawmaker accuses White House of BP shakedown#," is from Yahoo! News (6/16/10). Jon's comment:

Joe Barton is a jack(...). I guess he would have the impacted people to just absorb all the loss themselves. UNBELIEVABLE -- No, I forgot, just SOP for Rethugs. Scumbag Barton needs to be run out of office.

Powered by ScribeFire.

via ScribeFire

Posted via email from Southwest Postings

Going paperless

(Illustration: Free Images)

Relying on having access to only digital archival information necessitates adopting a very different mindset for me.  I have been used to having the information I need stored in my file cabinets.  Yes, I have more than one, even though I am retired.  Or it is in a set of office sorting trays, or a cardboard file box, or even in a stack. There are several advantages for me to go digital. Plagued by procrastination, I seem to be much more motivated to keep my digital files cleaned out and organized so that my computer runs faster.  I also love the magic of the "search" box.  I prefer typing and editing on a computer keyboard (using ScribeFire in the Firefox browser), to composing on paper.  I do not know how I got along before I discovered cloud computing on Evernote.  My computer is even preferable for simple notes and scribbles, signified by my reliance on a nifty little application called Note Mania.  Therefore, the trick for me has been to have fun and useful tools - applications - that work better for me than the old way of writing.  But writing is not the only thing associated with retaining information.  Reading is equally important.

Giving up the local newspaper means we will not have the paper delivered to our front porch every morning.  We will not read today's headlines, articles of local interest, wedding announcements, or obituaries.  The files I am going through these days include lots of old newspaper clippings  associated with my history.  And I cannot throw some of them away.  They had value then and they have value now. How could we discard the obituaries of our forebearers?  The reason is emotional attachment, which is the core driver of hoarding, by the way.  As with preferring hardback books to reading lengthy pieces online, I still prefer reading the paper form of our local news organ.  But we cannot afford it any more.  So I get all my news from television or online like everyone else.  And I will have to figure out something else to use for mailing packing material, for protecting the floor when we paint the walls, for training the puppy or for lining the birdcage.  There are definitely some ways we cannot go paperless.  More importantly, I am fully aware that news organization reporters (predominantly print journalism) are responsible for gathering and publishing the original news items to which we bloggers so casually link.

Trashing old paper files signifies literally not being able to get your hands on a piece of information you thought important enough to save at some time in the past.  My question is always, "What if I need (or want) this in the future. I am a keeper of information, not someone who would qualify as a hoarder, though some might disagree.  And I love to read from original materials.  It is that emotional attachment thing again.  What can compare, for example, to the original halting letters and spacing of my granddaughter's first grade penmanship blue book?  She is now well into her 20's and long past blue books.  What could be more precious than a mushy yellowed 1955 telegram from my boyfriend, now my husband of 54 years?  You can begin to see my problem.  But I am making progress.  I now know that I neither need nor want 1986 United Way training handouts on how to be a manager.  I have no regrets at being retired from that kind of activity.  And those old handouts would not tell me how to manage our Corgi dog who wants to run the household.  They are now dog-eared and faded copies that should go into the recycling bin.  Recycling, by the way, has helped me more easily make trash.  Stuff is not "wasted," another of my mental barriers to going paperless.

Forgoing extra copies implies the risk of losing the original document. The rule is that if the documentation is easily available elsewhere, do not keep the original or even a copy. I must remind myself that not every piece of paper is a valuable document.  Throwing the extras away gains valuable storage space for those essential originals the IRS wants us to keep for a time, or those identity documents that mark for your heirs your passage through this life. Yes, I am at the legacy stage of life, age 73.  I have provided my fair share of original recipes for those family or local club cookbooks.  My old scribbled pencil copy can go away.  The cookbooks are now all digitized, even if they show up in spiral notebook or paperback form.  I can always order another one, such as the Junior League club cookbooks that I collected as travel souvenirs for many years.

Getting off mailing lists indicates that I could miss out on potentially important information from outside sources.  It also means accumulating less paper to throw away.  Remember the advent of the lists offering to help remove your name from junk mail lists bought and sold for the purpose.  I did that but the effort must be maintained.  Rarely is it now that merchandise is not available online.  I do still enjoy beautiful slick catalogs.  However, they are rarely free. The thrill associated with the arrival of the Sears or "Monkey Ward" catalog goes back to living in the country in Wyoming as a child and looking forward to the free Montgomery Ward Christmas catalog coming in the mail in November. These days the mailing lists from which I remove myself are those unending press releases that all proliffic bloggers receive.  Even when I am trying to live paperless, I still get junk Email I must handle/delete.  Spam filters do not work when mailers acquire your name legitimately.

Posted via email from Make Good Mondays

Blog writing in transition. . . at an intersection

My blog writing has been in transition for a few monthsbecause  I am bored with my Blogger sites.  They are not as user friendly as Posterous, but they are probably better looking,  according to Heather.  Posterous publishes to most all my websites, however,  with just a few keystrokes.  And Posterous gets a lot more traffic than my Blogger sites.  So much of my dilemma is a matter of trade-offs.

Today I am writing this post using Yahoo! mail for the first time, rather than Gmail.  Via About.com reviews (see previous two links), and my writing experience, I am researching which platform is the most stable and user friendly for composing blog posts.  Both services provide autosave to draft, which seems essential to me.   There is nothing worse than working up a complex, lengthy or creative post -- only to lose it when my computer crashes.  This will happen on using the Posterous website for composing; there is no autosave yet.
My Yahoo! Mail Platform has become a habit for keeping in touch electronically, perhaps it could also serve for blogging, another way to keep in touch.  My phone service is with At&T, so I routinely write and receive Emails via Yahoo!, "the world's most visited homepage."  I have three separate "boxes," web addresses as a way of managing my communication.  There is a "public" box for the bulk of the mail, a "private" address for friends and family, and a "social" box for everything connected to social networking.
Facebook is a hybrid form that hosts both Email (messages) and blogs (updates).  Twitter is also a kind of combination.  A writer can compose a mini-post of 140 characters, as well as send "E-mail"  (what you are doing) to followers.  So, to my readers I say, have patience.  I am at the intersection of Blog Road, Email Avenue and Network Boulevard, waiting for the light to turn green again.

Posted via email from Make Good Mondays

Learn something new today --

Today's post at Make Good Mondays focuses of a few handy new things I have recently learned.  You might want to try out a few of them to make your online experience richer and more effective.  These are ideas, applications or tactics that I have tried and found useful during the past month.

Mozy - Online Backup, Data Backup and Remote Backup Solutions.  For just under $5 per month, you can back up all the information you would hate to lose from your computer.  Once the initial backup is complete (which could take many hours), you can adjust the settings to back up only what has changed at the same time every day, or you can set it to back up info a certain number of times each day.  By purchasing one year of service, I got one month free.  I found the application to be easy to implement and it appears to be a solid company.

HootSuite -  People who use this social network Twitter often find the original website lacking in functionality. I first tried TweetDeck, but I like HootSuite better. An excellent Twitter platform, it calls itself "professional," and it is free.  The features I like best are the tabs, that organize my entire set of Twitter lists (streams) into specific categories.  For example, my "Daily Scan" tab displays these streams: Mentions, Direct Messages (inbox), my Web-Friends (a private list), Media-Darlings, Bloggers-&-Blogs lists, and my Facebook feed.  A second tab displays my lists entitled, Newspapers-&-magazines, Television-newsletters, Writers-&-Reporters, Earth-&-Space Folks, Civil-libertarians/good-causes, Officials-&-Government, and Texas-Twitterers.  A third tab "Other Lists," displays a couple of lists to which I subscribe, and my own lists called, Check-out-occasionally, Good-advice, and Utilities.  The last tab is "Collections," and shows my own Sent-tweets, Favorites, Direct-messages (outbox), my ReTweets, Featured-Tweeps and Unseen-followers (another private list).  Thus all who follow me, and all those I follow get put on a list at some point.  No one gets lost and I only have to read the tweets that are most important to me.  I can find what I occasionally need or want and ignore posts that are of lesser interest.

Additional References: Links regarding the general subject of education from my regular contributor, Jon#:

1. "US college degrees: Still the best among world's top universities?#," is from Yahoo! News (6/2/10).
2. California passes bill to counteract ‘disturbing’ Texas curriculum#," is from The Raw Story (5/30/10). Measure ensures Texas standards don't 'creep into our textbooks,' senator tells Raw Story.
3. "Today's College Students Lack Empathy#," is from Yahoo! News (5/28/10).
   

(date of post: 7/10/10)

by Carol Gee

Author of:
Southwest Postings, a political blog

Make Good Mondays, a personal blog

Member of Twitter, a social network

Posted via email from Make Good Mondays

Making this a good Monday

Welcome to my redesigned website, using the new Posterous options. 

For now, I imported all the posts from my old Blogger page.  I changed the template colors and added an explanation of my reason for posting.  You may see some further changes, if I feel a bit more creative on down the way. I may add some "pages," for example.

As of now I am, indeed feeling this is a good Monday.  How 'bout you?

 

Posted via email from Make Good Mondays