Thursday, 20 March 2014
Picasa/Blogger is not working and that's my excuse for not posting...
I use google's awesome photo organiser, Picasa. It's free, it's easy to use to store/organise/edit/print/email/blog/etc.
There are plenty of other similar things out there, but Picasa is generally so good that I can't be bothered to check out the others.
Often, when I start a blog post, i pick up the images I need in Picasa, hit the 'Blog This' button at the bottom, and post them to a draft in Blogger's editing console, then I do the text within blogger. It's quick and simple and I'm used to it.
Recently, that's not been working, hitting 'Blog This' just gets me an error code. The nub of that error is:
rss: Required field must not be blank
Simple enough? No. Because there's no rss field that you can fill in. So of course, I do what picasa asks, delete cache and cookies, sweep out all the accumulated crap from my browser, and the problem's still there. I look up Picasa Help, no help. Forums, no help. This is Google, so there's no easy way to report a problem or contact support people. Then, after an age of googling, I find this
There are plenty of other similar things out there, but Picasa is generally so good that I can't be bothered to check out the others.
Often, when I start a blog post, i pick up the images I need in Picasa, hit the 'Blog This' button at the bottom, and post them to a draft in Blogger's editing console, then I do the text within blogger. It's quick and simple and I'm used to it.
Recently, that's not been working, hitting 'Blog This' just gets me an error code. The nub of that error is:
rss: Required field must not be blank
Simple enough? No. Because there's no rss field that you can fill in. So of course, I do what picasa asks, delete cache and cookies, sweep out all the accumulated crap from my browser, and the problem's still there. I look up Picasa Help, no help. Forums, no help. This is Google, so there's no easy way to report a problem or contact support people. Then, after an age of googling, I find this
How to Fix Blog This Function
Note:
The Blog function in Picasa can only be fixed by an Update to Picasa.
Until Picasa is updated, this page suggests one Workaround:
The Blog This Button and the Create menu -> Publish To Blogger... function both use the Picasa button function to call transport service to the Blogger.
The
underlying transport to the services was changed from http to https and
the URL in Picasa was hardcoded as http in the custom button files.
This will be fixed in the next Patch release.
Helpful, ha?
No clue as to when. And why couldn't they say on the error page "It doesn't work because we broke the 'Blog This' button"?
Even better, seeing as in order to be uploading by Picasa to Blogger, users must have a google/gmail account, wouldn't it have been really handy if there was some magic way to contact users to tell them that a key part of the interface between two popular Google platforms had been deliberately disabled, and there was a reason it no longer worked?
I wonder if google has heard of email? Oh... Of course, it sends me crapmail already...
I was an early adopter of Google, back when it was a newcomer to the search-engine world.
I've loved some of the things google has done, but sometimes, just some times, I loathe it. This is one of them.
This is what reminds me that when we put our trust in companies that host our content on the web, our content is hostage to their whim.
Update: I took some more time browsing for answers. "Update Picasa"? So I go to the Picasa update checker "You already have the most recent version" Well of course I do, because I ticked the "enable auto-updates" option. But being a belt and braces sort of bloke, I decide to go to the Picasa download site and reinstall it.
Magic. It works. Why? I don't know. Do I take back my grumbling?
NO I DO NOT DAMMIT!
If a developers deliberately screws up a feature, then the users should be informed, not left to waste their time trying to mend the unmendable.
GNAHHHH!
Update: I took some more time browsing for answers. "Update Picasa"? So I go to the Picasa update checker "You already have the most recent version" Well of course I do, because I ticked the "enable auto-updates" option. But being a belt and braces sort of bloke, I decide to go to the Picasa download site and reinstall it.
Magic. It works. Why? I don't know. Do I take back my grumbling?
NO I DO NOT DAMMIT!
If a developers deliberately screws up a feature, then the users should be informed, not left to waste their time trying to mend the unmendable.
GNAHHHH!
Monday, 17 February 2014
A Follow-Up
The great freeze actually lasted only a very short while. In the meantime, something called the polar vortex has caused incredible chaos and storms across the U.S., but here in this bit of Texas, you wouldn't know it. It's been warm enough not to wear a sweater, fleece, or jacket. There have been a few rainy days, and fog, too, a little south of here, but to a Yorkshireman it's positively tropical.
All the same, I should come clean about south Texas weather. Although this time it's not been cold, and usually isn't really cold, it has, on occasion been cold enough for the sea to freeze between the mainland and Galveston island, and mass die-offs of fish have occurred, with fish washed ashore in blocks of ice. The winter of 1983 saw conditions that were really cold, albeit for a relatively short time.
"It began when a pool of Arctic air pushed over the Texas coast the afternoon of Dec. 21, plunging air temperature from the 50s to the 30s (temperatures here are in Fahrenheit, the U.S. and pretty much nowhere else, oh Burma! Myanmar, as it is officially called now, use fahrenheit. Well, if you're a scientist, or engineer, I think you're officially supposed to be using Celsius.)
....in little more than an hour. In Houston, the temperature dropped below freezing the next afternoon and remained there for five days, setting a record for longest period of below-freezing temperatures in the city. Houston's temperature fell below freezing for 10 consecutive nights, bottoming out at 13 degrees on Christmas morning.
It was equally frigid on the coast - 15 degrees in Palacios, 14 degrees in Galveston and Corpus Christi, 19 degrees in McAllen. Air temperature remained below freezing for 77 hours in Port Arthur. Saltwater froze; on Trinity Bay, a sheet of ice 4 inches thick extended almost 500 yards from shore, and a similarly thick layer created a 100-yard band around the edges of the Upper Laguna Madre.
"You couldn't get a boat out in the bay for the first few days because the ice was so thick," recalled Lynn Benefield, who, in 1983, headed coastal fisheries' Galveston Bay field station. "When we finally did get out, the thing that sticks in my mind is seeing the back half of East (Galveston) Bay covered in slush ice from shore to shore. I'll never forget that."
The bitter, lingering cold was unlike anything Hegen, McCarty, Benefield or anyone else had experienced on the Texas coast, where freezes, while not uncommon, are typically short-lived. The most severe cold weather before the '83 freeze had been in January 1951, and it had been almost a century - February 1899 - since Texas had seen such deep, abiding cold along the coast."
"The below-freezing air temperature wasn't the only thing that chilled Hegen on his recognizance on the Upper Laguna Madre. What he witnessed as he and Vannoy explored the shallow bay system with the earned reputation as home of the best-quality speckled trout fisheries in the state sent shudders down his spine."It looked like snow drifts along the shorelines - big piles of white, 15-20 yards wide," Hegen said.
But it wasn't snow; it was ice … and dead fish. Thousands of dead fish.
"There were long windrows of dead fish - every kind of fish - stacked like cordwood," Hegen said. "The number and the size of the sow speckled trout we saw made your jaw just drop. There were thousands of them, dead on the shoreline. Huge trout, some I guessed were bigger than the state record.""
Other coastal freezes are on record in the northern edge of the Gulf of Mexico.
1955, 1899, and back in 1821, Jane Long, an early settler, was saved from starvation by cutting a hole in the ice to scoop out frozen fish. She also recorded seeing a large brown bear walk across the ice to Galveston.
Before her, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, one of the very first europeans to arrive here, (shipwrecked on Galveston island), recorded a similar winter in around 1527.
*for my American readers, Fahrenheit, drawing on earlier works by a danish scientist, Rohmer, set his coldest point by mixing a brine of one part water, one part ice and one part ammonium chloride. This mixture allegedly stabilised at 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Or he set it using the coldest temperature he observe during the winter of 1708/9 in his home town of Danzig, on the Baltic coast.
Nobody really knows.
"According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave, his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer's scale, brine freezes at zero, water freezes and melts at 7.5 degrees, body temperature is 22.5, and water boils at 60 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by four in order to eliminate fractions and increase the granularity of the scale. He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature (which were at 30 and 90 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval six times (since 64 is 2 to the sixth power).
Fahrenheit observed that water boils at about 212 degrees using this scale. Later, other scientists decided to redefine the scale slightly to make the freezing point exactly 32 °F, and the boiling point exactly 212 °F or 180 degrees higher. It is for this reason that normal human body temperature is approximately 98° (oral temperature) on the revised scale (whereas it was 90° on Fahrenheit's multiplication of Rømer, and 96° on his original scale). "
Source: Wikipedia.
The rest of the world uses Celsius (let's not get into Kelvin, for all practical purposes, Celsius will do). Celsius is, of course, far more difficult to understand. in Celsius, water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100 degrees. In Fahrenheit it freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212. Where in Fahrenheit is there a datum point within our grasp? An arbitrary choice of brine mix? What's a hundred? A fevered brow? For the record, in my early years, fahrenheit was the norm in Britain too. I can do both, but to me, fahrenheit seems too arbitrary and random. 0 degrees Fahrenheit is -17.3 Celsius.
All the same, I should come clean about south Texas weather. Although this time it's not been cold, and usually isn't really cold, it has, on occasion been cold enough for the sea to freeze between the mainland and Galveston island, and mass die-offs of fish have occurred, with fish washed ashore in blocks of ice. The winter of 1983 saw conditions that were really cold, albeit for a relatively short time.
Christmas Day, 1983, Galveston Bay, Texas.
"It began when a pool of Arctic air pushed over the Texas coast the afternoon of Dec. 21, plunging air temperature from the 50s to the 30s (temperatures here are in Fahrenheit, the U.S. and pretty much nowhere else, oh Burma! Myanmar, as it is officially called now, use fahrenheit. Well, if you're a scientist, or engineer, I think you're officially supposed to be using Celsius.)
....in little more than an hour. In Houston, the temperature dropped below freezing the next afternoon and remained there for five days, setting a record for longest period of below-freezing temperatures in the city. Houston's temperature fell below freezing for 10 consecutive nights, bottoming out at 13 degrees on Christmas morning.
It was equally frigid on the coast - 15 degrees in Palacios, 14 degrees in Galveston and Corpus Christi, 19 degrees in McAllen. Air temperature remained below freezing for 77 hours in Port Arthur. Saltwater froze; on Trinity Bay, a sheet of ice 4 inches thick extended almost 500 yards from shore, and a similarly thick layer created a 100-yard band around the edges of the Upper Laguna Madre.
"You couldn't get a boat out in the bay for the first few days because the ice was so thick," recalled Lynn Benefield, who, in 1983, headed coastal fisheries' Galveston Bay field station. "When we finally did get out, the thing that sticks in my mind is seeing the back half of East (Galveston) Bay covered in slush ice from shore to shore. I'll never forget that."
The bitter, lingering cold was unlike anything Hegen, McCarty, Benefield or anyone else had experienced on the Texas coast, where freezes, while not uncommon, are typically short-lived. The most severe cold weather before the '83 freeze had been in January 1951, and it had been almost a century - February 1899 - since Texas had seen such deep, abiding cold along the coast."
"The below-freezing air temperature wasn't the only thing that chilled Hegen on his recognizance on the Upper Laguna Madre. What he witnessed as he and Vannoy explored the shallow bay system with the earned reputation as home of the best-quality speckled trout fisheries in the state sent shudders down his spine."It looked like snow drifts along the shorelines - big piles of white, 15-20 yards wide," Hegen said.
But it wasn't snow; it was ice … and dead fish. Thousands of dead fish.
"There were long windrows of dead fish - every kind of fish - stacked like cordwood," Hegen said. "The number and the size of the sow speckled trout we saw made your jaw just drop. There were thousands of them, dead on the shoreline. Huge trout, some I guessed were bigger than the state record.""
Other coastal freezes are on record in the northern edge of the Gulf of Mexico.
1955, 1899, and back in 1821, Jane Long, an early settler, was saved from starvation by cutting a hole in the ice to scoop out frozen fish. She also recorded seeing a large brown bear walk across the ice to Galveston.
Before her, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, one of the very first europeans to arrive here, (shipwrecked on Galveston island), recorded a similar winter in around 1527.
*for my American readers, Fahrenheit, drawing on earlier works by a danish scientist, Rohmer, set his coldest point by mixing a brine of one part water, one part ice and one part ammonium chloride. This mixture allegedly stabilised at 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Or he set it using the coldest temperature he observe during the winter of 1708/9 in his home town of Danzig, on the Baltic coast.
Nobody really knows.
"According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave, his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer's scale, brine freezes at zero, water freezes and melts at 7.5 degrees, body temperature is 22.5, and water boils at 60 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by four in order to eliminate fractions and increase the granularity of the scale. He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature (which were at 30 and 90 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval six times (since 64 is 2 to the sixth power).
Fahrenheit observed that water boils at about 212 degrees using this scale. Later, other scientists decided to redefine the scale slightly to make the freezing point exactly 32 °F, and the boiling point exactly 212 °F or 180 degrees higher. It is for this reason that normal human body temperature is approximately 98° (oral temperature) on the revised scale (whereas it was 90° on Fahrenheit's multiplication of Rømer, and 96° on his original scale). "
Source: Wikipedia.
The rest of the world uses Celsius (let's not get into Kelvin, for all practical purposes, Celsius will do). Celsius is, of course, far more difficult to understand. in Celsius, water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100 degrees. In Fahrenheit it freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212. Where in Fahrenheit is there a datum point within our grasp? An arbitrary choice of brine mix? What's a hundred? A fevered brow? For the record, in my early years, fahrenheit was the norm in Britain too. I can do both, but to me, fahrenheit seems too arbitrary and random. 0 degrees Fahrenheit is -17.3 Celsius.
Wednesday, 29 January 2014
Icepocalypse! First, "Winter Storm Kronos", and then "Son of Kronos, Winter Storm Leon". Arctic Vortex, and other Piffle.
Yes, In the U.S., folk like their storms to be labelled.
Winter Storm Kronos! That was the arctic weather and blizzards that dumped an almost perceptible amount of snow on us last friday. Kronos!: I imagined a Doctor Who-esque scenario as supervillain Kronos, orbiting earth on a stealth-ship, pulls the levers that set in motion another ice-age.
Winter Storm Kronos! That was the arctic weather and blizzards that dumped an almost perceptible amount of snow on us last friday. Kronos!: I imagined a Doctor Who-esque scenario as supervillain Kronos, orbiting earth on a stealth-ship, pulls the levers that set in motion another ice-age.
It brought chaos to Houston, Texas, stern-faced
newsreaders looking earnestly into the camera, warning about disaster
planning, schools and all manner of businesses closed, temperatures
dipped below freezing for a few hours, and a teaspoonful of snow fell.
If I get caught shaking my head in bemused wonderment once more, the
sherrif’s department willl probably arrest me for ‘Mocking Texas’. I’m
sure they’ll have a law of that kind.
The schools were all closed again, yesterday, for ‘Winter Storm Leon’. No snow fell around here, but the tough guys of Texas cowered indoors. Ice is for inside a drink, or to skate on in a nice heated hall, when it gets out in the wild, they don’t know what to make of it.
If Britain did that, I kind of doubt the thrill would be quite the same as in "Winter Storm Bert", or 'Harry'.
Or Winter Storm "Tea and Crumpets".
Nonetheless, fearsome weather conditions have returned with 'Leon'.
The Woodlands is in the coastal plain designation, despite being 80
miles from the coast. Just north of here, the land rises slightly, and
there is a corresponding weather-step, they get snow more than we do.
i.e, they get it very rarely, we get it almost not at all. Mind you, for
a people who normally live in sweltering heat, a drop to a normal U.K.
january temperature is terrifying.
Nicely iced.....
I'm thinking "I survived a Houston Winter" T-shirts and bumper stickers.
See, the neighbours have a heavy accumulation of snow on the roof.
And the roads, ohhhhh fear and terror.....
We'll just have to eat the dog if the relief column doesn't get through.
Thursday, 26 December 2013
The Ships Of Yule, by Bliss Carman
|
For The Pirate, and GZ.
Not quite..
Closer
Nearly
And not fifty....
I'll leave her to explain in the comments........
Wednesday, 20 November 2013
Gaggling Geese
Einstein's Geese
Tony Gruenewald
Some Princetonians believe
that simply living within
the 08540 postal zone
adds at least
20 points to an IQ.
And they must be convinced
that even the resident geese
that loiter at the office parks
and on the outskirts of town
are literate.
How else can one explain
the sign?
The sign that had to cost enough
to feed and clothe
a family of four for months
in an underdeveloped country.
The sign that reads, "NO GEESE,"
and for added emphasis adds
a picture of a goose
inside the universal
red slashed circle.
And being Princeton geese,
they ignore the sign anyway,
having also inherited
that ivied sense
of entitlement.
While in my neighborhood,
the geese lean on
the black plywood hunting dog silhouettes
meant to discourage them,
smoking cigarettes and making
goose calls at passing women.
And even the park police are
intimidated. When you call to complain,
they confide in hushed tones,
"There’s nothing we can do...
It’s best to try to ignore them.
Thursday, 14 November 2013
interim....
Just a few words to say I've not left the planet, I'll be posting soon, just been busy busy busy.
It's exactly one month since I flew out of England to start a new life with my soul-mate, and there's hardly been a moment to catch my breath.
Here's a wedding photo: 24th October 2013.
Today's my birthday, we're going out, on our travels again. I'm planning a blog and email session, maybe tomorrow. so much has happened, so much, so many places, experiences, people, pictures. Oh my.
Best wishes, friends.
It's exactly one month since I flew out of England to start a new life with my soul-mate, and there's hardly been a moment to catch my breath.
Here's a wedding photo: 24th October 2013.
Today's my birthday, we're going out, on our travels again. I'm planning a blog and email session, maybe tomorrow. so much has happened, so much, so many places, experiences, people, pictures. Oh my.
Best wishes, friends.
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