Saturday, August 20, 2005

Preventing Blog Comment Spam

Spammers don’t just hit email – they also know how to add comments to blogs.  Several of my blogs/podcasts have had Spam comments added recently.  One way to reduce this is to enable “Show word verification for comments.”  That will cut out the machine-generated Spam, since anyone wanting to add a comment will have to type in the word to verify.  I’ve just enabled it, so it’ll be interesting to watch.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on using Word to post to Blogger, I’m favorably impressed.  It works great – even when you have several blogs.  Really a nice interface.

Friday, August 19, 2005

Posting to Blogs from Word

Posting to Blogs from Word

I found that Blogger has now developed a tool bar for Microsoft Word that allows you to write your blog post in Word and then publish it from Word.  

This sounds like a good idea to me, especially since that when I’ve copied things out of Word and pasted them in Blogger I get all kinds of codes along with the text – all the stuff carried over from Word.  I spent quite a bit of time earlier in the week cleaning up some things I wanted to post – hopefully this will alleviate that.  It also has the advantage that you can compose posts and then actually post them when you’re ready.

Hope it works as well as I hope it will.

Monday, August 15, 2005

Caregiving Class and more

My daughter Sara and I are teaching a 5-week class for caregivers at church, so I've started a new blog (Caregiving Notes) where I'm putting information that we present in class along with other things I run across that might be useful to caregivers. We'll even see if we can't get Sara to add some things as well.

Posts to this blog have slowed down recently due to the activity with the Making Career Changes blog and doing the podcasts. But as some of that smoothes out, I'll get back to some more regular posts here.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Mom's Paints

One of the things I ended up with after Mom died was her painting supplies. Painting was something Mom took up after she retired, and became quite passionate about in the 90's. The painting supplies were packed up in a number of boxes , and have been stored in my storage unit.

Years ago I did some watercolors, and have always intended to start painting again. Last week we were in Michaels so that Eloise could buy some more knitting yarn and I picked up a book on oil painting which kind of got the juices flowing. So yesterday I went to the storage unit and retrieved the boxes of Mom's painting supplies.

I really hadn't paid that much attention to what was there when I put the stuff in storage, so it was an interesting adventure to go through it all yesterday -- and it brought back a lot of memories as well, which was good.

There are two fishing tackle boxes filled with paints -- one for oils and another for acrylics. There are about 100 tubes of oils and probably 50 of acrylics. Then there's a box of 50 or so brushes. Another box contains about 10 canvases and five or six frames. More than enough supplies to keep me busy for a long time. And worth a considerable amount of money if you've ever priced good brushes or paints.

What was even more fun was finding a couple of new things Mom had painted. We have a number of her works already, but finding these was special. One was a water color she had done in 2000, likely the last thing she painted since she never set up the oils after moving to Houston. Another was an unfinished oil of bluebonnets -- but actually it's close enough to finished to go ahead and spray and frame. And there's also an underpainting of a Lilly (all the detail done in grey tones). She did several of the Lilly, and it's interesting to see one in an intermediate stage.

The boxes also included the books that Mom used along with her lessons to learn to paint. I started reading them last night, and it provided a lot of insight into the methods she used. There's also her notebook with her notes from her lessons.

So it was a good afternoon of discovery and remembering as I start down a path of following in Mom's footsteps.