Davy Jones 1945-2012

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Another part of my youth is gone today.  When I was a small kid, one of my favorite television program was The Monkees.   The group consisted of Michael Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones.  The show was funny, with music from the band, and most of the time consisted the latest romantic interest of Davy.

Jones also made an appearance on another of my favorite programs from my youth, The Brady Bunch.  In that episode, young Marcia Brady (Maureen McCormick) had a crush on Davy Jones and wanted to meet him since she was president of his fan club.  Of course, Davy saved the day and met with Marcia.  Speaking of crushes, what guy my age didn't have a crush on Marcia Brady back in those days.

Today, Davy Jones passed away at the age of 66 from a heart attack.  I will remember fondly his music and his acting.  Here is a clip of one of him with one of his hits with The Monkees.  RIP Davy.

Related articles

• Davy Jones: Moments We'll Never Forget (hollywood.com)
• Monkees singer Davy Jones dies in Florida at 66 - USA TODAY (usatoday.com)
• Davy Jones, Monkee and Dream Boat, Dead at 66 [Video] (gawker.com)

What a Way to Spend a Birthday

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Today is my birthday.  I usually do not like to call out attention to that fact.  I definitely do not acknowledge them in the office.  I do not like being the center of attention with cake and singing and all that sort of stuff.  Normally, I do not take the day off from work for my birthday.  It is February, so the weather is usually cold.  Today, we had a lot to do so I took the day off.

First off, our homeowners association has implemented a new parking policy.  They are now requiring us to have parking permits displayed in our cars.  The new policy takes place on March 1st, so I had to go by the management office and picked up our permits.  They required that we pick them up in person, rather than have them sent in the mail. 

Next up on the agenda was the first of two meetings in regards to our son.  The first meeting was with a lawyer to talk about getting guardianship of our son so that we can keep making the decisions regarding his care and finances.  The meeting went well enough.  The lawyer told us that the guardianship process was long and expensive and that there were other possible options to explore like power of attorney.  He emailed us a document to review on the various options.

After that meeting, we had a couple hours to kill so we headed to a nearby mall for lunch at Red Robin.  Then it was off to the local Social Security office to apply for SSI benefits for our son.  We had an appointment, and had a relatively short wait time.  Once in the office, the person assisting us with our application said that if we were to apply now, they would consider our income in assigning benefits.  Instead, she recommended that we wait until he turns 18 in April.

So, our two meeting ended up not being all that we thought they would be.  Instead, we have even more work to do on both fronts.  While the day was not quite as productive as we hoped it would be, we still received some good information.  Then again, I did not have to head into the office today.  Like the old saying goes, a bad day off still beats a good day at work. Oh, and there is one more thing planned for the evening, and that is dinner out with the wife.

Related articles

• Social Security Press Office: Patty Duke Turns 65, Applies Online for Social Security and Medicare benefits (notinvisable.wordpress.com)
• Childhood SSI Claims (farmerdreiser.wordpress.com)

Music Monday-Bob Marley "Could You Be Loved"

I am about three weeks late in acknowledging this, but February 6th would have been the 67th birthday or Robert Nesta Marley.  Bob Marley was without question the world's most influential reggae artist.  Marley brought the reggae sound to international prominence before he passed away in 1981.  His music is timeless.

Come join Music Monday and share your songs with us. Rules are simple. Leave ONLY the ACTUAL LINK POST here and grab the code below and place it at your blog entry. You can grab this code at LadyJava's Lounge Please note these links are STRICTLY for Music Monday participants only. All others will be deleted without prejudice.   PS: Because of spamming purposes, the linky will be closed on Thursday of each week at midnight, Malaysian Time. Thank you!

TrueTwit

Are you active on Twitter and other social media?  Over the past few months, I have gotten quite a bit more active on Twitter, though lately  I have been so busy with work and preparing for meetings regarding my son I have been a little less active of late.  One of the things that I did was that I started to use TweetAdder to help manage my followers.

The great thing about TweetAdder is that it allows me to search for people that I want to follow by keywords in their profile.  Usually, those keywords involve conservative politics or other things that interest me.  If somebody I add does not follow me back, I have the option to have TweetAdder unfollow that person. It also allows me to follow back automatically those Twitter users that follow me. 

In the time that I have been using TweetAdder, I have come across several Twitter users that are using a service called TrueTwit.  The idea behind TrueTwit is to reduce the amount of spam in your Twitter feed by having potential followers verify that they are human by using those dreaded captcha codes.  You could avoid entering the captcha codes if you signed up for the service itself. 

The idea behind TrueTwit is OK in and of itself, but I never signed up to use it.  One of the reasons that I never signed up to use it is that in the back of my mind I thought it might inhibit the number of followers you could get.  Personally, I have some difficulty with the codes so there have been times that I didn't want to be bothered with it.

Yesterday, I received a direct message on Twitter telling me that one of the people I was attempting to follow was using TrueTwit.  When I went to the link to enter the verification code, there was an ad banner where the captcha code used to be.  No matter what I did, I could not get to a captcha code.  I tried on my Android phone and tablet, Firefox, and Chrome.

Today, I have discovered that instead of the old captcha code, TrueTwit is now using a new verification program from Solve Media.  It requires that you look at a banner ad and enter the phrase that appears in the ad as verification instead of the old captcha codes.  It was really not very intuitive at first glance.

Once you know what you are dealing with in the Solve Media ads, it is actually a lot easier to know what to enter as opposed to deciphering a captcha code.  Still, the idea that I have to interact with an advertisement in order to follow somebody on Twitter is bothersome to me.  At this point, I think I will stop going to TrueTwit to verify that I am human just to follow somebody on Twitter.

Swamped

I have a lot of things going on right now.  Most of the time, I am able to keep a fairly good balance between the  real world and my blogging or online world.  By the "real world" I mean those things that I have to deal with on a daily basis like my job and my son.  The other stuff are just those things that I do to help me unwind and relax after dealing with the other stuff.

A few months ago, I took on a new position at work.  Shortly after I moved into the new position, the person who took my place left abruptly, and we have been shorthanded for a couple of months.  Plus, another coworker who had also taken on some of my old responsibilities took an extended vacation to get married.  So, I ended up pitching in on my old desk while also trying to move into my new responsibilities.

We finally got back up to full staff again a few weeks ago.  Needless to say, I am not far along as I would like to be in my new project.  So now I am trying to get caught up to where I would like to be.  Normally, I get to the office around 8:30 each day, and stay until a little after 5:00.  This week, I have been trying to get to the office by 7:00 to get more work in.  I am also taking work home with me on the weekend.  It is a bit harder to work from home, as the VPN can be a bit slow.

On top of that, we have several things going on with our son in the upcoming weeks.  With his 18th birthday coming up later this year, we have a number of things we need to do for him.  First we need to apply with the Social Security Administration to get Supplemental Security Income.  We also have a meeting scheduled with an attorney to retain guardianship for him for when he turns 18 so that we can still make decisions for him for his day to day care since he is incapable of making those decisions on his own.

I hope that with all of those things going on that I will still be able to blog here on a nearly daily basis.  The reality of it is that there is a pretty good chance that I will miss a few more days here and there updating the blog.  While this is fun for me and a nice outlet, there are a few things that take a higher priority.  Thanks for your patience.

Captcha Removed

Yesterday, I was doing the rounds and visiting several different blogs that I like to visit when I saw a post on MyQualityDay by Sharkbytes about how she had removed the word verification option for posting comments on her blog.  The purpose of the word verification system is to help cut down on the amount of spam comments left on blogs. Up until a tonight, I had the word verification option applied to this blog.

Recently, Blogger changed the way that blogs on the Blogger format display word verification images, or Captcha.  Previously, the code was one set of letters that was fairly easy to read.  After visiting Ask the Blogster, and attempted to leave a comment on a post.  The new word verification image is now two words and much more difficult to read

The new word verification not includes those words where the background and font color change in mid word. In other words, it starts out black text on a white background, switches to white text on a black background, and back again.  These days, I have been having a lot more difficult time deciphering those images.  Even with my spectacles my eyes just aren't what they used to be.

For that reason, as of tonight, I have removed word verification from this blog.  I found a lot of comments out there that people are not happy with the change that had been implemented.  I had to do some searching to find out how to turn off the option in my settings.  The new updated Blogger dashboard does not have the option to turn off word verification in the settings.  Instead, I had to revert to the old dashboard interface and turn it off there.

I will leave word verification off for now and will see whether or not it leads to an increase in spam comments going forward.  A while back, I had implemented comment moderation due to some spam comments.  I had considered removing it with the implementation of threaded comments, but for now, I will leave it on until I see how removing word verification impacts spam comments.

Related articles

• Recent Findings On Captcha & The User Experience (searchengineland.com)
• Seriously, What Am I Supposed to Do With This? (shirosrpg.blogspot.com)
• To All My Blogger Friends (towriteistowrite.wordpress.com)
• I hate captchas! (theomnipotenteye.blogspot.com)
• Word Verification (silverthoughts2.wordpress.com)

Music Monday-Trace Adkins "Then They Do"

My son is home from school for a long weekend. He is supposed to go back to school tomorrow. Having him home is great, but with his disabilities it is often difficult. Life is a bit easier when he is away, but I will miss him terribly.

I think about when he was younger and all the times I would get frustrated at some of his behaviors before we fully grasped the depth of his disabilities.  There were times that I could not wait for him to grow up.  I think any parent, whether of a special needs child or a "normal" child has thought about wanting their child to grow up.  But Then They Do.


 

Come join Music Monday and share your songs with us. Rules are simple. Leave ONLY the ACTUAL LINK POST here and grab the code below and place it at your blog entry. You can grab this code at LadyJava's Lounge Please note these links are STRICTLY for Music Monday participants only. All others will be deleted without prejudice.   PS: Because of spamming purposes, the linky will be closed on Thursday of each week at midnight, Malaysian Time. Thank you!

Doing My Part for the Environment

I have been doing something for the last few years as part of my everyday life that I recently found out was beneficial to the environment, and I never even knew it.  My intention when I began this particular habit really had nothing to do with being "environmentally friendly."

Being green is not something that I necessarily set out to do, but if it is something that I can do that is not inconvenient or more expensive, then I will "go green."  So what is this habit of mine that turns out to environmentally friendly?

I enjoy a glass or two of wine in the evening.  I particularly enjoy red wine.  I used to open a bottle of wine and drink two glasses, then put the cork back in and finish the bottle the next day.  Soon, I was expanding my drinking to a third glass, but that meant just one glass left in the bottle so I would just finish the bottle off.

As I have become more frugal, I started looking for less expensive ways to enjoy my wine.  I started buying boxed wine.  It was much less expensive than buying individual bottles of wine, and took up less space in the house.  I also thought it would allow me to cut back to three glasses instead of four, but that didn't happen.

Tonight, I was fixing dinner and just happened to look at the side panel of the 5-liter box of Franzia Merlot that I bought last night.  That is when I found out that my penchant for boxed wine is environmentally friendly as the side panel proudly displayed all the ways that Franzia boxed wines are good for the environment.

Below are all the ways that according to Franzia, buying boxed wines are environmentally friendly.  Now, whenever anybody asks me what I am doing to help the environment, I now have something to tell them besides recycling.

Related articles

• Thinking Inside the Box (seattleweekly.com)
• How Long is Boxed Wine Good? (boxwines.org)
• How To Open Boxed Wine (waywardwine.wordpress.com)

Organize Your Life

I do a lot of searching for things on the web.  A lot of times, I will want to go back to that site to look at the information a second time.  Unfortunately, I am one of those people that does not bookmark a lot of sites on my web browsers when I am surfing the web.  Consequently, I usually end up having to go back to the search engines to try to find the info.

What if there was an easy way to organize all of those pieces of information in one place without having to bookmark every site you find interesting?  Well, now there is with clipix.  Clipix is a free online tool that lets you create virtual clipboards that you can organize in the best way possible for you to go back and find when you n to later.

There are so many different things you can do with clipix.  You can use it to keep track of different places you might want to visit on vacation or books you might want to read.  It is great for creating a wish list that you can share for those dreaded "what do you want for your birthday" questions that come up.  I can never think of anything off the top of my head, but with clipix I can create a wishlist that I can share with others.

Recently, I made dinner for my wife and I that featured spaghetti squash as one of the ingredients.  It was the first time that I had eaten spaghetti squash, and I liked it.  I have started using clipix to clip different recipes to try featuring spaghetti squash.  The possibilities are endless.  Here is my clipboard of spaghetti squash recipes.

Signing up with clipix is simple.  You can sign up with your Twitter or Facebook accounts.  Go ahead and sign up and start organizing your clips today.  Let me know how you would use clipix by leaving me a comment.

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