How to SAVE YOUR ENTIRE BLOG (blogger.com)

Not being very technically savvy, I was pleased to find this advice on how to archive all the posts of my blog. In one easy step.

I did so. My advice is for you to do so as well. Now!

From Dummies Guide to Google Blogger (beta):

Blog Backup has always been a bit of a problem for bloggers ever since the advent of the New Blogger. In Classic Blogger it was easy by using the Httrack utility from httrack.com.

In the new Blogger data was separated from template/layouts. XML was introduced. Hence one could backup blog by saving each post via browser or by using feeds. Now with Blogger introducing import-export facility backup has become easier..........

Here are the steps to backup your blog :

1. Login at Blogger in Draft: http://draft.blogger.com/home. Soon this feature will be out of draft (testing) phase and you will be able to login at Blogger.com to backup your blog.

2. Go to Settings---->Basic----->Blog Tools----->Click Export Blog link.

3. Click the Export Blog button.

4. In popup window click Save.

5. In explorer window you can rename the file and choose location where to save it on disk. It is saved as an XML file.

6. NOTE : You can use this file to restore the blog using the Import Blog feature. This feature to restore blogs was not available before.

Digital theft?

So let's get this straight.

You buy a song. But the retailer says it would be better for you that you don't actually own the song.

It would be so much better, the retailer tells you, that it should keep the song. It will allow you to play it anytime you wish (but not quite with any music-playing device you own).

But then ... the the retailer, who now has your money (and that of millions of others), says, "Oh, so sorry. You can't play that music anymore. But thank you for your money."

Welcome to the bizarro world of Digital Rights Management (DRM).

The newest catch-22 comes from Yahoo! which just this week announced that as of 1 October 2008 it will no longer support any purchases from its Yahoo! Music Unlimited Store (and in the process will redefine the meaning of "unlimited").

This model of unlimited rental has been showed to be a fraud, and in a manner, theft. The music business has been crying that it is we the consumers who are music thieves. What they do is not theft?

I don't steal music. I buy it, whether vinyl, CD, or download.

My most recent purchase --a download through eMusic, one of (now) many on-line music stores -- was a mid-90s recording from the Old 97's. It's wonderful alternative-country-rock, or whatever the category is that it falls into. But I dislike that damnable misuse of the " ' ". An apostrophe indicates possession or contraction, not the plural.

[UPDATE 2008.07.28]

Yahoo Music plans to issue refunds and is trying to go one step further. If a customer would prefer music over a refund, Yahoo is looking for a way to give the customer copies of the purchased songs in the DRM-free MP3 format, according to a Yahoo representative.

Yahoo Music is transferring customers of Yahoo Music Unlimited to RealNetworks' Rhapsody service. These are both subscription music services, so Yahoo users who choose to make the move are unaffected. But those who purchased songs would be out of luck after September 30.

Just the news please

On Thursday, when Senator Obama was in Berlin, Germany, MSNBC ran a news story with this sub-headline:

Obama addresses 200,000 in Berlin;
McCain eats at German restaurant.

No matter a person's political affiliation, that was not a "fair and balanced" juxtaposition.

McCain is currently running ads in which one hears crowds chanting "Obama, Obama" as the narrator asks who is responsible for rising gas prices. That's not exactly fair or balanced either.

But McCain's piece is indeed a political ad with that genre's attendant hyperbole.

MSNBC is a news organization.

Twitter's utility, part2

Twitter. Think of it as a mini-blog service of sorts, and a group messaging tool. Posts to it, called Tweets, are limited to 140 characters.

Rob Pegoraro, IT columnist/blogger at the Washington Post has written a column about his experience with Twitter. Other than disapproving of its too-often down-time, he generally liked his experience.

Twitter has become my public notebook, in which I jot down the one- or two-sentence comments, quotes and reports that aren't yet worthy of a blog post, but which I don't want to leave buried in my story-ideas file. (Some of my Twitter updates do turn into blog posts, some of which themselves eventually evolve into stories--which can in turn provide for follow-up tweets and blog posts. There's a bit of a circular food chain here.) In addition, Twitter helps me stay current on the thoughts of other tech-industry types--the reporters, analysts, consultants, publicists, developers and other people whose updates I follow or who post replies to my own tweets. And Twittering's forced brevity has pushed me to be more efficient in my prose everywhere else. I've settled on a rhythm of five or six posts on a workday, with none on nights, weekends and holidays

At a recent beer event, a beer store owner saw me posting a Tweet. "You're such a techie-geek," he said with a chuckle. I began to explain how I use Twitter for business purposes (selling beer).

Then I realized, "Well, yes. I suppose am." And I took another sip of my beer.

Nations label their domestic opponents as terrorists

[Bishop Eliezer] Pascua, general secretary of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, gave nine lectures on a tour from California to Nevada to Chicago [in early summer 2008]. He spoke not just to re-trace the details of several of what he counts as nearly 900 illegal executions since President Gloria Arroyo took office in 2001, but to prick American consciences.

“Continuing to support Bush’s ‘global war on terror,’ President Arroyo has ratcheted up her government’s pressure on the Philippine left, reviving memories of the Marcos dictatorship and its dirty war against the opposition,” wrote author Luis Francia in December. “Manila knows that as long as it supports the Bush Administration, thereby obtaining economic and military assistance from the United States, it can get away with murder—literally. … For Arroyo and [her political party], internationalizing long-running domestic insurgencies and recasting them as terrorist threats to an ill-defined world order has meant tapping into U.S. aid once again.” <...>

There have been repeated warnings that other nations label their domestic opponents as terrorists in order to internationalize internal disputes and gain support from the United States, much as governments used to paint their critics as communists to gain U.S. aid.

The remainder of the story:

Somber message in Sparks
The Philippines’ president called her opposition ‘terrorists,’ so the United States joined her war
by Carol Cizauskas
Reno News & Review
17 July 2008

The author is my sister.

tasteless at the New Yorker

Tom Toles, of the Washington Post, today published his political cartoon take on a recent New Yorker cover.

Satire is effective when it is slightly askew, when a certain lack of realism indicates that it is indeed satire. When the satire is represented in an overly arch and/or realistic manner, it disguises the intent of the satire, and instead becomes an inside, wink-wink, joke.

Jack Shafer of Slate.com disagrees with me.

Although every critic of the New Yorker understood the simple satire of the cover, the most fretful of them worried that the illustration would be misread by the ignorant masses who don't subscribe to the magazine.

Firefox 3.0 crashes

Aargh! Not now!

I'm planning for a trip, and the new Firefox 3.0 crashes on me. I don't have the time today (or the inclination) to follow all the heretofore unpublished tricks to forestall problems with a supposedly stable, wonderful, alternative to Internet Explorer.

In Firefox's defense, it is an open-source and non-profit browser project. And its previous iterations have been stable and so much more user-friendly than Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

From the the How To Geek:

Troubleshooting Problems with Firefox 3 Crashing or Hanging

With all the fanfare surrounding the release of Firefox 3 and the setting of a new world record for downloads, the fact that many people are having problems with Firefox instability seemed to get lost in the shuffle… so I decided to write up a list of troubleshooting methods that might help solve your problems.

There's a number of reasons for Firefox 3 crashing, which could include any of these, or be something else:

* Incompatible or Buggy Extensions
* Buggy Plugins
* Upgrading an Old 2.x Profile to 3.0 (using a fresh profile works best)
* Spyware/Viruses
* Compatibility Problems with XP
* Video Card Drivers (Make sure you are not using old drivers)
* Tablet PC Incompatibility
* Sneezing loudly

You'll have to read through the article and go through the steps that might apply to you… the last, and potentially best, option is to completely uninstall Firefox and remove all your profile folders, and then install it again, which we've covered below.

The rest of the article here.

Over Stimulus check

I received my $600 stimulus check today.

And it had the phrase "overstimulus" printed on it.


Wooh hoo! Now I can pay a portion of my gas credit card.

That's an OVER stimulus?

Don't think so. Unless I've been 'over-stimulizated'.