Google Chrome

[Today I will] ... look at something in my behavior or attitude that might be stopping me from reaching one of my goals. (Eric V. Copage, Black Pearls, 15 June)

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I've been using the Google Chrome browser for the first time. I like the simple design. Yesterday I added a "TAG" button. This will allow me to quickly post new bookmarks to my Delicious bookmark account. Did you know you can access my bookmarks from your computer. There are bookmarks for sites to see in Washington, DC and for many pages of genealogy information.

I also have a BlogThis button that allows me to quickly post a link to any of my four Google blogs.

At the bottom of my Facebook "Info" page there is a place where I can list links to websites I want to share with Facebook friends. Yesterday I discovered that even though it appears that the number of lines is open-ended, it really isn't. Only five URLs display after I save the page. I added a link to Delicious in case someone on Facebook wants to easily find my bookmarks.

Philippians 4:11

I have learned to be satisfied with the things I have and with everything that happens. (Philippians 4:11 in Grace For The Moment by Max Lucado, 9 December)

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I didn't post to my blogs for the last two days. On Wednesday I attended four Christmas events at the Library of Congress. Yesterday I went to lunch with former co-worker, Bill Hamilton.

There is a rumor that Yahoo intends to drop support for their social bookmarking site, Delicious. I am a user of this application. I suppose that many other free Internet services will be shutting down in the months ahead. When there is a strong possibility of marked reductions in spending for advertising it is inevitable that any endeavor that relies on advertising for revenue is going to fail.

It snowed yesterday during the day. Melva and I were out driving in the snow going to luncheon engagements. Driving was tricky. We both managed to make our trips without incident. On our way to Bowie we noticed several accidents on the in-bound lanes of U.S. Route 50.

Mr. Dickie
17/Dec/2010 7:37

Bookmarking With Delicious

This is a brand new shining day and I have it in my power to make it a good one just by the way I think about it and what I do with it. (One Day At A time In Al-Anon, 23 November)

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I'm starting to gather the books I want to read next year in my daily reading program. I hope I can find the ones I stored in the basement.

Yesterday I added a few bookmarks to my Delicious bookmark collection. It had been some time since I added four bookmarks on the same day. These pointed to obituaries for members of my Henthorn family. I also included the obituaries in my RootsMagic genealogy file. If you are a member of my maternal or paternal family and have information about recent events that should be added to the genealogy file, I'd like to hear from you.

Delicious

Mr. Dickie
28/Nov/2010 8:52

Happy New Year

Two things happen to the man who forgets God and leaves him out of the situation. He becomes utterly and completely disorganized. He loses the power to face life and to cope with it. In the time of trial, life is unlivable without God. (William Barclay, The Gospel of Luke (DSB), p. 274)

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I maintained my daily reading schedule throughout the month of December. This morning I read the last page in twenty books I was reading at the end of the year. In all I read, at least, forty-one books. There were others that I checked out of the library and just scanned. I created a list of the books I read using the CSVed program I downloaded. This morning I signed on to WeRead and changed the status to "Read It" on all of the books I had marked before as "Reading." Later today or tomorrow I plan to return to WeRead to post the books I plan to read in 2010.

Nebraska University dominated and won the Holiday Bowl against Arizona in San Diego last night. I didn't watch until the end because the score was so lopsided.

This year I have enjoyed:

• helping with the Bowie Seniors Computer Club website
• making lots of Facebook friends
• blogging and reading the blogs of others
• learning how to use the Ancestral Author program
• posting my personal bookmarks to Delicious

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the fun!

Mr. Dickie

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year - 2009

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
2009

Today, I will let my friends know just how important they are to me. (Sefra Kobrin Pitzele, One More Day, 16 December)

Clear thinking means we don't allow ourselves to become immersed in negativity or unrealistic expectations. (Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go, 14 December)

Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God. (Hebrews 13:16 (RSV), Daily Guideposts - 2006, 13 December)

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To everyone who reads Mr. Dickie's Blog either on Google or Facebook we hope the year 2009 has been good to you, that you, your family and friends have had good health and good jobs. To those with health issues we pray that the new year will bring better days.

We appreciate the efforts our friends and family make to stay in touch via letters, telephone calls, Email, blogs, and Facebook. It was great to see more photos this year than ever before.

In spite of another computer disaster when my laptop stopped working I have managed to stay connected to the Internet. This was my year to finally get a high-speed Internet connection from Verizon FIOS. Phone callers to our house like this because after many years the phone line is open.

In October 2008 AOL dropped free website support. This created another mess. The genealogy website I'd maintained on AOL was no longer available. During the year I have been slowly posting some of the information again. Some is on my two Google genealogy blogs and some is on my private Google "group" and "site." If you are interested is seeing the private genealogy information contact me for further instructions. Some documents I made available for the first time.

I've been busy posting to the Internet all year long. I've enjoyed taking an active part in posting to the social networking site, Facebook. On Facebook we kept in touch with relatives in Panama and made friends with several members of the younger generation of our family in this country. As of December 22nd I'd posted over 280 bookmarks to the social bookmarking application Delicious. I posted 208 times to my genealogy "News" blog; 347 times to my Arrow Prayers blog, 124 times to the genealogy "Obits" blog, and 370 times to "Mr. Dickie's" blog. That's approximately 1,330 posts for the year.

It is my hope that if you took the time to find and read anything I posted that you found something interesting, useful or thought provoking from time to time.

Let's stay in touch in 2010.
Mr. Dickie

Remembering Cat Lai, Vietnam

Photo: Transportation Corps Museum
(1099th Transportation Company (Medium Boat) - Cat Lai, Vietnam)

[Don't] ... waste time pretending that things are okay when they are not. (Iyanla Vanzant, Until Today!, 15 October)

I am seeking a saner approach to everything I encounter. (Courage to Change, 13 October)

... the attitudes and activities which undermine our integrity have to go. (Food For Thought, 13 October)

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Yesterday I worked on a project to create Delicious bookmarks for Transportation Corps websites. I found one for an association of Vietnam vets, others for the 11th Transportation Battalion, one for the 1099th Transportation Company (Medium Boat) and one for the 199th Light Infantry Brigade. I enjoyed looking at all of the photographs and reading the text. I'm reminded of how much I have forgotten about that year at Cat Lai, Vietnam. For example I have forgotten the exact dates I was in there. I know the period was in 1967 - 1968 but can't remember the starting or ending month. There must be a record around here someplace.

Mr. Dickie

Maintaining and Expanding Contacts

Most people act, not according to their meditations, and not according to their feelings, but as if hypnotized, based on some senseless repetition of patterns. (Anonymous in A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy, 28 September)

Sometimes you have chosen to overlook certain behaviors for so long that you will be unable to see how negative they are. (Ric Engram, Pace Yourself, 27 September)

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I had a good weekend expanding and maintaining my contacts. On Sunday I enjoyed two nice phone calls, one with my cousin Fran and the other with my genealogy friend, Bob. It was also a good weekend for adding Facebook friends. My Conger family friend, Job, and I established a Facebook friendship. I also made friends with cousins, Jean and Julie. And I sent friendship requests to cousins, Jodie and Kristyna. And, I'll probably send another request to cousin, Melanie. I had a nice Facebook chat with our niece, Samantha, in Panama. I posted the URL of the website of John, our artist friend in Panama, to Mr. Dickie's Blog and to my Delicious.

I see I repeated myself. I guess that's because I want you to know what I'm excited about.

Mr. Dickie

Five Hundredth Posting

Photo: Aztech New Media

Just for today, I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle all my problems at once. (From Just For Today found in Courage to Change, 27 September)

...we can get unlimited benefits from changing our way of thinking. No realistic, reasonable person would consider this an easy task; indeed, there is nothing more difficult in life! (One Day at a Time in Al-Anon, 24 September)

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. (Winston Churchill in One More Day by Sefra Kobrin Pitzele, 15 September)

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Yesterday I made the 500th posting to Mr. Dickie's Blog.

Yesterday I attended the computer club meeting in Bowie, MD. All of the officers, except the Vice President/Program Chairman, agreed to run again. Dan, the outgoing Program Chairman, will be sorely missed. He has done a great job finding speakers. Thank you Dan for the work you did for the rest of us. Several of the club members discussed what appeared to be rather serious issues with their computers. Everyone is struggling constantly to keep their machines running. In my opinion, it's no fun.

In the evening I added a "gadget" to my Arrow Prayers blog that will display "Words of Jesus Christ." I'm not sure I like how it works because there are some ads at the bottom of the scrolling window. It will be fun to see how it works and to see if anyone comments about the ads.

I'm enjoying being able to post to my Google blogs and to Delicious from the Firefox browser. I think in time I will wean myself away from AOL and it's version of Internet Explorer.

Mr. Dickie

BookCrossing - The World's Biggest Free Book Club - Catch and Release Used Books

BookCrossing - The World's Biggest Free Book Club - Catch and Release Used Books

This is a link to the BookCrossing a site with ideas about how to share your old books.

I have this site bookmarked in my Delicious bookmarks. Today I installed the Delicious add-on in Firefox. This is neat. Now if I want to "feature" a website from Delicious in one of my blogs I can use BlogThis! to post the link.

Mr. Dickie

More Delicious

• The road of life is strewn with the bodies of promising people. People
  who show promise, yet lack the confidence to act. People who make promises they are unable to keep. People who promise to do tomorrow what they could do today. Promising young stars, athletes, entrpreneurs who wait for promises to come true. ... Turn your promise into a plan. Make no promise for tomorrow if you are able to keep it today. And if someone calls you promising, know that you are not doing enough today.

(Iyanla Vanzant, Acts of Faith, 21 February)

I was able to add bookmarks to pages on my Google genealogy group to Delicious. That's nice because the bookmarks allow me to write a description of the file I am referencing.
Tags make it possible to focus on a topic within my bookmarks. For example, If someone wants to see all of my bookmarks that have a tag for the "Yoho" family entering this URL is all it takes.

http://del.icio.us/MrDickie/Yoho

You can also search for more than one tag by entering a plus sign (+) between tags. For example: to find all of my bookmarks pointing to the articles about "PDF" written by Dick Eastman use this URL.

http://del.icio.us/MrDickie/Eastman+PDF

After trying this URL enter the following line without the word "Eastman" to see the difference. This one finds all of the pages about "PDF."

http://del.icio.us/MrDickie/PDF

This ability to gather all of the links together in one set is very powerful. You could think of the bookmarks of "MrDickie" as a website with pointers to all of the webpages he's either found or posted himself. This website doesn't have a structure, like a tree or organizational chart. Rather the website is dynamic or virtual. The visitor searches for the topic of interest using a tag or tags and Delicious presents a display, similar to a Google search, which gathers all of the pages about the topic of interest together.

There's more to it than I'm writing about here. Once you are at Delicious you will see lists of tags, a place to key in tags, counts of the number of times the tags were used and much more.

If you take a look at what I have done so far I'd appreciate hearing your opinion. Did you find it useful? Was it easy to learn and use?

Mr. Dickie