While I realize that my readership consists of only myself, I still think that I could inform my audience of a few tips and tricks.  As you all know, I have been working on the Windows Live Writer team for the past months and am fast approaching a year!   It has proven to be fun and I have learned a lot... For the next year I plan on posting a few comments about my Product, my Passion, and my Programming.   All of which will relate back to Window Live Writer.  It should be fun and at least if nothing else very useful for myself :) 

This time I hope to provide some useful tips on the Preferences that WLW offers the user.

Under Tools --> Options...  You will find a host of settings.  There are some which at first are more useful then others.  But some more advanced users may find it the exact opposite.

Lets look at the Preferences page first.

Editing

As you can see saving automatically is turned off by default.  This feature *can* be useful.  That is to say if you only want to take the most recent 'snapshot' of your post.  This is literally like clicking the save button automatically after so many minutes.  Be careful while using this, it isn't as sophisticated as we would like, and can actually cause data loss in some extreme situations.

Post Windows

Something that can be confusing is when you use a 'single window' and click new on an un-edited post, a new window will pop up!  What the heck!!!  It's ok its by design, we feel that its the right move to make.  Essentially its pure cosmetic, people liked seeing something happen when clicking new on a new post.  Because lets think about if you click new on a new post what should happen? Nothing, but then how do you know that new worked? It is a tricky one :)

Publishing

Closing a window after publishing will allow you to close down Writer based on a few situations.  One is 'Always' another 'Only for Blog This'.  Either choice is for the folks that open Writer, and then post within a few minutes and then close down for the next time they blog a post.  It seems like this person would find that they would also like un-checking 'View post after publishing." That way they truly are not nagged about anything upon publishing.   I personally use neither I usually have dozens of open processes on my desktop just waiting to do my bidding!!

I hope that this has been informative for you the users!!

So spaces has a new look and feel to its edit mode.  Apparently you can do all sorts of things very easily now.  One of which is enter edit mode,(by clicking Customize) and select things like: Modules, Themes, Layout, and Advanced.  This is very cool because it becomes very nice to work with now.  Simplicity is the key.

Kool-aid what do you mean... Ok I know its a shameless plug... but I think you will find that is easier to do some things now :)

I really just wanted to get a post up there, and don't really have time to go into detail about my own life... So For the 2 viewers out there (mom, dad... thanks), I thought I would just say what's up and try the new space customization work  :)

Oh and another thing... Add me as a friend K!

And now your moment of Oddness:

As I reflect on Memorial Weekend I realize that there just isn't that much memorializing going on anymore.  I mean come on, there are a LOT of folks, in war, that have risked their lives for me, us and our future me's and us's.  What strikes me as sad is that we as Americans do very little to thank them.  While it isn't possible to thank everyone individually (because most have come and gone before my time) I bid the collective force a great big THANK YOU! Thank you for protecting our families, thank you for protecting me, and thank you for protecting our way of life!

Growing up in the Rogue Valley part of Oregon, there is always a sense of American Pride.  This is directly because of the 'small town of America' look and feel.  It is something that (after the extinction of the logger) has become the predominant source of new income to the area.  One event that attracts many visitors is Boatnick.  The similarity to Seattle's own 'Sea Fair' is quite literally uncanny!  There is a carnival, also a jet fly by (not quite Blue Angles but loud and gets your blood going), and lets not leave out the Boats.   Three days of racing different types of boats up and down the river. 

There is much more then the average Small Town America to the Rogue Valley.  Namely Its Proximity to other things. Like white water rafting!!  For this (Rose's first trip down... and oh yes there will be more :P), we decided to take a small diversion to the California Redwoods, as it was a bit cold for rafting :(  These trees are magnificent. They range in size from 'Ultra-Mega-Huge' to 'Good-God-These-Things-Are-Insanely-Enormous.'    We started the 'trek' by driving down a long dirt/gravel road to get the back side of a costal jungle.  There was some off-road running as we blazed a path from point A (going through the alphabet 2 times) and wound up at point ZZ, which in some fluke of math turned out to be both 5 miles and about 10 feet from point A.   There was enough running to satisfy 2 half-marathoners with plenty of blunders worthy of Spanky's Ladder!  We rounded off the trip with some Smith River rock jumping, followed by a bear sighting (thanks Cat!) and Fireworks to end it all.

Please enjoy the pics of Memorial Weekend:

So this new tool that I told you all about. Well I am on the team now! Its fun and I don't want to go out and just be raving about something that I work on... SO I will make a pledge to keep my blog up to date... That should be fun.  I already have a few posts queued up (yea you can save them with this new tool).  They should be finalized in the next week or so... Oh and they will be posted to both my blogs if you can find the other one you will notice how similar they are. 

The Topic will include:

• Buying a New Car and That Story
• Trip to DC
• A Ferry Ride (and no Marc not that kind)
• The Redwoods
• Another Graduation!

I hope that you will all enjoy It will take me a few days to finish the rest BUT As soon as I start publishing you will see a new one everyday, why? Because we can set it up that way, make it automatic :O)

 If you would like to try it out please visit
       http://get.live.com/betas/writer_betas

 

I find that the Internet is so vast that on any given Saturday you can inundate your mind with so much about one topic that it will hurt... and hurt badly.  But is there any perspective?  Is there anything that can really be gleaned? Insight?

I have found a site. A blog, that has insight, balance, and perspective.  In the old days of community, the sick were treated by the community. The powerful were given lead, and the weak protected.  The young were taught.  And ALL respected the old, for there was the true wisdom.

In my humble opinion, http://dontoearth.blogspot.com/ should be at the very least looked at, and certainly respected!

I recently had the opportunity to sit in a Touareg.  It was extremely roomy! I didn't notice right away but I didn't have to duck down to see out the front.  The steering wheel was telescopic so I could bring it closer or move it further away depending on where my seat was.  It's center console was at the perfect height!  All in all I would give this '05 Touareg a 4.5 out of 5. 

Example pic:

So is Matt..... Are you ?

I do not understand what I am seeing.  We sounders deal with traffic everyday we are in an automobile.  One would think that with this type of experience, drivers would have found all kinds of tricks to optimize their trips.  From my observation, people are in fact not optimizing their routes.  One of the things that are out of my observation is:

Direct route.

• This is the obvious seeking of the shortest path from point XX to point YY.  This problem has a couple of blatant tradeoffs:
  • number of traffic control devices
  • speed limits
  • traffic flow
  • pedestrian influence

Here is the deal... While I cannot know for every person how many traffic control devices there are between their point XX and point YY. The thing is I can observe from a case by case basis how people treat these traffic control devices.  Here are a couple of general guidelines, that I believe would help at least a little bit while driving in the context of the Puget Sound.

1. At 4 way stops:
   • If you are going strait or turning right, and the criss-cross person is going strait GO.  It is inefficient for you to wait for two more turns to go when your right of way is not blocked.
     • Note if they are turning right (your left) then you must be aware of what others are doing because your right of way is NOT necessarily open.
2. At Stop Lights:
   • DO NOT BACK OFF THE LINE... There are sensors that are designed to, listen, to the traffic. They are on the ground and cannot work unless they are used.  When a car is backed off the white line, then they are NOT on the sensor, and they do not know to allocate time for your turn. 
     • This is especially annoying at night when there isn't any traffic. (Trick: Roll back and forth over the sensor to speed up the light by registering more cars)

***NOTE: Do NOT follow these guidelines if they violate local law.***

There is a new tool in town.  It is called, Writer!! Its a neat tool that reminds me of OneNote™.  It is still in Beta mode, but there are fun things.  From the get go... two noticeable things are, that after install and launch.  It launched but didn't prompt the user, it was hidden behind Firefox™.  Initially I thought that it didn't launch or that it was taking time initializing... but it just didn't pop into the foreground.  No big deal, also not a big deal but on install, behind the installing progress bar, there were what looked to be the tops of letters that could just barely be seen, and were probably some details about what files are going where. 

My first impressions are nice, I have tied it to my 'live.spaces' account. And am about to make my first update.  It should prove to be a nice experience.  There are a list of things that I can try though, and I want to give them a test go first. 

I just tried swapping views... its nice, you can view it docked into the blog of your choice.  Kinda COOL!

I would expect that there is a setting for it, but one thing that was noticeable is that spelling errors were not automatically noticed.   Even in Firefox 2.0™ there is a, rather crude, auto spell checking functionality.

A cool feature that I look forward to trying out is the ability to add custom plug-ins.  Something that I think would be cool would be to hook into another api so when you have a missed spelled word, you can hover over a suggested word and get either its definition, a use in a sentence, or list of synonyms so that you can better choose the word that you were intending.

Inserting a few things and then well call it a post

Home town and house that i grew up in... just under tuttle ct

Well thats it for right now...