In the Glossies: Gracious Living With LEDs

In spite of big box retailers' marketing campaigns, LED lights are still an expensive niche product for homeowners. It's not surprising, then, that home and design magazines feature them prominently.
Read the rest in my blog post at All LED Lighting, In the Glossies: Gracious Living With LEDs

Blitzed by @FeedBlitz

Some of you may have seen a scary message when you clicked on a link to my blog post this morning. The service that handles distribution of my blog, FeedBlitz, had a bit of a meltdown this morning. They've explained the error in an email and on their blog. In part,

This morning, shortly before 8am US Eastern, one of our databases became overloaded and, to use a technical term, crapped out.
Our monitoring apps told us of the situation, we quickly jumped on the apparent problem, and we thought we were done … but there was more to the issue than at first appeared.
One of our downstream web servers that handled tracking became horribly overloaded as a consequence of its being unable to reach that specific database. That in turn caused a failsafe in FeedBlitz to kick in, which had the nasty and unintended consequence of putting up a scary malware message.

There was no risk to your computer or with anything on www.roasterboy.com. I'm sorry for this false alarm. FeedBlitz responded quickly and correctly, getting the servers back online and communicating pretty well.

Twitter / RoasterBoy: It appears that @feedblitz ... via kwout

They did continue their regular Twitter posts, which did not relate to the crisis at hand and, for while, leading to the impression that it was business as usual. 

Why is Amazon a Mac hater?

Amazon offers a publishing service that delivers blog content to Kindles and kindred e-readers. The subscription costs $.99/month, one-third of which goes to Amazon.
I set up an account and will make this stream o' bits available through the Kindle channel. (If anyone subscribes, I will donate my proceeds to charity. I'm interested in the publishing process, not in making money.)
One annoying hitch, however, is that, when I go to the publisher's page to log in to my account, I'm greeted with this warning.

Internet Explorer isn't available and you really have to dig to find Firefox versions older than the current  (17.0) release.
It turns out that the message is benign. Safari and Chrome, the two browsers that I have installed on my Mac, work ok.

Eight years of RoasterBoy

Today we'll see Suessical at the Hanover Theater. Lily is with us for a few days. Cassie and Tess will join us. After the show and meeting the cast backstage, we get a bite to eat and come back to our house.
It's a day and a time that's less serious and more important, about letting go and listening, about having a seven-year-old read The Lorax to me after breakfast.



This blog started because of change, losing a job and moving to something unexpected. I never expected how unexpected it could be. Here's to more of it. Thanks for joining e safari.

Department of blogging

Yet another blog from yours truly: Parallel Eagles.
I'm currently a student in Paralegal Studies at Mount Wachusett Community College. This new site includes items related to law, intellectual property, and language presented in addition and, in some cases, instead of my homework assignments.
The sidebar includes links to various articles and websites that might be of interest. A full list of the links is available on RoasterBoy's paralegal Bookmarks on Delicious.

More on blogging

According to a number of folks who blog about blogging, it's our fault. "Bloggers have undermined the blogosphere."
Or, maybe, it's your fault - "You all are not clicking on the links like you used to."
In any event, it's changed.
For the worse?
"blogging has changed, but the blogging scene is in some ways in better shape than it was three years ago."
Want to know why? According to a poll conducted by smart people, Measuring Engagement of the Social Web: ‘07-’09 | PostRank Blog:

• you (we) are responding to more content later: 
  
• distribution of content is becoming truly distributed.
• the weak ties that everyone brings are helping the content to travel further and over longer periods of time

Further, we learn, "there has been a decline in hat tipping." We should be linking to other bloggers, calling out their good works, and building a spirit of community.
So, reflecting on all of that, I think I understand how this blogging thing is supposed to work:
First, I read a few local bloggers:

• Jeff at Wormtown Taxi writes today that The revenue hunting holiday Click It or Ticket campaign is kicking off now. He's cynical about the State Police's enforcement effort, regarding it as a revenue-generator more than a public safety program. 
• Nicole's post also notes that, because Massachusetts doesn't have a primary seat-belt law, police can't stop you just because you're not wearing a seat belt.

Then, I add my own notes:

• I support a primary seat belt law because I believe that seat belts are an important safety feature in all modern cars. 
• My experience has been that, while wearing a seat belt, I'm better able to avoid accidents. This has happened on several occasions, where I needed to swerve to avoid a collision. My seat belt kept me in my seat, such that I could keep control of the car.
  
• Of course, Massachusetts drivers, who wear their bad driving habits as badges of honor, insist on their right to put the rest of in danger because they want to do something stupid.
• [Disclaimer: my son is a sergeant in the Massachusetts State Police. My views do not necessarily reflect his or that of the State Police.]

Then, we add another link, Dee's Worcester Is MAJOR!™: Cellphone: Banned While Driving in MA! When?.
And, close with a quip:
The car in front of us was a Honda hybrid, the kind of car you'd expect to see while driving through Northampton. We followed this car for several miles, from one side of the city to other, until it finally turned off at a side road in Leeds. "That driver set a good example for saving energy," I said to my wife. "They conserved electricity by not using their directionals once."
And a link to a funny picture:

via There, I Fixed It: Epic Kludges + Jury Rigs Guess His Arm Got Tired Of Doing The “Go Around” Motion «