Posting to my WordPress blog from LiveWriter

This is a post that was created using Microsoft’s LiveWriter.  Curious to see how it works.

Favorite Music

Bob Dylan, Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello, Guy Clark, Ry Cooder, Bruce Cockburn

The Band, Flaco Jimenez, Frank Zappa, Lila Downs, Los Lobos, Chet Atkins, Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Junior Brown, KD Lang, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Harry Nilsson, Peter Green, T-Bone Burnett, Tom Waits, Paul Simon, Randy Newman, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, Crosby Stills, Nash & Young, Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Grateful Dead, Little Feat, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Beach Boys, The Doors, The Pogues, The Clash, The Pretenders, Radiators, Rolling Stones, Smithereens, Subdudes, Who, Bonnie Raitt, Steve Goodman, John Prine, Steve Earle, Tim o’Brian, Townes Van Zandt, Charlie Musselwhite, Toots Thielemans, Billy Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Hank Crawford, Bill Frizell, Cab Calloway, Hoagy Carmichael, Madeleine Peyroux, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Tal Farlow, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Cyndi Lauper, David Byrne, Talking Heads, David Grissman, Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli, Doc Watson, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Peter Paul & Mary, Donald Fagen, Steely Dan

In no particular order, of course…

Who did I forget?

Check out the Brights

Vision from their web site:

“Persons who have a naturalistic worldview should be accepted as fellow citizens and full participants in the cultural and political landscape, and not be culturally stifled or civically marginalized due to society’s extensive supernaturalism.“

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skepticism

Blog to twitter to Facebook

• You can set up a twitter account (if you don’t already have it).
• Then you can set up an account on twitterfeed.com to update your blog entries to twitter (updates every 30 minutes).
• Finally, you can add the twitter application to your facebook account.

With this setup, you can add a new blog entry which will show up in your twitter feed, and then twitter will update your facebook account. It flows downstream, meaning if you add a blog entry it goes all the way through. Add a twitter feed and it just goes to Facebook. Facebook entries only appear in Facebook.

Works great. There’s probably a way to list your twitter feeds in your blog.

Building a public blog

Working on gathering all my social links into this blog.

WikiLeaks – Real World Scandal and Intrigue

Offshore accounts, banks in the Caymans, tax evasion, money laundering, arson, denial of service attacks…  Wow!

I have been thinking about a site like this that could be used to dull the power of the drug cartels.  If anyone could post information anonymously…  Of course you’d have to filter out the dis-information…

 

from Slashdot.com

See one of the mirror sites here: http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Wikileaks

How to embed images into blog posts.

Here is an image from my Flickr account:

 

 And here’s an image from the picassa account:

 

New Blog…

Got the posts moved from the dotText blog.  Now to get the comments moved…

Hatshepsut and Destani Wolf

Today, Aurora and I had a great day full of art and history (and food).

This morning we drove into the city and went to the  New De Young museum (http://www.deyoungmuseum.org) to see the Hatshepsut exhibit.  When we got there, the lines were long so we toured the sections of the museum on Art in America from colonial times through the twentieth century.  We also browsed through the textiles.

Hatshepsut was an Egyptian queen who became a Pharaoh around 1473 BC when the Pyramids at Giza were already 1000 years old.  The exibit had numerous artifacts from her reign.  Read about her on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatshepsut

Before we left the city we stopped at the Zuni cafe and had a late lunch.

Later we went to the Berkeley Jazz School to see Destani Wolf, a friend of Elena’s from Berkeley High school days.  She performed 2 great sets with a Jazz Band.  It’s a small venue and it felt very intimate and with all her old friends there, it felt like we were hanging in her living room.

You can keep up with Destani at her MySpace site: www.myspace.com/destaniwolf

Año Nuevo State Reserve

On Sunday, Aurora and I connected with our friends Nancy, Lydia, Jeanette, and John.  It was a spectacular day full of the low winter sun in a clear, cloudless sky.

Nancy had organized a day to visit to Año Nuevo State Reserve to see the annual gathering of elephant seals.  We got to the reserve at around 10:30 and arranged for tickets for the 12:15 walk with the docents.  Before we left, Nancy treated us to a wonderful lunch with drinks provided by Jeanette and John. 

At 12:15 we walked out to a staging area where we met up with our docent guide.  Her name was Liz and she is a geologist by trade, but she’s been guiding elephant seal tours for about 10 years and knew her subjects well.

We were able to see elephant seals in various social strata, from the young lonely guys, to female harems and their pups, to the highly Territorial bulls who weigh in at up to 5000 pounds.  We stood sometimes as close as 25 feet from the seals.

After the elephant seal tour we drove further down Highway 1 to a winery, Bonny Doon.  We tasted a variety of the wines, mostly very sweet, which is not my style, but it was fun anyway.

We drove home at sunset time and the countryside was beautiful.

Heading to Texas – Day Two

Drove from Indeo, Ca to El Paso, TX. 

On the way we got a call from our neighbor and she said that there was a bad storm with thunder and lightning and that power had gone out in our neighborhood.  Of course the computers went of and back on when power was restored, but when she was checking out our house, she found that one of my computers was sounding a load alarm; the data server for the blogs, forums, portals, etc.  I asked her to re-boot the computer and that seemed to fix the problem.  So far so good.

We stopped Quartzite, AZ which is a snowbird town.  It is a town of people who travel and live in RVs and travel south, to a town like Quartzite, for the winter.  These folks mostly travel around and collect things to sell in the flea markets of Quartzite.  One of the main things you see in Quartzite are rocks; lots of rocks. Here’s a picture of a rock, that just wouldn’t fit in the car.

Some Quartzite links:
http://www.desertusa.com/Cities/az/quartzite.html
http://www.ci.quartzsite.az.us/community_profile.htm 

We ate at a cafe called La Casa and met Rain Golden Bear, the waitress, who said her family called her “Face that rains a lot“.  I suppose she cried a lot as a child.  She had tattooed rain clouds on her temples and she let me take a picture.  Click on the image to see a close up of her tattoo.

We drove on to Phoenix and stopped for gas and that’s when I realized that I had lost my cell phone.  We called to the La Casa cafe and Rain said she had my cell phone and would send it to me in Houston and would let me know how much it cost to mail it.  So we She is an angel. 

We drove on, knowing the cell phone was safe and stopped at the Congress Hotel and ate dinner at the Cup Cafe.  Excellent.

Now we’re at the La Quinta, but first we tried a cheap hotel called the Lone Star Inn.  I had seen it on the Internet for $40/night.  When we checked into the room, we found roaches crawling on the toilet and that set off Aurora.  We were out and back in the car in a flash and here we are at La Quinta.  $70 and free Internet.

What a day.

Heading to Texas – Day One

Cold rain started out the day, so packing the car in the rain was no fun.  Rain lasted the entire length of the San Joachin valley but the Grapevine was open and dry.  Staying here in Indio (about 80 miles short of Blythe) with free DVD rental and wireless connection in the rooms.  Thus this post.  On to Quartzite, Tucson and El Paso.