I remember when I first discovered I had it. I used to run when I was younger and then I switched to fast walking due to shin splints. I was also driving 3 hours RT each weekend to visit my Dad in a nursing home. After a few months of this I was in agony. I had this horrible pain that started deep in my upper thighs and just radiated down what felt like my butt muscle.
I had felt this pain on off for years, but I was never sure what it was.

It hurt when I slept and it hurt when I drove and I had to stop walking as a form of exercise it hurt so much.
I went to the Dr. and he said it looked like sciatica, ( which I honestly thought only elderly people got!) He suggested a steroid shot. Wow! It was almost instant relief.

That was about 5 years ago and here I am again ouch, ouch, ouch! I hate this. The good news is
I have only had 2 shots in that 5 years and it seemed to certainly help and last quite long.
I am on the computer about 10-15 hours a day now up from my past 8-10, so I am looking at ergonomic chairs such as the kneeling chair. Anyone out there find that has helped?

I have terrible posture and sit with my legs crossed often. I know this is complete no no.
As I was researching those kneeling chairs I came upon this post and website.

Pop-up ergocise program makes me exercise at work

I sit at the computer all day (also when I worked as a legal secretary) researching and finding help for my neck and back and sometimes I am here for hours without hardly moving except for my hands. You know exactly what I mean, right? This causes hand, wrist, shoulder and back pain that you don’t even realize you have until you stop. I have a herniated C5-6 with nerve compression/back pain but now I religiously use a pop-up ergocise program that has helped me tremendously. What it does is FORCE you to stop do hand, shoulder, back and neck exercises - some of which I have never even thought of. At first it was aggravating because I would be in the middle of something and the computer would freeze for a second and this girl pops up with a different exercise every time that lasts a minute or so. She gives you a written explanation and a demonstration. After a while you get used to it and if you don’t minimize and skip it, you will feel so much better after you take a minute to stretch. You can default her to your specific problem and only those will pop up. Go to www.ergocise.com and - after you read all the medical info about our condition - click “download reminder program.” Check it out! You’ll be glad you did.

From: Silky - Texas, USA

I like this idea for several reasons. One I sit here for hours and I am literally creaking when I finally stand up! That can not be good.
Next this will remind me to take a break, and breath.
I have tried some of the exercises and they are very short, ( 10-15 stretches or movements) and I can feel my body thanking me already.

This is straight from foliovision.com

Thank you!

November 6th, 2007

Firefox has a great search feature based on Command-F (Mac) or Control-F (Windows).

You get a cute little text box at the bottom of the screen which allows you to search the whole page.

Firefox Find - Command-F

Subsequently Command-G works just fine to take you down through the page.

Just ‘ (apostrophe) alone will bring up the Quick Find box. It looks almost the same but isn’t. Quick Find only searches URLs (a nice extra almost undocumented feature).

Firefox Quick Find - ‘ (apostrophe)

If you want to do a Quick Find in all the text you need to use / (forward slash).

Very nice.

Great for Unix geeks. Quite harmless.

Not quite.

You can get caught in an edit box (think Gmail or forums) and be unable to type an apostrophe.

At this point, cut and paste won’t work either.

If you press escape it will stop the QuickFind, but as soon as you press apostrophe again back is the Quick Find box.

It looks like either you can’t use an apostrophe or you have to throw away your writing (a true story).

Not quite.

There are a few solutions all surprising and undocumented.

1. Resize your browser window (the instant and wonderful solution)
2. Type about:config in the address bar to access Firefox’s hidden preferences and toggle “searchkeys.disable.all” to true

I haven’t decided whether to leave the QuickFind on (now that I know how it works). I certainly don’t think Quick Find should be on by default.

As iCannonBall writes:

The (’) hotkey was activated for me every time I tried at use a contraction in Gmail, as with wberryiii.

How many non-savvy gmail/FF users out there are being forced to abandon contractions?

This is the kind of advanced feature which has less experienced internet users reverting back to Internet Explorer or Safari.

Too dangerous for road use.

Credit to Lifehacker writing up this Firefox feature albeit with a positive spin. The remedies are there in three pages of comments but are rather difficult to suss out. But in the end my long text box entry was saved and I hope yours will be too.

November 22nd, 2007

Copy & paste Word into Wordpress

For a couple of years now I have been building blogs and CMS’s with Wordpress. It’s a damn fine web application that I don’t think I could do without. With its encompassing features and oodles of plugins, Wordpress has become a highly adaptive platform that can serve a variety of web site genres.

I’m constantly coming across new functions, plugins that make this web app even better. In fact its sometimes hard to keep track of it all. A few days back I came across a feature, that I had overlooked, that became native to Wordpress with the release of version 2.3.

Most developers know when you copy text from MS Word into onto a web page or even into some email platforms you get some pretty funky formatting going on. Word tends to add a few “special characters” of its own that can’t be interpreted. Common characters like dashes, commas & apostrophes turn into what I could only imagine would be Andy Warhols’ alphabet soup.

Now you can copy content from Word and paste it into Wordpress’ WYSIWYG natively, (no plugins) through the advanced tools button. Note: you must have the visual editor turned on to use this. (Probably why I didn’t see this feature sooner).

The Advanced toolbar button can be found at the end of the visual editor toolbar¹. A new row of tools drops below it. Click on “paste from word”². You then get a popup to past your MS Word content into. When you click ‘insert’, it sends the content to the WYSIWYG all clean and funky format free… Woot!

I probably wont use it much myself. I still opt to turn the visual editor off so I can format my own copy. But still, its a choice feature, especially for your clients who don’t know any better.

Thank you What the Deuce! Awesome and helpful.

Just click the line and then go up to “messages” and in the drop down menu, one of the choices is

“block sender”. Click that and you have now blocked any email from that senders address.

Instead of coming to your inbox, it goes straight into the trash.

So unfortunately you still will be receiving spam, but you don’t have to see it in your inbox

Most programs have a simple similar method to check

When you get an email and you are not sure if it is spam or a real email, like the one I just got asking me to confirm with AT&T you can do this.

Do not open the email.

Right click the email “line” as it is in your inbox.

A series of choices will pop up.

Go to the bottom one called “properties”

That will bring up a two tab window.

One tab will say “General” and the other will say “Details”

The general tab will show you the real email address that the email is from.

Then if you want to check further, click the details tab, ( this is all the technical stuff)

and open “Message Source” and you can actually read the email.

Now you have been able to view and check out a potential bad email without actually causing any harm

or activating anything on your computer.

The next step is to block the email from future deliveries.

This may or may not help since many of these spoofed addresses will never be used again.

It does me pleasure to block them so I always do.

I went and and bought the Mac Bible and literally trained myself by studying and practicing each page until I was done.
It took me about two months of working on that computer for about six hours a day, ( that book is huge!)
We had Compuserve and then AOL dial up.
It took about six hours to download games for the kids from AOL.
Eventually and with much sadness I had to buy a PC and learn Windows.
It took me five steps to get to what took me one on the Mac.
(that is an entirely different story)

Today I have five computers in my home “hub” and my children and
I are often on them at the same time.
I have a ten year who loves YouTube and all things Nintendo and Disney and Lego and Nickelodeon,
( and whatever homework they let him do online and he has a blog).
An eighteen year old who is into classical and modern rock, has a video Ipod, and uses MySpace everyday, ( and does his homework).

Then my nineteen year old is a heavy AOL IM user, MySpace, Facebook and iTunes in addition to doing all her college research and papers using the net.

Mom, (that would be me) is heavily into online shopping, forums, finances, eBay and news sites.
I also create websites, blog,write and speak on various Internet topics.

Our “family” room is truly being used as a modern family room.
Four people from elementary age to college, working away together and chatting between tasks.
I love it. It often is the only time I get to hang out with all of them.
They all use earphones, because they are all doing different things.
I love silence, so this works quite well for me.
They each stop and chat with me and each other at various points in the evening.

Often I ask their opinions on design ideas and feedback on my work.
They are quite good at helping me pick great color schemes for client’s websites and nixing certain elements that they think don’t work well.
I love simplicity and no clutter.
I find that they like that as well, even though so many of the
sites they use are visually busy and coming at you from all angles.
I hate to even add any advertising to websites I create and run, because suddenly they feel more “busy” and commercial.

The space we occupy now used to be a dead zone in the house.
One of those combo rooms from the late 80’s with a high slanted ceiling.
Who uses a formal “dining” area now days.
When ever I have people over, the happening room is still always the kitchen
I guess that will always remain the true hub of a home.

Stupidity is the quality or condition of lacking intelligence, as opposed to being merely ignorant or uneducated. This quality can be attributed to both an individual or a person’s actions, words or beliefs, or those of a group.

Wiki says it better then I could.
These would be the people we think of as “adults” who as parents or holders of a public office, or an executive, we would hope would know better.

These people may want to think about this quote from Jane Wagner:

A sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential?

Enjoy some stupid!

Mayor’s Racy Lingerie Photo on MySpace Upsets Residents

Monday, January 07, 2008

• ARLINGTON, Ore. — Mayor Carmen Kontur-Gronquist’s name is sure to be mentioned when Arlington holds its annual town meeting Wednesday.

Some of the mayor’s roughly 500 constituents will want to know her views on the issues affecting the Eastern Oregon community; others will want to talk about her underwear.

The mayor’s lingerie is a hot topic here, with some residents upset that she posted pictures of herself wearing only a black bra and panties on her MySpace page. She was on one of the town’s fire engines.

Kontur-Gronquist’s MySpace page is blocked to all but her friends, but the pictures were at one time available to all users. In an interview with the (Pendleton) East Oregonian, the mayor said she did nothing wrong and those who are offended need to get over it.

“That’s my personal life,” she said. “It has nothing to do with my mayor’s position.”

Kontur-Gronquist, who is also the fire department’s executive secretary, said the photos were taken before she was elected mayor three years ago, and she saw no reason to remove them from the Internet after taking office.

“I’m not going to change who I am,” she said. “There’s a lot of officials that have a personal life, and you have people in this community who have nothing better to do than scrape up stuff like this.”

Lorena Woods is one of those residents who say the photos of a scantily clad mayor reflect badly on Arlington.

“It’s a picture of her in bra and panties on a rural protection fire truck in a rural protection fire hall,” Woods said. “This isn’t the way we want our city to be portrayed.”

Councilman Jeff Bufton said he’s heard a lot of negative comments about the pictures, but declined to say whether the council plans to address the topic.

Update on Mayor -She got fired, ya think?

By CHRIS CONNELLY
Feb. 27, 2008

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Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, the mayor of Arlington, Ore., whose personal photos of her posing on a firetruck caused a firestorm in the small town, was removed from office Monday in a narrow recall election, 142-139.

Video

Mayor Not Stepping Down Despite Protest

Not every citizen of Arlington, a town of fewer than 600 residents, had kind words for the town’s first female mayor as the controversy played out.

The 42-year-old single mom faced attacks because of a photograph of her — taken years before she became mayor — clad in a black bra and underwear, posing on a local firetruck.

Earlier this year, some citizens found the photo and a few others like it on Kontur-Gronquist’s MySpace page. In January, Kontur-Gronquist spoke to ABC News about the controversy that sparked comment nationwide.

“I took this office,” Kontur-Gronquist said, “and those photos have nothing to do with me and my abilities as being mayor.”

Some citizens disagreed. When asked what kind of job she had done as mayor, school board member Grant Wilkins said, “Questionable. I have some reservations about some of her decision making.”

“I think everyone has to ask … in light of what has happened, ‘Is this a representation of what we want as a community?’” said Wilkins, who wants the mayor to leave office.

“The pictures were taken in a public facility and it’s not right,” Wilkins said. “She’s associated these pictures with being mayor. That’s not the representation that I want to see. People aren’t laughing with us, they are laughing at us.”

Story

Posing in her Underwear, Oregon Mayor Stirs Debate

Just ‘Joking Around’

At a council meeting in January, Kontur-Gronquist first heard of the plans by some residents to remove her via a petition and a recall election.

Kontur-Gronquist said at the time that using the photos to try to remove her from office was “low.”

“It’s cruel,” she said. “It doesn’t only affect me, it affects my family, it affects the citizens in the community.”

The photos date back to August 2004, well before she ever imagined becoming mayor. Kontur-Gronquist says they were taken after a day at the beach with a friend who was a volunteer firefighter.

Two years ago my Dad entered a nursing home after his third stroke.
He was one of the youngest residents since he was only in his early 60’s

Dad had owned his own business for over 30 years
and was very self sufficient.
His first major stroke came in 1996, and he was in
Stanford Critical Care for weeks.
He had to relearn how to walk and talk
and had permanently damaged his left side.
He managed to recover enough to go back
and work full time for the next ten years.
Then he had another devastating stroke.
This one struck the right side and was even more
damaging then before.
After the stroke he could not chew food,
barely speak or even roll over and the doctor
told him he would never use his right hand again.

He worked hard at his rehab for a year and then after driving 240 miles round trip each weekend to be with him at the nursing home,
I moved him to a nursing home closer to me.
This can be a frightening and isolating event made even harder
when someone has been independent, taking care of a large
family and themselves for over forty years!

My Dad was glad to be closer to me, but went through
depression and sadness at the loss of his ability to drive and be on his own.

He is still working on regaining more walking ability,
but is still in a wheelchair for now. ( he always likes to emphasize “for now”!
He refused to accept the proclamation made by the doctor about his right hand,
and much to the therapists amazement, he started to regain use of his hand.

I set him up with a desk and a laptop with dial up, since we couldn’t get broadband or dsl in the nursing home,
but everyone can have a phone line.
I taught him the joy of online shopping and free shipping and emailing people.

He took to this like a duck to water.
He found that using the mouse helped his right arm and hand.
His arm movement is somewhat limited so we bought
Dragon Nine Voice Recognition software.

He is now practicing using it to write for this blog
and website for stroke victims I created for him.
HandicapCafe.net

When people come to check out the Nursing Home,
the director always takes them to Dad’s room and they are very impressed.
He does so much on the Internet, he was able to take his love of
comics and use it everyday.
He uses iTunes to listen to music.
He also downloads our Pastors sermons when
we can’t make it to church.
He signed up for a media service and has access to hundreds of comics each day.
He reads his favorites and new ones too.
Then he sends his friends and family comics he knows we each will enjoy.
He sends different ones to each person.
Everyday I have several laughs because my Dad sends me such funny comics!
He writes a monthly column for the newsletter at the nursing home,
that he calls “ A View from the Chair”.
We decided to use that title for his blog too.
Recently the director asked him if he would come and speak at a meeting for nursing home owners and managers!
He was thrilled.
His topic is going to be:
“Getting Your Residents Wired”
Bringing Technology Into The Nursing Home.
by Vic Chernoff
He downloads the sermons from church when we can’t always make it and listens
to Joyce Meyers online and loves her uplifting and positive messages.

Dad said “I thought my life was over, now with my new skills, I feel like I am just getting started”.
To see him empowered and thriving and using the people skills he always had is such a blessing to me and my family.

Calling the police is almost useless. Here is why.
Law enforcement has begun to realize the danger and threats to citizens
being ripped off in this manner.
They are just starting to get trained computer fraud staff who understand
the internet.
One of the problems is by the time you realize
you have been ripped off, the trail is cold.
These crooks are hit and run.
The other main problem, is this crime is taking place
across the world in places like Russia, Nigeria and Belgium
They send their bogus spam out, and if they get the average of .5% of people
falling for it, they are successful.
The fake sites are rarely up for more then a few days.
They use free hosting and nothing that requires any kind of trail back to them.
This is like someone breaking into your car and stealing your wallet then
selling it to someone else and leaving the country in the same hour.

Please be careful out there, people are uninformed and ill equipped to recognize and stop fraud online.
If you have any friends or parents that may not use the computer much, especially if they just use it for email, please send them this article or tell them about online fraud and fake emails.

I was privileged to be one of the speakers yesterday at an event hosted by the Women’s National Book Association San Francisco at the San Mateo Library. ( what lovely conference rooms they have). My topic was ” Getting Started Online, Putting Your Book on the Web” .

Im halfway done with my book “Smart Women, Stupid Computers” so to spend the day with a group of writers is always inspirational.
Joan Gelfand (see her latest book here) was very encouraging with me about not waiting to finish my book and to start pitching it now. She laughed as she said, “they will tell you to change everything anyway, so don’t wait until your finished”.

What a wonderful supportive energy the attendees and speakers all had.

One of my favorite quotes is

“Nothing great was every produced in isolation” Yo-Yo Ma

This resonates within me, because I tend to isolate and burrow into my work inside my house, sitting in front of my computer. Which is fine in moderation and of course this is my career, but what I have learned as I have gotten older is I need people! Success is a team effort, and I need to join the team.

People want to help you succeed, you just need to open your heart and let them.

One of the other generous and wonderful authors I met, Martha Alderson, (Blockbuster Plots)  said something I think is profound, “Whatever you give away freely comes back to you multiplied many times”

When the writers panel was asked what they do to stay inspired, a desire to help others was part of what they all shared.

Teresa LeYung  http://www.lovemadeofheart.com/  who does career coaching for writing, said she feels like her mission is “pay it forward” and help others like she has been helped by fellow writers.

I would like to encourage anyone who is feeling discouraged or stuck in their writing to get out and join a organization like this that supports and encourages writers.

http://www.wnba-books.org/

Find a writer support group in your area today, something magical happens when a group of like minded people come together, don’t miss out on your opportunity be loved and supported by fellow writers.

“As you grow older, you’ll find the only things your regret are the things you didn’t do”

-Zachary Scott, 1914-1965, Actor