Month: November 2013
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Make Your Own Animated GIFs
Animated GIF files are the rage these days. You know, those digital photos that contain moving objects and people, not unlike the hung pictures at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books. Here’s an example: My niece, Bella Tanguay, making her first-ever horizontal dive. She already was doing straight-down vertical dives, headfirst, but needed coaxing from…
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Insert Special Characters
Back in the typewriter age, we knew how to add “special characters” such as exotic punctuation marks: Press a key along the top row for “$” or “%” etc. More common ones, like periods and commas, were among the main keys. Now with computers, we have Unicode characters, HTML characters, extended ASCII characters — more…
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A Walk in the Park
Cheri and I live just a couple of blocks from Chilhowee Park, an important and historic part of Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s the site of the Tennessee Valley Fair, held every September, as well as many conventions and exhibitions. To us it’s a walk in the park: a site, that is, for exercise walking. There’s a…
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Boomer Proves You Need Your Own Website
Still not sure you need your own website, under your own name? Boomer the Dog proves you do! Before we get to Boomer, here’s a wrap-up of what I’ve been saying about owning your own name: Like it or not, you have a public image. It’s an image magnified many times over by the Internet.…
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Holding on to Autumn
This time of year, I cling to the beauty of autumn. Brightly colored leaves, I love. Falling leaves — not my favorite. Because once they fall, they’re gone. So I “hold on tight”, cherishing every scrap of beauty, even as it fades away like the smile of Alice’s Cheshire cat. More and more trees show…
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Crawling the Web
It has long seemed to me that with the onset of autumn, spiders become more active and audacious in their web-building. Is that just me — or is there some basis for this theory about crawling the web? Either way, I’ve recently captured some interesting photos of spider webs that appeared behind our house. The…
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Dodging the Chocolate Bullet!
Sometimes it just isn’t safe to go grocery shopping. I mean, not for me. Because some of the folks who set up store displays of tantalizing food really know what they’re doing! Artists they are, truly. Especially around holidays! For us chocolate addicts, that means we’re putting ourselves at risk, every time we step into…
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Baha’i Temple Ceiling
Here’s an enthralling new image of the ceiling of the Baha’i House of Worship in Evanston, Illinois. Taken by Michael Bennett, a Chicago-area resident who frequently walks and takes early-morning pictures of Lake Michigan and its environs. At the center of the Baha’i Temple ceiling is a sacred symbol of the Baha’i Faith — the…