Archive | May 2014

An Unexpected Visitor

We Have Bats Up In Here!

So the cats are in the bathroom getting into something. I go in and find the shower curtain rod halfway down the wall. I go to push it back up and I notice this big brown something on the wall. Now it’s the bathroom; the first thing I think is ..yeah..poop. How the hell did poop get up there on the wall?

Ok, so it wasn’t a rational thought and I look closer. Uh..How the heck did this little guy get in here?!!

Click the Image for a Larger View

After the realization that it was a bat, comes the heart pounding OMG!! Ok, how am I going to get him out of here without hurting him or getting me bitten? I ran the cats out of the bathroom and closed the door. Which in and of itself was also irrational, the bathroom door had been open for several hours and he didn’t come out. So why would he come out now that I knew he was there? Right? Shut up, this isn’t your irrational moment! 😉 Continue reading →

Memorial Day Blessings!

May24

Thank You For Your Service!

A deep and heart-felt Thank You to all the Men, Women and Soldier Animals of our Armed Services, living and in spirit! Thank you for your service and your sacrifice.

This weekend is a reminder of the sacrifices that have been made for freedom. Formerly known as Decoration Day, it originated after the American Civil War to commemorate the fallen Union Soldiers. The south too had its day of Decoration, but the date of celebration varied through out each region of the nation. Continue reading →

The Misty Faery Portal

May21

A Simple Short Story

A dear friend of mine saw a picture yesterday that inspired her to challenge me to writing a story. I’m up for the task. This is for you Carol.

Oswald West State Park in Northern Coastal Oregon.
— Candice Allen

The Misty Faery Portal
by Springwolf © 2014

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, a young woman was lost and walked along a barren path in the middle of a misty forest. She wasn’t lost from her home or village, but from her heart and mind.

Her spirit was broken by struggle and hardship, tragedy and sorrow. She wandered through the woods in search of something, but she did not know what it was. Only knowing that she could never find it. She always returned late each afternoon to her tiny modest shack on the edge of the forest. A simple place that she called her house. A place that was remote and far from everyone and everything.

One night she sat before the fire and tried to stay warm and dry amidst the leaky roof as a storm raged outside. She began to cry and spoke out loud, to whom she did not know.

“Please help me find my way. Help me find the home where I belong. Give me the materials to make beautiful cloths and a garden that can fill my plate at night”. Through her tears and grumbling stomach, she sobbed as the night waned. Finally, falling asleep in the wee hours of the morning, weary and weak from exhaustion. Continue reading →

Getting Your Favorite Android Sounds

May16

Ringtones, Alarms & Notification Sounds

If you’re like me, you set up your alarms, notifications and ringtones with specific sounds that help you identify what’s happening before you even look at your phone. Then you went to a new phone and all those sound files aren’t on the new phone. Come on! I want my old sounds to notify me of events that I still need on the new phone!

There are two safe ways to get ringtones, alarms and notification sounds onto your Android. They come with the phone or you create them from sound files yourself. That’s it.

Yes I know there are a ton of websites that offer downloads for your phone and you’re crazy to use them. Either they spam your phone number with texts out the wazoo, or they sell it to every annoying hacker and spammer in the world. Or they load malware onto your smart phone with the sound file.

If you can’t find a reliable download site, such as one that’s offered from your carrier, don’t bother with downloading. Stick to what’s on your phone and what you can make yourself.

There’s one exception to that rule and that’s an app that provides sound files from all makes and most models. I LOVE this app! Though I wish it had the sound files from the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Maybe they’ll add those later; crossing fingers. Continue reading →

Android Weather Apps

May16

How’s The Weather

There are a lot of weather widgets out there. Local News outlets have their own apps now and most include weather tracking and notifications. But what if you travel? Some don’t go outside their own area. So if you’re at home and need to go to Atlanta, you’re out of luck finding out how the weather is in Georgia.

The Weather Channel App ☆☆☆☆
Has a lot to offer. Almost too much. Sometimes I don’t need video or images from around the world bombarding my display. Let me look at things quick and simple and I’m good. But other people like a lot of graphical interfaces. If that’s you, you’ll like the Weather Channel’s app. You can add locations and follow weather back home, where your move lives, or where ever your favorite sports team might be playing this week. You can set notifications for alerts, look at lightening and more.

Weather Bug ☆☆☆☆☆
This one is my most favorite. I have used Weatherbug on my desktop for years. I love this app on the phone. WeatherBug weather widgets display live, local weather conditions, forecasts, severe weather alerts and it can be specific to your location. So if you’re driving down the road, you can bring this app up, look at the radar and see what you’re driving into..or away from. You can add locations and set a primary Home location. Continue reading →

Emergency Flashlights

May14

The First App You MUST Add To Your Cell Phone

The most important App you need is a flash light. Seriously, it sounds funny but in addition to coming in real handy during your day to day life, you most definitely need it in an emergency situation.

I have used mine several times in the late evening and even a few times in the day. I can’t always find that flashlight in the utility drawer, but I know where my cell phone is. And it’s dark in the bottom part of the pantry, even with the kitchen light on! I use it in the house for little things, like plugging in the power cord in the power strip under my desk. Or looking for the splinter in my son’s finger.

It’s handy for Concerts, finding your way through the driveway when you’ve forgotten to turn the porch light on before you left the house. Or looking for that quarter you dropped in the floorboard of the car. Continue reading →

Happy Mother’s Day 2014

May11

I Love You Momma

Thanks Mom’s Of The Past & Present

Happy Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day is a holiday honoring motherhood that is observed in different forms throughout the world. The American incarnation of Mother’s Day was created by Anna Jarvis in 1908 and became an official U.S. holiday in 1914. Jarvis would later denounce the holiday’s commercialization and spent the latter part of her life trying to remove it from the calendar. While dates and celebrations vary, Mother’s Day most commonly falls on the second Sunday in May and traditionally involves presenting mothers with flowers, cards and other gifts.

In the years before the Civil War (1861-65), Ann Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia helped start “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” to teach local women how to properly care for their children. These clubs later became a unifying force in a region of the country still divided over the Civil War. In 1868 Jarvis organized “Mothers’ Friendship Day,” at which mothers gathered with former Union and Confederate soldiers to promote reconciliation. Continue reading →

Our Varied Interests

May9

Windstone Editions

We’re Pretty Eclectic

We Love a lot of different things and we enjoy sharing those interests. Especially with family and dear friends who are spread out across the country and even the world.

From the U.S. to Australia, from Washington, DC to Washington State, Alaska and even some dear friends in Hawaii. We can go north into Maine to find friends and south into Florida to find family.

If we share a few things that interest you too, come on in and share your thoughts and experiences too!

We love trains and technology. But we also love dressing in costume and attending the Renaissance Fairs throughout the south-east. We are a sports family, but only with certain sports.

We’re a huge NASCAR family. We love football and enjoy Hockey. We live on a lake so we can also slow down a bit and relax with a pole and a quiet morning or evening enticing the resident Big Mouth Bass to come for a visit.

My boys love engineering, astrophysics and building things. And we all like history, living in the center of the Civil War region, there is a lot to see and visit. So our adventures generally takes us to some interesting places where there’s always a camera ready to capture the historical, unusual or unexpected. Continue reading →

Samsung Galaxy S5

May9

I LOVE My New Phone

Each week it seems like we’re moving the DomlyDude’s business one step closer to being in full operation. We registered it in March and started the final set-ups for funding. That includes the business plan and the really tough part, the financial projections. We’re up to getting the licenses that will allow us to go into full operations in June! Yeah.

Part of my part in all this is being the person who answers the office phone. We decided the best way to take care of that in today’s world is through a cell phone. That meant we could take AT&T up on a recent offer they sent him and pick me up a new phone. A brand spankin’ new Samsung Galaxy S5!

I’m slightly in culture shock. My last cell was a Samsung Galaxy Nexus. It’s a big upgrade! But I’m loving my phone! I’ve spent 3 days setting it up and transferring data. Most of the transfer was a breeze! The set up has taken the bulk of the time, because I have so many new features and capabilities that I never had before!

There’s a lot of kewl things about the S5 that I didn’t have on the Nexus. One of the biggest things I like is that I can add Home Screens! Yes!! My close friends tell me I’m overly organized and not being able to organize the apps I use most was driving me nuts. I didn’t add too many more. I only have 7.
Being the teacher person I am, I like sharing what I learn in hopes someone else out there will find it help and overcome their frustration a little more quickly than I might have trying to find an answer. Oh and I LOVE sharing my reviews of new apps I’ve found and fallen in love with. I have several of those to add! So check out my new GalaxyTech section.

I’m having a blast!

HyperLink To Open Local Files

May6

Open A File In A Local Program

So you have a file on your PC and you want to make life easy for yourself and create a link from a personal home page in your browser to that file. But you want a program, like NotePad to open that file. What do you do?

You can search the internet high and low and you’ll find several javascript, php and visual basic solutions. But isn’t that a little over kill? Yes, yes it is. There’s a lot of information about why you can’t do this, or don’t want to do this. And some of that is valid. If this webpage was online and available to the world, the last thing you want to do is click a link that will run an executable file. That’s a huge security risk. Yes indeed it is.

But recently I had a need to simply open a text file on my pc, in Notepad. Now I could have changed how the browser handles files like this and anytime it finds a .txt file, it can open Notepad instead of displaying the file in the browser. But that’s not what I wanted to do. I only want Notepad to open for this one file, on this one page, for this one link. There’s got to be an easier way than all that overkill coding!

Of course there is. And a huge thanks to my very smart friends on MozillaZine – a Message Board for everything Mozilla. And in particular a big thanks to Gingerbread Man! I love that place. Now let me say this solution does not work with Chrome or IE. All I can suggest there is…use Firefox. Continue reading →

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