From now on

I am permanently blogging on a retirement-merry-go-round.blogger.com. Welcome to enjoy – or abhor but please don’t remain indifferent  - my musings and pictures there.

 

Free Burma!

www.free-burma.org

 

Retirement-merry-go-round

Ok, after writing two posts at  blogger – and uploading lots of photos without any difficulty - I am sold. I switched. From now on please come vist at  http://retirement-merry-go-round.blogspot.com

 

I think I am switching

Frustrated with WordPress  due to difficulties in posting images in the right size and the  right place I  tried to do the same in Bloggger..

And wow, what took me over two weeks in wordpress without even a minimally acceptable result  came out great in blogspot in barely a couple of minutes (you can see the first partial post there at retirement-merry-go-round.blogspot.com) Oh, well, great in comparison…

 I think I am switching…. but need to check how customer friendly other blogger’s features are before making a final decision. No more acceptance for customer unfriendly techno-gobledygook.

Very busy with the move now, though, so it may take a few days. See ya – here or there :-)

 

I am not a total idiot

… I’d like to think, although, I admit, I sometimes behave like one… (Don’t we all ?)

I am just not interested in technological details, which, I think, I should not need to know in order to use technology to do what I want  it to do.

What??? you ask. Ok, I shall explain:  do you think that it is necessary to know how the car’s engine works in order to be able to drive a car? 

No, I did not think you did, because most people, most drivers in fact, would just laugh at such a demand. (And I bet that most drivers – me included – do not  even want to know how and when to change gears – particularly Americans, since they had it so good for so long. Everything that can be automated, should.) Yet, when I was a young girl in the then communist Poland I was expected to pass the written exam proving I knew how  a car’s  engine worked and how  it was built, before I could actually start to learn driving the car with an instructor and get a license to drive it on my own. 

The  – ridiculous – explanation  for that requirement was that Poland at that time had almost no car service stations, so car drivers were supposed to be selfsufficient if anything happened to their vehicles.  The incredible naivety of  the car techies, who imagined that anybody, without a technical background, would be able (even if he or she was willing and had appropriate tools) to fix his/her broken engine at the side of the road, just after a few teoretical lessons on the inner secrets of car engines, still makes me laugh.

Today I feel in the same situation trying to upload my pictures to my blog. 

Not that i am a total novice at uploading pictures. No, I uploaded tons of images to various power point  presentations, email letters, etc. But not to a blog…

During the weekend I wanted  to write a post about Scania’s gardens and to do that I needed to upload some photos, but no matter how hard I tried, I could either post thumbnails or – when I tried full size images, they came out so huge, as to show only tiny, totally inconsequential fragment of the image on screen… even though one photo somehow accidentally “uploaded itself” (?) to a category (???) … and … lo and behold… there it showed in its desired size. Aah, the miracles of technology!

Ok, I DID try not to be totally  tech-arrogant, so I read  – rather carefully – wordpress’s faq  posts about uploading images, and the forum discussions and did not find what I needed to find, because

1) the information I needed was not there

2) whatever information was there was written by  geeks to geeks in Geeklish (= geek English), not for non geeks in English, so, not being conversant in Geeklish, I did not understand most of it.

Thus  today  I contacted  technical support at wordpress to get some help and Mark responded  very promptly (I have to admit, giving the credit where the credit is due),  that wordpress has no autoresizing … and referred me to a faq question: how big can my images be….. which I previously  read and had no idea how to follow. Sigh….

This reminds me of another technology dilemma, which was faced by one of my former clients, a  small, but international manufacturer of a highly specialized, technologically cutting edge product, who hired me several years ago to solve some serious problems they were having with their  instruction manual and product training.

The instruction manual was written in an extreme Geeklish (  actually in geek-German  and  translated to Geeklish and geek-Japanese), by the company’s tech afficionados, so proud with the cutting edge technology they developed and used in their product, that….. the manual they have written enabled their most advanced competitors to copy their technology and bridge the gap from their to my client’s technological advancement level in almost no time at all, which, of course, was not exactly what the company’s management and shareholders had in mind businesswise.

But the same manual – and the tech-repair loaded training – was a constant subject of complaints of their clients, because, although their maintenace staff could fix the product if it malfunctioned with the help of the manual,  their operators  – the very people to which the manual was ostensibly being adressed – lacked enough technical background to be able to use the product  on the basis of those waaay too geeky instructions.

It took me  no time at all to covince company management to stop the manual asap and withdraw as many already distributed copies of it  from circulation as possible, as not to give away all of their secrets to their competitors….  but it took me a lot longer to convince those tech-geniuses to help me as SMEs (= subject matter experts) to completely redesign  it  and publish in several interactive versions (on line, on dvds, in different languages, not only those of the company owners, but those of the majority of clients) able to accomodate every kind of user with every level of technical background  from  – if need be – a practically illiterate (they did happen, particularly in Malaysia and Brazil) operator of a machine, in which this technological marvel of a product, critical to the quality of production,  was installed, to a  Ph.D in fysics at any  manufacturer of a machine using this product as one of its components – without either  boring to death the PhDs in fysics and similar or going over the heads of  any of the end users

Immediately after we were able to get these recommendations implemented, and the new interactive instruction tools were distributed, clients started calling with praise how pleased they were with the improvements and soon after  the company got a  public endorsement  – at the largest relevant technology fair in the world - from several largest manufacturers of those machines that used my client’s product as a component, not only for the technological advancement of their product, but for “extraordinary customer friendliness” of  their product training and interactive instruction tools. The sales’ levels and company’s profits shot up and stayed up for almost three years…. until their techies – left again to their own devices - managed to ruin the “extraordinary customer friendliness” of  the company’s new and improved products’ instruction tools, once again reducing them to - incompregensible for most end users –  techno-gobbledygook. And the sales responded accordingly: they fell.

Geeesh,  will they ever learn????

 

A – nice ? – surprise

I think that from now on I’ll need to avoid drinking tea or coffee when I check the news or my blog in the morning.

Yesterday it was the news about the “fishy”? research (see post: Being bilingual makes you faster and younger!),  that almost made me choke …and today I discovered I have been listed on Technorati!?

Don’t laugh ( or go ahead, laugh if you wish)- and pardon my – inexcusable? – ignorance, but I had no idea what Technorati was, what did it do and for what purpose. Now – an hour  or so later –  I know a little bit – not much yet, but  a little

Yippi, if  this pace of my blogging education continues, in a few weeks I might be able to upload photos, which neither take either  a lot more space that a screen allows or show as a thumbnails (? is that the term)… and – dreaming big,  aren’t you, Minerva?  - I  then might even be able to learn how to create links… to posts in blogs I find important and try to comment seriously – and hopefully knowlegeably, like Jamie’s and Maciej’s separate discussions on being Polish - and foreigner’s view’s on how Poles view themselves – in blogroll see respectively An Englishman in Krakow and  A Pole in Ireland) even something with a mysterious and exciting name of a permalink.   Aah, possibilities!

 

Crawfish party and bacon pancakes

Friday night  Daughter and I went to the SACC/SWEA ( Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce, Swedish Women Educational Association) sponsored typical Swedish  crawfish party held at the IKEA store in midtown Atlanta.

We were squeezed too tight  (table rows were too close together, round tables in rows only added to sitting an moving discomfort) but the party was a typical kraeftskiva (crawfish party in Swedish) : noisy, rowdy, fun! An opportunity to meet local Swedes, speak Swedish, and sing Swedish “snaps-visor” (=alcohol praising songs) while eating tons of crawfish cooked in a dill-spiced water.

 Eating whole crawfish  without proper  crawfish utensils is pretty difficult, but Daughter had a stroke of genius  and  initiated use of a  heavy water glass to smash crawfish claws with in order to get to the meat inside them. Found followers soon, since it beats risking your teeth:  less troublesome and a lot less expensive, should a crawfish prove too tough for either teeth or glass.

(images to be added)

It was already a second crawfish party this year for me. Last weekend we had a “family” crawfish party on the huge balcony of my mountain place. “Family” and not family, since the “crowd” was a tad dysfunctional (?) or at least unusual: Daughter, me and my Ex-son-in-law. Yet we had a good time. It is always nice when a divorced couple can be friends and socialize with each other. We ate crawfish (purchased from IKEA), with good Swedish cheese and even better – not Swedish – red wine (but we also had Swedish Elderberry Aquavit for the sake of tradition. I usually avoid such strong alcohol in an undiluted form, but Elderberry Aquavit tastes surprisingly mild, so I had a whole shot), watched a beautiful sunset over the lake, and later the fireworks from a couple of marinas around it – since it happened to be  the Labor Day weekend. Very festive. The Jake-o- Lantern, in Sweden called  a full moon lantern and used  to lit crawfish parties is still hanging over my terrace table. I wonder what my American neighbors are thinking seeing it hanging there at the beginning of September, since for them it is a Halloween decoration. They might think, that I, an immigrant, somehow got the American traditions wrong.

(images to be added)

Yesterday, after getting up late ( at Daughter’s place in Atlanta) after the crawfish party, we scrambled to make our reserved time for breakfast at the Original Pankace House.

Daughter wanted me to try the southern specialty of  bacon pancakes. We’ve both been living – off and on – in the US for the last 25 years and always avoided the combination of bacon or sausage with pancakes, eating – if we indulged in a typical American breakfast -   separately eggs and bacon and then pancakes. But a few months ago Daugher went for a retreat and there the only available breakfast food was bacon pancakes, so she decided to brave it… and fell for them. I do have to admit: surprisingly good, too good in fact, so I am lucky I am moving away in a months time to a place where, hopefully, no one will serve them, so I might avoid gaining a ton of weight.   To tell the full truth, we weren’t brave enough to smear our pancakes with eggs before pouring maple syrup over them, so – smart as we are – we ordered those pancakes without eggs

I am moving in a month, sort of overseas, and, anyway, to an island, which poses a special sort of challenges, you might think, so what am I doing starting a blog and blogging about crawfish and bacon pancakes?  Ah, well, today I was supposed to sort my study – things to take, things to throw away, things to leave with Daughter…. so I decided to distract myself from that mundane and oh so boring duty by starting a blog… until it was time to go see Benjamin Franklin exhibition at Atlanta History Museum