Google Buzz

Google Buzz could be big. I don't have it yet, and I only chat and email with a couple of people regularly. Most of the people I keep in touch with online is through Facebook, and getting people to use that has been difficult. I'm not sure how much, if at all, I'll use Buzz, and I definitely want to limit access to my stuff, but I am curious and eager to see how it works.

For instance, I tried Google Wave at work, which is limited because only 3 of us have Firefox loaded and it won't work in IE without downloading software which we don't have admin privileges to do. And the 3 of us who can use it really don't, though 2 of us did give it a try. I like it as a way to collaborate. I can jot down notes whenever they occur to me, usually when I'm at home, and the others can add to that or make comments and slowly, a discussion occurs. And yet, it's just as easy to email or wait til we're at work together and talk face-to-face.

This looks just as useful, but I have reservations how much I would actually use it. So few of my friends actually use Gmail.

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Blogger Changes

Blogger is dropping ftp service, according to Blogger Buzz. Also, Google Pages are being dropped in favor of something called Google Sites and files stored there for blogs will need updating/fixing. The reasons they give for this seem sound to this non-techie and I appreciate the promise of big updates for Blogger this year

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Bloglines vs Google Reader

Google Reader is looking more and more attractive to me. I'm not quite ready to abandon Bloglines, but I do have a Google Reader account active with all my Bloglines subs and this announcement that GReader can let you know when a website is updated even if it doesn't have a feed might just be the tipping point.

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Extending Chrome

Google Chrome's beta version with extensions is now out of beta. I like basic Chrome a lot, so I'll be upgrading. Much as I love Firefox, v.3.6 beta, which I've been using, has been annoyingly slow and crashes every couple of hours, which makes me very unhappy. That should be out of beta, but it still is crashing. Here's hoping Chrome's new version is as stable as promised.

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The Joy of Pages

I can't wait to try this out. Blogger in Draft has added Pages, a much requested feature. I've managed to work around this fairly well, but this is so cool. A new blogging toy to play with!

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Help for Haiti

Doctors Without Borders created buttons for blogs and websites to make it easy to donate in support of help for Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake. Please give something if you can. I've added a button in the sidebar.

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Adventures in Computing

So, it's been a while. Sorry. I got a bit caught up in computer stuff. Those of you who read my other blogs are more caught up with what I've been doing. This is really just a blog about blogging, internet, and the occasional political rant.

First off, Happy New Year!

Second, I've been beta testing Firefox 3.6b5 and finally got annoyed enough with it to go back to the regular version. It seemed to freeze too often and I'd lost many of my beloved add-ons.

However, because I'd updated to Win7 because Vista lost my camera driver with the Pack 2 upgrade and refused to acknowledge any camera plugged into it despite my unistalling and reinstalling the camera software, I no longer had Firefox 3.5.6 because I'd only put the beta version on with Win7. So today, I decided to install FF 3.5.6 and that got weird because every time I restarted FF, I got logged out of all the sites I normally stayed logged into. That made me even more annoyed. So I figured, fine, I'll go back to the beta version, which is when I noticed that the 3.5.6 version had overwritten the beta version! So I had to reinstall that. Everything seems to be working now and the add-ins from the regular version are now in the beta version even though not all are compatible, same as when I was using the beta in Vista.

Are you confused yet?

Meanwhile. Win7 seems to be working fine. And the nice tech at Dell, who did the upgrade with me, also got my home network back up (which is the problem that got me to call Dell tech support in the first place). When I'd asked him if I should go from Vista to 7, he didn't hesitate before saying Yes. At least I can upload pictures to the desktop PC again and not have to go through the laptop for that. I did end up having to reinstall software and fonts, and it does cost $$$, but it's been worth it. So far. I'd been one of those few folks who had had no problems with Vista until that Pack 2 upgrade (which I refuse to put on my laptop), and then it was a mess. Win7 seems nice and it's using a higher screen resolution, so on my widescreen monitor, the fonts are smaller, but it's using all the space and I almost never have to scroll, or not nearly as much as with Vista.

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