American & Proud | Bloviating Zeppelin

Bloviating Zeppelin began on June 19th of 2004.

I never thought it would last more than a few months. I never thought I would be interested in posting more than a few months.

Surprise, surprise.

I was convinced I’d lose interest.

First it went five years.

I wrote only for myself. I had no idea how to embed links, how to post photographs. I could do nothing but write and click the “PUBLISH POST” button.

My continuing thanks to Texas Fred and Robert from American & Proud for bringing my graphics into the 20th Century, and then on my conversion from Blogspot.com to WordPress.

I’ve written for me; I’ve written to document portions of my life so I won’t forget; I’ve written to bloviate, to excoriate, to yell, to educate. I’ve written when stone cold sober and remarkably inebriated. I’ve written with tears running down my cheeks. And I’ve written as the snow fell and stacked up, over six feet, on my deck.

Throughout all this, my greatest thanks go to you, my readers. Thank you for trusting me, for visiting, for taking the time to comment and interact.

With all the hubris, arrogance, violence, hate, discontent, confusion, lack of understanding and, mostly, lack of time, I know that each and every one of you are challenged in your lives.

Yet you still find the time to come by.

I stand amazed. And incredibly thankful.

Thank you again.

BZ’s Druid cowl and analog sword

My wife and I have a pact.

She stays away from plants, because she has what some call the proverbial Black Thumb. Most plants she touches die. I handle the plants at the homes.

Conversely, I am the family Druid, the Luddite. I am as tech-savvy as a pair of worn socks in your dresser drawer. I stay away from the technology and let her handle the bulk of it.

Recently, for example — on WordPress, which powers this blog — I uploaded one single, solitary plugin. I’ve loaded plugins before on WordPress but this plugin somehow crashed my entire blog about two weeks ago. I couldn’t even access the dashboard in order to discover which plugin was responsible.

Luckily, my tech guru is Robert, who is the I.T. expert for the blog consortium of myself, Texas Fred, American & Proud, The Right Handed Cowboy and The O Word.

Robert was able to suss out the problem, un-crash everything, and bring my blog back up. God bless him. But absent his intervention, my digital world would have remained shattered.

That said, I’ve had — like most all of you, I suspect — damned near thousands of computers to date. And today I updated the one at my wife’s house in Ghetto Centrale.

Right now I’m typing my last post, for a while, on my Sony Vaio 15″ laptop. It’s been a great machine, not a hiccup to it, ever, with a great keyboard. I really like its keyboard, illuminated as it is in white, with a crisp strike, and very responsive. But it’s no Toshiba all-in-one, like the 25″ screen I have at the cabin in the Sierra Nevadas. It’s a remarkably sharp touchscreen with no cables or wires or confusion. It has a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse. I, however, dislike touching screens because I have to reach. And you have to clean the screen.

Today, as a replacement for the Sony Vaio, I purchased a 27″ Samsung Series 7, with an Intel® Core™ i7 processor, 10 gigs of RAM and 2 TB hard drive. Another all-in-one with a power cord and that’s it.

This will be my new confuser down here in Ghetto Centrale, at my wife’s house.

One niggling little problem: it has Windows 8 loaded. And, from what I’ve seen, I don’t like Windows 8. You cannot get any new PC without Windows 8. But apparently you can revert back to something similar to Windows 7 and the desktop with the START.

For shite’s sake, I don’t want to re-learn some new OS every damned 6 months.

Thoughts, anyone, on my purchases or Windows or PCs or Macs or desktops or all-in-ones or tablets or anything else digital?

Bloviating Zeppelin

Right thinking from a Left brain.

Tag Archives: American & Proud

BZ’s 10-year Bloggiversary

A brief tech update: