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Mon, 09 Jul 2007 15:00:33 GMT

It's blackberry time

July is blackberry time in the Ozarks. The plants are widespread at Roundrock, getting started just about anywhere enuf sunlight reaches the ground. Long-time readers will recall that the area where we are now growing a stand of pines we once called Blackberry Corner because, well, it was full of blackberries. (It was also the northwest corner of our property — and still is.)

I don’t normally eat the blackberries we have in our woods. I’m not sure why. I think I’m afraid of picking up some intestinal pestilence or such. Yet as a boy, in those idyllic summers spent in rural Kentucky, we used to wade into the tall grass and thorny canes and pick buckets of them at high season. My sainted grandmother would then make cobblers out of our loot. I seemed to have survived those days more or less intact.

And it happens that on our last trip to Roundrock, Libby and I did sample the blackberries. You can see that they are not the robust, finely shaped variety you find in the store. But they looked ripe enuf to try, so we did.

Sadly, they were mostly disappointing. They weren’t very flavorful, and they had large seeds within (larger than normal it seemed), which is Libby’s big objection to this fruit.

So I don’t think the deer and raccoons and quail and bears (?) have anything to fear about those two humans eating up their blackberry stores.

Missouri calendar:

Bird song has subsided; birds are busy raising young.

Posted by: Roundrockjournal      Read more     Source

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 06:43:05 GMT

Death of an oak tree

The storm came in quickly over the ridge, bringing rain and lightning and strong gusts of wind.



Nine miles above, the sun shone. Below that, darkness and chaos: hurricane-force winds, temperatures a hundred degrees below zero. We are fortunate that most of the drama in a thunderstorm is over our heads; what we see is mostly the violence of catharsis.*



A couple days later, I found a big old red oak, a property-line tree, reduced to a tall, jagged stump. Even from a distance, I could tell this wasn’t the storm’s fault. Wind-thrown red oaks tend to go over roots and all — and it’s a good thing, too. Over the course of millennia, such regular uprooting is one of the few ways a forest soil gets turned, and many native species of plants and animals have come to depend upon the complex, pit-and-mound microtopography that results. Bole snap, as it’s called, is more typical of other species, such as the chestnut oaks that dominate these ridgetops. This, too, serves its purpose: standing dead oak snags are havens and cornucopias for wildlife.



A glance inside the stump confirmed my suspicion: carpenter ants were the true culprits here. Odd, isn’t it, that we refer to such masters of demolition as carpenters? Then again, their homes are no more destructive of forests than our own. And we are no less heedless of coming storms…
__________

*See “Fly Me to the Clouds,” by Paul VanDevelder, in the July-August issue of Audubon magazine. Posted by: Vianegativa      Read more     Source

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 17:05:50 GMT

While Running a One-Man Home Business

If you are under a lot of stress, you will most likely find yourself getting sick - and this probability increases if you are running a home business on your own. The key to dealing with sickness in any kind of business case is to make sure that you never get to deal with it at all. Prevention is better than cure, the adage goes; so stock up on those vitamins, get a lot of ascorbic acid, and eat a balanced diet along with lots of water to keep you up and running.

However, if worse still comes to worst and you still get sick, then you can still run your business. First, hire an emergency assistant even before you get sick. Have this emergency assistant, who can be an on-call virtual assistant, ready to take care of any aspect of your business should you fall sick; and have this emergency assistant on speed dial so that he or she can get to your home quickly.

Stay away from stress so that you do not get sick. Studies show that multitasking will lead you nowhere, so do your tasks one at a time. When sick, do your tasks slowly: stress not only slows you down, it makes you sicker. Get yourself on the road to recovery faster by avoiding stress. If you can, do not work at all: take a vacation, and consider the sickness as a sign that you should relax.

Sleep early and drink lots of liquids. Your body needs to heal itself, so keep on eating a balanced diet, and get even more vitamins. Go see your doctor, and follow his or her instructions to the letter. The key to successfully dealing with your sickness is to make sure that it goes away as soon as possible so that you can get back to work. Posted by: noel      Read more     Source

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 13:39:52 GMT

Check Out the Opera Mini 4 Demo Video

While the iPhone Videos are making the rounds, let's check out another one. About Opera Mini, that is.



The 4th mobile version of the Opera browser is poised to challenge Mini Map's proficiency at providing a desktop-like browsing experience on the go, especially when you see it in action. Check out the demo video on their website, demonstrating the way it zooms into big web pages and scrolls around it. And take a look at Opera's demo video at Apple if you'd like.

Opera is pushing Opera Mini 4 as a powerful mobile browsing platform that works on even the "demo video." Posted by: Rico Mossesgeld      Read more     Source

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 09:43:11 GMT

Don't Treat Others the Way You Don't Want to Be Treated

This is unquestionably a very hard-hitting print advertisement campaign probably created by an animal rights activist group to make people to think that to what extent human beings are inflicting tortures on animals. The appearance of the campaign is somewhat disturbing as well and could only be displayed to adults. The advertisements have used strong visualization of the idea to communicate its message. In order to make it effective the campaign has reversed the roles of humans and animals to depict the misery of animals due to human conducts and behavior.

However, the most striking advertisement is showing monkeys are eating human brains, which is supposedly a controversial delicacy. The delicacy is served at a special table with a hole in the center. According to beliefs the monkey is tied up and the top of its skull removed with a knife. The animal, even now breathing, is placed under the table so its head serves as a bowl. The other ad is showing a man scrawling on surface while to mouse look on, it depicts how the modern world use these innocent animals to carry out their experiments. The third ad featuring a child and a seal is extremely disturbing.

The punch line reads, ‘Don’t treat others the way you don’t want to be treated’.

Via Spluch Posted by: Balendu      Read more     Source

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 07:52:34 GMT

Simplified SEO By SEOmoz

David Utter, writer at WebProNews, penned an article titled SEOmoz simplifies SEO. Ever wondered how simple SEO has become? Read on....

Utter wrote:
Now that the SMX Advanced conference has faded into memory, Rand Fishkin has posted something for those who may not be advanced enough for SMX topics. This will be a shock for those who understand 301 redirects, but not everyone knows how to use them properly.

Fortunately, Rand's 'Mystery Guest', aka Geraldine, has a gifted beginner's handle on the basics, and a deft hand on the keyboard. Her recent post at SEOmoz offers a beginner's guide, garnered through her experience gained from being asked about search optimization at her day job.

Her list of eight ideas tends to come back to one concept: clear communications. Even the brightest of people don't know everything, i.e., her boss doesn't understand how spam works. The vagaries of topics like redirects or SERPs need to be explained, not tossed off without enlightening the listener. "I have no idea why the hell Ask.com ads mention an algorithm," she wrote. "I can't imagine anyone outside of the SEO industry knowing what that means."

People don't want to risk looking dumb, and sometimes will nod in understanding rather than asking questions. Those SEOs who want to do well by their clients should make Rand's Mystery Guest happy and provide answers up front. Education given is just as valuable as education gained. Anyone competent enough to be doing effective SEO work should have no problem communicating and teaching along the way. Posted by: noel      Read more     Source

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 05:10:36 GMT

The Ultimate Pairing on Amazon

Ever wonder how a book gets paired with other like manuscripts on Amazon. You know the spot I mean "people who bought this book also enjoyed....."

I found a blog today called Plug Your Book in which author Steve Weber offers tips on how to be more visible on Amazon. Check out the posting on June 25 - he provides step by step instructions for how to have your book recommended along with other like-minded materials.

If you have a book on Amazon, Steve's tips will help provide additional impressions for shoppers who need what you have to say!

Deborah Chaddock Brown
Writer, Author, Excited About Steve's Tips!
AllWrite Ink Posted by: Deborah Brown      Read more     Source

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 01:56:29 GMT

Get Conneced, Even If It Hurts

"The one person you thought you had left in the past might just be lurking out there in full color. And he just might make you feel bad from a distance of more than 15 years and 4000 miles." ~(Danger in social networking sites)

It's true. While you're out there browsing the social networking sites you just may come across someone you don't want to connect with. So what? Just put them on your blocked user list and move on. You don't have to miss out on the magnificence of the Internet just because of a few sour apples. You don't even have to chat with them at all if you don't want to. Ignore them, they're really not worth it.

Make new friends. Lots of 'em. The Internet is a mind-blowing anthology of friends, information and fun. Get out there and explore it all. Posted by: Linda Roeder      Read more     Source

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 23:03:18 GMT

"What is Animation?"

Who's asking: Not Coming to a Theater Near You in another one of their collectively written extravaganzas: "[W]hat seems to have begun as an amusing scientific parlor trick, a simple optical illusion, now amounts to a vast range of technical possibilities, visual aesthetics, genres and subgenres in cel, stop-motion, and digital animation. This means that while we often use it to refer to a genre, the term 'animation' encompasses an unimaginably large spectrum of films that may have substantively little in common. The limitless variety in animation is in this way both its greatest strength and its Achilles heel."

In "Magic Kingdoms," Rumsey Taylor and Leo Goldsmith write that while there are "many immediate discrepancies between both men, fostered largely by the geographical and temporal distance between them...., a thematic similarity persists between the work of Walt Disney and Hayao Miyazaki...., and this similarity is the more remarkable phenomenon that emerges in a comparison between them." Posted by: dwhudson      Read more     Source

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 18:24:19 GMT

Skin (in and out)

On a recent afternoon, while Libby and I were sitting in the comfy chairs at our new camp, I looked through the trees and saw a wisp of something flapping on the trunk of an old snag.

The wisp was on the far side of the tree, so I only saw it when the breeze blew. And it was perhaps fifty feet away, so when I did see it, I didn’t get a good look at it. I thought perhaps it was some remnant of the bark the tree once had or maybe a vine that had come loose somehow.

When it came time to push ourselves out of the comfy chairs and continue our walk, I steered my feet over to the snag to see what there was to see.

The wispy thing turned out to be the snake skin you see above. The discarded skin was easily three feet long, and it hung from the tree above our heads. How it managed to stay there, I don’t know, but it was still supple, so maybe it was only recently crept out of.

My guess is that the snake (I have no idea what kind it might have been) had slithered up the tree in its attempt to get out of its old skin. Mission accomplished it then left the tree and left the old skin on the tree.

We left the old skin there though I wish I could have kept it. But we had a long walk back to the shelter tarp, and I didn’t think such a delicate thing would survive the arduous trek through the forest. So there it remains.

Missouri calendar:

• Smoketrees bloom on southwestern Missouri glades.

Posted by: Roundrockjournal      Read more     Source