Well, I did it. I spent the day setting up a Cafe Press shop for the blog. I only have a couple of designs in there so far, but I’m willing to put anything anyone sends me on anything in the shop for no extra charge. Also … I’m going to create more designs as times goes on.

I’ve made a page for close up details of the designs and colors that I have in there so far. It will be reachable from the Shop page button just below my header, and also from the shop itself.

Those of you who are interested in having your own Cafe Press shop should know that you can run one for free. If you do decide to open a shop, and it’s because you heard about it here, please let them know that I referred you, by clicking here: Start your own shop! … or by letting them know when you create your shop that I referred you. They’ll want my email and store ID … moof (at) blogsplot (dot) net and the ID is bloggedup.

Thank you kindly! :o)

For those of you who have been getting a stack overflow error from clicking on links on my blog …

You all use Internet Explorer … that’s the first problem …

The people at Word Press helped me track it down to one of my plug-ins … “Performancing Metrics” … which is a very nice little blogging program, with a lot of fancy features. I went to the PMetrics web site, and did a bit of research, and discovered that if I have the plug-in enabled, and the PMetrics code in my footer, that it can cause people running Internet Explorer to have a Stack Overflow error.

I’ve removed the code in my footer … so if it happens again – I’d like to know! It would be “back to the drawing board!”

Let me use this opportunity to put in a plug for Fire Fox. Really. No, I don’t work for them. No, I don’t get kick backs. I’m just so happy with it that I want to share the love! :o)

I have a left side bar that shows Technorati links, Del.icio.us links, my Favorites, my history, downloads progress, my extensions, my themes, page information, a biobar … and much more …

In my bottom status bar, I have my Performancing button, InFormEnter that fills things in for me with a click, a calculator, and a button that allows me to look at the page in Internet Explorer, if I want. This was handy when I was doing college labs that would only open in IE … I never had to run IE once. There’s also a little button I click down there if I want to see the CSS or the Javascript on someone’s blog. Those are all free plug-ins that you can get for Fire Fox.

I have TABS!!! I could never do without Tabs!!! I’ll paste some pics in below for you to see, but in short, each tab can be a different web site … and you can have as many open as you want. You can grab the tab, and move it around. Tabbed browsing is what IE is hoping to steal from Fire Fox … :p

I have a LOAD of buttons in my top tool bars … including buttons that reopen tabs which I’ve accidentally closed – very handy when I hit a close button while I’m writing a post … and yes, I actually do silly things like that.

Oh … did I forget to mention that I also have spell checking in everything I do? How about support for French, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and loads of other characters?

The Menu bar … at the very top, has a weather plug-in which is showing me the day and night weather and temperatures through next Tuesday … and if I run my pointer over a part of it, it shows me an AccuWeather radar map for my area.

Here are some pics:

Top part of my Fire Fox browser … left side. Notice the Weather stuff at the top, then one level down, you can see the regular tool bar. Underneath that, there’s a button bar which is configurable – you can add/remove a bunch of stuff from there.

Left to right, I have Display open Tabs list, Reopen closed tabs, Display closed windows list, Open new window, Open new Tab, A whole load of navigation features (including a “who is”), Open/close sidebar, top/bottom page, Flashgot, Sessions (browser will reopen with what you had in all the tabs when you closed, if you want,) Mail, ChatZilla, 3 Del.icio.us tools, 2 spelling tools, IE tab control, Toggle Google bar display, and a Google search.

Next row down is my personal quick bar, and I have almost everything in folders to save bar space.

Here to the left is a picture of one of my folders open, with the web links inside of it. I have several folders like that, as you can see.

Back to the above picture, underneath my personal tool bar, I have a Google Bar, and underneath the Google Bar, you can see some open tabs.

By the way, the Theme that I happen to use is called Nautipolis. There are hundreds of different themes. Your browser can look just about any way you’d like it to. This just happens to be the one I prefer. The default Fire Fox is my second preference.

Now, to the right is the side panel, which is on the left of the browser. It has 3 positions – the one you see here is open all the way. You can also close it down to the icons you see on the side (hourglass, etc.) or all the way to the edge of the screen. That tiny little gripper remains there so that you can click on it to reopen the side panel easily.

In the side panel, you can have all of the things I mentioned above … plus a whole lot more. Here you see a few of my browser extensions … :o)

The ones I use the most are Tab Mix Plus, InFormEnter, Minimize to Tray, JS View, AdBlock (which is out of sight,) All-in-One-Sidebar, ConQuery, and Forecast Fox. I have 30 extensions in all, and I occasionally go back to the Mozilla web site to look for whatever is new.

Before I forget, here is a link for downloading FireFox: FireFox 1.5 It’s free, it’s quick, it’s easy … you’ll wonder why you waited so darn long! ;o)

Finally, here is a pic of the stuff I have in my bottom status bar:

You see the goodies that I named above … plus the Adblock which I forgot to mention, but which I can’t live without!

And so, folks … if you’re running IE, you should at least take a look. It’s free, it’s easy to install, and it rocks!

It’s gone way past Netscape … and is catching up to IE pretty quickly!

Oh … and if you want to know about the companion email client, Thunderbird, let me know. Plugins, Themes, and a whole lot more. What Fire Fox is doing for browsing, Thunderbird is doing for email.

… parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme …

Actually, it was a seafood buffet, and I’m pretty sure we don’t have a fair in Scarborough, although we do have Scarborough Downs …

It was good to see Fr. Bob (the Reverend Robert Girouard … now you try to pronounce that! ;o) … we don’t see each other often enough. Fr. Bob is retired, and is a snow bird … he winters in Florida. I believe we’ve been friends for more than 20 years. When Joanie lost her dad, Fr. Bob did his funeral … and when I lost my own dad 10 days later, he did my father’s funeral too. It was a rough month – we even saw a dear friend go to prison that month for something he hadn’t done.

There have been a lot of good times, too … we’ve had delightful arguments “discussions” which no one ever won, and shared so many entertaining hours together that it would be difficult to remember even a small part of them. We know each other all too well after these many years, and stay right on each other’s hides when the BS starts getting too deep … ;o)

I said I would post some pics of today, and so here they are … each with an intro …

This is Fr. Bob … isn’t he cute?
Can you just see this fellow being a spiritual guru?
*snicker*

Actually, he’s always been a very good pastor, and his sense of humor has been no small part of his success. I’m proud to know him.

This is my Mom-in-Law, Althea Ballard. She’s my partner in crime. I love her to bits. If I move to Florida, she’s the one I’ll really miss.

This is Mom England, Joanie’s Mom. She just surprised me tonight by telling me that she’s lived in New York! I thought she’d always lived in Maine! She’s an amazing lady … I don’t know if there’s anything she can’t do …

My dear friend – since I was 13! We’ve only been apart for about a decade since we met … and now, she’s way up in Bangor (over 3 hours away) and I’m about to move to Florida. Gonna soak lots of tissues over this one before it’s over …

This is my wise-beyond-his-years chef son, confidant, and adviser. He’s also an amazing tech-head. He and his younger brother are the product of home schooling, and I can’t say enough about it. It turns out great people!

Yes, that’s me. I had a bad case of “helmet head” because of the darn rain. It poured buckets for the entire trip. We’re having a very very wet year.

And that’s it for now! Wow! Two personal posts in the same week!!! *LOL*

I’m going to work on something a little more blogworthy before the week end … or at least I intend to try. Don’t give up on me! :o)

And so … here we are at the end of another school session. I’m looking back on this particular stretch with some serious relief, because for the first time, I really felt some pressure to try to remain caught up. Racing through 8 week courses that should take at least a semester can be a challenge. I would be up to it if I were half my age … but they can leave me a bit breathless as I am now.

DeVry is graciously giving us 2 weeks to recuperate … I, for one, am a grateful Moofie! When we start up again in mid July, I’ll be taking “Health Services and Information Systems.” I’m awfully glad to be seeing the end of my “gen eds.” Oh! I did manage to hang on to my 4.0 though … *does a happy little dance!*

Just realizing that I haven’t made a personal post on here in months!

Let’s see … my two weeks looks pretty full! Tomorrow, we’re going to drive up the coast to Scarborough, ME, to a little restaurant called “Dunston’s School House”. It’s a seafood buffet. We’ll be meeting some dear old friends who winter in Florida, and are finally home for the summer. I’ll post about it when we get back … and share some pics.

I have a variety of other “goings on” this week, including accompanying my mother in law to the dentist … which is a long, long ride … and visiting with another elderly lady who’s asked to speak to me. I also have to make my rather embarrassingly popular Boston Baked Beans for a 4th of July party which we’ll be attending on Saturday. Next week is even busier … and I want to take the time to drive up to Old Town to spend a few nights with Sarah and Daein.

On the health front … since I’ve begun to be a bit more “out there” about this sort of thing, at the moment we’re struggling to get my blood pressure down to something a bit more viable. In the last few months it’s gotten quite high, and I’m having to take it twice a day at home like I did when all of this first started a few years ago. I consider myself rather well “pressure tested” where HTN is concerned though, so the range it’s in now doesn’t overly worry me … although my PCP is making noises that I find rather disconcerting. It’s been ringing in with a systolic between 180 and 220, which is far and away below what it’s been at its worst. I think that the only thing that worries me at this stage is that if it stays high, it could bring my renal function lower again … which would be too bad, because my numbers had improved considerably over the last little while.

And so … life goes on … and we muddle through with whatever we’re given.

To those who ask, yes, I really am thinking of moving to Florida with Sarah and Daein … and when I get there, I’ll be looking for a job interning in Medical Informatics while I finish my studies. The subject was created with me in mind, I believe … a blend of my two favorites: medicine and computers! :o)

For those who haven’t noticed, I’ve begun putting a link to a new French song each Saturday in the space just below my blog header. Also, I’ll try to add the words, and either a translation or a bit about the song on the “Mots” page. (Mots means Words, or Lyrics, in French.) Most of the songs are quite old, some were taken from the original 78’s … a few are more recent. So, take a listen, and let me know what you think! I’d love to hear from my fellow Francophones, by the way … let me know if you have a favorite, and I’ll see if I happen to have it.

Before I quit … we have two new bloggers I’d like to introduce: Dr. Anonymous, who’s continually making my blood pressure worse because he goes by the nick “Dr. A.” which is what my PCP calls himself. I keep thinking my PCP has taken up blogging … oh my … would that worry me!!! Anyway, he has a truly fantastic start on a blog, and if you don’t check it out, you’ll be missing out!

The other one is Fine Art Doctor … who has some very affective posts. Very intense on the emotions … but all presented as simply as if you were sitting with him enjoying a cup of coffee.

If you haven’t met these fellows yet, please get on over there and blogroll them! I promise you won’t regret it!

Grand Rounds is up over at Medviews!

Not only did Dr. Henochowicz do a fantastic job laying it out, he got up very very early! Hey! I think I’ve found a doc who’s on time! ;o)

Lots of our favorites this week! Not one to be missed!