Second day of no coff zzz zzz zzzzzzz....

Coffee withdrawal

I began to feel a bit jittery so today I started one of my periodic sessions without caffeine. No tea, no coffee, zzzzz, zzzz, zzzzz.....

Uh!! What was that? What did you say?

My active desktop.

The virtual one that is. Especially for Ann - she wants to know about the weather. Along the bottom you see four active desktop items. They all come from the Met Office web site. (In case you are new to blogger you can click on the picture to display a larger version)

How to create them?

The slow, methodical, "let's understand what we are doing" way:

Right click on your desktop, choose Properties/desktop/customize desktop/web then New.

Create new desktop items with the following URLs:
http://www.meto.gov.uk/datafiles/flat3ani.gif, http://www.meto.gov.uk/datafiles/composite2.gif, http://www.metoffice.com/satpics/latest_uk_vis.jpg,
http://www.meto.gov.uk/satpics/latest_vis.jpg

The quick and cheap way:
Right click on a link above and "open in new window". Right click on the picture that appears. Choose "Set as desktop item". Bingo! Note: you can do this with any picture from any web page.

When you have gone through all those you will find four small windows on your deskop. That is they are on your desktop, but are behind all the icons and other things. Move the mouse over one of the windows, near its top edge, and a ghostly title bar appears - use it to drag the little window somewhere convenient. Move the mouse to an edge of the little window and resize it to your desires.

Of course that tiny little window is not a lot of use so move the mouse near its top edge again and see four icons, the down arrow at the left edge and three others at the right hand side of the title bar: Counting from the left number two is best - it covers your desktop with the picture. Number one gives you a list of options - "make available offline" is good, as is "Synchronize" (Number three will seriously mess your desktop as it pushes all the icons around.)

When you cover the desktop like this you can get it back by moving the mouse to the top right hand side of the screen where you will see the little icons appear again. Choose the third from the right to shrink it back to the small window. You will then see your normal desktop background picture again. (You can see my background picture described here!)

The Met Office satellite pictures are updated every hour. You can either set a schedule to refresh them automatically (number one icon, synchronize/setup/scheduled) or just right click anywhere on your desktop and select "Refresh" when you want to see the latest.

Read more about active desktops at Microsoft.

Kate's Book Blog: Andrew O'Hagan on Robert Burns

Kate's Book Blog: Andrew O'Hagan on Robert Burns

These reflections on Burns are so close to my experience of learning to love him that they are well worth repeating:

"I ... fell in love, not only with the mind-warpingly beautiful lines in those poems, but with him - his life and his voice and his spirit travelling through time."

O'Hagan learned Burns' rythms by "typing his words"; for me it is singing his songs (in the car, alone) or in our social evenings.

Lately, learning to play the tunes on the tin-whistle evokes something very deep.

The warehouse at Burscough at twilight

This was taken in late June on a walk with friends. It wasn't smoke from the chimney but a jet trail across the sky that just happened to coincide with the chimney stack.

Why so late posting this? I just "happened" across the picture after installing Picasa - now at last I can get to grips with my digital picture collection. If only it could furtle round in my room and scan the several thousand 35mm colour slides I took over the last 30 years... Still, it's a handy little utility.

The Skylark flies at last!!

Skylark Fine Art
At last! Janet has launched the web site that I have been working on over the last six months. It is a shop and gallery for prints that she wants to sell. Some by herself, others by her father and more to come.

She has worked hard to make it look terrific (so have I) and it works on just about everything except the dreaded IE5 for Mac.

Take a look, and if you really enjoy good pictures, make sure you switch your browser to work in full screen mode - most likely you do that by pressing the F11 key. Pressing it again will take you back to normal mode.

Enjoy - and buy one or two for Christmas presents.