Virginia Breeze

When you have thousands of photos around you can always find a few that maybe can be dressed up and taken out in public. So here is a candidate for this Saturday afternoon. Soon to be Saturday evening (second photo below).

How are things going in your area this weekend? It seems rather low key around here. Perhaps everybody is saving up their energy for the upcoming Fourth of July weekend. That’s a pretty big one around this neck of the woods. Helena may not think so but that’s because she seems to be so attached to Great Britain.

Except when she is flying above it in an airplane. And even then she can’t resist diving out the door just to get back in a hurry. I’m kidding of course.

We went to a concert last night at an area shopping plaza. I was taking photos of the band The English Channel when I inadvertently pointed my camera at a building being constructed nearby. And wouldn’t you know it a large and very round security guard had to stick his face in my comfort zone to tell me about the policy of the stores.

You can’t take photos of the stores or the buildings. So much for celebrating freedom and the upcoming 4th. Perhaps somebody can explain that one to me. Here’s a photo of some of the band  and the crowd.  We enjoyed them a lot. And you can see from these photos that many fans were relaxing and enjoying them too.You can see some more photos of the band here on my Picasa Web Gallery.

One of my longtime blogging friends Helena had an opportunity to go sky diving recently. And she writes about it in her normal entertaining and factual way. I always enjoy reading her accounts of her activities.

She writes very well and then she uses the English language in a slightly different way. Why?

Because she lives in Great Britain! She also loves big cats.

Not big cats like Garfield. Not fat cats. Big, big cats. The kind of cat who would like to have you over for dinner.

They are very beautiful and she has many wonderful photos of them. But back to the part about diving out of an airplane. Sky diving looks like so much fun doesn’t it? Going 120 mph towards the earth and hoping your parachute was packed correctly.

Here tis.

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Do you feel like you could jump out of an airplane?  Have you ever tried it?  If a passenger jet is going to crash why do they not have parachutes for the passengers?  Should they at least have a few for those who might want to take their chances jumping?

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A month or two ago I was having a problem because SU was starting to bug me. A problem arose and it went down something like this.

I went to Best Buy and asked the Geeky Guy at the repair counter about Vista 64-bit operating systems. He said all the computers with it on them came back through the front door because customers were unhappy. They were unhappy because their printers and other stuff wouldn’t work when they plugged them into their new computers.

Simple enough. If a bit odd. But those of us who have bought enough stuff at Best Buy or other computer stuff stores understand that not all of it works. So I wrote a post about it and it got reviewed by SU afficianados. The next thing that happened was my stat counter started going off like a pinball machine.

And I should have just left it at that. But some dude in Great Britain decided he didn’t like the post and he thumbed it down. This was my first experience with being thumbed down and I didn’t like it. I especially was not fond of the language he employed when he thumbed it. Because you are supposed to use your finger for that.

So I did something you should never never do in most circumstances and especially in a circumstance where SU is involved. I wrote to them and complained about this guy. Because you know what happened next. My new SU friend who has heard it all a million times looked at MY record. And he saw that I had several different user names. Why? Because when I began with SU I logged in fitfully. AND YOU CAN’T LOG IN ON THE FRONT PAGE. The login is located deep inside the tool bar. Take a look!

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

So when I came back after a week or two in the beginning to see if this SU stuff was really any good I couldn’t get in!! The only way to get in is to sign up again!

Perhaps this explains why there is a problem with folks having more than one account on SU. I don’t know. But I do know it explained my situation. In any case the staff SU person was more concerned with my dormant accounts than with anything else. Mr. Bollocks from the United Kingdom was not breaking any rules. And after that my post about Vista that had gathered over 5,000 views in a couple of days suddenly lost its audience.

What happened? I don’t know. But it was actually a good thing. Because it got me over my need for SU juice. I was addicted and didn’t know it. Since that time I have taken another look at my blog and introduced some new elements. I have also started a new blog after purchasing a new theme.  It is called NewsLink Briefs and it will include hard hitting and snug fitting news. (I think that is funny but who knows?)

None of this would have happened if I had continued thinking about SU and their successful enterprise. It also struck me for the first time that they have a wonderful thing going. Because we are supplying them with the product they dispense to the world. We produce it and we refine it. In some strange sense we are all the employees of SU. And that’s great. Volunteerism is a wonderful thing. The problem happens when we are made to feel it is somehow immoral to use SU to help us grow our blogs. Bringing traffic to your blog while using SU is somehow a sin.

And I am happy that all of this is in the rear view mirror now. My stats are not messed up by SU blips any more. And I don’t have to worry about being an immoral SU user.

I still plan to use it to help other bloggers from time to time. But I have other things to do in terms of prime time activity. And maybe this is what SU wants. I don’t know. They were a mystery to me when I first started trying to log on to my new account and couldn’t find the login button.

And they are a mystery now.