Virginia Breeze

Last night I was glued to the tube watching Frontline and their documentary about life in China. It is not reality tv. It is harsh reality television.

It is “Thank God I don’t live there” television. I was walking around today thinking about the young woman who had to fight off her parents and her community to avoid an arranged marriage. And finally managed to do it.

The alternative? She has a job working in the city in some sort of high tech factory. And she works eleven hours per day seven days per week. Her task is to put four wires into a receptacle six hundred times per hour. That is ten times per minute for eleven hours. Over and over again.

Maybe she gets a half hour for lunch.

But the good news is that she meets someone she genuinely likes and they fall in love. So she has some happiness in her life. And she is a cute little thing. I feel like sending her a wedding present.

She will probably insert millions of wires into receptacles before she is done.

AAggghhhhhhhh.

Anyway. Moving on. There are many interesting characters that we discover. There is a young guy with a winning smile and a very attractive shirt who plans to tailor shirts for individuals and sell them on the internet. And the next time we see him he has ten women working on sewing machines and boxes of shirts ready to go. Amazing!

He becomes a Christian and seems totally satisfied. There’s no girlfriend in the picture so he doesn’t have to worry about supporting a family. It’s just him and dear old mom.

Smart guy!

Most of them are not so lucky. Loneliness takes its toll. But everything revolves around money. Relationships suffer. It’s a hard life. I couldn’t handle it. I would have to take a slow boat to the United States. And that option is available to some of them. But the parents exert an amazing influence on them and they stay.

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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/youngchina/

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Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of my Wordpress blogging adventure. The earliest post I can find is here

Not much has changed since then. I am still trying to relax and you will still see photos here of subjects that are primarily attempting to help me (us?) do just that.

These early posts are part of a Wordpress.com blog that still finds a few readers each day. It is a nice little blog and has some interesting posts in it along with some pretty bad ones. It’s all part of learning to be a blogger I guess.

Now I have four or five blogs and three of them are very active. I am happy to have made it this far and appreciative of those who were around last summer and still hang around here sometimes.

Hopefully things will progress in the second year. But blogging is about having fun unless you are making a living doing it. Are any of us making buckets of money?

If the answer is no then we should be doing things we enjoy when we blog! Right? There are Template Tombstones littering the Internet and many of them in my estimation belong to bloggers who were not enjoying themselves. They were not happy with the “progress” they were making perhaps. They were trying to do what the experts said they should do instead of what their hearts hoped they would do.

And they were not making money either. I met some of them in the past year and thought they were pretty wonderful people. No doubt they still are. Wherever they are.

Let us have a moment of silence as we remember some of their most memorable posts.

Thank you. Amen. Have a great Monday.

Update:// I deleted Wordpress.com.   So the earliest post is from this blog now.  It’s the same photo but it’s in a different place and the date is different.

More Writing

Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks. ~Author Unknown

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What, exactly, is the Internet? Basically it is a global network exchanging digitized data in such a way that any computer, anywhere, that is equipped with a device called a “modem” can make a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo. ~Dave Barry

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In part one we installed Total Commander and set it up so that it should work at this point. Once the username and password are installed all you have to do is click on the program and hit Control plus F to bring up the window with your blog’s name. Then you click on the name you want (if you have entered more than one blog) and hit Connect. Files flash before your eyes and you are ready to upload something.

But let’s be clear about one thing. I don’t know everything about this program. I can make it upload files and install them. Primarily that involves plugins and themes. All we are doing here is going over the simple stuff.

We are not going to install the NextGen Gallery plugin at this point. We are going to install Plugin Central so that almost ALL of our future plugin installations will be much simpler. Plugin Central was created by the guy I wrote about earlier. HIs name is Vladimir Prelovac and he helped me with my blogging efforts. Here is his blog

Vladimir Prelovac Online!

And here is the link to Plugin Central

So let’s begin to upload this plugin into our Wordpress Blog. We may not finish everything in this post because when you try to write down every step and leave out nothing you are going to take up a lot of space! But we will get there soon. I promise!

Hit Control plus F

Click on your blog’s name.

Hit connect.

See your cpanel and files on the left or the right half of the screen.

Double Left -Click on public_html

Double Left-Click on wp-content

Double Left-Click on plugins

Go to the other side of the Total Commander program and you should see your computer files starting with C Drive at the top (or whatever letter holds all your stuff).

You will find the Plugin Central plugin there and Double Left-Click on it. This should send all the other files away and isolate the one you want near the top of the window. Double click on it again and you should see some php files. One step above the php files is where you want to be so go back up one step. As a general rule one step above the php files is the file you want to upload in most cases. So it is good to check that they are actually there. This ensures that later when you go to your admin/plugin area there will actually be something there!

But we digress. You have an isolated plugin sitting there and you want to upload it into the plugin section that you have already opened on the other side. Left-click one time gently on your plugin and then press the F5 key. This will open a window that says Upload at the top. You don’t have to type anything in it if you already clicked one time gently on your plugin. Just click OK and files will once again flash before your eyes.

And you should see the plugin right where you want it on the other side of the Total Commander program and nestled securely with all your other plugins.

Next time I will discuss how you got that plugin from Vladimir’s blog to your computer so that you could do this.

Because we are not going to leave out any steps. That’s why I am doing this. Because there may be another older guy like me out there who would like to start a blog. And he wants to do it on his own domain. He wants to OWN his work. And he doesn’t have a clue how to do this.

When we went to school they didn’t discuss this stuff. I know it is difficult to comprehend how this could be. But believe me.

It was.

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While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our config.sys settings. ~Dave Barry

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There are really not enough simple explanations happening in cyberspace for someone who wants to blog but has no background that would be helpful in this regard.

In other words “I’M AN IDIOT !!” (and this is why “Idiots guides” proliferate).

Perhaps it would be helpful if I broke down some of the knowledge I have gained in this area. Because it is easy for me to explain things in simple language and not leave out any important little details. I need those details too!

THIS is what sinks ships. Those tiny little bits of information that are just so OBVIOUS to the knowledgeable may sometimes be left out. And that can leave us floating on a raft. Lost, lost, lost and waving good-bye to our new love as he sinks out of sight. Sorry Leonardo but you should have climbed up there with your true love. Being a gentleman will only get you so far.

But perhaps you were too tired after your adventure in the car.

So here is how I installed NextGen Gallery into my Wordpress blog from the word GO!

First we are going to upload some files.

I have a couple of tools for doing this. And the first one will allow us to bring the second one on board. So let’s begin with the first one. It is called Total Commander 7.03

Here is a download location

http://www.totalcmd.net/plugring/totalcmd.html

Follow the directions and open the software package.

This is shareware and in order to use it you have to play a little game. It will give you a number and you will have to click on the same number in order to get in. It’s very simple. It’s a confidence booster really.

Each time you want to use this program all you have to do is hit Control-F and it will spring into action.

A window opens. It says Connect to ftp server on top. And on the right is a button to click that says Connect. But before you can connect you have to set up a New Connection. New Connection is the second box.

So click on New connection. This brings up another window called FTP:connection details. We only need to worry about a few of the boxes here (repeat this exercise for each of your blogs).

The first box is entitled Session. Put the name of your blog in here.

The second box is entitled Host Name (Port). Put ftp.davidnotes.com in there. LOL. Actually you need to put the name of Your Domain in there. Sometimes it is written ftp.yourdomain.com but I used to find that to be slightly confusing. If you do too then we are maybe from the same planet.

The next box should have Anonymous login etc in it already.

Next is User name. Do you know your user name? Do you have as many of these per chance as I do? Well this one is the one you use to get into your Cpanel. It’s the one that came with your domain. If you didn’t write it down I can’t help you. Try looking in your admin panel/settings/writing. Look down there under Post via e-mail. There is a Login Name. That could be it! Or you may need to email your hosting company and have them help you.

And then we have the inevitable Password. You have many of these floating around too no doubt. This one is also associated with your cpanel. Same deal as the username. It could be down there with the Login Name.

In any case it pays to write things down.

But even more important than this it pays to write them all down in the same small notebook and then.. . . . .

DON’T LOSE THE NOTEBOOK! Always know where it is so you can find it at a moment’s notice.

And that concludes our first lesson boys and girls. We will move on in a day or two. But we don’t want to overtax ourselves with this stuff. It’s “Keep It Simple Sweetheart” all the way! And for now. . .

As Paul Harvey used to say

Bye Bye!