My Mobile Adventures *~*~*

© Copyright 2008 Tink *~*~*
http://MyMobileAdventures.com

Since my AT&T 3G phone service was messing up early in the day, there are some pics you guys didn’t get.  I’ve sent them up to Flickr – you will find just a few of them here -

CLICK to see some more pics from Fort Myers Beach today

I’ll try to get some more up there soon.  I took lots later in the day at the Holiday Inn, some of  which I already sent to this blog earlier today.  Right now I am super tired and I have not packed yet.  I might just go to bed and get up early to pack.

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© Copyright 2008 Tink *~*~*
http://MyMobileAdventures.blogspot.com

NOTE: If you are looking for CAMERA CRITTERS, please scroll down to the next post!

Well, we had so much fun last time I did this, I thought I might as well do it again. It gives me a chance to give some of y’all some linky love. <3 (it took me forever to realize when I saw that symbol, I was supposed to tilt my head to the right and see a heart). OK, here we go –

It’s DeVine! (Wednesday September 10th)

smarmoofus asked, “Is DeVine based on a character from a book/movie, or is she just a park character?”

Probably the correct answer to that is “she’s just a park character”. However, when I first “met” her, she reminded me immediately of a rather more sensuous version of the animated vegetation in the old Disney short called Flowers and Trees. It was part of the Silly Symphonies series. I’ve got a lot of the Silly Symphonies on DVD, but believe it or not, I found it on YouTube just now! It would not surprise me if the Disney Imagineer who came up with the concept of DeVine was thinking of Flowers and Trees

(the clip is 7min 31sec long)

Catsynth said, “The goddess of wine!”

You know, I never thought of her that way, but maybe you are right. I know that Bacchus was the god of wine. But who was the goddess of wine? I dunno!

gpc said, “I’ve never seen her before — this may be my inner muse!”

Are you trying to tell us that … that… that YOU’RE the goddess of wine? *genuflects*

Italian Sculpture at Epcot (Skywatch Friday September 12th)

Gayle said, “Pssst…he’s wearing a dress. Not sure who he is, but I hope he doesn’t bend over! Those look like rain clouds…I like Mickey’s big hand. I think that would look cool coming out the top of my house. It sure would draw attention! ”

You know, the piece is available, seeing as they’ve taken it down. In the beginning, there was the giant golf ball, aka the geosphere aka Spaceship Earth (there’s actually a rather nifty attraction inside). It was barren, and it was the symbol of EPCOT. Then, for the Millennium Celebration in 2000, they put up the the “Epcot” and the gloved Mickey hand. Purists abhorred it. I must admit, I was rather taken aback the first time I saw it. It seemed so garish and unnecessarily redundant to put a neon “Epcot” on the 18 year symbol of EPCOT.

Well, they finally took it down. I believe it was at the end of 2007. I’d gotten used to it by then, but when I realized that I had some photographic catching up to do with the “nakey” golf ball, I was ecstatic! It looks really pretty at night – they put some sort of purple lighting on it, which bounces off all of the facets.

So anyway, that Mickey hand probably isn’t doing anything special right now. Your mission would be to figure out how to heist it out of Florida all the way to Alaska. Good luck! :p

Christa rode to our rescue with the answer to most of our questions. Thanks, Christa! However, we still don’t know what’s under that guy’s skirt…

BIG Pile of Sea Shells at Blind Pass! (Friday September 12th)

Gayle said, “What an adventure. I would get so excited I’d want to take everything I saw home which I’m sure there are a lot of broken shells not worth getting. But I’d get them. Open market? Does that mean you do this to sell them?”

I replied in the Comments but since I think Comments are a pretty lousy way to communicate (hmmm, maybe I ought to write a techno-rant about that one of these days), I’ll repeat it here.

“I don’t sell my shells! I love my shells! But sometimes I give them away. For instance, sometimes I am hosting a niece or a friend and we go to the beach and there are no shells that day. Instead of letting them go home empty handed, I let them shell in my closet where I keep the ones I’m not displaying yet. No one has yet been unhappy shelling in the closet! ”

To this, I will add that I display them in glass jars and bowls and admire them, and take them out and play with them and rearrange them in an endless cycle of obsession which I confess that I cannot control, nor have I any desire to. Yes, having them is wonderful, but hunting them is da bomb! Once you have them, you’ve got to clean them and shine them and find the right container for them and and and…. I don’t really mind. I love my shells! I moved to this part of Florida from New York specifically to be near the shells. w00t!

Mare said, “Can’t wait to see your booty! LOL!”

But… but… but I hardly know you! And what would Mark and Miss Renee say if they knew?

Snowbird wrote, “Great post. How do you guys see in the dark???? I went to Access 6 today and found a couple of shark’s eyes (not as big as Gary’s) and a couple of Olives. Mostly kibbles and bits though. But I did find a big operculii!!!!! Or is that operculum??? LOL”

I went to that surf shop over by Jerry’s and I got one of those miner’s lights that you wear on your head. I also carry a hand-held flashlight, but there are times when you want both hands free, so I try to make sure that I’m wearing something with big enough pockets for the flashlight. Gary and Tootie used the lights off their bikes, which I think are brighter than a regular flashlight, but Gary doesn’t like the harshness (LED). Maybe next time we will trade – I’ll use his bright bike light and he can wear the miner’s light. He says I’m always blinding him with it anyway. You cannot help it, if you look up at someone, you shine ‘em right in the eye with it. He can get his revenge on me, and then we’ll be even. We’ll both be blind, but even ;p

gpc moaned, “I can’t stop moaning. I am happy for you but (groan). I have never found an opercuthingy, and wonder if I would know one without its shell?”

I loaded a photo to my Flickr PhotoStream because Flickr lets you put notes/labels on a photo. I labeled the opercuthingies, so you’ll be able to see what they look like. My first one, I didn’t know what it was at first, but I kept it because I thought it was weird and strange. I remember trudging back to my hotel and having a lightbulb moment about it. It’s very weird to think that you’re in possession of the door to someone’s home!

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

OK, looks like I’m pretty much all caught up addressing comments and questions. But there is one thing I wanted to talk about, and that’s this new Blogger “Following” feature. It messed up my Google Reader. I was already subscribed to a lot of you, and so when i started to Follow you, it duplicated all of you in my Google Reader. Even though there is a check box to uncheck, which I did, to explicity tell Google Reader NOT to put in a group of “mah peeps that I Follow”, it did it any way and messed me up. I know not why. It’s a bug of some sort – although, I’m sure the Blogger developers would call it a “feature”. Whatever, I had to delete everyone (both you AND your twins) and start all over again. I resubscribed/put everyone back into the Reader but I did not re-Follow. So don’t be mad if you don’t see me Following you back any more. I gots issues! When Google fixes it, I’ll be really happy to Follow you once more!

OK, that’s it for tonight. This is a LOOOOONG post! It’s been real. See ya real soon!

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My Mobile Adventures *~*~* presents…
“It’s The Geekend!” Volume 1, No. 2
© Copyright 2008 Tink *~*~*
http://MyMobileAdventures.blogspot.com

Are You Reading This Blog Through SPOKEO?

If you are one of the Spokeo readers, can you raise your hand please? I’d like to follow you back, but Spokeo doesn’t seem to have a feature that allows me to see who has my blog listed under “Friends”.

So… if you are one of the Spokeo subscribers, please leave a comment or email me or send up a flare or whatever! I’d like to have the opportunity to follow you back.

BTW, for those who never heard of Spokeo – it’s a social media aggregator. Suppose one of your friends has a blog AND they’re on Twitter, AND they post photos to Flickr, AND they post videos on YouTube, etc. With an aggregator you don’t have to go to four different places to read their stuff. You just go to the aggregator, and there it all is. There are other aggregators out there besides Spokeo. I have an account with Spokeo, but I also like FriendFeed, especially since there is an iGoogle widget available for FriendFeed. I just put it on my iGoogle home page and I can see at a glance who is posting what. If the source that you want to read has an RSS feed, you can always use Google Reader, too. I have also messed around a little with Feedly, which is a Firefox add-on. And speaking of Firefox add-ons….

ScribeFire Update

A few weeks back, I wrote about ScribeFire, a blogging tool that is actually a Firefox add-on and very convenient to use. Overall, I really like it; however, I did mention in that article that I was having some issues uploading photos. The next release of the Firefox add-on seems to have fixed those particular issues; however, several readers have told me this week that they are unable to see my photos. It doesn’t happen to all of my readers, and it doesn’t happen all the time, but the one condition that seems to be consistent among people cannot see my photos is that the photos in question were uploaded using ScribeFire. If I replace them with something I uploaded from the Blogger interface or with something that is hosted elsewhere, we are fine.

Regrettably, I will probably discontinue the use of ScribeFire for my blogging tool needs. I am pretty much all about the photos on this blog, so anything that might be interfering with your viewing pleasure is of some concern to me. If I find out that it’s NOT ScribeFire, I’ll happily use it again. As I type this, I see that Blogger is threatening a “scheduled outage” at 4:00 PM PDT (in 20 minutes, yikes, better finish!) – so maybe, just maybe it’s a Blogger problem and they’re going to fix it tonight.

I’ve thought about trying to find another blogging tool to use, but there’s going to be a major event coming soon that might make that unnecessary….

This Blog Will Be Moving Soon!

Date to be determined! For months now, my friend and website guru Annie of Pixel Currents has been working on and off on setting up a new home for My Mobile Adventures *~*~* self-hosted using WordPress. I like Blogger, but I’ve got a lot of space over at the hosting site where TinkRBell is located. That’s my pre-blog trip report site – lots of Sanibel and Disney trip reports and photos live there, from before I moved to Florida. I want to make use of all the space and bandwidth I have there, and have a photo gallery as well.

We’ve had TinkRBell shut down for a while now, redirecting everyone to here at the blog while we tried to figure some things out and messed around in the boiler room some. One of the things that stopped us from getting on with it and launching the new site was figuring out how to make Word Press do the “mobile” part. We messed with Utterz, but the photos were teeny tiny when we initially messed with it, so the idea was abandoned. I have, however, used Utterz here at the Blogger blog to send audio and video from my phone, and it works swell for those purposes. You can even mash them together if you time it right – audio, text, photo, video, combined into a single post.

I really kind of enjoyed the time I was at Disney and sort of having a conversation with Snowbird and Mare in real time. I would send a mobile post to the blog, they would comment, the comments would come to my phone via SMS text, I would call Utterz and leave an audio response which got forwarded to the blog, they would comment some more… it was really fun! And I want to get into more of that sort of interaction while I’m out and about mobile blogging.

Anyhow, fast forward a few months and we became aware of a mobile blogging plug-in for WordPress that looked really promising, but I didn’t have the right phone for it. Honestly, I was getting peeved by my carrier’s inability to give me bars out on the islands anyway, so I was ripe to switch services, but the WordPress plug-in situation kind of sent me over the edge, and that is how the Crackberry came about.

Alas, we found the WordPress plug-in to be buggy and uncooperative. And then came the day when Utterz decided to offer larger photo sizes – yay! We did some testing and voila, we were in business!

So now we are all excited, knocking out walls, picking out new drapes and carpeting, doing some decorating, and all that kind of thing. We are getting pretty close to the point where we can re-launch TinkRBell and the new blog. I’ll be sure to start bellowing about it often and early, and I’m hoping that not too many of you, my precious subscribers, gets lost!

OK, I think that’s enough geekishness for one post. Long post! Have a great GEEKEND! TTYL