Off The Record With Debbie & Tony http://www.delovesto.com The musings of Debbie and Tony - enjoy your visit Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:40:00 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-07 http://www.delovesto.com/2010/02/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-07/ http://www.delovesto.com/2010/02/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-07/#comments Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:40:00 +0000 admin http://www.delovesto.com/2010/02/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-02-07/ Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-07 is a post from: Off The Record With Debbie & Tony

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I started to write on a site called Associated Content several weeks ago, a site where a lot of authors write anything from product reviews to poetry and short stories.  Having posted a number of articles, I started reading some of the poetry, and having on occasion felt the urge to turn my thoughts into something that rhymes, I decided to try and write on a daily basis.

My mind is known to wander – frequently, and therefore you will find me writing about lots of different topics, but since my mind is emptier during my drive to work, some of these originated while driving. 

I hope you enjoy them.  If so, please leave a comment you let me know what you think…

If you have an account with Twitter, Facebook or any of the other Social Networking sites, please can you help by sharing this with your friends – if you like the poems of course.

Any suggestions for new poems would also be really appreciated, just leave me a comment and I will see what I can come up with.

Turning My Hand To Poetry is a post from: Off The Record With Debbie & Tony

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I apologise to our family and friends for taking a long time to get around to working on the photographs of our Christmas Holiday in Florida, but this is the first of several articles about our trip, Debbie and I hope you enjoy it.

Clicking on any photo will open a larger version in a new window.
Maximise the window to see the photo full size.

The Journey

We left Southampton the day before Christmas Eve, a very icy day in the South of England, and headed up to Heathrow Airport where we spent the night.  We had decided that it was better to drive up earlier, rather than risk bad weather, traffic jams and breakdowns, especially as we were flying out to Florida on Christmas Eve.   Debbie managed to get us a good deal for a night in a hotel plus parking for the duration of our trip – she is amazing at finding good deals online.

We  hadn’t been able to get direct flights to Miami from London, since Christmas is a very busy time, and the flights were almost all fully booked, and if not the remaining seats were horribly expensive.  With my only having got a job a month earlier after 3 months out of work, we had to make do with a cheaper option, and we managed to find a good connection with American Airlines changing planes in Raleigh/Durham in North Carolina, which worked out well.

Debbie was really stressed about travelling to the USA, since the last time she came into Miami she got held up for 15 hours in Immigration, but this time all went well, with the immigration officers in Raleigh waiting for her and having read her file before we arrived.    On then to Miami, which had worried us, since we wouldn’t be landing until about 9:30pm at night, then had to pick up our rental car and drive 15 miles up to Hollywood Beach where we were staying.

The flight landed on time however, and since we had already gone through immigration, we just had to pick up our bags and get a shuttle to the car rental location.  It was nice to get an upgrade to an SUV, however we did have problems with it later, but that’s another story, and we got to the motel about 11pm.

I had called the owner a few days before to tell them that we would be a little late arriving, and they left the room unlocked with the key inside.   More about the Motel later, but by now I am sure you are desperate for some pictures, so I will begin with a walk early Christmas Morning on Hollywood Beach.

Christmas Day On Hollywood Beach

The beach had quite a lot of seaweed on it from the storms of the previous day, the sky was rather ominous, and there were some good waves coming in, as we took a much needed walk along the beach after having sat on airplanes so much the day before.

There were also a lot of jellyfish washed up from the storm, which look like plastic bags.  I am not sure if they can still sting you when dead, but we weren’t about to touch them and risk it.

 This is the Motel that we were staying at, and as you can see it’s right by the beach.  It’s one of the older style Hollywood Motels, with a number of rooms above a row of shops.  No p0ol, but a great terrace where you can sit out and watch the world go by.

You can get an indication of just how many people go to the beach on Christmas Day, even when it’s cloudy, by looking at these pictures below.  You also see some rather strange sights!  I’m not sure whether all of these people were living or not, some looked remarkably like Zombies…

 

This is the view from the terrace at the Motel.  You couldn’t really ask for a place that is closer to the beach.  People even took Christmas Trees to the beach and sat around eating and drinking, and even the Lifeguard had a Santa hat on!

After a fairly quiet day of recovering after the long flight – we didn’t get to sleep until the equivalent of 5am UK time, we went out for a nice Italian meal in the evening at a restaurant on the boardwalk.

Much more to follow in the next installment of our trip to Florida.  We hope you enjoy the photos, and next it’s Boxing Day and we get to see the girls…

Christmas In Florida – Part 1 is a post from: Off The Record With Debbie & Tony

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I have spent the last three years trying to eat healthier, to lose weight, and to get myself fitter, so imagine my horror when I got on the scales last week for the first time in several months and found that I had put on 10lbs.

YES TEN POUNDS!

I put a lot of this down to it being Winter, and with the dark evenings, the cold and ice of England, or if not that the rain.  Combining these together make it very unpleasant to take a walk after work, or even at the weekends, and what’s worse, the cold weather makes you want to eat more wholesome food, like stews and steaming hot dishes with lots of gravy.

The weight gain is also partly due to my new lifestyle, since I started a new job three months ago, and now instead of walking at lunchtime, as I used to do when I lived in Florida, I usually spend my time on the computer and write articles – like this one…

I am guilty too of having been addicted to Evony (which I wrote about in another article), and for the last six months of last year I spent far more time sitting at the computer playing an on-line game than getting out and exercising.

Well, it’s now 2010, today is the 1st February, and I want to lose those 10 pounds and more and to return to being a bit fitter again.

My fiancee bought us a Wii for Christmas, primarily so that we could use the Wii Fit package, but we haven’t really used it until the end of last week. She registered on Wii Fit and tried it out, and on Saturday I thought “Right, it’s my turn to try and do something about my situation!.

So on the Wii Fit Board I get, and go through the registration process and tests. My balance has always been fairly good, although I couldn’t walk along a narrow beam to save my life, but imagine my surprise when the results showed that my Wii Fit Age was 38! Not bad since I am actually 55!

I thought it best to start with Yoga, since stretching and pose are good for you, but I quickly found out that this is not really my thing. I need to get into this later as I know it will do me good, but when your body is stiff and overweight, it’s not exactly easy.

So I moved onto Muscle Toning, and this seemed just as bad as Yoga. By now I was getting a little frustrated, and so I moved onto Aerobic Workout, and here I found I could have some fun. I started off by heading Soccer Balls, which took some doing, since I was leaning towards them with my upper body and not changing my body balance. Doing the Hula Hoops is not something I can do well in real life, but I quickly mastered this on the Wii, even though my fiancee was laughing hysterically at my movements. I think she got almost as good a workout as I did from just laughing!

Off now to do some Step Exercises, which not having done this in real life I found a bit hard, until I was shown how, and then I was off. I think of all the Aerobics exercises I enjoy the Hula Hoop and Step Aerobics best, since they are not too strenuous, but you can feel the effects.

Finally, I moved on to the Jogging, which again is something that I have never been good at. Having been overweight all my life and not having the greatest knees in the world, this is quite strenuous on my body, but off I set, jogging on the spot in the middle of the living room floor, and the way that my legs were kicking out had my other half in hysterics again. Even on the lowest level, by the time I got to the end of the course my legs had turned to jelly, but I could feel the benefits as I was puffing and panting away.

“OK it’s YOUR turn I said”, knowing that my fiancee isn’t any better at exercising than I am, and so she logged into the Wii Fit program and set about doing the Hula Hoops. Well, I practically got the camcorder out it was so funny to watch. I wish we had both videoed ourselves, as we looked ridiculous.

She then tried the jogging, and I could tell by the time she got halfway through the course that she was puffed and about to give in, but she didn’t, and kept going right on to the end, but like me it left her out of breath for ages.

I will keep you up to date as we progress, and I know that this will help us to get fitter over time. It’s still not the same as being outside in the fresh air though, and fortunately the days have started getting longer, and it’s possible to start going for evening walks again, which we both really enjoy.

Do you have a Wii and use it for keeping fit? I would love to hear how you are using it and what success you have had, so if you do, please leave a comment and let me know.

Are Wii Fit Yet? is a post from: Off The Record With Debbie & Tony

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Auto Pager in action screen shot. This shows Auto Pager in use when searching for images on Google. You can see the page divider on the snapshot.I am sure that everyone is familiar with the problem where you perform a search on your browser, or visit a site that has page after page of entries, requiring you to keep clicking on the button to take you to the next page, and waiting for that page to load and display.

Auto Pager is one answer to this problem, and having used it for the last six months or more, I can say that it works really well.  Written by Wind Li, Auto Pager detects when you have scrolled to the end of a page, and automatically loads the next page for you at the bottom of the current window, with a separator showing you where one page ends and the next begins.

The first time that you encounter a site with multiple pages that Auto Pager is set to recognize (for example Google, Yahoo, Bing and all the main search engines, plus the New York Times, eBay, Amazon, Digg and many more, and scroll to the end of a page, it will ask you if you want to use Auto Pager with this site.   Having confirmed this, it will then expand the bottom of the screen to include the next page, and will keep going as long as you keep scrolling down.

Auto Pager Options Screen. Auto pager is a cool plugin for firefox that allows you to scroll through multiple=There is an FAQ page for Auto Pager on the author’s site, plus the options screen allows you to change a number of settings and to add new sites to Auto pager, if they are not already configured.  (Click on the Tools option at the top of the Firefox window, Add-Ons, then select the Auto pager add-on and click on Options).

Some of these options may be beyond most users of Auto Pager, but you would really only need to play with these if you are a developer.

There isn’t much more to say really, except if you haven’t tried this plugin for Firefox, give it a whirl.  I am sure you will find that it adds to your productivity when searching through multiple pages.

Auto Pager – A Cool Firefox Add-On is a post from: Off The Record With Debbie & Tony

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FIxed Social Buttons is a great plugin for Wordpress that adds share buttons to the most popular social networking and bookmarking sites to your wordpress pagesSeveral weeks ago I discovered a great little plugin for Wordpress called Fixed Social Buttons.

This plugin automatically places buttons for popular Social Networking and Bookmarking sites at the side of your blog page, it’s very easy to set up, and the buttons stand out much better for sharing than others I have found in the body of a post.

To install the plugin on your Wordpress site, go to Plugins in the Admin Panel and select Add New.  Then search for “Fixed Social Buttons.   The nice thing about the latest versions of Wordpress I think everyone will agree is that plugins these days can be installed and updated at the touch of a button, and this is no exception.  It’s a lot better than having to download, unzip and FTP up to the correct folder on the server.  But I digress…

Having installed Fixed Social Buttons, a new option should appear in the Admin Panel under Settings.

Fixed Social Buttons is a plugin for Wordpress sites that adds buttons for popular social bookmarking sites to your wordpress pages. Buttons may be added either horizontally or vertically and at the top or bottom of the page.The Settings couldn’t be easier to understand.  You can choose the style and size of the buttons to use, which buttons to show – currently 11 (Flickr, Delicious, Digg, Webonews, Linkedin, Myspace, Reddit, Technorati, Facebook, Twitter, and lastly subscribe to RSS feed ), whether they should appear at the Top or Bottom of the page, and whether they should be shown as Vertical or Horizontal.

You can also specify whether the links are to open in a new window or not, whether to make the links Follow or No Follow, and if you are sharing to Flickr or Twitter, add your profile details.

It’s as simple as that – simple and effective.  I hope you find this useful.
See also the Fixed Social Buttons plugin page.

Fixed Social Buttons – A Great Wordpress Plugin is a post from: Off The Record With Debbie & Tony

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Share/Bookmark]]> http://www.delovesto.com/2010/01/twitter-weekly-updates-for-2010-01-24/feed/ 0 How To Add A Control Button To An Excel Spreadsheet http://www.delovesto.com/2010/01/how-to-add-a-control-button-to-an-excel-spreadsheet/ http://www.delovesto.com/2010/01/how-to-add-a-control-button-to-an-excel-spreadsheet/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 22:08:48 +0000 tony http://www.delovesto.com/?p=895 How To Add A Control Button To An Excel Spreadsheet is a post from: Off The Record With Debbie & Tony

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This was a problem that I was faced with at work recently, and having figured out how to do this, I thought the best thing to do was to present the solution with step by step instructions.

I wrote an article about this, and hope it proves useful to you.  You can see the full details HERE.

How To Add A Control Button To An Excel Spreadsheet is a post from: Off The Record With Debbie & Tony

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