Curves – Page 4 – Red Branch Chronicles

Stuffed

I started off, way back now in March, swearing to get on top of all this cyber stuff – social media communication – and I launched myself bravely into Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and WordPress as well as continuing to write and market my first book, Raiding Cúailnge, start research for my second book – tentatively titled “Three Spears” and actually live a normal life with all that entails – getting up in the morning, feeding the chickens, pottering around in the garden, going for a short cycle, endlessly devising the shortest and flattest routes between home and other points and all the other humdrum aspects of daily life.

And I’m stuffed.

I’ve just about managed to continue WordPress and my three blogs – Celtic Trivia, Book Stuff and Curves- and start scribbling notes for Three Spears but I am afraid everything else has gone by the board. I just don’t seem to have the time to do them all and certainly I can’t remember the last time I bothered to look at Twitter or LinkedIn.

As for Facebook …

I remember a knowledgeable guru told me that I should narrow my focus and concentrate on just one aspect of social media. “Make it yours” he told me sternly and he opined that I should focus on Facebook.

Well, of course I didn’t and I suppose it is too late now given that I seem to have poured my energy into WordPress. I think it is the fact that WordPress remains a bit similar to the hole in a tree down in the local park (which I cycle past). I post stuff here and I feel it is the same as if I stuff it into a hole in the tree and I have no idea if anyone ever reads it or bothers to look at it but for some obscure reason, I enjoy shoving a nugget into the bole of the tree and leaving it there for someone to discover – posthumously!

Whereas with Facebook, I feel constrained in some way I haven’t fully analysed as yet. I think it all comes down to that vague, unidentifiable fear I mentioned ages ago – hmm, on Facebook or on Word Press? I am sure it is just a question of tightening up a nut here and a screw there and making a few fine adjustments to the way I present my Facebook page but at the moment – although I haven’t checked for weeks – I feel inundated with Facebook things – are they posts, tweets, messages, mails? – with the whole world constantly updating their whatever it is and uploading new photos of themselves – I can tell because I get a constant barrage of beeps and whistles from my mobile phone telling me that I “can’t be a man ‘cos (I) don’t smoke the same cigarettes as (you)” – thank you Nanker Phelge.

Anyway, the point is that while I struggle to continue with the triad of blogs on WordPress as well as continuing to work on Three Spears, I just don’t seem to have the time to mess around on FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ and I have yet to make a hash of Tumblr, Instagram and Gawd knows what else I can ignore!

Commodity or Currency?

This – for me- from where I am coming from, (mostly ignorance) – whole deal about bitcoins is pretty weird. What are they? According to at least two articles I read on BBC news they are either a commodity – like pork belly and coffee – or they are a token like the Italian “getone,” which you had to buy – usually in a bar with a good coffee machine – before you could use a public telephone. So, bitcoins – or getones – weren’t currency because they (the latter anyway) had no monetary value but they were worth the duration of a telephone call. This was well before Skype, I suppose.

Anyway, the point is, that these yokes, bitcoins, are something that can be traded and swapped, – like, I suppose, pork bellies and Euros. (By who and where, and what for?)

So, where do they come from? Who makes money from them? Why was it all a big secret? Why didn’t the Japanese guy – or did he? – say something like – I am not the inventor.

I remember reading something somewhere where it mentioned that if you ever wanted to be mega rich from absolutely nothing, then start your own religion. Ron L Hubbard did apparently – as well as write books – did he write Genesis or was that God?

So, bit coins are “mined” from something – obviously – but a 64-digit number is the answer to some increasingly complex cryptographically engrossing problem and then you need a bitcoin address. And a wallet in the cloud? Mother of god! It’s all getting a bit too fancy for me – a bit rich for my blood and I still have not done anything about the copyright issue for photos and that kind of stuff. Something to look forward to later, this month!

Can’t believe it is May already.

Pictures & Copyright

There is always something new, isn’t there? I’ve started to insert a few photos into my various posts – some from my own photo collection – I stuck an album, called “Gargoyles”, a while ago on Facebook – and some from Google images. The thing is, I don’t know about copyright procedures here. I think I have acknowledged their use each time but I am still not sure if that is sufficient.

I don’t really know where to look or who to ask to find out. I suppose that is the same in lots of ways in life – I don’t know where to go, what to do or who to ask! So… I suppose, along with millions and millions of others I hope, I pretend to know what I am doing and I act as if I do, most of the time anyway. So in this case scenario, I will put myself to the test and find out, explicitly, the ins and outs of copying photos from anywhere in the web and putting them on my blog.

I should look for answers right here in WordPress. I could google it. I could ask a computer guy. I could read a book.

I know that I can’t plagarise something created by another person and that I must acknowledge ownership somewhere – footnotes,caption, that sort of thing – but I am unsure about such things as permission and so on. I’m not looking to buy or pay for an image, I just want to be ok about using one or more images, which are most definitely not mine, on this blog.

Two Hands

Ok, I was wrong the other day – I mentioned something about two hands and speculated that it might have been a weird drawing by René Magritte.

I just checked – it wasn’t. This is what I was thinking of at the time – and this is by a Dutch artist called Maurits Cornelis Escher

escher.hands.drawing

This is something that I have always liked by Magritte (the Lovers) – a bit different, I know. rene-magritte-les-amants-1928-49301988

Okay, I hear you – what has all this to do with Learning Curves?

Well, … emm… ehhhh, ok, I had to go and look for these pictures somewhere and then I couldn’t just click and copy or drag them from wherever they were into my blog – I had to do other stuff first. Ok, I know, not a huge deal at all but – well, for me, I did it so there you are and … never mind.

Only Me?!

I have just noticed that I am the only person following myself! I didn’t know that was possible. Rather like a snake eating its own tail or that weird picture (by Magritte?) of two hands.

Anyway, poking around on the site – which I had imagined I had down pat at this stage – I discovered that I had one follower and that was me, myself and I!

So, ready to plunge into the cyber abyss, I clicked on Sharing and then connected this whatyamacallit to Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

No idea what is going to happen now.

I feel a bit daft having posted a few snippets about Celtic Trivia, and other Book Stuff and now discovering that I might as well have been posting them into a hole in a tree in the local park.

Might get a better result doing that, actually!

Realisations

Looking back at my first post ever on March 22 I have only now just begun to understand what I didn’t know then.In this sally at communication in cyber space, I have been thinking of it like a concrete word document upon which I pound away for a while and then save / post it. And then, the next time, I open the same document again and add to it, rather than starting a new one / post.

I suppose that makes sense.

Learning Curves

Ok, I think this is the start of my learning curves. All I have to do now is start linking my website or blog – I have to admit that I am not one hundred percent sure which is which at this point but I suppose that is the point of a learning curve – to things like FaceBook (another black hole in my cyber knowledge) and Twitter and Google and … Gawd, what else is there?

Anyway, I have my toes in the water and I don’t suppose there is any fear of my drowning just yet although I am struggling a bit to know just exactly what I am doing. I can’t quite seem to get a handle on my different pages / posts that I want to have – one for Celtic Trivia, another for Book Stuff and then this third one for my Learning Curves.

OK, Another day, another crack at this daft thing.

I wonder should my Celtic Trivia stuff should be a post or a page?

Where are my menus? I want to have a home page with menus directing you – the insatiable reader to the different parts of my thingy – Gawd, that sounds a bit weird.

Easter Sunday Night

I haven’t made much of an effort recently on this thing so I am going to try something new on – I’m going to put up an album of photos on Facebook.

Oh Gawd! you all groan, pictures of -my mother and her generation called them snaps) stuff we don’t remember. Anyway, here goes – actually, should the pictures (snaps?) be in WordPress or FaceBook?

Going to try FaceBook first.

Cheerio

01 April 2016

(Red-faced with embarrassment) well, under the influence of an excellent bottle of Penfolds Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz – like drinking a dark, rich liquid velvet – I stumbled onto my Facebook page on Easter Sunday night and attempted to create an album of Gargoyles (why I couldn’t tell you) but all I seemed to have managed was to upload about 80 random photos but nothing like an organised album. Surely it can’t be that difficult! Anyway, ‘Nuff said about that for the moment.

On to other things.

Yesterday, surrounded by, no doubt, out-of-date library reference books on Word Press and social media, my laptop open to online tutorials beside the desktop computer which seemed to have at least a dozen open tabs, I lurched unevenly from page to post and screen to screen, and finally managed to change my background Theme and to – I think – set up some menus to guide whatever unfortunate lands on these muddled attempts. Oh, by the way, I also discovered that what should have been Posts were, in fact, Pages so having laboriously changed that, I now should have two (2) static pages (Home & About Me) – that means the info’ there will probably not change dramatically over the course of this learning curve – and three (3) Posts (Celtic Trivia, Curves & Book Stuff) which I will add to several times each week (if I can think of anything!)