Technology Day

Yesterday was technology day (as opposed to, or at least not directly in line with, Earth Day) for me. I spent an hour and a half on the phone to Verizon tech support trying to figure out how to listen to my own voice mails. Very patient people, Verizon. I can now do it.

I didn't want a Blackberry - my firm insists I have one, a sort of soft ball and chain for their valuable employees. It works too. I find myself obsessing over messages I get - email messages only, until today. No obsessing over VMs until this afternoon. Now I can start. As far as the non-technology aspects of the Blackberry go, my thumbs are about eight times too large to press the keys, which I can't read except with a jeweller's loupe under a halogen light, so I have to type messages with my left index finger. It takes about five minutes per line. Or I call, using a non-Blackberry device to call on. That works.

This evening I found out how to a) email a post to this blog b) text message a post to this blog from the Blackberry (which clearly I won't be doing unless I'm stuck in a well-lit version of the Black Hole of Calcutta with no other means of contact) and c) how to add widgets so that people can recommend my blog posts to Digg It, Delicious and Stumbleupon.

The last might actually prove useful. Why not recommend a few next time you're here?

I tried out about fifteen "How to put Social Networking links on your Blogger posts" sites and none of them worked at all - malformed XML, probably caused by me plunking them down in the middle of something else like a major chromosome translocation of the blog code.

However, this site's instructions worked. Cranked.me

I did have to make one adjustment. The default blogger code for this layout does not include any such line as the data:post.body example given . I had to add the paragraph breaks around the data:post.body code that was there, which is about the limit of what I can do. Can't say I expanded my knowledge of anything, but at least it worked.

Edit: I just added Twitter, as a javascript widget, so it doesn't come out below each post, it comes out above each post instead. Thanks to Interesting Stuff That Matters for that tip.