Ha ha! Ah ah ha ha ha!! PIctures! Pictures!

Okay folks, in case you didn't get the Hint, my website now has pictures!! And I am as Pleased as Punch. I will confess, it took me a rather embarrassingly long time to figure out how to even get a profile picture, and I had to download two... um, "McPrograms™"...? to do it. But it was worth it!? :-) I got "Hello" and "Picasa" because they were shiny! And Friendly! And promised that I could put Pictures on my blog with them! Using very small, simple phrases, like, "You can put pictures on your blog with them!" Ha ha! (I didn't get much sleep last night, in case you can't tell by the punch-drunk punctuational style.)

You have to realize that my husband and some [most] of his friends at school (hi Mike, Spite [posts as "rich" for some reason] and other friends are Linux/Unix/etc. geeks. This means they abhor (ABHOR!) McPrograms. They abhor these mass-marketed computerational abominations of big, bloated, control-freak programs. You see, Hello and Picasa are designed for people [like yours truly] who honest-to-Big Bird DON'T know squat about a computer beyond

1) This is the keyboard, screen, mouse (we have no idea what the tall black box does...)
2) This is the internet (yahoo, Chatting, shopping, music, pictures, anything as long as it's Point-and-Click)
3) Occasional MS Word document as need arises.

Even to the point that- it would be funny if it weren't so sad- to help you get pictures on your blog, Hello has a character called the BloggerBot which (I am not making this up) enters a Chat Room with you and dialogues to lead you through linking your pictures. Because- don't you see- that's the only environment on a computer we're comfortable with! a stinkin' CHAT ROOM!!

I have to laugh.

So anyway, these programs promised (PROMISED!!) to be Point-and-Click easy happy, but even then I had a little trouble. But eventually I started figuring things out and got a bit, um, carried away? Nahh... messing around with the Template for this blog. Hence the exciting picture in the middle of the sidebar. The blogger people didn't PLAN that to be there, people! That was my invention!! (Yes of course it was an accident. That doesn't make it any less Spectacular, does it?) I actually googled a request for some html code for that one, cut-and-pasted and forced it to Work. Before Nate even got home! (He told me how to resize pictures and several more things.)

I must confess that I'm not entirely sure what these two programs have done to Chelsea. Hello said something a bit vague at one point about "finding, taking over [taking over?] and organizing all the pictures on your computer" meaning I think that it can Glean from even the uttermost ends of the hard drive- but I have to wonder, what else did it do? I had a slight queasy feeling- you know, the kind when you're being Duped by a McProgram™ (oh you guys wouldn't know about that I guess; you're never duped) and you wonder, if this is how certain parts of Europe felt in the 30's? I bet Hitler was all charming and Point-and-Clicky in the beginning too, wasn't he? Huh?!? WASN'T HE?!? (told you I didn't sleep much.) Anyway, my dear husband has our computer set up to use good clean trouble-free programs like Mozilla- we don't like Microsoft things [for some reason?]- but McPrograms are generally set up assuming you're using IE (which is rather logical, in that if all you can do is Point-and-Click you aren't likely to have a browser that wasn't pre-installed). So I worry about Polluting Chelsea's environment with my little downloads. AND, as proof my fears are at least somewhat founded- since being online this morning I've had all kinds of things pop up- like Dell support, and Microsoft virus scanner, and something from Hello, and also my hotmail account did something weird...

Yes, just like Poland.

Anyway, I don't mean to sound proud of being very, very Dumb about computers (it IS rather cute if you don't look too hard) nor overly proud for doing beginner-level html things (like pictures). I'm just really happy to make my website look a BIT more what I'd like. What would I like, you ask? Um, some lavender sections, preferably with little daisy-chains going around titles. Fancier borders and fonts and what not. (Oh hey, I could change the font, right?) My favorite U2 song playing. The scent of fresh baked bread to waft through the screen as you wait for all the other crap to load. That's not asking Too Much, is it friends? (Yeah, that's right, Linux-pervs: I want even MORE fru-fru. ;-)

Heck, I might eventually elimitate words altogether. Who needs 'em when pictures are ever so much more exciting? Anyone want to vote for me to redo my "100 things" as all graphics?

I finally managed to move that to the sidebar where it belongs. :-)

PS I'm posting this Fri. morning at 10:44 but I'm going to change the time to make it go BELOW the fabulous post-picture. :-) 'cause I'm sneaky that way.