Actions Speak Louder Than Words

I spent most of the day writing and fine-tuning an essay about word processing to submit to the about.com site. It's not perfect and seems a bit dry, but hopefully it will do. In my essay, I discussed the benefits of word processing and its ability to handle various tasks with ease and efficiency. Although I've tried to make it as interesting and relevant as possible, it wasn't the most interesting essay I've ever written. I'm really more interested in writing a technical guide as opposed to writing about the subject itself. I suppose it's like writing fiction as opposed to writing about the mechanics of writing fiction. One is the actual doing and the other talks about doing. It's much more fun to do than to talk about doing!

New Year, New Start

2012 is finally here. This year, I'm hoping to find more focus in my life since focus has always been a big problem for me. This year, I will be turning 40 and I want to start living in accordance with my values and interests. Instead of waiting for things to happen, I would like to make them happen. I want to write more and really delve into photography. I would love to make a living by writing about different subjects and publishing nature photos. Travel would be fun too, if that's where that road leads me.

During the last two months of 2011, I've written and published two poems as a Yahoo! Contributor. The first is a short haiku, which was a popular form in 17th century Japan. My haiku is called Ruby in the Snow. My second poem is a sestina entitled The Winter Journey Home. Uncommonly seen today, sestinas were invented during the 12th century High Middle Ages in what is today the southern section of France. With 6 stanzas of 6 lines and a two line envoi using words repeated throughout the poem, it is the longest and most challenging form of poetry I've ever written, but the finished product was very satisfying.

I've also been thinking of applying for a position as a Guide on about.com for Word Processing. With my professional background in that subject, I think that I might stand a fair chance of writing for that topic. It would help me break into professional writing and I would be able to share my word processing knowledge with others.

Classic is the Best

I have been using Yahoo! Mail for a long time and through the years, Yahoo! made changes designed to improve and enhance the user experience. When it first came out, it seemed like a good idea so I switched from my tried and true Classic Yahoo! to the new fangled version. What was simple and intuitive turned into a bloated and slow interface. I hated it and switched back. Over the past few months, Yahoo! seem to have become a bit more aggressive in switching users over to "the dark side." For months, I could not log into my account without being harassed by a message about Terms of Service. Clicking on the wrong button in the message would initiate the new Yahoo! Mail. After months of carefully dancing around the Accept button, in my haste one day, I accidentally hit the dreaded Accept button. I resigned myself to using the new version for several weeks since there seemed to be no obvious way to revert to Classic, but today I finally had enough of it. What was once a simple act of opening and reading my e-mail, turned into an aggravating ordeal today. During several incidences of trying to open and read my e-mail, I received a message from Yahoo! stating that there was a problem with the mail and that I should check my network connections. I know that there is definitely nothing wrong with my connection. Going through Yahoo!'s Help pages to find out how to switch back to Yahoo! Classic was not at all helpful. It seemed that the instructions for reverting back to Classic didn't exist. They must be trying to convert everyone to stay with the new interface for some reason. Fortunately, after what seemed like a long time researching the solution on Google, I was able to find the answer on Yahoo! Answers. I'm posing the link to the fix here so that anyone who has trouble switching back might be able to do so. The topic reads "Upgrading to the new Yahoo! Mail, but in the middle of the article, there is a section titled "What if I don't want to upgrade to the newest version of Yahoo! Mail?" with a link to bring you back to Classic:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/ymail/context/migrationv2.html

Good luck!