Croque Monsieur

I'm on a diet. Ha ha ha. Let me try that again. Theoretically, I'm on a diet. But temptation is everywhere in Paris and I keep telling myself, well, you won't live here forever you have to treat yourself while you can. sigh.

My sweetie and I had lunch in Montmartre this weekend. I mortified him by taking out the camera so I could show you what exactly a Croque Monsieur sandwich is. We call them Croak Monsters and they're basically a ham sandwhich with cheese on top that gets all bubbly under the broiler. Yes, I know I could have skipped the frites, but that's all part of the experience too, right?

My husband got the Croque Madame, which has an egg on top:

We ate outdoors at a cafe called Le Chinon - very sweet friendly waiters always happy to speak english. I haven't tried anything but the Croque Monster, but I'm sure the rest of the food is excellent as well. It's on the corner of Rue Audran and Rue des Abbesses. I'm probably mangling the spelling of that...

Now to answer a quick Blogger question that Anna raised. I highly recommend that you set your blog up so that your comments come into your email. Do that by going to your SETTINGS, then choose the Comments folder. At the bottom of that page there is a space for Comment Notification Email. Add your email address there.

Your email address won't appear anywhere on your blog by putting it there. It just means that you will receive every comment posted on your blog in your email. Then it's a very simple matter to reply to comments at least from fellow Bloggers or those who've set up a Blogger profile.

Unless they're no-reply. If Bloggers want their email addy to show up, then they need to go into their profile and add it. That's the best way to interact.

Some of This, Some of That

I feel good! Yesterday I completed my top, now called Raspberry Rumspringa (it's the second quilt in the Rumspringa series. I just love that word. Rumspringa, rumspringa, rumspringa.) And no, you don't get to see it.

We had sunshine and I got out a bunch of quilts to take better photos of them. Not great photos, but better. While I had the camera out, of course I had to take a pic of baby Pokey:

You know how I showed you a pic of Nancy's quilt that she made at Gwen Marston's retreat? Well Nancy has now started her blog - woohoo! It's called True Blue Quilting Nana. She's got pictures and a story from retreat, so go say hello and encourage her to post even more!

[edited to answer Clare's question: No, this isn't the Nancy who's antique quilts appeared in Liberated String Quilts. I still hope that Nancy starts a blog too!]

The Priority Hope Challenge is going great - come on over and check out some awesome little quilts. There's still plenty of time to make one of these yourself.

I'm cogitating and plotting another class. I'll fill you in soon (and if I don't, jab me with a stick).

The rest of this post will be about photos and space limitations on Blogger.

I have been posting over three years now and have only used up 16% of my alloted 1GB of space on Blogger. But, having said that, I resize my photos BEFORE I upload them to Blogger.

In Picasa, I edit my photos and SAVE them. I name them and then go under FILE and choose the option to Export Picture to Folder. It gives you the choice of what size to make the photo. For snapshots and almost every one of my pics, I now choose 480 pixels. That's a nice size. For pictures of quilts that I want you to be able to see the detail, then I'll go to 800 or 1024 pixels. Very rarely have I gone about that.

So I choose a size and send my photo to a folder called Websize. I only upload to Blogger from THAT folder.

I put my pics on my blog using blogger itself. I click the little square that looks like a landscape and it pops the Photo Upload tool. I choose the browse my computer option and always have my photos in the center and LARGE.

Now Picasa and Blogger will take the full huge megapixel photo and resize it to fit the screen properly, but they don't resize the number of pixels. So you're still taking up all that allotted space. How do you know how big your photos actually are? Go to your blog and click on a photo - if it comes up huge, bigger than your computer screen then you know you're loading big photos. Click on the pic of Pokey up above. When that photo launches, it won't be much bigger than how you're seeing it in the blog post.

Some other things to know. As soon as you've uploaded a photo into a blog post, that space counts against you even if you choose to delete it and never publish it in a post. Space gets used by UPLOADS. So going back and deleting old blog posts? Won't work. No point in going and resizing photos either. The space is already counted against you.

So the moral of the story is, you have plenty of photo space for your blog. Just make sure that you resize your photos and make them smaller before you send them into a blog post or the Picasa online photo album.

And I just hope that none of you have the terrible time loading photos that Giraffe Dreams Carol E. had (has?). That's how I learned that it's uploads that count against you.

Good luck. Did that answer the questions?

I'm editing this post to answer a couple of questions.

How do I know how much space I've used? Click on that little landscape icon when you're editing a blog post. The Photo Upload Tool will pop up. At the very bottom, next to the orange button it will tell you what percentage of your space you've used up. Mine says: You are currently using 161MB (15%) of your 1024MB.

OR you can follow the directions here - but my way is a lot faster. It also says that if you have to buy more storage space it costs $20 USD per year for 10 GB.

Identitiy Theft and Blogging

I just learned some scary information about how easy it is to hack into someone's email or other online accounts. As bloggers (or Facebookers, College Alumni) etc we put a lot of information out into the ether that someone malicious could use against us or our family.

In a Scientific American article How I Stole Someone's Identity, author Herbert H. Thompson writes about just how easy it was to gain access to accounts just by knowing a few items about someone such as their name, hobby, and where they work. EEK. Getting an email address can provide even more info.

You can listen to the author on the Talk of the Nation radio show on September 23rd. Here's a link to get to the show's blog, look for the post entitled It's a Hacker's World Out There. The audio is available there (and on iTunes). Listen to the show and read what they have to say.

For instance, lots of online security measures ask for things like Mother's Maiden Name, Name of First Pet.

I've seen lots of that in people's blogs, along with exact birthdates and places. And even more information than that. And I've seen that information about people's children.

There are some good preventative tips in the article and I loved the suggestion that one caller made: never give out your mother's REAL maiden name as the answer to a security question. Use a made up word from your childhood that is easy to remember but has never ever been on the web. Like Schnorgleplatz or something. Lie on those questions, just make sure you know what the answer is.

Talk about these things with your kids - they need to know too.

Sharing Work and Blogging

Wow, I think I hit a nerve on that last entry about posting photos.

Nancy gave me permission to post pics of her own work on this blog, but I'm just going to show you one of them, since I'm hoping she's going to start a blog herself (woohoo!) This liberated log cabin houses quilt contains little pink squares from Nancy's grandmothers stash. Makes it even more special.

And since I was compiling links for her, figured I might as well share them with ya'all. Blogs are a great way to share your love of quilting.

Here's a video tutorial for beginning a blog on Blogger. There are other tutorials that may help as well, such as adding gadgets.

Here's where you go to start your Blogger blog.

Blogger has great tutorials themselves in their Help Center. Here's one showing how to upload photos.

I highly recommend that you also download Picasa, a free photo tool that helps you to get the image just right AND you can also work with it to upload photos to Blogger. I use Picasa to brighten and crop my photos making me look like I'm a better photographer than I actually am.

Help with Picasa can be found here.

Speaking of photos, here's my darling Lily:



Super-brightened Lily:

Etiquette for Posting Photos

I have a quick question for you all. Is there any established etiquette (or netiquette) about posting photos of other people and other peoples class work on a blog? I know I've seen (and really enjoyed) photos from classes and retreats posted on the net. Have you all asked express permission to post the photos online or just not worried about it?

My response is to say "No Problem - go ahead and post unless someone has asked you NOT to." For instance I can understand if teachers didn't want certain copyrighted classroom material published. Any thoughts on the matter?