Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Start a free newsletter for your blog

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As I mentioned at least once before, I’ve noticed that a number of people have been registering on this blog. This is the only blog I have set up where people are able to register as a member. However, up until now I didn’t really have a good way to keep in touch with members of Tricia’s Musings.

Instead of registering as a member of Tricia’s Musings through the WordPress Interface, why not register to become a member of a blog email newsletter instead?

Zookoda has created an easy way for bloggers to keep in touch with their readers, and that is the program that I think I’m going to use on this and likely my other sites. With Zookoda I’ll be able to send daily, weekly or even monthly summaries of my latest posts directly to my visitors. It’s a free service, so I might as well give it a try.

I’ve discovered that by using the Zookoda email newsletter subscription program I’ll be able to manage my subscribers easily, as well as schedule regular broadcasts by day, week or month.

What I like about Zookoda is that I’ll also be able to customize my newsletter so that it will match my blog design, as well as create a customized newsletter subscription form. Mobile users can get their newsletters in text form which will keep the cost for those receiving mobile text messages down.

I have registered for an account with Zookoda and I’ll be setting up a subscription form for the new Tricia’s Musings Newsletter on this site. I’ll update this post when I’ve set up the newsletter so that interested visitors can sign up. Don’t worry. I don’t think that I’ll send out a daily newsletter, but one every two weeks or once a month with summaries of the best posts that I’ve made during that time period may serve as a nice reminder for people to come back and visit.

I think this is a great way of promoting your site, and getting those who only visit every once in a while to return more often.

Sites that provide content, but aren’t in blog format can also use this as a way of keeping in touch with their site visitors too. I might even set this up for my two websites. Oh dear, I’ll soon have 10 newsletters to maintain!

I hope that my favorite bloggers decide to set up their own newsletter through Zookoda too. I’ll sign up. I will. I promise.





My Favorite TV shows

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Thirteen Things about My favorite TV shows

This is Thursday Thirteen #35

I thought I’d list 13 of my favorite TV shows …

1…. Heroes

2…. House

3…. Gray’s Anatomy

4…. 24

5…. Lost

6…. Survivor

7…. Desperate House Wives

8…. NCIS

9…. CSI New York

10…. CSI Miami

11…. CSI LA

12…. Criminal Minds

13…. Numbers

What are your favorite shows?

Update: Thanks for all of your replies. I was pleased to see that a number of you also enjoy many of the shows that I like to watch as well.

It does sound like some of you were surprised that I didn’t include a number of your favorites in my list. Remember- the list in only supposed to be 13 items! I could easily have listed 25 television shows that I watch regularly.

So which shows did I leave out that I also enjoy watching each week? Ugly Betty – I forgot that one somehow. It’s definitely a top 5 show! My name is Earl, Two and a half Men, How I met your mother, the Class, Shark, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Family Guy, Entourage, Little Mosque on the Prairie, Bones and I’m sure there’s more but that’s all I can think of right now.

I like murder/drama/mystery type shows, however I also like a good mix of humor too. I don’t understand why there isn’t a few more good humor shows on TV these days … the majority of the popular shows are so serious!

Oh I forgot to mention that I also like a good documentary, biography, Animal planet related documentary, Funny pet videos – a wide mix of things. You know, just like this site.

Variety is the key to life – and also good TV enjoyment.

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Greek Food

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Since I’ve been having kind of a bad week Chris and I decided to order some take out food from one of our favorite restaurants. We haven’t order from that restaurant for a long time, or treated ourselves to much take out since we are trying to watch our money, so it was quite special.

We ordered the vegetarian Mousaka, Spanakopita, Saganaki, and lamb chops. The two meals came with their yummy Greek potatoes and rice, and a nice tossed salad.

Mousaka is similar in some ways to Sheppard’s pie. The regular version has a ground meat at the bottom. Since it’s Greek food I doubt that it’s hamburger. It’s probably ground lamb or pork. The top is mashed potato. The vegetarian version is what we ordered and the bottom is made up of grilled veggies- mostly eggplant.

Spanakopita – is Filo (light flaky pastry) wrapped spinach and cheese.

Saganaki – is a type of goat cheese that is very lightly breaded with cornmeal and then they pour either Vodka or Ouzo on it and set it on fire – lightly toasting it. Yum.

Right, so it probably wasn’t the healthiest meal for me to have. Especially since I seem to have problems with corn meal. I had awful pain after eating dinner for hours and hours, but you know what? I loved the taste of it and that’s all that counts. I have to treat myself occasionally even if I have to pay for it.

If you’re curious and you’d like to see what food we ate, you can visit the Omonia Restaurant and look at their menu. I’ve eaten in the restaurant twice, but for some reason I enjoy their food better as take out.

What do you know- I checked to see if I spelled the names of the various foods we ate properly and I did spell all of our menu items correctly. This Greek neighborhood must be growing on me.

Check out my box widget

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widget.jpg
I just added a nice new widget to my side bar. Do you see it over there on the left? It’s the green Box.net Widget. I can upload anything from podcasts, videos, music, photos or any other type of file that I want into my Box.net account and then display it using the Box.net widget in my sidebar.

All of the files that I upload will be hosted at Box.net where I can upload as much as 1gb of files for free. That’s a lot of space. Box.net also gives you unlimited bandwidth when using their widget. Which means that popular sites that get a lot of traffic will always have a widget that can be viewed by their visitors. The widget can be used on blogs, myspace, and I suppose any website where you can use Flash code as the widget box is a flash player.

Setting up the widget was very easy. I simply went to the widget page where I was asked to upload files that I’d like to use in my widget. I decided which of my files to upload, inputted my email address and a password, and then the page went to work uploading my files onto box.net. A short time later the files had been uploaded and the page changed to show me my personal widget code.

The standard widget box is two tone black, but you can customize the box with a color and title of your choosing. The color choices are black, dark blue orange and green. Obviously I chose green for my widget.

I discovered that you can also adjust the size of the box widget. The default size is 289 px wide, but my sidebars are narrow so I simple changed the width size until it fit into my sidebar nicely. Unfortunately you can’t see the full title that I gave my box widget now. I had named it Tricia’s stuff however it now says Tricia’s … Box. Maybe I should come up with another name? Many of you have much wider sidebars than I do so it’s unlikely that you’d have to change any of the coding, but it’s nice to know that you can change the size without making the box look odd.

I’ve only uploaded a few photos at this time but I think I might add some of my favorite music. Don’t worry it’s not auto-play. you have to click on the music title before it will begin to play the song of your choice.

I really like my new widget box. Perhaps I’ll upload different things each week for my readers to discover?

What are Pointless Directives?

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I’m beginning to get a very good idea what Pointless Directives are after reading Fabs newest blog. Yes it’s called Pointless Directives and it’s … well … full of directives that are kind of strange.

You really have to read a few posts to understand what I mean.

Fab is a humorous guy and his posts will make you giggle. At the end of his Directive posts you’ll find a directive – some silly little thing that you should do that’s tied into whatever the topic of the post was about. He often tells his readers to do some pretty strange things.

If you like a good laugh head on over to Pointless Directives.

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