A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York died after he was trampled by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy.

At 4:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors were set to open, a crowd of 2,000 anxious shoppers started pushing, shoving and piling against the locked sliding glass doors of the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., Nassau County police said. The shoppers broke the doors off their hinges and surged in, toppling a 34-year-old temporary employee, Jdimypai Damour, 34, of Jamaica, Queens, who had been waiting with other workers in the store’s entryway.

In another diary, JV referred to my,”superior Net skills,” and I'm a bit humbled by the phrase since I have quite a bit to learn myself.  For example, I don't know how to post a picture or video in the comments section yet I'd like to learn.  The trial and error process I've been using is pretty time consuming.

Maybe some of the most knowledgable folks can begin a “how to” series  so we can all get up to speed on the technical stuff.   What do you say, Front Pagers?  Can you enlighten the masses?  Maybe it can be divided into separate “how to” diaries.  How to post video; how to post pictures; how to post either in the comment section; how to embed a link in the comment section; how to make a short video using a digi camera; how to post a webcam diary; how to post an audio file or podcast; what plugins are required on FireFox, IE, or Google Chrome; etc, etc.

In the meanwhile, I'll share what I know below the fold.  Also, I'd like to offer a humble idea about communication.

How To Post Images and Video 

1.  The image or video needs to be available online.  If you have it sent to you via email, or if it's in your hard drive, you need to be able to upload it to a web page.  Here are two ways to do so:

     a.  Set up a free YouTube account to share videos.  www.YouTube.com

and;

     b.  Set up a free account with an online photo sharing program, such as Flickr.  http://www.flickr.com

2.  From there you can copy and paste the “embed code.”  

3.  When your writing/editing your diary, you need to click on the “Formatting” drop down list.  (It's just below the “Rules” paragraph and just above the “Title” fill in line.)

4.  Choose “No Format.”  

5.  Paste the “embed code” where you want it to appear.

6.  Before you continue writing, click on “Preview” to see if the code actually works.  

7.  If it works, super!  

8.  If the code is screwy, there will be a message in red saying something like, “Expecting [code acronym].”  This is when I try to make a decision whether I can decipher what the error message is telling me, or just ditch the effort.  

As an English major a long time ago (and I'm pretty darn sure BP was an English major as well), I realized one day with humility that, indeed, a picture is really worth a thousand words.  If you have the ability to post a video or picture, then you can save yourself a lot of writing and increase the likelihood that people are going to read what you have to say.

That's about the limit of my knowledge.  It was a process of learning through the school of hard knocks over two years of GMD activity.  

Front pagers?  What do you think about a “how to” session while things are a little more quiet prior to the beginning of the new biennium?

Communication

Maybe another diary on respect and asking about the tone of a message before we assume anything.  We're all human and can fall into a pissing match from time to time, and we saw this happen over the last couple of weeks, including a screed against a fellow GMDer I recently put out for the public view.  As Liane mentioned in one comment, tone can be easy to misinterpret.  Maybe we can practice asking about what planet someone else is coming from before we assume we're victim to a personal attack, just to make sure.  Although sometimes it's pretty obvious.  Also, maybe pointing out that everyone should feel that it's ok to extend a “mea culpa” or public apology when it's probably appropriate.  

I hope this last paragraph isn't interpreted as blog snobism.  I've displayed my lesser qualities here, too.  When it happens, it seems that we should consider the folks who read GMD but don't choose to comment or become members.  For them, I'm sure our lesser moments are about as pleasant to see as family bickering.  We have an audience and a level of discussion that rises above any other in Vermont politics online, and we need to take care of those folks, too.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about impeachment. Many of you know I was against the whole indictment resolution. Kurt Daims and Dan DeWalt pushed a binding resolution