Technophobia

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

I never cease to be amazed at the number of forwarded emails I get from coworkers (my boss is the worst offender) with phony alerts and warnings. The latest was this one:

Claim:  Service station customers are getting stuck by HIV-loaded syringes affixed to gas pump handles.

Status:  False.

A simple check at Snopes.com before you decide to forward the message will save a lot of people the hassle of checking it out themselves or living with some irrational and unfounded fear. It is the first thing I do when I get one of these messages. Almost all of the time it’s a false warning or fake story.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

OK, so I like a lot of the functionality of LibraryThing. However, the one thing I wish I could manipulate for the blog widget is to show what I’m currently reading, just finished reading, and plan to read as opposed to whatever was most recently added to the list or a random list.

I’m leaning toward just having the permalink to my Library list in the sidebar until they have that functionality, because I don’t really want to show the most recently added books to the list, which right now happen to be books that I read years ago and added in order to rate/review.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Via Steve the Llama Butcher, comes LibraryThing - a resource for online cataloging of what you’re reading. It looks like a very user friendly system, so I’m sure I’ll add already read books to my list and the books I plan to read as well.

What I haven’t figured out yet is the blog widget, but maybe you have to pay for that service? Anybody know?

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

For whatever reason, those two YouTube posts still keep hanging up my page. So I’ve closed them again for now. The kitty post below seems fine though, so enjoy that one.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Since YouTube seems to be having technical issues today, I’ve closed the recent posts with embedded videos.

[LATER]: They are working again. As such, I present the following cuteness:

[via cute overload]

Monday, August 14, 2006

Another reason to love YouTube.

OK GO, On Treadmills

[Via Jaynee, by way of Fluid Pudding]

Monday, July 24, 2006

So late on Friday, my phone rang and it was Jaynee. She had arrived back in South Carolina and was calling with a desperate request for some Tivo activity on her behalf.

Seems that all things are slower in the south and they won’t have cable or internet until Aug 7. I couldn’t do it.

However, I am happy to record her shows for her on the upstairs Tivo, which doesn’t get a lot of action. It happens that we have a VCR set up there, so I’ll be able to download the shows to tape for her easily. I think she has our mother recording shows for her, too.

So know that the Cooties are doing well - all out of the NJ house, closing is complete, moved into their apartment in SC, and she already has a job interview this Thursday at the law firm of one of her college buddies. She has posted a couple of updates, but regular posting at Cootiehog will resume on Aug 7, I assume.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Count Internet Monk as one of the blogs that Father’s security set up renders unviewable. I receive the frustrating 412 - Precondition Failure screen when I try to open his page. Same is true with Outside the Beltway, which used to be a daily read for me. I’m good if I get to read that a couple times a week now.

*sigh*

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

I’m still debating between straight sole proprietorship and LLC, but I’m leaning toward the sole proprietorship at this point. For the main reason being that it’s easier to start up in terms of paperwork and fees. I really need to get that business license - maybe I’ll try to do that on Friday morning after I work on getting my new married name driver’s license.

Anyhoo, I am still loving making jewelry and my friend is selling a lot more of it than I thought she would, so it’s looking to be a future money maker. That’s cool.

I started to subscribe to magazines and in one I saw an ad for Jewelry Designer Manager software, which I think I’ll need to get. I think I’ll need to be a lot more consistent and structured when I price my designs and have to keep track of my inventory. This software looks like the perfect tool for what I’m looking to do. I think that cost will be totally worth the expense in the long run.

Monday, May 15, 2006

For some reason I’m having a hard time with all things internet this morning.

I had a lovely TV round up all set to publish when things got weird and it got lost.

I think our network is having issues.

Frustrating.

Monday, April 17, 2006

You know what’s totally cool? I’m watching CSI on Spike on the computer as I type this post.

My Dad rulz.

UPDATE (4/18): I think this is what I installed. It has a recording function, so I could use it like TiVo, but I’m pretty sure that would eat up memory pretty quickly. I don’t anticipate using that function much.

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

I have been away from computers all day. So I just checked my gmail account to find a message from one of the tech support geeks that I have communicated with at pMachine Hosting during my tenure with them. She wanted to let me know that they discovered that my blog was locked up again (it’s a long running problem with Apache that they can’t figure out because I’m the only one encountering it) and that they had “fixed” it and reminded me to upgrade Expression Engine, yadda yadda yadda.

Of course, I had no clue that things were broken. I love my webhost.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

So yesterday I went to the website for Virginia where you can sign up to start a business and your tax thing and all that. I filled out all of the stuff and then clicked on the button to finalize it. The website kicked back to a prior page, so I fixed what they thought was broken and it looped back to the same spot. I repeated that three times before I gave up. Ridiculous. Oh and one of the links the site offered for downloading a tax form that I’ll need was broken. Actually a lot of the links were broken.

In the meantime, I checked out a bunch of books on wedding planning from the library. One of them is about consulting by a guy who runs a consulting ring (for lack of a better term - it’s actually an association and I’m just feeling snarky today) and offers training and entry into the ring association. So I checked out the ring association website this morning to find that the training for beginner wedding consulting is a hefty $1K. Is it worth it? Probably, but I don’t have that capital, thanks. According to that dude, I’m a wedding dabbler. I can live with that.

Which leads me to thinking that I really am going to have to consider a small business loan or try to hunt up a small business grant. I’m don’t really have the seed money to front a start-up business at this point.

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

The dangers of Gmail’s new chat feature are plenty. I’m wondering how long it will take Big Brother to remove access from Gmail altogether as a result.

That said, I had a lovely conversation with Beau during lunch.

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Update your virus checker software.