Posts Tagged ‘google’

Madison’s Crazy Week

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

I’m so proud of her.  She’s has a crazy week since I last blogged.  As many of you know, she goes to a Catholic school.  Well, she got picked to read a petition (if you’re not Catholic, it’s the part of mass where we pray for others).  She’s got hard words to read like classmates and principal, so we’ve been practicing every night.  She’ll be doing it next Tuesday at 8:30 mass, so if your interested, let me know!  Bill is going to go to work late that morning to see it!  I’m super excited (and a little nervous) for her.

She’s also full of crazy questions like:  Why did God create sharks — they hurt people?, Why do trains ride on train tracks and not the road?, and you know stuff that MOM just doesn’t know the answer too and cant Google the answer.

The last cool news is that she has a new tooth coming in.  Unfortunately, the tooth in front of it isn’t loose yet.  I called the dentist, and we are suppose to get her to wiggle it.  If it’s still not loose in a week, we have to bring her in.  I love our dentist, and they straight out said that they prefer the tooth to fall out on it’s own and pulling would be a last resort.

We are taking the kids tonight to a preview of How To Train A Dragon.  It’ll be Will’s first movie at a movie theater so wish us luck!

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True Life Funnies

Monday, October 5th, 2009

I actually got this in an email and have to pass it on. My brain still hasn’t recovered from Izeafest yet, so I’ll be updating you on that awesome conference later.

  • I wish Google Maps had an “Avoid Ghetto” routing option.
  • More often than not, when someone is telling me a story all I can think about is that I can’t wait for them to finish so that I can tell my own story that’s not only better, but also more directly involves me.
  • Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.
  • I don’t understand the purpose of the line, “I don’t need to drink to have fun.” Great, no one does. But why start a fire with flint and sticks when they’ve invented the lighter?
  • Have you ever been walking down the street and realized that you’re going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you’re
    crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.
  • I totally take back all those times I didn’t want to nap when I was younger.
  • The letters T and G are very close to each other on a keyboard. This recently became all too apparent to me and consequently I will never be ending a work email with the phrase “Regards” again.
  • Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn’t work? You take the cartridge out, blow in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid in America did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There was no internet or message boards or FAQ’s. We just figured it out. Today’s kids are soft.
  • There is a great need for sarcasm font.
  • Sometimes, I’ll watch a movie that I watched when I was younger and suddenly realize I had no idea what the f*** was going on when I first saw it.
  • I think everyone has a movie that they love so much; it actually becomes stressful to watch it with other people. I’ll end up wasting 90 minutes shiftily glancing around to confirm that everyone’s laughing at
    the right parts, then making sure I laugh just a little bit harder (and a Millisecond earlier) to prove that I’m still the only one who really, really gets it.
  • How the hell are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?
  • I would rather try to carry 10 plastic grocery bags in each hand than take 2 trips to bring my groceries in.
  • I think part of a best friend’s job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.
  • The only time I look forward to a red light is when I am trying to finish a text.
  • A recent study has shown that playing beer pong contributes to the spread of mono and the flu. Yeah, if you suck at it.
  • Was learning cursive really necessary?
  • Lol has gone from meaning, “laugh out loud” to “I have nothing else to say”.
  • I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.
  • Answering the same letter three times or more in a row on a Scantron test is absolutely petrifying.
  • Whenever someone says “I’m not book smart, but I’m street smart”, all I hear is “I’m not real smart, but I’m imaginary smart”.
  • How many times is it appropriate to say “What?” before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear what they said?
  • MapQuest really needs to start their directions on #5. Pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.
  • Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.
  • I find it hard to believe there are actually people who get in the shower first and THEN turn on the water.
  • Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.
  • I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t at least kind of tired.
  • Bad decisions make good stories
  • Why is it that during an ice-breaker, when the whole room has to go around and say their name and where they are from, I get so incredibly nervous? Like I know my name, I know where I’m from; this shouldn’t be a problem….
  • You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you’ve made up your mind that you just aren’t doing anything productive for the rest of the day.
  • Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don’t want to have to restart my collection.
  • There’s no worse feeling than that millisecond you’re sure you are going to die after leaning your chair back a little too far.
  • I’m always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to.
  • “Do not machine wash or tumble dry” means I will never wash this ever.
  • I hate being the one with the remote in a room full of people watching TV. There’s so much pressure. ‘I love this show, but will they judge me if I keep it on? I bet everyone is wishing we weren’t watching this. It’s only a matter of time before they all get up and leave the room. Will we still be friends after this?’
  • While watching the Olympics, I find myself cheering equally for China and USA. No, I am not of Chinese descent, but I am fairly certain that when Chinese athletes don’t win, they are executed.
  • I hate leaving my house confident and looking good and then not seeing anyone of importance the entire day. What a waste.
  • I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it’s on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.
  • Why is a school zone 20 mph? That seems like the optimal cruising speed for pedophiles…
  • As a driver I hate pedestrians, and as a pedestrian I hate drivers, but no matter what the mode of transportation, I always hate cyclists.
  • Sometimes I’ll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.
  • I keep some people’s phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.
  • Even if I knew your social security number, I wouldn’t know what do to with it.
  • Even under ideal conditions people have trouble locating their car keys in a pocket, finding their cell phone, and Pinning the Tail on the Donkey – but you can bet your a$$ everyone can find and push the Snooze button from 3 feet away, in about 1.7 seconds, eyes closed, first time every time…
  • I think the freezer deserves a light as well.
  • I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Miller Lites than Kay.
  • The other night I ordered takeout, and when I looked in the bag, saw they had included four sets of plastic silverware. In other words, someone at the restaurant packed my order, took a second to think about it, and then estimated that there must be at least four people eating to require such a large amount of food. Too bad I was eating by myself. There’s nothing like being made to feel like a fat b@st@rd before dinner.
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The Muddy Fractured Web

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

This is a sponsored guest post written by Chris Brogan on behalf of Trust Agents. Post powered by Sponzai

mud This is a jumble of techie thoughts, and won’t necessarily appeal to everyone. Just the same, it’s on my mind.

I was thinking about an old article that quoted Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious, where he talked about how he organized his site to have obvious syntax. He said, that once you get the hang of it, it became very easy to use the site, even from a browser window. Example: If I want to read any pages saved with the tag “chrisbrogan”, I can search http://delicious.com/tag/chrisbrogan . Now, replace my name with whatever else you want to search up on the address bar of your browser, and you pretty much know how to surf through Delicious without any effort.

For the record, Craigslist.org is like this. I can navigate it simply and from the address bar, and I understand what I’m searching out.

The entire concept of the URL, the uniform resource LOCATOR, was that we’d have a way to find resources (or web pages, or files, or whatever information) by way of coordinates that wouldn’t change.

Twitter introduced the need for URL shortening services. They were around before, but Twitter made them necessary. Now, they’re practically a business unto themselves.

And I’m thinking about projects like Glue and now Sidewiki (Google’s little “stick a wiki against any website but only if you’re using this application to see it” project). They’ve obfuscated the clarity of web pages. Okay, I get the notion of annotating the web. I understand the premise behind having ways to see things in our own way out in the wild web, but I think it messes up the point.

People had some real mixed emotions about Seth Godin’s Brands in Public project, but I couldn’t see the fuss. Seth just organized a bunch of information that was out there, and gave brands the opportunity to buy into his effort. The brands could’ve done all the work themselves. Seth saved them a step. The project, however, doesn’t create two webs. It just revisits this information in another format.

The splintering of commentary and conversations problem (how services like FriendFeed and Twitter and Facebook scatter our conversations all over the web instead of consolidating them) is real, and yet, it’s a matter of views. We’re interacting with data where we consume it, which is sensible enough. The missing tech, actually, is just the ability to get those comments all corralled and easy to respond to in some way (and many companies are trying to make that easier).

So where does this take us?

First, I think abstraction is here to stay. I don’t think we’ll have simple URLs to remember for all things (wish it were, but it’s not). I think the trend of shorteners that supposedly add value is here for a while, too. I think the fractured conversation is here to stay.

Now, will this impact business? Not exactly. Instead, it will require us to pick our battles, to determine just how splintered and muddy we want to get to catch up every drop of conversational/business goodness, and it will require us to keep futurists and sages on speed dial (how quaint a term is that?).

Funny thing is: many will never even know this war is even being waged.

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Join My Spark E Crew!

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Wall-E was all about changing the world one piece of trash at a time. Well, Spark-E is all about changing the world one blog at a time. I have seen how blogs can truly change things for people, and I want you to be a part of that.

I was one of ten awesome bloggers that were chosen to be part of an exciting adventure for 2009 from Izea.com. As an insider, I am privy to top secret news that only my crew members get to know about, I’ll be giving out swag, and possibly even some meetups! I already know I’ll have some Izeafest tickets to give out!

Why should you sign up with social spark?  It is a great way to make money online. You can pick what things you want to talk about.  Sometimes you are writing about things that you check out online.  Other times you have the product in hand (http://mythoughtsideasandramblings.com/2009/04/09/walking-for-breast-cancer-network-of-strength/).  I got the pedometer and I got paid to write that post! They offer any kind of advertising you’re willing to do on your blogs.  If you just want to add a banner to your blog, you can get paid per click.  You can Twitter ads on your Twitter stream, if someone clicks it, you get paid.  You get to pick what you want to blog about — they don’t pick for you.  Now, you do have to qualify for the opportunity to be able to take it.  That could be living in the US to having certain traffic stats.  It is nowhere near as complicated as I know it must sound.  Now, all opportunities you take with them are “no follow” which means you don’t have to worry about Google taking away your page rank.  Also, all posts will have the disclosure badge you will see on the bottom of that post.  You are able to customize the color of it, so you can match it better to your blog.  Sounds great, right?

If you have a blog and haven’t signed up, here’s what to do:

Go to www.socialspark.com.   Basically, you just fill in the blanks — they will ask for your name, address, brands that you like, etc.  You need to make sure you pick Spark E as the crew you want to join.  Also, make sure you put in your blog information (URL, what your blogs about, etc). Once they accept your blogs, you are on your way to making money.

Lisa, I am already am a member there, but want to join your crew.

Here’s what you need to do if you already are using Social Spark,

1. Log in to your SocialSpark profile.
2. Click on account.
3. Click on Manage Blogger Account.
4. Click on Profile.
5. Jump to question #7 which is “Your IZEA Insiders Membership”
6. Pick Spark E
7. Click Save and Continue.

It’s really that easy.  Anybody who joins my crew (as long as you live in the US – I am mailing these myself and have to keep the cost down), I’ll be sending some swag to you!  After you’ve joined (or if you are a crew member already), email SparkEcrew@gmail.com with your address, and I’ll get it out to you right away.

Hope to hear from you all soon!

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Gadget Advisor

Monday, October 27th, 2008

I have learned that even though I know about computers and gadgets, there is still a ton I need/want to learn.  That is where sites like Gadget Advisor come in really handy.  You can learn about the Best extensions for Firefox and the Google Cache Checker Firefox extension. There is even software reviews like this one: Blaze Media Pro review. It is nice that the posts are written in plain English, so you do not have to decipher out the techno speak.  They even have tech news that you can follow.  If you want a tech site that you can actually understand and enjoy, check out Gadget Advisor.