Entries from February 2009 ↓

So, I was trying to figure out why I’ve been enjoying Facebook more than Twitter lately, despite their crazy new terms of service. (Which they’ve adopted and rejected, interestingly enough.)

And I realized, it’s because I don’t know who the hell half my Twitter contacts are.

On Facebook, I try to only connect with people I know personally, with a few exceptions. It’s relaxing to chat with them, and interesting to know what’s going on in their lives.

On LinkedIn, I talk with other professionals, and try to answer questions when I think I can contribute something.

With blogs, I visit the site to read the content, and comment back and forth with the author.

On Twitter, I’ve added people because I met them, liked their blogs, or because they were on some list back in the day when I first started getting into social media. Some of them are people who started following me, so I checked out their updates and followed them back.

But aside from a few people I’ve connected with in other forums as well (aim, LinkedIn, blogs, conferences, email, or in person), I don’t have much to say to my contacts.

I’m not a famous enough person to broadcast my activities, and I’m not using Twitter to promote my blog or business. So, do my followers really care that I have a new laptop cover? Do they really want to see pictures of my cats fighting an orange? Really?

Some people use Twitter very successfully. They spend a lot of time there and have built their own networks, or use it to read and provide useful content to others.

I’ve had luck using Twitter to connect with professionals, or to strengthen connections made in other forums. Going forward, this is probably what I will stick with, rather than trying to forge new connections with random contacts.

Image credit: social media icons

This is so cool – Jon and I are into Stella, so I made him lamps with the 3 main character’s faces on them.

Jon’s sister Tessa happened to indirectly know David Wain (the lamp in the middle), and sent him the link by way of her roommate’s mom.

So, today, David Wain blogged about it and posted the picture and now our wall is famous!

This is wonderful, although I think our ceiling and floor are kind of jealous and might need to be placated.

The first thing we noticed when we walked into our apartment was that the freezer door was open.

Neither of us had actually eaten anything from the freezer this morning, but since it was unlikely our cats had learned to levitate while we were out, we assumed that it must not have been tightly latched when we left for work. Sometimes closing the fridge can make the freezer door pop open, if you hit it at just the right angle.

Now, I’ve had food poisoning (from chicken, who deserve to be plucked and eaten forevermore just for this audacity), and I am not willing to risk that again. We salvaged what we could, and threw the rest of our freezer food away. A fair amount of money, right when we’ve been trying to cut back and save up for the baby and our down payment fund. Ho hum.

I was too tired to really get upset over this, and ironically, we’d just been talking about needing to clean out the freezer while we were driving home. Having all your food defrosted and bacteria-filled and also covered with the juice from a leaky popsicle can really motivate you to clean up.

Jon, good sport that he is, took the trash down our three flights of stairs and out to the dumpster. I cleaned out the freezer, and used the opportunity to wash all our freezer compartments and clean out our ice bucket.

The silver lining? Our freezer is immaculately clean right now. Also, we will have room for all the food I’m planning to start stocking us up on this weekend, since it’s been more difficult to cook when I get home. I’m a little bummed that I can’t have a Skinny Cow for dessert now, because they got desecrated by bacon drippings, but now I have an excuse to eat cereal, which I’ve been craving lately anyway.

So, the bottom line is, if you want to motivate yourself to clean your freezer, leave the freezer door open and go to work for the day. It’s a little inefficient, and I’m not even going to think about the energy wasted, but unless you want to die of salmonella, you’ll sure clean up fast.

What depressing events have you turned into positive situations lately? Also, do you actually believe in salmonella, or do you think it’s one of those things people hype up when it’s not really an every day risk, like shark attacks or terrorism?

This baby sure moves a lot. It started way back in December, and he’s gotten more active each month.

Right now, he is tucked into my left side, sitting on my ribs. Also, there’s so much pressure pushing out that my belly button has disappeared. I kind of miss it.

You can see the movements now, and you can kind of feel where he is in there. Generally, he’s squashed mostly on one side, with limbs making little movements all over. I’ve tried to think of ways to explain how the movement feels from the inside, so people will get an idea of what it’s like.

Sometimes it’s like your stomach is rumbling. Other times it’s like a hiccup, but in the wrong spot. Sometimes it’s like when your muscle is in spasm – it doesn’t hurt, but it’s tightened up so you can’t fully relax it and stretch out. A lot of times it’s a little hitch like you’ve burped, again in the wrong place and not involving your lungs at all.

When he gets on a roll, it’s sort of like having an eye twitch in your stomach. When he gets stuck, it feels like a stitch in your side after you’ve been running – not terrible, but you need to stop and rub the area until it relaxes. The weirdest thing is that by now it’s not weird to have someone moving around in there.

I wonder what it feels like to him sometimes. When I change from my right side to my left, I kind of picture him going “Whoaaaaa” and sliding across to a new position. I don’t know if this actually happens, or if he’s protected by the amniotic fluid and stays pretty stable. I’ll have to ask him when he gets out. Hopefully, he will also return my belly button.

Why I Loathe Going to Ikea

Ikea has more carts than Market Basket, and the people are just as crazy. When you finish one nightmarish level, there’s another one, with even more stuff.

The knickknacks and weird stuffed animals and plant containers made only for 2″ pots get to me. I always come out of the marketplace area wanting to give away all my possessions and curl into a little ball.

Granted, we have some Ikea furniture that we’ve been pretty happy with. If it’s made out of real wood not particle board, and is not a desk chair, Ikea furniture is actually pretty nice.

For further insight into how I feel about Ikea, check out Molly Schoemann’s post Oh the Hu-Mall-ity. Substitute “Ikea” for “mall” and there you have it.

Why I Love Going to Ikea

But when you get home… oh, when you get home, you have all this awesome stuff to assemble. I don’t actually care what it will eventually make, I just see piles of metal and wood and baggies of hardware, and I’m happy for the rest of the afternoon.

This trip was for Project Baby, so we came home with a sturdy crib, a dresser that can double as a changing table, curtains, a lamp, shelving units and a few other things.

That’s hours of assembly, right there. And, it’s not like it’s plumbing or building from scratch, either – it’s nearly impossible to break anything expensive and you already have all the pieces.

So, Let Us Build

I was pretty pooped from the trip, but I had bits of baby stuck in my ribcage in a very interesting way, so sitting down and relaxing wasn’t an option. Also, assembling shelving units is much more fun.

The instructions said to put a block of wood over the metal before banging the pieces together with a hammer. I didn’t have any spare bits of wood lying around (all my wood is already in use, in chair-form or similar) so I tried banging directly on the metal.

This had loud and unfortunate consequences. Metal against metal clangs in a ear-splitting way that is horribly unpleasant, even though you do feel kind of like you’re building a railroad, which is definitely fun, even as your ear cilia plans to commit suicide in self-defense.

After trying to use Jon’s Perl book and an extra-large coaster as a buffer, I finally gave up and just bashed the pieces together quickly (there were 16) and hoped the neighbors were out.

Then it was just a matter of screwing things together and velcro-ing on the drawer pieces and getting the stickers off the frames. You know and I know that rubbing alcohol would work best for this, but I for one prefer to use knives whenever possible.

The Finished Product

That done, I waited until Jon went down to bring up the crib box and dragged the shelving unit down the hall. (He doesn’t like me to move things these days, which is a logical request that I pay strict attention to whenever he is in the room.)

After unpacking the baby clothes given to us by our wonderful friends Pat, Kate, Kahn & Michelle and our parents, we had our first official nursery furniture.

Seeing all the clothes unpacked kind of made it all even more real. I don’t know why teeny socks would do that more than a watermelon shaped (and sized) stomach, but they do.

In the next couple of weeks, he’ll have a place to sleep (although no blankets) and a place to poop, which I’m sure will be terribly exciting.

Luckily, these pieces of furniture consist mainly of wood not metal, so hopefully our downstairs neighbors will not come after us with guns.

When it comes to personal finance, if I can’t do it online, I don’t want to do it at all.

I realized this today when I went to increase my credit limit on two of my credit cards.

I went to one bank site, clicked on request increase, and received a message seconds later that my credit limit had increased 600%. (I guess it’s been awhile since I last requested an increase.)

I went to the second site, and they said to call their 800 number and request an increase. What? I have to use a phone? I can’t just click on a glossy button and get instant gratification? I have to interact with other humans? And I can’t even email them? Forget it. I’m good with my 600% increase on my other card, and I’ll just quit using your services.

Likewise, if I can’t pay for something online, I don’t want to use it. Amazon.com, Paypal and eBay have set a trend that makes any site without an online payment option dated and unfriendly. Most major stores support this trend by offering online catalogues with shopping carts to streamline your purchase process.

When we were running a business from home, we discovered that even the Post Office lets you pay for postage online, print out your packing slip and schedule a pick up time for the mailman to come to your house and get your package.

As a business, why would you not want to make it easier for people to pay you? Ever?

As a consumer, I realize how easy it is to impulse buy when your purchase is instant, so I try to take the time to think each online purchase through. But once I’ve made the decision, I don’t want to have to call someone to make the purchase. There are just too many other places that will take my money instantly for me to bother with you if you won’t.

What sites irritate you because they don’t offer an online payment option? From a customer’s standpoint, is there ever a valid reason for a business not to offer this?

Image credit: credit cards, button, old phone, usps.

This will be a kind of weird post, because it’s not about taking over the world, it’s a guide for setting up mail rules in Entourage. But how embarrassing would it be to be in a meeting with the Evil League of Evil and be the only one there who couldn’t filter your email. Yeah. Didn’t think about that one, did you. Anyway, now you’re covered.

To explain: I needed to write a guide for a family member, and I wasn’t feeling it in Microsoft Word. Nothing against it, but I was using large images, which wouldn’t fit on the page, and kept making these huge white spaces, and that bothered my soul. So I’m just going to post it here, and have complete control of editing, as opposed to trying to edit around Word formatting. Happy sigh.

How to Set up Rules in Entourage

1. Open Entourage. Good luck setting anything without this step, noobs.

2. Select the Tools menu on the top of the screen and click on Rules.

3. In Rules, select the type of account you have. In this particular situation, I know this person wants Mail (IMAP). I’m using Entourage for an Exchange account so my example uses Mail (Exchange).

4. Click on New at the top left hand corner to create a new rule. This window should pop up:

5. Enter a rule name. I’ve chosen “Resistance is Futile.”

6. Click on Add Criterion. Use the drop down menus under Add Criterion to select the requirements for the rule. For example, if you want to filter all emails sent from WorldDominatorsWeekly@wdw.com, your window should look like this:

I’ve used “Is” for the second dropdown, because I know the email address and can match it exactly. There are a variety of different choices, just use your common sense to filter emails however you want to. For example, if a different person sends out the email each week from the same domain, you might just want to set your rule to “Contains” and “@wdw.com.”

7. Now you need to tell your rule what you want it to do with the emails you’ve filtered. Click on Add Action which is in the same window, underneath the criterion you’ve just set.

Use the dropdown menus under Add Action to set the action you would like. For example, I want to move my filtered emails to go into my Newsletters folder, which is a subfolder of my Inbox.

To choose the destination folder, use the second dropdown menu. If you don’t see the folder you want listed, select “Choose Folder,” then select the folder you want in the new window that will pop up, and click Choose.

Now your window should look something like this:

8. Click Okay and your rule should be visible (with a small check mark) in your Rules window:

If you see your rule, close the Rules window, and since Macs save automatically, you’re all set.

9. Note for rules with multiple criteria: If you’re having trouble with any of your rules, make sure the criteria is very specific and outlines exactly what you want. If you’re using more than one criterion for a message, and you want it to filter if ANY of the criteria are met, make sure you change the Execute dropdown to reflect that, since the default setting is to only filter the message if ALL of the criteria are met:

You’re Done!

Good job! You’ve successfully created a mail rule. Now, you can set your rules to filter all emails from people you don’t like straight to Trash. Hehehe.