Being pregnant is like having a small, quiet parasite living in your stomach. You can’t eat, you can’t sleep in anymore (nature calls) and you get an intimate appreciation of what your food looks like after it’s decided that your stomach is a stupid place to be, and it now craves open air.

They call this the first trimester.

The good things: You can’t scoop cat litter anymore because the bacteria will kill you (mild exaggeration, don’t be alarmed, fellow preggos), so this is no longer your job. You don’t need an excuse to find the smell of toast disgusting when someone fails at using the break room toaster oven. You get to buy really nice fruit (we’re talking fresh cut pineapple and berries) and nobody complains that you are wasting money. Of course, you will probably not keep that pineapple in your stomach, but it’s pretty nice going down.

The better things:They’ve invented pasteurized everything. So, you can still eat feta cheese, which means Greek salads aren’t dead to you for 9 months. They’ve invented lollipops just for you. You get real close with your doctors, because they introduce you to your ovaries with the ultrasound machine. Your husband gets really extra nice, and that sack around your belly? It’s not fat! It’s BABYJUICE.

Finally, people get absurdly happy when you share your news. I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty nice to make people absurdly happy with absolutely no effort on your part at all. I wish everyone took all my news like that.

I’d say “I went to the store.” And then you’d say, “You went to the store!? I went to the store once!” And someone else would chime in, “I own a store! Stores are the best, just wait ‘til you go to another one.” And people would email you all the time with advice like, “The green store is more fun than the red store. You should totally try the green store. We all love stores.”

Of course, by that point in their lives, no one remembers that the store made them puke 12 times a day, and forced them to give blood every 2 weeks. To be fair, it’s possible that this isn’t normal, and my physicians group is made up of highly educated vampires.

Anyway, welcome to the news. I hope it has made you ridiculously happy. I hope that you jump up and down, at least once, if not with general delight in all things baby, in delight that you will never know your toilet as well as I now know mine.

It’s going to be a heck of a lot of fun when it’s born – I’m going to teach it secondary and tertiary colors instead of rainbow order, and the ABCs backwards, and then watch all the other kindergarten kids’ minds break when I send it to school. That’s what YOU get, children of traditional thinkers.

Muahahahaha.

So far, I have seen a man put a garden rake into a blender (somewhat disappointing, as he only blended the handle, not the spokes) heard a middle-aged woman sigh in complete contentment on the monorail and say, “Oh Doreen, this is the life,” and watched Brian Carter give away a pony stuffed into a handbag.

I’ve also learned how search and social media go together like PB&J, how online marketing and B2C interaction is changing, and where to scope out your nemeses (or competitors, for the conventional) and learn all their secrets.

I’ve discovered that personalization and engagement are the future of online advertising and confirmed that people are looking for relevant, useful content rather than sales pitches with scads of corporate blather. Also, apparently people, we’re getting smarter.

That last one was a real shocker, because we are the reality TV generation that, at one point, embraced the macarena. But they say we’re actually technologically smarter these days.

Consumers now have websites and blogs. We’re familiar with Facebook or LinkedIn or Digg or Twitter. We read newspapers online, and watch and create shared videos regularly. We have proved our intelligence by uploading episodes of My Little Ponies onto YouTube, so that the Baby Sea Ponies and the Flutter Ponies will never be forgotten.

In addition to the useful content provided by Pubcon speakers, the conference was a hit because I got toys. I got a couple of hats, some silly putty, a very sad chicken salad (but hey, free food), and a first aid kit with many band-aids. I plan to use these band-aids at a later date to create a Great Work of North American Art, which I’m allowed to do, because my degree says so.

Best of all were the little OCD pocket notebooks. How did you know that the color-coded mini post-its would fill the obsessively organized with light and joy? Oh, you clever Pubcon, you.

Overall, nice job Brett Tabke & Company. Great show, and many new things learned.

1. Free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (thanks to Kahn for the heads up)
2. Free Starbucks coffee (thanks to the guys on 114 for making mine iced)
3. Participating in the decision-making of your country (If you don’t show up, don’t harrumph about it, you had your chance.)

Only Acceptable Reasons Not To Vote

1. You are frequently mauled by irate, unpatriotic bears, and have consequently lost faith in the democratic system
2. You are severely allergic to elementary school children, and cannot enter the polling place lest you die
3. You are deceased and considered ineligible

What Will the Voting Bring?

1. The first African-American president in the United States of America
2. Blatant cheating followed by completely ineffectual attempts to correct it
3. A landslide victory for the Green-Rainbow Party followed by the realization that there are more than two valid political parties

And You?

Go out on a line here, and make a prediction. I won’t hold you to it.

Unless you are right. Then you will be my new authority on all things psychic, and I will get you your very own silverback gorilla (I know a guy), which you will have to hide from PETA because they may or may not be endangered.

Salmon Can Type!

I got an IM from a coho tonight. In case you’ve never seen one, that’s a coho there, on the right.

How did this happen?! I mean, no thumbs. No fingers, even. You can’t fool me, I said, cohos can’t type.

I wasn’t all that surprised to get a random IM, although the fish thing did kind of throw me for a second. I post one of my AIM screen names online, so every now and then I get a message from a name I don’t recognize.

Salmon are Rude

So I wasn’t worried when I couldn’t place my good friend BunnyCoho when he or she IMed me. Being A) relatively polite to strangers and B) insatiably curious, I IMed back. Mistake. If I want to listen to a random person insult me, I’ll turn left from a right turn lane in downtown Salem. Then at least I’ll deserve it.

Oh, Disappointment, Salmon are Actually Just People

It turns out, this is not intended to be SPAM or general harassment. This is a social experiment. TheGreatHatsby is a bot that scoops LiveJournal account screen names, and randomly matches the users up. The insidious thing is that it’s done in such a way that each participant believes the other one contacted them first.

This is kind of a neat idea. I like to talk with new people, and I’m all for new methods of online communication. But if you’re going to initiate unsolicited communication between people without any advance notice of the experiment, you’re going to piss a lot of people off. So, unless the goal of the project is to create irritated misanthropes, you might have missed the mark a bit.

According to the Wikipedia article, this bot died out in 2007. TheGreatHatsby was replaced by the Salmon bots, which are essentially the same, but less private (your screen name may or may not be filtered) and more confusing (text is randomly edited). Screen names may appear as (adjective)Trout, (adjective)Salmon or (adjective)Coho.

Oh Good, I’m Not Crazy, Being Hacked or Being Spammed

My thanks to Morouxshi.com, for the instructions on how to opt out (type $optout as a response) and livejournal’s themissinghat for explaining what the heck was going on.

Good luck to Project Upstream as well. I was glad to have a reason to learn about something new, and you can surely add one more misanthrope to your tally.

Image credit: red coho

There’s nothing like sitting in a meeting across from your boss, in an open room with no conference table between you, for 45+ minutes, then realizing that your fly was unzipped the whole time.

This is how I started my day today.

The Solution

Since I like to encourage my co-workers’ appreciation and amusement at the suffering of others, I returned to my desk fully zipped, buttoned & clasped (the pants I wore today were kind of complex) and promptly shared the story with Cynthia, who sits in the cube behind me.

My grandmother taught me that when you’re completely mortified because of something asinine that you’ve done, you should always tell on yourself, and laugh about it thoroughly with others.

Otherwise, no matter how inconsequential the situation, it will just fester and embed itself in your psyche so that 19 years later, when you think of first grade, all you can remember is your horrible teacher making fun of you, because apparently you can’t tell the difference between a bean and a pea. And even as I write this, I’m still cringing.

Being able to laugh at yourself somehow takes the sting out of your embarrassment. Plus, you get a good story that you can share and then forget about. I don’t know why this works, but for some reason, it does.

Incidentally, the word “embarrassing” has entirely too many letters, and should be roundly punished.

And You?

What about you? Tell me about an embarrassing moment that you handled gracefully. Or, because it’s even more fun, one that you really didn’t, and wish you had.

“Mr. DeMartino - Daria, can you concisely and unemotionally sum up for us the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

Daria - Manifest Destiny was a popular slogan in the 1840s. It was used by people who claimed it was God’s will for the U.S. to expand all the way to the Pacific Ocean. These people did not include many Mexicans.”

Oh, Daria, I wish you were my friend.

I remember learning about Manifest Destiny in school. Our history books were somewhat selective - for example, in the course of the Miseducation of Leanne Heller, the 50s-70s were a peaceful time, when everyone got along. Before that, we had the feudal system, which everyone liked, especially the serfs.

So, you can imagine how Manifest Destiny was described, embraced, and applauded.

I don’t have a problem with world conquering. (Obviously.) But I don’t understand the need to refer to your actions as Divine Mandates.

One reason might be to sway the masses to do your bidding and like it. Silly, I know. I can’t possibly think of a country where the strict religious beliefs of one political party has prevented voters from reasonably and fairly assessing the competency of its candidates.

Anyway, there’s a fantastic book about this called Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom. Essentially, it’s the story of animal farm, but with people, and on a slightly larger land mass (i.e. China):

Summary: A rebel group is determined to overthrow the corrupt government, their leaders get used to power & become corrupt themselves, and they proceed to use religion and false divinity to control their population.

Aside from this reason, I can’t see claiming it was my God-inspired destiny to do anything in particular. I believe in the possibility of spirits and prophets. It’s when the other kind of profits get involved that I start to question things.

Using God to justify plundering the wealth of others is uncalled for. If you’re jerk enough to take it, and you have the power to just take it, you should be big enough to say, “Hey, I’m a jerk, and I think I’ll take that.” Sure, you won’t be very popular with the conquered and the righteous, but who is? Plus you’ll have a lot of stuff.

Probably a lot of SHINY stuff.

Anyway, prove me wrong. Have you ever felt divinely inspired to do something? If so, what’s your crusade? How will you handle it if your crusade clashes with another person’s jihad?

And to end it with a conquering spirit, Rock On, Viking Kittens:

More on Daria

More on Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom

To make myself feel better, this post will be about 5 people who have it worse than I do.

1. Jackie Berg. Jackie is the most recent Survivor Reject. And yes, I watch Survivor. It is the perfect show for aspiring world dominatrices. You slowly eliminate your enemies (and then allies) one by one, and then cackle over their burned out torches.

Anyway, it sucks to be her, because her tribe decided that physical & mental skills were less important than keeping around expendable dead weight named Kelly. Survivor has 12.85m viewers, according to this completely arbitrary site. Have you ever been humiliated in front of 12.85m people?

2. AIG’s executives. Despite their canny financial aptitude and frugality, the financial crisis has been hard on AIG’s executives. They all live in shacks and eat only rice and beans.

Oh wait. No they don’t. They go to spas and then steal my #)$*#*(%&($) tax money. Burn in Hell, AIG. Roast evenly on both sides.

3. Anyone with SARS. My sickness sucks, but SARS is worse and less curable. SARS is no joke. Although, when I was studying aboard in Italy, there were a lot of asian tourist groups with Burberry face masks hanging around the Duomo, presumably because of the risk of SARS. Near the start of the semester, I came down with bronchitis. Just to have fun with the tourists, I used to sidle up to them, look alarmed, and start coughing my face off. That was fun.

4. Anyone with stocks. According to my financial guy, the market’s dropped 40% from its high. My mutual fund weeps at night, in cold, dark corners at the end of the earth. That is where the sad funds go.

Luckily, I have approximately 200 more years before I can retire, or approximately 5 more years before I carry off the celebrity kidnapping that will fund my empire. Think A Life Less Ordinary with no singing, deux ex machinas, or berets.

5. The staff at the new Dunkin Donuts on Route 114. Apparently, it takes 6 people and 20 minutes to make an egg and cheese sandwich. I understand. This is a complex alchemy. There are eggs AND cheese involved. That’s TWO forms of dairy. And let’s not get into how difficult it must be to differentiate different types of bagels. I mean, they’re all SHAPED the same.

But the reason it sucks to be them isn’t their lack of skills or IQ. It is because, in retaliation, I will firebomb their cars. Let me give another cinematic example, but with a clearer visual. Think the Godfather, when Michael’s Sicilian sweet patootie gets into the car before it blows up. Yeah. Like that 6 times. Pew pew pew pew pew pew.

Gee, that was sure cathartic. You should try it. Whose life sucks more than yours?

And just for fun, let’s end with Avenue Q’s timeless classic, “What Do You Do with a BA in English/It Sucks to Be Us:”

Image credit: Jackie, spa, chart

I understand. Being a beacon must be pure hell on cruises, what with the other ships steering into you all the time.

To be fair, let me add that I was tempted to write all about my new warm fuzzy feeling towards Joe Biden tonight, but then he and I had a slight disagreement about gay marriage. We’re still on speaking terms, mostly because of his flashy grin, sexy squint and ability to string coherent thoughts together, but he’s on probation.

Instead, I’m going to point you towards an excellent blog, I Heard Tell by Molly Schoemann. Tonight, she’s watching the VP debate on the big screen, and has promised to report.

I wait with bated breath to hear Molly’s unbiased (I call it this because I agree with her) view of the debate. Personally, I need a cupcake before I can watch any more of this. Sarah Palin’s idea of logic makes me crave comfort foods.

I’ve always thought that pivot tables were the epitome of what you could do with Excel. You can look up formulas and you can stumble through the sort & format tools by trial and error, but pivot tables take effort. (Usually more than the average person wants to give.)

Not so. Pivot tables are easy.

So let’s give this puppy a try, shall we?

Step 1: Set up Your Data

Here’s an example of data. All well-organized world dominatrices should have a list of all the countries of the world. You should also have one of those maps with the red and green territory pins, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, be sure to give your columns headers, and try for a solid block of data. (No empty cells.)

Next, highlight your table of data. (Key command = CTRL + A) With the info still highlighted, go to Insert>Pivot Table>Pivot Table. A prompt will come up, asking if you want to create a pivot table. Click OK, and don’t freak out when all sorts of strange things happen.

Now, this is the fun part. When you clicked okay, a new sheet should have opened up, and it should look something like this:

Step 2: Choose the Data You Want to in Your Pivot Table

1. Choose Your Row Data

I’ve chosen “Country Name,” since this is what I want to see on the left-most row. To select data, go to the box on the right, called the PivotTable Field List. If you don’t see this box, click anywhere within the pivot table on your spreadsheet to make it appear.

Drag the data name (in this case, Country Name) to the Row Labels box in the PivotTable Field List.

Alternatively, you can also drag your selected data directly onto the pivot table, where you want it to appear.

2. Choose Your Column Data

Choose your column data the same way as you’ve chosen your row data. I’ve chosen “Resistance” for my columns. You’ll probably want to choose a column where the fields are numerical. Dates also work well here, and can be sorted by ranges including months, years or quarters.

3. Choose Your Report Filter and Values

I’ve chosen “Population” for my report filter, and “Cost” for my Values. Again, try to choose data with numerical fields. Your PivotTable Field List should look something like this:

And, your pivot table should look something like this:

So, now you know how much it will cost you to conquer each country, sorted by the anticipated level of resistance.

But there’s still a lot of information here, so much so that it’s almost overwhelming. That is where your “filter” function comes in handy.

Step 3: Breaking Down Your Data So It’s Useful

To create a data filter, click on the down-arrow to the right of your column, row or report labels.

Un-check “Select All” and select just the items you want to view. I’ve chosen Albania, Croatia, Eritrea and Spain for my rows. I selected 1,2 & 3 for my columns, and I’ve left the population filter alone. So, now, you have a much more manageable data table.

From this data, you know that of the 4 countries you’ve selected, either Croatia or Eritrea will be slightly less expensive and less difficult to attack and conquer than that pesky Albania.

Step 4: Analyzing Your Data

Sum vs. Counts

Now, you can also change the function, and find out the number of countries that fit your specifications, rather than the cost.

Right-click “Sum of Costs” or whatever you have in your value slot, and select “Value Field Settings.” This should get you to a screen like this:

Change the value field to “Count” of whatever else you would like to measure.

Charts

You can also use this data to create charts. Highlight your data, click on the insert tab, and select the type of chart you would like to view. This one’s not terribly fascinating, but it does underline the point that, if you’re budget-conscious, Croatia or Eritrea are the way to go.

Detailed Data

Another neat something about pivot tables. If you double click any number in your table, it will automatically create a new sheet, with more detailed information. For example, if I click on C6:

This is what I get:

Creating Page Fields

Finally, to create a sheet for each page field, go to Options>Options>Show Report Filter Pages. If you do not have a lot of repeating values in your data, I would not recommend doing this, as you will suddenly have 6000 pages of data. If you do have a lot of repeating values (for example, if 200 countries cost 500 goats each), this can be a useful tool.

Step 5: Where to Learn More

I learned how to create pivot tables at a Skillpath Excel course, taught by Instructor Tom Fragale. I found the class to be useful, and the instructor to be helpful and knowledgeable.

Additionally, as a result of the class, I learned how to create macros, scroll bars, drop-down lists, forms, auto-fills and histograms, but most importantly, I can also set up little buttons that generate prompts telling people if they click “yes,” I will drop a bag of scorpions on their heads. Granted, the other things might be more useful, but that one is far and away the most satisfying.

I hope this has enabled you to create a pivot table in Excel 2007. If you have any questions, please post them, and I will do my best to answer them. If I don’t know the answer, I will either 1) Smite you or 2) Find the answer elsewhere and post it and the referring link.

I am re-posting the article for 3 reasons.

If you have not yet made up your mind, I hope this will encourage you to think about how electing McCain and Palin will affect your life.

If you have made up your mind to vote for McCain and Palin, please read the article to confirm that her beliefs are your beliefs and that, whenever possible, her decisions would be your decisions.

If you have made up your mind to vote for another party, please continue to voice your reasons why. Be fearless but conscious of others’ opinions, passionate but level-headed, and firm in your beliefs but willing to listen.

Enough of my motivations and wishes.

Here is Drill, Drill, Drill by Eve Ensler

American playwright, performer, feminist and activist.

“I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it’s their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don’t like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story — connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God’s plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin’s view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, “It was a task from God.”

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist’s baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God’s name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don’t move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, “Drill Drill Drill.” I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?”

Thank you for your time. Please keep reading - there is so much available to you - and please keep thinking, instead of just accepting.

Another fun article on Sarah Palin.