Clerk at coffee shop: “Your change…”
Me, with a nod: “Edith.”
Clerk, smiling: “Oh! Marsha.”
Me: “Excuse me?”
“I thought you were introducing yourself…”
“Oh… sorry… I thought you needed my name. For the coffee.”
“No, I was giving you your change…”
“Oh… right. Sorry, I’m hearing things… heheh!”
“Oh okay… ha ha!”
My friend Christina Stork just posted this meme thing on her Facebook. What a goof!
Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 15 people you like and include me. You can’t use the artist I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It’s a lot harder than you think! Repost as “my life according to (artist name)”
Google Voice is a fantastic (and free!) new service that you really ought to try if you can get your hands on an invite. Hard to explain, but it’s a universal number that you use to route your phone calls & text messages to whichever phone you happen to be using at that moment. If you have multiple phones, you can have calls routed to your work phone during the day and to your home or cellphone after hours. You can ring any or all your phones at once, and whichever one you pick up is the one that gets the call. If you’re hiking on the Appalachian trail and out of cellular range, route your number to the landline in your cabin. You can make lists of your contacts and send different people to different phones… work contacts to work, friends to your cellphone? You can record different greetings — say, a short one for friends and a longer “I can’t come to the phone right now” type message for unknown callers. (I made special personalized greetings for my mom and my dad.) You can block callers or send certain people straight to voicemail every time. All your voicemails and text messages are archived on the web for you, and the best part? Everything can be transcribed into text… and if you like, the transcription can be rocketed off to you via direct SMS and/or e-mail. Sometimes the transcription can be comically off, but it seems to work well enough to give you a general idea of what the caller’s going on about without having to actually listen to the message. There are a lot more features; it’s a very deep service with a bit of a learning curve, but it’s well worth the bit of extra effort you’ll need to become a true GV ninja.
Google Voice is currently in beta with some sort of waiting list for invites; I was lucky in that I had an old account with Grand Central, which later got bought by Google, spiffed up and turned into the current service. Everybody on Grand Central got the option to turn their account into a Google Voice one, so that’s what I did. I wasn’t crazy about the number GC had originally given me but I was able to pay a one-time fee of ten bucks to get a new & more memorable one in the area code of my choosing. So now, no matter where I move off to, no matter where I’m staying or what phone I happen to be close to, I can always get my calls routed to the best place. I can give out one number that’ll (in theory) follow me around for the rest of my life… knock on wood that those years be many.
More reading if you’re interested…
This is for testing only; please avert your eyes. Or, don’t. I’m trying to figure out what happens to the RSS feed if I leave a blog post’s title field blank. So what happens? Maybe you already found out. Or maybe it destroyed everything so I changed my mind and added some stupid title after all.
(Update: Still don’t know how it affects the feed, but it borks the comments page. So I can’t leave post titles blank until if & when I get that figured out.)
By the way, since I’m blathering about my site I might as well tell you: I think I’m going to resume the folding of my Twitter-stream into my other blog posts, the way I used to do back before I stuck ‘em into a little box in the sidebar. This would apply to both the normal web-view and the RSS feed. I have mixed feelings about this. Assuming you use an RSS reader and also care enough to follow my blog there (that’s a big also) then the RSS feed is going to be (to the best of my ability) a complete version of the various info-chunks that appear on my site, at least during the odd phases of the moon when I’m going anywhere near this so-called blog. That would be a good scenario for most people. But if you also follow me on Twitter, then you’re getting duplicate info. That’s annoying. An ideal option would be to offer a separate RSS feed for people who wanted one without the tweets. I’ll work on it, maybe… but there are a lot of things I want to do to tweak my website, who am I kidding? If it starts bugging you, let me know in the comments and maybe that’ll put a fire under my ass to get the template in place.
You may have already heard more than enough from me about e-cigs, but here I go again. The FDA put out a press release the other day, saying that carcinogens were found in one e-cig cartridge they tested — one out of only eighteen cartridges tested, and those from only two out of the hundreds if not thousands of companies selling e-cigs. Carcinogens are bad news. But the good news they didn’t exactly highlight is that the carcinogens were only detectable to the level of parts-per-billion, whereas those same carcinogens are measured in “analog” cigs in parts per million. So there may be a quality control issue with one company — a company known to e-cig users for hawking one of the highest-priced and worst-performing brands on the market — but even so, that “tainted” brand is still about a thousand times safer than a normal cigarette, right? Why didn’t they compare e-cigs to regular cigs? And why are they only testing products from the same two companies that are currently suing them in federal court? Things that make you go “hmmmm.”
I’ve been twittering a lot over the past few years but I miss writing in complete sentences and paragraphs. Time to get back on the horse I think.
So yeah, the past few days I’ve been playing around with various music-streaming services that have iPhone apps. It sure is a whole new world compared to the old days of Live365 and Launchcast… now it’s all about music recommendation, and prediction of what you’ll like. I know Pandora’s been around awhile but I hadn’t played with it much until now… pretty sweet. IMEEM is nice too, though maybe not quite as user-friendly. There are so many others out there… but it’s not that easy to teach a machine about the preferences of somebody as finicky as me. And I can’t invest that much time on multiple sites; I want to pick a good one and stay there. Which ones do y’all like?
I think my ultimate goal would be to keep all my digital music in the cloud, including podcasts… like an iTunes on the web. I’ll deal with backups, but please keep these one bazillion MP3s safe for me and available for streaming anytime through my iPhone or my computer. Keep my original versions if they’re unique to the network, let me decide whether or not to share tracks, and let me tweak my ID3 tags the way I want. Let me hear my podcasts and keep track of which ones I need to catch up on. I’m sure some of this is doable now, but not on any one site. And which company would I trust with all that data? Sure wish Google would stick their finger in that pie! It’s a service I would gladly pay for (within reason) if I could count on my data being safeguarded for many years to come.
At least I’m listening to music again. What a concept.
Pretty pretty. And waaaarm. And squooooooshy!! My very first, and consequently very favorite pair of hand knitted socks.
There are a few flaws in my knitting that I’m well aware of, which I’m not going to discuss here. (Any more.) Experienced sock knitters may notice those flaws right away just looking at this picture… I’d appreciate it if they’d just shut it, for now, and notice the things that aren’t screwy-looking. And praise my mad newbie sockmaking skillz.
So I’m re-learning how to knit; I’m working on a scarf for the first time since I was like sixteen. Just the garter stitch — I can’t do the faster Continental method yet, I’ll figure that out tomorrow thanks to this terrific video series I found on YouTube! Maybe I shouldn’t have bought black yarn for my very first project… kinda hard to see what I’m doing. My logic was, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting the thing dirty while I flailed around working on it. But anyway, it’s not so bad. I got like four inches done in the last 24 hours — 50 stitches, maybe 12 or 13 rows. It’s going to be a pretty wide and long scarf, if I actually finish it. :-)
You probably know this about me already, but I am a gadget person. And I recently got my hands on a few shiny things I’d been lusting after for awhile. I thought, now that I’ve lived with them for some time, I should do a little writeup on how they’re working out for me. My preciouses are: the Amazon Kindle electronic reader; the Roth Motorboard electric scooter, and the Eee PC mini-laptop. I’ll start with the Kindle and then maybe write about the others in another post. Or not, who cares? Google is your friend. And they’re all great products, I recommend them all. :-)
I just started (again) using the TwitterTools plugin for WordPress to post individual tweets directly to my blog. Problem is, I wasn’t happy with the way the tweets were being displayed — raw and unstyled, and with no linkback to the status page on Twitter. When you use the post-to-digest feature it does have the linkback, and it’s easy to style because you can target the enclosing list element. So I wanted to copy those two features over for the individual tweet-to-blog posts. So I hacked that plugin into shape! I’ll post the steps I took in case it comes in handy for someone else.
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