I saw this link posted a few times on twitter and wanted to share it:

Six ways you can help in Haiti.

The comments are full of even more links and phone numbers you can use to help. Do something, please. If you can’t afford to contribute, repost this to your own blog, tweet it, add it to your facebook status, emial it to a friend, just get the word out.

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It basically makes YouTube finally move more into the realm of social networking. You can see which of your friends are online, what they are watching, when they have faved something, etc. From what I can tell these invites are still pretty exclusive so if you are as addicted to TheTube as I am all you have to do is comment here, add me as a friend on YouTube (YouTube only allows friends to be given invites) and I’ll get you the invite.

Hope you all are having a great weekend!

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Make sure you all check out her Etsy store that has ADORABLE necklaces, earrings and rings. I’m thinking about getting a piece of her jewelry for the next giveaway. Or possibly a gift certificate for her store and the winner can pick what they want? We’ll see!

PUPPY UPDATES TOMORROW!

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Oh wait, that was, like, a week ago. Lets start over.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

I really hope that everybody had a FANTASTIC Christmas. Our was awesome. Five days of sitting on our asses being as lazy as humanly possible. One morning I ate chocolate ice cream for breakfast AND dinner. Not having a child around you have to set an example for is SO TOTALLY AWESOME.

We are having a few friends over but I wanted to take a few seconds to get a blog post out there before 2008 comes to an end forever. I’ve spent some time today in google reader reading all your wonderful 2008 recaps. Some are doing memes and some are listing important things that happened month by month but I kinda hate memes passionately and I’m blond so you can’t reasonably expect me to remember what I did last January. For serious.

So I’ll just leave you by saying that 2008 was one of the most awesome so far. I got married to my soul mate and we bought a house. Two things I’ve been dreaming about for years and years. And two things that totally made me not feel bad at all about not being able to buy Christmas gifts for each other because we are BROKE. Every day at least once I look down at my ring finger and get that little rush of adrenaline knowing that he’s MINE. FOREVER. And every day we come home from a long day at work and an even longer commute home and we pull up to our house and I think, “We are home. This is OUR HOUSE! We have a house!”

Everybody be safe tonight. Surround yourself with good friends and the ones you love the most and make sure you get a kiss at midnight. I’ll raise my glass of champagne to all my online friends. I love you all. Happy New Year!

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EVERy SINGLE DAY, NOVEMBER!! ARE YOU READY?!

I assume by around day 4 I’ll be regretting making the commitment and my posts will have deteriorated into nonsensical rambling clearly made by a delusional nutcase.

So, you know, it’ll be pretty much normal around her but with more posts.

Are you guys and girls participating? If so, comment and let me know. On November 1st when the theme changes I want to have a section to highlight and link to other NaBloPoMo-ers.

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And I don’t know if you remember that time that both Ben and I got somewhat COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY OBSESSED with 24 after it had been on the air for three seasons already? And we watched three seasons in a few weeks by watching it every single night and I actually blogged about possibly needing methadone and counseling when it was over.

Then last February we decided we should check out this LOST show that everybody keeps yammering about and: INSTANTLY HOOKED. We watched the first two seasons on DVD from Netflix when Season three had already started so we DVR’d the third season then watched them when we were done with one and two. Then we died from embarrassment and shame.

Then, dear internet, then about two weeks ago I finally took the time to take a look at Hulu and it was like I hit the mother load. Bones, Fringe, Nip/Tuck… all shows I never really took the time to watch before and now I’ve caught up on all of them… while at work. heh

But the best, BEST, OMGBEST!!!! They have all 14 original episodes of Firefly in the correct order. *swoon* I had never really gotten the chance to watch the show properly and after seeing Serenity (LOVE that movie and it still gets the most play on my iPhone) then watching some of the shows out of order, it was really confusing. But not anymore! I watched all 14 episodes in TWO DAYS, then started watching them AGAIN today because: HEART

I can’t believe this show was taken off the air. Given the massive fan base of the TV show, then the movie, it’s just a SHAME. After I finished the season I did more reading about it and Joss Whedon originally planned for it to be a seven year series and my poor broken heart aches to know what WOULD have happened. How long would it have taken them to realize River’s full potential? When were Mal and Inara FINALLY going to stop being stubborn and just DO IT ALREADY? What was the real deal with Shepherd Book and why DOES he know so much about crime and it’s major players? These are questions that I’ll never get answered! NEVER! How am I supposed to go on with no resolution!? No ENDING!? No Mal and Inara DOING IT?!

Anyway, in case you’re, like, into that kinda stuff, you can follow all my obsessing via my hulu feed. But I warn you, if you intend to be the least bit productive, DO NOT CHECK IT OUT AT WORK.

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Now all you get is this sad little post instead.

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The debate is also questioning which one will become mainstream first, if either ever will. My opinion? I don’t really see it happening. When I try and explain the concept of twitter to non-geek folk, they just look at me with a blank stare and inevitably the same response: But, why? They just don’t get the micro blogging community as a whole. Now, compare it to a MySpace bulletin and eyes light up and lights come on and angels sing and THERE IT IS! There’s UNDERSTANDING in the eyes, they get it! Then you say, well just cut out all the spammy shit and do it in less then 140 characters. And THERE IT IS AGAIN, the blank stare.

I think that realistically, twitter stands more of a chance to become mainstream just because FriendFeed has SO MUCH of Teh Geek linked to it. Walk up to your mom, aunt or dentist and ask them what Vimeo is. Or brightkite. Or del.icio.us. Or hell, even Digg. Chance are if you are reading this blog you’ve heard of all or most of those but I bet you that your “mainstream” friends have NO CLUE. So how are they supposed to ever really grasp FriendFeed, which is just an aggregate of all those services?

Anyway, this post was originally going somewhere else and ended up here. So with that I’ll ask your opinion! What are your favorite Social Networking tools? I updated my FriendFeed accout today to include most of them that I use and there are SEVENTEEN accounts.

My FriendFeed account links to:

1. twitter
2. Facebook
3. brightkite
4. del.icio.us
5. Digg
6. Flickr
7. GoogleReader shared items
8. GoogleTalk status changes
9. Intense Debate
10. LinkedIn
11. Pownce
12. StumbleUpon
13. Tumblr
14. Vimeo
15. YouTube
16. Zooomr
17. Aflux’s RSS feed

And that’s just where I got to before I got tired of adding them to FriendFeed. Add me to any or all or none. I’m just kind of interested to see how many of these ACTUALLY get used because on some of them I’ve signed up to secure the name, played with them a bit, then completely forgotten about them. I’m going to pay attention to FriendFeed for the next few days and see how much any of them actually get used and based on your answers to which you use more, see if maybe twitter isn’t as popular as some of these debates would have you think… but I’m skeptical. I get a lot of twitter traffic.

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Seriously.

I always liked to believe that reporters were given a bad rap. That when people claimed they were taking things out of context, or that practically no background work had been done prior to a segment, that they were just over exaggerating or being whiny jackasses. But today you pretty much proved that the douchebag reporting reputation that has developed on network television is 117% true. You get an extra 17% because seriously, Kathy Lee Gifford? Whoever thought THAT was a good idea deserves an extra 17% of COMPLETE FAIL.

When you interviewed Heather Armstrong today on your show it was clear to me from the very beginning that both of these common failings were true. First Hoda mentioned a passage from one of Heather’s blog posts saying:

Hoda: “You wrote on your blog that you worry that your daughter will resent you because all of her business being put out there…”
Kathy: “Potty training and all those things that are kind of private.”

Well Hoda and Kathy, had you taken time to ACTUALLY READ THAT BLOG POST you’d have quite possibly also mentioned the rest of the passage that explains EXACTLY how Heather feels about it and, in fact, thinks in the long run that Leta will CHERISH all those stories.

From furniture Elhovothat dooce post:

You will resent me for your curfew and the fact that I will not let you leave the house in that mini-skirt. You will resent me for showing up to your school in my pajama bottoms and for raising my hand in a PTA meeting when I hadn’t brushed my hair. You will text message your friends to tell them that I am the most horrible person on the planet because I’m forcing you to study for your exam in the morning. You are going to think that I cannot possibly understand what you are going through, and you will slam the door in my face.

Will you resent me for this website? Absolutely. And I have spent hours and days and months of my life considering this, weighing your resentment against the good that can come from being open and honest about what it’s like to be your mother, the good for you, the good for me, and the good for other women who read what I write here and walk away feeling less alone. And I have every reason to believe that one day you will look at the thousands of pages I have written about my love for you, the thousands of pages other women have written about their own children, and you’re going to be so proud that we were brave enough to do this. We are an army of educated mothers who have finally stood up and said pay attention, this is important work, this is hard, frustrating work and we’re not going to sit around on our hands waiting for permission to do so. We have declared that our voices matter.

If that doesn’t profess the exact opposite of what Kathy Lee was trying not-so-eloquently to imply, that how dare you think about writing about your daughter online and *gasp* POSTING HER PICTURE, I don’t know what could possibly GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEAD short of getting in your face and shouting it through a blow horn.

Had Kathy taken FIFTEEN minutes of her time to ACTUALLY RESEARCH the topic and the person who she was interviewing she might have actually walked away from the interview without looking like the stereotypical, uneducated, assumptive “reporter” that she’s trying to play on TV. And if I had a dollar for every time that I was at my grandmothers and was forced to listen to Kathy talk about her sweet, precious Cody on NATIONAL TELEVISION I too could quit my day job and find something else to pass my time. Like publicly slamming other mothers from my make believe pedestal way up there. *points up*

Both of you are mothers and today you failed your fellow mothers across the nation. You could have turned that segment into a resounding statement about the exploding growth of a community of beautiful, powerful, motivated and brilliant women bloggers. Fellow mothers banding together to form a wave of support for complete strangers, for the mother down the street, for the mother sitting silently on the park bench, for the mother quietly suffering from postpartum depression, for the mother who’s so confused and upset and doesn’t know who to turn to… but instead you chose to go the sensational route.

Seriously. Shame on both of you.

-Anna (proud mommy blogger) Hirsch

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So I catually DID IT! YAY!

Amanda tagged me with this meme…

The meme consists of four questions requiring four answers, and then the tagging of four people.

4 Jobs I’ve Had in My Life:
- Gift wrapper at Sneads! Man, Stephaine and I could even make wrapping boxes in a small cramped room fun.
- Carmel corn bagger/sales associate (HA!) at the great Kern County Fair.
- Computer Sales rep at Best Buy. Please buy the warranty. Please.
- Professional blogger. I think since I’m making money off this site and others now, I can add that to my job list!

4 Shows I DVR
- Big Brother 9
- Lost
- House
- Family Guy

4 Places I’ve Been
(It was hard to pick only FOUR because I was lucky enough to have a Grandma growing up that took us all over the country, literally, when we were growing up. So I picked some of my favorite places.)
- Fombell, PA. I lived there in second grade with my Aunt Cathy, Uncle Larry and cousin Stefanie. Some of my best childhood memories were there. It was like my second home and I miss it dearly sometimes.
- Maui <3
- Washington DC. TWICE! And I can't wait to go back again and getting to take Cassidy with us.
- Mackinac Island, Michigan. I absolutely plan on going back there and staying at the Grand Hotel. It’s on my bucket list.

4 Favorite Foods
- Garlic Chicken Calzone DELUXE from Frugatti’s in Bakersfield
- Any souffle from Bella Vista in the Bay Area
- Clam chowder in a bread bowl from Spash Cafe in Pismo
- Mom: home made fettucini alfredo, Dad: rosemary (fresh of his plant) potatoes and turkey noodle soup (he makes the noodles too).

4 People I Tag
You, you, you and YOU! And Jenn MUST DO IT!! Like, every blogger IN THE WORLD has been tagged with this in the last week. If you aren’t one of them, TAG! You’re it!

*Title Quote: Elaine Liner: We Got Naked, Now What, SXSW 2006

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