JOOST!

WEEEEEEEEE!!! I just FINALLY(!!) got a Joost invite and now I’m too excited to get any work done because I want to try it out. I will as soon as I get home and let you all know how much it rocks. Out of curisoty I checked the Joost Invite DIGG out to see how many people were still waiting for invites and now I feel really special. 3127 comments and counting… And to think I got mine from a flickerite.

Lesson: Seek alternatives to the mainstrean. And Flickr ROCKS!

This reminds me of an email we got at work yesterday. Very long and very wordy and as usual the most important point was wrapped up in once sentence somewhere in the middle:

Downloading your favorite song or new video file onto your Major Medical University workstation becomes a legal liability for the hospital.

I’m sure this email was sent out as a direct response to somebody doing something stupid. It’s also probably why the IT guys were here for an entire 48 hours trying to wipe out a worm that somebody let in about a week ago that stopped one of our most important systems from functioning.

I don’t understand why they don’t just walk around slapping The Stupid One’s with a large Trout. I’d think it would get the point across much more effectively.

STOP CYBERBULLYING

I mentioned yesterday that today was a Stop Cyberbullying Day and I have quite a bit more to say about this now that I’ve had some time to formulate in my head what I want and need to get out. But first a bit of background as to why this event came about.

I also mentioned Kathy Sierra yesterday. I had only read her blog a few times when I’d been linked there and she seemed like a swell gal with some great ideas and posts pertaining to community/userbase building in the blogesphere. Most recently I had read her Devil’s Advocate post about Twitter. (Because I love all things Twitter. I’d even use the word ‘addiction’ but more on that later.) When I was linked to her site last week from a post that Cincyli wrote I was flabbergasted. When did it suddenly become okay to post such horrible things about people online? To photoshop pictures of them with a noose, or gagged with women’s panties?! I agree with her reaction, wholeheartedly. It’s disgusting and sick and so beyond what is thought of as “okay” by anybody that has any amount of decency.

I think the problem with the Internet is anonymity. When you can throw rocks at somebody while nameless and faceless you feel much more powerful. And to me, at least in my own case of cyberbullying, that’s the goal. To feel like you have some kind of power over people. I haven’t addressed my cyberbully on my blog at all. To me, to publicly address him, is to give him the power he desires. I have the power and this is my way of dealing with it.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not very thankful and sympathetic to what Kathy is going through and I applaud her for dealing with it in the best way she see’s fit and for drawing some much needed attention to the matter. My bully hasn’t ever made an actual threat against me but believe me, if it ever came to that I’d be in contact with lawyers and police with a quickness.

The big thing that I have seen and been disturbed by is the willingness of other people to ‘look the other way’ when they see it happening. They continue to allow these offenders to comment and participate in a community even though they see cyberbullying going on. They have the attitude that if it’s not happening to them, they don’t care. This is where the blog community has faltered. If EVERYBODY stood up and said ‘What you are doing is not okay, and you are not welcome’, I think this problem would be greatly reduced. The bullies would lose that power they are trying so hard to maintain.

P.S. – Also, check out Kami Watson Huyse’s blog. She has a great post today about the effect that cyberbullying has on kids and teens beyond the blogging realm. I’m scared to think about the world that my own daughter is going to grow up in with the Internet making it so easy to anonymously attack your peers.

Diligently working…

On a new theme. So far I’m about 40% done with the Photoshop mock up. So it’ll be up sometime… around Christmas maybe? I can’t seem to get away from these gray color swatches with little splashes of pink. Meh. Guess it’s me?

Andy Carvin has declared tomorrow Stop Cyberbullying Day. The recent drama over on Kathy Sierra’s blog has quite a few of the A List blog community finally taking a unified public stance against Cyberbullying. Finally. It’s tragic that it had to come to light the way it has, with a woman afraid to leave her own home or travel to be a part of a community that should offer only support and friendship. But I think that many bloggers have fallen prey to little egos and anonymous cowards for long enough.

I’ll be writing more tomorrow to support this event but I wanted to give you all a head’s up so that if you want to you can join in. I really hope that some of you are willing to finally step up and speak out for once. Not because you’ve been attacked, but because you want to do what you’ve known all along is the “right thing to do”.

Doh!

So, I get an email saying that Rosie O’Donnell has updater her flickr photostream and when I look it’s a camera phone shot and her phone has included her PHONE NUMBER. On her flickr. By the time I saw it, (maybe 30 seconds after the email came in) it had been viewed a few hundred times. Doh!

She’s removed the info so I blurred the number out of the screen capture but I wonder how many phone calls she’s gotten from that 10 minute flub.

Saying No to the N-Word

Brian Lehrer of WNYC had a segment onhis show this morning discussing The N Word that I found interesting. For the sake of this blog post, I’m going to USE the ACTUAL word’s. The N Word is nigger, the B Word is Bitch, Queer is Queer, etc.

Here’s the back story: A city councilman in Queens submitted a “symbolic moratorium” bill on the banning of the word “nigger”. According to him, he want’s people to stop USING the word, but to continue to TALK about the word. He says that they use the word incorrectly and not he way it was historically meant to be used: “to hate and subjugate people”. He states that when people use the words that were hate driven as a term of endearment or expression it shows they are not understanding or respectful of their history and are unaware of the emotional impact it has on people around them.

When I was first listening to this and was thinking about blogging about it I was kind of upset that SUCH a big deal is made out of this ONE WORD when people commonly throw around words like bitc, or queer… and the list goes on and on but for the sake of this blog post I’ll focus on these three. I agree that originally the word was born of hate and misunderstanding and ignorance and in THAT time, to use it was wrong. But so were the other words I mentioned. You speak of a time when black people could not vote, or own land, and were enslaved to do the work of a master and guess what! There was a time when WOMEN could not vote, or own land, and who’s sole purpose was to serve a master (husband, kids, etc). And NOW, TODAY, AT THIS MOMENT, we will not let two people who love eachother, who want to vow their lives to the other, to do so because they share the same anatomical organs used to reproduce and urinate. Now, the difference between not letting two people get married and lynching and mob killings is big and I acknowledge that. Those things are wrong. The ACT was wrong. Inexcusable, really. But we are living in a different time and place now and we’ve evolved and changed and now african americam people have the same rights and privelages as every other American (unless, of course, you are gay).

And I realize now what made me upset. This guys is spending FAR too much time (and tax payer money) on a word that has a HISTORICALLY negative context. Any of these three words can be used to demean somebody, but they ALL have alternate meanings now also. I’d think the fact that the word has evolved into something more than a derogatory slur would MEAN something. The people that once let the word make them feel fear and shame have turned it into something they can “own”. Women call their friends bitches all the time and what they mean by that is YOU ARE FIERCE, GIRL!! WORK IT!! And queer? Not only has the gay community embraced the term but Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a massive success! These words can still be used to try to harm somebody but by taking the word and changing the meaning and OWNING IT, they’ve taken some of the power away from those that use it in a negative context. And the more they make the word into something they own, the more the power will continue to dwindle until there is no negative power left in the word.

It’s time to leave the past and evolve. TEACH the past, KNOW the past, LEARN FROM the past, but GET OUT OF the past. Spend time at press conferences problem solving and planning the FUTURE for the very youth you seem so concerned about instead of dwelling on something has already grown past the point of no return. In short, quite your whining and focus on POSITIVE things you can do for your community, instead of trying to hold on to the negative.

*climbs off soap box*

Disclaimer: This is my opinion. You might disagree with it and if so, I encourage you to speak up and let me hear your side because I know that I can always learn more by hearing what you think and feel. But! Please do so calmly and respectfully.

Theme?!

No really! The other layout that I talked about in September… it actually EXISTS! While Cassidy was gone for a week I worked on it a lot. Coding it from the ground up turned out to be a little more time consuming than I had imagined (and there was that month or two that I didn’t work on it AT ALL) but now that it’s starting to finally all come together I’m really liking it. Ben even likes it. That’s saying a lot because he generally he thinks they are ‘okay’. This one he’s managed to come up with more than one adjective for. And none of them were ‘suck’ or ‘really?’ or ‘nice’.

I’ve added quite a bit of new content. Some of this is because I’ve found cool new apps while playing with the 8525. My only complaint about the phone so far is that it’s POP mail sucks. A lot. Gmail has a nice little java app that you can run locally but it doesn’t allow you to attach files. I liked being able to email pictures to my flickr account with the Sidekick2 but the POP on the 8252 has MAJOR lag. Like a four hours of lag. I know the image files are quite a bit larger but yeesh. Four hours? I’m an instant gratification kinda girl. I want it to happen NOW!

So I came across a cool little program called ShoZu that uploads pictures via a pretty simple “one click feature”. Not only to flickr but to pretty much any moblog service out there. You can also upload video’s directly to YouTube which is kinda neat and I plan to start abusing that soon. One of the best features though is that you can upload photos in a blog post to wordpress like you see in the post below.

Another nifty little thing I discovered is Twitter. Twitter is kind of like a moblog minus the vanity shots. heh You send text messages to it via IM, SMS or on the web of what you are currently doing. Anybody who’s added you to their list also gets the IM or SMS and vice versa. So, how is this cool? Well, I’ve added a little script in the sidebar of the new layout titled “currently” that shows you what I’ve said and how long ago I said it. So basically, I can let all you readers know exactly what I’m doing at all times. So… you can totally stalk me. And… I can totally rub Maui in your face.

What?! Rub Maui in your face?! Yeah! Because I really want to have the site live by tomorrow night. It hurts my finger bones to type that but I honestly plan on having it live before I leave so I can take advantage of some of the cool new features like Twitter and ShoZu while we are away. And adding it to this theme seems just a little too lazy and EASY and NOT GOING TO CAUSE A PSYCHOTIC MELTDOWN for me. I’m all about the psycho.

I know what this is going to cause. It means that my Friday night will be spent running around the house like a psychotic obsessive retard cleaning and packing everything we own into way too many suitcases. Then Ben will spend two hours taking all the dinner plates and bottles of Windex OUT of those suitcases while trying to convince me they ALREADY HAVE those things in Maui.

But really this is a distraction I need. I can’t sleep at night and I’m getting more done at work then a superhuman because I’m in hyperdrive mode and cant’s stop moving. So if it wasn’t working on the site I’d be spending my time doing something REALLY useless to pass the time. Like counting the tiles in the kitchen. Or obsessively brushing the cats. Or cleaning baseboards with a toothbrush and bleaching the refrigerator. I guess that last one isn’t such a BAD thing but I have a reputation to uphold and “clean” is not one of them.