In which I declare the rest of us Gods.

On the way into work this morning the DJs were talking about John Mayer’s recent switch from twitter to tumblr. John made a post on his tumblr talking about how much better it was than twitter because it’s conversational structure is better:

I love reading other Tumblr users replies, because they’re thoughtful by virtue of the fact that if they’re not, they’ll bring the intellectual property value of their own blog down, and that’s a commodity on Tumblr.

Now, John actually has a point here. I can imagine for somebody like him the sheer amount of @replies you get can be OVERWHELMING. And especially for douchebags like John Mayer it’s got to get a little old checking your @replies and having to hear about what a tool you are. But you know, I guess that twitter just likes to keep it real and John Mayer IS A TOOL.

Now, I read this post he made about twitter and how he was over it when he first posted it and just rolled my eyes because it was just more of John Mayer being the self-important ass that he is. Reading that post it was clear that he never used twitter for what it was meant to be used for. It never asked “How my I help you in further inflating your ego today, John?”

The thing that really bugged me this morning was how the DJs didn’t know what tumblr was and thus dubbed John “technologically advanced” for being “ahead of the social networking game” and I’m sorry but, WHAT THE FUCK?

John Mayor showed up on twitter THREE YEARS AFTER IT LAUNCHED. Long after the day of the FailWhale, and COLOR WARS (TEAM #FF1CAE FOR LIFE) and wouldn’t know what to do with twitter if it didn’t have search and trending topics. Do you remember that? Being able to search tweets was BIG NEWS for us geeks when it was introduced!

He joined twitter after it became popular and “the place to be” on the web and only after other “A Listers” started getting media attention because of it. And probably only because his publicist was tired of having to listen to his elitist bullshit every day and wanted to give him some other outlet to have his cock ego stroked while also injecting him into the cool new trend. Reading his tweets and blogs make my brain swell. I’m pretty sure he pays somebody to follow him around with a thesaurus. BIG WORDY PRETENTIOUS POSTS! HE HAS THEM!

And now he’s joined tumblr. Well great! WELCOME TO 2007! Dude is SO AHEAD OF THE GAME!

I joined twitter December 30th, 2006.
John joined twitter January 30th, 2009.

I joined tumblr in late 2007.
John first posted to tumblr November 12th, 2009.

If John Mayer is technologically advanced because in the last year he’s started to utilize software that’s FOUR YEARS OLD then most of my online friends are technological fucking savants. No, GODS!

No, just BETTER THAN JOHN MAYER!

Which isn’t saying a lot.

Because it’s John Mayer.

In 140 (plus possibly 673 more) characters or less.

Have you ever thought to yourself, “I should tweet that” only to find that it’s just not possible to get your iFriends to fully appreciate the awesomeness of trying to explain to your daughter just how NOT OKAY it is to tell somebody they have fat feet?

Well, I do. Like, all the time. Seriously.

And I always think to myself that HELLO!! BLOG!! But then I start to wonder if posting crazy stuff in little bursts like that will fill up your Google feedreader (all 38 of you!) and risk you hitting that unsubscribe button. The problem is that I just don’t have it in me right now to sit and really write.

Truth: I’m stressed the fuck out.

Ben still hasn’t found a new job. We all need summer clothes but I keep thinking we can wear these jeans just a bit longer. Do I really want to spend THAT MUCH MONEY on razors?! Especially if nobody can see my legs because I never wear shorts because I only have two pair that I can wear. I want to sign Cassidy up for some kind of summer camp but with Ben here, it’s seems silly to spend money on something like that when he’s here to keep her busy. I really want a new iPhone, mine is on it’s last legs but I’m not about to blow $199 on a new phone when I think of all the other things we need. I had the idea to sell a purse and some makeup to cover the cost of the phone but if I sell that stuff there are so many other things that money could go towards and iPhone isn’t at the top of the list, things like summer clothes still are. It’s not that we CAN’T go out and buy these things, it’s not that bad, it’s just getting over the mental hurdle of buying anything we don’t ABSOLUTELY NEED until Ben finds work.

I’ve been taking on a lot of extra responsibility at work which is great because I’ve basically injected myself into the new system we are about to roll out so I’ve got job security. But. It also means more work, added stress and having to deal with more people. Also, not having time to blog from work.

And I hate to lay this onto Ben. I know that he’s equally as stressed out as I am and what words can he offer me? We’re in this together. It’s not something where one of us can look in from the outside, sheltered and unaffected, to give comfort to the other. We are both suffering. And as much as we’ve both tried to not let it effect us, it has. I’m sure that he’s SO READY to be out of this house and back into the workforce that it’s frustrating for him. Add that to me being completely stressed out and it’s naturally led to some tension at home which means; more stress.

Then one of the hardest things for me, the one I constantly have to tell myself to not dwell on, is that I really hoped this year would be the one where we’d start trying to grow the family and, obviously, we aren’t about to go down that road when we aren’t financially stable. The hardest part is watching people all around me get pregnant. There are TWO girls out of the 8 on my team at work that are expecting, too many online friends to count have suddenly all started popping up pregnant or about to deliver or have newborns, then family members… It’s SO hard to sit back and read/watch that. I am honestly so happy and beyond thrilled for all of these awesome girls and families but hearing about it is so bitter sweet. Sometimes if feels like 97% bitter and 3% sweet. Something I try not to dwell on but tell that to my uterus and that stupid clock ticking so hard it’s like an entire drumline has taken up residence in my cerebral cortex and boy are they throwing one hell of a kegger.

*deep breath*

So yeah, I tend to stop blogging when I start to feel this way because as much as I try to not let my mood effect my writing THAT MUCH, it does and I can’t control that.

SO ANYWAY! I’ve decided that it’s kind of silly to let aflux just sit here and rot, right? There are awesome resources out there like the WordPress iPhone app so I can publish those moments on the go. The good ones. The ones that make me smile and forget the stress and help the day pass by. The ones I hope to start documenting so that I can look back at the end of the day and smile and say, hey! Things aren’t THAT BAD! Cassidy thinks I have some pretty PHAT feet!

Vlog: What’s your favorite iPhone app?

I had to cut about four minutes off this video because stupid YouTube is all Nazi and demands that videos be under ten minutes. I was really serious in the video when I said that I could blather on about this stuff forever.

For some reason Viddler is crapping out for all the computers in the house even though it works for everybody else. I’m pretty sure it’s just a problem with our ISP since I’ve run across a few other sites with issues. Hopefully I can get that issue resolved sometime soon because I like it better than YouTube.

ANYWAY! Here ya go! Watch, listen, learn.

Itty Bitty bit.ly

So I mention various bits of geekery on different websites like twitter and then end up having to explain it and often times I think, “HEY YOU! YOU SHOULD BlOG THAT!” So I’m going to start tying to be better about letting you all know about cool things as I come across them

First up: bit.ly

Bit.ly is a great little web app similar to tinyurl. Only on steroids. When you create an account and log in, it does cool stuff like keep track of your most recent shortened urls so that you can go back and easily find them to post other places.

That’s not really what I’m wanting to tell you about. I know that a lot of my readers are really into twitter and THANK GOD because how else am I supposed to stalk you all?! Well, bit.ly had this awesome FireFox plugin that makes surfing twitter so much more fantastic.

Here are three of the many reasons it rocks hardcore.

#1 – Follow conversations! It makes following conversation much easier. When you see that somebody has “in reply to *username*” at the bottom of their tweet you can mouse over it and it will pop up a little box that shows you the tweet it’s in reply to. See the screenshot below:

#2 – Picture preview! If you upload a picture to any of the most popular twitter image apps, like twitpic then then when you mouse over the link it pops up a thumbnail preview of the image before you click on it. This is especially great if NSFW images are a problem. Not that they necessarily would be since SURELY you wouldn’t follow anybody that would do that!

#3 – Information overload! This is actually a pretty dang cool feature. When you mouseover any bit.ly link (and some other tiny links) then the box pops up and gives you some pretty cool information. Mainly, it shows the number of time that the link has been clicked. But it goes further! If you click the more information button it redirects you to a page on the bit.ly site that has a wealth of information about your link including where the clicks are happening, the country and if it’s a blog post, it will even list comment responses to the blog and any other backlinks to the post. Here is an example from a tweet I made earlier today about a techcrunch article.

By clicking the “more information” link I can see that it’s been clicked 55 times, 3 other people on twitter tweeted the same link, 0 people posted it on friendfeed and a short preview of all the comments on the techcruch article.

Here is an example of a tweet that ijustine made earlier today:

So, if you use Firefox (YOU SHOULD) and twitter (YOU BETTER*) then bit.ly is just something you are going to have to have. So go get it now!

*And also, if I’m not following you already, leave me your username so I can.

You are too much for me, Home Depot! I wish I knew how to quit you.

Last Satruday morning Ben woke me from a beautiful and blissful sleep to tell me that I was snoring. This doesn’t seem so abnormal except that he had been UP AND OUT OF THE ROOM FOR AN HOUR. I’m not sure the exact face I made at him at that time but I know what I was thinking. It was something along the lines of “I wonder how far into his ass my foot is going to be before it starts to register how terrible a mistake he’s just made”. Turned out he just woke me up to see if I wanted to go to Home Depot with him.

I should have stayed in bed.

When we got there we had two goals in mind. 1) Get him a set of calipers to measure my brake roters 2) Pick up a wallpaper remover tool and spray and some paint swatches, both for Cassidy’s bathroom. Other than a slight snag when the tool guy didn’t know what calipers were, we made pretty good time and I even got Ben to detour down the lighting isle to scope out some fixtures for ALL the bathrooms.

Then we got in line to check out.

Then 45 minutes later when we were still in line, actually the THIRD LINE, Ben’s cooling system broke and his rods reached critical mass and I had to slowly step back about 15 feet to avoid becoming collateral damage.

See,the computers were down. The were running around FRANTIC and OMG WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO THERE ARE NO COMPUTERS HOW DO WE FUNCTION!? Because, you know, it’s not like you can actually SELL something if there’s not a touchscreen monitor in front of you telling you how which step of the check out process you are on, what to do next, and the amount of change you need to dispense.

So because they couldn’t use their fancy machines to hold their hands through the process let me tell you the genius system they devised.

Step 1: Stand in line so that ONE girl at ONE counter could write all of the items on a triplicate form while the 24 people in line behind you groan loudly.

Step 2: Stand in another line so that a girl can add prices to the form, then manually add them up, calculate tax and total it.

Step 3: Stand in ANOTHER line to pay using one of the old school swipe style credit card machines.

Step 4: Walk to power tool isle, pick up nail gun, place directly against head, pull trigger.

Of course we were in line #3 and next to pay and get the fuck out of there when… suddenly all the computers started working again! I slammed my stuff down, almost turned around and spit venom directly into the face of the man that tried to line cut me after he’d spent 45 minutes in line behind me and CERTAINLY should have understood that based on line hierarchy, my shit was getting checked out first and if you try to get in my way I am allowed to backhand you with a sledgehammer.

Then the check out lady took the receipt we should have gotten and slid it into her register before she realized what she was doing EVEN THOUGH SHE HAD A COMPUTER TELLING HER EXACTLY WHAT TO DO AND WHAT TO SAY AND WHEN TO HAND ME WHAT AND WHEN.

So it was another 15 minutes of standing there because she had to finish the next sale to open the drawer. Only the machine wouldn’t take the guy’s debit card. And then it wouldn’t take his credit card. So he had to go out to his car and get his check book. And write a check. With his hand. And a pen.

It was sometime between the failure of the credit card and the check writing that Ben’s head started to actually steam and I had to move further away because he was radiating enough heat to melt the plastic bags holding my nifty new $5.00 wallpaper removal tool. From 15 feet away.

When we finally got our receipt and got out of there we weren’t sure whether we should go to Starbucks and treat ourselves for not actually reaching critical mass or drive straight home and start drinking obscene amounts of tequila to forget the entire experience. We opted for the Starbucks.

My love affair with Home Depot is OFFICIALLY OVER.

At least until later this week when we go in to price flooring for downstairs.