Forgive me for not seeing the light until the darkness came; sunny days seem far away.

Forgive me for not keeping the faith; swift and sudden fall from grace.

Forgive me for breaking you; oh God, he’s drifting away.

Forgive me for beLIEving the lies; the T.V. screen don’t make it factual.

Forgive me for trippin; world hunger, no cures, corruption, police brutality, drug addiction

Forgive me for not defending against the slander; everybody wants to read all about it.

Forgive me for not being there; just let me be.

Forgive me for not lending my voice; lie for it, kill for it, die for it

Forgive me for invading; respect’s not given it’s earned.

Forgive me for seeing exactly what I wanted to see; get away from me.

Forgive me for being so damn disrespectable; what do you want from me?

Forgive me for not standing; they were kicking me.

Forgive me for injustice; why can’t I see?

Forgive me for not trusting; L.O.V.E. ain’t what it used to be.

Forgive me for not caring anymore; left for reasons unexplained.

Forgive me for judging; heart of stone.

Forgive me for giving in; just do the things I say.

Forgive me for my abandonment; promised me forever.

Forgive me for not making a change; words are not enough.

Forgive me for not beLIEving; ghosts in the mirror.

Forgive me for the blood on the stairs; who gave me the right?

Forgive me for not giving a damn; is it too late?

Forgive me for hurting you; can’t conceive it.

Forgive me for being a stranger; don’t walk away.

Forgive me for not smiling; my heart is broken.

Whatever happens; don’t let go of my hand.

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Today’s horoscope seems awfully on target with my life… Interesting when that happens…

I have been fascinated with horoscopes since I was little.  I’ve got a bit of my Dad in me.

Jan. 29 Capricorn Horoscope

You’ve got something to say, and you won’t be able to hold it back another second.  This has been a long time coming, but with the stars’ intense emotional energy arriving this morning, keeping quiet any longer isn’t necessary, and won’t be possible.  You’re being asked to express yourself, and knowing you, you’ll find a gracious, affable way to do it — even if what emerges is a good-bye.  You have to do this.  Now do it.

Wow…

But I think I’ll pull a Costanza instead and do the opposite of what I would normally do.  I’ll just do and say nothing… well… maybe just a quick Goodbye as it really has been a long time coming.

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When I walked into Walmart today, I saw the Michael Jackson’s “This is It” DVD right in front.  I have been waiting for this to come out and was going to pick it up from Amazon.  But when I saw it right there, of course, I could not resist and bought it.

I fully admit it… I am a big Michael Jackson fan.  I don’t know why his death hit me so hard.  But it did.

It was not shocking or even surprising to me but just incredibly sad.  The week(s) following his death I was glued to the TV watching MJ as much as possible.  I watched various Jackson tributes and shows and all his videos and played his music all the time… I even read his updated biography this past July.  I don’t know why I was so MJ crazed but I was.

My kids now know who he was and even my 5 year old can recognize his music and his face.  This is something that I thought I’d never to admit to anyone.  I’m not one of those crazy Michael Jackson fans though (you know the ones I’m talking about) but I must admit that I have been borderline fanatical about him over the past months.  I thought about going to see “This is It” in the show but ended up passing on it knowing I was for sure going to buy the DVD.

BUT…   I also know that Michael was a broken person.

In the end he just could not overcome his personal problems and it ultimately killed him.  I don’t know if he was guilty of the pedophile crap but I do know that he did nothing to stop the madness surrounding it.  And instead, he did things to amplify the perception of guilt.  He could have “normalized” himself enough to end that witch hunt.

But he didn’t.

It’s almost like he relished in the pain of it.  He wanted his personal life to be the poster child for “look at me, my life sucks, take pity on me” while he wanted his professional life to be “I am on top of the world, hear me roar.”  That’s a dangerous combination.

Right after his death, I wanted to know where his family was in all this.. where was the intervention?  I mean come on… when you write songs that have the lyrics of

Relax
This won’t hurt you
Before I put it in
Close your eyes and count to ten
Don’t cry
I won’t convert you
There’s no need to dismay
Close your eyes and drift away

Demerol
Demerol
Oh God he’s taking demerol
Demerol
Demerol
Oh God he’s taking demerol

He’s tried
Hard to convince her
To be over what he had
Today he wants it twice as bad
Don’t cry
I won’t resent you
Yesterday you had his trust
Today he’s taking twice as much

Isn’t he screaming for help here?  And that wasn’t even a recent song… it’s off his 1997 album.  He was standing in a crowded room of “friends” screaming at the top of his lungs for help so why didn’t someone help him?

I’ve been watching the Jackson Family Dynasty show since it came out a month or so ago.  Wow… is that family fucked up.  I think they really thought that show was going to help the public perception of the Jacksons.  It did anything but.   All it showed was how all of them are so wrapped around their own personal desires and egos.  It’s all about me, me, me… no wonder these people couldn’t help Michael.  They are lost themselves.  It’s very similar to how Paula Abdul thought her reality show would “help explain how mistreated she was”. Instead that show is the likely catalyst for why she is no longer on Idol.

So why didn’t anyone else help Michael?  Someone, anyone?? I think people did actually try to help him.  But the hard reality of it is that he didn’t really want to be helped.  Any broken person must WANT to be helped – truly helped – if it’s going to work.  Eventually the people who were really in his corner – the ones truly looking out for his best interests – either gave up or he threw them away.  It’s definitely a tough place to be in as I’ve learned in my own personal life.

Was Micheal broken?  Yes.  For a very long time.

Was Michael the best performer EVER?  Absolutely! And he’ll be for a very long time.

I’m definitely looking forward to watching “This is It” later tonight.  I’ve heard it’s amazing.  And I know for sure that I’ll cry.

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OnlyWire allows automatic submissions to the top social bookmarking sites with a click of a button.  I usually submit my links manually (digg, twitter, facebook, etc.) but thought I’d give this little tool a try and see what happens.  I might have to remove facebook because I believe I already have my facebook attached to my blog postings – I just can’t remember.  Sad.

You can use the OnlyWire service for free if you add an only-wire widget to your website.  Here’s the OnlyWire WordPress Plugin.

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A few weeks back, I saw a posting on the MomPack looking for a web designer who would barter design services.  It’s been so long since I’ve taken on any web design clients and even longer since I’ve donated or did design work pro-bono.  The first websites I ever designed were back in 1996 (yes that means I’m old).  lol!  My first design clients came in 2000.  And some of those I took on as pro-bono sites to help me build a portfolio.  One of those sites (which is no longer up and running) was done for an older woman who created handmade floral craft items.  I took her site on for free so I could learn more about shopping carts.  In the end, I had created a very large ordering site for her that brought her a nice chunk of regular orders and income to supplement her retirement.  It was a website that she could never have afforded.  It was a great feeling.

I’m not sure what spurred me to e-mail this particular lady back.  I have no idea how I even caught the e-mail because I haven’t been actively reading the MomPack list in a long time.  But I did.  So I checked out her current site and saw that it had enough content in place that it would work as a wordpress site.  Having just redid my blog, I thought it would be nice to delve a little more into wordpress.  So I e-mailed the lady.

The non-profit is an Indiana organization run by Christine Martin.  She started it last year in hopes of helping local single parent families and families who have experienced a loss of a child.  It hit a little too close to home.  Having just helped Jeanine get through a nasty divorce and seeing firsthand the changes single parenting has brought to her life, I thought karma seemed to be staring me in the face.  I was going to help this lady if she’d let me.

So after a few e-mails back and forth with her, I started working on the website over the past few weekends.  Unfortunately, I did not take a before shot of her old website. I usually do when I work a redesign but I completely forgot and the DNS switched.  Bravenet – her old hosting – does not allow website viewing of accounts that aren’t pointing to them so there was no way to go back and view the old site using Bravenet’s server domain.  I tried.  So, I have no before shot unfortunately.

The before site was mainly white with text.  It had a menu at the top that linked to all the individual text pages.  It was designed using Bravenet’s website creator and was very basic.

Here is the redesign.

I had a lot of fun working the design.  Along the way, I learned a lot more about word press especially creating different sidebars for different areas of a site.  The new design was coded from a blank frameset like this blog was.  But… there were several things I did better this time around. That being said, I did not do all the end testing in various browsers so I have no idea if the site looks right in anything but the current versions of firefox or IE.   If you happen to see something that seems out of whack, let me know so I can fix it for her.

Ultimately, I’m very happy with the outcome and think Christine is too.  I sincerely hope the new design gives her non-profit organization a fighting chance to help women in need in her local area.

Non-Profit Website:  BlessingInGiving.org
Owner:  Christine Martin

EDIT:  I just saw this post – How to create your best website layouts ever so I thought I’d throw up my sketches of this site.  Just a little peek into Jen’s brain… lolol!

Related posts:

1. Unique Word Press Blog Design
2. About damn time…

For the past week, I’ve been working on swapping my front room with my back room.  I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile – over a year – but I kept running into resistance from other family members (..ahem… DH).  But after some more arm twisting, we agreed to swap the rooms.  Before the move, my front room – the room people walked into when they came in the front door – housed my computer, the Wii and Dan’s toys.  It was usually a big mess.  It was not an easy room to walk into every day nor was it a room conducive to having people sit down when they came over.  Typically people would stand around at the front door and stare at my big mess.  lol!   I was just tired of it.

I took before photos – but I took them on my regular camera and for some reason my laptop isn’t reading my SD card this morning.  The drive isn’t even coming up.  The SD card is working because my camera recognizes it and usually my laptop recognizes it fine.  Not going to be good if my SD reader is bad on my laptop.  So I have no before photos to show you… only photos of my work in progress…the photos below were taken on my iPhone as I went along and are quite blurry.  I have an older blog post (opens in new window) that has two photos of what my office and front door could get like although they weren’t this bad when I started my move…it’s always nice to have a point of reference. lol!

DAY 1 – Tuesday – The plan

The first thing I did was put together a planning sheet of where everything was going to go. I’m usually pretty good at visualizing things like this in my head… but I will still plan out diagrams on paper and work things out from there.  I try to make my diagrams as close to scale as I can but they aren’t perfect.

This was my original new front room layout.  It stayed exactly how I planned it out.

This was my original configuration of the backroom.  The black areas are the fireplace and right in front of the back door.  I ended up not having the one bookcase come out perpendicular to the wall in the end and my desk ended up turned the other way around.

After I had the two rooms planned out, I needed a plan as to how I was going to move the furniture and the nightmare that is my office.  A lot of times, I can just visualize things like this in my head – but in this case, I made myself a step by step list.

I pretty much stayed on track with my list although a few things were swapped in order.

DAY 2 – Wednesday

So the process began…. clearing up my desk area so I could move my bookcase over was probably the biggest item on the list.

Moving most of my desk into the dining room as a temporary holding area… this photo was taken before everything was moved into this area.

The bookcase below was actually over to the left and housed everything you see on the desk.  The books in it now came from the bookcases in the backroom.

All of Dan’s toys were removed – they’ll end up in the backroom at some point – I don’t think I’ll be able to avoid that.  lol!

That was the end of the first day.

Day 3 – Thursday

The photo below was actually the third or fourth step on Day 3.  Prior to taking this photo, all the couches and bookshelves and TV cabinet were moved and the rug was steam cleaned.  Then I took my desk apart and moved it in two pieces putting it back together on this end.

On the other side of the backroom, the TV cabinet and couches were moved – with the couches eventually going into the front room.  But at this point, we didn’t have cable in the front so for two nights we watched TV back here like this.  Cozy.  lol!

Then the bookcase on the left was moved from the front room.  Had to take the top shelf off to get it under the doorway casing.  Everything on this bookcase came from the front room.  I had also moved my two file cabinets into place as well as staged my printers.

This was the end of day 3.

DAY 4 – Friday

Friday was spent putting my office back together.  Hooking up my monitors, organizing my shelves, etc.  At this point, I went through papers and notebooks and threw things out.

DAY 5 – Saturday

Moved the couches into the front room.  And, yes, I need to go through the coats on the wall.

The armoire below was delivered (via Rick’s parents) on Saturday morning and it houses a new TV (via my mom).  This TV wouldn’t fit in our other TV cabinet so it’s been sitting in our dining room for the last two months.  We finally got it hooked up with the new armoire.  Love when our parents decide its time to “upgrade” furniture… usually their “old” furniture isn’t really THAT old… in the case below, both parents wanted TV upgrades so we were lucky and got their old items (which work great and look good too!)

In the backroom, we have a large area where the kids can still play – and we can workout (oh yeah… gotta get back to that workout thing…)

Rick is now calling my office, the Watchtower (for those of you Smallville fans).  It’s the first time, I have three monitors setup.  I just didn’t have the space on my desk before.  Very cool.

I’m pretty excited that this is done.  I was able to do the majority of it by myself.  With a little help from these little guys… what a woman can do by herself these days…

So pretty much I spent two days moving furniture around and one day setting up my office.  Not too bad.  Now hopefully things will stay picked up…well, a girl can dream can’t she?

Related posts:

1. Wanna see something damn scary?

Just wanted to post a solution I found to the highly annoying problem of GMail crashing Firefox when you close a GMail tab or move away from GMail.

If you google for this error, you’ll see most sites agree, including the Mozilla team, that the GMail Talk Plugin is causing this error. The solution is to disable Google Talk.  Just look under your Add-ons and uninstall GoogleTalk.

The only problem is I don’t have Google Talk installed.  So now what?

To find out that GoogleTalk is definitely the cause, you’ll first need to check the firefox crash report to make sure it is reporting GoogleTalk or UserCallWinProcCheckWOW. You need to report the error using the Mozilla Crash Reporter (the box that pops up on a crash that asks if you want to report the error).  Report it and then look at the crash log.  If you don’t report the error, it will not appear in your crash log.

To access the crash log, just type “about:crashes” into your browser.  It’ll open a screen like this

Click on the last report ID and it’ll open the bug report on mozilla.com.   You are looking for what caused the crash – in my case it says the Google Talk Plugin.

This confirmed that the GoogleTalkPlugin was causing my problem but how could it cause the problem when I didn’t have it installed?

After some more “Gmail Crashes Firefox” Google searches, I came across a thread that talked about all kinds of complex backup and profile recreating.  I really didn’t want to do that.   I try to leave profile testing as a last resort.  However, this caused me to go look in my plugins folder to see if there were any GoogleTalk files.  I found a remnant GoogleTalk file in there.  I removed it and the GMail crashing Firefox immediately stopped happening.

C:\Users\your account\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\plugins

The file I removed was called “nptalkplugin.dll”.

GMail crashes stopped.

Related posts:

1. Took the plunge and changed to GMail

Yesterday after fighting with Thunderbird yet again, I decided to take the plunge and switch my email over to GMail.   Jeanine has been using GMail exclusively for over two years (I think it’s been that long now) ever since her last Outlook crash.   I wasn’t ready for GMail then and GMail wasn’t ready for me.  It’s come a long way in the past two years.

I don’t know if I like the idea of storing my personal emails on an online/public server.  But I do like the idea of being able to access them wherever without having to know all my individual email passwords off the top of my head.  I have always kept a folder of passwords to my various hosting accounts and clients hosting accounts in Thunderbird.  I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to move those emails over to GMail or not.  I’m probably just being paranoid as everything is out there these days – much more bothersome than some hosting passwords.

I spent a good chunk of time researching yesterday how to move my existing email over.  I periodically remove old e-mails (like once a year) where I go through a serious purge.  But on a daily basis, I’m not so good at regularly deleting crap I don’t need.  With GMail, I already see that changing – select ALL – DELETE – is a very nice option.  LOL!

After going back and forth with a few “programs” that would import e-mail into GMail, I decided to opt for using Thunderbird to do the import.  I setup an IMAP account for my GMail account in Thunderbird.  I could see all the GMail “labels” and I was able to create new ones on the fly right from Thunderbird.  Then it was a matter of drop/dragging the  folders and e-mails right into the GMail labels.  The process went rather smoothly.   I created filters on the GMail side as I went along and this morning have been creating some new ones on the fly as I receive e-mails.  The process has been remarkably painless for me.

I usually group my e-mails by e-mail account – all KV e-mails, go under the KV account, all libracorn e-mails go under the libracorn account, etc.  I’ve been account based for years to help keep track of which e-mail address is receiving which e-mail.  I started doing the same with GMail – creating a master label named my email account and work from there.  But after organizing for a bit, I decided that I really do not need to go that route anymore.   So I broke everything out and started labeling more by content than account.

For instance, I have some newsletters come to my main comcast address, some come to my KV and some to my libracorn.  Now I have a master Newsletters label and under that each label by type.  Most people probably do this – and I did this to a point when I was account based.  But the mentality is really different and it takes a bit getting used to.

Now, GMail does allow you to label incoming e-mails right off – so theorectially, I could label them by the TO account and put them all into a label based on that.  The problem with that is then I’ll have the e-mail under two labels which makes it appear as two copies.  I want to be able to SKIP the inbox and file right away into the type of content.   I was surprised that it didn’t take long for me to fall into this pattern.  I have tried it again and again over the years – and it was the primary reason I liked Thunderbird.  I don’t know why it felt right to my brain this time but it did. 

Enough of my babble… some cool GMail things I discovered that helped me.

1.  Importing via Thunderbird was immensely helpful.  It was just drop and drag and viola e-mails moved.  Now, I’m not sure you could do this if you had thousands and thousands of e-mails to move.

2.  I like sub-labels and sub-sub labels.  I do not like the way GMail names them on the left.  For instance, I have a LISTS label and below it SCRAPBOOKING and below it folders for the individual groups I sub to.  GMail by default will show this as

LISTS/SCRAPBOOKING/P4D

and it gets cut off and all you see is

LISTS/SCRAPBO
LISTS/SCRAPBO
LISTS/SCRAPBO
LISTS/SCRAPBO

So I found this cool Firefox add-on to make the GMail labels drop-down – or work like nested folders.  You have to install GreaseMonkey to use it.   The add-on is called “Folders4Gmail“.

So the above looks like

Where you can open/close each main folder.

So far my move to GMail has been successful and I won’t have Thunderbird hogging resources, locking up and giving various errors every time it checks e-mails (which was getting highly annoying).

3.  Add-on to put a “Refresh POP3 Accounts” on the inbox.  When you click it, it’ll refresh all your POPs in one shot.

4.  Add-on to make the side navigation panel wider.  I have a wide monitor and would like the left nav a little wider to see my labels better.  I manually edited the JS file though and changed ‘180′ to ‘50′ in both spots as 180 was a bit too wide.

Related posts:

1. Gmail Crashes Firefox When Closing Tab

Yesterday, I received this direct tweet from @webmastergeek after following him.  I don’t think he intended his auto tweet to look this way but it was definitely good for a laugh.   LOL!

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I have had Vonage phone service since January 2006.  I believe at that time, Vonage had been around for a year or so.  I remember at the time, I was completely fed up with Comcast (and prior to that AT&T) and their billing.  Very overpriced.  So I took the plunge and switched.  I have never looked back.

On Friday, I had to call Vonage and cancel my business line and fax line.  I figured they’d some how screw it up and cancel my main line.  I also wasn’t looking forward to speaking to someone who had difficulty speaking and understanding English.  I had been dreading this call for a few weeks now.  They bill all customers on the 4th of the month, so I knew Sunday was my billing day.  So I called.

My plan was to make two phone calls.  One to cancel the business phone line and one to cancel my fax line which was attached to my home plan.  I wasn’t trusting that the person would not get “confused” during the call and screw it up.  I’m so trusting of customer service people. NOT.

As it turns out, I actually got someone I could understand and who could understand me.  WOW!  First problem out of the way.  So I give him the number and tell him I need to cancel it.  He asks me ONCE why I was canceling and then tells me the line qualifies for a 50% reduction in price because this line had been with Vonage for over two years.  I told him that it was a great offer but I just didn’t need the line anymore.  He said okay and canceled it right there.  Immediately.  No begging.  No other gimmicks. Refreshing.

Ask once to see if you can salvage my business but if I say no, then respect my decision and just cancel my account, please!

So after this first part when well, I took a chance and when he asked if there was anything else he could help me with, I had him check my home line – to see if I qualified for that 50% reduction in price.  LOL!  He did and I did.  So he changed the plan for me.  I have a feeling that it was a cancelation offer he was extending but since the jig was up there wasn’t much he could say I guess.  So he switched my billing to the new plan – and I was emailed immediately of the change (gotta love technology).  So my $24.99 unlimited everything switched to $12.50 unlimited everything.  SWEET!

Then I told him there was a fax number associated with this account that I needed to remove.  I haven’t been using it and didn’t want to pay for it anymore.  He said okay and warned me again that it would be immediate.  I said “Fine.”  He said “Okay”, paused, then “It’s removed.”  I refreshed my Vonage account online and saw the fax number was immediately removed from my main account.  Received a cancellation email.  Done.  Refreshing.

Even though I got rid of two lines, the rep was incredibly professional and extended an offer to me for the line I was already keeping.  No hassles and immediate service.  I really dread dealing with utility companies.  HATE IT!  But Vonage continues to have my loyalty. They probably would have had it regardless because I do like their service – but I probably wouldn’t have blogged about it.

I REALLY LOVE when Comcast comes to the door to sell me their digital phone service.  This has happened twice now.  The conversation goes something like this

Comcast:  “Hi!  I’m in the area contacting Comcast customers that do not have all of our services.  I see you have our internet service.  Who do you get your cable through?”

Me: “Comcast.”

Comcast: <embarrassed> “Oh.  I guess we need to update our records.”

Me:  “Yeah, I guess you do.”  Starts to close the door.

Comcast: “Who do you have your phone service through.  If you get all three services through us, you get a discount… <insert big marketing speil>”

Me: “Vonage.”

Comcast: (light bulb of potential sale goes on in head)  “AH!  Vonage.  Hmmm… well… they go out a lot, don’t they? They aren’t a very reliable service. Don’t you have a lot of downtime with Vonage?”

Me: “Only when my Comcast broadband service goes down.”  Closes the door.

Comcast: “Oh yeah. I guess it would.”

I’m such a bitch.  LOL!

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