RAMBLINGS
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 … Read more
[ Continue ]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.
[ Continue ]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 … Read more
[ Continue ]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.
[ Continue ]I think I’ve been found out… by myself?…hmmm Today’s Horoscope You’ve decided to blow the whistle on yourself, Jen! All of a sudden, it’s obvious that you’re not performing as well as you should be. It is time to put the legendary Capricorn self-discipline to work. You may change your work methods, budget your money more carefully, or diversify your activities. Perhaps you’ll reorganize your team at work. All sorts of solutions are available to you. Yes. It’s called procrastination and laziness… two of my most favorite words in the world. lol! I think I like this one better. Honor your contract with yourself. Respect your own desires. Yes. I need to respect my own desires more. I know I do. It seems like the universe is trying to tell me it is time for a change.
[ Continue ]Well the time has finally come… the time to say goodbye to the dedicated server. I can’t believe I’m blogging about this – admitting it to myself was hard enough. Maybe putting it out there for everyone to see will help me move past it. After some soul searching and serious thinking for the past few weeks, I have decided that I need to get rid of my dedicated server. In the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be moving my personal websites to a shared environment and getting rid of my hosting clients. I still have a few from the RTech days – like 5. But I simply can’t afford the server anymore – for the first time in almost 10 years. My online “business” isn’t really a business anymore… economy or poor choices or laziness or whatever… the fact is I am not making enough money to cover the server anymore. And that has been incredibly hard for me to admit to myself let alone blog about it… So I’m going back to basics for awhile which means getting rid of most of my business expenses including the server. The few hosting clients I have just don’t cover the cost of the server for the year and my income isn’t doing that either anymore. I have been running some form of online business since 2000. I started with web design and then grew it to be more of a small biz hosting service. Hosting got way to stressful for me. As more and more of my clients were starting to make good money from their websites the need to be able to offer real 24/7 support increased. And by the end of 2004 after losing hard drives on 3 different servers it was time to call it … Read more
[ Continue ]Thursday mornings are my grocery shopping time. HATE IT!
[ Continue ]Brain Dump… I came across that term sometime this week in regards to thinking your business plans out. I think it was mentioned on one of the linkedin groups I subscribe to. I don’t recall. The idea is to just write everything down that you could think of regarding getting your business started, back on track, or whatever… a brain dump. So I thought I’d do a little Friday Brain Dumping. ENABLING – I saw a twitter this morning that directed you to a great site whose focus is on finding free commercial use fonts. So I spent a good chunk of this morning downloading. lol! If you are in need of some fonts, check out Font Squirrel. Great stuff! After I grabbed a good amount of fonts, I didn’t want to unzip them all individually… I am lazy (just ask Jeanine)… So I came across BitZipper (free trial) that will unzip files in a batch. I checked WinZip but didn’t see that option. BitZipper worked like a charm. I might just have to buy it now for all my batch unzipping. lol! Last Friday, I spent three hours (yes 3!) weeding the front yard. I ended up with an entire 33 gallon garbage can filled with just weeds… crazy… Today, the lawn looked pretty good and I only was out there for 30 minutes weeding. I’m hoping to get a little time over the weekend to weed some in the back yard before they overrun my flowers. My allergies have been crazy bad this year and I have been living on Zyrtec every day practically. Hopefully that dependence will STOP soon!!! What a great start to the day… lol! I came across another twitter link to this No Spec blog post. Back in the day (and I’m talking years … Read more
[ Continue ]So “My Best Friend” Married a Sociopath was not well-received at the box office. Released in the year 2000, it grossed a total of only $500 in 50 theaters on its opening weekend, well below the $20 million it thought it was entitled to. The film had a very mixed reception – highly praised by other sociopaths yet a strong adverse reaction from the average movie goer.
Ed Gein gave high marks to the sociopath for being “an exceptional psycho viciously trapping his victim while leaving her to grasp wildly for individuality and empowerment”. Others have given the sociopath poor marks for its misguided ways and high opinion of itself.
As the story unfolds it becomes quickly apparent that the victim needs to get away – far away – from the sociopath. I must give So “My Best Friend” Married a Sociopath, a whopping 11 stars, for its incredibly accurate depiction of every day life being trapped with a psycho that everyone else views as “very strange but okay”. Until you are fully submerged in the every day dealings of the victim, you can’t begin to comprehend what life is truly like with a sociopath. This movie was extremely eye opening, gut wrenching and an every day emotional roller coaster. It is not something for the faint hearted.
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