Category: How I love the Interwebs

Where I’m coming from

An interesting meme on identity, pilfered from daysgoby. I’m not convinced I’ve done it justice.

I am from paperback books, from Lays BBQ chips in a turquoise bowl, and from orange shag rugs.

I am from primary-coloured paint chipping from cold metal playground bars, from a blue two-wheeler with a white banana seat and high-rise handle bars, from dog-eared lined notebooks and fat red pencils.

I am from the bruised green sky of a pending thunderstorm, from snow that works its way under even the most tightly wrapped scarf, from sleeveless shirts on starry summer nights.

I am from the raspberries and the lilacs, from red rosebushes crawling up the trellis and emerald green lawns carefully tended. From yellow brick houses with gingerbread trim, and wide straight streets with towering trees.

I am from presents on Christmas Eve, from crepes made from scratch, from Kiefers and McLeods and even deBeers – yes, those deBeers, but too far removed to inherit any diamonds.

I am from the laughter and the bliss.

From you are my shining star and you can do it. From you can’t play with us. From we don’t want her on our team, you take her, but we don’t want her either.

I am from Jesus Christ Superstar crossed with the Force and belief in a higher power. From but why? From how can you know?

I’m from kilts and Delftware and the Maple Leaf, from potato salad and rice-a-roni at Christmas, from hagelslag on buttered rye bread triangles, from canned spaghetti on french fries.

From the Mosel river valley, where the voices of ten brothers and sisters raised in song flowed through the vineyards and over the sundial, from twin brothers who married sisters, and from highschool sweethearts.

I am from patriotism and respect and kindness, from endurance and appreciation, from storytellers. I am from love.

(Feel free to play along.)

Seven random things about… Simon

About a million years ago, Laura from Lunatic Fringe tagged me for the “Seven Random Facts About Me” meme. I’ve done a bunch of these over the years, and it’s getting tough to come up with more fresh stuff that you don’t already know about me, which is part of the reason I’ve sat on this for so long.

Then, inspiration struck. You might not need to know seven more random things about me — but what about seven random things about Simon, the cutest preschooler on the planet?

Simon

1. He’s adorable. No, really, he is. He’s one of those sweet-natured, flirty, adorable three-going-on-four-year-olds who just seem to have a natural ability to charm people. And he uses it shamelessly to his advantage.

You're my brother

2. He’s going through a kissing phase right now. I’m laughing to myself just thinking of his puckered puss as he offers it to me to be kissed many, many times a day.

Simon at six months

3. He’s adventurous in his food choices. He’ll try just about anything, and often asks for us to share what we’re having. He loves salsa (even and perhaps especially the hot stuff), fruits of all kinds (but he favours bananas and apples), guacamole, and mustard. He’s also a “dipper” and will dip just about any kind of food into any kind of dip.

First birthday cake

4. He’s got a preternatural memory. He regularly beats all of us at Memory-type card games, and even his preschool teacher has commented on his ability to remember details of past experiences. He quantifies everything from a few hours ago to last year as “Remember a long, long time ago, when….?” but recalls far more than I ever do. Someday, that will come back to bite me in the ass in a big way – mark my words!

Easter eggs

5. He likes predictability and routine. Every single morning, he asks me the exact same questions: “Is Jen coming today?” and “Are you going to work, or the gym, or the airport today?” (Granted, I go to work five days a week, and the gym once a week, but I’ve only gone to the airport twice, maybe three times, in his entire lifetime. And yet, the airport ranks in his daily questioning – and will be further ingrained when in fact I do fly out to Toronto for another conference next week!) He also asks me, every day without fail as I walk in the door and often before I get my shoes off, “What’s for dinner tonight?”

Simon's first birthday adventure

6. He’s feisty. He’s got a temper, likes to get his own way, and doesn’t take kindly to being scolded. He’s not cowed by our voices raised in anger, but yells right back. However, he’s also easily appeased.

at Grand Bend

7. He seems to have a strong affinity for music. He loves to dance, to sing, to play musical instruments. Where Tristan loves Thomas the Tank and Scooby Doo, Simon prefers the Wiggles and the Doodlebops.

Simon

What, that’s it? I’ve got seven already? But, I’m not done yet! I didn’t get a chance to tell you about his unruly curls, how he crawls into bed with me in the morning almost every day, how he still says “lellow” instead of “yellow” and I secretly kind of prefer it, and how he sometimes calls me “Mama doo doo” for reasons that baffle me, and… and…

Simon the caterpillar

Why I’m thinking of quitting Facebook

A not-so-hypothetical situation: It’s the Christmas season, and you’re doing a little bit of online shopping. You click over to Amazon, or eBay, or another one of 40 or so sites, and make your purchase. And the next thing you know, all of your “friends” on Facebook get an update in their Facebook News Feeds: “DaniGirl just bought Season Six of Smallville on DVD from Amazon.com.” What, you didn’t see the little pop-up window warning you that your purchase was about to be added to your Facebook account? Oh well, hopefully the “friend” you were buying the gift for doesn’t read his news feed that day.

As if that weren’t creepy and disturbing and Orwellian enough for you, how about the fact that you are automatically signed up for this “feature” and to opt out you have to do so on a case-by-case basis.

Here’s how the CBC describes “Beacon”, the latest new “service” on Facebook (thanks to Barbara for the link):

For example, when you engage in consumer activity at a partner website, such as Amazon, eBay, or the New York Times, not only will Facebook record that activity, but your Facebook connections will also be informed of your purchases or actions.

If you buy a book on Amazon, a little bit of code is embedded within that site then sends the data to Facebook and informs your friends that you’ve bought a particular book. Or say you’re surfing the recipe/food site Epicurious and rate or comment on a few recipes, again your Facebook friends will be notified of your culinary interests, as will Facebook itself and their advertising partners.

Thus where Facebook used to be collecting data only within the confines of its own website, it will now extend that ability to harvest data across other websites that it partners with. Some of the companies that have signed on to participate on the advertising side include Coca-Cola, Sony, Verizon, Comcast, Ebay — and the CBC. The initial list of 44 partner websites participating on the data collection side include the New York Times, Blockbuster, Amazon, eBay, LiveJournal, and Epicurious.

The idea, of course, is that if you see a friend buying a certain product or using a particular website, you’ll take that as an endorsement for that product or service. It’s insidious and creepy, and may be the achievement of advertising’s Holy Grail: ads that don’t seem like ads at all. You may also find your profile picture beside paid ads for whatever product or service you bought. Imagine it: “Trojan Condoms with extra sensitivity, now available from Amazon.com. DaniGirl bought a box yesterday!” with my profile pic of me – and the boys, no less – beaming out at you.

MoveOn.org offers a flash demo of how Beacon works. I’ve been trying to figure out the technology behind the tracking of purchases, and while I’m sure it must use some sort of tracking cookie, I can’t find any information about exactly how it’s triggered.

Now, you know I’m not anti-advertising, and I’m not even all that vigilant about protecting my personal information online. I think the nature of most bloggers leaves them fairly laissez-faire about sharing information about their activities and interests online in a public forum. When the Sitemeter / Specificclick blogstorm passed through (Sitemeter was installing “spyware” tracking cookies to report web behaviour back to an advertiser) I made sure to switch to a tracking-free account, but I wasn’t alarmed enough to stop using Sitemeter because of it.

This time, however, I’m seriously considering using these instructions to not only deactivate my Facebook account but to delete it entirely. (Facebook doesn’t allow you to simply delete an account, it just lets you put it into dormancy, leaving all the juicy personal details you’ve added intact in its databanks.)

At the very least, I’ve signed the petition at MoveOn.org, which required the use of a fake zip code, since they don’t seem to be receptive to Canadian signatories — ironic, because Facebook is far more popular here than in the US.

I have to admit, I don’t use Facebook much anymore these days anyway. I sign on every day to play a couple of ongoing games of Scrabulous, but I haven’t perused my own News Feed in a while. If Facebook reconsiders its position and makes Beacon an opt-in system like most of its applications, I’ll probably keep a stripped-down account just so I can keep my toes in the social-networking waters. While it’s a fun toy, I can’t say that Facebook has been an incredibly useful tool, or even as much fun as blogging. I don’t think I’d miss it.

What do you think? Do you have a Facebook account, and does this freak you out, or is this just something we’re going to have to get used to in an increasingly transparent online world?

One thousand (!)

Did you know that the letter A does not appear in the English spelling of any number lower than “one thousand”? Oh, the trivial gifts the Interwebs give to me.

One thousand. Like, a thousand words, or a Thousand Islands. Or, one thousand posts.

Yes, my bloggy peeps, this is my one-thousandth post. One thousand posts in not-quite 34 months. The mind boggles.

You know, I always wanted to be a writer, and I always knew that I had an easy style when it came to stringing words together — but I always feared I had nothing to write about. *snicker*

And now, in honour of my one-thousandth post, a couple of favourite subjects: Books! Memes! BOOK MEMES!!

(Thanks to Raising WEG, from whom I filched this one.)

This list is via the Guardian’s report of the top 20 books re-read by Britons. I’ve italicized those books I’ve read, and bold-faced the books I’ve read more than once.

  1. The Harry Potter Series by JK Rowling
  2. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
  3. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
  4. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
  5. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  6. 1984 by George Orwell
  7. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
  8. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis
  9. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
  10. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  11. Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
  12. To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee
  13. Flowers in the Attic by Virginia Andrews
  14. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
  15. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
  16. The Bible
  17. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  18. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
  19. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
  20. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Hmmm, so I’ve read a lot of books Britons like to read, but didn’t enjoy them enough to re-read them. These books, however, are the first five that come to mind when I think about books that I’ve read more than once, and sometimes more than twice:

  1. Contact, by Carl Sagan
  2. Generation X, by Douglas Coupland
  3. Who Do You Think You Are, by Alice Munro
  4. The Shining, by Stephen King
  5. Shoeless Joe, by WP Kinsella

What books have you found worthy of re-reading?

All about Beloved

This went ’round the blogosphere about a month ago and I filed it away for just such a brainless Friday during NaBloPoMo as this, but I first saw it at Slouching Mom’s place so she gets the linky love.

1. Who is your man?

Beloved. (When I started blogging, everyone had a pseudonym. Tristan’s middle name is Louis, so he was Luigi, and Simon’s middle name is Francis, so he was Frankie. It took me about two weeks to realize I couldn’t blog about them without using their real names – it was too awkward and fake, and we don’t have a drop of Italian blood in our combined family lines – but I kept Beloved first for an affectation, and now purely with affection.)

2. How long have you been together?

Twelve and a half years, since March of 1995. Married since July of 1999.

3. How long did you date?

We didn’t exactly date. We lived in separate cities (me in Ottawa, him in London) for eight months but were exclusive from the day we met. For most of that year, I’d drive to London every second weekend. He moved to Ottawa and into my apartment on New Years Eve, 1995.

4. How old is your man?

Two years younger than me. He’ll be 36 at the beginning of December. (Family trivia: with the exception of my mom and dad, in every couple in my extended family – both sets of grandparents, my brother, my cousin, my aunt – the woman is older than the man.)

A kid on Christmas morning


5. Who eats more?

He does. His favourite snack, as a ‘starving’ student back in the days when we first met, was an entire chocolate freezer cake or a dozen doughnuts washed down with a litre of milk.

6. Who said “I love you” first?

Um, can you believe I don’t remember? I *think* it was him.

7. Who is taller?

He is, just barely. He’s got about two inches on me. I love how we fit together.

8. Who sings better?

Him, no contest. He has a lovely, resonant singing voice that comes from deep in his chest. I couldn’t carry a tune with a wheelbarrow to put it in. Although I do have a better memory for lyrics, which seems patently unfair.

9. Who is smarter?

A couple of years ago, I might have said I am. Now, I’m not so sure. He has more edumacation than me (a university degree in fine arts, a college diploma in animation, and a couple of semesters in a prestigious illustration program) and a much better memory, but I think I’m a little bit quicker of wit — but just barely.

10. Whose temper is worse?

Oh, dangerous question. We both have temper issues. Mine is quicker to flare and blaze out, his is more dramatic when escalated. We are constantly working on this.

11. Who does the laundry?

I’d say it’s a 75/25 split, with him on the 75 side.

12. Who takes out the garbage?

He does. That job is attached to the cat litter in our house, which is all his. One of the niceties of being regularly pregnant!

13. Who sleeps on the right side of the bed?

Um, we both do. On the right side of our own beds, that is. He snores and twitches, and I’m a light sleeper, so for now he sleeps in the guest room. I think we’re headed for twin beds once the Player to be Named Later claims a room of his own.

Daddy and his mini-me, 2002

14. Who pays the bills?

I do, which suits both of us. I have obsessive control issues over this one, thanks to my practice marriage.

15. Who is better with the computer?

He is, by far. He even teaches programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. When we first moved in together in 1995, I had a little 486 with Windows 3.0 and knew way more about computers than him. It took less than a year for him to be more facile with computers than me, and he’s since left me in the dirt. I’m good with social media but a Luddite with everything else. Thank goodness for live-in tech support that works for dirty favours!

16. Who mows the lawn?

Mostly I do, because I like to. Same with shovelling the driveway. He does it maybe one time in five.

17. Who cooks dinner?

I cook, he cleans up afterward.

18. Who drives when you are together?

Early in our relationship, I drove the majority of the time. Since the boys were born, I’ve relinquished my hold on the steering wheel – with the exception of road trips, and especially through Toronto. See temper question above!

19. Who pays when you go out?

I think he does most of the time, but I’ve never really noticed.

20. Who is most stubborn?

Me. I’m also more opinionated. And who is most easy-going? That would be Beloved, thank goodness.

21. Who is the first to admit when they are wrong?

Probably me. I like closure and official endings to disagreements, whereas Beloved likes to just pretend nothing happened. Unfortunately, this prolongs and even escalates a lot of disagreements into full blown arguments.

22. Whose parents do you see the most?

Mine, by far. My folks live around the corner and we have dinner together at least once a week. His dad and stepmom visit us, or we visit them, a couple of times a year, but we haven’t visited his mom in a couple of years.

A new daddy

23. Who kissed who first?

Aren’t these things usually mutual? Neither one of us could resist the magnetic attraction, but I guess he was the more forward of the two of us.

24. Who asked who out?

There was no ‘asking out.’ We met in a bar, and he (no joke) invited me back to his apartment to see his sketches. We were a couple from that first night.

25. Who proposed?

The more of these questions I answer, the more I realize how non-traditional our relationship is. There was never a proposal, from what I can remember. Marriage was always on the table, it was just a matter of when. When we finally went out and bought an engagement ring together, he carried it around the mall and dangled it in front of my nose like a carrot as he went into all his favourite (electronics) stores, knowing for once I was at his mercy. He finally slipped the ring on my finger in the parking lot of our favourite restaurant just before dinner.

26. Who is more sensitive?

Too close to call. We’re both soppy romantics, but I think I’m a little tougher in some respects.

27. Who has more friends?

Me. I’m a social creature, and he maintains that he hates people.

28. Who has more siblings?

We each have one – he has a sister and I have a brother. Having a three-child family is unprecedented in our immediate families.

29. Who wears the pants in the family?

Ha! I’m not answering this question on the grounds that it may incriminate me.

Daddy's crazy!
One of my all-time favourite pictures.

A great start to NaBloPoMo!

Yay, it’s November!

Never thought I’d say those words. Truly, I hate November. Of all the months, November continues to be the suckiest. Bad things happen in November.

But November means that the arrival of the Player to be Named Later is just three months away. Yay! And November means Halloween is done, so we can talk about getting ready for Christmas. Yay! And November means it’s National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo, where I get to scintillate and entertain you EVERY SINGLE DAY of the month! (I’ll leave it up to you whether that’s a yay or not.)

But yayest of all is this: Postcards from the Mothership has made the cut as a Best Parenting Blog finalist on this year’s Weblog Awards!! YAY!!

The 2007 Weblog Awards

Thank you SO much for the nomination, I’m truly honoured. And not only did Maggie nominate me, but the judges picked me – well, picked blog – out of a field of more than 45 nominees, to be one of the 10 finalists!

*pauses to beam proudly*

You know what this means, don’t you? The polls open later tonight, and you will be pestered incessantly politely asked to vote each day this week. I’m absolutely thrilled to see that one of my favourite bloggers, Bub and Pie, has also made the list of finalists. Another yay!

Winners will be announced November 8, although I suffer no delusions that I’ll be among the top three five finalists — oh hell, I’m just happy to have made the cut. I mean seriously – Amalah and Finslippy? Yeah, like I can compete with that. Really, I just want you to vote for me so I don’t come in last, okay?

And now, I will shamelessly ply you with photos of my adorably Halloweened children to make you more amenable to voting for me. Simon was a fuzzy caterpillar, and Tristan created his own costume of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (from Fantasia). Beloved had the peaked hat as a souvenir from a trip to Disney World many moons ago, and I invested a stellar 66 cents on a pair of white gloves for him. Tristan put the rest together himself. (The little monkey in the bottom left picture is Jordan, our nanny’s son.)

Halloween 2007

So you can see I have plenty to be happy about early on a November morning. What about you? What’s worthy of saying Yay in your life today?

The one that could use a few segues

You know why pregnant women are cranky? It’s not the hormones, it’s not the sleep deprivation, it’s not the heartburn or the aching joints or the fact that your brain has taken a holiday in the south of France leaving you to defend for yourself without one.

It’s the pants.

You’d be cranky, too, if you had to adjust your pants every. single. time you moved. Stand up – hitch up pants. Before sitting down – hitch up pants. Walk any distance greater than four steps – hitch up pants. Every half hour, your underwear have been hitched up and down by your migrating pants so many times that you have a wedgie AND they’re somewhere near your knees. AT THE SAME TIME. And it’s not just the pants, because your shirt tails have to be adjusted, too, because pregnancy shirts are so long these days. It’s more like “stand up – lift shirt tail – hitch up pants – adjust underwear – smooth out shirt tail – take two steps – repeat.”

No wonder women wear those silly-looking bib overalls for most of their pregnancies. I mean, sure they’re cute and all when you’re a perkily pregnant 24. But when you’re a lumberingly pregnant 38, you wear the damn things just to have some blessed relief from wrangling gravity for your pants all the damn day long.

***

Did you see the CanadaWrites contest on CBC? They’re calling it “the writing game for quick-witted Canadians.” Send in your original short piece in one of the following categories: songs, humour, ad, movie pitch or … wait for it … BLOG POST!

I was so excited about this until I realized just how very short 200 words is. I took a look at four or five of my favourite posts, and they were each in excess of 800 words, some of them more than 1000 words. Yikes! It takes me 200 words just to set the scene some days. Oh well. I may still enter – and tell me if you do, so I can vote for you!

***

My friend ÃœberGeek sent me a note yesterday playfully accusing me of propping up my search rank by lacing my breastfeeding post with google bait for porn searchers. I laughed him off, and then cringed ruefully this morning when I got more than five hits from this referrer: girls.go41.de/?s=girl%20breast%20photo. I didn’t want to click through and I’m not going to give them the benefit of the link. But sigh. And ick. And sigh.

***

We’ve heard a lot about bad corporate behaviour on the Interwebs lately, between pictures being stolen from Flickr and Secret Agent Josephine’s artwork being stolen, not to mention the endless proliferation of content scrapers and splogs.

This is not one of those stories.

I noticed a couple of hits from links at MommyClub.ca, so I clicked through to see what they were linking to. I was rather annoyed to find my entire post from yesterday, and when I looked around I saw that they were syndicating my feed. I was just about to write a “cease and desist” letter when I got an e-mail from one of the managing partners. She said she had approached me some time ago asking my permission to syndicate the content (which she did) and did not remember if they had my consent or not (they didn’t.) They’d had some sort of infrastructure change and somehow my feed was activated, and when she noticed it she wanted to check with me to make sure it was okay with me if they posted my feed.

I politely declined, but I have to say I was highly impressed with MommyClub.ca’s behaviour. They proactively checked with me, not once but twice, to ask my permission to publish my content. When I said no thanks, the posts in question were gone almost immediately.

The Interwebs are full of bad behaviour, but there are some good people who still behave ethically out there. I thought this one deserved some props.

Snog-worthy literary characters

I was going to save this meme for later in the week, but I got so wrapped up in the writing of it that I couldn’t bear to leave it in the can.

Veronica at Toddled Dredge wrote a post about posts she has not written, and one of those topics was seized upon by her commenters as a post that should be written. Thus, the meme that wasn’t, but is: my top ten ‘snoggable’ literary characters.

This was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. I mean, a “kissable” character is not the same as a “favourite” literary character. Arthur Dent from the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy, for example, and Garp, while among my favourite and most memorable literary characters, are not exactly the ones I’d most like to lock lips with. Plus, I’ve lamented before about my absolutely horrible memory for the details of a book once I’ve closed the cover for the last time. But once I got rolling, I realized that (a) there are lots of kissable literary characters out there and (b) I have ecclectic tastes in literature – and men.

My top ten most snoggable literary characters are:

10. Andy, the narrator from Generation X. I’m a sucker for a quick wit and tasty turns of phrase.

9. Jasper Jackson from The Calligrapher. An artist, a lover of poetry and a sensualist… but above all, a rogue. I’ve never been immune to the charms of a rogue.

8. Remus Lupin from the Harry Potter series. I almost chose Sirius Black for this slot, but it’s his fierceness that I find attractive. For kissability, you want the more sensitive soul, right? Lupin it is.

7. Luke Skywalker. You may argue that he isn’t exactly a literary character, but it was in reading the book that my 10-year-old self truly pined for Luke Skywalker.

6. Rhett Butler from Gone with the Wind. See rogue comment above. (Not so much the movie version, though. I think the moustache detracts from the kissability factor.)

5. Henry DeTamble from The Time Traveler’s Wife. Swoon.

4. Holden Caufield, from Catcher in the Rye. Moody and dark… and maybe I could ‘save’ him with a few good kisses?

3. Ricardo Carlos Manoso, aka “Ranger“, from Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books. Mysterious, dark, rich and almost unbearably sexy. I’m not ordinarily a fan of the darkly handsome, but Ranger must be the hottest character in fiction. Ever.

2. Louis de Pointe du Lac from the Vampire Chronicles. Lestat is way too arrogant, but Louis is sensitive, and thoughtful, and oh so sensual. Plus, Brad Pitt plays him in the movie. I mean really, this one was a no-brainer.

1. Ponyboy Curtis from The Outsiders. My inner-14-year-old left no doubt that this would be my number-one choice. Vulnerable, thoughtful, and a writer, but fiercely loyal and tough enough to fight for what he believes in. Sigh.

Want to play along? Consider yourself tagged!

Get yer blog on – moving to your own domain

A couple of people have asked me about moving to a self-hosted domain, and recently Maggie (hi Maggie!) asked me about customizing a blog.

This is more a recap of what I did, rather than a tutorial. I only wish I’d done this years ago! I was so intimidated by the process, though, that I was too scared to try it out. Maybe by sharing this, I can show you how easy (no really!) it can be.

Anyway, this will be long, so I’ve tucked most of it below the fold…
Continue reading “Get yer blog on – moving to your own domain”

Hey you! Lurker! This one’s for you

Huhn. I thought I had to wait until January for International Delurking week to beg y’all to come out of hiding, but apparently today is (ahem) “The Great Mofo Delurk” day. Don’t believe me? It must be true, cuz they’ve got BADGES!

The Great Mofo Delurk 2007

So! You, over there, the one who visits every day but never says hello. And you! The one who just stumbled over here looking for Star Wars porn – sorry to disappoint you, but you could at least leave a comment to let us know you were here.

Out yerselves, quiet lurkers, and be known in the brilliant klieg lights of the comment box – this is your day to shine.