August 30, 2010

On being a computer refugee.

This sucks. This sucks so hard.

I’m on Blake’s computer right now because mine…is FUBAR. It was/is a MacBook that was about 6 years old, I’d guess, that I was given when it was about 4. At the time, Blake had built me a new computer so he put Windows on it so the kids could play Sims 3 on it and I just used my big box.

Fast forward about 2 years and he says, “y’know…the Mac is actually a little better than your desktop and it’s a laptop so you should use that” and I reluctantly did, giving my desktop to the kids so they could play Spore and Sims 3. (The reason we were running Windows on the Mac was because I couldn’t get Spore or Sims 3 installed on it using Mac OS but both worked fine with Windows, I don’t know why this is.)

So I used the Mac for about 4 or 5 months and had *just* gotten it broken in and all set up the way I wanted it and then last week I woke up and the Mac wouldn’t wake up. I shook the mouse, pressed every key on the keyboard, closed and opened it and finally had to do a hard reset. When it started up again, it was running slow as molasses. iTunes was unusable, FireFox was also unusable yet somehow TweetDeck was working fine. It wouldn’t restart of its own accord to I had to do about 5 hard resets until I called Blake at work in tears not knowing what else to do. He suggested that I use IE to download Chrome, so I did and Chrome seemed to be working okay, so I made that the default browser and imported my FireFox bookmarks. But iTunes still wouldn’t work, it would load up but you couldn’t make it play or press any buttons. Then I tried to open Photoshop, which I use pretty much every day, and it wouldn’t load due to a program error, even though it was working fine the day before.

So I put up with this wonky machine until yesterday when I backed up all my stuff and Blake wiped it, with the intent of putting Windows 7 on it, which he had had on it at one point when the kids were using it but the key expired or whatever because it was only a trial, so he had to put XP on it, which was on it when I began using it. (Yes, using Bootrcamp, which I’m told isn’t the most stable, but what the hell else is there?)

Well, he couldn’t get Win7 on it because he was using a key from work and I guess the computer had to be on the network to authenticate or something so that was a bust and that’s when he tried to put XP back on it. It kept freezing during the install and then when it was installed, trying to put other programs on it, like Photoshop, it would freezer and stall out and he’d have to start over and finally he got maybe 4 progs on it, one being iTunes and another being FireFox (which I prefer because of all the extensions) and they were doing the same things they were doing on Thursday so basically my computer is totally fucked, meaning that I basically no longer have one.

What sucks is that I have absolutely zero way to get a new computer so my only temporary solution is to hijack Blake’s for now, but for how long? He needs a computer too and this is the one I won at Camwhores expressly FOR him so I can’t just take it back (and if I did, what the hell is he going to use?)

So I don’t know what to do.

Sometimes, because Camwhores buys so much shit from them, Dell gives Kevin a deal on computers but there aren’t any right now and I wouldn’t have the money for one even if there was one.

Long story short: I’m completely fucked and have no way of updating my cam, doing shows or running my business and I’m at a loss as to what to do and freaking out completely.

July 23, 2010

Team Elmvale!

I’m so sappy and ridiculously proud of my community both online and meatside right now, I could honestly cry. Thank you so much to my online friends for voting for a town you’ve never been to or maybe even heard of, being a 1700 population town up against a 10,000 population town, we REALLY needed your votes!

Here on the ground, the town had 24 hour voting stations set up at the community centre, the rec centre, a couple of restaurants and the library and everyone was up all night voting, eating together, listening to music and just being a great community.

Here at Sunnyland, Madison and I started voting at noon yesterday and she went to bed this morning around 5:30am, which I made it to about 7:30am. Madison set an alarm to be up for the last hour & a half of voting because once I explained to her about town pride, not unlike the lemon tree episode of The Simspons, she really got into it and I couldn’t be more proud of her. Blake voted from work and again between after dinner and his bedtime yesterday and again this morning.

So what happens next? We have to watch TSN tonight at 6pm EST to see who won. The whole town is gathering somewhere to watch apparently, but I’m not sure where. Probably a few places. We’ll be watching from home.

Anyway, that’s the scoop! Thanks again for everything, you guys are awesome!

Posted at 2:29 pm in: Advertising , Family , Friends , Internet , Kids , SRS BSNS , Summer , Sunnyland , blogging , social networking , twitter
July 22, 2010

Elmvale Needs Your Help!

So the itty bitty town I live in (population 1700) is in this contest by TSN and Kraft where they could win $25,000 to upgrade our rec centre’s facilities which we are in DESPERATE need of.

How it works is that for the next 24-hours (voting started at noon, my time and ends at noon tomorrow) you can vote for either us (Elmvale) or another town called Brighton (population a lot more than 1700) which I’M TOLD ALREADY HAS A TOWN POOL SO TO HELL WITH THEM and whoever gets the most votes win.

And that’s where you come in. We need your votes! And the beauty of it, my lovely internet-addicted friends? Is that you can vote AS MANY TIMES AS YOU WANT between now and noon tomorrow. As long as you’re not voting by mechanical means (prevented by a captcha), you can vote as many times as you possibly can and WE NEED YOUR VOTES!

So please, vote once, vote twice, vote a million times! Our community deserves it.

Thanks in advance! I’ll update everyone on if we won or not after the contest is over. :o) GO VOTE! VOTE VOTE VOTE!

July 2, 2010

OMG YOU GUYS!

This morning I blipped Tequila by the Champs and told everyone on Blip.fm & Twitter to do the @peeweeherman dance.

AND GUESS WHAT?

Pee-wee Herman himself retweeted my blip, causing like, a million people to do the same AND he posted it on Facebook too. So I’m like, semi-famous right now.

See?
(Click to enlarge.)

My life is now complete.

July 1, 2010

In honour of Canada Day…

Have some Scratching Post. :o)


(Fun Fact: On The Mike Bullard Show (last clip), I showed my underwear on national television. :o))

Anyway, these clips are not in chronological order. The official videos are, but the live stuff isn’t. I was digging all of these up to show Madison when she woke up, in honour of Canada Day so I thought I’d share. Enjoy!

Posted at 9:11 am in: Canada , Madison , Music , Nicole , Sunnyland , Women , myspace , social networking , videos , youtube
June 28, 2010

Oh, this & that.

Know what I hate? When you’re half asleep, in a great dreamscape, but conscious enough to be rolling around in bed trying to control the flow of blood flowing from your vagina so it stays on the pad, rather than gushing up over it and soaking through your pajamas onto the sheets. I really really fucking hate that. Oh yeah, and cramps too. If it weren’t for the pain I was in while all of this was happening, I probably would have kept sleeping, but no, I got up and by the time I took all my “morning drugs”, including painkillers, I was up and awake and there was not a goddamn thing I could do about it.

So here I am.

As I’ve mentioned a few times already, I’m reading Eat, Pray, Love and right now I’m in the middle of the book where she’s just arrived in India and she’s talking about yoga. Admittedly, I know absolutely nothing about yoga. When I went last week, the teacher wanted us to fill out some paperwork that was half questionnaire and half  “you can’t sue me if you break your neck” stuff, but she asked the question, “why are you taking yoga?” Blake & I were the only ones filling out this information because the other 3 girls in the class are regular students and since Blake always finishes these things first and leaves me feeling awkward while I finish mine, I just wrote “to maintain weight” as my reason, but that’s not totally it and now I feel like she thinks I’m vapid for saying that because according to Eat, Pray, Love, yoga is much more than a body exercise. It’s supposed to be all transcendental & shit. The fact of the matter is, I don’t really know why I’m taking yoga. It seemed like a good idea at the time? It’s a good immersion therapy exercise? To take away some of my menstrual pain eventually? (I hear there are poses for that.) To show off how flexible I am as a party trick one day? All of those reasons? None of those reasons? I don’t know. What’s the right answer to that question? What is it she would have wanted to read under that question? I know “to maintain weight” wasn’t it.

By the way, I’m doing Hatha yoga, which according to Eat, Pray, Love is just your run of the mill yoga, nothing fancy. I think Kelley, our teacher, said in one of the e-mails to Blake that she was mixing it with another kind of yoga, but I forget what she said now. All I know is that last week was a positive experience and I’m actually kind of looking forward to this week’s class.

Last week’s class I found to be very very easy when I expected it to be very very hard. I did all of the poses more or less correctly, according to Blake, but I didn’t get into them the proper way and I didn’t do certain nuances of some poses, like in downward dog your heels are supposed to be flat on the floor but I’m not flexible enough to accomplish that yet because my muscles haven’t stretched enough from repetition of the pose. And I don’t really understand the teacher’s instructions most of the time. Like, she says to flex or release the muscles in your wherever but I have absolutely no fucking clue as to what muscles she’s talking about most of the time because the only muscles of mine I’m ever aware of is the uterine ones. And my thigh ones, but that’s a long story as to why…

So I made it through all the poses and my position in the class is right beside the giant wall clock in the studio and I was amazed at how fast the class went. I was expecting it to be an agonizing hour, like gym class where time just stood still, but it wasn’t like that at all. In fact, I didn’t even think to look at the clock until there were only 10 minutes left.

Since I didn’t know any of the poses to begin with and since she didn’t name all of the poses we were doing, the only two I picked up on was “table pose”, “child pose” and “downward dog” because those seemed to be the transitional poses between other poses.

Blake was apparently sore the next day from doing the class, but I wasn’t and I’ve been wondering why the whole time. Blake says it’s just because he hasn’t used a lot of those muscles in a long time, but I would guess that neither have I, so why wasn’t I sore? I felt barely any strain whatsoever during the class which made me think I was either doing it wrong (likely) or maybe my flexibility is just better than Blake’s (possible).

Right now I am in hell due to menstruation (my 3rd period this month, hooray for me!) and on the questionnaire she asked if we had any health problems that may affect our ability to do yoga and I put down “endometriosis”, SO, on Tuesday I don’t know if I should tell her I’m in hell before the class or if I should just not say anything and do the best I can. “They” say that exercise is good for cramps but that has never been my experience at all. I’ve never tried yoga for it before though, not really. I do a variation of “child pose” all the time for period pain where I sit cross-legged and bend the rest of my body forward the same as “child pose”, but I don’t think that’s an actual yoga pose and we don’t do “child pose” for very long during the class so that one won’t be doing me any favours tomorrow. I’m just hoping that this period hell will be over by then, but I’m not holding my breath.

And the only thing I have left to say about yoga is that Blake & I have brand new, spiffy yoga mats that are apparently in the trunk of the car and will stay in the trunk of the car (so they don’t get dog hair on them) and mine is pink. I don’t know what colour Blake’s is, but I’m guessing blue since that’s the colour of the first one he bought. It was $60 for both of us to rent mats for the class but I didn’t want to do that, especially because I suspect we will be taking yoga from this woman for a really long time because I actually like it but also because I wanted a pink one godammit and the ones for rent are either “gym class” blue or “crusty blood clot” maroon.

So that was yoga. I know I was brief about it last week and you guys wanted to know more than “it was eeeeeeeasy”, so there ya go.

In other news, I haven’t painted a fucking thing in a week because I’m a WoW addict who does little else right now than chew painkillers and pretend I’m a blood elf and that’s mostly what I intend to do until the end of next week, criticism be damned.

The thing with WoW, especially right now in the formation of a brand new guild, is that it’s largely a social game. I spend my days (and nights) killing fictional beings, yes, but I’m also chatting with about 15 other people while I’m doing it. And it’s like…okay say you stay off the internet for a day (the horror!) and you can’t get caught up with your friends list on Live Journal or Facebook the next day. WoW’s similar in that if you don’t log on for a day, you can miss a lot socially but the people who were on, have probably out-leveled you by about 2 levels and right now we’re all trying to stay within the same range of levels to be able to do dungeons and quests together. This guild ‘s entire purpose was to start toons from scratch and level them together. (A concept that’s been lost on some people who have decided to roll death knights who start at level 55, but whatever, good for them. I hope they like playing alone because that’s all they’ll be doing for quite some time.)

Anyway, as an officer of the guild and also the person with the most time on her hands, I kind of act as guild master when our guild master isn’t around, which is often because she apparently actually has a life. She pretty much only logs on to buy us guild bank tabs because she’s the only one who can do it and sometimes she levels her priest for a few hours, but she’s never on for entire days or nights like the rest of us are. (Which is fine, this isn’t a diss on our GM at all, I mean really, the job at this point is to just buy bank tabs and that’s pretty much it since our officers can add people to the guild or promote people.)

Basically the guild is being run by me, our friend from Camwhores, Warcorp and our friend Stephy. And Stephy got a job today so her time in Azeroth is soon to be more limited, I’m assuming. Warcorp’s our money-making machine who has almost single-handedly financed our first 3 guild bank tabs (I helped too, but nowhere near as much as he did) and since we’ve been filling up the tabs pretty quickly, I’ve been telling people what to take, what to sell, what to use and what to disenchant and I’m not even sure I’m doing that correctly because I don’t know for sure what a lot of the stuff we’re banking is for or what it does. I’m a WoW nerd, definitely, but I definitely have to ask the other WoW nerds of our guild for guidance on a lot of things because the game’s changed quite a bit since we stopped playing 2 years ago and the only profession I ever did seriously was alchemy (which I’m doing again) so I only really know what’s useful for that.

I’m hoping that Ditsy can spend some time with us every now & then to organize our guild bank a little better because I’m told she’s an expert WoW organizer.

Last night we did our 2nd guild instance, which was Gnomeregan and it took foreeeeever. Blake didn’t end up in bed until almost 2:30am, so tonight is probably not going to be a WoW night, especially since we still have yesterday’s True Blood to watch – so maybe I’ll get some painting in after all. Really, the two paintings that have been sitting on my coffee table for about a month only need arms, a signature and varnish to be finished, so I could probably get that done in a a couple of nights if I really wanted to. And since I like money, I should really want to.

Anyway, that’s all I really have to report other than the fact that both kids had excellent report cards and once again, both of them got principal achievement awards. The last day of school is on Wednesday and it should be an interesting summer with Alex & Ronny getting married, the kids going up north to Phil’s for a week or 2 giving Blake & I TIME ALONE OMG, my gardens and a few other things we have lined up.

So that’s that. I will now leave you with some lovely WoW screencaps that I’m sure you will all be thrilled by.


This Wailer is no match for Endometria!


My ride.
It sucks that when I get the next level of mount I HAVE to ride a brightly coloured chicken because there are no black high level chickens. I think that’s stupid.
The other day I saw a blood elf riding a zebra and I meant to look up how that was possible.


Blake & I drinking. He’s a troll shaman. And actually that’s a pic from last week, he’s had a change of hairstyle since.


Me riding a wyvern to destinations unknown.
This is how we roll on the Horde side, wyverns, zeppelins and dragonhawks.

And finally, the sun setting in Tirisfal while I wait for a zeppelin to Orgimmar.

June 3, 2010

This is what you miss…

…by not being a member of Camwhores.com!

For the rest of this month, I plan on spending my evenings at Camwhores because Blake & I have such a good time with our friends over there, so if you wanted to come hang out too, you’d be more than welcome!

THE MORE, THE MERRIER!

May 28, 2010

I love this shit.

My friend Jay Holben linked this in Facebook this afternoon and I just got around to watching it now. Pretty interesting stuff. It’s a year old, so you might have seen it and I’m sure the stats have changed, but still interesting I think. Anyway, the text moves faster than I could read, so I suggest pausing when necessary and also possibly viewing the video in a larger size than I’ve embedded here. Here’s the YouTube link to the video.

So, is social media a fad? Even before watching this video I would have said “absolutely not”. The world’s changing and I feel really privileged to be alive at this point in history when the world’s changing changing changing and doing it faster than a lot of people can even keep up. I mean, how many people reading this can even figure out their Facebook’s privacy settings? (Take a look at Time magazine this week, that’s the cover story.)

I dunno, I just like this stuff a lot so I thought I’d share the video. I’m too tired to make a real post about it, so excuse me for not being my normal verbose self tonight…

Edit: Here’s this year’s version of the same video with updated stats, it was released this month.

April 1, 2010

I find Halcyon very inspirational.

Thoughts on optimism, Facebook and digital intimacy.

Posted at 12:49 pm in: Internet , Spring , facebook , internet celebrities , social networking , videos , youtube
March 30, 2010

Spread it wide & far!

Posted at 12:46 pm in: Advertising , SRS BSNS , Spring , facebook , social networking , twitter , videos , webcams , youtube

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