Quotes

I love quotes, especially when they appear seemingly from nowhere, at the perfect time, and jump off the page at you. They attach themselves to my brain like an octopus tentacle might.

"Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel."

This quote jumped out at me this morning, and it made me appreciate the fact that I'm mostly a Thinker, and I can find humor in anything. Even the dark parts of life.

I just spent a long weekend on a positively lovely vacation with 8 fantastic women. We ate good food, drank cocktails, lounged on the beach, walked, swam, talked, talked, and talked. It was so good for all of our souls.

Upon return to work yesterday, I found out there would be "an announcement" today, we should "stay focused on our projects" and continue "business as usual."

The irony of the timing was indisputable, so I waited till I got home, and then laughed. Life takes such amazing twists and turns, you just never know what's coming. I choose to find humor in that...and "choose" is the key word.

Without laughter, I have nothing.

Happy Birthday, Mimi

My grandmother had her 99th birthday last week. She's raised 5 children of her own and has 10 grandkids and many great-grandkids.

She's been alive 99 years. 99. What a cool number.

If I live to be her age, that means I have 59 years to go! I'm not even halfway there yet!

I'm just amazed by that.

Happy Birthday, Mimi !!

Band Concerts

I'm talkin' about the Middle School variety --- not Sting or U2. My youngest has a band concert tonight, and I'm home with bronchitis. I desperately want to go to the concert, because they really *are* entertaining, but my ears are sensitive.

I'm wondering if it would be rude to sit in the back with earplugs. :-) Or maybe I'll just stay home and watch more of the Olympics.

Speaking of the Olympics, when do they end? I think everyone I know is suffering from sleep deprivation. Despite the fact that so many of us have DVRs, we're watching on time delay, and the results are posted online (with lots of videos) the following day, *nobody* wants to go to bed and miss a thing! It's quite funny if you think about it...

Google Buzz: Privacy Fail

I was initially excited to see the new Google Buzz appear in my gmail and wrote some silly posts about it with my friends. I was curious, as always, so I started poking around. Interestingly, and much like Facebook, I could see who my friends were following, and who *their* friends were following. I thought nothing of this until I saw a friend's link to a blog entitled "F*ck you, Google" which admonished Google for setting these friends up without permission.


The author was physically abused by a former boyfriend, and he was suddenly a follower in her Buzz. All because they had exchanged emails.


Then I realized that anyone could choose to follow me without my notification or permission. Not sure I like this...


I clicked the "turn off Buzz" button at the bottom of the gmail page and the Buzz folder went away. Am I off the Buzz grid? Not quite!


It turns out that there are some pretty detailed instructions for completely opting out which haven't been well-publicized yet. A friend emailed them to me, and I'll link to them at the bottom of this post.


I've been following Internet privacy for a decade. Initially because I was collecting usage data at work that was illegal to collect, unless we called it "Research & Development" ~~ which it certainly was, so we were in the clear. Our privacy attorney was still pretty squeamish about it though, so we stopped. That program has snowballed into the bandwidth monitoring and limiting program at the US's biggest broadband provider. All because I said "hey, why don't we...?"


I'd like to publicly thank Google for giving us something newsworthy to follow when we aren't watching the Olympics!! I have a feeling we're going to see some new laws and some very quick backpedaling by the big G.


The links I promised, in case you want to opt out too:


http://www.scotxblog.com/legal-tech/gmails-turn-off-buzz-still-does-not-turn-off-buzz-heres-how-to-really-do-it/


http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=175004#off

Short and sweet

I've been reading more blogs lately and recently realized that I read short blogs and skip the longer ones. I either don't have the time or attention span to read the whole thing in one sitting. I'm perfectly capable of reading long blogs, I just don't.


So I've decided that I'm going to write shorter blogs more often. I'm not going to wait for something funny to happen, like I have been. Apparently my life isn't as funny as I thought it was last year. :-)


Soccer season starts in two weeks, I'll probably encounter more ridiculousness there...