| Subcribe via RSS

Family Night Tonight

June 10th, 2008 | 2 Comments | Posted in Dad's Cancer, Daily Life, Err., Family, My Life

The family night for my dad’s passing is tonight. We’re having “Family Night” in lieu of a viewing, since Dad’s being cremated. We are borrowing an urn, since Dad is being shipped off to the crematory in a city near the beach and won’t be back until Thursday.

We were in the funeral home again today, which made me think I might cry, but I didn’t. We setup the pictures of dad, saw some of the flowers that had been sent already, and set out some of Dad’s Hot Wheels toy car collection and clown collection. Ironically, one of the funeral home workers is scared of clowns.

We picked out the urn to borrow - Mom originally selected an understated one with a bird on it, and I said “Mom, we’re not paying for it. We’re not even buying it. We’re borrowing it. If we can borrow any one of them, let’s borrow the most expensive one.” So we did. We picked up a really beautiful urn that was cast bronze and blue something or other, very ornate and heavy.

So far there are already three sets of flowers, and we’ve gotten lots of sympathy cards, text messages, e-mails, Facebook Messages and Wall Posts, MySpace messages,  blog comments, and in-home visitations. It’s always comforting to know people care, especially when you feel like falling down in a time like this.

The song “Let It Be,” the version from the Across the Universe soundtrack, makes me cry. Almost every time I play it. Dad likes the Beatles, so we’re going to play them tonight at family night. I’ve only got “Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Across the Universe” on CD here at my mom’s house, so that’s what we’re going to use.

Share and Enjoy:
  • del.icio.us
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Slashdot
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
Tags: , , ,

Warning: Crazy Weekend Ahead

This weekend I’m going with a friend halfway across the state to help his sister move across town. It’s a long story. But the neat part is, we’re leaving tonight, will stay in a hotel when we get there, move her tomorrow, then go hang out and stop at the hotel we stayed at back in February for the free Happy Hour.

I’m going to use some of the road time to study for my GMAT, maybe pre-write some blogs for next week, read a book, or just chill and talk to my friend. In any case, it’ll be nice to get out of town for a weekend.

My girlfriend-equivalent is going home for a couple of weeks - I’m going to miss her. But I’m glad she gets to go see her family, I’m sure they miss her. She’s also going to see her friend, who happens to live in my hometown, so I’m going home to see my folks in a couple of weeks, and I’ll bring her back here when I leave. I imagine that’ll be a really good day, seeing her again after two weeks.

Happy Friday everybody!

Share and Enjoy:
  • del.icio.us
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Slashdot
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
Tags: , , ,

Terrible Tuesdays

May 6th, 2008 | 1 Comment | Posted in Catharsis, Err., Tech Support, What the...?!, Work

Good grief. Exam week for college students apparently makes everyone grumpy and annoying. At first I thought, maybe I’m not being polite enough, so I tried harder on the phones today.

Then I heard other people in the call center dealing with angry clients, too. Apparently during exam week, everything is an emergency, and everyone’s computer is broken, and everyone needs it fixed now or sooner.

Couple this with an onslaught of completely retarded problems, like previously mentioned e-mail account issues and students who can’t follow directions.

To add insult to injury, the students still continue to queue up in the entrance way that is shared between student parking and faculty & staff parking, thereby blocking my car from leaving for lunch and making me wait, honking and angry, to get back into the faculty & staff parking after lunch, and making me late. They just sit there, waiting on someone to leave, so they can get into a parking space, instead of moving along and looking for parking elsewhere.

At least there’s an end-of-the-year party I’m invited to tonight. Maybe I’ll push one of them off the deck and into the river. That’ll make me feel better.

Share and Enjoy:
  • del.icio.us
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Slashdot
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Bloggers Unite For Human Rights on May 15th

Bloggers UniteOn May 15th, 2008, bloggers from across the world will be participating in one of the largest collaborations of online publication for human rights violations. If you decide to join me, you can help by being a voice for those who don’t have a voice.

There are several main topics to choose from, primarily to keep everyone on the same topics so the impact is greater - such as Darfur, Shi Tao in China and Yahoo!’s part in his being seized by the Chinese government, the illegal detentions at Guantanamo Bay, and more.

Blogs are indexed by search engines, feed readers, and other programs of interest. That means when thousands of bloggers write on the same topic, especially in a relatively short period of time, like one day, it gets noticed.

Join Bloggers Unite now, and on May 15th blog for Human Rights violations world-wide!

Share and Enjoy:
  • del.icio.us
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Slashdot
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
Tags: , , , ,

Get Proper Rankings for Your Blog

Google Page Rank has been king of the web for far too long. They use a “mysterious” and “magical” formula whose inner workings is only barely understood by the public. GPR also has a certain amount of manual human adjustment to weed out those that “cheat the system.” How biased or unbiased this system is has been subject of some debate among bloggers.

Now is the time for change - bloggers can take ranking back into their own hands again. Izea Inc., the company behind PayPerPost and SocialSpark and RockStartUp and firm spacebar atheists when it comes to titles, have launched IzeaRanks.com. This RealRank system is based on the actual popularity and traffic to your site, and is reserved specially for bloggers.

It’s fairly simple to install and use - just visit IzeaRanks.com and sign up, then get the code for the ITK tools (a small snippet of Javascript) that you put into your blog’s HTML code. Usually that’s somewhere inside your blog’s template. Their website has instructions on where it should go.

Once installed, the IzeaRanks RealRank system will show you how many site visitors you have per day and on average for the week and show you on a line graph how you do on a month-to-month basis. You’ll then be ranked amongst other RealRank bloggers. There are already thousands of other blogs on this system, so you don’t have to feel like your ranking is artificially inflated because of a low number of initial rankings.

Finally, show off your blog’s ranking using an IzeaRanks badge, another small snippet of code you can put in your blog’s sidebar or other location that displays your rank for bragging rights.

Sponsored by IZEARanks

Share and Enjoy:
  • del.icio.us
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Slashdot
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
Tags: , , , , , ,