Category Archives: Internet

There is this 30 days of letters blog meme going around. It requires you to write a letter to someone, once a day. One of those requirements is to write a letter to your best friend. The truth is, that’s really hard for me to do. I have so many amazing friends that I cannot help but give more than one of them the title “best.”

My primary best friend is one Ashley and she has held the title since middle school. The thing that I love about our friendship is that she will always hold the title, even if we haven’t spoken in weeks. And sometimes, when we do speak, we can just settle into comfortable silence. It rocks.

Then there’s Dez. We ran in the same circles for years before we began to talk to each other but now we talk to each other pretty much every day. I would be lying if I said she isn’t one of the reasons that I wake up. Truth be told, I can’t remember just when it was that I realized that I need her in my life but I do. We can be silly. We help eachother with websites and ideas. Yet she’s just as good at being my shoulder to cry on when I need her to.

Ashe and I haven’t always been friends. Or even had the best friendship ever. We’re both pretty stubborn when it comes to things. We can both be emotional. But we can discuss things of a serious matter or that are completely nonsensical, too. I enjoy that.

Even those people who aren’t quite my best friends are too awesome for words. Where would I be if Jenn hadn’t taken me in and spread her amazing positivity all over the place? What kind of person would I be if I hadn’t met her little boy? I honestly shudder to think of the thought.

And two people I could never forget to mention: Lars and Christie. Lars is my Dutch friend who is funny and silly and listens to my crap even when I don’t want anyone to have to listen to is. Christie makes me laugh and smile and..despite the fact that we met using pseudonyms, she has quickly become a friend of the real me, too.

Lately, I’ve (re)started talking to two people whom I feel belong in this post but may not even read it. One of them is my friend Giles. He’s been on my MSN list forever, I don’t even know how we met but I do remember that he’s half Irish. Our conversations are always so entertaining. I can be so stupidly funny (or maybe just stupid) with him and it’s great.

And there’s miss Loony, another one of those folks who I knew of but never talked to. Not any more. We’ve chatted quite frequently, often being ridiculously silly. She went me a message one day when we hadn’t talked about how she missed me which was crazy because I’d missed her, too, and it was great knowing that.. I mattered in someone’s life.

You might ask how I gathered all these awesome friends. You might be surprised to hear that this list barely covers my awesome friends. Honestly, I feel awful for leaving people out of this post but, if I didn’t, it would literally never end.

The truth is, I’m really lucky to have my amazing friends but I think part of the reason that I have amazing friends is because I am a pretty good friend myself. That’s definitely one of the things that I have pride about. It’s one of those things that maybe I didn’t intend to do but now I never intend to stop. Quite frankly, if I died and the only good thing people could say about me is that I’m a good friend, then my life will have been well worth it.

I am no super activist. I don’t picket. Or burn my bras. I’m not even good at boycotting stuff. But I talk and, perhaps more importantly, I listen. This is how I’ve come to learn a lot more about issues like feminism and women’s rights in the recent months. And the more I learn, the more I agree. And the more I learn and agree, the more I talk. And not everyone wants to hear about movements. A lot of people are okay with the status quo. A lot of people don’t want to put their necks on the chopping block. People don’t want to lead the fight.

That’s okay. You don’t have to. You can just talk about it. After all, I am only one person. I can only do so much but instead of that convincing me that I shouldn’t try at all, I’ll just open an avenue of communication and help spread the word as much as I can. Isn’t that what change is, anyway? Isn’t knowing half the battle? Even if I’m imparting knowledge to people who may not necessarily care. They may still take something away fro the conversation. And movements need people at every level.

If enough individuals open up those lines of communication and spread knowledge and awareness, change will come. Uniformity will happen. Bonds will form. It may not be easy. Or quick. And sometimes it may not be legal. Yet, I have never shied away from doing something because I was afraid it would be too hard (okay, except for calculus. Sorry Roch!) and I don’t intend to start now.

If all I can do is talk about the things that matter, then I plan to do it.

nor can you live without them. Depending on your sexual orientation, you may think I am talking about men and/or women. I could be but I’m actually talking about computers!

I caught a trojan the other day and I have been battling ever since. It was stupid that I got it in the first place because Avast did warn me but I didn’t respond in a very.. cautious way and got infected. Since then, I’ve run over a dozen programs (at least!). Things have gotten better but not perfect. At first, I had horrible, fake Windows alerts and a pseudo-antivirus program that wanted me to download crap. I managed to get rid of the pop ups and fake program but I kept getting Google results hijacked and my comp was lagging like hell.

Now, the lag seems to be minimal (it is eight years old, after all!) but my results are still, sometimes hijacked. It’s annoying but not completely debilitating. I’m still running daily scans. The frustrating thing is, many programs have caught something but it’s obvious this thing has opened a back door and keeps letting more in anyway.

Like last time, Dez has been a great help coming up with suggestions but I’m pretty close to just buying some protection software.

Daddy Forever is giving away a Lenovo ThinkCentre A63 tower computer and two ThinkVision L1951P LCD monitors and I have to say, I’m in! We all know how old my computer is and as well as it’s served me and as much as I love it, I wouldn’t mind having something newer and something with two monitors! So here’s my blog post entry and here’s hoping that I win. XD

In the event that you’ve been hiding under a rock, some major shit has been going on in the Gulf of Mexico. Namely, an oil rig owned by BP exploded, killing 11 crew members (if I recall correctly) and leaving a hole wide open on the ocean floor, from which oil has been flowing ever since. Known as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, it has become the largest offshore spill in U.S. history and has leaked oil onto shores in Louisiana and Florida.

Now, I’m not oceanographer or bigwig CEO. I’ve never been swimming in the ocean let alone working in it. I know there’s a shitload of pressure 5,000 feet beneath the surface of the ocean but this shit has been going on since April 20th and every solution that BP has tried has been akin to a “band-aid over a bullet hole.” I know some folks hate that terms but, really, it’s true.

In the mean time, 500,000 to 4,200,000 US gallons of oil have been leaking into the oil per day. If you’re a fan of beach vacations or own land in Louisiana, you’re fucked. The news is even worse if you’re some ocean dwelling creature . The internet is full of heartbreaking images of struggling birds and dead sea turtles. It ain’t pretty, folks.

I’m sure we will come up with a solution. Some great minds have already proposed other solutions. I’m sure even if they are valid, bureaucratic bullshit will prevent the solutions from being applied as swiftly as possible and with hurricane season on our hills, this is not good news.

But you know what’s even worse? Even when we do fix this, it will happen again. That’s right. Experts agree that this sort of thing is more likely to happen because we are having to go deeper and deeper to drill for oil and that’s kinda dangerous. Now, the republicans say this can all be prevented if the democrats would just let them drill in the ANWR. And democrats are quick to report that if the republicans would sell all those damned SUVs, maybe this could be prevented.

Maybe. I don’t buy either debate but I do think that something is clear; if there are fingers to be pointed, none of us innocent. Consumers who continued to let car companies build cars that depend on oil? Guilty. Car companies who considered to build those cars? Guilty. Government that failed to protect consumers and the environment while allowing car companies to be all sorts of ridiculous? Guilty.

Fear not, though. I just read an article that lists 10 Things You Can Do to Help. From volunteering to donating, your helping hand will be appreciate. If you haven’t picked up a bottle of Dawn lately or seen some commercials, the dish soap was used during the Exxon-Valdez oil spill to clean up animals. You can register online to donate $1 per every bottle of Dawn you purchase toward the cause. I’m almost out, anyway. You can also help out if you are a sailor or fisherman, own a hair salon or see an animal injured by the oil spill.

It’s the least you can do, really.