GodsendJen

This comes to us from geek blogger Phil over at Haacked.  It's a father's day advertisement from condom-maker Durex.

Online dating caries with it implicit risks. You never know when that anonymous Mr. Right is a personal stalker waiting to happen.  The trunk of his sports car might be filled with guns, knives, rocks or worse--computer equipment.  But the biggest risk is the one you probably don't give a second thought to...that a coworker with PhotoShop might happen upon your profile.  Then just imagine the fun they might have with all those photos of you enjoying yourself in the great outdoors.  If you are a shirtless male with a porn star caliber mustache...well hot dawg we're in business.

If it turns out this is my last post...well it just indicates that my coworker Bruce, the former Marine pictured here, doesn't share our sense of humor.  If that is the case I only hope our government trained him in the art of the quick and painless death.

This week marks the first time in at least 2 months that I've felt good.  Not ok, but really good. I spent much of the last two months trying desperately to funnel enough caffiene and sugar through my body to function.  My house suffered, my yard suffered, and I made sure everyone around me suffer--though hopefully not too much.  The hidden upside to going through cancer treatment is it really makes me appreciate this point, Feeling Good Again.  It's when you wake up in the morning and think you've just gotten a new lease on life.  So appropriately my theme song for this week, and maybe this whole month, is Robert Earl Keen's Feeling Good Again.  How fitting that he's swinging back into town for a show at Variety on May 16th.  Like Robert Earl says,  It feels so good feelin good again.

Feeling good also means I can once again appreciate some of the creative exploits people post on the internet.  It's no secret that I completely dug The Muppet Show as a kid. They were on every afternoon and they were funny. The Muppets didn't try to shove education down your throat with stupid parlor tricks. The shows weren't Brought to You By The Letter 'P' and there was no segment requiring you to slowly count 5 items over and over again.  The Muppets were about entertainment, complete with musical guests.  It was Saturday Night Live for the first-grade set. The movies, they were a little lame.  But the TV show was the best thing on in the afternoon.  What else could make a 6-year-old understand that Harry Belafonte was...cool? Well here is an updated trip down nostolgia lane.  A trailer showing what might have happened if Jim Henson, rather than Quentin Tarantino, had directed Pulp Fiction. Yes, the fountains of blood are missing, but otherwise I say Spot On!

You might have noticed some issues with the site this week. On Monday I decided to upgrade my blogging software. This is a simple task.  Download files from Source Forge.  Change some configuration settings.  Upload the files to my website.  Unfortunately I discovered some problems with my FTP access during the upload.  It allowed just enough FTP wizardry to break the old version of the site, but not enough to install the new version. It has taken a couple of days for the hosting provider to work this out.  But we are back up and running.  Unfortunately I've lost the visual modifications I'd made to the old site, the blogroll and some other links I'd included.  I hope to have them all back by the end of the weekend.  Until then you are stuck with this skinable site.  Just be aware that not all of the themes in that drop down list will work with my content.

When I was 24 and bought my first house I was a novelty amongst my friends.  The only ones with homes were older and married. It never occurred to many of my single women friends that they could buy a house. If they did think about buying a house they quickly changed their mind.  A single woman couldn't really take care of a house alone, right?

Three houses later I'm no longer alone.  A new article on CNN Money reports that single women now account for 22% of the home buyers.  In fact, single women account for twice the home purchases of single men.

I am not, and will never be, a bra-burning feminist.  But  these numbers make me smile--and I'm very happy to not be an oddity anymore.

As A Nation Changes, So Do Homebuyers

One of the wonderful things about the internet is that you can easily proliferate stupid ideas.  This one is dumb, but at least fun.  Its Talk Like A Pirate Day.  In the spirit of this I took a quiz to determine my pirate name.  The result: Bloody Jenny Bonney.  For me the pirates life is about the fighting.  I'm unpredictable but that's ok because a "pirate's life is far from full of certainties."  Get your own at Pirate Quiz. Once you have a name you watch this video to learn how to talk like a pirate and then you can hit the local watering hole and try out these Pirate Pickup Lines.

Turns out this is just a week for gadget finds that scare me.  Today's find is compliments of WSJ Technology Guru Walt Mosberg.  In today's journal Walt reviews a new toilet seat that warms, washes and dries the user. Walt says it best:

The Swash 800 doesn't have every bell and whistle of the top-of-the-line Toto models. For instance, it doesn't automatically raise and lower the toilet seat. But, like its rivals, it has three main features. The first are retractable, automated wands that spray water to cleanse the relevant body areas. The second is a warm air blower that dries those same spots. The third is a heated seat.

You don't have to buy a whole new toilet to use the Swash 800. It installs in place of your current toilet seat and hooks up to the existing plumbing valve that's behind your toilet.

Hrm...but how does it it do its thing?

A wireless remote control panel that runs on two AAA batteries controls the Swash's actions, and this remote can be mounted on a wall if you choose. Ten buttons and a display cover the front of this remote. The two wands are controlled by buttons on the remote grouped according to the gender of the user. There's a single "For Him" button that says "Back" and two "For Her" buttons labeled "Back" and "Front." These buttons are accompanied by icons showing anatomically vague stick figures.

For example, push the "For Her" front button and a pink wand releases a gentle spray. Each wand is rinsed before you use it, and after you arise from the seat, whether or not you used it.

Using the remote, you can adjust the force and temperature of the water, and the temperature of the heated seat. You must manually decide when to stop the water or air.

We found that the heated seat, which can be set to automatically turn off or on at certain times of the day, was a great feature. And the warm water -- once we got the temperature right -- was also a luxurious twist on the normal bathroom experience.

But, while the water was nice, the dryer was awful. It works only at one temperature and speed, and it didn't do the trick for us.

My verdict?  I don't anticipate trying one out any time soon....its just too weird. For what its worth these toilet seats are very popular in Japan--so maybe I'll try one on vacation someday.

WSJ Story

Brondell (The Toilet Seat Company)

Some days I sit around wondering why Geeks get such a bum rap from society about being strange. 

Then there are days like today, where the intersection of Geek and Capitalism come screaming at you from the shadows and frightens the bejeezus out of you.  Today is that day.  In my morning trolling of web sites to distract me from work I found Shiny Shiny.  This site is devoted to gadgets for women.  As long as you stick to the mobile phones and mp3 players its pretty innocuous.  Then I tripped on the landmine....a category called Furnishings and Furniture.  "Diamond Solitare" napkin holders, bizarre visual sensory chairs, furniture that can grow, fish that can't grow....well its just too much to take.  My favorites-- a vacuum cleaner lamp and a robotron toilet paper dispenser.  As friends you have the responsibility to shoot me if these items ever enter my house.

I've been playing with a new photo site online called Tablo.  They do poster style arrangements of your photos in varrying layouts.  This one has pictures of my last trip to Virginia. Click on it to view it in real size.

About once a year I can count on getting sucked in by a show on Discovery.  Past shows to grace my TiVos season pass manager include Monster House, Wing Nuts, MythBusters and American Casino.  I'd been hearing some guys at work talk about their newest Discovery fav, Deadliest Catch.  I hadn't been interested enough to go out and look for it on TV.  I mean it's a fishing show about guys who smell of fish and are out in so much cold that they have icicles on their beards.

Then yesterday, faced with a rainy day in Georgia, I found myself being a bum in front of the tv.  And what did I watch?  Deadliest Catch.  Not just one episode...I found the marathon and had consumed at least 5 hours of that show before I went to bed. I don't know if its the elements, the danger the narrator keeps on telling us about, the Bon Jovi theme music, my efforts to guess the number of crab in a pot, or just the thought of eating so much yummy Alaskan crab.

Get out the peanut and set a wish list...

Deadliest Catch.

When I was growing up I remember trying earnestly to convince my cousin Chad, whose birthday fell on Christmas Day, that my birthday was better because grown-ups care more about Flag Day than Christmas. 

I've since realized the foolishness of that argument and thought that in honor of my birthday it would be fun to create a list of other cool stuff that turned 30 today. You would think that the wonder that is google would make this easy.  Sadly the only pop culture event I could find attributed to my birthday was the premeir of the Gong Show.

What I did turn up was a few terrible things that happened on June 14.

1940: Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration camp was established in German-occupied Poland
1954: The first national civil defense drill was held. 
1985: TWA Flight 847 was hijacked by Lebanese Shi'ites after takeoff from Athens, beginning a 17-day ordeal

Other events attributed to "Today in History"

• In 1775, the United States Army was founded.
• In 1777 we adopt the stars and stripes.
• 1789 - Whisky distilled from maize is first produced by American clergyman the Rev Elijah Craig. It is named Bourbon because Rev Craig lived in Bourbon County, Kentucky.
• In 1846, a group of U.S. settlers in Sonoma proclaimed the Republic of California.
• In 1946 Donald Trump was born.
• In 1951 the first Univac Computer was dedicated.
  
• In 1954, President Eisenhower signed an order adding the words ``under God'' to the Pledge of Allegiance.
• In 1976...well that's when I showed up.

Cheers to getting older.

I finally broke down and got a new camera.  I'll spare you the technical details, but so far I'm happy.  I will try to add a video I took soon...I just need to figure out how to best edit it first. This is my favorite picture so far, from Dorothy's swim meet. For more shots, see the photo gallery.

In the early days of my career I got to work with artsy types, pr folks and writers.  Once I started making money the crowd changed to mostly geeks, often in their 40s.  I have nothing against geeks, and at my core I probably am one, but I've always rejected participation in truely geeky activities. I've never worn a pocket protector, I've never programmed my own calculator, and never written my own operating system. I've also failed to participate in the most essential "geek" undertaking of all, building my own PC.  I enjoy computers, really.  I've used them for work and play since I was 7.  But I've never felt like I've done anything that comes remotely close to needing a custom built pc.  Sure, maybe you can save a few bucks if you really source your parts, but buying the OS liscense trades off with that savings, and you never really have the benefit of a warrenty and those shiny labels that actually tell you what your computer has inside. Partly because of this I've never viewed a PC as art or a conversation piece. This week that changed. 

In his web stumblings a friend came upon a page called "Case Mod" at Neetorama. The first image on this site is the beautiful Moo Cow Moo pc pictured here. That's right, that pretty Holstein is a PC.  The creator of this magnificent conversation piece has complete instructions on his website and action shots detailing various parts of the construction process.  Yes, this appeals to my inner farmgirl, but more than anything it reminds me of a favorite childhood toy.  Other kids had Sit -N- Spin and Legos, I had diecast tractors and one very cool plastic cow.  This cow came equiped with a bendable neck that you could push down into a water trough.  At that point you would pump the tail up and down just like an old well pump.  When Bessie was full her head popped up and she would moo.  Then came the real fun of milking Bessie the plastic cow.  Their were even little white tablets you could use to make sure the water that went in came out looking like milk.  Bessie was a childhood favorite and I really see no reason why bringing her back as a PC would be a horrible idea.