Is it just me?

... or does this seems a bit excessive in the packaging dept? The little Voyager box was shipped inside the big brown box - which was more than twice the size of the item (not to mention the item that was inside the voyager box is just a little thing that sits in my ear).


Off to the recycling bin it all goes...

Because I'm like a proud momma...

Claude and I finished building our bookcases a couple of weeks ago, and considering they took us so long to finish, I feel they deserve a post of their very own. We started making them a couple of weeks before we put the water feature (read: flood) in our bedroom, hallway, livingroom, etc. Needless to say, that put a bit of a crimp in our plans of getting them done in about 2 months. Once our lives settled down a bit, and we had some needed down time, we started working on them again in the fall. We finally got them up on the wall in December (with some strongman help from Tony!) and finished putting the last coats of wipe-on polyurethane on them at the beginning of this month.

I now give you...
drumroll, please...

Our beautiful new bookshelves!!!

Even bigger?!?!

For those of you who are fans of Powell's City of Books in Portland, they are planning on adding 10,000 to 20,000 sf of space to the existing store. How exciting! Claude and I have only visited the store once, but it was one of the best bookstore trips we have ever taken - we found a couple of books on the Konkani language plus some fun Stephen King and Neil Gaiman kids books.

The story was in this morning's Shelf Awareness and gives you the lowdown on what their plans are at this point. They are 'planning in the open' meaning that they haven't finalized the plans and will let the public know as ideas unfold and plans are finalized. The timeline for the increase in size and the improvements is to have it completed by November 2010.

Yay for more books!! We'd better start building bookshelves now...

Very sad...

Heath Ledger was found dead at his apartment at about 3:30 this afternoon. Apparently there was an open bottle of sleeping pills nearby. It's not known whether it was suicide or not at this time, but regardless it is very sad. He was a very talented actor who was not afraid to take chances. I respected him as an actor and an artist - which is pretty much all I know about him. It is always sad when someone dies, and harder when it is unexpected.

Anyway, this my little way of remembering him.

If you would like to read one of the many articles about his passing, you can start here.

Stereo headset for Treo 650 - any thoughts, opinions?

Well, on Thursday my headset for my Treo 650 that allows me to listen to music and answer calls while I am out and about, finally died. Technically it still works, but only if I push the wire into the plug that goes into the phone - not exactly how I want my headphones to work. I bought the current headphones on June, and needless to say, am not impressed with the quality of it. This is not the first part of it to break, but the rest I could live with. This one turns it into a piece of useless garbage. :-(

Anyway, I've been looking at reviews for headsets that allow me to listen to music and also answer a phone call in the middle of a song without fumbling to pull out my phone. There aren't that many out there, and the one I have come across that looks good is the Plantronics Voyager 855. Just thought I would see if anyone has any suggestions or any experience with this headset. I've read the reviews and know that I will have to install some more software on my treo if I decide to go this route... but you never know what knowledge the hive might have that I don't.

Drop me a line if you have any thoughts!
xk

ps... in case you are interested, the piece of crap I bought before was a Seidio 2-in-1 Retractable headphones from Treonaughts (and, no, the 2 star review wasn't there when I ordered it... hindsight... 20/20... yada yada yada).

Just a quick note...

Best freakin' day at work! Had a meeting with UBC Volunteer Services coordinators today and a meeting with our volunteers. I have to say - we have a really great bunch of volunteers. They are all really good, nice, intelligent people.

I love ending my work week feeling like I am doing something good that I believe in and enjoy. Warm fuzzies all around.

Tomorrow... many, many things to do - starting with a meeting with an engineer, then on to a plumber... then out to do some shopping for a special night on Saturday (gotta look purty!).

But right now I feel like I could conquer the world! (right after I finish the laundry :-) )

over and out
xk

What are fundies?

Sounds like a kind of underwear, doesn't it? Well, this is one of the things that I learned today - apparently fundies is a nickname for fundamentalists. While it is kind of a silly name, it is a term used on a somewhat frightening (and sad) website. The website is FSTDT, which stands for Fundies Say The Darndest Things.

At first, reading through their Top 100, I thought it was all made up and someone's idea of a joke. Then I started looking around. The Top 100 page is a collection of comments and opinions written by fundamentalists and collected on this web. All of the comments have an accompanying link to the source, a link to comments by those who read the FSTDT website and a date. (The source information made me have an appreciation for the site - they are willing to list their source and show that they are not putting words in someone else's mouth or paraphrasing.)

Some of the comments are stupid or misinformed, but at least one is unbelievably sad. The third item from the top of the page is from a mother whose son came out to her and she, in her infinite stupidity, tried to make him straight (yes, this is a simplification - to know all the details, go here). At the bottom of the post, you find out that her son eventually killed himself. There is a link to a forum where she is asking her 'friends' if perhaps something she did (like getting rid of his therapist who understood how difficult it was to come out to his mother and told to not be gay) might have contributed to his decision to take his life. Every bloody person on the forum tells that nothing she did was wrong. That she did the right thing trying to 'make him straight' and even asks if he tried to kill himself every time she told him something he did was wrong - trivializing the influence she had when he tried to open up to his mother. In my opinion, all of those people don't deserve to have children, or to breed. All of them contributed to this young man's death - and I wish someday they realize the full weight of that. Sadly, I doubt they will.

Why am I posting this? Because knowledge of what is out there will hopefully make us all stronger - and more willing to speak out against that which we believe to be wrong.

Update: On a personal note, we are going to the wedding of two very, very good friends of ours this weekend, who also happen to be lesbians. I am so very happy to live in a country to that allows people to express their love for each other - a right, not a privilege - everyone should have.

This post is terribly, terribly overdue as I asked a friend if I could post part of her email back in October! She had sent out a great informational email about TELUS instituting Long Distance access charges and her phone call with one of their reps. If anyone has any more info on this, or a different take on it, I'd love to hear about it. I have to admit, I haven't really looked into this myself at this point (I know, I know! Bad library girl!!), but plan to at some point, as one of Claude's cousins is working for a VOIP company and would like to sign us on.

Karen's email, used with her permission:
Subject: TELUS money grab...

Or at least so I think...

Just a warning to all of you! Check your phone bill this month. There might be a notice regarding a $2.95 monthly Long Distance Access charge per month starting next month (or maybe it's just mine, but I thought I'd forward this on...) Basically, even if you don't dial long distance YOU WILL STILL BE CHARGED unless you block LD calls from your phone. If you do block LD calls from your phone and then you want to reinstate LD calls, they will charge you $10 to get the service back up and running.

Utter crap I say!!!

Thankfully I use DialNSave as my 3.8cents a minute LD provider...you dial a local # to then dial a LD number so I can block LD calls but still have LD access. The customer service rep was trying to tell me "well...it's like having insurance for your car." and I responded "so if I don't have a car, I still have to pay insurance?" She didn't really have an answer for that one...I'm guessing they're getting a few phone calls about this hahaha.

Regardless, anyone know a good alternative to Telus?

Fancy fingerwork

Going through my morning website routine, I noticed a post to Lifehacker for a website that allows you to practice and chart your progress at typing. This would have been a great tool when I was in the library tech program trying to speed up my typing. I'm a fast typist, but when I'm being tested I freeze up and my typing speed slows down by at least half. This website for me replicated the feeling of being tested and made me loosen and speed up when I was feeling under pressure (part of it was that you start typing gibberish - something I've never been good at).

So, for those of you that want to improve your typing, want to learn touch-typing or for those of you that want a pat on the back to confirm that you are super-speedy, check out Keybr.com

I'm not going to apologize for not writing here for a couple of months, as that gets old after a while. Let's just say that I hope to make this a habit again - I've missed writing here and now that my schedule has evened out and I'm in a job where I have more time for me, I think there is a distinct possibility that blogging will enter my life again.

Unfortunately, one of the two things that has prompted me to write this morning is a bit of sad news - partiers broke into Robert Frost's home in Vermont and vandalized it. An interesting note at the end of the article in Shelf Awareness was that the publisher for An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England immediately claimed that they had no part in the event. One of the many questions that pops into my mind is "How does he know that?". When you put a book full of ideas out there, how do you know whether your book planted the seed that led to that event. You don't.

My other thought is, "Who thought of such a screwed up idea for a book?" - but that is another entry, as they say.

(I've included the article below - as mentioned, it is from Shelf Awareness.)

Notes: Frost Home Vandalized; Store Reopens After Fire

Barbarians stop by woods on a snowy evening.

Robert Frost's former home in Ripton, Vt., was ransacked last weekend when 50 or more people broke into the historic site for what police called "an underage-drinking party," according to the AP.

The vandals "broke a window to get into the two-story wood frame building--a furnished residence open in the summer--before destroying tables and chairs, pictures, windows, light fixtures, and dishes. Wicker furniture and dressers were smashed and thrown into a fireplace and burned, apparently to provide heat in the unheated building. . . . empty beer bottles and cans, plastic cups, and cellophane apparently used to hold marijuana were also found . . . vandals vomited in the living room and discharged two fire extinguishers inside the building."

Something there is that doesn't love . . .

Some say the world will end in fire . . .

So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.


Incidentally Craig Popelars of Algonquin, which last fall published An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke, commented, "This is not our fault."