I know they’re watching 30 September 2009

Last night I ran into a bit of frustration.  I could not, for the life of me, get third-party apps to work on Facebook.  While this isn’t a huge deal (I think I am over FarmVille and Fish World already), I was rather distraught over the loss of Word Twist and Scrabble.  I need some Word Twist in my life!  I kept getting this odd redirect error on Firefox, and a search of the All-Knowing Interwebz led me to believe it was an issue with Firefox, especially since I could get my apps to work on IE.

Apparently that was a fluke, however.  After deleting my history, my cookies, and eventually completely wiping Firefox off my system and starting with a new installation, I was still back at square one.  I downloaded Safari with the hopes that maybe that would work.  I got the same error.  That’s when I tried IE again and got nowhere.

Hmm.

Kurt logged into his Facebook account on this computer, while I tried mine on his, and while he could successfully check on his mob, I couldn’t get anywhere with my apps.  A-ha!  Obviously it wasn’t me, it was my FB account.

Well, as long as we’ve got that sorted out.

That’s when I tried to scope out FB’s help forum, which is an utter laugh.  I found about a hundred postings in a thread all about the error I was getting, but the last post really took the cake.  Apparently this woman emailed Facebook to let them know about this error, and they emailed her back to tell her her question had been answered in the forum.  They included a link — back to the thread in which everyone complained about the issue, but had nothing regarding whether it was being fixed or even worked on!

Look, I know FB is a free service, and as such, I won’t complain about it too much.  I’m not one of those people who knee-jerks and says, “I WILL NEVER USE YOUR SITE EVER AGAIN” (or “buy products from your company” or “patronize your business” — whatever the situation calls for) because most of the time, it’s a one-time fluke.  I was searching for something on Amazon yesterday, and the product I was looking at received one star in the sole review it had garnered only because the customer had gotten screwed over by the company he bought it from through Amazon.  But most people aren’t going to read the review to realize the issue wasn’t due to the product; they’re just going to see one star and move on.

The world could use a bit more patience and understanding, is what I’m saying.

The thing is, though, I think FB could do its users a huge service and at least pretend to address their users’ issues, instead of making them think that it’s just about impossible to get any kind of resolution.  Take, for example, Flickr.  There are people that are crazy obsessed with their Flickr, worse than I am.  And when Flickr goes down, which is rarely, they freak the heck out.  But here’s the thing — there are help forums that are easy to find and navigate (unlike FB’s) in which one can post about a technical problem and have a staff member respond at some point to reassure the users that they’re aware of the problem and working on it.  Usually the subsequent postings are encouraging and grateful that Flickr is doing such a great job of trouble-shooting.

What FB could do is post a link under the help menu with “Known Bugs and Issues” or something along those lines, or maybe even have a link on the front page that says, “Having technical issues?  Click here” that will take you to the troubleshooting page, in which users can post about their problems.  And then FB can have a staff member or even a volunteer with direct access to FB’s technical department post something like, “Thanks for letting us know about the issue!  We’re aware of it and are working diligently on this problem.”  I mean, it doesn’t even have to be true.  But I guarantee it’ll ramp down the jerky responses of “FB SUX! I’m moving to MySpace!” and also help to make users feel more secure.

But what do I know?

Anyhow.

So Mary Ellen is one year old already, and yesterday she had her well-baby check-up.  She is a big baby, that’s for sure!  She came out to 23½lbs and 29¾” tall.  She’s something like 80th percentile for her weight and 66th percentile for her height.  That surprised me slightly; she looks awfully tall to me.

I’m amazed at the differing opinions among doctors.  My doctor thinks ME looks great, nice and healthy and perfect for a one-year-old girl.  Yet when we ran into a couple with a son just a couple months older than ME, and the exact same size, their pediatrician said their son looked like he was 2, and that he was too big for his age.  How does that even happen?  It’s not like you can control how a kid grows.

The little boy was dang cute, though, I must admit.  There’s just no resisting the cute ones!

Lucy in the sky 28 September 2009

Did you hear?  The Lucy in the song “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds” has died of lupus.  She was only 46.  John Lennon always insisted that his son Julian came home at the age of 4 with a drawing and insisted it was “Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” Lucy being a classmate of his.  Everyone else says it’s a reference to LSD, but whatever.  It’s still sad, and 46 is too young.

Today I have certainly earned my [imaginary] paycheck!  A few days ago, I wanted to read while Kurt was watching tv, but the problem was, the most comfortable place to read, aside from laying in bed, is the living room.  Which is where Kurt was watching tv.  There’s an armchair in the office, but there’s just something about the office.  I don’t care to spend a lot of time in there.

So I came up with a plan over the weekend.  I told Kurt I wanted to start looking for a small table to use as a nightstand on our many trips to antique stores and thrift stores, and that I also want my very own rocking chair.  I’ve wanted one for so, so long!  We weren’t able to find anything good tables at the thrift store on Sunday, though I did find these cute telephone tables from the 1970s.  I considered buying one, since they were less than $10 each, but then we’d have to sand and paint them.  I might still go back to get one, now that I have an idea of my limitations for that area.  And the chairs that were available at the thrift store — mmm, no thanks.  We might have to go to my new favorite antique store up in Massachusetts this weekend to see what they have.

For some weird reason, I decided to see what I could do with my new plan today.  No, I don’t have my new table, and no, I don’t have my rocking chair, but I do have my hope chest and an old armchair we got for free (my favorite price!) back in Washington state.  My neighbor across the street was getting rid of it, she having picked it up from a church rummage sale or some such with plans to reupholster it.  It’s in desperate need of reupholstering, at least the matching hassock is.  There’s a huge hole in the top of the hassock’s fabric that has only gotten worse over the last three years.

Here you can see the two rooms I focused on today.  On the left is my bedroom, not to point out the obvious, and to the right is our office.  It isn’t really an office; it was supposed to be ME’s room, but we decided to keep the girls in the same room for right now.  Mainly the office is used as Kurt’s dressing room so he doesn’t disturb me at the ass crack of dawn when he goes to work.  Anyhow, these photos are taken mid-demolition.  You can see that I’ve already gotten the armchair into the bedroom, and the stacks of books are from the black bookcase which is now residing in the office.

Partway through the demolition, I decided it would be a good idea to finally get rid of the computer armoire in the right corner of the office as well.  It’s just this big, honkin’ piece of furniture that houses a dead computer and all kinds of random stuff.  It was beyond time for me to take care of everything.  Now the dead computer is in my closet until I can find some time to reformat it, and I have managed to sell the armoire for twenty-five cash dollahs!  I made up a flyer for Kurt to post at work, and the first guy who saw it wanted it.  And now it’s out of my house. Woot!

After several hours of hard work, in which I also culled many, many books from my collection, as I have run out of room on three and a half bookshelves plus the interior of my hope chest (some people keep linens in their hope chest; I keep books), I managed to acquire for myself this lovely, lovely reading nook.

Behold:

Now isn’t that just the bee’s knees?  It looks so cozy and relaxing, and amazinglyenough, I think my room looks bigger now!  My hope chest is still my nightstand at this point, and what I like about having the armchair next to the bed is my book is already right there.  I’ll just sit down in the chair and everything will be ready.  Awesome.

Plus the office looks so much more open.  Grace’s books are on the bottom two shelves of the bookcase, and I plan on giving her the top shelf when she needs it.  My parents bought that keyboard for me when I was seven, figuring it’d be a lot easier to move a light keyboard than a heavy piano as we journeyed from one duty station to another.  Now Grace loves to play on it, and maybe one day she’ll get piano lessons, as I did when I was a kid.

I still need to find a new home for the printer in the office, though I have a feeling it’s going to be trashed or recycled or whatever it is that you do with printers.  After we moved here, that printer started bleeding black all over the page, and changing the print cartridge didn’t help.  So we ended up buying a new one for cheap about a year ago.

See the framed pieces above Grace’s bookshelf?  I stitched those when I was in kindergarten, I believe it was.  It could have been pre-K, I’m not sure.  Either way, they are OLD.  They’re yarn stitched on burlap, and I vividly remember stitching them.  I remember the smell of the burlap, the feel of the yarn, the large blue plastic needle I was using, and how I was bored with stitching while I was doing the grapes one — which is why you can see that I wasn’t exactly following the lines anymore. (If you want to see that photo larger, you can visit my Flickr page.)

I’m quite pleased with the new look to my house.  Now if only I could do the same for the rest of my home…

Looking out to sea 26 September 2009

The light was gorgeous tonight as we tooled around Tiverton.  We’d gone to dinner at a local seafood restaurant, courtesy of Restaurant.com’s hugely discounted gift certificates.  There’s no way I would have felt comfortable spending that much money.  The entire dinner, I was looking around and noticing how many white-haired people there were.  We were the youngest folks in there, and I’m not counting Grace and Mary Ellen.  Amazingly enough, they were really well-behaved.  I was so pleased.

But after dinner we didn’t feel like going home again, so we drove around to see what could be seen — which is usually what we end up doing when we can’t think of anything else.  I’m glad we did!  I was able to get some really beautiful shots of the light on the water.  I’ve been feeling a bit… uninspired when it comes to my photography lately, and the problem is, this is the worst time to feel that way!  The foliage is starting to turn, and I know I’ll be able to get some gorgeous photos — if I can get my act together.

Last night I went to our local high school football game, held in supposedly the worst area in Rhode Island.  My friend was joking that we should have been packing while at the game.  It was a little unnerving to see security and police officers right there on the field.  Nothing even remotely exciting happened, fortunately.  Even the game was a little boring.  We scored two touchdowns in the first two minutes of the game and ultimately won with a score of 36-16.

Because there came a point where I wasn’t really paying attention to the game, I struck up a conversation with the man next to me.  He’d been wandering the sidelines with his big dSLR camera, and when I noticed it was a Nikon I began to drool a bit.  Then he started telling me about the medium-format camera he has, and the darkroom in his home in which he can develop his own black and white photos.  My drool became almost unmanageable at that point.  He even let me play with his camera!  It was seriously amazing — the viewfinder was at least twice the size of my own, which made composition so much easier.

I almost ran off with his camera!

It was so nice to talk to someone who understands photography and cameras, though.  I probably talked his ear off with the equipment I have, and the stuff I’d like to one day acquire.  At the end of the night, we exchanged information, and he sent me a kind email with some really encouraging words about my photos.  I checked out his site, and let me tell you — he’s got some serious talent.  I’m sure I can get plenty of inspiration poking around in his photo and seeing how he sees things.

Speaking of photography, have you seen THIS?  This man set out to prove that the best camera is the one that’s with you — a philosophy that I subscribe to, and not just because I don’t have the biggest and best of cameras.  It just galls me sometimes when people tell me, “Oh, of course you get good shots!  Look at your camera!”  Well, would you say to an author, “Of course your novels are bestsellers!  You have such a nice computer!”  or to an artist, “You paint so well because you have fancy paintbrushes!”  No, you wouldn’t.  A camera is only a tool.  Ansel Adams had the simplest of cameras, yet look  at his amazing photos.  It’s all about being able to see in your mind’s eye what you want to capture in a frame.  Some folks have it, some don’t.  And a camera won’t make someone a great photographer.

It does help, however.  I would really love to upgrade my camera just to make it easier to play with my settings, plus not being limited to certain lenses would be nice.  Maybe one day…. maybe if I win the lottery…