I also Love my boyfriend's new Netbook

A bought himself a netbook for Christmas this year. He's wanted one for a while because we usually take a computer with us when we travel and he wished we didn't need to take such a big obvious computer with us. The netbook was the perfect solution. He asked me if I wanted one since my laptop is slowly dieing, (Seriously, I thought that was mis-spelled, too, but it is apparently the correct spelling!) but I resisted. No, I want a laptop that I can edit videos with and do more than surf the net. I still want a computer I can do those things with, but I have learned to love the netbook. I'm typing on it right now.

It's tiny, it's lightweight, it's much faster than my computer. I don't save anything on it, but instead use my little corner of cyberspace via GoogleDocs, etc., so I don't have to worry about it crashing. We used it (and the iPhone) on our vacation recently to find coupons and hotels, to plot our route, to check email, to write an article for work and to play. It's great.

It's Tuesday morning following vacation, I played catch up yesterday and I have a haircut tonight. Yes, I have nothing better to do with my time than blog about how I love this computer.

XO, netbook, time to get ready for work.

The Key to Good Relationships is...Less Communicating?

The other day, I told E, "We need to hang up - we're just making stuff up now." We weren't literally making things up, but we were making up things to talk about...bringing things up in the conversation that were inconsequential and irrelevant just to keep talking. E and I have been known to speak on the phone for hours at a time and often laugh about how much worse/better/more it was when we lived together - at that time, a quick bathroom break or a night of sleep would be just enough time apart to catch our breaths and come up with even more to talk about!

Lately, we've been having a harder time finding time to actually talk on the phone, so we've started leaving each other long voicemail messages...by long, I mean that the voicemail system actually cuts us off because we have "exceeded the time allowed..."


...and then we sometimes call right back and keep talking...


...for as many as 4 messages worth. That's about 20 minutes of voicemail. I like to blame E for this situation, because, let's face it, the girl can talk! But I am equally culpable for it and may, in fact, have started it, because I have a minimum 30 minute commute each way every day to work. I have tried to curtail this lately - I suggested we try emailing one another a couple of times a day instead - but you know it's gotten out of hand when you have to state that the RULE (as opposed to the exception thereto) is that you listen to one anther's messages when you can and that they are not important unless we text one another otherwise. The RULE is that our messages are not important. There's something wrong with that, right?

E's step mother once told her that "The key to any successful relationship is communication." Well, in addition to my original response, which was "No shit, Sherlock," I'd like to refer to the following:

Do Less communicating. Less talking, less yelling, less arguing, less emails and IM and Twittering, less phone calling. While I think communication is extremely important, and should be one of the keys to any relationship, I also think we do it too much. Especially as most of it becomes nothing but jabbering at each other, with very little actual listening. It is noise. Let silence into your life. Let stillness pervade our minds. When you do communicate, make it count, make it sincere, and more than you talk, listen. Make every email count. Only IM when it’s necessary. Spend less time on the phone and Twitter and Blackberry and iPhone, and more time with humans, more time with yourself, more time in the present.

[Emphasis mine.] This, from the Zen Habits blog, which I found by Googling "best blogs" and checking out Time's 2009 Top 25 Blogs. As they say in the film industry, "I have no notes." I cannot even think of what to add to that as it is a finer summary than I could come up with. And it fully expresses my opinion of Twittering - who wants to be Tweeted for God's sake with all the other electronic/media/noisy chatter filling up our lives already?! So, dear friends and readers, enjoy the silence.

Hello, Reader, This is The-B-Hive

I didn't know that Cotillion was a class, but according to Wikipedia and King of the Hill, it is. Watching KOTH and Bobby trying out his newly learned manners on the phone got me wondering - does caller ID eliminate the need to identify one's self when making a call?


At first, I thought maybe it did - after all, you've got a pretty good chance to know who it is.... Doesn't seem that many people identify themselves when making calls anymore anyway and maybe that's because of caller ID - after all, it's not the latest invention.


After some thought, I think this is not such a positive development, though. At work, I have caller ID on my phone, so I can see from which phone someone is calling me, but I do not know who is calling and without them identifying themselves, I have to either ask who is calling or not care.


Because I share my phone with my manager, I usually pick up the phone and answer, "This is The-B-Hive." When I call someone, usually in response to a page, I also start by saying, "Hi, this is The-B-Hive, did you page?" Even at my clinic, if I intercom from one office to another, I quickly and briefly identify myself to the other person.


And it's not just at work, but even on personal phones, especially with the use of cell phones. I've both answered and made calls from my partner and my friends' phones and people will often simply start talking assuming that I am the owner of the cell phone without waiting for me to identify myself and without identifying themselves.


I haven't had any major misunderstandings or cases of mistaken identity from someone failing to identify themselves on the phone, but I think it's one of the niceties that keeps society lubricated and flowing smoothly, like most rules of etiquette.

Great Mixed Tapes

Went to a White-Elephant re-gifting exchange last night and one of the gifts consisted of several cassette tapes. This on the heals of hearing how VHS as a format is pretty well dead, though this is not news to most of us. Cassette tapes seem to be pretty well dead, too and I'm not sure that CDs could have done it without the assistance of MP3s. I like the technology, but I'm saddened to think that no more will young lovers and friends express themselves in the language of mixed tapes. I pulled down a box today to find the few cassette tapes I still have and found the boxes, but not the tapes to a few of my favorite mixes. Here are a playlist from a mixed tape out of the singles that I liked on various CDs before selling them back to a used CD store.

Lucas With The Lid Off
Red Hooded Sweatshirt
I Got A Girl
Stars
The Freshman
Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?
All I Wanna Do
I Don't Want to Wait
Voodoo
Eternal Flame
What Do You Hear In These Sounds?
Falling In Love
Leaving Las Vegas
Strong Enough
We Danced Anyway
Out of My Head
Angus Soundtrack
Veinto De Cambio
Sex and Candy
With or Without You
River of Dreams
Luka

When I hear certain songs, my mind automatically queues up the song that followed on my old favorite mixed tapes. Many of the songs are things I wouldn't have heard otherwise or never had on any other format. I probably couldn't name the songs or the artists, either, so I probably won't ever acquire that tune. When I grabbed these empty tape cases, I actually got excited about recreating a mixed tape that my first college roommate gave me - it was a great tape - but alas, this case was just an album she copied for me and not the mixed tape that I so enjoyed.

I'm clutter clearing tonight, but I'm feeling a little nostalgic about it.

Background Noise

Dear Friend,

I'm so sorry for suddenly ending our phone conversation, but somehow I just couldn't handle the background noise on your end of the phone. I look forward to talking more soon.

Love,Me


When is it okay to let someone go because there is too much going on on their end of the phone? Is it okay? If they can concentrate on the conversation, should I be able to deal with it? If all is calm and quiet at my end, I think I deal with noise on the other side better, but if things are hectic on my end, it just doubles the stress level, because I've got barking dogs, heavy bags and a full bladder on this end and people talking and milk steamers screaming on the other end. And I can deal better with it if I know the noise is finite, as, for example, as passing ambulance or something one is walking past. This afternoon I all but yelled at and hung up on my good friend because I got so stressed out by all the background noise.

Surely that was not polite, but this gets back to the heart of the intrusion of our technology into more private realms of our lives. There was some article online a few weeks ago about movies that are totally out of date, such as Pillow Talk, because of the totally outdated technology of the telephone party line. The common scene I recall is the restaurant maitre d' bringing the telephone to the table for VIP guests or requesting they come with them to take a call - those days are gone, it seems (except at my work, where a very comfortable elder woman makes herself right at home and who's husband calls her there asking for her by name, but not specifying that she is a shopper and not an employee - how strange). Cell phones mean everyone is on the phone in restaurants. Despite my connected-at-the-hip (literally, with a belt clip) relationship with my cell phone, I actually appreciate those restaurants with a no-cell policy.

During a business meeting yesterday, I left my ringer on because I needed to receive a call or text message to perform an exchange during the meeting. I apologized in advance and excused myself away from the group when the phone rang, but it rang no less than three times in excess of the call I was waiting for. It was obnoxious and reinforced my desire to keep my phone on silent at all times. I hate hearing the ringing phone, be it mine or anyone else's! I don't know how I would feel if I were the barista helping my friend today. I don't know if my friend kept the phone or earpiece in place while talking to the barista. I don't know if my friend raised her voice so that I could hear her clearly or if that annoyed the people around her. I do know that I did not enjoy the noise of the cafe intruding on my life at that time and despite my desire to talk to my friend, I let her go in favor of a more peaceful moment.

Cell Phones Take Over the World!

I have a pet peeve that is getting harder and harder to avoid. It happens with my partner, my best friends, my business partners, random strangers and family. It's something that almost everyone, including myself, has done at some point and which sometimes seems pretty innocuous. It's just answering your cell phone - what's the big deal?

I'll tell you what the big deal is: it's rude.

When I'm spending time with someone and our intimate or friendly conversation is interrupted by an annoyingly ringing cell phone and then, even worse, my conversational partner picks up said annoyingly ringing cell phone and proceeds to start another conversation, I am APPALLED. I could make a list of all the reasons and ways that this is disrespectful, but I'll just give two variations on one: a) you aren't valuing my time and b) you aren't valuing our time together. I could also go into lengthy explanations of that, but it's really self-explanatory and I value my time enough not to take it up explaining that.

I just wanted to get that off my shoulder - it's been it's own little chip world there for a little while now. Please, please, please, people, take into consideration that the technology we have is supposed to enhance our communication and our lives but not take them over. Spend quality time online or on the phone with friends and family, but don't disrespect or disregard the people who are with you right now. Just like at the movies, silence your cell phones, unless you truly are expecting an important call. If that's the case, let your companions know in advance and beg their pardon when you have to walk away to take the call. Ninety-nine percent of the time (I'm making that up) you won't miss an emergency (and the 1% of the time that you do, what could you have done anyway?).

Computer Maintenance for the Un-Savvy

So I tried to maintain my computer tonight and almost blew it up. My boyfriend is a computer whiz, so he was able to fix what I broke, but we started off the evening thinking I might have to buy a new computer!

It started with me deleting the "guest" account he had created for himself on my computer - you know, when you start up your computer and you select the use icon from the front page and enter your password. That account had been painfully slow and really unusable anyways, so I got rid of it. Then I decided to defragment my C:// - after the analysis, the computer reported that it needed to defragment, but didn't have enough memory to do it properly.

So I decided to delete Norton Internet Security software which I'm no longer using. That un-installation was taking a long time, so I left it while I went to work, thinking I would start the defrag when I got home since I had company coming and wouldn't be on the computer anyways. When I got home, the computer was frozen in the middle of the un-install, same place it had gotten hung up before. Unfortunately, I forced an End Program through Task Manager and then couldn't restart the uninstall and started getting messages that my computer was dangerously low on memory. We later learned that lots of people have this problem and the Norton is a bitch to remove. Removing your Norton program using SymNRT helped though.

Before we did that or found that, we cleared up a ton of space (from 60 MB available to about 3GB) using CCleaner and deleting some duplicated or unnecessary programs from my hard drive. After all that, we ran Spybot and Ad-Aware which found NOTHING! Previously, while running on my Norton subscription with automatic live updates, both programs had found critical objects that required attention. So, in addition to being a pain in the ass to remove and almost shutting me down, Norton wasn't even providing the same level of security I now have with AVG, a free Internet security program. I can't recommend AVG more glowingly - it automatically updates and scans the computer EVERY DAY.

So, from now on, cross my heart, it's a weekly computer maintenance day with the following tasks in order of operations:

• Backup all
• CCleaner
• Check for unwanted/unneeded programs and delete
• Clean up unneeded documents and files
• Spybot and AdAware
• Defragment
• Restart several times
• Backup all

And, as part of the beauty of the Internet, you may start to see some things posted here as a place for safe-keeping. Oh, how I love and hate technology.

The Phone is There for MY Convenience

We have all these modern conveniences, all these devises to give us wireless and constant access to work, our friends and family and even the entire world-wide-web. Seems that all this access should improve our lives, but I think it takes careful managing of our relationships with technology to make it work for us, instead of allowing it to work us.


Starting with cell phones. I decided not to get a land line, so now I only have a cell phone. I love my cell phone. Like pets, it's okay to love your cell phone so long as you don't love your cell phone. I enjoy the convenience of making calls wherever I am: stuck waiting for my number to be called at the DMV, on the way to my friends house to see if they need me to stop at the store for anything, in the airport, by the pool. I especially enjoy the ease and convenience of text-messaging. I can just ask the question, send the reminder, share the info really fast without actually having to take the time to speak to the person. And it's easy to get the same from my friends too. I find this less disrespectful to the person I am with than actually making a call, but I know it drives some people, that is, A, crazy.


What I hate is receiving calls. When I'm home alone or needing to speak to someone, I love people to call me, but if those conditions aren't met, I hardly answer. It's nothing personal and often it's unintentional because my phone is on silent so I don't notice the call anyway. But even if I notice the call, I often silence or ignore it if I'm with someone or doing something. Because "the phone is there for my convenience." I use quotes because this is, in fact, a quote and not my words at all, though I can't for the life of me remember where I read that story. At any rate, the phone is there for my convenience and I'm not going to pick up if it's not convenient. That may mean I'm busy, I'm with someone, I'm just not in the mood to talk, I'm not in the mood to talk to that particular caller or that I'm suffering from cell phone head, since that's the only phone I have now.

I want to encourage, well, everybody, especially those others who also only have cell phones, to consider taking this approach as well. There is no reason that using or having a cell phone, even if it is one's only phone, should mean that we have to be accessible all the time. The silent and ignore features are there for our convenience too.