Author: Christine

Christine is an Avenger of Sexiness. Her Superpower is helping Hot Mamas grow their Confidence by rediscovering their Beauty. She lives in the Heights in Houston, Texas, works as a boudoir photographer, and writes about running a Business of Awesome. In her spare time, she loves to knit, especially when she travels. She & her husband Mike have a food blog at Spoon & Knife.

BlahBlahBabble

I’m Disappointed…

I’m so disappointed. I write a nice little snippy post about the fact that I think Bush is a nut case and that they lied to us all just to get our approval for the war in Iraq, and there are no trolls to play with? No one to tell me that I am completely wrong and Bush is right? Nothing?

Does everyone suddenly agree with me? I find that hard to believe. I just hope that people didn’t hold back and not comment because they were afraid I would slam them for doing so. I realize that not everyone sees things the same, and I happily welcome differing opinions. So come on – spill the beans!

Amuse Me

I Want It Now!

I must, must, absolutely must have this t-shirt. The best t-shirt ever. I want one before our next H-Town Blogs gathering – it would be perfect! [via Laserone]

Amuse Me

Must… Stop… Laughing…

Just what you’ve been looking for … it’s the D & D Guide For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. All you ever wanted to know about how long they could go for, interspecies fertility, and so much more… [via Ernie]

Geek Love

Newly Digital…

Remember the days when everything digital was so new?

When I was in 4th grade, my school (St. Patrick’s, Kankakee, IL.) received a gift of two Apple II computers. Back then, no one had personal computers in their homes yet – they were new to the market. One of the teachers started offering a Saturday morning computer club, and we could come in and learn how to program cool things. The main thing I remember doing was creating a pixel-based image of a rainbow on the computer, which required that I plot each pixel of color based on the coordinates and the color I wanted it to be. I would spend hours with graph paper, drawing out pictures that I could later program on the computer.

My Mom was a teacher’s aide for the gifted program at the public school at the time, and they had a TRS-80 computer at school. I remember when they sent it off to have it upgraded from 2mb of RAM to 4mb. (Or was it 2k to 4k? Wow, it’s been a long time. I don’t remember.) We got a TRS-80 for our house for Christmas that year. (The Commodore 64 came out right afterwards, but she went with the brand we knew.) It didn’t have a monitor of it’s own, we hooked it up to an A/B switch on the back of the color TV. The “disk drive” was a cassette tape player which was always pretty tempermental about what it wanted to record. I remember entering a program in from one of the books that came with it – it displayed one of Robert Frost’s poems, and then the screen would fill up with snow.

My junior and senior year in high school (Cypress Creek, Houston, TX), I took Computer Science and Computer Math. We still used floppy 5 1/4″ diskettes. I learned things like C, Fortran, Pascal, and a variety of other things I can’t remember today. All of my friends were taking the word processing class – I was more interested in programming games or ways to improve my gaming skills that’s why I used services as Elo Boost to help me with this. When I started playing, I found this new game called CS:GO and honestly I was like addicted to it for months!! I would always be playing to get a higher rank and then I finally found out about Counter-Strike: Global Offensive boost where I could boost my ranking.. without playing!! Plus I had Blogomania to keep me busy after hours), but computers are still a constant part of my life, whether it is for research, for work, for fun, for blogging. All of it is something I never would have imagined back when we had that TRS-80 with the cassette tape drive.

This post inspired initially by Ste, along with Chris Pirillo and Andre Torrez, who wrote theirs as a part of Adam Kalsey’s Newly Digital Project.

BlahBlahBabble

Could It Get Any Worse?

I spent hours at the office yesterday getting documents together, in order, and in boxes ready for FedEx to come and pick up. I scheduled the pickup. I confirmed the pickup twice. (I get a little paranoid like that.) I checked the boxes again before I left to make sure that FedEx could get them. I talked to the guys at the security desk for the building, explaining that FedEx would be coming some time around 6:00 pm (the time FedEx gave me on the phone.) They said it was no problem at all, as long as FedEx could get to the boxes they would let them in to pick them up. “Ok, so I don’t need to sign anything or do anything?” “No, we just have FedEx sign in and they can pick them up.” I left, headed home to get ready for the baby shower, and zoomed off to the south side of town for that.

Uh, only one problem.

FedEx didn’t pick the boxes up. When I go online to track them, there isn’t any record of them. I tried again, thinking it was just a matter of time for them to get in to the system. Nope, still nothing. Finally I got my pickup confirmation information out and called.

It seems that when FedEx showed up to get the boxes, there was no answer. Not clear if that means they buzzed to get in to the loading dock and their was no answer, or they called the office number for the firm, there was no answer, and they just assumed that they couldn’t get the boxes. Either way, they didn’t pick them up.

Craptastic. What am I going to do now? All of their drop off locations are closed on Sunday, so I can’t go and get them and take them to a drop off spot. They are just … sitting there. And I can’t do a damn thing. Spectacularly craptastic.

Update! 2:10pm – My co-worker called from the office – she had gone in to work to prep for a trial that is tomorrow. The lead attorney on the case that the boxes were for is there, and pointed out to her that FedEx didn’t come to get them. They called FedEx too, filed a complaint, and FedEx will be picking them up tomorrow, sending them out for first AM delivery on Tuesday directly to the office where the deposition is at, all at their expense. She was amused that I was checking on them from home, especially when I told her that I was trying to figure out what to do about them. All is good again…