I finally hit the 1,000 follower mark on Twitter over the weekend and with just 31 days left of 2009, I’ve begun to contemplate my 2010 career paths, and must I say “development.” Simply, the comic strip says it all: I want to “Tweet for Food.”
Although, I’m non-traditional in my Thanksgiving feast and opt for wine and pizza over turkey and mashed potatoes, my food choices don’t translate to the heart of the day–giving thanks. So in the spirit of the day, I give thanks for:
1. Twitter - This simple tool has provided me with a world of new friends, which I enjoy hanging out with both online and in person. Together we share information, drink wine and rant about what ever bugs us.
2. College Basketball - The dreary days of February and March are much more bearable with the thrills of the ACC basketball and March Madness.
3. Airplanes - Despite all the crazy added fees, airplanes open me to the world of travel, for which I could never live without.
4. Clean Air- Having visited China where there are no regulations on pollution and a simple walk outside leaves you covered with soot and dust in your mouth, I am forever grateful for clean air.
5-iPhone - What can this phone not do? It keeps me connected to everyone and everything.
6. Paxton, the cat –For 12 years, this cat has provided me with friendship and unconditional love.
7. Google - If I have a question, Google’s always there.
8. Health- A traditional response for Thanksgiving, but I’m especially grateful since I get the flu once every 14 years and a cold every 5 years. I’m a very healthy specimen!
9. Botox - I don’t get this is as much as I’d like, but it’s a miracle for minimizing the aging process.
10. Family - Another traditional response, but when things are tough, you’re stuck or need some extra help, I can depend on them.
Thanksgiving’s just five days away, but a local radio station and countless retailers have bypassed our forefathers in favor of 24 hour Christmas music. Now, I agree that the birth of Jesus should get more attention and yes, more songs, but let’s not totally shaft our forefathers. Don’t they deserve more than crowded airports, bloated stomachs and highway traffic jams? After all, they risked their lives in search for the freedoms we enjoy today. Shouldn’t they have a few songs too? Yet, in my quest to find songs dedicated to these brave colonists, for which Thanksgiving was founded, sadly I only found one: “Faith of our Fathers.“
What started as a typical “Amy” Monday of running errands while the rest of the world went back to work, quickly turned into an exercise of piecing my digital life back together. An hour into my daily Twitter gig, I get an annoying notice to restart my machine. Finally, after I’ve completed all my Twitter-job duties, I restart. To my horror, the 10 month Dell never comes back to life. It sits there with a black screen and no power pumping through the power cord. “You’re kidding, me right?” I’ve already had two motherboard replacements and I knew I had just killed the third.
Yippee! I get to call friendly, Dell Technician somewhere in India. An hour later, I have a service number for a system replacement. Perfect—now how do I get all the crap off my current system? I was totally having a Carrie Bradshaw moment when she takes her computer to the crazy 24 hour tech place and they tell her “did you back-up?” Panic runs through my body and I wonder about every blog post, every photo and every video and song I had saved on that PC. And then there were all those Favorites I had saved…my lifeline to the online world. Could my digital existence be gone that quickly? Not really! For $200-$300, I could have my hard drive extracted and all data recovered. But wait, I don’t have an extra $300! Fortunately, some of my data was saved last week when I upgraded to Windows 7 so it couldn’t be a total loss. It all came down to how much was I willing to lose to put myself back together?
And then it occurred to me. I had a lot of my data stored on the cloud. All my email was on a Comcast server. Many of my photos were on Flickr or Facebook—the others were on my external drive because they were too big for the hard drive anyway. My blog posts resided on my server for all my websites. All my presentations for my classes and student assignments were saved on the Wiki. Even last night I had updated all my writing notes to the Google Notebook. And yeah for me for importing all my Favorites to my new favorite social media site: Delicious. The cloud had saved me.
So by day’s end, my digital life although a little fragmented was recovered. I had survived the crash with minimal loss. Thank heavens for the cloud!
If you know me, you know I don’t always have a filter, and that’s just for the stuff that hits the air waves. For the other stuff, it still lingers in my head–until now! My apologies if you find offense…it’s just what goes on in my head.
1.A Facebook profile photo should be about you, not your kids.
2. Going to work is just like high school, but with adults, acting like kids.
3. Amen to Botox!
4. You don’t look important when you immediately make a call on your cell phone once the plane has landed. You look needy!
5. Just because everyone else is the crossing the street doesn’t always mean it’s safe to cross. You’re only contributing to more bodies to pick up when cars speed around the corner and run you all over, which will lead to a major traffic jam and piss off more drivers.
6. Yes, I’m over thirty, pretty and single. I don’t see the problem.
7. Pregnancy is a choice, not a disability. So why are there special “mother-to-be” parking spaces?
8. Long hair after the age of 45 does not work for all women. Likewise, women who refuse to cut less than 2 inches off their hair or leave it long because their boyfriend/husband likes it are very insecure women.
9. If you’re going to have a dog, you might as well have a kid. They both require baby-sitters and have to be walked.
10. College is more about the experience than what you’ll do with your major afterwards.
11. Sunscreen is the best anti-aging cream and it only costs $10 a bottle.
12. A career in Human Resources is a career in adult baby-sitting.
13. Quality over quantity in all aspects of life.
14. Trends are for the few and not the many.
15. Diversity does not always translate to an African-American woman/man leading the Diversity function in organizations. I thought our country was further along than that.
16. Making 5 decisions in 20 seconds at Starbucks does not qualify for good decision-making skills.
17. Ugly people attract other ugly people and pretty people attract other pretty people.
18. A dentist has a captive audience.
19. I didn’t understand why my friends couldn’t watch Three’s Company growing up. I just thought the way Crissy laughed was funny.
20. I turn the channel every time the Sarah McLaughlin Human Society commercial comes on—that’s just too many sad little faces for me to watch.
