Where 798 pages of Facebook Applications and OCD meet.

Last weekend my husband and I went to visit my brother and sister-in-law as part of the official start of our summer vacation. They both have their own laptops, but apparently my brother insists on keeping his in its virginal, pristine condition by refusing to allow anyone to download anything onto it from the Internet. So anytime this need appears, my sister-in-law’s computer is pressed into service.

It’s a good thing they’d told me about this on an earlier visit. Because otherwise, the conversation I overheard between them would’ve been even more disconcerting than it already was:

My sister-in-law: “So, where’s ‘The Whore’?”

My brother (looking around, completely unconcerned): “Um, I think she’s in the bedroom.”

My husband: Well, a war that you probably weren’t even aware of looks like it may finally be coming to an end.

Me (thinking hard about where there might currently be a war): Afghanistan? Iran? The Balkans? Lichtenstein?

My husband: Have you heard of “The Format Wars”? Blue Ray v. HD DVD’s?

Me: (blink)

My husband: Well, Blockbuster just announced that they will only be stocking Blue Ray DVD’s from now on, so hopefully soon there will finally be one standard form of high def DVD’s, and we can start buying movies on DVD again.

Me: Um,…yay?

A few blog posts ago JAM accurately noted that one of my answers to the Friday’s Feast questions, specifically the one stating that my husband is in charge of all technology in our relationship, was causing me to lose nerd points.

He is right, of course, when he says that “a true geek wanna-be would have answered with something.” That goes a long way towards explaining why I only scored as lightly nerdy on my quiz

So I was very excited to discover yet another nerdiness assessment the other day, because it looked at lots of different areas besides math and science, and I thought I had a chance to score a little higher (I know-it’s just sad, isn’t it, that scoring higher as a nerd is one of my ongoing personal quests?)

So here are my latest results:

Your Geek Profile:

Academic Geekiness: High Music Geekiness: High Fashion Geekiness: Moderate Gamer Geekiness: Moderate SciFi Geekiness: Moderate Geekiness in Love: Low Internet Geekiness: Low Movie Geekiness: Low General Geekiness: None

I am, of my own free will, reading a book about HTML coding,

AND

My eyes have neither spontaneously burst into flames, nor have they begun to bleed down the front of my face.

Listen. Are those hoof beats I hear?

Today dooce referenced a song that sent me flashing back to my early years. She mentions “trying to coax Leta into singing Mormon hymns over the phone one more time. Jesus, he wants her for a sunbeam”. I think that someone, somewhere must have decided that Jesus wants all young children for sunbeams, because I too sang that song, but as a (former) Baptist, not as a (former) Mormon.

However Jesus appears to be keeping up with the times, because yesterday he emailed me. And now, instead of wanting me “for a sunbeam, to shine for him each day”, he wants me to refinance our house with his mortgage company. “Our loan department is trying to reach you One Last Time since previous attempts to contact you all failed.” Apparently I missed the burning bush and the pillar of fire by night, so he had to resort to email.

The times, they are a-changing.

 Dooce, sometimes spam is funny, Tech NO, These Are the Days of My Life					

I am just loving my new blog tool, Hit Tail. It’s providing me with tons of data about my blog, which of course I am just passing right along to my engineer husband (AKA, “Someone who actually knows what to do with scientifically gathered data”.) And then that leaves all the fun stuff for me, like today’s Top Ten List:

The Top Ten Funniest Keywords Or Phrases People Are Using To Find My Blog On The Internet

10. using your witch powers

9. ostrich vomit

8. cat poo in tub

7. dirty jobs hippo

6. mike rowe tooth

5. benign wart on head

4. rats in our house

3. neon orange bug

2. naked vacation

1. ryan is a poo

About two years ago my husband and I went to the electronics store to purchase a DVD burner and an iPod. He sent me to find the iPod, and went off in search of the DVD burner himself. I personally know nothing about electronics, but I memorized everything he told me to ask for, and I figured that I could lean heavily on the approach to male salespeople known as ” The Damsel In Distress.”

Unfortunately, I was in for a very rude awakening. Apparently guys who work in electronic stores are completely oblivious to damsels in distress.

(Important Side Note: The other group this doesn’t work on is Other Women. Say, for example, that you go to a dinner party at a friend’s house. And say that once you’re there you locate a guy and decide to focus your “Please rescue me!” energy on him. The guy may very well want to ride to your rescue, but he won’t have the chance to do anything about it. Because you will be dead. Because the woman to whom the guy belongs will have stabbed you in the face with her salad fork. But, I digress.)

So one day I was recounting this story to a friend of ours, with special emphasis on the fact that while I, personally, was passed over by at least three salespeople, the moment that my husband began walking towards me clerks flew over from all corners of the store, and were falling all over themselves to help him. (And yes, I am bitter.)

When I was done with my story our friend replied, “Well I know exactly why that happened. It’s because you don’t have enough nerd points.”

(Another Important Side Note: This is the same friend who, when told that I had become a Certified Life Coach responded by declaring that the entire profession of coaching is a made-up job.

My husband tried to mediate this little “misunderstanding” one day, and so he asked our friend, “Well, didn’t you ever wonder who you are, or why you’re here, or what you’re supposed to do with your life?”

And our friend replied, “Well, yeah. But then I turned ten, and I decided to become an engineer, and I was fine.”) [Read more…]

I recently installed this new program called Hit Tail on my blog, a new search tool to help you identify keywords people use to find you and your website.

So I checked it today, and guess what I found? One of the ways that people are finding me is by entering the phrase “ostrich vomit” into their search engines.

How cool is that?!

I can only assume that this is due to the many posts where I profess my extreme love for Mike Rowe and “Dirty Jobs”. At least, I certainly hope that is the case. Otherwise, I may have some issues I need to look into.

I am trying to get The Truth Laid Bare blog ranking system set up on my blog, and I am having A Lot Of Problems.

I have set up an account at truthlaidbare.com.

I have added my blog and validated and confirmed it on the “My Blogs” page.

I put up the Javascript code for my ranking in the ecosystem on my site. (It was up for over a week and I never got any ranking at all.)

But for some odd reason, I cannot “Claim My Blog”. I added my blog over two weeks ago, but when I search for it in the system I get NOTHING.

I even tried all of this in Internet Explorer just in case the problem was Mozilla Firefox, but I still got the same NOTHING results.

I wrote to The Truth Laid Bare asking for help, but I never heard anything back.

So now I am asking you, my Internet friends, what did you do to get this to work on your sites? What am I missing? What am I doing wrong?

Any help would be MOST appreciated, by both me AND my husband as then I would not need to send him a text message later in the day to express my frustration by saying, “I HATE EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING!”

Thanks.