So, I'm breaking up with Google...

So, after 6 months of nothing but trouble with Google, I'm quitting cold turkey. This blog will remain up for archiving purposes, but the blog will be relocated back to http://thatgirlwithablog.wordpress.com/.

So long, Google!

Twitter Mouseover Problems

Whoa! So really, I only have a Twitter because of blogging (okay, and I love a good one liner), but this shit is crazy today. I went to reply to an @, and then all of a sudden, it's telling me that I'm RT something from Unilever or something like that. Eek!

Apparently, Twitter's gone haywire with a spam-link generating bug, with the site getting about 140,000 new tweets of this variety every 10 seconds. Ouch, Twitter. Merely hovering over an affected link with automatically have you posting various smut sites in a matter of seconds, as my account is doing as we speak.

I've read a variety of things, that it will be fixed in three hours, maybe five, but Twitter hasn't released anything on their official blog. Real nice, Twitter. Security firm, Sophos, detected the vulnerability earlier today, so we'll see how long this takes to fix.

That's one hell of a whale fail right there, and I imagine there's going to be some serious Twitter withdrawal going on worldwide today. Apparently, you can still get your fix by using any number of third party sites, including my favorite, Ping.

Good luck, Twitter users! Be safe out there.

UPDATE: Twitter has finally posted something on their blog. Even if it is short and useless.

Technorati Validation

Dear god, this is a pain in the ass. Please ignore, thanks.

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Aaaaand We're Back! With A Centipede Drama.

Remember how I told you that you might not hear from me for a week or two? Well, make that a month apparently. We're officially all moved in and mostly unpacked. Not so bad! It's actually starting to feel like home. There's always those things that you find after you move into a new apartment, though, like the fact that we don't have lukewarm water (we have cold, hot, and boil your insides), or that all the faucets are backwards, or that all the floors are crooked, or you don't actually have an address. Generally, I think that our house was built by a left-handed Pollock. Also, there's bugs. There are bugs in my house, you guys.

They aren't adorable, handsome bugs like this guy, either.

 Where's Allie Brosh when you need her? I need a hilarious MS Paint picture of me cowering in a corner with a bottle of Raid.

When we moved in, there was a considerable amount of webs and bugs and things, but I figured that it had been empty for a month...these things are bound to happen. Well, this is what I thought until that fateful day...

I mean, it's not like we have an infestation, but one bug is seriously too many. Last Friday, Adam and I are hanging out in the office (which I have not yet used for blogging, BTW), watching True Blood, having a glass of wine, and generally relaxing when here comes this Goliath of a centipede racing across the floor. And I mean RACING. Holy shit are those bastards fast. So, at this point, I start screaming at the top of my lungs and pull the classic "dumb bitch in a horror movie". I run INTO the corner because for some reason I think that's a good idea. Now, I don't have any recollection of this part, but I can thank Adam for filling me in after I got my heart to stop beating out of my chest, I start screaming, "Stop" and "No" at it, obviously expecting this centipede to speak English and cease it's running directly towards me. Well folks, I'll inform you: Centipedes do not speak English. At this point, I'm cowering the in the corner using my easel as a shield, because THAT'S appropriate, and this thing is still hell bent on crawling on my feet (I just know that's what he was thinking), so I use the only weapon at hand, and throw my easel at it. I threw an easel. At a centipede. It's like the adrenaline rushed mom lifting a car off of a baby. Except it's me screaming like I'm being murdered throwing an easel at a centipede. I cannot even begin to imagine what the neighbors thought. (Sorry, neighbors!) I only succeed in hitting Adam with the easel and the centipede gets away. Five days later, I still won't go into the office without a chaperone. So then, yesterday, I'm reading about how to get rid of/prevent this situation from happening again, and I read that they can live for THREE TO SEVEN YEARS. I hope that little bastard found his way out of the office. Please, oh please, oh please, let him find his way out of the office. Or hopefully I scared the living shit out of him and he had a little centipede heart attack somewhere behind my bookshelf.

Scariest picture on the internet. The centipede in my office was a cross between this thing and King Kong.

 We do have spiders in the basement and on the porches, which can be expected, and tiny, tiny millipedes. The millipedes are actually kinda cute. They're just like little black inchworms. And I can't see their legs, so we're cool. Also, I'm starting to be okay with the spiders. As long as they're not huge and/or hairy or on me, we're cool. They eat other bugs, such as said centipede, so as long as they do their fucking job, I won't kill them. After Friday's incident, I did kill a few on the porch to set an example. Tell your friends, spiders.

Also in my research of creepy crawlies yesterday, I found this stuff, Eco Exempt D. It's eco-friendly, all natural, and will apparently kill just about anything including ants, centipedes, cockroaches, crickets, firebrats (whatever those are), fleas, millipedes, pill bugs, scorpions, sowbugs, spiders, hornets, wasps, bees, and yellow jackets. Mother fuckers are going down. I just ordered it on the internets yesterday, but I can't wait for it to get here. I gladly fronted the $40 in exchange for Adam spraying the house. He can do the gross boy jobs, thanks. Once we get it sprayed, I'll let you guys know how it works out. Hopefully, it doesn't kill my cat either. It's good for six to twelve months, too, which is pretty cool.

Oh, the adventures of moving. Sheesh.

Moving: A Drama

So, tomorrow's the big day! I'm moving, and not just the blog this time. I'm moving me and a husband and a whole house full of things. What an adventure this has been already!

So, we found this apartment Memorial Day weekend and all of my friends laughed at me for starting to pack that weekend. "Oh Amanda, you're so funny with your neurosis and OCD!!!" Well you can fuck straight off because I'm still not all packed. It's amazing how much shit you can accumulate within five years in a very small apartment. Where did we get so many...things? Absolutely useless...things. Granted, they're pretty things, but things nonetheless. Things that need wrapped in 1000 pieces of newspaper and put in boxes that then have to be lifted and moved. Jesus, who thought this moving thing was a good idea?

Also, no one seems to know the address of the new apartment? Who moves into an apartment with two addresses? I do, that's who. If you talk to the post office, it's one, if you talk to utilities, it's the other. Which is awesome, because it's been insane moving the utilities. Wednesday, I called Verizon...I wanted that shiny new Fios package. We talked to the people in the other apartment in the building and I was pretty sure that they told me they had Fios. So, I call Verizon and they tell me that Fios is not available in my area. I told them to check the other apartment number, they tell me that it's not available there either. So I tell them to check the other apartment's service, and the representative tells me that they have regular Verizon service, not Fios. So I spend 40 goddamn minutes on the phone with this guy setting everything up. We went with the phone and internet (DSL) service that we have now and that comes bundled with Direct TV. I've never had a problem with them, so I figure, hey, that's fine, completely forgetting that this is a rental unit. So, I email the landlord to make sure that they're okay with us putting a dish on the house and they reiterate that the other apartment has Fios! So I call Verizon again, and they tell me that yes, Fios is available at the ONE address, but not the other! How could you have service at 437 but not at 435 when it's a dead end street?! So then, I spend another 40 minutes on the phone canceling the old order and putting in a new one. Sheesh.

So, long story short, I'm now getting Fios in my non-existent apartment. It's a way better deal and I'm pretty excited about it. I'm pretty excited about the new apartment in general. While I will miss the apartment we're in now and the neighborhood, I'm eager to have a fresh beginning. It was always the running joke that if my apartment had one more room and two more closets, I'd live there for the rest of my life. Well, this apartment has one more room and four more closets. Hooray for lucking out! We'll have a real, live office for me to blog in, now. (Even though usually I post at work, shhhh!) Maybe it will inspire me to not be such a slacker.

It's been insanely busy in work and life though. Ever since we went away on a three day conference and the beginning of June it's just been impossible to get caught up. I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, however. What amazes me is how people do all this shit and have other obligations and families and whatnot. I would have torn my face clean off. I'm overwhelmed now, ferchrissakes, I can't even imagine throwing other things on top of it. Some good, hard work never killed anyone, but damn. So, when you don't see me for a week or two, you'll know why.

Have a happy and safe Fourth of July weekend and just hope I don't go on a homicidal rampage. In honor of this day, check out this super sweet video:

It's Done!!!

The importing is FINALLY done.

Sweet mother of god, that terribly, arduous process is done. I ended up doing the vast majority of the import manually, thanks to every importer sucking my lady-balls. A lot of the pictures and video from the old posts are gone, but rest assured, they will be in all the new posts.

It's been so long I think I've forgotten how to blog. Seriously.

Thanks for waiting around during that process, I promise I'll have something new for you very soon!

And to all the old fans, please make sure to update your RSS feeds! For the new folks, check out all the cool stuff going on on the "Contacts" page.

Hi Everyone!

Hey everybody! I just moved over to Blogspot from WordPress and it's...been an interesting transition to say the least! So please forgive me for what my blog looks like right now! I promise it will get better soon! Especially when I get a chance to get ALL of my stuff imported. Whew!

Also, my comments didn't import! Get to leavin' 'em so it doesn't look so naked around here, haha.


You can check out the beginnings over at http://thatgirlwithablog.wordpress.com/

RIP: The Remix Manifesto

So I saw this on the Documentary Channel last night and it absolutely blew my mind. RIP: A Remix Manifesto, an open source documentary directed by Brett Gaylor, is two and a half hours of battling copyrights. It touches on medical equipment, music, art, bloggers, DJs, music piracy and more.

What I thought was incredibly funny was Girl Talk appearing in this. This guy went to my high school and now he’s out there face-fucking the RIAA. It’s pretty awesome. Also, totally didn’t know that he was a biomedical engineer. Also, pretty awesome. I was just having the conversation with my husband the other day of why I think it’s bullshit that you can patent medical equipment. Have we really become that greedy and paranoid that we would rather patent potentially life changing medical advances and make a buck than to improve the quality of life for millions of people?

Like the Brazilians. They’ve just said a big ‘ol “Fuck You” to the music industry and started doing their own thing. And what makes it all the better is that this revolution was started by their Minister of Cultural Affairs at the time, Giberto Gil. Some of the mixes being created down there are simply phenomenal. Things that you would never expected to be mashed up…well, there they are. I can’t remember who said it or what the exact quote was but it was something along the lines of the fact that there is not originality anymore. Originality is mixing two things that have never been mixed before.

Dan O’Neill is a fucking madman and I love him for it. The cartoonist and and founder of the Air Pirates, a group sued by the Walt Disney Corporation in the 70′s, still just can’t stop drawing that mouse doing decidedly un-Disney-like things, including dealing drugs and going down on a female companion. It’s hysterical actually, and it’s amazing what they’ve done to keep that mouse under wraps, but The Mouse Liberation Front lives on, 40 years later.

Also included was Jammie Thomas. Remember her? The single mother who made less than $4,000 annually, but the RIAA decided it would be okay to fine her $222,220 for uploading 24 songs to Kazaa? Yeah, that Jammie Thomas. It would take her the rest of her life to pay that off if she gave them every penny that ever came to her name. It’s ridiculous.

Copyrighting ideas is slowly ruining the creative future of the world. Check out this documentary. Watch it. Remix it. Share it. Enjoy it.

You can buy the DVD here, or you can find a torrent. Your choice. Also, you can find the entire documentary in eleven-ish parts over on YouTube.

YOU! Can Help Stop Violence Against Female Journalists

In light of the recent imprisonment and release of Euna Lee and Laura Ling, now is the time to stop violence against female journalists around the world.

These women who fight every day to have stories told are constantly berated and threatened just to get this information to you. It’s easy to think that this sort of thing happens only in developing countries, but it happens here, too! A recent survey found that a staggering 82% of female reporters worldwide have been threatened or attacked because of their work.

Everyday they write articles knowing that it can ultimately lead to their persecution, but they do it anyway to release the truth to the masses. It’s time to stop the silencing of female journalists.

Here’s what you can do to help:

- Ask your senators to support the Daniel Pearl Act, which helps monitor violations of press freedoms.
- Join The Committee to Protect Journalists, which helps reporters working within authoritarian governments get their voices heard.
- Visit imwf.org to petition for already imprisoned journalists.

Most importantly, remember our rights for a free press. We are all entitled to that. Whenever a reporter is silenced, so are we!

Just a quick note…

I love blogging.

Top 3 things about blogging so far:
1.) Mike Budai knowing my blog.
2.) Brian Frazer commenting on my Myspace.
3.) Getting free music. (Thanks Signal to the Ocean Estate!)

And a runner up:
The search terms never fail to make me laugh. Today was “Coraline + jockstrap”. Never a dull moment.

Hopefully, this week will be a lot less busy than the last, so I’ll have lots of things for you! More books, maybe some sports, and some tunes. All for your enjoyment, so stay tuned!

Some ACTUAL News, Please?

Between last night's news and this morning's, I have finally reached the limit on how often I can hear about Michael Jackson.

For fuck's sake people, there is actual news occurring everyday and we're missing it for what? A half-plastic, drug-addicted dead man.

Things that were pushed off of the NEWS, not the Today Show or Dateline, the regular fucking news:

1. The Iranian Election. Iranian opposition leaders have called for  the release of  people detained during the post-election protests. A "strongly-worded" statement on the Ghalamnews website has expressed their criticism of "attacks against innocent people, dormitories, and houses... and some shocking brutalities carried out by plainclothes forces supported by security forces" and also referred to the deaths of protesters "whose only crime was to object to the election fraud... at spontaneous several-million-strong demonstrations held in extraordinary peace and order. If their rights had been slightly respected or if the people had not been lied to or disrespected, the situation would have never turned to a national crisis." They have called for an end to the security-state of Iran, let's see who answers.

2. North Korea. Even after the UN Security Council condemned North Korea for the nuclear test explosion on May 25, 2009, and demanded that North Korea not "conduct any further nuclear test or any launch using ballistic missile technology," the Pyongyang government launched SEVEN missiles on July 4, 2009. On Monday, the UN Security Council has a closed-door meeting that quite frankly, no one seems to know anything about. MAYBE IF IT WAS COVERED ON THE NEWS!?

3. Chinese Riots. China's worst ethnic violence in years has been  going on since Sunday and who would've known!? More than 140 people are already dead with over 800 injured as Chinese riot police and Uighurs (a Muslim minority) clash in the streets of Urumqi. The Urumqi women have been rioting in the streets to save their husbands who have been arrested, beaten, abused, and tortured.

Everyday, we have people fighting, literally fighting to the death for simple rights, and here we are glued to our television sets because a pop-star died. It's goddamn ridiculous.

On a completely unrelated note, please remember that you can still Vote NO on the Miami Seaquarium! You can vote once per day, so keep 'em comin'!

Podcasts and thoughts on blogging...

So, Brian Briggs now has podcasts for BBspot! You can find them here. Warning: you WILL lol, so make sure you're somewhere where people will not look at you strangely. I learned this the hard way yesterday, on public transportation. I got some odd looks. Just looking out for ya!

Other than that...it's been fun! I'm getting a steady flow of views and I'm even on a few RSS feeds! So thanks everybody!

There is just one thing...

I have quite a few friends and acquaintances who have frequented the site and I get the comment all the time: "I didn't know you could write!". While I appreciate the flattery, the issue here is, really, I can't. That's what's so sad.

In research for this blog, I have checked out a lot of other blogs and wow...really? Why bother to post it if it's unreadable? I will be the first to admit that grammar has gone the way of the dodo, but basic spelling and punctuation, too!?

Example: I know damn well that when someone asks you, "How are you?" that the proper way to respond is, "I'm doing well, thank you, how are you?" or something similar. I was on the phone with a client the other day (twice my age, might I add) and said just that. He actually corrected me! He says, "Good, so you're doing good?" I really don't have a problem with this.

I do have a problem with not being able to spell if you're going to be posting actual, informational content on the internet. Comments, chat rooms, email, IMs, tweets, whatever, that doesn't count, but if you're publishing something like a blog, something for public consumption, you should at least make an effort! Simple things like two, to, and too or their, they're and there. We learned this in grade school kids, please remember!

I just think it's amazing sometimes what people will publish. Not saying that I am the world's best blogger or a grammar Nazi (I'm sure you'll find your fair share of grammatical inaccuracies on this page) but I can spell.

So, has it reached the point that if you can competently spell, you're a good writer?

Also, I don't understand the volume of blogs just posting a video or an audio track. You can't even put a little blurb in there of why you chose to put that song or video on your blog? What made you put that there? What did you like or dislike about it? WHY, dammit, WHY!? Inquiring minds want to know!

All in all, I've really enjoyed blogging so far and I'm looking forward to many, many more posts (so many new albums coming out!), so stay tuned!

So I Have A Blog

I have typed and deleted in this little box about 15 times already. Blogging is way harder than I thought. So here goes...

I wanted to just start out with a blog of things that I thought were interesting or whatnot, but I have this urge to type things about me in here for the first post. I got this account to blog about things that I like, things that I hate, things that happen in my life, all that jazz.

And when it comes down to it, sometimes you just have to realize that you really don't have any substance.

Shit.

Well, here goes nothing:

A Little About Me
I'm a 20-something married girl living in Pittsburgh.
I'm actually pretty lame now that I think about it.
I work a full-time corporate whore job. It pays the bills.
I go places, I do things, most of them will probably end up reviewed on here.

Can I start a real blog now? Yes.