I took Rafael to see Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, and there were a couple scenes kind of dark for my five-year-old. Made me vlog on iMommyTalk: When is a PG movie too adult for a young child. iMommyTalk.
Archive for: September, 2009
Sept. 29, How to Dress Like a Celebrity for Halloween
Want to be Mickey Rourke or Octomom for Halloween? I had some suggestions of what you could and what you should do to go as one of the big newsmakers this year, on Esquire.com.
Sept. 28, no more driving while texting
AAA’s new goal is to get a DWT (driving while texting) ban in all 50 states. Hot Hardware.
Sept. 25, school photos and 24 casting
Have school photos gotten out of control? I opined as such on an iMommyTalk vlog.
A familiar face (and voice), actor Stephen Root, will join 24 for a multi-episode arc next season, so I dropped a note on TV Tyrant.
Sept. 25, #FollowFriday
I had the extreme pleasure on Monday of finally meeting one of my oldest friends on Digg.com, Tal Siach. After dinner in Union Square, we met up with a whole mess of other diggers and bloggers and other folks whom I’ve “known” in the social media sense but never met face to face, even after years, sometimes, of contact.
So I thought that in honor of Tal’s visit Stateside, I’d #FollowFriday those folks I’ve known for a while but only just got to meet for the first time this week.
@TalSiach: Naturally, I have to start with Tal. One of the nicest and most honorable people you could meet in the online world, Tal was, as I said, one of my first friends on Digg (my entree to the social media field). When I was an utter n00b on Digg and had virtually no front pages to my name (possibly even before I had a single one, it’s hard to remember), Tal was always there on the other end of my IM, offering encouragement and advice. When I was laid off, Tal was one of the first people telling me I didn’t have to go look for any new job, I could make things work myself. I’m proud to call Tal a friend, without quote marks around the word.
@MensFitness: Well, this isn’t Devin Pratt’s personal account, but Devin and I have been Digg friends for quite some time and it was just so nice to meet face-to-face. I remember many, many IM conversations between us where we’d try to figure out what category some post would work best in or checking to see if we could get a shout to help boost a submission. Oh, and, by the way, Devin is part of the website The Longest Trip, which is basically a place for guys to blog about their 30s and 40s. He and Stephen, below, are both part of the team behind the site.
@sbcea: Stephen Bailey is a raconteur, a manabouttown, a digger, a tweeter. Basically, Stephen’s a freelance writer who’s all over the place writing about all sorts of stuff. And he Diggs and Tweets and is just an all-around nice guy. Plus, he spent about an hour discussing 24 with myself and @ShawnMSmith, whom I #FF’d in my Music FollowFriday post, but only met for the first time in person this week. Yeah, we talked about the Jack Bauer hour for an hour or more. Wanna make something of it?
@Casspa: Cass Anderson is another person I’ve known on Digg for what seems like forever. I got to meet him at the beginning of the night, with his lovely girlfriend. We started chatting, more people arrived, mixing began and next thing you know, I’m on a train going back home to Jersey and Cass and I didn’t get to actually have a conversation. That’s OK, because we’re on each other’s IM and actually know who we’re talking to now. Plus, we’re both in the NY metro area and we’ll get to meet up at some other … meetup, and next time we’ll actually already know what each other looks like.
In going through my whole list of everyone, it turns out I’d already met most of the folks there in person at some event or another. So this week is only four (but you get five if you count Shawn, so I’m gonna count him) recommendations, but that’s OK. There were other very cool people there, most of whom I’ve already FF’d some other time, or whom I know I’ll get to soon.
As usual, please note in the comments if there are any folks you think I should be following. Always like to check out new folks on Twitter.
Sept. 18, #FollowFriday
Past lives.
Many of us have had what seems like multiple lives – so many different workplaces that we know people from all over the place, many of whom we’ve reconnected with here on Twitter.
I’ve had a few folks get in touch lately via Twitter whom I hadn’t seen or heard from in what seems like eons. Maybe we’d reconnected a little via Facebook, but Twitter is even more immediate. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to introduce some people from my old lives.
The teenage years:
@Flyssy: I was a camper and then worked at an arts camp in New Milford, Conn., for three summers. Naturally, I worked in the Publications shop, writing poetry and publishing literary arts magazines and camp yearbooks. I learned how to do every job there, from typesetting to printing, and Marko was one of the growed-up counselors who was wicked on an offset press. His hair was verrry 1980s Britain at the time. Now, he runs a guitar collecting website and does all sorts of cool stuff online. And his hair’s much shorter and less shaggy now.
Freshman year of college:
@JamieDicken: I lived in a co-ed dorm, but on the first floor, which was the only floor where the boys and girls were totally separated because of the lobby and common room. The girls’ section was called, creatively, the Virgin Vault (better than the boys, I think, as it was the Mole Hole). We became a rather tight bunch, as we were sort of locked into a two-hallway area and didn’t have to worry about boys coming along and seeing us in various states of disarray, I suppose. Jamie lived around the corner and we took more than one journalism class together. Heck, if it weren’t for her, I probably wouldn’t have had the good fortune to get into Eric Zorn‘s Basic Writing Lab, and my life would probably suck right now. Thanks, Jamie!
Working at The Miami Herald:
@BeckyandHollee: Becky and Hollee both went to Northwestern, my alma mater, but are … younger than I am. That’s all I’m gonna say about that, but I met them because of their internships at The Miami Herald when I was a reporter there. Being a grad, I always welcomed the NU interns and usually became friends with them because, after all, they weren’t THAT much younger than me. And I was old and wise and in my 20s, after all. Hollee used to hang with me and some of my friends, too. Now they’re both all growed up and moms and journalists and professors and are even writing a book together. Dayum.
The Arizona years:
@Tony_Blei_Photo: I worked for a paper outside of Phoenix that has had more ownership changes than Madonna has clothing changes at an average concert. Like many newspapers, it’s had money issues in the past few years and has all but fallen apart, which is a shame. It wasn’t the biggest paper, but it sure was the scrappiest. We consistently beat the Arizona Republic on stories and had lots of fun doing it. And the photo staff was really top-notch. Tony was one of the photographers there, and was also a good copy editor and writer.
My final days of newspaper journalism:
@DavidSchepp: David and I worked in the same office for most of my final 8 years in a newspaper newsroom. He was a business reporter, I was metro editor. We wrote, we blogged, we participated in the office Secret Santa. Our office rocked; we had a good time there, even when it seemed as if the world around us was totally crazy (because it was – and so was our office, honestly). Now he’s blogging for Daily Finance and some other sites and we keep an eye out for whom among our friends is being laid off next, as well as the decimation of our former newsroom.
Sept. 17, Comcast moves on demand mobile; Gene Roddenberry’s Mac up for sale
Comcast is going to start offering wireless internet and bring its on demand service to mobile devices. Hot Hardware.
The very first ever Apple Macintosh Plus, a gift from the computer company to Gene Roddenberry, is up for auction. Hot Hardware.
Sept. 16, parenting solo
Question of the Day: When the cat’s away, do the mice really play? iMommyTalk.
Sept. 14, bionic hearing?
A new Bluetooth-compatible headset can give you near-bionic hearing. On Hot Hardware.
Sept. 11, #FollowFriday
I spent some time on Blip.fm this morning and realized I hadn’t done a music-focused Follow Friday yet, so what better time than now?
I go in fits and starts on Blip, forgetting about it for days on end, then spamming my listeners with song after song. Sorry about that.
But many people out there are far more consistent than I. Not just on Blip, but just on music overall. So I thought I’d share with you some of the most music-oriented people I follow:
• FeinX: DJ FeinX is the alter ego of @MichDdot and will spin tunes such as Du Hast by Rammstein synced to a SpongeBob Squarepants video or Fatboy Slim with David Byrne & Dizzee Rascal. He also tweets out cool music-related articles and photos.
• MissKit: Miss Kit is the better half of our first recommendation today. And her Twitter stream is more or less all blips. And good ones. You’ll hear the Rolling Stones, Cypress Hill, Pink and Simon and Garfunkel. Did I mention her musical taste is rather eclectic?
• TheRapUp: This account is the stream of links to articles on The Rap Up, written by our friend @Rizoh. The blog has lots of news, opinion and, of course, music videos. If you’re into any hip-hop, you can’t really go wrong here.
• DianaCostello: I used to work with Diana and she’s great. If you’re into Phish and that whole scene, you’ll find lots to love here. She also helps administer a music blog that hosts lots of musicians local to the Lower Hudson Valley for performances. The link is on her Twitter profile.
• ShawnMSmith: Shawn and I have bonded over our shared love of The Pixies, one of the best and most underappreciated bands of the late ’80s-early ’90s (and reunited in 2004!). Though Shawn doesn’t tweet out lots of links to songs, whether on Blip or his own site, a good percentage of his tweets relate to music. Cool music.
That’s it for this week. Got any recommendations? Particularly for music-related Twitterers? Drop ‘em in the comments.