erica's joys :)

Yaaaaaay, long weekend! Please be safe with your fireworks and don't start any forest fires.

Here's a quick fireworks/forest fire story:

When I was about 13, my parents had this huge 4th of July party at our house in Alaska. We lived in interior Alaska (North Pole) and the climate is extremely dry there. The area is also very full of trees. As you can imagine, dry+trees+fireworks=bad. Very bad.

I'm getting ahead of myself though, as I was saying, the parents threw a mean 4ofJ party and everybody decided to go out back to the lake (gravel pit) and shoot off fireworks. Nevermind all the dry trees around, the fireworks were going to be pointed towards the water so no worries, right? You guessed it...very wrong.

So apparently, you cannot direct where fireworks go, no matter where you point them. Sometime during the fireworks fun, we noticed smoke and some crackling sounds. Someone yelled fire and all I remember after that is running extremely fast and jumping over one of my little brothers friends (also running) to get to the house to call the fire department. Turns out someone already called 911 so I just stood there on the back porch/deck looking at the fire.

The adults managed to get the fire put out before the fire department arrived but that didn't stop them from citing my dad and giving him 24 hours of community service and a $500 fine. I don't think I need to tell you what the moral of this story is.

Speaking of burning, I just switched the RSS and ATOM feeds to point to Feedburner. I was/am trying to figure out how many people actually care about what I write but don't want to comment. I have the feeling that some just subscribe to see if I post anything about my job. If that's you, trust me, you're pretty much wasting your time. Outside of "Hey look at this cool feature/product," you won't see anything about work in here. Well maybe I'll mention what I had for lunch occasionally (the miso soup was outstanding today btw).

So I just got back from watching The Devil Wears Prada a little while ago. Meryl Streep was outstanding. I read the book a while ago and I'm glad I forgot most of it. Not that it wasn't a good book, mind you, just that I always feel a big letdown when I watch a movie that's been adapted from a book I've read. Forgetting the book helped me to enjoy the movie, I believe.

Last but not least, I will be celebrating the second iteration of my 25th birthday in exactly 1 month. For the occasion I will party in Cauli-fornia then get on a plane and party in Atlanta. Paris Hilton eat your heart out. If you'd like to be reminded about my birthday, use this:

Once again have a good and SAFE weekend everybody.

The views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

Google Checkout launched today. This makes me happy for a number of reasons, one being that there is an alternative to Paypal now.

The second reason? LOOK at all the stores that accept Google Checkout on the day of its release.

The third? A nice centralized way of seeing that I shop way more than I should. Brilliant.

Yeah lots of cool stuff. I was an actual merchant, I'd be all over signing up for the seller stuff.

Anywho, time to get ready for work. Happy Thursday all!

DS Lite....in Pink. Excuse me while I lay on the floor and die of sheer joy.

read more | digg story

I was going through an old blog I have thats still online (no link, its private) and I realized that I have been blogging in some form or fashion since 2003. Nuts.

Anyhow, I was surfing through digg this morning and found The Best video ever. Of course I'll share it but a few words first. If you have never driven in Atlanta traffic you will not comprehend the magnitude of what is going on in the video. You may try to get a sense of it by comparing what will happen on your major highways but that won't accomplish it. They taped this video on I-285. I'd like to see something similar done on GA400. Still, the people who pulled this off are brave individuals indeed.

If your name isn't Erica Baker you can stop reading here. If your name IS Erica Baker, this is for you.

I just got Google Hosted email for my domain. That means you can have any @ericabaker.com email address you want, powered by GMail. I'm all for sharing so if your name is Erica Baker and you want an email address that ends in @ericabaker.com, leave a comment and I'll set you up. :)

FYI, I won't have any access to your emails or your password so there is no need to worry about privacy.

First things first. Yesterday was my little brothers 21st birthday. Happy Birthday Jeffrey!

It's supposed to be a rainy weekend in Atlanta so I plan to stay in. Drink some wine, eat some Chinese (you gotta take a break from pizza some time) and hang out. Well a little bit of Halo thrown in here and there too. I might actually get a chance to read a book this weekend. I haven't done that in so long its pathetic. Frankly, I cannot refer to myself as an avid reader until I start reading a lot again. Any recommendations?

Not much to write about on the tech front for right now. I've added a search for this blog courtesy of Google and CJ. You can find it in the sidebar under the archives.

Oh by the way...invites.
Orkut invites? Yes. I'll do a bulk invite once a week for people interested in joining.
Picasaweb invites? Those too (only a few of them though).
Edit: Writely invites now too. :)

Leave a comment with your Gmail address if you want one. Sorry, none for advertisers.

Have a great weekend folks.

*Pride Fest 2006 is this weekend in Atlanta.

Howdy folks. I am now back in "the A" after driving down to Palm Bay to see my dad for Father's Day. 8 hours after work on Friday to get there and 9.5 hours back on Sunday (all lanes blocked on I-75 dontchaknow). Yes my friends, I am the ultimate road warrior. I don't mind driving since the car does most of the work, however, I do mind driving while bored. Usually I listen to audiobooks on long drives. That being said, I couldn't believe the car I rented couldn't play mp3 CD's (note to Pontiac...wth?). I was really stuck, then desperation kicked in. I ended up plugging my laptop in to the cigarette lighter for power and listened to books on it the whole way. Not the easiest way to listen to audiobooks but until I replace MyPod it will have to do.

Moving on, I found out my oldest nephew has been using the internet! Hurrah! Given that he knows how a computer is supposed to work, I've put the Edubuntu project on pause until August as I can't very well give him a P.O.S now. The family has decided to pool moneys and get my nephew a real computer for his birthday. Normally I'd build one but I don't have the time right now. I'm open to suggestions as to where to purchase a premade one.

For my weekly (okay not weekly but whatever) WTF, let me introduce you to the Logitech 5.1 Game Console Adapter. Click the link and note the number of sellers that have this little ditty online. You would think that somebody would have it in store. Not so my friends. I spent a nice amount of time going to Radio Shack (which was okay since it gave me an excuse to go to the Cheesecake Factory), Worst Buy, and Fry's. Not only did they not have it, I was told at Worst Buy that such a thing didn't exist. I, of course, pulled up a picture of it on my Crackberry and shamed the smart ass A/V Blue Shirt. The guys at Fry's spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out a way to accomplish the same thing the console adapter does. That isn't surprising given that Fry's tend to be the Best. Store. Ever. However, they couldn't figure it out and so I am left to order the $5 thing online and pay $10 shipping. Oh Joy.

Finally, the pièce de résistance. I have met The Wiki. Yep, Wikis have been around for a while but not THIS wiki. This wiki speaks to my heart...what is it? Why the Best Pizza in New York wiki (yes it always comes back to the pizza). Now I will no longer have to wander the streets of NY looking for the goods. I simply consult the wiki and find the closest place that I can get a fix. Now if there was a similar wiki that detailed where to get the Best NY Pizza outside of NY, I'd be in sheer bliss. Mmmmmmmmmmm.

Yep, I have one. Lookie!

Will it replace my Flickr? Only time will tell...

I have a thing for pizza. It's up there on my favorite foods list with broccoli, spinach, bratwurst sausages (chicken not pork), and mashed potatoes. I'm also quite fond of chocolate. Now, I try to limit how often I eat either pizza or chocolate but when I want to be bad, I want to be BAD. I want to have both at once, feel my day of guilt for my badness and go on about life as usual.

That being said, I would like to know what the pizza delivery industry has against chocolate. There is obviously a vendetta, given the exclusion of one of the most coveted sweets from their dessert offerings. Fruits and sugars and cinnamon can be found in abundance but there is no chocolate to be had. Its not like there aren't recipes incorporating chocolate and pizza. A search for chocolate and pizza returns 300 results.

Where is the rule that pizza delivery desserts may only include fruit topping, sugar, and/or cinnamon? Who decided this? I should hope that some enterprising world class pizza chain would buck the trend (I'm talking to you Papa John's) and offer a chocolate based dessert.

Rant over.

They all get taken apart:

Don't you wish your nephews were cute like mine? Dontcha?

Good day loyal readers. Please stop reading here if you don't care about Woot-Off's, the Nintendo Wii, voting, Google Browser Sync, or sunlight addiction.

Still here? Great. On to the post...

First things first. If you haven't been to Woot! today, you are hereby informed that there is a Woot-off going on. I finally got the 6 piece speaker set. I've been trying to get that thing for 2 years. Thank you Woot!

So Arstechnica announced that the classic Nintendo games on the Wii will be priced between $4.50 and $8.99. I don't know about you, but for me, $8.99 is a small price to pay to rekindle the magic that is Mario. The buzz surrounding the Wii has grown to huge proportions and frankly, I don't forsee any other console touching it for a while. Hello, Nintendo? Welcome back to the #1 spot. We've missed you. If you could just make the DS games playable on the Wii, that would be grrrreeeaaat. Thaaaanks.

Today during my sun break I was flipping through US News and started reading an article about an Arizona voting lottery. Yeah, I'm late, so what? Anyhow, turns out that a Tuscon physician made quite the interesting proposal; pick one lucky voter to win $1 million dollars after the presidential election. The idea is that the chance to win $1 million will draw more people to the polls. I think its a great idea as anything that brings out the vote works for me. However, some people are all riled up about it. OMG, bonus! It pisses off the conservatives! Bring. It. On.

So Google Browser Sync got released today. Yay!

Finally, I'm addicted to the sun, I think. I don't feel good unless I'm soaking up some sun rays. Yes, even in the winter. Does anybody know what thats about? Is it because I'm vitamin D deprived?

I must sleep now...I was planning on posting some more about Sharing with Google Reader as well as some stuff about social engineering. I'll save it for the next post.

So I just discovered that that Google Reader can display complete feeds on any site that allows javascript. Mind you, I knew that it could display specific items I selected in Reader, however, I did NOT know that it could display complete feeds. Imagine my surprise when I was searching Groups for this info and chanced upon this post by Mihai Parparita.

Only new items will have that label applied (it works kind of like a filter in Gmail). If you simply want to share a whole feed, you can actually do that by playing with the URL in the sharing code. Replace the "user//label/" with "feed/".

Well ya don't say. It works too, you can see it in action over in my sidebar. Yay! Sorry Feed2Js, you were so good to me for so long, but I've found my feedmate.

So earlier today I had a lot to write about and now I've forgotten it all. I'll remember tommorow I'm sure.

Good Thursday people! I can't believe it's Thursday already, it feels very much like a Tuesday. As it stands, I am up at 6:39 am and have been up since 5:30 am. I don't know what's up with that since I normally don't rise until 7 ish. Weird.

Moving along, my Memorial Day Weekend was pretty nice. I rented a car and drove up to pick up my sister and nephews and head to a wedding (congratulations Jay and Brittina!). My oldest nephew, Kevonnie, was the ring bearer in the wedding and he was way too cute...feast your eyes on the cuteness.

I brought along my MBP for the trip and my nephews were so engrossed in it. Every time I opened it, they wanted to touch _something_. This can be nothing but a young interest in computing so I'm working on getting them a computer of their own. Mind you they don't have one in the home so they need the exposure anyhow.

I have an old Compaq Presario that I'm going to reconfigure for my nephews use. As I don't want to put any flavor of Windows on the computer, I was looking around from some educational/kid oriented flavors of linux. Surprisingly, a search for Linux for Kids yielded bad (out of date) results. Asking around proved to be a better source of information and I was pointed to edubuntu. Mind you, I'd never heard of edubuntu before. Yes I've been living under a rock apparently but now that I have been enlightened? Hello, jackpot!

Edubuntu is geared towards use in schools but works in the home environment too apparently. The first screenshots I saw of some of the programs are exactly what I'm looking for; a fun, educational, introduction to computers. I've not installed it yet but I soon will. [Note to self: purchase KVM.] I'll try to update later on with my experiences.

Whew so this post is way long but I have one more thing! I got my Valleyschwag yesterday! Woot! I'll take a picture as soon as possible but for now I used my iSight to take a picture, here's a listing of the contents:

• womens Typepad t-shirt (XL)
  
• womens rubyred labs t-shirt (XL)
  
• STICKER from ALABEL.NET
• songbird sticker
• abazab.com tattoo
• broken livejournal pencil
• perplexcity puzzle pack
• goatsesighting.com sticker
• EFF sticker (!)
• FeedBurner sticker
• 1 women 2.0 conference button
• 2 minty buttons

A nice haul I'd say. Shockingly, the womens shirts fit! Thanks for thinking of us more endowed women, schwag creators and Valleyschwag. :)