Socializing – Page 4

Chris is bring the Espresso machine to work

August 12, 2008 by Tricia

Do you ever take home appliances to work when there’s a party?

My husband does!

Tomorrow his department, the hospital Day Surgery unit, is having a party for one of the staff. They seem to have a party or celebration or some kind of special lunch at least every two weeks. Sometimes, when it’s brunch style, Chris will go to one of our local Greek bakeries and bring in Greek treats like chocolate baklava and other goodies.

Not this time though … This time he’s decided that he’s going to bring in our capresso Espresso machine. He loves pulling out the machine and making Espresso or cappuccino for people whenever we have a dinner party or drop in guests.

Now he’s going to do it for the people he works with. I have a feeling that my Espresso machine won’t come home tomorrow night when he does. They’ll want to keep it there!

So do any of you have espresso machines at work or have a coworker like my husband who brings the machine in for special occasions?

A new way to network and promote your sites

August 1, 2008 by Tricia

Yesterday I read a blog post about keeping your Twitter and Plurk accounts functional and it caused me to revisit a site that I’d been to in the past, but dismissed as not being what I needed at the time.

The site that I visited and subsequently signed up for was Ping.Fm. Perhaps you’ve heard of this site?

Ping.Fm allows you to update your social networks quickly and virtually from anywhere. Best of all, you can update all of your social networks at once!

In my last post I talked about how I think Twitter might be a waste of time for people because some of the bloggers I follow seem to always be sending out Tweets. Now add other social networks like Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Facebook, Friendfeed and a multitude of other social network sites and you could literally spend your whole day posting messages on these sites just to network and keep in touch with your friends. There are so many social networks popping out of the woodwork these days that it’s becoming overwhelming! So you can see why the idea of being able to post one message to one site and then have that message delivered to all of your social networks at once might be beneficial.

I think I originally dismissed Ping.Fm when I first came across it because I wasn’t yet a member of Twitter or Plurk or some of the other sites that Ping.Fm interacted with at the time. However now that I’m a member of at least half of the sites that work with Ping.Fm I can really see the advantage!

Ping.Fm is very easy to use. Just sign up and activate your social service. You can post your Ping.Fm messages directly to Blogger and WordPress.com blogs, Social sites such as Bebo, Brightkite, Facebook, FriendFeed, hi5, Identi.ca, Jaiku, kwippy, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plaxo Pulse, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, and Xanga. You can also use Ping.Fm to post message to the following services – AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk (GTalk), Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, iGoogle Gadget, Facebook, iPhone Web App, and Mobile App (WAP).

BTW all the links in the paragraph above are to my social network profile pages if you’d like to visit them and add me as a friend.

Imagine how much time you’ll save by being able to post message to your friends and contacts on several of those sites all at once?

Now, if you happen to have a WordPress blog on it’s own domain there’s a WP Plugin called PingPressFm that will allow you to notify your social network sites about a new blog post. The WP plugin only works with WP 2.5 and higher so if you are a Ping.Fm member and want to use the plugin on your blog make sure your installation is at least WP 2.5 or higher.

Unlike some I don’t post a lot of messages to my social networks, but I do like the idea of being able to notify all of these services of new blog posts. Up until now I’d only been using Twitterfox to post blog post updates to Twitter. If the PingPressFm plugin works well I’ll use that instead.

Ping.Fm is in Beta right now and you need an invite before you can become a member. So consider this your invitation. The invite code is currently pingscompany. Oh and speaking of invites if anyone has an invite for Jaiku I’d love to get one so I can explore that site.

If you know of any other handy services that make it easier to network I’d love to hear about them.

I don’t get twitter?

July 31, 2008 by Tricia

I like Twitter and I can see the benefits of using Twitter both socially and as a way to promote blog posts, websites or special events but I’m puzzled by the people that I see constantly using twitter.

I follow quite a few people on Twitter and I use the TwitterFox extension in my Firefox browser so that I can see all of the most recent tweets as they happen. Some people barely tweet (me), others only tweet a few times a day at most and then there are the constant Tweeters.

I see some people posting Tweets from 5 in the morning until late at night – sometimes as late as 2 or 3 in the morning. Some of these people must do one hundred or more tweets a day.

I just see it as a time waster.

Perhaps that stems from me having so many blogs, websites, blogrolls and mailing lists to manage that I barely have time to answer emails or reply to comments (bad bad blogger!), but I think it also stems from my past experiences with Chat.

Back in the late 90’s when I only had websites and ran mailing lists I got involved with a group of friends. We spent several hours each day chatting online. I’d work all day, getting up at 5:30 in the morning, come home from work and check my email, perhaps check the chat room and try to make dinner as I multitasked. Then when my husband would get home from work we’d have dinner and perhaps watch a TV show or two, but by 9:30 or 10 pm I was back online chatting with my friends as we had a standing talk time. I’d stay online sometimes until 4 in the morning falling into bed to sleep for only an hour and a half.

This went on for months, perhaps even as long as a year. In the end I was exhausted all the time and not very productive at work. Considering that I’m a nurse that’s probably not the greatest thing right?

I realized that spending so much time on line was affecting pretty much all aspects of my life so I shut it all down and stopped chatting. I still ran my website and mailing lists and continued to answer something like 400 emails a day, but I also got my life back – well mostly.

These days I have accounts at all the main I.M. sites – Yahoo, MSN, AIM and so on, but I don’t use my accounts. I never chat. I guess I’m afraid I’ll get hooked on it again and waste too much time – time that I just don’t have anymore.

So as I watch these people Tweet all day I wonder if they are falling into the same trap that I did. I know some of these people have multiple blogs as well as children and jobs. Are they neglecting important aspects of their lives as they send out all those tweets?

So … Do you have a tweet account? If you do, how do you use it? Are you becoming a tweetaholic or do you only tweet occasionally when you have something important to pass on or to promote a new blog post? ( Same question could apply to Plurk I guess.)

I spent a lot of time outside today … busy busy

July 5, 2008 by Tricia

Chris and I had a busy day today. We took our puppy Midnight over to the Brickworks for a walk by the ponds and through the forest and while we were there we attended a walking tour of the lost rivers of Toronto. Quite interesting. I took a number of pictures too. I’ll post more about that portion of our day when I have the pictures ready to post.

When we got home we noticed that our neighbor Sofie was sitting on her porch. This was a big surprise because Sofie had a stroke back in February and was hospitalized for about three months and has been living with her youngest sons family for the last month. They brought her for a visit to her home even though there’s no way she can ever live there every again as she needs to be cared for throughout the day now. It was kind of sad, but also very good to see her.

I sat on Sofie’s porch talking with her for about two and a half hours – directly after coming back from our nature hike. I didn’t even go inside my own home to get a drink so by the time my visit with Sofie was over I was thirsty and tired. However after a brief bit of downtime (by this time it was 7 pm) Chris and I decided to go out into the garden to finish putting mulch on the garden beds.

Do you know how messy red cedar mulch is? I’ve got it in my shoes, socks, probably down my top and after washing my hands when I came back inside the bathroom fixtures and sink had a red tone to them. Yep … lots of red dye everywhere! Luckily it came off easily!

It was a busy day! We went out for our hike at about 11 am, didn’t get back until 3:30 and then I visited with Sofie until a bit after 6 pm. Then after only about half an hour of downtime we were back outside in the garden until 10:30 pm! So I guess I spent about 11 hours outside today.

Time for a rest!

Our neighborhood and neighbors are changing fast!

July 3, 2008 by Tricia

My immediate neighborhood seems to be going through a lot of changes lately.

I think I mentioned a few times that my Karaoke neighbors on the other side of our semi-detached put their house up for sale something like last October. Well they finally sold their house in February and the new neighbors haven’t moved in yet but they’ve been doing renovations like tearing down the ugly fake stone wall and the popcorn ceiling and stuff like that. They expect to move in at the beginning of August.

Then there’s the house beside us where my stalker oops I mean elderly neighbor Sofie lived. She had a small stroke in February was hospitalized and then she moved in with her youngest son. So her house has been empty, but the family plans to either sell it in the fall or put it up for rent. I kind of hope they sell rather than rent. I can just imagine a series of really bad neighbors if they rent the house out. If that happens maybe Chris and I will look towards getting out of here. Hey I hear Wilmington real estate is pretty nice. Now that’s an idea.

Just a week ago one of the houses across the street and one down the street from us went up for sale so that will mean two more new sets of neighbors in a few months or so.

In general we have a very good neighborhood and most of us are fairly friendly with each other. Heck, at least three of my neighbors give us food when they are celebrating. Remember the Greek Easter feast that the neighbor behind us gave Chris and I in April? Yum!

Other neighbors come over to our house or backyard to party or we go to their house to party. I think our newest neighbors who are renovating right now will be like that. The man is in a band and plays guitar and as you probably know my husband also plays guitar so they already get along famously. The wife is really nice too and I think we’ll get along well.

I just hope that the houses going up for sale end up having really nice people buy them that fit into the neighborhood well. Hey people don’t have to mingle, but hopefully they are nice and say hello every now and then.

Chris is bring the Espresso machine to work

I don’t get twitter?

I spent a lot of time outside today … busy busy

Our neighborhood and neighbors are changing fast!

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