Rachel’s Reflections

Today is the Eleventh Day of Christmas.  It is also my cousin Katie’s birthday.  Happy birthday, Katie!

This is also my 100th blog post. Congratulations to me! Jeremy says, “But there are only 77 comments.  Y’all need to work harder!”  I did 100 posts in 58 weeks.  Hmm…maybe I need to work harder too.  I would like to post at least twice if not at least three times each week this year.  I did reach a huge milestone: I posted to my blog every day in December.  I’d never actually done a whole month before.  .So that’s awesome.  How long until post 200?

On the Eleventh Day of Christmas my true love gave to me

Eleven ladies dancing
(Ten pipers piping
Nine drummers drumming
Eight maids a-milking
Seven swans a-swimming
Six geese a-laying
Five golden rings**
Four calling birds*
Three French hens
Two turtledoves
And a partridge in a pear tree.)

* Note: Wikipedia says “calling birds” is a corruption of “colly birds” which are black birds.

** Wikipedia also assures me that golden rings does not refer to “jewelry but to ring-necked birds such as the ring-necked pheasant.”

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Today, April 1, is April Fool’s Day.  It is also the Chief Petty Officers of the Navy’s birthday, and no, that’s not April Fool’s joke.  It really is.  At my command they celebrated by wearing khakis (they usually wear DCU–desert camouflage uniform) and eating cookies that our OIC (Officer in Charge) bought them.  So Happy Birthday, Chiefs!

But what I mainly wanted to talk about was Google.  You see, Google does an April Fool’s joke every year for April Fools.  And I didn’t want you to miss it, so I am going to post links.  This year they did several.

This year, you can sign up to go colonize Mars.  Join Google’s Mars colonization project called Virgle.  Click on the link to go to the site and learn all about it.  “Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.”  You can also take a test to see if you’re colonist material or join the Mission Control community, which is a place to leave your comments or read others’ comments.  (Warning: Some people have a serious lack of a sense of humor.)

If you have gmail–Google email–you can now send emails into the past.  That’s right, folks, never miss a deadline again.  “Just click ‘Set custom time’ from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox.  Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality.”

 And if you have trouble getting up in the morning, Google has something for you too.  Now you can purchase the Google Wake Up Kit.  It uses Google Calendar and will send an SMS message to your phone.  If that doesn’t work it will use “more coercive” means: “The kit includes an industrial-sized bucket and is designed to be connected to your water main for automatic filling. In addition, a bed-flipping device is included for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.”

And finally today can be your lucky day.  Google added one of its famous “I’m feeling lucky” buttons to its Google Calendar, according to this source.  Clicking on it adds random events to your calendar like dates with celebrities.  I don’t have a link to it; when I opened Google calendar it didn’t have that link.  So, sorry.

Google has had a lot of fun with this.  I would really encourage you to go to Google Hoaxes, which is a wikipedia article which has the complete list of Google April Fool’s jokes.  It lists them for each year, starting in 2000.  Don’t miss MentalPlex (Google’s search engine can now read your mind), the Google Copernicus Center (known for its state-of-the-art deoxygenated living quarters), Google Romance (“Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance.”), Gmail Paper (Google will mail you a hard copy of every email), or Google TiSP (short for Toilet Internet Service Provider).  Last year there were two, and this year there are a total of 11, some of them country specific, like the one for Australia: gDay–”a new beta search technology that will search web pages 24 hours before they are created.”

My favorite wasn’t listed, and that is the year where they let you type in a person’s name and it would email that person a search results page of news articles about that person.  Of course they were fake articles, but Google picked some funny article blurbs to use.  I don’t remember what year that was. 

So I hope you have fun with this.  I did.  Happy April 1st everyone!

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Hey, I just added a “widget” to my sidebar!  That was some way awesome computer skills in action, folks!  I stole the idea from this blog: 4tunate.  It’s a world map that tracks visitors to your blog.  I saw it and thought, “How can I get me one of those things?”  So I clicked on it and it opened a larger world map.  I thought, “Hey, cool!”  And I looked right away for Bahrain, and sure enough there was a big, red dot.  So she doesn’t know it, but her Bahraini visitor is me!  But anyway, I looked around that site and at the top it said, “Get your own, free: easy as 1, 2, 3.”  So I clicked on it.  And do you know, they’re right?  It WAS easy?  Computer people don’t explain things in easy terms very often.  So these guys get an A+ 100.  All I had to do was register, then login to the site, and it gave my html code to copy and paste into my blog.  AND–this is the important part–it had step-by-step instructions for HOW to do it.  I clicked on the link and, lo and behold, there were a lot of choices for the different kinds of blogs.  So I looked down the list until I found Wordpress, which is the kind of blog I use, and clicked on that and would you believe I found step-by-step instructions that were helpful and complete and easy to follow?  Hard to believe, I know.  But I did.  I followed them AND IT WORKED.  That’s amazing too, isn’t it?  So I was able to add this thing ALL BY MYSELF and without Jeremy’s help even.  That is like super, totally amazing!  I’m so proud of myself.  So I had to share the news.

So now I can track where my visitors are from.  Even if there’s only like three dots I think it will still be cool.

I wish I knew why the weather widget doesn’t work anymore….  Any ideas, Jeremy?

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My Jeremy is the sweetest guy in the world.

Yesterday I received a box and inside was a present from him. It was an e-book reader, a device about the size of a paperback book, but thinner, that allows you to download books (e-books) onto it and read them. According to the box, depending on file size, you can store between 80 and 160 books on it. There’s supposed to be lots of titles to choose from. This is a Sony machine and they have their own “e-book bookstore” but maybe you can buy them from other sources too. Not sure how that works just yet. But I was poking around online, and I gather that it’s becoming increasingly common for publishers to publish books in both print and e-book formats. There are some publishing houses that only publish e-books, but they don’t seem to have a very good reputation in the publishing industry yet. From what I understand they don’t have good fiscal responsibility, sell poor quality books, and tend to be “here today, gone tomorrow.”

If you’re interested in learning more about e-readers, this site has some reviews of different models and manufacturers.  Each word in the previous sentence goes to a different article or review on that site.  There’s more stuff there, but that’s all I was able to find and save URLs to before the friendly DOD computer system caught up with what I was doing (looking at blogs) and blocked the website.  Blogs are dangerous, don’tcha know.

I haven’t really had a chance yet to power it up and see how it works, but I look forward to doing that.  I hope I’ll be able to download some books I’ll enjoy.  I was looking at Sony’s online ebookstore last night and it seemed most of the titles fall into the category of literary fiction, which we all know means “highbrow fiction that’s mainly about somebody’s abusive past and/or unhappy marriage, has no plot, is actually about the meaninglessness of life, and is really boring.  The only redeeming features are an interesting title, good cover art, and pretty prose–if you’re into those sorts of things.”  I hope they have some good genre fiction.  I looked up this author and only found two books.  She’s written 30+.  Not a good sign if you ask me.  I haven’t looked up any other authors yet.  Hopefully my favorite author, Terry Pratchett, will be well represented.  If not, hopefully I can buy ebooks from other places.  Not sure about that because I’m not sure about the “proprietary format” stuff.  Will have to learn, I guess.

But the coolest thing about this present is that Jeremy had it inscribed (or engraved–whatever you want to call it).  Right on the front at the bottom it says:

To my creative wife Rachel

Who treasures good books

 Isn’t that sweet?

See?  He is the sweetest guy in the world.

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