The joy of working with college kids is the crazy stuff they discover on a daily basis and insist on sharing with you. Four student workers and I huddled around my iMac the other day at the insistence on another student to watch this short film. Now that I’ve been subjected to it… I insist you watch it, too!

5) You can say things like ‘twitter that’.

4) Where else (besides Facebook) can you seek out attention by acting emo?

3) Shaq, Christopher Walken, Martha, John Mayer, Dwight from the Office, Diddy, and Ashton Kutcher are doing it.

2) I’m doing it!

1) Everyone else is doing it.

Sometime in the middle of moving last fall, I broke my trusty alarm clock and was forced to find a new one. Being the geek I am, the first one I tried let me wake up to the music of my iPod. A genius plan if music actually had the ability to wake me up. So after a week of late mornings, I headed to Target to try and find another option. Lucky for me, they had a simple, yet loud, red alarm clock on sale for 10 bucks.  Even better than it’s pretty color, this alarm clock sets the time and time zone automatically when you plug it in. Needless to say for months I’v been more than satisfied with my purchase that is until this morning.  In case you didn’t know, Arizona is one of two states that do not observe Daylight Savings Time.  This is something my alarm clock was not aware of and something I didn’t consider when crawling into bed at oh-dark-thirty after yesterday’s marathon cleaning spree.  So when I woke up for church this morning and those big red letters displayed 10:45am, I didn’t really think much of it.  Disappointed in oversleeping and not being able to go to church, I rolled over and went back to sleep until my phone beeped at me.  You can imagine my surprise when my phone said it was 10;41am.  It took but a second for me to realize that time was not moving in reverse but that my alarm clock was set to DST.  Oopsies!  Worst part is…. 4 days later I still can’t figure out to reset it back an hour.

My cell phone died last night and wouldn’t allow me to make or take any calls.  No big deal, right?  Wrong.  I panicked.  What if work called? What if someone I loved needed to get a hold of me?  What if Verizon wouldn’t give me a new phone? What if I had to wait for them to ship me a new phone and didn’t have one when I went to Willcox for 5 days? WHAT WOULD I DO? With the use of Lauren’s phone I called Verizon, and after explaining my issue, they told me to go to my local store the next day (today) and they’d switch it out for me. Ok, one crisis averted, but I hadn’t talked to my mom and dad in a few days due to my self-quarantine and was worried about them not being able to call me. Dumb, I know especially when I remembered that their cell phone was a local Flag number and I had a home phone. Whoopsies. (I blame the cough medicine for my over-reaction and not my obsessive need to always be connected.) So with fingers and toes crossed I went into the store this am at opening time and walked out 12 minutes later with a brand new, working phone. Wow. Why again did I freak out?

This might be TMI, but upon the realization that Cory and I were sitting together tonight with our macs and color-coordinated passport hard drives, Lauren insisted that we take a picture and ‘put that on the internet’. Notice the pink and blue. Mine’s cute and purse-ready. His is the powerhouse for computing gaming. I’m on facebook… he’s rockin’ WoW. What is it they say about opposites…. oh, well.  Maybe I’ll think of it later.

This made me LOLIRL as my student workers would say.

Sadly enough, she doesn’t come in pink.  But she will look amazing in my new purse I just bought to carry her in.

The game just changed.

RIAA says, “No more lawsuits: ISPs to work with RIAA, cut off P2P users.”

It’s a sad day in Laurelland.  My big iPod went to be with Jesus late this afternoon, and the mourning has officially begun.  I’m not as devastated about losing the physical hardware as I am about losing the 51 amazing playlists I had created in our time together.  Do you know how long it takes to create the perfect sing-a-long or rainy day playlist?  Years, I tell you! It was especially difficult to whittle down my gigabytes of John Mayer and Ryan Adams to only three a piece.  But just like when buying a new puppy after the loss of a faithful companion, I need time to heal before I even think about bringing a new iPod into the family.  I need to be sure that not only will it meet my portable musical needs but that it will place nice with the other three members of my iPod family.  Most of you might think that that’s pathetic or insane, I just call it good mothering.

Something tells me you’re not gonna buy this, but I swear it’s the truth.  I was truly considering purchasing a purse-sized netbook before I saw the style of this beauty.  Isn’t it totally me?

Today marks Day 1 of my hiatus into the world ‘off the grid’.  I honestly haven’t gone this long without a pure form of the intarweb for the past six years or so.  Sure,  I have my cell phone, and most of the time I can survive with that (the admin page of this blog, gmail, espn, the basics).  But I’m going to have quite the catching up to do on some of my favorite feel-good websites.  So, read them for me, would ya?

Quirky, comfy and original.  I lived on this website as I was decorating my new apartment. From paper products to home decor, I have a happy moment here each morning before work.

With a tagline like that who needs to say more.  Music lovers bookmark this one!

Think celebgossipblogging but about sports.  No, this isn’t about where Kobe had dinner last night, but if you’ve ever owned a fantasy team, this should be bookmarked.

Home redesign done with creativity and more than a few amazing tips. Have a design dilemna? They can help!

More design goodness.

My New Music HQ

Here’s a lil bit of tech-geekery for your Sunday afternoon.  Ever wanted to create an online icon of you for the masses?  An identifiable jpg for the world to see.  Well, here’s your chance with FaceYourManga.  Choose your skin color (sadly, ghostly pale wasn’t an option), eye shape, and at least twenty other facial features to create your own mini-me.

Here’s mine.  I’d love to see yours.  Good luck finding the right blend of you with the handful of options there were.  I’m still missing my dimple in my chin… long lashes… rounder face… smaller mouth.  But it’ll work for now.

A few weeks ago in preparation for the fall semester my students workers and I roamed the halls of more than a few of our dorms mapping out the signal strength of wireless on campus.  Somewhere on the third day, I found this sign on the door of a RA.  These words are the reason that I’m writing two weeks worth of blog posts on this Saturday afternoon to post date for the days that I won’t have a second to put words to page.  They are why I plan on spending more hours at work than at home, and why my loved ones and friends knows that I’ll be ‘unavailable’.  It takes something like 1200 hours of work by thirty student workers and four full-time staff to do what we plan to do in the next four days, and when it’s midnight and I’m just walking in the door for the first time in 16 hours… this is the purpose and passion I’ll cling to.  Pretty cool, huh?

If you’ll be patient with me, I’ll soon explain the joys of what this week has in store for my life, and the controlled chaos that has become my close companion. Until that time, you’ll have to settle for a little geek humor in the form of a video I plan on using in my training workshop tomorrow morning if I can find a way to be up by 6am.

Notice something wrong with this picture?  Oh, yeah.  The Internet light is off on my DSL modem.  Still.  Qwest somehow didn’t transfer my service but instead disconnected it.  To add insult to injury, the normal time to reconnect a disconnect service is 7-10 days.  Even after raging at four supervisers, I’m still not able to be connected until Thurs or Fri.

So for now I’m blogging and connecting on 52Kbps dial-up.  Thank you free university dial-up.  I remember a time not too long ago when I could only dial-up from my parents house at less than 19.2Kbps.  Yet, somehow that seemed worlds faster than this speed.  I’m definitely learning to appreciate high-speed connections.  At least until I have DSL again, I have Bravo and the new joys of Shear Genius and Project Runway.  Talk about addictive.