This is a popular comment that pops up on the ‘net from time to time. It’s a totally accurate comment on dating and women:

DragonflyBlade21: A woman has a close male friend. This means that he is probably interested in her, which is why he hangs around so much. She sees him strictly as a friend. This always starts out with, you’re a great guy, but I don’t like you in that way. This is roughly the equivalent for the guy of going to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we’re not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we’re going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn’t work out, we’ll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.

This is the source, as far as I know.

I must give kudos to the original writer for expressing reality in such a succinct way.

I came across this comment again this morning on Digg.com’s post The Real Reason Women Don’t Like “Nice” Guys.

Technorati Tags: dating, relationships, girls, women, wisdom, insight

It’s 4:22.. well, let’s say 4:23 AM and I suppose that it goes without saying that I’m awake, eh?

This night’s dream was pretty farked up. It was about the murder of a woman in her young 20’s. Caucasian, longish curly dark hair.. an attractive enough gal.

The one who killed her was her boyfriend. Apparently he was into some seriously illegal stuff and she knew… and they had an argument? I can’t quite remember what triggered the murder, exactly.

When the dream first began this was just another murder on the over-hyped evening “news”. I wasn’t much affected by it, but I was playing some anonymous MMO and some of my guildies were deeply affected by it.

Yeah, well, it goes without saying that this is one strange dream… so if you think that this is weird.. heh, read on. Read the rest of this entry »

Diggnation recently covered a Digg headline about Geek Squad. This has happened before, of course, because the so-called “Geek Squad” is (pretty much) uniformly laughed at by us computer nerds.

I digress though.

The latest situation is the result of someone being pretty sneaky. The owner of the PC put software onto their computer that would record a video of everything that happened on their PC; mouse movements, folders opening.. every little thing was recorded. After this was installed they then sent the PC to the Geek Squad to have iTunes installed. That was the only “work” that they hired Geek Squad to do.

What happened? The sneaky recording software caught someone at Geek Squad copying all of the porn from the computer onto a thumb drive. Not only that, but the person at Geek Squad was apparently checking the Properties of folders to see if they contained enough data to be worth their time. Sheesh!

This made me think: What if it had been financial data? Work or school documents? Other people’s (friends, family, clients’) personal information?

You can imagine how this made me consider the subjects of security, privacy, and even identity theft. It was a chilling thought!

Once at my computer the majority of my data would be right out in the open. As unlikely as this scenario is, I had to wonder what I could do to prevent that level of intrusion. Read the rest of this entry »

Previously I mentioned that I was one block away from meeting my fitness goal. This morning I met it and then exceeded it! Woohoo! I jogged non-stop around the park and then continued, adding the full length of one of the two longer streets (a rough guestimation of an additional 3ish blocks).

My next fitness goal will be to do the splits, with a much longer term goal of completing two circuits non-stop around the park.

Yar!

~Steph

Technorati Tags: goals, fitness, health, exercise, work out, weight loss, jogging, running

Yep, I’m in a pretty good mood this morning! ;D

I almost didn’t go out to jog this morning. I’ve been in a slump recently as I struggle with burn out and, to exasperate the problem, I got into the Tabula Rasa beta this morning. I had to force my lazy arse out of that door, but I made it…

…and I’m glad that I did! My goal for this summer has been to jog completely around the park once non-stop, and I came SO close this morning! The park is divided, of course, into four sides. Two of those sides are very long, and two of those sides are “short” (the short sides are the length of one block). I would have made an entire circuit had I been able to complete just one more short, one block stretch – yar!

So close! Unfortunately my chest was simply too tight by that point, and my jog had become a small trot of sorts by then anyway lol, but hey! I’m feeling pretty good.

One block to go!

~Steph

Technorati Tags: fitness, jogging, running, health, exercise, weight loss

This is not an official update. This is something that I whipped together.

Here is what this “update” does:

• Returns results from within the last 3 months (so no out dated information is returned)
• Search results will (or rather, “should”) all be in English
• PDF files are removed from search results – YAY!

Download It Here

Oh, the Google icon in Firefox’s drop down box is much larger than the others. This is because I was too lazy to resize the PNG image file, but it has the added benefit of making it easier to select “Google” from the list.

Why Did I Do This?

I made this change to Firefox’s built-in Google search box after being annoyed one too many times by sloppy results. Yes, I realize that this may shock many of you: Google can return sloppy search results.

I’ll pause here while you all gasp in horror. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I signed up for Netflix. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about doing for awhile now, and I found a coupon code that gave me a one month free trial instead of the usual two week trial. For those interested the code was 80004745 . Mind you, I have no idea how long that code will last, so good luck!

Oh, I went with the super cheap $4.99/mo option by the way. I’ll get only one DVD at a time, but I’m not a huge movie watcher anyway. I’m using Netflix to catch up on some anime (Full Metal Alchemist, Ergo Proxy, & some others) and that’s about it. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a list of the privacy tools that I regularly use on my computer. The software listed here is free.

Friends say that I go a little overboard with the protection of my privacy, and I suppose that I do. However, there is a key tool here that everyone should use and that’s email privacy. Just like everything else in the computer world, the word “encryption” now refers to something that is so easy to use that you can forget that you’re using it while still reaping all of the benefits.

Technology moves forward, after all.

Note that I hope to be using Freenigma soon but I don’t have it yet so it’s not officially in this list. It’s free, and I should have it soon. If it works as they say it does then this will be my #1 recommended tool to everyone. More on this later.

Out of all of the software that’s listed here I only recommend the first, Ciphire Mail, to the average computer user as long as you use a program like Outlook Express or Thunderbird (it’s not useful if you log into a website to use your email).

From top to bottom the programs decrease in how easy they are to use for the average computer user. Read the rest of this entry »

Just FYI: I’ve updated my PGP keys for both my primary address and my website contact address, and I revoked my older keys.

…but I don’t post about it every day now. I also hit burn out awhile back, but I got out again this morning with jogging, crunches, push ups, and stretches.