Flock, take me away!!

I happened on this article from Continuous Computing Blog: Flock: The New Superstar Social Browser which seemed to describe all of what I do on the internet, from Flickr, to Blogger, to del.icio.us, to RSS feeds. Could it be possible that a browser be so in tune with me? After all, it is just a computer program, and it's the content that counts right? It took me forever to remember to download and install it, and here I am tonight, completely assimilated into the Flock — The web browser for you and your friends in just an hour.

It just makes me realize how much I've been in the dark ages just getting by with Internet Exploder with hundreds of add-ons (see my comment on the original article). Flock is FANTASTIC!! Flickr and Blogger were setup in a matter of seconds, and importing my Bloglines subscriptions took maybe 2 minutes to figure out. Plus having tabbed windows is a necessity. I've been slowly trying to haul my friends into the Web 2.0 world through Flickr, Bloglines, and del.icio.us, but this will throw them in head first!

Of course I am posting this by using the right-click Blog This button and I simply dragged the Flock logo right onto this draft! Holy smokes, I love it!

Blogged with Flock

The Muppet Personality Test

You Are Scooter

Brainy and knowledgable, you are the perfect sidekick. You're always willing to lend a helping hand. In any big event or party, you're the one who keeps things going. "15 seconds to showtime!"

The Muppet Personality Test

That's me! There was no fit between full figured and scrawny, so geeky it is.

Playing the piano in my sleep

I mentioned that I was a known "sleep talker" in my previous post about the How the kids sleep. By this I mean that I will speak out loud while sleeping in the middle of a dream. If Doug is up for it, he will sometimes ask me a question, and I will answer back in the context of the dream. As long as he doesn't ask me anything too complicated, I can carry on for a few sentences. If the questions are too hard, I get confused and annoyed and say "You're waking me up!" Sometimes I will have no recollection about the conversation in the morning.



This reminds me about how I used to play piano in my sleep when I was a teenager. My father told me that before he woke me up in the morning, he would see my fingers playing while I was sleeping. I found this old photo from around that time (1981) of my piano playing. After looking at it for a minute, I figured out that I was playing Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu Op. 66. I knew this from seeing the A in the left hand and my thumb on the G#, an unlikely combination. I dug up the sheet music and found it on measure 13. However, my right ring finger is pressing down the F, which is definitely a wrong note!! I don't remember whether I was just posing, or whether it was taken while playing. Either way, I don't think I was counting on finding a mistake 25 years later. There are more photos in this set and I was able to figure out what I was playing in another shot as well. It is probably "finger memory" recalling all these pieces, which is pretty amazing.

Conversations with Adam in the car

In the car, you can have very frank and intense conversations because you are relegated to sit with one another but yet not required to have eye contact. It is the one place where you can be sure to have your kid's attention because they can't run away. Many people have noticed this phenomenon, as I've heard about this on WGBH Morning Stories as well as Mommycast (not that my whole world centers on podcasts or anything).

So one day driving Adam to and from soccer (yes the cliché soccer mom), we had a conversation about school and college. I told him that he would be going to college and probably live there (make it a fact now so that he doesn't get any ideas otherwise). He was extremely alarmed about living away from home because he said he would miss me. I replied that it was extremely sweet of him to think so, but when the time came, he would probably want to live away from home. He was adamant about missing me and having me live with him at college, so I told him that I would remind him that he felt this way when he turns 18. Such a sweet sentiment from a 5-year-old, I was really touched.

Last week as I was driving him to ice skating lessons, we had another funny conversation.

Mom: Adam, what are you doing?
Adam: I'm watching TV in my brain.
Mom: What are you watching?
Adam: The Simpsons. What are you watching?
Mom: Well, I'm watching the road because I have to drive. Actually I'm singing to myself "Thumpity thump thump, thumpity thump thump, over the hills we go" because we just went over that bumpy part and we are going to ice skating lessons so it reminded me of wintertime. "Thumpity thump thump..."
Adam: Stop it Mom!

Happy Fourth!

We managed to go to two sets of fireworks this year. Here is the best shot taken at Manchester, NH. Maybe next year I will actually use a small tripod, but it is hard to capture a moving target (by that I mean Adam, not the fireworks!). Here is the video footage of the fireworks as well. Apparently, Adam started smiling at a girl nearby and soon he was looking more at her than at the fireworks. I realized this afterwards, when I glanced over and found her smiling at him! I maxed out my camera memory so I only got part of the finale. Thankfully, a new 4GB card is on its way.


Just to be complete, I added the video of the fireworks we saw at Devens on June 30.

My credit card story and phishing scams

I just love this image, even though it is in Greek! Since my anniversary is coming up (no 7 year itch!!), I figured I should finally complete this post that I started because my credit card number was stolen on my anniversary last year. No, it wasn't some internet phishing scam or unsecured transaction, or even a phone scam, it was the old fashioned steal the number off the credit card by an unscrupulous waitress at the Wayside Inn. I know this because the entire week before, I had been down in NY visiting my mom and did not use my credit card at all. We went out for a fancy dinner and got this surly waitress who took forever processing the charge. The very next day with no additional purchases, I get a call from my credit card company asking whether I was buying racing equipment from the UK. I was glad the good folks at MBNA, where I get 2% of purchases going towards the kid's 529 plan, were on their toes.

The funny thing was a few weeks later, I got a security alert email from work saying that there was a phone scam where people claiming to be from the credit card company call you saying that there are unusual purchases on your card and asking for your information to verify that you are actually the card holder. I actually got my call as a phone message, so I had to call them back and I simply assumed that it was MBNA I was talking to (thankfully it was). But if I had taken the call, I would've completely given up all the information the person asked for, without asking to call them back. When I first checked this out on Snopes, Urban Legends Reference Pages: Crime (Security Guard), I could've sworn that this was labeled as a False hoax, but apparently I either read it wrong, or they have updated the page since I last looked at it. It is true, people are getting phished out of this info in this way.

In a related story, I read this scary article, Financial Cryptography: George's story - watching my Ameritrade account get phished out in 3 minutes. This is a really good story, here's a teaser:

As I'm checking emails I start receiving email notifications from my on-line
broker Ameritrade. The email notifications kept coming one after the other, you
just sold out of Duke, you just sold out of Home Depot, you just sold out of
Ford, I watched on my screen as the flurry of emails kept coming across my
screen, pretty much my entire portfolio of Stocks was being sold out right
before my eyes. I took notice of the time when I received the first email
confirmation, it was 9:31AM and as you know the equity market opens up at
9:30AM. My heart was racing, I was stunned and I said to myself this can be
happening to me, I'm a business and technology savvy as I've worked for major
investment banks and brokers as a consultant in the areas of technology trading
for equity and fixed income markets.