New Year - Let's Get Posting

Today I found a very interesting new site called Momversation.com It shows videos of conversations between the top "mommy bloggers" from the web on interesting topics. This site is far more fun than reading text. I got sucked in for a good long while. Hope you enjoy.

Nothing much beats sleep

I could post a long blog post or go to bed. If I knew anything about Good Advice, I'd have to say, honey, go to bed.

I just want to say, Obama/Edwards looks like a great idea. I loved the way they complimented Hillary. I thought it was bold for John Edwards to say Hillary is where she is on her own merits and not because of who she's married to. This is a nice, if probably untrue, thing to say. It still is nice. If it's not because of her husband, then okay but then it's because she's playing on racism and that's not much better. But I digress and I meant to be light and positive.

I'm tired because I traveled down and back to Newark yesterday. Nervous I'd miss the 4 am wake up, I woke up at every hour leading up to 4 am. Then I got home last night and couldn't really wind down to go to bed early. And again tonight, same story - not the Newark part but the winding down part. Had to finish a favor for a friend so I've been sucked into my computer and away from my millions of tiny little threads counted by small people in Indonesia for my pleasure. So, to bed I will go.

I'm liking the website www.dooce.com btw and think she's not getting a fair shake on the TV. What else is new? I'm also wondering if there's a space anywhere online where someone's not selling something - including themselves. Why is everyone wanting to get something from someone else. Is this a uniquely American phenomenon? Do you even know what I'm talking about? I must be rambling. Last night I was talking in my sleep about twittering. I guess that's when you know it's bad.

Don't want keyboard face.











xo my friends. xo.

Not knowing what's going to happen

I think the pause in the blog is indicative of something. Two of the bloggers are pregnant and two of us are not (as far as I know). For the two who are, not only are they pregnant, they have existing children to care for, marriages to maintain, houses to run and jobs to do. Maybe in that order? For the two of us that aren't pregnant, thinking about when to get pregnant, what to do for work, how to plan it properly by money considerations, travel, work, etc. it's all very mind boggling yet so big it's actually out of our control.

This blog is a public thing and probably too open of a forum to talk about these issues here in any great detail. Our colleagues, friends and strangers read it and take away some sort of perception about who we are or what we mean. I for one know that most of what I've been thinking about lately has not exactly been good advice - how can I give any when I feel rather adrift?

Anyway, just wanted to check in. Register that life is in flux and it's as it should be. this is right for our age but bad for the blog. If any bright good-advice ideas come to me, i will be sure to post.

A couple things for those who work and produce documents: don't email a document that's not formatted to print. always number your slides in powerpoint. be sure your font is consistent through out your whole document and save each version of your excel docs with a date or version number so you can keep track.

separately, right now my favorite obsession is to do haiku on twitter, but that's so obscure and techie, I can't see many of my mom friends getting what I'm talking about. my advice would be to join in and see what's going on on twitter. I suppose I like it because it seems like a ticker of the collective unconscious, but maybe it's all just crap. Follow me: www.twitter.com/emilybee

For a mom fix

My sister sent me this link today to Postcards from Yo Momma. it was featured on the very clever Very Short List, website today.

I found myself laughing out loud to some of the posts on there and the hilarious things that moms say to their grown children. It's been a long time since I got a note from my mom, but this little site reminds me how funny and precious moms can be.

Best of the Web - 2007

To keep you hip to what's cool on the internet, here are a few great summary pages.

Best of YouTube 2007
I could watch the tetris one over and over. Don't quite get the chocolate rain one but it kicked off a phenomenon, so you have to watch it at least once.

As an aside, I wish this video ranked up there:


South by Southwest 2007 Website winners These are great sites. These are the change-makers.

Webby Awards 2007 More conventional, better known. Some of the "bests" are debatable.

Eight Annual Weblog Awards This is the most relevant award list for us authors of this blog to read. There are amazing blogs recognized - great for browsing, discovering new sites, interesting activity going on on the web.

What are your favorites? Let's discuss.

p.s. This blog didn't rank in any "best of's" but it's pretty darn clever and so close to home it hurts.

Useful sites for our lives

Babble.
A site for parents from the guy who did Nerve. I did the RSS feed on the Strollerderby page. Now I get feeds in my outlook regularly updated. Keeps me up to speed with the hipster parent dialog. Which means I get to vacillate between guilt, indignation, self satisfaction and nervousness with the mass of other gen-X parents raising kids these days. (Am I gen-X? What exactly are the qualifiers?)

My Del.icio.us Bookmarks.
Delicious is a social bookmarking site. It's useful as a place to find information that's been found by people before you. It's a way to search the web in a more narrow way. People tag sites they find useful to Delicious. The aggregate power of the social network raises the status of certain pages above others. It's sometimes a better resource for finding detailed information that might not make it to the top of a search on google due to newness or being in a crowded, broad category.

If you use Delicious and want to save articles for me to see, when you tag your links, set a tag that says "for:emilybigpicture" and I can see what you've thought I might like.

Captioner
Take pictures of other people and write captions on them. Fun and funny.

Astro

Enter your date and time of birth and get an incredibly accurate daily horoscope.

Real Clear Politics

A one stop shop for the best articles Politics.

I heart podcasting

These are the Podcasts I keep up to date on my iTunes.
They are all available from the iTunes directory.
To access each site directly, click on the hyperlinks below.

APM: Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac
This podcast is updated everyday. In the first half Garrison Keillor talks about which famous writers are having a birthday today and a little bit about each. In the second half, he reads a poem. The Change, by Tony Hoagland represents exactly the sort of poem that keeps me tuned into this show.


Commonwealth Club Radio Program
Hear in depth discussions with speakers covering a range of timely topics. I’ve found I’ve gotten news from this source that isn’t widely available elsewhere.


NYTimes Front Page
If you only have a few minutes to keep up with the world a day, this is a great way to stay up to date.


Harvard Business Review Ideacast
Forward thinking business ideas. Fresh, innovative and well considered opinions. I’m often left thinking about the topic for well after the initial listen.


KCRW Today's Top Tune
A song a day. This is a great way to have a total change of pace from the rest of the day. Often this is the first thing I turn on when I come home from work. Breaks up the sameness.


Podrunner: Workout Music
Dance tracks for running. Not all are good but when they are good, they’re very good. I can run longer with this music than most anything else.

This American Life
#1 podcast for car trips. Hilarious, touching stories about people being people.


Radio Lab
Fascinating investigations into some of life’s most basic questions. My favorite so far: why we sleep.

YogaDownload.com
Best way to workout in a short window of time or in a hotel room.

Basic HTML - How to make text or images clickable

I'm trying to figure out how to make text or images linkable. This post will be my experiment. I'm going to search for some tutorial then try out my neophyte HTML skills in this post.

AbFab Clips

Okay, that worked!

I can't seem to paste in the code that I used without it rendering as readable text, so instead, I'll say Visit About.com to learn more.

By the way, work on the Edit HTML. When I tried to paste on the Compose tab, it didn't work.

Hope this cryptic post leads you to figure it out, too.

How to RSS

RSS = Real Simple Syndication

What you get - if you use iGoogle or something similar, you can add this blog to your iGoogle page. The way you do this is to:
a) click the "Add Stuff" link (top right side of page)
b) click the "Add feed or gadget" (middle left margin)
c) Type or paste this URL: www.ourgoodadvice.blogspot.com
d) Click add
d) Voila!Any updates to this blog will be fed to the new Our Good Advice widget on your iGoogle page. You can drag and drop the widget anywhere you want on the page.