Yesterday I did something unusual: I looked at my keyboard.  Those of you who type as badly as you spell won’t understand that.  But then perhaps the 2 kewl people don’t read Bitter Women.  (After my last hiatus, I’m not sure anyone does, but that’s another story.)

So I looked down, and was completely ooked out.  I’m not a tidy woman, but I am clean, and I realised my hands were resting on something completely repulsive.   Exhibit A shows the keyboard after I’d cleaned the left side of it:

This is not the interesting part.  See I do realise that most people clean things all the time.   This is pretty much what I saw, except that my keyboard has more of a grey tint than brown (well after I cleaned it, anyway) but the lighting here makes it look like I took this photo in a darkened bar.

The rant comes in here:  I freaking hate digital cameras.  Oh sure they’re lovely and when you take pictures of your cruise to Florence, you get nice sharp images of the twisty roads and perfect skies.  But that all comes at a price: seeing a bit more of reality than you really want to see.  Case in point:

Yes, I was actually putting my hands on that… every day. No wonder I got sick last week. In fact, I feel a little nauseous looking at it now.

Life is not flattering at 10.2 megapixels.  I really don’t want to see my world in razor-sharp 3 point focus.  And I can do quite a lot of this reality-checking record-keeping with a rechargeable li-ion battery that allows me to take up to 520 shots in single-frame shooting mode.  Yes, now close-up facts can now be in my face all day long and recorded forever.

If the camera did this to my keyboard, you can only imagine what it did to my face.

I miss the days of fuzzy inexactitude… of flatterying distance… of polite need-to-know reality. 

I also realise, dear readers, that missing any type of days is a sign of getting O. L. D.  Girl-fren has always warned me that getting older ain’t for sissies.  I see it’s also not advisable for those with a weak stomach or an expensive camera.

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Today I got this message from feedburner via my Google Reader:

“Your Source Feed, http://www.bloggerbingo.com/bitterwomen/feed/, is now working fine. Carry on! We will let you know if anything bad happens in the future.”

Wow, like my own little personal CNN.

Alert!  Jayne!  Hubby thinks you have onion breath!

-or-

Alert!  Jayne!  Son is eating cookies 30 minutes before dinner!

Because the regular CNN just notifies me of things that can’t possibly affect my life, like:

Alert!  Jayne!  Britney Spears has done something stupid again! 

-or-

Alert!  Jayne! Lots of people die hideously! Again today!

It’s always freaking something, but I tell you, I’m sort of liking the idea of this RSS alert telling me any time something bad happens.   As long as it’s all about ME, baby.

But then it might be more fun to have something tell me when something good happens.  Damn.  Even technology has gotten cynical.  3:-O

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I posted this originally on AboutBlogging, but I thought I’d post it here too for those of you Bitter Readers who don’t go to both, because I want you to know that I’ve added a couple of things to make commenting here just that much more rewarding!

#1 … I’ve installed Lucia’s Linky Love on both this blog and the AboutBlogging blog. It’s a dofollow wordpress plugin that will enable commenters to get linkbacks to their own sites. (Currently, if you leave a comment on a blog, you do not get link “juice” for it in Google/Technorati with relation to their rankings. This plugin fixes that.) However, to prevent “human comment spammers leaving insipid, irrelevant comments just to get link-juice”, I’m setting this plugin to reward only users who comment 3 times. This way if you’re a regular participant, you get some linky love!

Another thing I’ve added is what I decided to call “Be A Community Builder”. It’s just a way of letting new commenters know that you will show them some love!

Here’s the “pledge”:

…for every new person who leaves a comment on my blog for the first time. I will:

1) Visit your blog or website
2) Visit Several Pages
3) Leave a comment on a post if have something to say
4) If I like your articles/posts, I will bookmark them in Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, or other appropriate Social Network.
5) If you tell me that you have subscribed to my RSS feed then I will subscribe to yours as well.

If you’re willing to take the Community Builder pledge(ish), saying that you’re willing to make an effort to do these things for your readers, then why not make a post or put up an icon saying so?

I created some icons which you can see here, and if you email me (my address is on my About page), I will also send you the png files with the layers if you want to edit them yourself to match your website or background a little better. Also, if you comment either here or over at AboutBlogging on the appropriate posts saying that you want to join up, I’ll add your website link to that post on AboutBlogging.

Which I think it’s just pretty darned cool. Thanks Fish!

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I’m a geek. I admit that. I own more websites than I have fingers (maybe toes too, if you count domain names without homes.) But ZENO , the new robot from Hanson Robotics just creeps me out to high heaven.

Maybe this is why:

CHUCKY	ZENO

And in addition to being creepily adorable, according to the website, he “sees, hears, talks and remembers who you are”. So he’s a little stalker. I had always envisioned being stalked by someone tall, dark, handsome, and as obsessed with Boston Cream Pie as I am, but I suppose fantasty rarely meets reality, and I’ve probably got the best chances with this lightning-eyebrowed chucky thing.

If this isn’t enough, Hanson is developing a line called Humankind. Info from website: “Our bio-inspired HumanKind robots are world renowned for their amazing interactivity and conversational capabilities, which has placed them at the leading edge of life-like technologies in both appearance and behavior.”

Human-like behaviour? Great. This means we have a whole NEW race of drama-queens to deal with who leave snarky comments, stalk your websites, calls your mother and tell her you’re either losing or gaining weight (whichever will distress her more.. my mother freaks out at either situation)… they’ll probably make Humankind reality shows, and then next thing you know those metal-heads will start blogging about how to make money blogging.

P.S. I just noticed as I was finishing this up that ZENO already has his own blog .

This isn’t a paid blog post, but it really really shoulda been. Somebody owes me a pie.

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I have no clue what’s going on at Amazon these days!

But they have a fun new feature… a little widget you can get to post on a website. Nothing to buy, you just vote for what you like, and you can make a list of ANYTHING, and put it on your site.

So here’s one I found there that was already made up… your votes affect the master list, so vote early and vote often! :))

Oh by the way… I’m still expecting to see poems from my last post, so don’t think you’re off the hook! (You = ~:> )

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