Who needs exercise when you could sit in the Hawaii Chair! Just look at how buff and tone it will make you! Although seriously, could anyone actually get work done sitting in that thing?

Remember last year when Boston was shut down because of the LED art that was put up as part of a Cartoon Network promotion?

It seems that this year there are people putting LED art up to celebrate it.

Something tells me that that might not be a wise idea…

Oh goodness, do you realize how long it has been? Back in 2003, Mike helped me first define what a blurker is:

Blurker (BLUR-kur): n. 1. One who reads many blogs but leaves no evidence of themselves such as comments behind; a silent observer of blogs. 2. One who reads many blogs but has no blog of their own; a blog-watcher or blog voyeur.

So I’ve declared today and international playday. And I know people won’t see this, so lets just declare all the way through this Sunday a sort of playfest. Like the Superbowl of Blogs. Cheer on your favorite bloggers. Let them know you are reading. Give them your support. Leave as many comments on blogs as dollars are spent on Superbowl ads.

Oh, ouch. I hate to think of how much money is wasted on Superbowl ads. Maybe that isn’t a good idea.

Comments though are a GREAT idea. Don’t be a blurker. I promise, it doesn’t hurt at all. Matter of fact, it will feel good. Try it. Leave a comment. And if you write about this, be sure to trackback me too! (Props to Jay Lee for the suggestion! And thanks to Charles for helping to spread the word!)

Back in December, I purchased a MacBookPro. It is a beautiful new laptop, and as much as I wanted to love it, it was hard to adjust to a completely different operating system. I was trying for the first few weeks, but just couldn’t seem to dive right into it.

Then my Dell laptop, which is just over a year old, decided that it was jealous and hurt that I had bought a new Mac. It just locked up one night while I was exporting wedding photos for a client. Fortunately, I do a lot of work on external hard drives, so nothing was lost. The laptop was still under warranty, so we called in to Dell’s support and diagnosed that it was the motherboard that had gone out. They sent a new one.

Meanwhile, I was plunged headfirst into the Mac world. No options, because I had work to do. I’m happy to say that I’m thrilled with the Mac now, and I’ve gotten over most of the hurdles. I’m installing the last of my software, and soon I’ll do a final sweep on the again working Dell to make sure I’ve got everything before we reformat it and pass it along to Jason. He would have had it even sooner if it hadn’t been for the crash.

The only hiccup in all of this was the migration of software and email. None of the latest slideshows have been created because I didn’t have the keys on the Mac until today. New slideshows will be coming soon now! Album design also had to be put on hold during the switch, but that is up next as well! I have a long task list of things to do, but I’m plowing through them pretty fast.

When it came to email, that was where I was most tripped up. I didn’t want to lose anything, so I was using Gmail for awhile as my mail client just to get by. Now, I’m all set up in Mail, so I’m going back through all of my old emails and writing everyone again to make sure they got a response. I’ve recently learned that some of my mail has been getting flagged as spam - probably because I was using Gmail to send it. So if you haven’t heard from me, check there. Meanwhile, I’m going through in Mail now as fast as I can and checking in with everyone to make sure nothing was overlooked. If you haven’t heard from me, please write again — I will be back to my twice a day email response system by tomorrow! (11am and 4pm are my email checkpoints, whenever possible. I always stop, check and respond to email at about the same time each day.)

Looking forward to hearing from you! I’ll be writing from the Mac from now on! I *heart* Apple!

There has been a shocking lack of comments around here lately, so it is time to call out all the Blurkers! I’m declaring January 31, 2008 an International Comment on Blogs Day! No more blurking, you guys! Leave the feedreaders behind, hop on into the browser and say something. If you have a blog, you know it is nice to get comments - so really, shouldn’t you leave them too? I’m just sayin’…

Regarding the article in today’s Business section of the Houston Chronicle, what I actually said was that it was my *last* great moment of geek fame.

I actually had many other moments of geek fame before that, owning a blog hosting company, being a very active blogger, having my websites written about on Yahoo!’s pick of the day and in the New York Times, plus being nominated for awards for my web work. But my life has changed a lot since 2004, between getting married and moving on to being more focused on knitting (which I still do - I’ve finished the second sleeve on my latest sweater and now need to stitch it together!) and photography (wedding and art) and less on the geek side of things. I let Mike take over the truly geek side of things in our house.

I am still a HUGE social media advocate, and I like to use my geek powers for good, not evil.

Tired. Very sore. Wedding yesterday, Amanda & Craig, in Tomball. Beautiful. Photos now in line for editing, will share soon. First need a long nap.

Gave up my nap today though to submit photos to the Spring Observer and be interviewed by them for an upcoming article. Elaine & I, plus Fresh Photography, will be the featured artist at the Yale Street Market in February! Yeah! Be sure to come by and see us next Saturday!

Once I wrapped up the interview, I wrote up part 3 of the post on Lauren & Dante’s wedding in The Woodlands, Texas - you can view it on the wedding photography site. This one is all about the details. These two photos are my personal favorites of the macro shots I took of their rings.

Dwight Silverman wrote a great post about Matt Mullenweg today. It is hard to believe just how much has happened since Matt left Houston for San Francisco, and how WordPress has grown, developed, and changed the blogosphere over that time.

Speaking of Dwight, I *finally* got to meet him in person this morning. We have been in the same circle here now since 2003 or so, and yet we have never met in person. People have even joked that we’re like Clark Kent and Superman - never in the same room at the same time. (He is CLEARLY the Superman in this scenario.) And the first thing he told me? That he gave me a shout out in the post. For naming WordPress. My last great claim to geek fame… ah, good times, good times.

Now I need to go and focus on the Got Social Media conference. Read about Matt, he is quite the awesome guy.

And remember - social media tools don’t make the conversation, they support it. Now go forth and Twitter!

Just a quick announcement for those planning a wedding - there is an open studio tonight at Houston’s Two Be Wed! It is this evening from 6-8 pm, and it is a great chance to meet a variety of vendors - including me! There will also be videographers, invitation designers, florists, and cake bakers. I’ve even heard a rumor that there will be cakes there to sample! Yum!

Let me know if you will be coming, and if you have friends that might be interested, be sure to spread the word!

Second verse, same as the first!

Another round of photos over at the wedding photography site. You know, in case you haven’t subscribed to the RSS feed over there already!

I’ve posted the first part of the photographs from Lauren & Danté’s wedding over at the photography blog. Feel free to comment on them!

The Windows computers in our house are out to get me.

We bought new Macs back at Christmas, and two weeks ago our desktop computer decided to freak out in response. Yes, I am convinced that the computers know and are revolting because we have betrayed them. The main thing I used that computer as was a print server, and it couldn’t see the network - so I couldn’t print. Fortunately, thanks to the holidays, I didn’t have many meetings at the time so I didn’t need printed documents. However, I have a meeting tomorrow, a meeting on Monday, maybe another meeting this weekend, and you can see that I need to print. Mike determined the day that it stopped working that it was the video card, and he first tried using one that we had here to fix it. That didn’t work, so we went to Fry’s tonight and got a new card, and he put it in the machine. All is well again with Floyd as of this evening. (Yes, Mike has named the computers. Muppet names. All of them have Muppet related names. My old laptop was Cookie Monster. Teehee!)

Then last night I was exporting close to 300 photos from Lightroom on the old Dell laptop. Since it was processing so much, I decided to get to work on finally getting everything migrated to the Mac so that I could pass the Dell on to Jason. It wasn’t like I’m getting rid of it completely - and yet it still decided to quit on me too! 201 photos into the export, it just stopped. No more cursor for the mouse, no response to anything I tried. I couldn’t even do a ctrl-alt-del to turn it off. It was late, I was tired, and I finally just turned it off.

This morning, I needed to get the DVD of the photos burned, so I tried to turn it on so I could do that before I headed off to Twisted Yarns to knit.

It wouldn’t come on.

Press button, lights blink, and then they go off and the fan turns off and the machine is silent.

Press button again. Then decide to unplug all external drives in case that is the problem, and try again. Still nothing. Call Mike into the room to see if he has an idea - or to just point and gasp and point while flailing my arms at him, because I knew deep down he wasn’t going to be able to do anything. And I was right. He tried taking out the battery and powering it up with just the power cord, but that didn’t work either.

I finally just had to leave the house and retreat to knit. Two sticks and some wool, and I was much happier. Meanwhile, while I was gone, he was awesome as always and contacted Dell Tech Support. The laptop is just over a year old, and has 610 days left on its warranty. They poked and prodded at it, and in the end they determined that it was the motherboard that has gone bad. We had two options; Dell could send us a box and we could send them the laptop to fix, or they could send us a new motherboard and he could install it. We chose to have them send us the motherboard. Hopefully, that will do the trick and in a few days Jason will be up and running on the Dell.

I’m *so* glad that I was in the midst of moving to the new machine - I had everything that I needed already backed up to external drives. I might be missing some of my Lightroom presets, but if that is the worst of it I am pretty happy.

Meanwhile, this was the swift kick in the arse that I needed to get me to migrate FAST over to the Mac. Lightroom is now installed, and I should have Photoshop running by the end of the weekend. Since Floyd is back up, I can print for my meeting tomorrow. I want to do test prints before I print client orders, so I’ll send those off shortly.

I guess there is nothing like being thrown into the deep end to force you to learn something new!

Wow. And you thought it was bad when *I* acted all gangsta cool. This makes me almost cry, it is so funny! Don’t you wish that YOU lived in Houston so you could have fine commercials like this one all the time?

[via Kelsey on twitter.]

I know, I know - I promised that I wouldn’t duplicate every post from the wedding photography site over here, but this one is worth noting. I had to take a moment today to write about one of my defining moments as a wedding photographer.

Read, Comment, Enjoy! *grin*