Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Tag: internet (Page 2 of 6)

Day 333: not saving the world

It’s late and I’m pretty tired.

We tried to save the world tonight, from a global pandemic, but failed.  Twice.  It’s sad when you play a purely cooperative game and you lose, because then everyone loses.  No one wins!

I was actually going to go to sleep close to an hour ago, but I instead read some forum posts about the board game we played tonight.  What did people do before the Internet existed?  I guess they didn’t get distracted and went to bed when they planned to go to bed.

It was a good weekend.

It’s hard to believe that there’s only a month of year 26 blogging left for me and two months of a baby-less existence left for us.

Day 322: 2009 favorites

Author’s note: This post is ghostwritten by Katie. Scott is busy reading the directions to a new board game we got for Christmas, so he’s dictated his list of “favorites” for 2009. I’m providing the descriptions, which probably won’t give you any real insight as to why he picked them.

From Scott: I wanted to make a best of 2009 list, but seeing as it’s only my opinion on things, calling anything “the best” seems like an overstatement. So instead, here are my favorites of 2009:

Favorite Movie: Where the Wild Things Are
I talked Scott into going to see the Maurice Sendak exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum on Free Museum Day. He wanted to go to the Chabot Science Center, but I convinced him it’d be a better strategy to go into the city during the day and then come back to the East Bay and check out the science center at night, since they have an observatory. It would have been a brilliant plan except that everyone else apparently had the same idea. By the time we got to the observatory there was NOWHERE to park so we had to turn around and go home. The only relevant point to this story, of course, is that Maurice Sendak wrote Where the Wild Things Are, and we got to see a lot of the original drawings that day at the museum. The movie was pretty good too.

Favorite Old TV Show: Lost
I don’t even remember what happened last season on Lost. Time travel? Juliet might be dead? (Oops, spoiler.) They’ve been on hiatus longer than the human gestation period! We’ll have a BABY before we know how this show ends!

Favorite New TV Show: a toss-up between Glee and Better Off Ted
Yes, the singing is fake, and yes, the baby drama is a little over the top, but how many other TV shows have choreographed musical numbers? Glee may be cheesy, but who among us doesn’t love cheese? Better Off Ted is pretty funny too. I feel like there are a lot of shows about people named Ted, though at the moment the only other one I can think of is How I Met Your Mother. That probably isn’t relevant either.

Favorite Theatre Event: American Idiot
For those of you not in the know, Berkeley Rep produced a musical this fall in collaboration with Green Day. The result, American Idiot, felt a lot like I suspect Hair felt like back in the 60s. Disenchanted youth abusing drugs and alcohol to dull the pain of real life…one guy goes off to war, another gets his girlfriend pregnant, the rest of the plot is a little fuzzy. We had seats in the second row. The set was enormous, the music was loud, and the baby had a great time thrashing about in my belly like the dancers onstage.

Favorite Internet Thing (Useful): Google Wave
Umm…Scott sent me an invitation to Google Wave, but I never actually tried it, so I have no comment on this one. Other than I heard from other people that it wasn’t useful.

Favorite Internet Thing (Useless): Yo Balloon Boy
I was disappointed to find out, about 10 minutes ago, that this is an actual internet thing and not just something clever that Brice thought up for his facebook status update.

Favorite Food: Yogurt by weight
I’ve never seen Scott so swept away by any other trend. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that you feel like you can’t get ripped off–you’re paying for exactly what you put in your bowl. That and he feels like an “expert.” And I can pretend it’s somewhat healthy!

Favorite National Event: Barack Obama’s inauguration
We only saw about 5 minutes of the inauguration telecast before heading out to work. We had recorded the whole thing on our DVR but never watched it and it got deleted. We saw the important part, though, when he was sworn in.

Favorite Personal Event: Katie’s pregnant!
I bet we can all predict Scott’s favorite personal event of 2010. Hint: Katie will no longer be pregnant! (And I don’t mean the series finale of Lost.)

Scott: Wow, Katie did such a great job writing most of this post, maybe I’ll make her write all my posts in the new year! Tomorrow, I’ll write a lot about video game this past year, which I would never let Katie write because she’d make video games sound stupid and boring. She once wrote an ode to a Playstation that should never be seen by any video-game-loving gent. It would break a boy’s heart.

Day 321: prime

In a little over two weeks, my three month dalliance with Amazon Prime threatens to perish.

When an offer for a trial of Amazon Prime popped up in October, I bit.  I knew that, most likely, we wouldn’t be traveling this holiday season (what with Katie’s baby belly) but we’d probably still be exchanging Christmas gifts with family.  So, in a unexpected bout of foresight, I signed up for the trial primarily for the last minute Christmas shopping and shipping we were sure to do.

And it did come in hand over the past week, especially the part where I could extend my membership to four additional family members, meaning my mom and most of the Dahls got free 2-day shipping from Amazon as well.

But what a tricky business it is, the knowledge of Amazon Prime’s power at your disposal every day.  How tempting it is to buy everything on Amazon when you know it’ll be at your doorstep in less than three days.  How much more quickly your finger clicks the checkout button on Gold Box deals when there’s no minimum purchase required to get free shipping.

I’m sure that having Prime has caused me to buy a few things from Amazon over the past three months that I wouldn’t have otherwise.  I’m sure that’s an effect that the Amazon geniuses hope for.  It’s just so easy.

The question is: do I continue my Prime membership.  Is the convenience and burden worth $79 annually (though less, if I can split it among family members)?  Or is it just $79 being anted up for a much bigger pot of Amazon spendings spread over the next 12 months?

Day 306: password marriage

There’s a scary and magical point in every relationship, beyond which there is rarely turning back.  It is a bond of trust in our digital age that is so strong, there is little to compare it to.

It is the moment when you give your partner the passwords you use to your online accounts.

All of a sudden, you are vulnerable in a way you’ve never been before.  Suddenly, someone else in the world has all of your information.  At a moment’s notice, Katie could transfer money in and out of my bank accounts, send an email as me to my friends and co-workers, and de-friend half of my friends on Facebook while sending them spiteful messages.

In the hands of a deviant, a person’s black book of passwords is free reign.

Which is why it’s such a stirring moment in a relationship, because it is a way to signify to that other person that you’re in this together, that you trust them with your entire identity.  What could be more romantic than that?

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