Sam Woodfin's Micro

Well Done, Craigslist!

 

And I can still search for an apartment! It just takes an extra step!

I'd black this blog out for the day, if I knew how to do that without losing the entire thing, but I'm hosted at TypePad. It's not as easy to disappear and reappear as when I was hosting my own site!

And blackouts aren't what really matters. Stopping SOPA? That's what matters! The people we vote into office need to be paying attention!

Cooking With Klout!

I've had a couple of people ask me in the past week about Klout. Some people don't get the benefit of it. It's not been that long ago that I didn't get it, either. I posted a couple of times about Perks that I've gotten from Klout, but today's Klout Perk came in handy, indeed!

We'll start with the box. (And forgive the creative license I've taken with the photos in this post. I've become a bit envious of the photos a friend has been taking with her iPhone and running through filters on Instagram. I have no iPhone, and no access to Instagram, so yeah, I'm playing in Paint.NET.) I was on my way to the grocery store when I found it on my front steps. It was a bright orange box o' goodness on a not-so-brilliant day.

This is what it looked like (sort of; see previous paragraph) when I opened the Klout box and took out all of the packing paper. We'll get to what's in there, shortly; but I wanted you, dear reader,  to share the excitement of actually opening the box.

This is a rather large set of Top Chef rubber-tipped, stainless steel tongs. They're lockable, too, 'though honestly, I have no idea how that works. These will come in handy, today, retrieving chicken -- so tender it falls off the fork -- from my crock pot.

This is what I assume is supposed to be the Perk's pièce de résistance. This is How to Cook Like a Top Chef. It's a nice, colorful, aesthetically-pleasing hardback book, suitable for whacking someone over the head with, but also packed with recipes, cooking techniques, chef bios, tattoos, and other fun stuff. This will be useful and challenging-in-a-good-way when I can actually afford to cook something that isn't either chicken leg quarters or pork neck bones.

But the most useful bit of all, today, was the coupon for a free frozen entrée from Healthy Choice. It's not pictured, because it's already been redeemed. That's gonna be a blessing, tonight, when my mom wakes up around eleven o'clock and decides that she's hungry!

And Klout, if you're reading this: Free food, and free tools for preparing food? Always, always an appreciated Perk!

Really, Twitter?

Ecomom Delivers!

I got my bunch o' free stuff from Ecomom (via Klout), today! At first, I thought they'd forgotten the heart-shaped soap, but they'd conveniently stashed it inside one of the stainless steel food containers. (Clever you, Ecomom!) That particular soap was larger than I expected it to be, while the containers and the shampoo bar were smaller.

I'm anxious to try out everything that came in this order. I'm especially itching to have Mom try the shampoo bar. But it's the lavender soap that's already seen use. Nice soaps are nice, but when your water heater is broken, nice soaps are even nicer!

I've Got Glue!

I got these stickers in the mail, this morning, from GetGlue! My favorite is easily the Anne Rice sticker (second cricle, top row). But I have no idea what to do with them, besides maybe sticking a select few on my computer case.

Do people trade these things? Do you have GetGlue stickers? What do you do with yours?

Another Klout Perk Perks Me Up!

Last time, it was a free Stephen King short story in e-book format. Tonight, I got a $25 discount code to use at ecomom.

As it happens, ecomom is currently offering free shipping on all US orders, so this was a huge "Hello, free stuff!" moment, for me. It also turned out to be a free-stuff-I-can-use moment.

First, I ordered a bar of rosemary and lavendar shampoo for Mom. Credible or not, if someone says that rosemary shampoo can help with dementia, I'm damned sure going ot try it. And guess what! Someone said just that. I wanted to order more than one, but, apparently, these things sell out quickly. One was all I could get.

I also ordered two large and one small stainless food storage containers. Mom rarely cleans her plate, so I need containers for the leftovers. Preferably easy-to-clean containers with no leechy chemical stuff in them, because she's got enough going on, already, kthanx. These seem to fit the bill. (Plus, I like them. Just plain old like them. I like durable things.)

I had a tiny bit of that $25 dollars left, and nothing else that I needed, so I ordered one heart-shaped lavender soap because some portion of the proceeds goes to an emergency fund for women with cancer.

And I am excited for all of these things. Thanks to Klout, I gained a bit of hope to top off an emotionally-exhausting day. And, if that rosemary shampoo seems to benefit Mom, at all (beyond, you know, cleaning her hair), ecomom will have gained an actual paying customer!

Think Facebook is a Privacy Minefield?

LOL.

A few minutes ago, I got a phone call. I didn't recognize the phone number, so I ran a quick Google search. One non-membership site told me that the number belonged to a male, that it's a Verizon landline, and what street in which city that landline is located on. It also gave me the guy's first and last initials and let me know that he uses "dating sites".

Another site gave me the guy's first and last name, a street number to go along with the street name, and a zip code. It let me know that he's "associated with" a female of the same surname, but doesn't specify their relationship to each other. With a little help from Bing/Virtual Earth, this site also gave me a map showing the location of the guy's residence, as well as giving me options to get directions to his house or to view his neighbors. That last bit is neat! I got to see an aerial photograph of the entire neighborhood, with each house labelled with its occupants and their phone numbers.

I can see that this guy has a pretty nice house, even if it does look just like some of the houses that surround it. It's a two-storey house with a fire place and a two-car garage.

A little more poking around, and I even know two of the cities he has lived in previously, and that he's is into ham radio!

I did discover one discrepancy, though: The web can't decide if the guy at this phone number/address is 65 years old or in his early 30s. That's OK, though; I didn't really need to know any of this.

What you need to know, however, is that while people bitch and moan about Facebook's privacy problems, if you're on Facebook, it's because you signed up for it. Does that justify privacy policies that aren't user-friendly? No. But, again, you signed up for it. The same can't be said for all of the other sites which will gladly cough up your personal info with neither your knowledge nor your consent. That poor guy whom I could now stalk like a mofo, were I so inclined? All he did was dial my phone number. Or maybe he just allowed someone else to dial it on his phone.

And do you want to know what I found when I searched Facebook for this guy that I now know so much about?

Nothing.

On Facebook, he doesn't exist.

Facebook Drives More Traffic Than Twitter Does

This is a lesson that has made itself blatantly obvious over the past couple of days. Maybe this is easier to see on a low-traffic scale. Maybe it's because people on Facebook are more engaged than people on Twitter. Maybe some of my posts are more-tailored to the interests of my Facebook friends, or, since most of my Facebook friends actually know me in meatspace, perhaps they're more invested in what I have to say.

Regardless of the reasons why, for these two posts, my 145 Facebook friends absolutely ran roughshod over my 594 Twitter followers. The odds are against that happening. Do the math: My tweetstream has a potential reach that's four times the potential reach of my Facebook account. My blog's traffic doesn't reflect that, at all.

And you, fellow bloggers? Is Facebook also the dominant force behind your pageviews? Or does Twitter actually drive more traffic for you, and I'm just doing it wrong?