My Friend Julie's Status

What ever you give a woman she will make it greater. If you give her sperm she will make a baby. If you give her a house she will give you a home. Give her groceries she will give you a meal. Give her a smile and she will give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges whatever she is given. So, if you give her crap .....

It figures

I was planning to write a post called, 'Tax the Bastards!' but once I wrote the title I felt there was nothing more that needed to be said.

OK, I lied. I did actually end up blogging about it on Working Girl, which is my other blog.

And now for something completely different. There was a brief 'thing' going around Facebook and the Blogsphere where you create your own album cover based on threee random inputs from the Web. Here are the rules if you want to try it:

YOUR ALBUM ARTWORK:
1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random”or click here. The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 - Go to "Random quotations"or click here.The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”or click here. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 - Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

It never quite took hold because the results weren't that great for most of us. For example, here is mine:


Isn't that totally lame???

But not everyone failed. For example, Kristina got this:


It figures.

Sort of apropos, although different, my favorite new word is 'moobs.'

25 Random Things About Me

I got tagged on Facebook to create a list of 25 random things you don't know about me, which is kind of hard after the High School Questionnaire. . .

But anyway, rather than posting the list to FB and wasting a perfectly good blogging opportunity, here are yet another 25 random things about me that most of you may not already know:

1. I’m legally blind without glasses.

2. I think John Stewart is really hot.

3. I’ve dated more Europeans than Americans.

4. I hear voices in my head when I design software.

5. I own Sister Act. And Sister Act 2. In German.

6. I eat more than Ralf.

7. I don't see the point of American Idol.

8. I like men in Lederhosen a lot.

9. I once ate silkworms. I didn't know they were silkworms until later. They kind of tasted like chicken.

10. I organize my entire life with scribbled notes on bits of scratch paper.

11. I think people who voted for Bush in 2004... what were you thinking???

12. I weighed more in HS than when I was pregnant. Not much more, but more.

13. It drives me crazy when the left side of my hair is longer than the right side. It's OK if the right side is longer.

14. To get Ralf to propose I broke off a prior engagement, moved to Germany, found work and housing, dated a couple of other guys and finally instigated that risky showdown about the maternal clock (so don't cross me because I don't pull any punches).

15. I’m a bit of a hypochondriac.

16. I worry I'll get AIDS from an evil doctor or a sloppy pedicure. (See?)

17. In HS I was awarded a scholarship to a prestigious acting school. I ended up turning it down because I didn't want to wear sun glasses and a baseball cap just to go shopping.

18. I once seriously considered getting a Ph.D. in political science.

19. I can't believe how lucky I am to have a husband, kids, floor heating, coffee, flexible work hours and good health.

20. When I read a good book I see everything as vividly as the real world.

21. I wonder about things all day long, like whether Posh ever smiles.

22. I wonder if my dad misses me.

23. My IQ is 142.

24. I am pro death penalty for violent crimes involving children.

25. My nose is crooked. It's subtle but it kind of bugs me.

Winter Wonderland MY ASS and other topics

Winter sucks: My kids have to be at Kindergarten at 8:15, which means at 7 we start getting dressed: tights, lined pants, undershirt, overshirt, pullover, socks for each child. Then around 7:55 we start putting on snow boots, scarves, hats, mittens and ski jackets. And this morning, as a special treat, by the time we finished these winter follies I realized that the car was frozen solid (-7 degrees C) and that Ralf had hidden the ice scraper in his man cave somewhere. Fortunately, there are few problems that a major credit card can't solve and I was able to scrape the ice off my windshield with my Visa.

Back to school: I’ve branched out from connecting with colleagues on Facebook to connecting with old high school friends and suddenly it’s like I’m back in biology class again, pretending to work while secretly passing notes. For example, this is how I found out that a girl I went to high school with was in Robert Palmer’s ‘Simply Irresistible’ video. Yes, I played volleyball with someone very slinky. I figure this makes me vicariously slinky. See if you can spot me, I mean, her:





Hairy encounter: I also reconnected with my German hair stylist Entela, who is actually Hungarian and looks just like Courtney Cox. Entela is an artiste. I can’t wait to bring my hair to her. It hasn't had any professional attention since September and needs to be saved. This is me:

German doctors: I called my German doctor to find out if I had whooping cough. After looking through my files for several minutes the receptionist told me sternly - like I had crossed some sort of line by calling - that she couldn’t tell me the results over the phone and Herr Doktor would have to call me back. That's standard here, by the way: they take your blood and tell you to call in a week for the results and then when you call they tell you they can't tell you anything and the doctor will call you back. But if you don't call, they won't call you, like they have to be activated by your voice or something. The good news is that yes we have no whooping cough.

And finally, I think I found a perfect blog posting. I haven't quite decided whether Kristina is being sarcastic or if she's just plain evil but she's very funny. So, instead of writing something meaningful myself today, here’s a blog I wish I’d written.

Do I actually like Facebook?

Last week I registered for Facebook in response to an invitation from one of my colleagues. It wasn’t the first invitation I’d received but I’m the classic late adopter – I tell myself that this helps me design great software because I’m designing for other late adopters. Anyway, by now virtually every person I’ve ever so much as shaken hands with is on FB so I went ahead and signed up. Then I spent two days almost exclusively on FB, looking around, trying things, seeing what works (for me, that is) and what doesn’t.

5 things I like about Facebook:

1. Seeing what people are doing right now. For some reason I love knowing that Christine is moving an armoire or that Jenny just posted pictures. This is way more fun than Survivor or other reality shows because it’s not just random average-looking people off the street mugging for the camera, I actually know these people.
2. It’s a great way to get information fast, like the ‘Machine is Us(ing us)’ video Michael posted or comments on Prop 8. In just 2 days I’ve learned more stuff than I ever get from chatting with people.
3. Getting pinged – it’s almost as good as having real friends! Maybe even better, since I can take my time with those snappy comebacks, which you can’t do in face-to-face encounters.
4. Having virtual contact with friends and colleagues way out here in Bavaria. And having an easy way to remind them I exist.
5. The plug ins, like how compatible my movie taste is with Sandy Voypick. Run far, Sandy, we have nothing in common.
   

4 things I don’t like about Facebook:

1. The search results list doesn’t show enough info the members to actually find the people you care about unless they’re already connected to you in some way – for example, maiden name, graduation year, etc., would be extremely helpful when I’m sifting through the 20+ Aaron Baars to find my Aaron. Classmates.com – which sucks in many other ways - does a way better job of connecting you to the people you’ve lost touch with that you’re actually interested in.
2. I joined 2 groups I was once part of (The JET program and Judson School) and have no friggin’ clue if anyone I know is also part of those groups. Also when you view all you have no idea where you are in the list, no way to organize search results and by the time I got to # 7 in the Next list I was starting to see repeats.
3. The overall usability isn’t that great. Sure, billions of people use FB every day, but who are you going to believe, them or me?
4. It’s way too easy to spend too much time being virtual and not enough time being real. After only a day on FB I found myself shushing my very real daughter while responding to something someone wrote on my virtual wall.
   

I wanted to come up with even lists of 5 things I like and 5 things I don’t like but as it turns out I like more things than I dislike about one of the most popular and accessible Internet applications of our time. Facebook is a fun social networking tool and there’s no doubt it has shaped how people use the Internet to network. And I definitely think there’s a place for it in the workplace, where your success may well be dependent on your social connections.

But is it more than that? Does FB represent the future of business applications?

For example, could you use Facebook as a team management tool at work? Interesting idea, but challenging when you get down to it because it doesn’t seamlessly include the business applications your teams probably use, like document management, etc.

I’ve also heard rumbles about using FB as a core system of record for business applications but I don’t see it – the information that, say, a global HR system needs isn’t there and even the information that is there is spotty. For example, if my company wanted to get my employment history from FB it would look like I only ever had one job.

So, as a business application I don't think FB is quite there, at least not in its current form. But it is definitely meaningful for business. Which means that the question ‘Do I like FB?’ that I started this posting with is the wrong question because the answer doesn’t matter. Somehow this little application that allows you to ping and poke people you seldom speak to in person has scratched a deep collective social itch.

Business is about people, after all, so business can't dismiss anything that has captured the imagination and mindshare of so many people.

And I think that the journey of collective intelligence/networking/thinking/sharing has just begun.