It’s been one year with my ipod Touch.

Do I still love it? You bet.

Do I still use a dozen apps everyday? No way.

My vision has narrowed but is still dusted with silver. And since my old post regarding the ipod Touch is one of my top pages hit with search results, I feel duty bound to update everyone on what I’m still using – or not using – one year later.

So, what’s changed? I’ve simplified.

(Why does that sound like a spell right out of Harry Potter? I feel like I should be flicking my wrist. Simplify!)

Let’s have a look. Out of the twelve I named as essentials one year ago, only 3 remain in daily use. I’ll go through my list:

In the totally and utterly forgotten category:

• touch to do
• stanza
• mobile rss
• read it later/instapaper
• wordpress
• evernote

(Most of these lost out to a simpler app that I found – and will name later – to do multiple functions. Or I eventually found that I didn’t like doing that thing on my teeny ipod screen as was the case with writing blog posts and reading RSS feeds.

Lucky winners to have been replaced by uber-winners:

• grocery gadget was a fail. now using Grocery iQ –> a faster interface in the app and web app, easier all around, lightening fast syncing. Love it!
• tweetdeck –> replaced by the basic app Twitter makes for itself. I like Twitter but we’re not BFF’s, so there’s no need for the super micromanagement capabilities of Tweetdeck. Neat but unnecessary.
• words with friends –> got old. games usually do with me. these days when i feel like a scrabble sort of game, i’m playing War of Words. It has bombs and crazy bonus tiles, different shaped boards and more mischievousness available.

Still kicking and entertaining me everyday are:

• podcasts. my kids are starting to roll their eyes when i speaker dock my ipod. lol
• goodreads. for bragging rights. i love being around the house reading wherever and being able to update my progress in reading a book.
• alarm clock. for waking up at any hour. has yet to fail me!

But my biggest most terrible addiction is for Simplenote. A – haha – simple text app that has a web counterpoint for easy syncing and cloud storage. I’m in love. And simply can’t say enough about it.

Just recently, Simplenote introduced tags into the system and everything that I loved got easier to find.

When I want to start a blog post, I jot my inspiration down and tag it: blog.

When I find a recipe I want to try but not yet save for future generations, I copy/paste it into Simplenote and tag it: recipe, try.

If it’s worthy and will be staying around, the tags change to: recipe, file.

When I’m achievement chasing and need a guide so as to note forget where the three secret messages are hidden…

When I need to use one of three different library card numbers to renew the kids or my own library books…

When I need to add to my to-do list…

Simplenote’s two most amazing qualities are the speed at which I can be inputing data and the convienence of where I can retrieve it. Comparing it to Evernote, the latter is overkill. Major overkill. I don’t need all those bells and whistles. I need text. And I need it saved.

Which is Simplenote’s other beauty, I can get at the text I need whether I’m at work, at home on the couch or sitting here at the computer. And I do use it everywhere.

Menus, quotes and thoughts from whatever I’m reading, web logins and shopping lists. Simplenote is my most used and beloved app one year later. Cheers!

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Life shifted this week. Fundamental.

A long standing problem with my cell phone tested my patience for the last time, and I took the plunge of buying a new one. What a daunting task that was. Thankfully the bother had induced enough thought to arm me with the right questions and a solid understanding of my needs to wade through the sea of choices. Still you should have seen me as I walked into Futureshop. So many tables – so many handsets on each one, multiplied as if by magic by all those teeny tiny buttons.

Finally, after it all, my dinosaur masquerading as technology had morphed into actual tech. Cute little slide out keyboard and everything. I’m a texter now! Is that an actual term in use? Is there another? All I know is that my dad learned to text before I did and my friends around town who happen to be a little younger than I were using the painstaking method of Facebook messages to get in touch with me. lol

No longer! I logged twenty-something texts on my first day and tonight sent a text with a picture I took on the camera. We celebrated my son’s birthday with dinner at a restaurant and I captured the moment.

I always thought it odd when the hosts of TWIG – such a positive group of one of my favourite podcasts! – would muse over how no one calls or emails anymore. And in my own life I would be all like “Hey email me and we’ll get together” or “Facebook me I’m always online.” It didn’t happen as often as I’d hoped. And I wondered. Now I know.  They were texting and I wasn’t. And while it didn’t exclude me from their world or my family’s life, it did change something. I was that much further away.

Because the difference was instantaneous. After the first text to my brother, he called an hour later to ask advice on how to make rice… again. Would he have done that if I hadn’t reached out first? Later in the day, my friend wrote a long series of txts: how do you like it? which phone did you get? and finally the best one yet “Welcome to the world of texting!” I could have kissed her.

Instant communication has its challenges. It beeps even when you’re at supper. And I’m clueless to the etiquette. (is there texting etiquette?) How much is too much? Are the hours of polite texting communication the same as for telephone? Like — don’t call after nine, maybe ten if you know the person well. And it’s so short. blip, blip, beep. Not the best venue for deep conversation.

But for what it is and overall in the scheme of things in life, I’m so happy I made the leap. I’ve honored the pledge I made to myself in getting to know those I care most about rather than trying to stay in touch with the whole world. My new phone makes my little world into my whole world. And I love you all.

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all about Fan Expo 2010 in Toronto!

It was held in a bigger venue this year and was just as packed. Surprise, surprise. We learned our lesson from last year and had advance tickets but still – gasp! – had to stand in line to get in. Oh well. It didn’t take long for things to get exciting. The highlight of the day was first up!

I went there with one intention — meet Felicia Day, actress and alumni of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, developer of the hilarious web series The Guild, major reason I’m proud to be a girl gamer and star of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. She’s an internet star.

What do you expect or say when you meet a celebrity? My husband asked me what I thought I’d say to her. I had no idea. Really I just wanted to shake her hand and see if she was as nice and authentic as everyone says.

Walking in the door, being tossed into an ocean, waves of people bumping up against us, we went against the flow determinedly making our way to the celebrity signature area.

OMG there she was. At a signing table with Amy Okuda, another of the actresses from The Guild. I could see her!

What do I do?! My legs became lead. I didn’t want to move.

Reality kicked back in shortly as the stars in my eyes faded and all those other fans lined up to see her came into focus – about a foot in front of me.

They all had some version of  ”What does she think she doing cutting in line?!” face on, but we’re Canadian so they didn’t do anything about my interruption and I politely asked my way to the end of the line. Are you in line to see Felicia Day? Are you? You too? Um, ok. How about you? Oh, maybe that’s the end… yes WAY over there.

We settled in at the end of a line that would surely be at least a two hour wait. Imagining that there was no way the kids would stay put with so much fun ahead of them, we started devising a plan to meet up later when… this little girl in a red official looking vest – not unlike Little Red Riding Hood, I mean she had the pigtails even! – came up and asked us who were waiting to meet. I gleefully told her, and she said that she thought we might be able to skip the line.

Skip the line?! Yea, she said, Felicia didn’t want kids who were here to see her waiting around and bored to tears, so she had given specific instructions for any children to be taken straight to the front of her line.

Seriously???!!!

Not only was I going to meet her, but I was not going to have to wait. AT ALL. Little Red Riding Hood said she’d double check and come back.

And that’s when I knew the universe loved me.

Why? Because I had spent a solid month, every single second of my free time, making costumes for the kids to wear to Fan Expo. Yes, they’ll double as Halloween costumes and then after that around the house for fun. But it’s really for Fan Expo that the kids get the biggest kick out of being dressed up. Anyone in costume or cos-play walks around like a celebrity. People stop you all day long to ask for your picture and it’s a whole day of feeling special and pretending to be your character.

This year we did particularly well – my two were Zuko and Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender TV series, not the movie. And one of the boys from the family we went with dressed up as Aang, going so far as getting his mom to shave his head!!! Together, the three of them looked incredible together – adorable, accurate and kick-ass, with the pretty much the personalities to match each of their chosen characters.

Back to the craziest moment ever…

Little Red came back and told us to follow her. And so we did, refusing to look back at the I’m sure bewildered faces of the rest of people in line. We were escorted up to the front, waited while Felicia finished chatting with one lady and then there we were. She and Amy signed a poster – she ooohed and awwwed over the kids costumes – and then came around from the back of the table to take a picture with all of us. Voila!

She really is super nice.

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Upgrade Your Life is a techie how-to book absolutely stuffed with more solutions to organizing our modern lifestyle than one person actually has room to fit into our modern lifestyle.

The fun of the book for me was to register, consider and sift all of author Gina Trapani’s little hacks to find the ones that could potentially revolutionize my life. There was a lot of sifting, but it definitely worked.

Before going further, I should justify why I feel this book fits the criteria of the Women’s Unbound Reading Challenge.

(This blog post is SO late. I finished the challenge and wrote this months ago, but it sat lonely in my drafts file, only rediscovered yesterday. Hurray for broken stuff that helps me find unpublished posts! lol)

Participants are encouraged to read nonfiction and fiction books related to the rather broad idea of ‘women’s studies.’  The definition according to Merriam-Webster: the multidisciplinary study of the social status and societal contributions of women and the relationship between power and gender.

This book transcends them all. It’s not about women’s issues, but placing this book in a woman’s hands is giving her the tools to solve many problems.

Women are underrepresented in the enormous field of technology and computer science that is changing the fundamental shape of society. I don’t think women can afford a hands-off “that’s the guys” territory approach to computers and how we use them in daily life. Now, don’t let me lead you the wrong way. This book will not teach how to hack into your local school and change your grades. But it will teach confidence. How? Because it will help you feel like you have a more active hand in your life. It will help you realize that you have good ideas and provide you ways to bring those ideas to fruition. And a little independence will go a long way.

Upgrade Your Life is written by a woman, about a topic and a field that is heavily male-oriented for the moment and provides the tools for any woman in any field to feel empowered to make her own choices and not just pay for the brake work because the mechanic says so, so to speak. I believe it’s an excellent candidate for this reading challenge.

So, back to the book…

I heard about it because I listen to Gina every week on a podcast called TWIG, This Week in Google. Never miss an episode, it’s one of the little highlights of my week. Along with tech guru Leo LaPorte and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, the three discuss all that is going on in the world of Google. The good, the bad and the ugly. They chew over tech news, what’s happening or about to happen,, cell phones, cell phones and more cell phones and eventually get to this extraordinarily interesting conversation about where we are as a society and where we’re headed. Not unlike a really cool sociology professor I had once.

Gina is the “Tip of the Week” contributor and I mention that not because it’s the biggest part she plays in the trio, but rather because of how indicative it is of who she is. Having founded Lifehacker “tips and downloads for getting things done” years ago – if you’ve never been there, click the link now, it’s a must read – she offers little keystrokes, shortcuts and an ocean of creative problem solving to make using Google products even easier.

Long time readers of my blog know by now that I’ve been a Google convert, using their web services for years now. The move from using Outlook to Gmail for email alone totally flipped my life on a head. I railed at what I did not understand, but once the epiphany came, I can’t get enough. Total fan-girl here.

My interest in technology spins off of my partial obsession with organization and how I can use it for my own better ends. When you’re the kind of girl who takes whole weekends as a teenager to move furniture and reorganize, you’re also the kind of girl that gets a kick out of the fact that Google is just so darn good at integrating their many amazing services and making your life handy dandy. See, it’s not just me anymore to keep track of. Now it’s my job and a husband’s home business and kids and swimming lessons and all of the social activity that comes from our growing family.

And I don’t just want to scrape by. If I had a motto in life or something that people remembered me for, it would be that I lived and loved well and with grace. Believe me, I don’t always meet that bar, but anything that can help me be less anxious, more settled and confident and bring enjoyment into my life… well, those things are always welcome. And so many of Gina’s little and not so little hacks have done that for me.

Not to mention that I find her an eternally positive person. Her enthusiasm for what she does and sincerity in offering it to us absolutely oozes out of everything. A successful woman known for her smile rather than her rants. That’s a woman living gracefully, living well.

As a sample, I’ll offer one of my favourite hacks, number 90:

I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox as my web browser for years and never knew that this was possible. (Though since the writing of this post, I’ve switched to using Google Chrome as my browser, but that’s another post and this is still a GREAT Tip.) Check it out…

You can create bookmark “groups.” Say you check the same four webpages every morning or as soon as you get home from work. Instead of painstakingly opening each one, you can with one click open them all at once. Brilliant!

Here’s how – open all the tabs you want to group together, go to Bookmarks, click Bookmark All Tabs. A window will pop up that allows you to name them as a set, do so and you are done! I used this hack to make three groups of pages that I use in conjunction quite alot. They’ve been so handy-dandy.

1. Social Butterfly: my Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook
2. Photo Sharing: my Flickr, Picasa, Picnik, befunky
3. Recipe Search: Epi, BBC, Foodnetwork, Food Blog Search, All recipes, Big Oven

Other hacks taught me the importance of tagging my flickr photos, the magic button key command that is Alt+Enter, how very much I needed an To-Do organizer though I did not in the end using her main example (Simplenote rules!), how to freshen up our filing cupboard so I can find stuff, what a wonderful thing keeping my inbox clean is, how to search my gmail for anything under the sun, and how to get slightly lower priority email like goodreads and freecycle mail to skip my inbox and go to its own folder saving me a mountain of time.

Turns out that there was quite a bit that I was already doing well. Confidence booster to be sure! I save my bookmarks in Delicious and can access them anywhere, I use Gmail, as a family we share our Google calendars so no one is left in the dark, I’ve sorted and named and dated each individual one of our digital photos for years, and I’ve consolidated all my email accounts into gmail for so long that I forget that I’ve ever used anything else.

Wanna-be hacker that’s me!

p.s. Gina was named among Fast Company magazine Top Women in Tech for 2010. Go see what she and other women are doing online, in tech and games.

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Last week my husband came home with Blizzard’s long-awaited Starcraft II nestled under his arm. It’s a video game. He hadn’t mentioned any plan to buy it and as he walked by, as he loaded it up, as I heard the roar of Blizzard’s famous opening cinematic movies coming from his office, a queer almost forgotten feeling in the pit of my stomach slowly materialized into nostalgia. I remembered this. I’ve been here before. But there was quite a different flavour mixed in. What was that?

As I fumbled trying to identify it as bitter or sweet, it was easy to remember it’s origins. It had been years – nearly ten actually – since I’d seen my husband sit down and do the thing he has loved best all his life: sitting at a computer to play a video game.

Don’t get me wrong. He adores his Xbox 360, dabbles with the Wii, obsesses over which games are on sale and what his gamer score is on the iPod, but that particular image of him and his PC game, a game in which no wife or children are involved, had been absent from our lives for a very long time.

Gaming had almost nothing to do with my life prior to getting married. I mean, my kid brother would get me to help him solve puzzles in the 11th Hour when he was stuck and I was known to play a mean game of Tetris when bored. But I happened to fall head over heels for a gamer who was more man than any tight pair of wranglers I’d ever seen.

And I love my geek. But for a long time, I felt like a widow as he played his games. He’d be at it for hours. We did lots of other stuff together, but there was something about the nature of this  hobby that because I didn’t understand it lead me to being jealous of the time he spent with them.

He did his best to find games we could play together. There was Worms and You Don’t Know Jack, a trivia game with a smart alleck host, that we sat at the computer together to play. But the immersive games were lost on me. He was in the middle of Ultima Online when we got married, tried Everquest briefly – thankfully it was never his crack – played through the original Warcraft games and expansions. And who could forget the first Diablo or Wolfenstein? Honestly, I thought it was a waste of time.

I read while he played and kept my opinions to myself. I wonder if he thought my hobby was a waste of time. ha!

Can’t be though because what I read was his library: Star Wars novels, Tolkien, Lawhead, the Chronicles of Narnia and Robert Jordan. I read almost everything he had and begged for more. What a sneaky man. By introducing me to fantasy books – something else that had been absent from my life prior to him – he was simultaneously sowing the seeds of my conversion. I loved fantasy in book despite myself and my perhaps less than hidden disdain for fantasy in video games. Fantasy opened up my imagination, showed me I had choices in life and gave my romantic sentimentality a sense of playfulness that was desperately needed to balance my serious side.

And he never stopped trying to find more games I would like and that we could play together. (Still hasn’t actually.) Once he had moded our very first xbox and loaded it with emulators, we were… wait, wait, sorry I’ll say that all again in English for ya. He took his original xbox, sautered some memory chip onto it that voided its warranty and scared the hell out of me but allowed him to load software on the xbox. That software would “emulate,” meaning run old computer systems and their games that had been hacked by other people. In other words, we had a Commodore 64, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and others INSIDE the xbox, and we could play the old games on the xbox.

So on this rogue system, we played even more Worms and found Tetris Attack. A  forerunner of Bejeweled – you know that game, right? – that was familiar to me because of the name Tetris, it really wasn’t a tetris game. You are getting rid of blocks, not dropping them. Nevertheless, it was a hit at our house, and we became hardcore. Competitions began as soon as the two babies were tucked in for the night and continued furiously into the wee hours of the morning. I dreamt of those brightly colored blocks with crazy faces. My strategy I plotted in REM.

Matches were won and lost. There was definite competition. I couldn’t beat him until I’d played enough on any given night to get into a groove. That’s when my fingers became magic and the hours melted away… together.

Little did I know, but we had established our beat. And it was fertile ground to sow in some Diablo II. He suggested, and I, on a Yoshi high, agreed. Nothing in our life has been the same since.

There was an enormous learning curve moving from a game controller to playing a game with a keyboard and a mouse, but once I stopped the swearing and sighing and being too stubborn to ask for help, I loved the game. I loved it so much that I never wanted to stop. And he loved that I loved it. My butt didn’t leave the computer chair for hours.

Without high speed Internet without malls in the middle of nowhere and our biggest luxury being that we owned two computers in the first place, we clobbered demons, crawled dungeons and had way too much fun slaughtering cows. We ended up playing through Diablo II countless times with several characters on several different difficulty levels. It was my first experience pretending I was someone else, someone made of pixels, and that’s when Kalanna was born. I used Tolkien’s elvish dictionary at the back of The Silmarillion to make up the name and alias that would give me the freedom to try many new things in the years to come.

It was then too that I discovered my everlasting love of breaking barrels. There could be treasure inside! And a girl can never have too many mana potions. Smash, boom, bang! Who cares if we’re about to get eaten by a horde of angry Bonebreakers, I see a barrel and it’s MINE!

Diablo II was so much fun, a story to dive into, frustrations to take out by dealing out fireballs and extremely empowering too. It may seem a giant leap to switch from a discussion of video games to women issues, but for me the two are linked.

Letting myself simply enjoy my time, moving outside of the stereotyped women who lived and breathed (down my neck) all around me was huge. Huge! And my acceptance from that moment forward of the gaming culture in my home instantly made me a different kind of woman. Someone, when I look back, that I’m so proud to have become.

From there it was an easy move into Halo and Baldur’s Gate and, when we got high speed internet, World of Warcraft. I’ll never forget my first sleepless night. Stayed awake till four in the morning or something crazy to finish Star Wars: Republic Commando, the first game I played beginning to end by myself. I had arrived.

As time has gone on, I find my favorite games are still ones that I play with my husband. The recent exception was Dragon Age: Origins in which I didn’t know how to react or feel when I started… sorry when my character started flirting with another character of the male persuasion. His name was Alistair. It was kind of too real for me. Awkward romance aside, Dragon Age let me be the hero in 3D, in a story I controlled where I could glory in the well-chosen path and put up with the consequences when my steps weren’t so well-placed. But the lines of right and wrong were really blurry. You could be whoever you wanted to be – a personality of myriad nuances – and still end up in the same spot at the end no matter what. The game accepted you for who you were. Frankly this made me nervous and uncomfortable. I wanted to be the hero who did it right. Same way I play life. But the game just wanted you to do it your way. Same as life really is.

Puzzle Quest was also awesome, being a similar game as Tetris Attack and taking me back to those days, only it involves some more serious strategy. Mages always need a plan to keep their cloth covered bottoms from being scorched.

Anywho, I’ve wholly embraced the culture of gaming now. My kids play. We play. We all play Rock Band together  We’ve moved onto to board games and our rec room basement is now such a crazy perfect layout for the tv/xbox, board game area and then the computer station from which I hope to one day be tearing through and taking names in the upcoming Diablo III and The Old Republic.

I play as much as I can. I just began Puzzle Quest II which is massively even better than the first and hope to start the duo of Mass Effect games as they are sci-fi versions of Dragon Age by the same company and huge hits and why aren’t I playing them right now?! Because I have too many pots on the fire. Creativity explodes in my head on a daily basis, and I follow where it wills. One day it sends me to my sewing machine, another to the keyboard to talk to you fine folk, sometimes to the kitchen or the garden. Gaming comes in last place in the summer, but first in winter.

So when the husband brought home Starcraft II, what was that unavowed feeling? It was four of them, actually. It was me remembering the days of widowhood, then crazy jealousy that it wasn’t the kind of game I enjoy therefore not a game we could play together, mixed with supreme vicarious giddiness for how much fun he was going to have, and lastly remorse that I had ever made him feel bad for being who he is. Somehow, him walking in the door with that game brought us full circle. We’ve arrived. I’m a gaming gamer’s wife. Because it’s been the most fun ever. +5 to family game time.

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