I'm done, I'm done

Woo Hoo....I finished my final Christmas shopping last night. All I had left were a few stocking stuffers for DH but they had been looming for days now. I also didn't have to go to the mall or target so the traffic wasn't too bad. I am way later than I normally am with shopping but still feel great to be done. There were a few items I wanted to get but could not find so I ordered them from Amazon.com and they will come after Christmas. I really need to remember to use amazon.com more next year....they literally have everything.

On a totally different subject. Our car got keyed sometime between Friday afternoon and yesterday. There is a clear key scratch that runs the entire lenght of our trunk lid. It is all the way down to the metal and just looks terrible. We don't know exactly where or when it happened. I am so mad that someone would do that for the hell of it. Why? DH and I are going to stop by the body shop on our way home from work today to get an estimate on fixing it. I'm still so pissed at this.

Random thougths for today

1. It was so nice to catch up with two of my closest friends for dinner last night. We hadn't seen each other in over 6 months so it was great to catch up and reminise. It was a great time.
2. I have the best DH in the world. Last night on the way home from work he offered to cook his specialty baked Zitti for Jeff and Danea to reciprocate for the wonderful meal Zee cooked for us this weekend. (Since I don't cook DH knew I was going to need help with this one....but he just came out and offered - what a sweetie)
3. My nieces and nephew will be celebrating Christmas without me. I wish I could be there with them.
4. Jim's Christmas gifts are still not quite complete. I have got to get that done tonight.
5. I am realy jonesing for a cutting maching. Right now I'm thinking about the wishblade but still looking at the pazzles one.
6. More HOTP paper came for me yesterday that will be perfect for the assignment I am working on. I also leared that my contact is the creator of the Sarabook. That's cool.
7. Only 2 more days of work left until the break. Then I am off for 11 days. Woo Hoo.
8. Two of my engineers have a management presentation to give in 30 minutes and I haven't seen it yet. I am slacking off and letting them present without looking at it first...the good news is they have both given a similar presentation in the past so it should be OK.
9. I have to schedule some interviews for the week after New Years.
10. It's only 9:30am and I am already getting hungry. It's going to be a long wait till lunch today!!!

Do you think before you speak?

My parents tired to teach me to think before I speak. Of course there are many occasions when even I am surprised at what comes out of my mouth, but for the most part I do OK. Especially at work. It doesn't take much, just a tiny bit of restraint to make sure all those random thoughts don't come out for all the world to hear. A little self filter, like the 3 second delay on tv. I could have made some serious career limiting statements if I just said what was on my mind all the time.

I swear sometimes people can say the such stupid things it blows my mind. I am still shaking my head at what someone said to me today. I started to write out the gory details of this mornings saga but quickly realized that it would probably bore anyone reading this to death. In summary one of my co-workers basically came into my office and announced to me and the majority of my team that overheard his decree, that all my group does is play around with excel spreadsheets and has no real impact to the company. I have never felt so professionally demeaned. What made it worse is that he was so loud the majority of my team heard him. This was so demoralizing to them.

I was just so shocked at his comment I got a little lost for words. I was able to get out that I thought he was being a bit presumptuous about what my group does, and that he clearly does not understand what we do or how much we influence the strategy of our department. He did apologize, but not in the loud voice he used to announce his opinion in the first place. It didn't really matter....the damage was done.

Of course, about an hour after the confrontation I now have the most eloquent and powerful comeback perfectly drafted in my head. He is long gone and probably has no recollection of the events of the morning and clearly no idea how his words were so disrespectful. Ironically this guy doesn't even know how much we actually impact the activities of *HIS* own group.

This kind of stuff happens all the time. People say whatever dumb-ass random thought they are having. It really does make me want to scream. "Please, think for 3 second before you blurt out another word"

Dudes, I am so glad it's Friday!!!

I'm Lucy!!!!

OMG, Wendy posted this on her blog (she is Schroeder) and I just thought it was too funny. I am Lucy

Here is the link to the site so you can see what character you are:

http://quizilla.com/users/anonymousnowhere/quizzes/Which%20Peanuts%20Character%20are%20You?/

Domain Spoofing

Yikes, I never thought I would be saying those words. In fact I didn't even know what that term meant until Monday of this week. Domain spoofing is when somebody hijacks your domain name and sends out spam that looked like it came from you.

Jim and I have a registered domain name. Several years ago Jim and I were thinking about starting our own consulting company and I wanted to develop a website. So we got a domain name and I started playing around with the website. We quickly realized that it was just not practical for us to leave our current company and go out on our own. So I haven't touched the website in almost 5 years, but I still use my email from that site.

On Monday morning I went to check my email and saw over 300 emails that were bounced back from various email accounts that were 'undeliverable'. They were all in reference to a message that looked like it came from "Christine" from my domain name advertising male enhancing drugs. Obviously I did not send out this message so I have no idea why so many of them were being returned as undeliverable.

After a call to my internet provider and web hosting company I was informed that my domain had been spoofed and there is very little that can be done about it. They told me that usually ~5% of the messages are returned to the sender as undeliverable. Since I got about 300 returns they estimate that ~6,000 emails were sent out with my domain name on them.

The good news is that it looks like the hacker only sent one message from my domain and has moved on. Some people will stick with a domain name and use it over and over until it is shut down. Since it is an illegal activity you can get the FTC involved, but since no money is being lost there is not much they will do about it. Especially since the majority of hackers are not from the United States they don't have much autharity to do anything about it anyway.

I just hate the fact that my domain name was used to distribute such spam, and hope that I am not spoofed again. I feel really bad for real businesses that rely on the reputation of their domain name - if they get spoofed it looks like some reputable company is sending out spam.

It's Female Rah-Rah time for me

Being one of only 2 females on our departments staff of 20 is sometimes a real drag. Since technical females fall into a special hiring class at this company there are a lot of special events and activities aimed at recruiting high level technical females to our company. When it comes to supporting these activities they always look to the current employee base. Since our department only has 2 female department heads the two of us always get roped into supporting this kind of crap.

Later this week I will be one of the companies representatives at this years WITI conference. This is nothing but a big female Rah Rah session. My biggest problem is that I do not support these kind of groups at all. As a hiring manager I want to be empowered to hire the best candidate for the job regardless of race, color, or gender. My current team is made up of 4 females and 6 males. This is a very good mix for a technical enviornment. However not a single one of the women were hired because they are female and I didn't have to do any speical recruiting to find them. I would hope I have my current job because I was the most qualified not because I am female....the fact that my company's policy on hiring makes me question this makes me so frustrated and mad.

So looking forward to this conference just puts me on edge. Yuck. I hate it. I did try to get out of it, and quite hard. In the end I decided not to make a big stink about it and just go ahead and attend. But I will basically just make show up make sure that I am seen being a "role model" and then I am headed back to the office to get real work done.

Here is a link to WITI so you can see the Rah Rah hell I will be living this week.
http://www.witi.com/

ooohhh I think the worst part of this entire thing is that I have to wear business suits for 2 days. Yuck.

CorrespondenceART

Woo Hoo. Another 3 pages were requested by CorrespondenceART for the Jan/Feb/March issue. The best thing about the request is that one of the layouts was a MMM entry (watch out world). So of the 5 layouts I did for MMM so far 3 of them are picked up. The second request is for a layout I did well over a year ago using one of the first collections of BasicGrey papers. This has always been one of my favorite layouts (my niece sitting on a vintage fire truck). The last layout they requested was a new one "remember this moment" with the picture of W and S hugging.

I am seriously hoping this magazine makes it. With all the publication and distribution problems I have my doubts, but darn I am really hoping they pull through. I know a lot of people who have stopped submitting to them because of the problems. I know this will hurt the quality of the publication if they don't get back on track quick.

Of the issues that have been published I have been so impressed with the content. They still seem to embrace the lumpy, shabby, vintage scrappers.....and I still LOVE that style. So the bottom line is I really hope they get things with publication and distribution fixed so I can see my pages in print.

TGIF

Woo Hoo, I am so glad it's Friday. This has been a bit of a tough week. Jim was out of town from Monday until last night, and I have had a mild cold all week. When Jim is out of town I usually get a lot of scrapping done, take nice long bubble baths, and just pamper myself. This week was a little different. Because I had a cold all my energy was zapped so I basically sat around and did nothing. The cold is not terrible just a sore throat, runny nose, and some caughing....typical cold symptoms. I have been popping vitamin C all week and I know that it has helped keep the cold mild.

Now that Jim is back and I am starting to feel better I am really looking forward to the weekend. I do plan on sleeping in and getting some extra rest, but I am hoping to make up for all the lost scrapping time I wasted just laying around.

On Sunday Jim and I are going out with some friends to see a Laurence Juber concert. LJ is one of the best fingerstyle guitar players in the country. Jim and I have seen him several times before, but I am still really looking forward to Sunday's concert.

Stitches, Stitches, Stitches....

No not the medical kind, but the UK scrapbook convention kind.

OK, Wendy and Zee both told me to get off my lazy ass and get this blog updated. No they didn't use those exact words but that's what the sentiment once. Thanks girls....I want to keep this blog going and you gave me EXACTLY the kind of encouragement I need.

Now back to Stitches. This is the annual UK craft convention. From what I can tell it is very similar to our CHA (although I'm sure much smaller). Most of the US companies don't go, but they use their distributors to show off their new goods. This year I am doing all of the layouts and cards for the ScrapGenie display.

So I have been hard, hard at work for the past few weeks and expect another two months of the same. The good news is that I am almost 1/3rd done. Here is a sample layout from the companies I have completed so far:

All My Memories



Pebbles Inc:

Karen Foster:

Doodlebug:

Daisy D's (keep in mind this company gave me very little to work with so it's mostly paper)