As the person who used to sit on the other end of tech support calls, I can see this question popping up quite often tomorrow.  I just feel sorry for all the techs who are going to have to field the influx of support calls tomorrow.  Often when one website goes down, some people think the entire internet is down.  Often it’s not the case.  Tomorrow it will be.  Websites such as Wikipedia and Reddit are going to completely take their entire site OFFLINE tomorrow in protest of some legislation that is making some serious waves among internet giants.  The bills are named SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), and other anti-piracy bills that have been created to try and stop copyright infringement.

Wait?  But isn’t infringing on someone’s copyrights already illegal?  Why, yes!  Yes it is!  The problem is prosecuting sites hosting copyrighted content when the sites exist overseas.  So the geniuses in our government decided that they should take matters into their own hands.  Which don’t even get me started about the government trying to get involved in every aspect of our lives.  If I want someone controlling every little piece of my life, I’d have given myself over to Google long ago… oh… wait.  Ignore that!

So basically some congressmen, who don’t understand technology or the infrastructure of the internet (kinda like my Mom who thinks that things can be stored on different “clouds” according to my most recent conversation with her) started to draft bills that they think will help shut these sites down.  The internet relies on DNS to find the right locations.  Each website has an IP address that when I type in www.tech4mommies.com the DNS system will tell your computer that www.tech4mommies.com is actually located at the address 66.117.5.125.  That’s the REAL address of my site.  In the original draft of SOPA there would be people monitoring the internet… if they THINK you are in violation of copyrights they would just remove the link that tells the computers of the world that www.tech4mommies.com is really located at 66.117.5.125, essentially making it so no one would be able to access my site.  The problem with this is that I could be shut down for any reason at all.  It’s censorship.  It’s 2 Live Crew being Banned in the USA all over again.  Other drafts of the bill have removed the “messing with the DNS” part, but it’s essentially still censorship instead of protection.

Google is promising to post something on it’s homepage tomorrow about the bills.  Google and Facebook have both come out in opposition of the Bills, and urge you to do the same if you enjoy any type of social networking.  Google has even gone so far as to try to help come up with a solution.  Please!  Let the people who understand technology figure this out.  Don’t just fly by the seat of your pants as you store things on your different clouds.

Contact your congresspeople and let them know that these Bills will BREAK THE INTERNET!

Mashable has a great post detailing exactly the problems with the Bills if you want to read more about it.  http://mashable.com/2012/01/17/sopa-dangerous-opinion/

Stepping off my SOPA boxa now.

I have a confession to make.  I’m super obsessed with cheesy ABC Family Original Christmas movies.  I mean OBSESSED.  Since my wonderful scrooge of a husband is NOT so obsessed, it’s a good thing he works long hours this time of year (he has every right to be a scrooge after working retail for the last 8 years).  I just can’t get enough of them.  I record them all on my DVR and watch them every year.  My favorite is Three Days.  Makes me cry EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

So we’ve established that I love cheesy Christmas.  I also love flash mob Christmas.  Again, crying like a baby every time I watch one.  A friend of mine did one recently that’s awesome, and there is always the classic, and now T-Mobile has brought us one. I love how all the performers are dressed in the T-Mobile pink. It is so fun to be able to easily see how many people are part of it, and how they all just start coming out of nowhere. It looks like everyone had a ton of fun, and of course fulfills my need for an unlimited supply of cheesy Christmas.

So have a very cheesy Christmas, and a happy New Year, and a wonderful Hanukkah, and a great Kwanzaa,  and even a very merry Festivus.  I know we will!  (seriously, watch Three Days, sooo awesome!)

This post is sponsored by T-Mobile

Remember when I described my “house of the future“?  Well, either someone at Microsoft reads my blog, or they have the same ideas!  Microsoft just released this video about the productivity of the future.  Can I just say the video is AWESOME!!!  So awesome in fact that I NEED it NOW!!!

My husband and I are always talking about how amazing video game quality is.  Where 20 years ago I was at my boyfriends house watching his family play golf on a Playstation One, and thought it looked AMAZING!  It pales in comparison to how video games look now, and sometimes it’s hard to imagine how much things will improve in the future.  This video gives me awesome home that better things truly are yet to come!  Definitely go check it out.  I’ll admit that the video just about made me jump out of my chair and shout for joy!

Check out more videos and Microsoft’s vision at http://www.microsoft.com/office/vision/

Big things are happening on all of my blogs over the next few months.  It all started out with my site redesigns!  I re-did the design for Tech4Mommies, Organized Mom, and my sister’s site Super Healthy Kids.  Plus we launched a new product at my company that I’m super excited about called Chica Password Manager.  Definitely go check it out!  Anyway, I saw this in a tweet, and thought it would make a super funny image.  Thanks to GeekBabe and CoastieFish for the quote (I created the image).

If you haven’t heard by now the Facebook page for “the Crock Pot Girls” has grown enormously over the last couple weeks.  I mean CRAZY growth, unheard of growth…. spammy growth.  I first heard of the site when I noticed several of my friends had “liked” the page in my Facebook stream.  One of my friends that I noticed liked it I happened to be chatting with on Skype at the very moment.  When I clicked over to the page and saw how many fans they had (at the time it was probably around 700,000) I was curious… so I asked my friends that my Facebook stream had TOLD me liked the page, what they liked so much about it.  I got a resounding crickets chirping and a big fat “What?  Who??”  They had no idea what I was even talking about and had never even visited the site.  Then I click over to the Facebook page again, and even though my stream had said several of my friends had liked the page, only 1 of my friends was actually listed as liking it.  Things that made me go hmmm.  Now every time I look at the posts over on the Crock Pot Girls Facebook page I have to put some protective eyewear on, for fear that my eyes will roll right out of my head.  Let me list the many many issues I have with the site.

1. The black hat bot tactics to gain likes.  In the “early” days of the page, as in a few days ago, whenever you would click on someone’s profile that had posted something on the wall of the page there would be nothing there.  No other posts besides the post on the CPG wall.  So I’m supposed to believe they up and joined Facebook just to be part of this “amazing” page??  The other part of the black hat technique is the one I can’t quite figure out how they pulled off, and that is the one that listed several of my friends liking the site on my own stream that didn’t really like the site.  Someone on their wall posted a comment asking how people heard of the site.  Almost every answer was “I saw that several of my friends had liked them so I checked it out”.  If they hadn’t figured out a way to display that my friends had liked them when my friends had actually never heard of them, that needs to be brought to the attention of Facebook.

2. There is NO Content!  The CPG themselves have put up ONE very poorly made video.  Their website BARELY works, and there’s almost nothing there.  So what is there to like?  There are people that do super high quality informative videos like Project22Six and Digitwirl that have BARELY any likes at all (comparatively speaking).  This is high quality content to actually like.  What does this site have to offer that you can’t get in a better form or in better quality elsewhere?

3. If you really like Crock-Pots go to the REAL Crock-Pot site!  People are justifying that they like the site because there are so many new recipes for them to try.  The recipes on that page do not have ratings or pictures, or even categories.  If you are looking for Crock-Pot recipes (which don’t even get me started that what the girl’s site should really be called is Slow Cooker Girls since Crock-Pot is a registered trademark name, and there will be a cease and desist letter heading down to those girls lickety split I guarantee it) the real Crock-Pot Facebook page has easy to navigate recipes and ratings all within the Facebook page itself!  Why would you need this frantic site with recipes that really may or may not work that are impossible to find… again I ask… WHAT IS THERE TO LIKE THERE?  If you are really obsessed with your Crock-Pot, wouldn’t it just make more sense to LIKE the real Crock-Pot page?

4. People are lazy – So every time I check out what people are posting on the CPG page, so I can try and figure out what there is to like about it.  I see CRAZY comments like, “you guys should do an iphone app”.  If you took about 2 seconds to look you’d see about 50 iphone apps dedicated to Crock-Pot recipes, INCLUDING an official app from Rival (the makers of Crock-Pot) themselves!  So what do you need an app from this page for?  Not to mention, THERE IS NO CONTENT to make an app of!  Except the somewhat tried recipes of the “people” who post on the CPG page.  Then there’s the “you should have a food network show!”  FOR WHAT??  A horrible looking website?  A poorly created video?  THAT deserves a show?

So people ask me or others that are upset with the site…. why do you care?  It’s not harming you.  No, not directly, but it’s just like currency, when the value of the dollar is diminished, costs increase for everything.  If the value of a true fan on Facebook can also be diminished it doesn’t give the people who legitimately grow their social media presence much of a fighting chance.  Do yourself a favor and check out people who are doing it legitimately, and working hard to find you recipes you can actually use, instead of following the crowd and liking something with nothing to offer, and no real work put into it.  Great links…

Crock Pot Guys

Year of Slow Cooking

Crock Pot Blog

365 Days of Slow Cooking

**UPDATE** 11/7/2011 – First, the “girls” have made the decision to change their name from the Crock Pot Girls to the Crockin’ Girls.  This has made their RABID fans declare war on Rival, the makers of Crock-Pot.  Even though girls have never stated that Rival is the one that requested them to change their name.  Rival themselves even had to put out a message on Facebook stating that they did NOT ask the girls to change their name, due to the fans attacking them on their Facebook page.

I requested several times on the Girls’ Facebook page that they please clarify to their fans that Rival was NOT the people who told them to change their name, but my requests have gone ignored, and their fans continue to attack and bash Rival and the Crock-Pot registered trademark.

Second, I don’t believe in deleting comments, even comments that are extremely rude to myself and my readers.  If you feel the need to post your opinions, you are free to do so, just as I’m free to post my opinions on my own blog, but let me clarify some things…

No, I am not jealous.  I am not a “foodie”, I can barely cook.  If I had “come up with this idea” (which is definitely NOT a new idea as there is a Facebook page that has been around for a year prior to the Crockin’ Girls starting their page called Crock Pot Recipe Exchange which was started with the exact same purpose), I would not have started it even if I knew I could get a “million likes”.  It’s not something I’m interested in talking about and therefore would not have done so.  If they had an AMAZING website, and fantastic photos and content like some of the other food blogs out there, then yes I may be a little jealous because someone else is working hard and doing a fantastic job out of it.  THIS?  Nothing to be jealous of.  I am proud of the growth and community I have built on my own.  The right way.

No, my life is not consumed by this.  I do have a life and I don’t spend my entire day thinking about/writing about this.  I wrote ONE post about this social media anomaly.  It’s hardly something I would say takes my entire time and therefore I have “nothing better to do” than to criticize a site I feel uses less than organic methods to gain their followers.  If you spent a second to check around my site, you would see that I use my time to try and educate women on technology that could help make their day and life easier.  Poke around and you may just learn a thing or two that will help you in your life.

Lastly, when I was researching this back when it all started, I did find further evidence of the black hat techniques that I discussed earlier, but I’m done trying to educate people that refuse to listen.  If you want to find out the truth, you can always ask.

The social media world I live/work/breathe in was all a buzz this morning because of a T-Shirt.  The shirt (pictured here), which says “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it” made a whole lot of people mad, including myself.

Some people were upset, like me, some people were indifferent, and some people defended JCPenney’s right to sell whatever they want.  First, I was mad.  I don’t get too upset about companies in general.  Like I don’t agree with the people who get mad that THEY purchased a Mature rated video game for their kids.  If they bought it for their kid, it’s their fault, not the video game makers.

I was mad about the horrible message this shirt sends to our girls.  The self-esteem issue is the first problem I have with it.  That you have to be “pretty”.  What about those girls that don’t feel pretty?  I don’t know what my parents did, but my sister and I have excellent self esteem.  I am trying to do the same for my children.  I want my daughter to not focus on her looks.  I want her to focus on her brain, on her personality.  Just because I would not choose to buy it, doesn’t mean some other little girl in her class has the same type of parents.  What is this shirt teaching THEM?  That she should force her “less pretty” friends to do her homework?  That she should make fun of someone that she doesn’t think is pretty??  Because it’s FINE as long as it’s in the name of being “sassy” right?

My second issue with the message of the shirt is that you shouldn’t do your homework, and to be considered pretty you should be smart.  I’m not a teacher, but I have some friends that are, that were or are and they were very upset about this t-shirt too.  Homework shouldn’t have a bad connotation associated with it.  If you keep telling your kids that “homework is boring and hard and yucky” then this is exactly what they are going to believe.

The third issue I have with the message is the brother part.  Which has the underlying tone that boys are smarter than girls.  UGH.

So, while I can see the point of my friends who say, just teach your kids that they are smart, that looks don’t matter, that girls can be smarter than boys, don’t by the shirt, etc.  Yes I agree and will be doing all of the above, so why am I so upset?

It was more of a last straw kind of thing for me.  I have been in a VERY male dominated industry my entire professional career.  I’m in Information Technology, what can I say.  I have always worked with a majority of guys.  I worked for an IT consulting firm, and we had several clients.  My role at the company was Rapid Response.  Meaning I was behind the scenes doing help desk calls until one of our clients had a critical business down server crash situation.  So typically I had never met with the client face to face, they would mainly deal with the person who was their regular IT Manager from the company.  If it was a client I had not been to before, I cringed in anticipation of “the look”.  This is the look I got on way more than one occasion.  It’s the look of “really?  YOU are here to come fix my crashed server?  Don’t you realize I have a business to get back up and running!  Isn’t there someone else that can do it?”  Some people would be bold enough to even SAY what they were thinking with that look.  I would get all the time, “Isn’t there someone else that can help me?”

So THAT is what had me up in arms this morning.  The fact that after all these years if MY daughter decided to go into IT like her Mommy, she would get that very same look.  It’s the fact that this sort of mentality isn’t just perpetuated, it’s ENCOURAGED.  Boys are smart, girls are pretty.  Of course that’s just the way it is.  People need to be TOLD that this is not the right way of thinking, and we need to be the ones to tell them.

Luckily today the social media wrath of women everywhere caused JCPenney to pull the shirt from their online store.  This isn’t about one shirt though, this is about an entire mentality of a large company that thinks this sort of thing was OK.