When I was a kid, my twin sister and I spent hours days weeks pouring over the Sears catalog circling every item we wanted for Christmas and our birthday (3 weeks after Christmas). By the end of the first week, we had to write a color key for family members because we usually circled everyfuckingthing and needed to specify:

1. which ink color belonged to whom (this never worked, being a twin means getting the exact same thing in different colors),
2. which ink color was most recent (we often discovered we had a hidden desire to take up guitar or BMX bikes upon our seven-thousandth perusal),
3. which ink color indicated the most important items (by this time everyone usually had already done our gift shopping so also a waste of time),
4. which ink color indicated the other twin did NOT want that item (heaven forbid I get the skateboard when I wanted the Atari!).
   

This tradition went on my entire childhood and it still makes me smile to think of it. I have explained the experience to my kids (girls, 11 and 13) trying to get them to understand but to no avail...

until last year.

Ah yes, it came in the mail. It was pitifully smaller than the Sears catalog, it had far less diversity, yet it became the Holy Bible in our home until well after the holidays.

The fights, the arguing over who should ask for what, would Great Gramma understand the newfound desire for bacon-motif products and canned unicorn meat, would it be better to mark the Totoro t-shirt a more greatly desired item than the night vision goggles?

Several months after the holidays, one of them finally hid the catalog from the other with the excuse that she was "hogging it" and it was never seen again.

The girls asked me yesterday when the new ThinkGeek catalog will be here. I said I wasn't sure if they were sending them every year and to go to the site.

"It's not the SAME, Mom!"

Oh, I know it's not the same ; )

#geekON

I'm going to be trying to post my updates here. If you know me at all, expect oddities :-) ~ donna

I've been in client Twitter accounts this morning seeing some really interesting Twitter glitches--the best of today being Twitter randomly show that I'm not following several of the users in my "whom I'm following" list.

I've gotten to the point now where I kind of look forward to Twitter's wackness as fuel for my sarcasm gene.

I couldn't resist logging into my personal account and, lo-and-behold, I've found the real problem. I FORGOT TO ACTUALLY USE IT! Oh holy tweep shit Batman, I created an account and forgot to tweet a damn thing and haven't followed a soul! No wonder Twitter baffles me--I don't know what I'm doing at all!

I'll be working on my apology for all the snarky comments I've made about Twitter glitches since it's apparently my problem.

#ConfessionsOfATwitterNo0b

It appears Skype has fixed the security vulnerabilities in its Android app per their e-mail this morning:

After a weekend of developing and testing we have updated a new version of the Skype for Android application onto the Android Market, containing a fix to the vulnerability reported to us on Friday. Please do update to this version as soon as possible in order to help protect your information.

We have had no reported examples of any 3rd party malicious application mis-using information from the Skype directory on Android devices and will continue to monitor closely. Please rest assured that we do take your privacy and security very seriously and we sincerely apologise for any concern this issue may have caused.

Adrian Asher
Chief Information Security Officer
Skype Information Security

If you're running Skype on your Android device and haven't updated to the latest version, grab it in the Android Market: Skype for Android

The other day Kyle (@thedroidguy) posted a video using images submitted by members of the Android community showing off the fun and coolness of their Android devices. It made me smile as it was a great insight into what the Android community is: real people being geeky and excited about their open source mobile platform.

I'll be you will recognize a lot of faces and there's definitely some Android bling on display--hope it makes you smile as well : )

Original post on The Droid Guy

Those of us who've been on Twitter for awhile (I've been using my account actively for over a year now) can't help but notice when tweets come through our timeline offering to tell us how popular we are.

SEE WHO YOUR MOST BESTEST TWITTER WORSHIPPERS ARE!

YOUR TWITTER BFFs 4EVAH ARE...

I'M A BIGGER #TwitterWhore THAN...

mKay, I made that last one up and maybe extrapolated on the others but it pretty much sums up the Twitter metric fluff (don't even get me started on the "serious metrics" like Klout).

If you've interacted with me on Twitter or in social media anywhere, you already know that it's all about me. Not about promoting myself, I'll leave that to the #TwitterWhores, but about searching out people to follow and interact with that can teach me something and make me laugh and to promote my passions of women in tech / #geekgirls, open source, hactivism and #AndroidEvangelists. BUT, I'm not immune to running @technobozo through a software maze to see how cool you think I am. #id #ego #superego #human

I believe I've found the best Twitter metric to satisfy all of us, including those from the land of #TwitterWhoredom *drum roll...*

Follow Cost

It rolls off the tongue like Holocaust and measures your ability to annoy others on Twitter against Robert Scoble / @Scobleizer.  Follow Cost will check your Twitter activity and measure your updates in milliscobles (seriously? the picture of Scoble on this page is by Brian Solis ...no one is that doubly cool). The best part is: NO ONE is more annoying on Twitter than @Scobleizer! We all win. We can't tweet as much and we can't think we're as cool so no one is going to fail this one!

These are the kind of Twitter metrics I'm talkin' about! #fullofWIN

So, how annoying am I? Well, if you're reading this you have some idea but here's proof:

Thank you Luke Francl and Barry Hess for this useful and highly technological Twitter metric.

Those of us who are always the geeky family member hit with tech support and computer help questions over the holidays now have a new weapon in our arsenal: Teach Parents Tech. It's as simple as clicking a few boxes and selecting from a variety of available videos on computer basics, Internet use, working with images, messaging, etc. Enter your e-mail and the recipient e-mail and you're done!

You've upped your geek cred with your friends and family and you don't have to endure the frustration of explaining that clicking "start" is how you turn off a computer 721 times or why using "password" or "secret" as a password is flat out stupid. That said, I have the perfect recipient for my first tech help message:

Now, go and get your geek on!

*Thank you to @fjfonseca for sharing the Gawker haXor article.