What Your Beloved Nerd Wants for Christmas

These days just about everybody loves at least one nerd. In many ways this is quite advantageous; you never have to worry about how you’re going to hook up that lovely new entertainment system when you get it home, how you’re going to recover a decade’s worth of pictures when your hard-drive bursts into flames* or what to do when the twenty page document you just spent the last month writing won’t print. This relationship, however, can become troubling at Christmas time when you realize you have no idea what this person would like or how to even find the things they’ve told you they would like. Sometimes I wonder if my husband has written his Christmas list in pseudo-jargon just to mess with me. Despite wish lists that might as well be written in a different language and my outright inability to understand technology, over the last ten years with my nerd, I’ve learned how to make him happy on Christmas morning. Continue reading

A Girl’s Guide to Computer Repair

We’ve all been there, after hours of procrastination, you sit down to your computer to get some work done on that big project and the compter won’t turn on. Panic sets in when you quickly realize just how much you depend on your computer for work, research, communication and entertainment. This situation is made all the more distressing for damsels who, like me, know frighteningly little about how to fix a computer. Lucky for me, whenever my computer has a problem – anywhere on the scale from minor to major –  I can turn to my computer programmer husband, pout my lips, bat my eyes and say, “muffin, it’s not working,” and he makes everything better. For those women who aren’t so fortunate, I asked my personal nerd for his best tips when facing a broken computer. Continue reading

A Girl’s Guide to Computer Maintenance

In this day and age, knowing your way around a computer can be a great asset. Unfortunately, not all of us take easily to understanding that magical box under the desk that we call our computer. If you are anything like me, you ignore it completely until it stops working. I can get away with this because I married a computer programmer, but for the rest of the world, the best way to avoid a catastrophic meltdown and the stress of finding someone to repair your computer at a reasonable price is through preventative maintenance. This week I handed my husband a tasty bottle of beer and asked him all of my computer maintenance questions, the following is what I learned. Continue reading

Texting Your Pants Off: An In-Depth Look at Sexting

I heard an interesting term on the radio today, “Generation Text”. The term refers to anyone born from 1990 – 1999, and is applied to describe the dependence on cell phones displayed by youths who grew up using them. This incarnation of the term was coined by Canadian politician, Ian Scott, when he attended a concert and noticed many audience members using cell phones, (talking, texting, or recording) he also noted that they all fit into the same age bracket (early to late teens). Continue reading