I absolutely LOVE it when Amazon gives strange pairing suggestions. Like, “People who bought that folk music CD also bought this toaster!”  Some of them I’ve seen are really funny, but I haven’t gotten any good ones lately.

However, almost exactly a year ago today, I was Christmas shopping for my dad on Amazon and needed ideas. So I looked in their gift ideas guide under  both “Dad” and “Boyfriend/Husband.” The latter category had a “Cycling Accessories,” to my delight since my dad is an avid cyclist.

The following is a screenshot that I took last year and posted on Facebook, asking my friends,

“So, should I get my dad the Hello Kitty bike bell or the Disney Princess basket?” 

This year I’m finding myself once again not having any idea what to get my dad for Christmas. So, I went back to Amazon and checked under the same gift guide, and the same categories.

That Hello Kitty bike bell and Disney Princess basket must’ve been really popular last year with the guys, because they’re still there. 

Have you gotten any fun and/or odd Amazon pairings lately? Please share if so! (Links to screen shots encouraged.)

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If you know nothing else about me, you know that I love cats.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that half of my Facebook friends have hidden my updates in their newsfeeds because of my excessive sharing of photos of my cats, cat videos, LOLcats, etc.

I’m not as nuts about cats as this girl, but boy, do I love me some cats. After all, the internet is made of them.

Anyway, it’s not often I actually blog about my cat findings on the web (or blog in general, I know, I know…), but yesterday I found the BEST cat-related thing EVAR.

Introducing. . .  The Procatinator!!

It’s random GIFs of cats. Set to music. And it’s wonderful.

Like its name suggests, it’s easy to waste time on this site.* I’ve found it to be the perfect thing to lift my mood up if I’m in a funk and make me laugh. Yesterday I kept clicking the “show me another cat” link on the left and about fell out of my chair laughing.

You’re welcome.

*I am not responsible for your lack of productivity from The Procatinator. 

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Seems like the new “ticker” on Facebook is the one new feature everybody loves to hate. Well, most people, anyway. The past couple days, while everybody on Facebook is trying to figure out what shows up in whose ticker, how to stop it, etc. I’m absolutely LOVING it.

Maybe it’s because I’ve got the maturity of a 13 y/o boy, but it seems to me that “show up in my ticker” is the new “poke” — the latest innocent Facebook feature that just sounds, well … dirty. This morning I was having a BLAST with ticker innuendos. So much that I made a status update and invited others to play.

Of course, I brought it over to Twitter, too. Here are some others I’ve come up with:

“I don’t want that to show up in my ticker, I better test it first…”

“Every time I cook that for dinner, it shows up in everyone’s ticker!”

“Lately I’ve noticed a lot of my friends are taking screen grabs and comparing each other’s tickers.”

“Son, I told you if you make that face in your profile picture too much, it’ll show up in everyone’s ticker … FOREVER!”

I recently introduced my friend Jackie, who loves sock monkeys, to The Monkey Shop. She “liked” their page the other day, and this morning, I couldn’t help but notice that all her monkey business kept showing up in my ticker!

So far my favorite from a friend is from my friend Mike:

So we had a few drinks, yadda yadda, long story short, I showed up in her ticker the next morning.

I’ve been having WAY too much fun with this.

Is this immature? ABSOLUTELY.

But you know what? I don’t care (and neither should you). Suddenly, social media is fun again, and I couldn’t be happier.

Now it’s your turn — show me your ticker jokes, and I’ll show you mine!

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One of the joys many people, including myself, find with Twitter is the beauty of the tweeted “overheard” statement, which is some odd statement that is, well, overheard, that you just feel compelled to share with the rest of the world. (Because of character constraints, “OH:” is usually used before the statement instead of “Overheard” though I confess when I first saw people using this I wondered what Ohio had to do with anything.)

Usually neither attribution nor context is given, which makes them that much funnier. In fact, in my office, it’s become somewhat of a competition between coworkers to see who makes my “overheard” tweets. I work with a very creative, linguistic bunch and there’s never a dull moment in our conversations. My overheard tweets aren’t always coworkers, mind you, oftentimes they’re friends outside the office, like at gigs or something.

Anyway, the other day I decided to see which gems I had tweeted “OH:” recently, so  I went to my profile and searched “OH:” in my tweets only. Twitter only archives the past few days now, which I just learned, but the tweets in my past few days’ archives were not only hilarious, but kind of sounded like a funny story if you read them in chronological order.

Keep in mind that NONE of these tweets are related in any way, shape or form, and most had completely different contexts:

To “get it,” you have to read from the bottom up, but to make it easier, here they are in succession:

“That’s like, WAAAAAY down the road. Like Friday.”

“Haven’t you seen Subway commercials? Don’t you know the right way to say it?”

“I wore so much black I out-blacked myself. Black is the new black!”

“You are the reason that dress was invented.”

“Woo! It’s nice and bright in here! It makes me wanna take this dress off!” #unrelatedtothelasttweet

“We’re going to drool all over her like a pork chop.”

“… and it doesn’t give you the risk of having quintuplets!”

“You just want me for my numbers.”

“You gotta perpetuate the SEO-ness of your lineage.”

“Who the hell are you and why are you soliciting me?!”

OK, maybe it’s only funny to me, but I’m curious to see if anybody else’s completely unrelated overheard tweets also look like they kinda tell a story. It’s an interesting and fun exercise.

Here’s what you do:

1. Just view your own profile on Twitter.
2. Plug “OH:” (or “overheard,” whichever you use) into the search box and make sure that the box is checked to read only your own tweets.
3. Read from the bottom up.
4. Do they kinda tell a story?
5. If so, take a screen shot & share.

Come on, you know you want to. It’s fun!

Possibly Related posts:

1. Geeks have more fun!

In the meandering, ever-changing saga that is Facebook’s user experience, once again the mammoth social network made some abrupt changes without warning to its community.

On April 1st, Facebook changed their rules again and unleashed “community pages,” in an asinine attempt to “simplify” the already confusing issue of Pages vs. Groups.

This was not an April Fool’s joke, either.

The goal of this new “feature” is to weed out the unofficial brand pages from all the “official” ones on the network, and retain fan pages specifically for businesses, brands, public figures and official spokespeople for any of them. For example, if one wanted to make a page for a random cause or to make a statement, it would fall into the “community pages” category. Once the community page hit a certain amount of users, Facebook would hand admin privileges over to the community, thus creating a Wiki-like platform.

In every past instance of Facebook making big changes, users have protested within the network by creating hundreds of “Bring Back the Old Facebook” groups and even a few pages. However, this time there appears to be very little protesting in the social network by the addition of “community pages.”

Not because users don’t want to, but because they can’t figure out how.

“I don’t like it at all. I wish they’d bring back the old Facebook, and so do all my friends,” said Sarah Jones, a die-hard “Bring Back the Old Facebook” online protester who admins several groups. “I’d start another protest on Facebook but I can’t figure out if I should make a page, a group, or now one of these new community pages!”

Others are more suspicious of Facebook’s motives.

“I think it’s a conspiracy, Facebook is trying to confuse us so that we can’t protest all the change,” said one Facebook user and avid Obama supporter who declined to be named.

Indeed, as of this writing there are a few anti-community pages fan pages, but none have any more than three fans.

To make matters worse, Facebook also decided they are soon going to replace the “Become a Fan” button on fan pages with a “Like” button, citing better conversion on the “Like” feature within the network and increasing engagement without implication of commitment.

“I’m not a fan of removing the ‘become a fan’ button, and I don’t like the idea of just having a ‘Like’ button. Would fan pages become ‘Like’ pages?” asked one concerned Facebook protester, “I was going to make an anti-Like Button page but it wouldn’t even have ‘fans’ anyway… now I can’t figure out if it should be an anti-Like button group or page or community page to protest removing the ‘become a fan’ button AND the addition of the community pages!”

Many users have said they’re giving up and going back to MySpace, but are wary, as they got lost on the way to Facebook the last time.

It is uncertain what Facebook will decide to change next, but one thing is certain: They’ve finally found a way to quiet all the noise of whiny protesters within their network.

Image via Blackrage.org.

Possibly Related posts:

1. If you are not a public figure, you do not need a fan page. Period.
2. Yeah, I’m a big fan of Facebook.
3. Are you creating bad “social currency” on Facebook?

(Real men of genius!)

Tonight, I salute YOU, Mr. “I-Sync-My-Twitter-and-Facebook-Accounts”!

(Mr. I-Sync-My-Twitter-and-Facebook-Status!)

Yes, you sir, are oblivious that your Facebook friends really don’t care about your every move & your Twitter followers are a) mostly the same people, and b) annoyed as hell.

(Absolutely, completely oblivious!)

It’s imperative that you tell EVERYONE POSSIBLE about that ham sandwich you had for lunch, or that you are happy it’s football season, because you are just. that. important.

(I’m big on the internet! I’m big in Japan! Germany loves me!)

So go on and open a Ping.fm account, Mr. Twitter-Facebook-Syncer, because YOU are a REAL MAN OF GENIUS.

(Inspired by the Bud Light “Real Men of Genius” radio commercials, you can hear all of them here.)

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Remember these commercials?

You either loved Smiling Bob or you hated him. I thought these commercials were hilarious at first, but after so many euphemisms for “natural male enhancement” and cheesy double entendres, every time I heard that annoying whistling song and saw Smiling Bob’s unnatural-smiling face, I wanted to reach through my TV screen and punch him in the teeth.

However, in a conversation about companies and social media yesterday, Smiling Bob popped (no pun intended) into the forefront my mind. Whether we want to admit it or not, there are a lot of similarities between Enzyte (not linking to them, sorry) and brands’ expectations of social media.

Anybody that fell for these Enzyte commercials bought into the bulls**t that this once-a-day pill would be the answer to all their problems. . . at least in the bedroom (which leads to solving the rest of their problems, apparently). Guess what? It wasn’t.

Consumers who forked over $100 million were sold on this idea, though:

“. . . After a few shorts weeks, Bob has a LANE full of confidence, PRIDE to spare, and now everyone can see that Bob has made some SIZABLE STRIDES to improve his SCORE.”

Many, many businesses seem to think that social media is their Enzyte. That it is some kind of once-a-day thing they do and after a few short weeks, their company will have tons of publicity, they’ll look cool because they’re online, have sizable profits, and an improved overall brand.

Hate to break it to you, but social media is no magic pill that cures everything that ails ya.

We can learn something from Smiling Bob, though. Watch these, and pay attention to the last one, especially:

Let’s substitute a few key words with “social media”:

1. The quality of social media is very important.
2. There’s a proper tool for every social media project.
3. Working with social media can be both fun and rewarding.
4. When it comes to social media, it always helps to listen to an expert.

(I hope I don’t have to remind anyone that the term “social media expert” shares the same degree of ambiguity as Enzyte’s intentional usage of the term “natural male enhancement.”)

According to Wikipedia,

Because Enzyte is an herbal product, no testing is required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. An official of the Federal Trade Commission division that monitors advertising says the lack of scientific testing is “a red flag right away. There’s no science behind these claims.”^[4] The company has conceded that it has no scientific studies that substantiate any of its Enzyte claims.^[5]

So whatever happened to Smiling Bob?

Twenty-five years in prison and over $500 million in fines for massive consumer fraud that “preyed on the vulnerabilities and inadequacies of customers in a case about arrogance and greed.”

I don’t think anybody who promises successful social media strategy and doesn’t deliver the goods is ever going to get sentenced to prison or fined like that — not at all. Nor am I implying that everybody who claims to “do” social media is a Smiling Bob — of course not. But if you think your business can get a quick fix and ahead of your competition with an out-of-the-box social media “strategy” requiring little effort, think again.

Social media can be an enhancement to your overall marketing efforts, but by no means should you think it will solve all your company’s problems. If somebody tells you that, check to see how much they’re smiling at the time.

I encounter people who think social media is the Enzyte for their business quite a bit, and it’s frustrating. What is it about people that makes them think it’s a magic pill? Is it the overblown publicity of the usual case studies, or hearing about it from celebrities and TV networks? Is there something I’m not seeing?

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I had a really bad day the other day and sent out a tweet from my phone that said this:

This is a game I love to play: Computer commands/shortcuts for real life. It came up in a recent conversation on Facebook with Arno, a.k.a. @camera_obscura, one of my South African friends. He said, “My next few weeks will be much easier if I could uninstall the “sleep” function from my body. And also upload information to my brain.”

Amen to that.

I’ve played it before briefly on Twitter, but I’d like to see what we come up with in the comments. So far this is my list of computer commands/shortcuts I want for real life:

• An ESCAPE key for awkward situations.
• *CMD/CTRL+F for things like my car keys.
• CMD/CTRL+Z for “undoing what you just did as you get the sinking feeling that you have officially just been a dumbass” (that one was Arno’s)
• A service like shorten URL that you can plug long meetings into.
• A help file (per Arno’s friend Adrian)
• CMD/CTRL+S to save important things for later
• Copy & Paste to relay important conversations so you don’t get anything wrong.
• CMD+Q to just quickly quit stuff and get on to the next thing.
• CMD++ to make things bigger that are too small . . . like, uh, ice cream sundaes (be creative)
• CMD+- to make things smaller that are too big . . . choose your crisis & shrink it!
• CMD+H to instantly hide
• CMD+O to open doors and stuff
• CMD+R (or F5 for PC users) to refresh . . . could save money on your water bill
• CMD+SHIFT+DELETE to empty the trash . . . nobody likes to do that in real life!

Your turn!

What are some computer commands/shortcuts you’d like to apply in real life?

*Note: I’m a Mac person so I use the CMD key, which is similar to the CTRL key. Your shortcuts may slightly vary if you’re a PC person.

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As of the other night, yours truly is now a contributor* to a hilarious site for people who secretly (or-not-so-secretly) hate their jobs, Office Evil.

My first contribution is currently the featured MadLib on the home page. It’s a memo from your boss. He/she saw what you were doing on those social networks on company time and NOT very happy about it. Fill in the blanks to find out exactly why you’re in deep.

*Disclaimer: Potential future employers – Please do not interpret this the wrong way. Though I currently work for myself, anybody can tell you that I’m a workaholic, love what I do, and always go above and beyond. This is only for fun, and came about randomly. Don’t hold expressing my creative juices against me.

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We all should know how it works by now — Facebook takes info from your profile & IP address and then targets ads at you in the sidebars. To make it even easier for them to tailor to your consumer needs, if you do or don’t like something, you can rate it with a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” and even tell them why you did or didn’t like the ad. Seem fair enough. I cooperate with them and rate ads sometimes, because hey, I’ve actually found some pretty interesting stuff through them, and isn’t that their ultimate purpose?

One would think.

However, the past few weeks I’ve noticed that my ads were increasingly about weight loss.

I’m going to be frank here — although I am a woman and generally we with the XX chromosome sequence do tend to be more self-conscious about our weight — I’m not fat.

I’m not as thin as I used to be, but honestly, I can’t complain and I don’t, especially on my Facebook profile. I don’t even talk about my weight in my status updates, which are constantly changing. Why? Because I’m not an insecure teenager starving for attention (otherwise I’d be on MySpace), and I’m comfortable in my own skin. Sure, I’d like to lose 5-10 lbs., but who wouldn’t?

So I repeatedly tell these weight-loss ads “thumbs down” and tell them “irrelevent,” “uninteresting,” and even “offensive.” They keep coming.

I got to the point where I just ignored them. I rated other ads that are more relevant to me, things about writing, public speaking, social media, local bands, etc.

Then I turned 30.

Now, apparently not only does Facebook think I’m fat but it also thinks I’m old. Case in point:

It should be stated that I am not a mom, nor do I look as old as 30 (I’m sure there’s a strong correlation there). As  a redhead, I am extra careful of exposing my skin to the sun for very long, else I turn into one big freckle and seriously increase my chances of getting skin cancer. “Pale and proud!” is a motto of mine. I’m OK with this, and I count my blessings for having a combination of good genes and brains enough to not tan, therefore, I do not have wrinkles.

Yet Facebook is relentless. No matter how many “thumbs down” I give these ads, according to their keyword spiders or little men on the other side of the monitor, or however these things are decided, I am now not only fat but old. And not just “aging,” but old. For the past few days, this is what I’ve gotten:

This, my friends, is Barbara Walters. Granted, Barbara Walters is one of the women at the top of my personal “Most Admired” list, but nowhere on my profile do I mention her name. And God bless Bawba Wawa, she does look great for her age (though I’m sure she’s had work done), she is 78 years old.

Now, not only does Facebook think I’m fat, but it thinks I’m old, too.

Facebook thinks I’m Sally Struthers. Or someone like her, I mean. Hovering somewhere around 60, bigger-boned than I’d like, dying to look younger and thinner.

Amazing.

What kind of off-targeted ads do you get on sites like Facebook and other networking platforms? What/who do you think Facebook thinks you’re like? I’d rather not be like Sally Struthers, but I’m sure there’s got to be worse … right?

… right?!

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