…about the day before the Vegas wedding. :)

1. My second hairdresser was awesome, which was lucky because the one the day before had been a total bust. I wore my tentative wedding hair to the bachelorette lunch. Lunch was friggin’ awesome (Mexican cuisine of the tastiest variety):

2. Dianah, Susan and I went to an oxygen bar:

3. I bought a Coach wristlet for $50 at Caesar’s Palace, because Kristen gets a 50% discount as a Coach employee (at ANY store), so I had a small bag to carry that evening. I got this, but in black. I also bought a bracelet at the Playboy store. Shopping:

4. Shopping, dinner at Roxy’s Diner, running into clothed male revue boys, all very fun. Then the night officially started at Fremont St:

5. The club we ended up spending most of the night at was supposed to be visited by Adam Sandler that night, but he never showed. Kristen and I crashed his reserved VIP section, were given drinks, and then we were escorted out of the VIP area.

6. I don’t remember this Tweet.

7. We never made it to a strip club (and Dianah never got to join us *sad*). I’m a little sad about that, but we wouldn’t have had time with how much time we spent at The Bank… everyone just got too drunk to keep track of time.

8. Undisclosed debauchery is filtered to the LiveJournal. VIPs can go dig up the big juiciness of the night there.

[You can find all the pictures from the bachelorette extravaganza HERE and that day’s Twitters are HERE.]

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That said, if you’d like to support us, you may do so by clicking the “Donate/Subscribe” button in the right hand column of the site, or you can click HERE.

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So, shortly before we went to Vegas and got married and such, I started staying up really late, getting things done, worrying about things, or just staying up late to do something I wanted to do. Then we went to Vegas and the time zone change made that an advantage, because I was already in West Coast mode, and then on top of that, we started staying up way too late out in Vegas (because it’s Vegas and there’s no concept of time), and by the time we arrived back at home, I was used to being up until about 4:00 a.m.

It’s gotten progressively later and later, until last night, when I stayed up until 6:30 a.m., took a shower for Tuesday morning and saw Jim off to WORK before going to bed.

That is totally not acceptable. Totally not a way to operate, and tonight, I am taking the bull by the horns. I have two Advil PM tablets in hand, I’m downing them now and I am GOING to be asleep prior to 1:00 a.m. I am not going to become some weird third shift person who works sometimes at 3:30 a.m. because… well, I’m awake and what the hell else is there to do at ridiculous hours like that?

Plus, I’m WAY sick of that penis enlargement informercial that doubles as a staged sex talk show. Horrifyingly awful and it’s on constantly on more than one channel after 4:00 a.m. NO MORE.

*goes to eat the mushroom and go tumbling down the rabbit hole and such*

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1. Work (this includes several sub-tasks)

2. Slashfood entry (post one for Tuesday and write up one for later this week)

3. Mail packages (tea packages, Viddler tee, Fathers Day/wedding-related gift for Dad, social security name change thingy… USPS=$$$$)

4. Continue work on updating resume (bleh)

5. Call and yell at UA parking office, b/c I paid my tickets and my transcripts need to be released from hold

6. Work on outlining my session for Podcamp Ohio

7. Anxiously await morning visit from UPS man (where are my Moo cards that I ordered for Podcamp???) (My Moo cards didn’t come. :( )

8. Deposit mileage check I found from when I worked at my old job (at least two months old) - I FORGOT THE CHECK AT HOME.

9. Use unexpected mileage check to purchase The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley (sequel to the book I stayed up past 5 a.m. to finish yesterday) (I bought the book even though I forgot the check)
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EDIT: I haven’t even gotten to most of this due to stuff I forgot I needed to do. TOO BUSY TODAY.

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So, I’m is hitting Podcamp Ohio on June 28th (next weekend), and I’m doing a session entitled “Podcast Visibility & Internetiquette.”

Session description:

This session is a round table discussion about how to properly and appropriately interact with your audience online. It is important to know where the line is between properly promoting your content, and driving away viewers and fans with overly zealous marketing and poor knowledge of netiquette. The discussion will include a brief presentation and then a casual exchange about how to properly use social networking sites, blogging, email and microblogging services like Twitter and Pownce to keep fans updated without turning into a spambot.

What I want to know from all of you is this:

How much self promotion is TOO MUCH self promotion?

Sure, I have my own opinions about where the line is, but I want to get an idea of what the rest of you think. Where do you draw line when it comes to someone on Twitter, or Facebook, or (shudder) MySpace plugging their work and giving you links to their projects? What types of self promotion really turn you off of a project or even a person altogether? Who do you think does self promotion well, and who have you seen cross the line too many times?

I want to start off my session with some things that are commonly understood to be faux pas in online marketing and some advice on basic ways to do it right on a few of the commonly used sites, so help me to understand where YOU, as an online content consumer, draw the line.

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I’ve been twittering a lot about reading comics lately and I’ve taken a lot of trips to Land of Cran on BrightKite, and I haven’t really talked much about what I’m reading.

What I’m reading is some really great stuff… the kind of stuff I haven’t read before, because when I was younger I was very into Superman, the X-Men, Shi, and Witchblade, and in May, I wandered into Land of Cran with an enormous amount of new free time and I simply asked the clerk to show me some amazing series. Every single thing he recommended was amazing and I’ve been going back for new volumes ever since.

I’m not going to cover everything I’ve read (a little Barry Wean, Fables, 52 [not good], and the stuff below), but there are two series that really, REALLY stand out. I can’t get enough of these.

The Walking Dead

An amazing monthly black and white that started in 2003. It’s written by Robert Kirkman (amazing) and it tells the story of a group of people who are trying to survive after zombies have mostly taken over. It didn’t sound like my kind of thing, but I was hooked from issue one and it is really well written and really well illustrated. I find myself sad at the end of each issue and I’m quickly approaching the end of the volumes that have been published so far, so I’m going to be really sad when I have no more to read. Currently on Volume 6.

Y: The Last Man

This is a series about a huge moment where everything on the entire planet with a Y chromosome dies simultaneously, with the exception of a man named Yorick and his monkey. Totally amazing story, very apocalyptic like the Walking Dead series, and I’m also very sad when I get to the end of one of these volumes. The questions that are raised… about what would happen to our government, our military, our culture, our transportation… it’s all just really fascinating, and scary in a lot of ways. The snarky last living man is alternating between doing a lot of joke-making and growing up as he’s beginning to realize how important his survival is to the survival of the human race. Currently on Volume 3.

If you’re a comic book fan (maybe I’m the only one, I don’t know), what are you reading these days? If you’re just an avid reader, what are YOU reading right now? I picked up some Robin McKinley last night that I’m really excited to revisit when I’m ready to take a break from my comic book phase.

Tell me what you’re reading! I’m so excited to be reading again!

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Click on the photo below for the set of our professional wedding photos. :)

We’re really happy with how they turned out!

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Thursday, we got our marriage license:

Then we had dinner and drinks at Quark’s with Dianah, Karen, Jim’s cousin Paul, and my dad and stepmom. I had a Borg Sphere, Cardassian Ale, and Picard’s Pockets (steak pita sandwich thingies). After walking back from the bar, we were at the hotel’s C-Bar for a little while longer and then I passed out. GREAT evening. :)

STAY TUNED! Friday entry brings bachelorette fun!

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Don’t worry, I’m not actually blogging 15 minutes before my wedding. I’m setting this entry to post in the future, so that while I’m anxiously awaiting my walk down the aisle, somewhere the powers of the internet are reminding all of you that I am getting MARRIED (in 15 minutes).

If you want to watch, head over here and choose today’s date. Only a certain number of people will be able to watch live, but soon after the ceremony is over there will be a playable video.

I’M GETTING MARRIED! :) Yep.

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My last act at Viddler before disappearing until June 14th (nuptials and honeymoon) is to issue a new VidChallenge. I want to see RESULTS, people! If I come back to no pet videos (and I know a lot of you have pets), I’ll be very sad. Flood the VidChallenge group with your various animal friends, and a winner will be chosen in a couple of weeks (and perhaps they will get a spiffy Viddler tee or some stickers?). I’m looking forward to meeting all of your furry (or otherwise) animal companions!

RULES:

1. Tag it with “PetChallenge”

2. Put it in the VidChallenge group

3. Must be pet-related

4. Three entries per user allowed

5. Entries due by June 20th

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1. Get black pants hemmed for flats (why are all women’s dress pants made with the assumption that every women will be wearing 3″ heels with them?).

2. Fax contract to Slashfood (I will be writing for them soon. :) )

3. Return clothes purchased at Old Navy online (too big).

4. Check Best Buy for cheap memory cards (lots o’ memory = gooood).

5. Head to bank to deposit wedding gift money we’ve received so far and get cash for on the trip.

6. Head to hairdresser for trim and eyebrow wax.

7. Mall visit for assorted supplies.

8. Another shop for assorted supplies.

9. Finish doing all laundry at home so all our favorite clothes can come with us.

10. Finish packing (must finish packing… stress of packing not being complete is very big).
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Countdown to wedding: 5 days, 4 hours.

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Some clips from driving home from Columbus from the Podcamp Ohio May Meetup.

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I’ve been curious about the way Jim’s acting lately, as the wedding grows nearer. I haven’t been able to put my finger on it, but I realized today that I *think* he might be…

…excited.

I don’t know how macho men like Jim show excitement for an event like their wedding, but I think Jim is pretty psyched for the trip AND for getting married. We haven’t had a real argument for a while now, and he seems almost chipper, which is totally unlike him (at least not for long periods of time). I don’t doubt that inwardly he’s very excited and happy and totally ready to marry me, but I wasn’t prepared to get to see it beforehand.

All you men who are already married… what did you feel like the week before your wedding? I’m sure you weren’t giddy and frantic like your future wives (or maybe you were!), but did you notice a change as the wedding started to become something that wasn’t just down the road but actually a soon-to-be reality?

I like the change I see in Jim… I didn’t picture or expect any outward excitement, because that’s just not how he operates with most things, but I’m actually getting to see outwardly that he is really excited to be marrying me. How unexpected and comforting. :)

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…dying, I think.

The powers that be have blessed me with such severe allergies / sinus annihilation during this entire long weekend that I spent 22 hours in bed completely incapacitated and I’ve spent the past 24 hours blowing my nose to the point of it bleeding frequently.

Seven days until we fly to Vegas and I have a red, scabbed-over nose that will not stop running and I have been awake updating wedding spreadsheets for hours now.

Something’s gotta give, Universe. I WILL look gorgeous and non-sniffly by June 7th, or you’ll be mighty sorry for this recent pollen count and the fact that you’ve sprung severe allergies on me at age of 27, less than a month before my wedding.

Harrumph, Universe. Harrumph, indeed.

(Thus endeth today’s bridezilla ventings. Expect more now that we’re at t-minus 7 days until airplane lift-off.)

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Here are the first two videos from the Podcamp meetup in Columbus a couple weeks ago. In the first, you can see a bit of our Panera time and then little tidbits of our wanderings through ITT Tech. The second reveals that no one at ITT Tech likes podcasting and we epic fail at interviewing.

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This last bit of trombone footage features a little bit of Jim, who suddenly reveals he used to play trombone in grade school and demands that I provide him with dinner. I mention the horrible verbal faux pas I was going to make my original video about this VidChallenge (therein making the actual faux pas in THIS video).

I also seem to remember a mystery song… I think it’s the trombone part to part of a a Glenn Miller song, but I can’t remember for the life of me.

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In this installment, and I play (and suck) a lot more. Stay tuned for the 3rd (and final) contribution to the VidChallenge group, in which I get Jim to play the trombone on cam and he harasses me as well.

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I have been introduced to a new phenomenon on the internet, which I have given a name and defined as:

Scorned Lover Syndrome - receiving a sarcastic, chastising email or other method of communication as retaliation for not accepting a person’s friend request.

I missed the part where I am suddenly required to explain my actions to the person whose friend/link request I declined. Are people actually of the opinion that it’s okay to lash out when their friend request doesn’t result in a successful connection?

I’m somewhat appalled at this behavior, and want to call it out as an netiquette no-no. I’m amazed I even have to say it, but: Do NOT send bitter emails to people who decline your friend requests on any network for any reason, especially a professional network like LinkedIN. It’s incredibly bad form, and not very professional to boot.

I received a friend request maybe a week ago from a person I didn’t know, and when I received it, I did not have any indication of why the person wanted to link with me and I didn’t know who they were, so I clicked “Do Not Know,” because to me, LinkedIN is a place for professionally networking with people you would… well, that you would recommend professionally, or that you would feel comfortable giving access to your existing professional connections. I’m not one of those people that accepts every request on any network, and while that may not be the best thing to do by someone else’s standards, it’s my personal choice.

Then, today I received an email from the scorned member:

“I have been very active in this community since the first one and count both Chris Penn and Chris Brogan as friends, you can check out their recommendations for me on Linkedin, oh that’s right, you can’t, you clicked on the Do Not Know button when I sent you the request.“

I responded succinctly and incredulously, which wasn’t met well, and now the exchange is over (I hope), but I am still amazed and somewhat amused. When did simply having the same interest become the same as knowing and connecting with another person? When does a person become so confident in their awesomeness that they would be indignant if you choose not to immediately connect with them before ever even having an email exchange?

I know there are a lot of people who accept all friend requests and have 7,000 people they’re following on Twitter, and I think that’s great and wonderful and super duper if that’s how you choose to handle online interaction, but don’t expect every person on the internet to handle networking the same way, and if you’re already an online media professional, you should probably already know that.
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Internetiquette is an ongoing series about internet etiquette and how we could all be doing more to reduce out jerk footprint on the web. If you’ve witnessed an internet violation worthy of an Internetiquette tsk-tsk’ing, email me.

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Don’t worry, I will embarrass myself further in subsequent entries for the InstrumentToday VidChallenge.

This is just the very tip of what I recorded several hours ago… I’m not sure how much of it will end up going on Viddler, but there’s quite a bit of it to sift through, so stay tuned…

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Okay, my free day is over and it was awesome. I “accomplished” the following things:

• I slept in until 12:34 p.m.
• I caught up on Google Reader until it felt like work, and then I stopped.
• I played Warcraft for a few hours.
• I ordered pizza!
• I read the first 57 pages of The Amber Spyglass (holy sacrilege, batman… I like this one so far).
• I took TWO naps.
• I watched How I Met Your Mother (episode was kind of lame *sad face*) and Medium with Jim when he got back from poker.

And NOW, I’m going to head to bed soon and start fresh tomorrow with a pretty great day under my belt. :) w00t!

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If you don’t hear from me, assume that I am somewhere relaxing and doing things I’ve waited two years to be able to just spend all day doing… things I didn’t get to do this weekend with family dinners and other obligations, and won’t get to do this weekend either.

Today is the day. Leave me be (unless it’s something fun and completely unrelated to work, school, or any of the gazillion projects I’m juggling) and I’ll see you tomorrow. You can probably check Twitter at any point to find out how I’m spending my totally free day, unless I decide not to Twitter. Who knows?

Oh, and go schedule a day like this for yourself if you haven’t had one lately. :) You deserve it.

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Click on the image below to see my feature for today at Viddler, which is an episode of MobLogic in which Lindsay Campbell is arrest with others who were peacefully protested against the three police officers who were acquitted in the Sean Bell trial (the officers - in plain clothes - shot an unarmed black 50 times and will see no consequences).

The comments over the show’s site are mixed, some calling for more objective journalism and calling Lindsay’s actions a stunt, but what I really love about the show is Lindsay’s capability of presenting her own experience, while continually and openly analyzing her role in this new brand of online journalism.

She’s not objective, but in light of what happened, I think it’s less okay to be objective than it is to be outraged and saddened by an event that will change the level of trust that many citizens living in New York City will have in their police force for a long time. I’m not feeling very objective about it either.

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I had no idea until a few weeks ago that Masters level academic regalia was friggin’ weird looking… It took me almost an hour iron this outfit this morning with all the folds and weird seams and stuff. I will store snacks in my sleeve extensions.

Check out the sleeves and hood (my hood is brown velvet with navy and gold inside):

Graduating today!! Wheeee!! :)

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Birthday recap, some talk about my upcoming “done”-ness and graduation.

Then, brief clips about writing my last ever paper and then going to my last class.

And THEN, less than a minute at the end of my last day of internship. w00t.

So, this Friday, after walking across the stage with my fancy Masters hood and getting my fake diploma in front of Jim and my classmates and everyone else, I will “officially” graduated.

And you won’t have to hear about it as much. ;)

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Sometimes I lose my mind and do silly things. At least I was listening to some quality Bob Dylan at the time…

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and a lot of writing-then-deleting in regards to a topic that I’ve wanted to blog about for a while now. For a month or so, I’ve avoided writing about it, because it wasn’t an objective subject and it was too tied to specific people or situations, but I feel like right now is the perfect time to talk about it abstractly, because I’m in a place of clarity at the moment.

The short version is: The older I get, the more I realize that not one single person on this planet has it all figured out, myself included.

Most of the people that I have looked to over the years as role models or parental replacements are just people my age (or even much older) who think they’ve figured it out and have been all too willing to instruct me on life (since they think they’ve figured things out), and then in the all-too-frequent absence of true family involvement in my life, I’ve latched on and gobbled it up.

The reality is that every person has a little gem of wisdom to share that will clarify something in your life, and then piles of other baggage that another person should be careful not to adopt for themselves. I have been eager to find a role model or a mentor in my personal life, maybe due to the infrequency with which I receive that tutelage from the people I lived with growing up, maybe because we all really want to find a person to mold our life after, and what becomes clearer and clearer as I get older is that there is no other person in the world who can epitomize and instruct another person on the proper and successful living of their life.

We are all unique and unprecedented and potentially even greater than those who came before us if we learn from the gems AND the non-gems that we see in others.

I feel like the past twelve months have been a lesson in depending less on others, in being wary of unconditional follow-his/her-lead, in accepting the faults in others while also refusing to be a part of the problem. Maybe it’s because this is a big growing-up year for me, and I think part of it is that a wedding brings out the absolute worst in a lot of people in ways that I hadn’t been prepared for a year ago.

It might be good, this new wariness on my part, and parts of it are a little sad, because realizing that no one person