1. Do you have a doppelgänger?
I suppose so since I have a twin.

2. Do you keep your car cleaned up?
Not as much as I used to. I used to wash the outside all the time, now I don’t. You won’t find trash inside though and my drivers mat needs cleaned more often too.

3. What is a current fashion that drives you crazy.
I’m not into fashion, but for the life of me I still to this day, cannot figure out why the hell women would want to wear high effin heels.

4. How often do you go grocery shopping?
Couple times a week if I have money because I like buying fresh veggies and fruits.

5. What has been the best surprise of your life?
Probably that I finally got my 2 degrees.

Five Question Friday #34

Five Question Friday #16

Five Question Friday #30

On Saturday!

1. What’s the one personal hygiene thing you will not do in front of your spouse?
N/A.

2. What’s your favorite thing about a newborn?
Their playfulness and how everything they see is new to them.

3. When is “too young” to have a Facebook account?
Pre high school age. Just like I think cell phones shouldn’t be given to children before they hit high school. But then again, why does one even need a facebook account? I don’t have one and don’t want one either.

4. What are your hoping for for Mother’s Day?
It will be just me and the dogs so quiet comes to mind.

5. What was the best field trip you ever took in school?
I honestly cannot remember if we even had any field trips in school. Maybe they are more liberal with them now.

Five Question Friday #42

Five Question Friday #34

Five Question Friday #22

1. What is your next home improvement goal?
Well since I rent I try to make minimal improvements because it’s my money and I don’t know how long I am going to be here. But that’s gone out the window since it’s been over 10 years. I think I will rip out the carpet and put in fake wood floors on the first floor only. I hate carpet.

2. If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be? No religious texts (ie Bible, Quran, Torah, etc, etc)…
I don’t think there is any book anywhere that I would want to read over and over again because once I read a book and start to read it again because I think I may not have it I remember exactly what happens.

3. What is on top of your refrigerator?
Dustpan with small brush. A box that holds a couple mouse traps, a couple of empty jars and a box of straws.

4. What are your favorite or most used phone apps?
Way too many to count but I’ll try. These are all Blackberry related since that is the phone I have.

BEBuzz: Changes LED lights for every single email, phone, app, and contacts.
BEReader: Google reader
Fightin’ Words: Scrabble
Quicklaunch: One button access to apps
BEWeather: Weather app
Ubertwitter: Twitter app
Email++: Added features to all my emailing
Foursquare
Pandora
Pageonce Pro: Keep up with my bank accounts and bills to be paid
Wordpress

5. What’s the one thing you hate most about your spouses job?
N/A/

Five Question Friday #25

Five Question Friday #34

Five Question Friday #10

Not really though. The semester is officially over but I only have 3 weeks before the next semester starts at the end of May. I am trying to finish off some certificates so I can get vouchers for the actual exam so it will be less out of pocket money for me. Overall though 3 weeks is not much time for anything really if you think about. When you go on vacation you have to get ready. You go and have a blast on your vacation but once you get back home you have to decompress and clean everything you brought back. Three weeks is not enough time to do all of that if you ask me.

I would, however, love to take one had I have the money. Most students aren’t fortunate enough to have excess money though unless you have a benefactor which I do not. I did plan ahead a couple years back as I WAS planning on going to the Bahamas and got another passport made. I have no idea where my last one went as I would have loved to have kept it from when I went overseas.

Sitting on a beach just like this one sipping a strawberry daiquiri is my idea of a vacation. I would have my Nook with me to read the plethora of books I have loaded so I would not need to buy any, which you cannot, while outside of the states. Abaco Real Estate has properties for sale and for rent. Abaco Island has many attractions aside from the beaches themselves including museums and gardens. At this point I think I would just love the peace and quiet of any place.

Vacations

Two Weeks Off

Vacation Time Again

A Guide to Crowdsourced Review Websites

Summer is fast approaching and the time is coming to plan vacations, try new restaurants, and see the summer’s blockbusters in movie theaters. As the season approaches to make more consumer choices, there is no better time to explore the online resources created to help us make those choices better. User review websites are great tools in helping us decide which restaurants and movie theaters to frequent or avoid.

Crowd-sourced reviews have become even broader in their applications, and we can now use peer reviews to pick the right doctor, professor, or computer software. From as seen on TV products to the new appetizer at your local dive bar, user reviews are cropping up all over the online consumer landscape. Let’s look at some of the available peer review tools and their uses.

Food
Yelp is a well-known user review website devoted to restaurants and other businesses. But few people realize they can use food-centric social networks such as Foodspotting to gauge a restaurant’s food quality by their customers’ reviews. Users upload actual pictures of their ordered dishes along with their opinions of the food. Most reviews focus on the entire restaurant while social networks for foodies are based on specific dishes at restaurants.

People
The people we ask to deliver value for our money are some of the most influential people in our lives. Our professors, our teachers, and our doctors are all people we trust as a result of very important consumer choices. RateMyProfessors is an online collection of college and university instructor profiles searchable by school.

Each profile has a section for students who have taken classes by these instructors to leave thorough reviews of the instructor and their educational experience. Similarly, RateMDs is a service for medical professionals. Unlike RateMyProfessors, RateMDs does require membership fees to access the majority of the site’s review functions.

Education
In addition to helping you find the right professors for your learning style, user reviews can be helpful in other areas of your education all the way down to the notes you use to study. Notehall is an online database of notes students have taken during classes in schools across the country. Students upload, review, buy, and sell notes based on the notes’ quality. Each set of notes has user reviews from other students who have previously bought and used those notes.

The service is 100% legal and professor approved. The notes are not used to get answers for a test but instead to help students better understand the material or catch up on a day of class they may have missed.

Movies
Movie reviews can be helpful when going to the theater becomes more and more of an investment of time and money. Fflick was founded to provide a platform for crowd-sourced movie reviews based on users’ twitter feeds. Google has since acquired Fflick.

While the service appears to be temporarily down as a result of the acquisition, Google seems to have bigger plans for the consumer tool. An insider tech blog speculated that the deal “could enable the search giant to incorporate sentiment analysis and social considerations into its content discovery process.” In the meantime, you can find user movie reviews on Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon.

Image source: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2007/08/22/iphone460.jpg

Reviewing ReviewMe

Iron Man 2

Five Question Friday #38

The Rules: I’m going to ask FOUR QUESTIONS that everyone can answer and then you have the option to add a fifth question of your own for those who are visiting your blog to answer in the comment section, along with commenting on the four standard questions you answered!

1. Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?
Yes, and it annoys me even more when I make them and miss them.

2. If you could witness any event past, present or future, what would it be?
I’d like to be able to view Atlantis.

3. When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Any job related to computers. I’m finally doing that now after 2 degrees.

4. If you could offer a newborn child only one piece of advice, what would it be?
Would they understand being a newborn? Anywhoo, don’t lend money or help any family relative buy anything. You will get burned.

And your question is:
Do pronunciation mistakes annoy you? They sure do me. It actually drives me bonkers and I will cringe and hold my tongue trying not to correct them.

Monday Quiz About Me #6

Monday Quiz About Me #4

Monday Quiz About Me #5