However, one of the things I re-discovered while at RT was the joy of a tweet or two or ten. I found myself constantly turning on the Seesmic app on my Android phone. If I was waiting for someone, I turned it on and checked it. If I couldn’t sleep, I checked it. Standing in the elevator, I checked it. The RT tweets were a hoot which helped reestablish the whole thing for me. Some very funny stuff happened at that convention.

Used in conjunction with Facebook (my tweets post to my FB account) I managed to gently tease author Desiree Holt. I posted that I was sitting behind her in the lobby court of the hotel, buying her 100th book. And I was. Grinning with every click of the touch pad on my netbook as I made my purchase.  When Desiree saw what I’d posted, she got up and turned around and came over to hug me. The look on her face was priceless. I got such a kick out of using social media in such a way.

The power of the tweet came into play again when I got home from the convention on Sunday. I was sitting in my recliner, glad to be home, and I decided to look at Seesmic. What I found was a tweet from Jane of Dear Author about losing her Kindle and color Nook at RT. By coincidence, the “gang” (aka Z.A. Maxfield, Lynn Lorenz, Belinda McBride, Tara Lain, Stephani Hecht and Cherise Sinclair) and I found a Kindle in a green cover and a color Nook in a gray cover at the table where we sat down in the lobby court. When we turned on the Kindle it said the owner’s name was Jane.  A name like Jane could be anybody and neither ereader gave up any other information to us. Plus, I think we felt kind of bad poking around in them for information on the owner(s). So we called the lobby court manager over and turned in the Kindle and Nook to her.

Seeing Jane’s lamenting tweets about her lost ereaders reminded me that we’d found two and that one had said it belonged to Jane. Seemed like way too much of a coincidence to me, so I tweeted to Jane about our find and where we’d turned in the two ereaders. I was happy to see them find their way back to their owner. Especially since I now know what it’s like to be ereaderless. (I gave Nikki my Nook 3G to use with etextbooks and bought a color Nook, but when we had the chance to buy a mobile home a week later, I returned the color one in order to put the money to better use. Now, I’m without an ereader and I’m so lost!)

So I’ve renewed my acquaintance with Twitter a little and I’m glad that my doing so led to a good deed.  Hopefully, I won’t go back to being a stranger because I’ve got a bunch of new followers and even *gasp* Yasmine Galenorn is following me! (Hi, Yazza!) And I do miss the tweets of my friends Marty, Dave, Karl and Hilly. I need to turn on my original Twitter account and not just the Lex Valentine one.

Not to change the subject, although I am, the house situation is nearing a close literally. The house is being inspected on Tuesday and we expect to close escrow possibly the following day.  So very soon I’ll be changing my address and will no longer have a landlord. Rott and I are both looking forward to that despite how much money (and a Nook!) it has cost us.

Now, it’s time for my Monday Marcus. I can’t believe I’ve been posting this beautiful man for years now. Ah, well. It’s a good thing he’s so good looking or I’d tire of him, wouldn’t I? LOL

Before I go, if you don’t follow me on Twitter, I invite you to in the hopes that you’ll all encourage me to use it more than I have in the past two years. My author Twitter name is lexvalentine and my original account is winterheart. See you there!

Have a great Monday!

Late last night, I got an idea. Like a dog with a bone I couldn’t let it go. So I tweaked on this thing and messed with it and studied it and messed with it some more and tweaked on it some more. And then, I really started to like it.

Now, I’m no code whore. I know enough to make me dangerous with a template so I always have backups of backups because God knows no one can render a template useless faster than me. But for some reason, last night I looked at that CSS and the logic of it just fell into place in my head. At least where color is concerned. I may not know CSS very well, but I know a hex code when I see one! So I figured out how to customize the color.

It still has issues that I haven’t been able to wrap my brain around yet, like this whole featured article stuff and how to make a static header, and how to make it start on my welcome page and not my blog. (No, it’s not the standard WordPress setting, it has it’s own specialized settings just for this template.) But I’ll figure it out and if I don’t and I get stuck and frustrated, well, I’ll throw some money at someone and let them fix it for me. I know I’m more than halfway there now so that’s very satisfying.

The funny thing is that I used the same template I used for Jason Edding’s site. If you look at his and you look at mine, you’ll do a double take. They don’t look very alike at all. That’s the beauty of a template that has customizations built in and then gives you the option of changing it even more.

Now, my reason for wanting the site in better shape than the temp template I had up? I got a release date for Where There’s Smoke. Yep, May 3 – Rott’s birthday. Although, I have to admit, when I told him about it, he put his hands over his ears and said, “I can’t hear you!” when I said it’s a gay book. For another, he said he doesn’t have birthdays anymore and he’s still 21. (He’ll be 44. LOL) But yeah, I’m excited to have this book come out. And eventually, the construction zone will move here, but I’m just not there yet with ideas. And yes, the bats stay.

So this morning, tired as I am from a lack of sleep (I have a cut on my leg and it throbbed so badly I couldn’t really sleep) I’m feeling jazzed about some things. So I need a very nice Marcus today.

I wish I had a bigger image but it’s kinda cool anyway.

I was gonna talk about my trials and tribulations with a very cool tribal cut out aluminum computer case by Raidmax, but I’m too disgusted to even put the facts on paper as it were. Just UGH. BIG UGH.  Suffice to say, I’m not ever buying an aluminum case again no matter how cool it is or how many features it has that I want. It’s steel or nothing baby. Okay, maybe I could be talked into a plexiglass case…*eyeroll*

Here’s hoping you all have a simply awesome Monday!

I finally gave up trying to fix it and settled down to move the database. Well, not really move it but copy it to the new domain. I tried the backup/restore function within the database itself. No dice.  I googled for some tips and tricks and came across a php board where some techie guy said, yanno the backup/restore doesn’t work very well. Go into phpMyAdmin and do an export/import.

Ooooh, I thought. This sounds right! Did it work? NO. Okay, it sorta worked. In the admin panel it showed me all the threads. I thought wooo hooo! I went to the forum itself… empty. Whaaaa? Massive headache ensued. So I gave up and pondered the damn thing for a few days. My conclusion? I needed someone else to look at the damn thing. I had to be missing something.

So I sent Marty an email. He’s smart and resourceful… the kind of guy who would know about databases right? Well, he’d never moved one before, but offered to poke around in mine to see what might be wrong.  Marty’s next email shocked me. The two boards have different versions of php. Woah. I never even thought to look at that! So I deleted the new board uninstalled phpbb and went into the configuration to upgrade my php from 4 to 5.  Then I reinstalled phpbb3. Now, it’s ready for another try.

I’m not sure that I can still make this work but it was nice to have another set of eyes look at the problem. Instead of it being a bad database that needed a timeout, it just needed someone else to tame it. Or so I hope anyway. I really appreciated Marty looking at it. If anyone out there knows php board admin rights stuff, email me. I still can’t merge that effing thread. *sigh*

It’s Monday so I’ve got a nice Marcus here to drool over.  I kinda like the scruffy face look on him.

Now, for the first time, I think I’ll put a naughty female behind the fold. After all, I really did appreciate Marty’s help.

I probably coulda shown that without the fold huh? I mean her ass is hanging out but you can’t see it all that much. Not like this:

Hell. That’s not that naughty either. Oh, well. I’ll have to go looking for some naughty ones I guess. Everyone have a great Monday!

First up, the always awesome Jen from Redneck Romance Writer came through for me again with great suggestions for Silver Lining, even though she’s a busier person than I am. I worked my ass off on it Friday night and just a wee bit ago… I took my balls in hand and subbed it to Amira Press. I think this time I really will bite my nails. This story had a major overhaul and went from it’s original 4900 words to a whopping 8559, but I think it’s ready now.

When I put my query letter together, I realized that this publisher wanted to know what my marketing plan was. Me? Market something? Then I realized that for once in my life I’d done something RIGHT! I mentioned the loops I belong to (Yahoo and Google groups). I mentioned how long I’ve had winterheart.com. I mentioned that my author website at lexvalentine.com was up and running. I mentioned this blog and the wonderfully supportive blogging community I belong to. I mentioned the Zanctuary board which is filled with people from JR Ward’s message board. I mentioned the Bar…. Then I brought out the big guns. I mentioned a fistful of social media networking sites from Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn to Flickr and Brightkite and on and on… Damn.

Look what you people and a smart phone have done for me! MADE ME LOOK GOOD ON PAPER! WOO F’ING HOO! I was never so happy to be an anal geek as I was tonight.

Moving on, I’ve been learning to make trailers using Windows Movie Maker, which by the way, sucks major ass. At my office, I am the queen of Powerpoint. It’s not hard to be the queen of PPT there. I’m like the smartest person there when it comes to using software. I have this really cool PPT about email that incorporates the company’s credo essentials… it’s narrated by a staff member who emcees our big Memorial Day and Easter events. He has a great voice… and all I do to show this PPT is click on slide show. It runs all on it’s own and I just sit there. Not even a click. I love it. So making the trailer is kinda like doing a PPT presentation.

At any rate, the most I’ve ever done with anything like this are the PPT things and using Audacity to clip MP3′s for videos the president’s assistant makes. Now, I’m no dummy. I’ve been watching Ruthie make these videos off and on for a year. I decided to make myself a trailer after the Lex site was done and guess what? It wasn’t too hard and came out okay! Lady V from The Divine Madness said I could use their music (just to be all official like) and voila! Here is my masterpiece! (Don’t be too hard on me, I’m a newb at this remember?)

So, there you have it. My trailer for Lex Valentine, author. Tomorrow, I’m gonna tell you a little story about Jester, a sexy song, and how Justin let me steal his name. Then I’ll show you the other two trailers. Like I said in the title… media blitz!

I’m off to get some sleep before the big Chatroom Racers Stakes day at the sim Saturday morning. I already know I’m gonna get my ass handed to me on a platter. I even had the nerve to run a girl against the boys going long. Luckily, I think she won’t care.

Have a great weekend!

Scenario 1: You see a friend online on your IM. You send them a HI. They respond and you start talking. Then your friend just stops answering you. After 10 or 15 minutes go by, you wonder if they are on the phone or working or something. However, an hour or more goes by and you notice that the person still shows as online, yet you never once got an explanation from them for why they stopped talking to you.

Scenario 2: You see someone online. They do not have a busy message up. You send them a message and they snap back at you, telling you that they are busy.

Scenario 3: Someone sees you online. They send you a message. You talk for a few minutes and then they just stop, like in #1 above.

Scenario 4: Someone IMs you as soon as you come on, to ask you about someone else. No, how are you? No, are you busy? No anything. Just blurting out what they want, getting the answer and then, without a thank you, they stop talking to you.

There are a lot more scenarios. Those are just the top ones that several people have been perpetrating in my world lately. I know that IM software is buggy. Sometimes it shows people online when they are gone. I give people the benefit of the doubt… until those scenarios become regular occurrences.

So here’s the thing. Why is it that people feel it’s okay to be rude, because you’re talking to someone online and not on the phone or in person? In this age of technology, those scenarios up there are just as rude as hanging up on someone. Why do so many people not get that?

At any rate, here’s what I’d like to see the perpetrators of those scenarios do so that they stop pissing off me and others:

• If you don’t want to talk to all the people on your IM list, make yourself invisible to the ones you DON’T want to speak to. Then, if they are courteous, they will not IM you.
• If you do start talking to someone but become distracted by other IMs or Tweets, tell the person you gotta go, you are talking to someone else and you just can’t concentrate on all the convos. I don’t get pissed when people say this to me. I prefer to know that they’re busy with someone else rather than they can’t be bothered to tell me they don’t wanna talk to me anymore.
• Start your IM convo by asking how the person is. If they are busy… this lets them know that you will not take offense if they don’t have time for you, and shows them that you aren’t just some rude SOB who lives in an egocentric world.
• Use your busy or away message if you busy and/or away. Don’t just snap at people because YOU didn’t put up an alert or warning.
• When you IM someone, and start a convo, don’t just stop talking because someone or something else is more interesting or more urgent. If you started the convo and you can’t continue it, then you need to end the convo. Tell the other person you have to go.
• Don’t forget the common courtesy that was instilled in you as a child. The people online are just as real as the people you see every day face to face. They have feelings and they deserve to be treated with the same level of courtesy as any other person.

All of us have been the victim and the perpetrator in these instances I’ve depicted. I’ve started becoming more aware of how I treat others online because of the way I’ve been treated by a handful of people whom I thought – knew – were my friends. We all need to realize too that just because someone is your friend doesn’t mean they understand what is going on with you and isn’t hurt when you treat them rudely in IM.

I’m not sure how to solve these issues. I’m probably going to have to bite the bullet and send an email to all the perps because they don’t read my blog. I wanna be nice about it, but at the same time, it’s hard because I’m disappointed in their behavior. I don’t want people to be mad at me, but I also don’t want to feel bad when I speak to them in IM and they just don’t show me any courtesy. Obviously, it’s something that has to be tailored to each friend in an individual way, but I don’t like having to do it. I wish I could just understand how people can get like this. It reminds me of how people drop all their friends when they have a new love interest. It’s rude, and hurtful.

Ok, I’m stepping down from the soapbox. Do you have an IM or Twitter pet peeve? Something that common courtesy would resolve? Feel free to rant about it in comments.

Have happy social media Sunday!