Telling It Like It Is

For people that drink as much coffee as we do, our recent experience with a single serve coffee maker in our hotel room during our Chicago vacation created temporary disappointment. I can only guess as to why hotels choose to provide hotel guests with one-cup coffee machines versus one that brews more than one cup of coffee at a time, but we weren’t impressed.

The moment we checked into our hotel room and saw the tiny coffee making appliance sitting on the counter at the hotel we stayed at, we knew we weren’t going to make it through our entire vacation trip with that silly looking coffee maker. We made a beeline to the nearest store and bought a cheap, black 12-cup automatic coffee maker that was sitting all by itself on a discount clearance shelf for just ten dollars.
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I have been a Skype user for a long time now, keeping in contact with friends and family living in the U.S and abroad. One of my family members lives in Spain, and having Skype to at least instant message or chat while on different time zones has been great. Email only does so much, but Skype is better. While instant messaging with Skype helps keep me closely connected with family and friends who don’t live nearby, instant messaging on Skype isn’t enough for me anymore.

I’ve known about webcams for Skype but hadn’t taken the time to learn how to use Skype with a webcam, and I needed to find out more about choosing a good webcam to use with Skype. I’ve heard there is a way to use a digital camera with Skype too, but using Skype on my home computer with a webcam is all that matters to me at this point.
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Every year, as our wedding anniversary approaches, we always check to find what the anniversary gift timetables show as being the traditional and modern anniversary gifts for each year. We celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary on January 25, 2010 and according to the tables and charts, the traditional gift idea is wool or copper.

The modern anniversary gift for a seventh anniversary is desk sets. Hmm, seems as though the traditional anniversary gifts would be somewhat more romantic. The idea of giving or getting a desk set as an alternative anniversary gift didn’t appeal to either one of us.
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Having continuous cell phone problems with our previous cell phones lead us to look into the difference between the Blackberry smartphone and the iPhone. We were both desperate to find the best cell phone and cell phone plan to fit our needs. Choosing a smart phone like the iPhone or Blackberry Bold or Curve, deciding which was the best, was a difficult decision to make.

After carefully reviewing many of the cheaper cell phones on the market and knowing what our needs are for business and personal use, we ultimately decided that we both needed a good quality smart phone. But which one? The iPhone or the Blackberry? If we decided on a Blackberry vs. an Apple iPhone, what is the best Blackberry cell phone? Is it the Blackberry Curve, the Palm, the Storm, the Pearl, the Tour, or the Blackberry Bold?

We both spent a lot of time reading iPhone reviews from current users, and it was interesting to learn that there has been numerous complaints from female iPhone users who have long fingernails. Apparently a lot of women aren’t very happy about how the iPhone design makes it difficult to type on the iPhone touch screen keypad, and that women with long fingernails or “chunky fingers” are hankering for a stylus to use with their iPhones.

I thought it was kind of funny that some women were accusing Steve Jobs and Apple, the maker of the brand spanking new Apple iPad device, of being “misogynistic” due to the fingernail problem. It’s pretty ridiculous to expect every geeky gadget or electronic device to match every possible user, long fingernails or not, and I have no problem trimming or cutting back my nails in order to not have the problem with my smartphone.
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What are some cheap and fun things to do during family vacations to Chicago? Anyone who has been to Chicago during the winter months knows that taking a Chicago vacation requires bundling up with warm winter clothes to offset the cold, blustery, freezing temperatures and winds from the Windy City. There are a lot of fun and cheap things to do in and outside of Chicago, indoors and outdoors, including things to do in the suburbs for families, kids and adults of all ages.

Looking for fun things to do in Chicago during the summer or winter? Chicago has a lot to offer tourists and vacationers throughout the year with favorite places including museums, parks, indoor and outdoor swimming, golf courses and mini-golf courses, family entertainment centers, live theater, ice skating, comedy clubs, festivals, art galleries, restaurants, working farms and orchards, amongst thousands of other Chicago attractions.

Whether you take a vacation to Chicago in the spring, summer, fall or winter months, make sure you plan your itinerary to include the popular places in downtown Chicago and in the suburbs north, west, east and south of the city. Coupons, discount tickets and pass cards like the Go Card help a lot to reduce the overall costs of a vacation trip and tours around Chicago, or anywhere else you want to go.
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This is a book review guest post of Hush, Hush: The New York Times bestselling book by Becca Fitzpatrick. The “Hush Hush” novel is a very popular book among teens and young adults, including a Hush Hush fansite “Fallen Archangel” at fallenarchangel.com and a Youtube video trailer.

In Hush, Hush, Nora Grey meets Patch Cipriano. Patch is mysterious, attractive, a bad boy, and the school’s newest transfer. Nora is brown-haired, smokey-eyed, an only child, and a columnist for the school’s eZine.

In the biology class they share together, Patch seems to know way too much about Nora; things not even her best friend, Vee Sky, knows. But when the tables are turned, and the biology assignment requires him to talk about himself, he refuses to budge. Patch’s nonchalant attitude leaves Nora frustrated with mixed feelings. While her teen hormones cause her to be attracted to Patch, something else, deep down, tells her she needs to be afraid.

When a mysterious shadow appears in Nora’s room, and a man wearing all black and a ski mask shreds her friend’s car, she looks to Vee for comfort, and winds up meeting Elliot Saunders and his best friend Jules at a local diner. While Jules seems to act strange around Nora and Vee, Elliot warms right up; confessing he just transferred from Kinghorn Prep to Coldwater High.
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When the Apple iPad was unveiled last week by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, gadget geeks were anxious to learn what all the hype was about. Who will want to buy the iPad and what all does it do? Is the iPad application device worth the hype that has been built up? Whether or not the iPad will crush or slay netbooks and e-readers like the Kindle remains to be seen. The iPad is an application device and not a computer or a laptop, so why there is talk about the iPad crushing netbooks sounds like nothing more than hype and geek jargon to me.

After reading a ton of pro and con reviews about the Apple iPad and watching video presentations, plus finding out from FOXNews that my already overloaded smartphone carrier AT&T will be providing services for the iPad, I’m underwhelmed. Some thought the iPad would be named the iTablet or the iSlate instead of something that conjures up thoughts of feminine hygiene products for women.

Oh, the iPad jokes took the net by storm, and hilarious they were for sure. Admittedly, the iPad is a good looking gadget, but who is the moron that came up with the goofy name? The cost of the iPad, a giant iPhone kind of gadget, is too rich for my blood. Unless Apple lowers the price. Yeah, right.
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Since my husband and I are both American Idol fans and live in Texas, north of Dallas, it seems only fair to reveal which contestants made it through to the Top 24. The Dallas American Idol auditions were shown on American Idol already last week, but inquiring minds are curious to know which Texas contestants made it through the Hollywood round in hopes of becoming the next American Idol mega star. American Idol spoiler alert!

Ever since Paula Abdul left Idol, and now Simon Cowell is leaving after season nine, whether or not AI will last much longer remains to be seen. Personally, I don’t enjoy watching the audition phase, with all the singer-wannabe’s and moron’s acting like fools, but at least we’ve got a few contestants from Texas that made it to the list of Top 24 according to the leaked spoilers. Some of the auditions are funny and others are just stupid.

Then again, nearly everyone has heard about the song Pants On The Ground, fanned the page on Facebook and had the song stuck in their head for days.

As with previous seasons of American Idol, spoilers and lists of contestant names have been right and this season is no different. JoesPlaceBlog (www.joesplaceblog.com) has the complete list of American Idol’s Season 9 Top 24, including links to contestant MySpace pages, Facebook, audition videos and performance videos for those who are interested.
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Taking a vacation in Chicago is one of the best places for travel, with so many things to do during the summer and winter months, there is no chance of ever running out of fun things to do in Chicago for cheap. Chicago is by far one of my favorite vacation hot spots since my kids and grandkids live there, and since I used to live in the northwest suburbs of Chicago years ago, visiting my old stomping grounds will be a treat.

We’ve had a good time during our inexpensive Staycation vacations, but this year we decided we really needed a getaway vacation where we can fly to Chicago and enjoy the Windy City and its many attractions. Planning a cheap vacation trip to Chicago includes finding good deals on hotels, car rentals, air fare, discount event tickets and finding as many free activities as possible. When it comes to planning a vacation to Chicago or anywhere else, cheap is good, but free is better.

Deciding where to stay in Chicago, where to eat, where to park if you’re going to spend time in downtown Chicago or surrounding cities, and where all the hot spots are in or outside of the city are things that must be decided. Picking what hotels or motels we would consider for our visit to Chicago was easy with Hotels.com, and since I used to live there I know what neighborhoods are good or bad, and what areas to avoid at all cost.
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Having cell phone problems of one kind or another is frustrating to say the least, especially when the problems affect business calls that should never be missed or lost. Problems like missed calls, dropped calls and battery problems have caused us to start looking into the possibility of buying a new smart phone, buying a replacement cell phone and/or changing our service provider. We have used Cingular/AT&T as our service provider for a few years and to say that the coverage is spotty and unreliable is putting it mildly, but is Verizon, T-Mobile or Sprint any better?

Calls drop when going from a 2G tower to a 3G tower and vice versa, and there are local areas we refer to as “dead zones” where we have no cell phone coverage at all. There are times when someone calls our cell phones but the phone doesn’t ring at all, where the call is immediately sent to voicemail and there is no message indicating we missed a call or have a new voicemail. Is that a AT&T coverage problem, a cell phone problem, or both?

Even though the contract for our cell phone plan doesn’t expire for a few more months, we’ve been told we can get an upgrade and new cell phone/smart phone now rather than waiting until our contract comes up for renewal, as long as we sign a new contract with AT&T. We don’t want or plan to sign a new one-year or two-year contract with AT&T because we’re seriously considering switching to another cell phone provider like Verizon, who reportedly has the best coverage in the U.S.
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