Name: Rebecca Bollwitt
Screen Name: Miss604
Personal Blog: www.miss604.com 
Social Networks: Flickr, Friendfeed, Twitter, Pownce, Facebook
Current Employment: Self employed: Senior Partner, sixty4media
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

It started off as a passion for writing about the region and sharing my local knowledge including a love of history. Combine that with my technical background and my love of all things social media and I have managed to turn blogging into a full time job, which in itself motivates me more and more each day.

Miss604.com is focused on my life in Vancouver, which involves unconferences, meetups, walks in the park and hockey games, among other things.

  I try to use at least one photo with each post, I find it's easier to tell a story that way believe it or not. I also try to incorporate short video clips usually max 90 seconds (Flickr video size).

In 1997 I started an online fan site for my favourite band at the time, using Netscape Communicator and I was instantly hooked on HTML. From there my passion for all things web grew and saw me dabbling in online audio, streaming and editing until I was hired at the world's largest webcaster of financial audio. This career move, based on my digital media hobbies at the time, lead me to Boston where I oversaw online production (the recording, editing, encoding and live streaming of audio).

Upon returning to Vancouver in 2004 I started to get into blogging and noticed a lack of Vancouver-centric content. Most of the writers had only been in the city for a year or so and did not share the same knowledge and know-how about the region that I did as a born-and-raised local. I decided to take my passion for writing into the online realm to share my voice using a medium I had come to know and enjoy. Using Blogger at first then moving my blog to WordPress in 2006, I dove into the blogging platform head-first, teaching myself how to use CSS and also how to code in PHP.

At the time I was also co-hosting a podcast with my husband (since 2005) and that fall we decided to branch out and start a group hockey podcast - recording through the magic of Skype. I became very active in the local tech community; attending events, live blogging, doing interviews and building my knowledge from then on. I started producing podcast episodes, developing screencasts and broadening my blogging portfolio, with writing on sites like Techvibes and E!Online.

In early 2008 we formed sixty4media, a partnership dedicated to social media consulting. Helping others understand blogging, getting them started with a blog, and even providing custom WordPress themes and screencast videos to help them personally or professionally.

online at the shops with unsecure wireless network

online at the shops with unsecure wireless network

I have just read the Technical Brief for Windows Home Server Drive Extender.

Here are some f the important points to note when using Windows Home Server:

• Hard drives are formatted before they are added to server storage. Make sure that you back up any important files that are on the hard drive before you add it to server storage. Formatting a hard drive deletes all files on the hard drive.
• Do not use USB 1.1. USB 1.1 is much slower than USB 2.0. The home server performs slowly if you connect hard drives to a USB 1.1 port. If you are using external hard drives, ensure that they are connected through USB 2.0 or IEEE 1394 (for example, FireWire). USB 2.0 works best with one drive per controller. Performance suffers if multiple hard drives are connected to a single USB 2.0 controller. Using hubs to connect multiple USB drives to a single controller has a negative impact on system performance and is not recommended.
• If you unplug an external hard drive prior to using the Windows Home Server Console to remove it, the drive will be listed as Missing. In this case, you should immediately plug the hard drive back into your home server, and then follow the instructions in the Remove a Hard Drive Wizard to safely remove it.
• It is highly recommended that you not use hardware RAID technologies for your home server. Recovering from hard-drive failures becomes increasingly complex when hardware RAID systems are used. The recommended approach is to use multiple hard drives that are configured as Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD).
• Windows Home Server automatically manages the shared folders on your home server. Do not modify the underlying configuration of the shared folders that Windows Home Server manages. Creating shared folders outside of the Windows Home Server Console is not supported.
• You can lose files if you remove a hard drive. To safely remove a hard drive, click the Server Storage tab on the Windows Home Server Console. If you do not have enough server storage space, Windows Home Server warns you that you could lose files or file duplication as a consequence of removing the hard drive. You will also lose files with file names longer than 240 characters as a consequence of removing a hard drive. Windows Home Server sends you a health message if you have files with file names longer than 240 characters. Rename these files with a shorter file name.
• Do not use Disk Manager. Windows Home Server is a powerful system that automatically manages your hard drives for you. Almost any change that you make with Disk Manager will cause the storage system on your home server to fail, and possibly result in data loss.
• You should not use the DEFRAG utility on your Windows Home Server hard drives. Defragmentation does not affect the primary data partition in a home server with multiple hard drives because the majority of files are 4 KB tombstones. The DEFRAG utility may cause issues with the Volume Shadow Copy Service that runs every 12 hours to create previous version snapshots of the shared folders on the home server.

This post was written using Qumana. Apparently this works with Macs and PCs. Gordon and I are trialling this right now. I would love to hear any other feedback from Drupal users.I couldnt get it to work on my Vista 64 Machine. It installed OK apparently but would not run. I installed it on XP in a virtual machine and it worked fine.

The interface is very TinyMCE like, it is after all a lighweight browser. It is nowhere near as nice or easy to use as Windows Live Writer, but it is easier to setup. Its main benefit is the MAC compatability.

Powered by Qumana

I have written several posts about Live Mesh already. If you won’t know what it is then here is a short explanation of Live Mesh.

We have implemented Live Mesh in our organisation to provide the following solutions:

• Synchronisation between staff members of web development files. Currently being used by 1 staff member in China and 2 in Brisbane.
• Synchronisation of clients files between my office and theirs. Being used by one client so far.
• Synchronisation of files between my PC and my laptop for travelling. Being used for several projects as well as access to other files.
• Synchronisation on my PC between my virtual machine and my local  machine for software development files. This is better than using mapped network drives because the history tells me what files have been updated or added.

Amanda is currently researching the use of Live Mesh to share pictures between her work PC, her home PC and her friends PC so that they can seamlessly share hi-res photos. She will write about that soon.

However another possibility has crossed my mind and that is of using Live Mesh for simple file backup. I think this has a great potential for most of our smaller clients with one or to pcs and no backup solution, or maybe only a backup hard drive. I will be trialing this with one particular client who also has a remote access need and see how good it works. I note that PST files are excluded however but the remainder of his files should be able to be backed up online.

Here is some recent news about the Live Mesh capabilities and “limits”

• Size of all contents in a single Live Folder: 10GB (of course there’s still the 5GB quota which limits how much you can synchronize with the Live Desktop)
• Individual file size: 2GB
• Items (file or folders) per Live Folder: 100,000
• Members per Live Folder: 200
• Number of Live Folders per user: 200
• Number of devices per user: 100

The countries it is currently enabled for (English locale only) are US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada, India and Ireland. So sign up quick!

Yesterday we did the McConnell road circuit again. Josh, Mick and I headed out into the bush for this ride together. Josh had a new bike he was keen to test, a Mongoose. It performed well for him, but he is very light weighting only 60 Kgs. The only thing I was worried about was if the gearing would be low enough. It was so good in fact he rode up all the hills that Mick and I walked up!

The circuit starts at the drive able end of McConnell Road where you park your cars. Heading down into the bush you get a series of up and downs that are fast and fun and a good warm up. Turning right you then start to climb the ridge Here you find a forestry road and a small hill that has 2 very technical steep descents. Rutted and with loose gravel they make for a fun diversion. Josh performed particularly well leaving a nice rash on his bum when he decided to wrap himself around a tree after losing it. From there the long climb up the ridge is lung burning, calf burning time. I alternated between bottom gear and spinning as fast as I can while sitting well forward on the saddle to keep the front wheel down, and standing up and climbing in a bigger gear. About half way up I gave up and walked. Michael had also quit. Josh was on and off for the first steep bit but once hitting a slightly more gentle gradient he managed to ride to the top which finishes with a very short sharp steep climb. There we had a rest and bemoaned hills in general. However its all in good fun because the point of the climb is the downhill. And what a down hill!. The scene of a crash a few years back where I was awarded the mountain bike club trophy for crash of the year, This down hill has it all. Fast loose gravel to start with, then some fast rough packed dirt, followed by some steep technical sections with one and sometimes two wheels locked as you negotiate ruts, rocks, drop offs, tree roots and jumps. Mick almost lost it right in front of me as we took the conservative line down past one big steep section. Josh went straight over it and managed to stay on even through the rough bumps at the bottom. I took the wrong way through the bottom section and had to hit a drop off at speed to clear it forcing me onto a berm that had front and rear wheels threatening to go different ways, but releasing the brakes and just letting the bike go kept me on board. From there some fast downhill sections with some ruts and bumps that the front forks have no problem handling and a couple of good jumps at the bottom see you come flying back to the cars.

An awesome ride and only the second time Michael has done this one though Josh and I have ridden it many times.

Just when we had nearly finished the last round of security upgrades Drupal releases a new set of upgrades for 5 and 6 sites. Fortunately we have this process down pretty well now so it looks like aManda is going to be busy for a while performing upgrades.

One really cool module we have found for version 5 sites is the Update Status Module. This feature is included in Drupal 6 core, but had ben missing from Drupal 5. Now we can be notified whenever contributed modules are upgraded and go and replace them.

One of the main reason for the security patches is the chance for users of the BLOGAPI feature to upload malicious files. This includes users of Live Writer and other applications that take advantage of this feature. This fortunately is not too much of an issue because site administrators should only be providing this feature to users they trust anyway.

A note from Tim: Susan Bradley AKA the “SBS Diva”, has been an amazing help to our business with her awesome willingness to assist every time I have had a question about SBS 2003. She has provided information, links to help pages and forums, hot fixes and even posted me a SBS 2003 Best Practices book for free. She well and truly deserves the MPV recognition from Microsoft for her contribution to the SBS community. We’re excited to present her profile today.

Name: Susan Bradley.
Screen Name: Susan (boring, I know). Also known as the SBS Diva.
Personal Blog: www.msmvps.com/blogs/bradley
Social Networks: While I am part of www.linkedin.com and www.facebook.com there are still times that I go, do I really call some of these folks friends?  Social networks have to build off the social part first and foremost.  Twitter is one that I watch other twitterers but my "fake" twitter is actually run by Vlad Mazek (www.vladville.com).  He actually twitters better than I would -- check out www.twitter.com/susanbradley
Current Employment: CPA, Network Admin, Forensic specialist
Location: Fresno, CA, USA

It started back in 2003 because the blogging site of www.msmvps.com was needing to be moved from the ownership of a Microsoft employee to external control.  It would have caused too much personal liability for the person in particular.  So originally I started the blog because I was put in charge of administering a blog site.  I first put tech notes up there, then rant, then items I considered interesting, so I sorta fell into blogging.

Mostly it's small business technology focused.  And obviously it has to be something I care about.  So there is a lot about security concerns with small business as that's something I'm passionate about.  :-)

Most of the time it's short and regular.  I sometimes have longer posts, but not often.  I will use images, but not usually video.  If I do use video, it's someone else's video as I'm not into making vidcasts and what not.

The funny thing is that when I was a young girl, I bought several journals and NEVER would keep writing in them.  Yet here I am on the blog and I've kept it up.  I think if you would have told me way back in 2003 that I would enjoy  dumping thoughts on the web like this, I would have told you you were insane.  But here I am several years later still hanging in there.  I think the key is to go with your passion and don't  force the communication .  Blog because you want to, you like doing it, not because it's some item on a business plan and it's the latest thing to do.   Do it because it makes you see things and consider things in a new light.

Came back the same way I went. What took 2 hours 20 minutes to go, took 2 hours 17 minutes to come back - thats consistent driving!

Now I am home I have a massive amount of work to do. While I was away I could get into my server and process emails, manage files and other bits and pieces but my laptop does not have the same development environment for coding, making it impractical to try and work on some of the jobs I have to do. Only having 2 screens in the motel made it hard also when I’m used to working on 4.

So today its diving into the code work and getting the piled up jobs out of the way and done. First some paperwork associated with being away, a strong coffee to help with that and then code code code!

Oh and we just got word yesterday on a massive database contract we tendered for in February against Oracle – we won it! So that will kick off in a couple of weeks and I need to be clear of other work. Anybody know of any Excel and VBA developers in Brisbane looking for work? Email me or use the contact form in the menu bar.

I am in Toowoomba now. I am currently in a motel room (pictures below) using very fast ADSL2 Internet service provided free by the motel via wireless network.

I got here the fun way.

When I wrote my motorbike off a couple of years ago I waited for some time before replacing it and eventually replaced it with the Suzuki Swift Sport. Since then I have done 18000 km but no real good driving – just city and highway work. Today I got the opportunity to really go driving with it.

The videos are on YouTube. They are all filmed on public roads using a camera held in my hand while driving and holding the wheel. So the image quality and stability is sacrificed for safety. Additionally I didn’t push the car beyond the speed limit. However the roads are so twisty that was not necessary to obtain some great footage.

Mt Glorious uphill eastern side video – Mt Glorious uphill eastern side Google map

Mt Glorious top rain forest 1 video - Mt Glorious top rain forest 1 Google Map

Mt Glorious top rain forest 2 video - Mt Glorious top rain forest 2 Google Map

Mt Glorious descent Western side video - Mt Glorious descent Western side Google map

Wivenhoe dam crossing video - Wivenhoe dam crossing Google Map

Ravensbourne Forest video - Ravensbourne Forest Google Map

What am I doing in Toowoomba? I am working on a financial process review for a mental health community care organisation. They provide a clubhouse for people recovering from mental illness and preparing to get back into the workforce. There certainly are some interesting characters. I might see if I can get some photos later. Today I had lunch with a  grizzled old character who was full of fun, a slow speaking country boy and a chap with a scarred up face and liquid brown eyes who dribbled his gravy all over his chin/ I have promised to listen to some of his stories later. Should prove interesting!

After work I checked into the motel and then headed out for my favourite meal – red duck Thai curry. Yum! Now I have a whole bunch of notes to write up and prepare for some intensive workshops tomorrow.

Sunday afternoon I went mountain biking. This had been planned for 2 weeks with 3 other mates – however they all piked on me – one at the last minute the girl! No matter I went by myself. I went to reconnoitre an old cycling haunt that I hadn’t been to for about 3 or 4 years to see if the tracks were still all rideable. The area I went to was the glasshouse mountains lookout. See the map below.

The track starts at the top pf the hill where there is a lookout. Going along a dirt road there are plenty of little tracks on the side of the road to ride on for a bit more fun. Finding the right down hill was tricky. There were several and I went down 2 wrong ones before finding the right one. From there I zigzagged through the bottom of the valley and then up onto the next ridge, Going down into the next valley again was fun and very technical. Lots of opportunities for air but I was very careful not to get too much as the other side of the bumps was always unpredictable. Motor bikes have been chewing these tracks up though they are not allowed in the state forest.. From here it was a long hard slog back to the top of the hill and the road from where it was just a hard fast ride back to the starting point.

The boys missed out!

Objective - build a Media Centre PC that out put HD sound and video utilising the HDMI digital format. Must be able to record 2 channels simultaneously (the Olympics is coming up!)

Budget - there wasn’t one – though there's only so much you can spend doing this.

• Zalman HD160XT Plus Home Theatre Case Black
• Zalman 500W Noiseless Power Supply with Heatpipe
• Zalman CNPS9500 LED CPU Heatsink
• Intel S775 Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz CPU
• ASUS S775 P5Q Core 2 Motherboard
• Integrated HD Sound Card
• Integrated Gigabit Network Connection
• DDR2 4GB Geil 800MHz Dual Channel DDR2 Kit
• 1TB Seagate 7200rpm 32M Serial ATA HDD
• 1TB Seagate 7200rpm 32M Serial ATA HDD
• Pioneer BDC-S02BK Blu-Ray Reader/DVD Writer Combo
• ASUS ATI 3850 256M PCIe HDMI Video Card
• Hauppauge HVR-2200 Dual HDTV + Analog Tuner PCIe
• Microsoft Media Centre Keyboard and Remote
• Logitech Cordless Mouse
• Powerware 5110/500VA Line Interactive UPS
• Vista Ultimate 32 bit

I started by getting the case out of its box and pulling the cover off. It was beautifully constructed in a satin finish black aluminium with counter sunk flush screws holding the top lid on. Immediately I was impressed with the quality of the construction. This is not a cheap case and the build certainly did not disappoint (except for the Optical drive bay - more on that later)

The optical drive bay and the HDD drive bay are held with one screw and a sliding bracket. Very secure and easy to remove. The case came with the fron touch screen already fully installed and connected. All I had to do was connect the Power LED and Switch to the Motherboard along with the front panel audio, FireWire, USB and card reader. I forgot to take a picture of the dropdown front panel here but you can see it in the last picture of this article. I have included a shot of my workspace while I was doing all this. I took over both dining room tables.

Next came the motherboard installation. As usual I installed the CPU first and then looked to install the CPU cooler. I always dummy run thee things because they are far easier to install out of the case then in and it make sense to ensure that there is clearance etc. In this case I was fairly confident there would be top clearance for the large Zalman CPU cooler seeing as the website I reviewed the case on suggested this cooler. In fact there were about 5 mm clearance. However I had a far worse problem.

The motherboard is an ASUS P5Q and comes with the capacitors on two sides of the CPU area and blank space on the other two sides. Unfortunately The CPU cooler mounting clip would not clear these capacitors. Some I put in some hard work with a bastard file on the tempered steel and ended up removing about 0.75mm of excess metal on the bottom of the clip. This gave me a few thou clearance over the capacitors onto the clip. Once pulled tight on the clip it has about 1 mm clearance. The second photo here shows this clearly. The clip is also actually touching the heat sink fins but I am sure that will not matter.

Next step was to mount the RAM onto the motherboard  and then screw the motherboard into the case. This was very easy to do. first I fitted the back plate and then the motherboard goes in very easily and screws in nicely. The Power supply unit was next and I was very surprised here. The case is designed so the PSU goes in upside down. Normally PSU fans suck air from inside the case and then exhale out the rear. This case requires the PSU to be mounted so the inwards fan is against the outside edge of the case – where there happens to be cooling fins and a vent and so it draws external air in and ejects it from the rear as per normal. However this means that the air it is pulling in will be cooler than normal and thus require less cooling from the heat build up inside the PSU and here the fan will run slower and quieter. At least this was my assumption as to this design method. But it makes sense. The CPU fan is blowing at the rear mounted twin 80mm fans so that is plenty of suction out of the case. In my case I connected the 2 read CPU fans to the PSU and Chassis Fan one connectors on the motherboard so that they can take advantage of the BIOS Q-Fan cooling options. I set the system to run in silent mode.It is not completely quite but considering there are a total of 7 fans in it it is remarkably quiet and cool. I am copying 400GB of data to the drive via network cable as I write this and it is showing a MB temp of 27 degrees and a CPU temp of 40 degrees. The 3 chassis fans are running at around 2000RPM and the CPU cooler fan at 1300RPM. The hard drive cage fan and bottom case fan are not monitored or controlled.

I installed a Pioneer Blu Ray Player / Burner and a 2 1 Tb Seagate Hard Drives. The only annoying thing about this whole case was the supplied aluminium bevel to add to the front of the DVD tray. It didn’t fit. I fiddled and fiddled and eventually gave up. I could have taken to it with a file but I had enough of filing by this stage.

Next was installing the Video card and TV Tuner cards. The TV Tuner card came with a half height rear plate attached, but 1 screw and a lock nut removed and the provided full size back plate was installed.

Both slotted in easily with plenty of room for cooling and air flow. The TV tuner requires no extra power but this video card needed a PCIe power supply. The reason I chose this card is that it has an HDMI output including the HD sound from the motherboard. Seeing as this unit is replacing my current Digital tuner set top box with HDMI output and also my current media centre laptop I needed to get the best quality sound and video I could. This video card can actually run in a higher resolution than my projector can handle which is 1080i.

This video card came bundled with Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts.

This shot is of the completed case interior and exterior.

I achieved a Vista score of 5.7 which is extremely good. The only thing holding it back is the CPU which admittedly is not a high end CPU. But for this machine it doesn’t need to be.

The final show below is the unit in my audio cabinet underneath the Amp/ Given the coolness of the case I have the network switch on top of this unit. You can see the dropped down front flap here exposing all the stickers and the front panel card slots.

Set up was pretty simple. After I had installed Vista and Media centre, I installed the units standard software to run the front panel info screen and decided to use the standard Windows Media Centre remote rather than the supplied remote. You can choose between them as they were both detected.

Once I had the touch screen info being displayed on the second screen (surprisingly easy to follow instructions for both nVidia and ATI cards) I turned my attention to the TV. I have been using Media centre for ages but not with a TV tuner. The TV tuner worked perfectly, scanned and gave me all my channels with labels, and then I installed the IceTV electronic program guide. We are now set up with the whole Olympics TV programs being set to record automatically, along with the AFL, NCIS and a few other shows.

These cool clouds were in the sky when we got home yesterday afternoon

had to get a photo and ended up taking a few

these are stitched together to make a panoramic picture

This weeks GGB is Jen Myers from the US of A… her survey is below.

Name: Jen Myers
Screen Name/s: deliberatepixel, antiheroine
Personal Blog/s: deliberatepixel.com; I'm also one of the bloggers behind skepchick.org, a community of bloggers interested in rational and critical thinking with a feminist slant.
Social Networks: I think I'm on virtually every social network out there, but I use Twitter and Facebook the most.
Current Employment:  Web Designer
Location/country: Columbus, OH, US

I've always been a writer, and when I was little, I used to make my own magazines.  It just seems natural for me to now do the same digitally!  I'm also fascinated by the way we can share ideas and build communities so easily with blogs.

I blog about a lot of geek girl topics, including women in technology and media, plus stuff about film and culture.  While I obviously have a few favorite topics I regularly return to, I'm open to new and unusual things to blog about.  I'm also really interested in being able to pass along news and event items about topics and happenings I don't feel get enough attention, like independent artists and developers, or successful women in STEM fields.

I do a bit of everything.  On a daily basis, I create short posts, sometimes just text but also video and imagery.  Every so often, I write longer, more involved posts.  I definitely make sure I'm putting out original writing, but I also enjoy pointing out other interesting things around the web that others have written.

I've been blogging in some form for about five years.  I actually used to keep an online journal by manually entering text and HTML every day, then I discovered blogging systems :).  My current blog has been established and going strong for two years now, and I have a small but seemingly loyal and interested audience.  I'm looking forward to posting more frequently and reaching more readers.

but i didn’t - tough luck

nite

Wow. I have been part of the alpha trial of socialmedian for a while. Today they moved to Beta.

Today Robert Scoble followed me on socialmedian. Cool!

Here is my spyjournal socialmedian news site, and here is Roberts.

So what is socialmedian?

socialmedian is social news network that connects people with personalized news and information. socialmedian enables you to easily keep up-to-date on the news that matters to you and to people who share your interests. (from the FAQ)

Basically you can create news streams of relevant information to a news topic or category of information. So in my case I have created numerous channels including Drupal, Excel, Microsoft Office and Windows Home Server. As I and other people find news articles or websites relevant to these topics we can add their RSS feeds or the individual page or article to the stream. This can be done as simply as clicking a link on a tool bar. In addition, socialmedian will also recommend sources for you to add based on the topics you have entered for your News Network.

Once you have created a news network others can follow all or part of it, as you can with other peoples news networks and topics. So “Hi Robert” – if you notice this! I have been following you on and off since long before you left MS! I think you were one of my first RSS feeds.

More things to come for spocialmedian include:

• work on an iphone app for socialmedian
• connecting more sites in/out of socialmedian
• private news networks
• and other fun stuff you have asked us to build for you.

Beth may not be as Internet-geeky as some of us, but she certainly is a geek, she is actively involved in plenty of social networks, and she does blog. So she made the cut for our series!

Name: Beth Snow
Screen Names: drbethsnow - or - Beth77
Personal Blog: drbethsnow.wordpress.com
Social Networks: Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Flickr, Friend Feed, identi.ca, Last.fm, MyBlogLog, Technorati, Twitter. I'm also a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists: http://improbable.com/2007/07/13/beth-snow-joins-lfhcfs/  and the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique.
Current Employment:  I run a research training program in gender & addictions and I teach nutritional sciences courses at the University of British Columbia; I also teach science to elementary school kids as a "Scientist in Residence".
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

I mainly write things that I find entertaining and, somewhat surprisingly to me, others seem to find what I write entertaining as well.  So now my motivation is writing to entertain & build community, as well as because I just like to write.  Oh yes, and to win friends and influence people.

As my blog is a personal blog, that topics that I write about vary in that I write about whatever happens to interest me at any given time.  But I do seem to have some themes, including hockey (I am Canadian, after all), science, occasionally politics, funny things I find on the Internet, rants, feminism, and shoes.

I blog regularly (about once a day), sometimes short, sometimes long.  My blog postings are predominantly text, but I occasional embed videos from Youtube, etc. I haven't yet ventured into the realm of videoblogging or audio, but I've thought about it.

I've been a geek as far back as I can remember; I've always enjoyed science and grew up knowing that I'd be a scientist.  I've also been a girl for as far back as I can remember ;-)  So how did I become a blogger?  Well, I started blogging as procrastination, but a form of procrastination that felt more productive than your run-of-the-mill procrastination, since, in the end,  I had a bunch of writing sitting up on the Internet when I blogged.  I was writing my doctoral dissertation at the time, but it was a lot more fun to blog than it was to work on that dissertation!   Eventually I somehow completed my doctorate, but by that time I was hooked on blogging!