30 WHOLE Minutes Without Facebook

The last half hour of my life was illuminating.

At noon EDT, Facebook went down for most of us in the US. All it took was 5 minutes of it not functioning for me to get up, start doing laundry, and finally pour myself some cereal for breakfast. I came back to the computer, and it was still down… so I hopped on Twitter and blamed Hamas for the outage. (Because who else could possibly be responsible? Clearly, it was some terrorist act!) I read through my feed in less than 10 minutes. And then I hopped on G+ and did the same thing.

It’s amazing to me that I can eat breakfast and entirely catch up on 2 social media platforms in 20 minutes, but often stay on Facebook, scrolling through articles and witty shit my friends say for hours. It makes me wonder what it is about that site that has the ability to keep my attention. It must be the conversations.

Annnnnnd SWITCH!

So, I’ve gotten the heads up from GoDaddy that my domain name is fixing to expire in October. They’re trying to convince me to renew 3 months early and pay $14.99/year for the privilege. I wonder how many people are stupid enough to just go along with it. If I transfer my domain name to a different service, I’ll pay about half of that.

This has me thinking: I’ve already got web server space at 1and1.com and I also pay WordPress $13 a year for the privilege of using my domain here. This seems like a silly waste of money, especially considering that WordPress puts banner ads at the bottom of my entries, which means they’re actually making money off my blogging. (And I’m not…)

To transfer a .com domain to 1and1 is $7.99 for the first year, $14.99 every year afterward… so essentially, there’s an incentive to transfer your domain to a different service every year. What a pain in the ass!

Awesomeness for August 1, 2014

3 Great Things About Yesterday

1. Remember that awesome house I wrote about that Adam and I put a bid on and lost to someone who came in with a cash offer? Well, it turns out that the bank had misrepresented the amount of taxes on the property, since it’s on a double lot — so the deal fell through, and yesterday, the house went back on the market. 🙂 (We put in an offer today!)
2. 20 minutes of bike riding at the gym with no seizures.
3. Deep, deep love for the ability to use 5 Hr Energy, Aleve, and Afrin.

Daily Cute
The folks at Animal Planet are pretty much the world’s experts in cute. What’s cuter than baby animals? Cross-species friendships with baby animals.

Hold on tight, here come all the feels.

Everyday Earbug
I love funk & soul music. Have since I was a small kid. I blame the Muppets! Today’s earbug is my favorite modern, girl group jam since the Moulin Rouge remake of Lady Marmalade. I can’t help but dance to this… and for whatever reason, I’ve convinced myself that it’ll end up as one of the songs in the Sims4. It just seems like even AI would want to shake its booty to it.

And Some Good News In The MS Research Dept.

Scientists have generated stem cells from skin samples and turned those stem cells into myelin-builders.

Check it out.

“For the first time, New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) scientists generated induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells lines from skin samples of patients with primary progressive multiple sclerosis and further, they developed an accelerated protocol to induce these stem cells into becoming oligodendrocytes, the myelin-forming cells of the central nervous system implicated in multiple sclerosis and many other diseases.”

I’m guessing that a treatment based off of this research will be available in the next 10 to 20 years… because science is slow.