The Holidays for me this year could be summed up in one word: quiet.

I’ve worked, rested, and spent time with family. It has been an extraordinarily nice change to the normal chaos of my life but it has also been extraordinarily quiet! There hasn’t even been any family drama (with the exception of my aunt canceling Christmas dinner on Christmas). But I am not complaining. Yes, a cooler Christmas would have been great (80+ degrees for Christmas stinks) and having more family around would have been nice (5 out of 50+ makes for a small Christmas), but actually having time to read a book for the fun of it and getting AT LEAST 7 hours of sleep a night is pure bliss for me!

Although, I noticed one thing this lovely holiday season… people actually said Merry Christmas. I’ve grown up in the age of political correctness with strict “Happy Holidays!” wishes and “Season’s Greetings!” cards, so for me to hear “Merry Christmas!” from so many people this year, I just couldn’t help but take note. I don’t think its good or bad, it was just surprising after years of people trying to be as politically correct as possible.

Happy New Year!

• Elton John’s Baby Photos: It is a totally appropriate picture of two proud new parents with their child. Shame on you for covering it with a “family shield”! Such bigotry is unacceptable.

They are a beautiful family.

• Burqas in France: Ok, its France so I can’t cite a constitutional right to religious freedom as I could if it were the U.S. HOWEVER, as a very diverse developed nation, I am very surprised that France would do something so backward.
• Brown Bag Lunches: This is one that is near and dear to my heart because if I didn’t bring my own lunch to school, I never would have eaten lunch in elementary, middle, or high school. The school lunches that they offered us were nasty and they say the meals are healthy but really they’re just cheap. I know that in some private or charter schools they offer legitimately healthy and tasty foods, but that, unfortunately, is not the American standard. So to eliminate the option of bringing your own lunch is just wrong. Plus, what about the kids with food allergies or certain dietary requirements?!
• Baggy Pants: They shouldn’t have to ban them. As a common courtesy to the rest of the world, people please just pull up your pants and be done with it.

Please, just pull them up.

• Babies: Playing devil’s advocate I can recognize that business’ have the right to decide who they service, but the maternal part of me just screams out that if you don’t want my kids, I don’t want you.
• Kids’ Self-Expression: They said that they banned ”unnatural” hair color and “bold” make-up because it was a distraction in class, I say that that is a load of baloney! Kids get distracted in class because they are human, not because a classmate is wearing heavy eye liner. The real reason behind this ban is because those kids tend to make adults uncomfortable and so the adults try to control them and force them into being something that makes the adults more comfortable.
• Student/Teacher Facebook Friends: I get that it blurs the line in student/teacher relationships, so I understand saying that they shouldn’t “friend” each other, however, I AM friends with some of my teachers, so the SUPER simple solution is to just wait until the year, semester, whatever, is over with and THEN friend each other (that shouldn’t be illegal).
• Fur: Yeah!!! It’s about time.

Eva Mendes for PETA

• Saying “Bless You”: It’s a simple, common courtesy and you BAN IT????
• Ketchup in France: Seriously France what is up with you?
• Elective C-Sections: This shouldn’t have to be a law. Mothers’ shouldn’t want to deliver their babies before they are ready (plus C-sections are more expensive and can be way more risky than a natural birth). And even if the mothers’ are crazy enough to want to have the baby early, their doctor’s shouldn’t allow it (Hippocratic oath anyone?).
• Dakota Fanning with Perfume: Seriously?
• Eyes: I can’t help but say, WTF?
• Skinny Jeans: Ok, some people just shouldn’t wear them. However, who are you to say, especially at the college level, what someone should or should not wear?
• Interracial Marriages: Shame on you! As I said with the Elton John ban, such bigotry is unacceptable.

So, of course I watched the latest Gossip Girl episode, Rhodes to Perdition.

I am so over the whole Charlie/Ivy drama, and the stuff with Nate and his grandfather is like an update from two seasons ago. Blair and Chuck forever tug at my heart-strings (can’t help it; they’re my favorite couple on the show). But what really got me on this latest episode was Serena’s (Blake Lively) final look on the show.

Can't you see it?!

I thought her hair was fabulous. It’s a look that can only come out for certain occasions and it’s not one that just anybody can pull off but she sure does with the big golden curly hair. But the great hair wasn’t what got me. The second I saw this look, my mind just screamed: KATE HUDSON!

The golden girl look is pure Kate Hudson and the sad look on Blake Lively’s face made me flash back to Kate Hudson in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days right after she has her heart-broken by Matthew McConaughey. Then the camera zooms out and you get a full look at Blake Lively’s dress.

I could totally see Kate Hudson wearing that. Can’t you?

I am a very private person.

I rarely use Facebook although I have used it a little bit more recently because of Words With Friends (fun!). I post status updates maybe half a dozen times a year and only really write on friends’ walls to say happy birthday (which I unfortunately miss most of those reminders because I’m not on the site frequently enough). I have a Twitter account but I only follow a handful of people and haven’t actually posted anything myself. I also have a Google+ account but I haven’t added any friends or +1 yet. And I have a similar situation with my LinkedIn page (although that one I have a specific plan to improve my page and increase my interaction for job search purposes).

The common thing through all of the accounts above, I have chosen to create them and I have chosen what information I want to put out to the world. But apparently in this digital age of online identities, I don’t always have control over my own.

A recent article in The New York Times talks about Klout.com and how a mother was concerned to find her children had pages on the site without ever signing up. Apparently Klout.com would create profile pages for everyone with Twitter accounts or Facebook pages or really any type of social media account, and post the number that they calculated for the person’s online influence; whether or not the person actually knew about it.

Personally this ticks me off. Its bad enough to deal with some of the wacky security changes Facebook makes sometimes to keep what you want private private, but for a website that I’ve never even heard of to have a page for me without my knowledge or consent, I think it should be illegal. Thankfully, the article in question goes on to discuss how the backlash of the mother’s concern caused Klout to stop automatically creating profiles and give people the ability to delete their account if they wish. But really, the decent human thing to do would be to never have created them without a person’s knowledge in the first place.

To me that sounds totally 70’s yet it seems appropriate for the times we are living in. Throughout my 21 years I might not have always paid the closest attention to the news but I still can’t recall a time in my life where Americans were so outspoken about their beliefs and what they want as they are right now. Consumers are affecting change in multi-million dollar companies, even billion dollar companies recently!

I’ve mentioned previously how Netflix made an epic mistake this summer by dividing their company in two and jacking up the prices and then their customers made it known that it was not ok and forced the company to rescind most of the changes. Now last week Bank of America had to do the same thing.

Bank of America implemented a new fee which charged customers $5 a month to have a Bank of America debt card; never before had a bank charged a monthly fee for holding a debit card and people were upset. As this article by Yahoo Finance explains the campaign to get rid of the fee was spearheaded by a part-time nanny living in Washington, DC called Molly Katchpole. She started an online petition through Change.org and got more than 300,000 people to sign it. And as the founder and CEO of Change.org, Ben Rattray said,

“It’s an awesome display of the potential power that real people can have when they come together,”

Katchpole said that she thinks part of the interest in the petition stemmed from the timing of Bank of America trying to do this in the midst of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. And a spokesman for the bank, Ernesto Anguilla, refused to comment as to the influence the petition had on their decision to revoke the fee, but personally I think it probably had a pretty solid impact. And I am also very grateful to the Bank of America customers for squashing the fee. Other banks like JP Morgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. were considering similar fees and as a debit card holding customer of Wells Fargo I would have been looking for a new bank had they implemented that fee.

A sign from Occupy Wall Street

Inside a Microsoft Store

Last week in class, someone brought up that they heard Microsoft was opening up retail stores. At that moment nothing was confirmed, and the entire class was just kind of like, “Huh. Really?” No one could really think of why that could be a good idea for Microsoft; after all Microsoft primarily sells software which doesn’t require a retail location, it would just be a big added expense. And supposedly the stores were going to be like Apple stores? Again, why would Microsoft do that?

Microsoft Store vs. Apple Store

And low and behold… not only was Microsoft opening up a retail store, but it was opening up its fourteenth store! Apparently
Microsoft has had retail locations for a few years now (since October 2009).

As a result of this new opening The Seattle Times did an article on the stores which is very appropriate given that the new store was opening in Seattle, WA. The article outlines the grand opening of the store along with what it sells and why. The article says,

“The idea [of the store] is to put a fun and friendly face on a company sometimes perceived as stodgy, and to better position the brand in consumers’ minds — a weak spot for some Microsoft products.”

I think the idea behind the creation of the stores is a good one because what it says is very true for Microsoft; and the article itself is a positive one that justifies the existence of the stores. However I just don’t really buy it. Admittedly, I have never been in a Microsoft store so I may be wrong here, but I think that the stores are a waste. I tend to be a PC girl myself, so Microsoft and I, were friends, but why would they put so much effort into finding locations, designing the stores, hiring and training people when
they can have stores like Best Buy do it for them? I know that that isn’t the perfect situation because Best Buy still sells Microsoft’s competition, but is having their own really justifiable? The article even said that Microsoft won’t say whether or not the stores are profitable, which to me says that they are most likely not. In the end, I just think that they will prove to be not worthwhile.

I read an article from The Washington Post for class this past week. It was about how Netflix stocks took a dive after they announced the true amount of subscriber losses (800,000 accounts instead of their previous expectation of 600,000). Personally, I think that the hit in stocks should be no surprise for Netflix given how horribly they have handled things in the past few months,
but for me what was a surprise was the actual quality of the article.

It came from The Washington Post which means you can expect it to be of excellent quality with great facts to back it up and impeccable grammar. Or at least that’s what I would expect. But for this article I was sadly disappointed. As I read through it I had to reread sentences multiple times to be sure that I was getting what they were trying to say. Thankfully it wasn’t like that for every sentence, but it was frequent enough that I was questioning the sanity of the author and publisher by the end for submitting it to the public like it is.

Yes there were the wonderful facts to back up what they were saying, which is in line with the expectation of The Washington Post, but the grammar and wording were really rather awful! An example:

“Domestic streaming subscriptions are forecast to decline this month, level off in November and rebound in December to end at 20 million to 21.5 million, Netflix said. DVD subscriptions will fall “sharply” to 10.3 million to 11.3 million customers.”

That’s just bad English. Inconsistent use of verb tenses and the use of “to” the last couple times… all I can say is “Ughhhh!”

Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis was quoted, “We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience. We have apologized to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.” The company intends to offer customers $100 worth of premium apps for free which consumers will be able to acquire sometime in the “coming weeks” until December 31, 2011. Also, Enterprise customers will get a free month of technical support.

This situation reminds me of an outage that AT&T customers experienced in August or September this year which left cell phone users unable to make calls let alone text or anything else. The company apologized for the service outage, but to my knowledge, never did anything to compensate for the failure of service.

It boils down to:

Blackberry had to do something to compensate for their screw-up because they have a much smaller market share and let’s be honest, to a degree, Blackberry is dying. Research In Motion has to try and make it up to their customers because they could easily switch to another company.

And AT&T was able to get away with not doing anything to compensate their customers because they are so huge and they could afford to lose a few customers without really hurting their bottom line (which some sort of compensation could).

Steve Jobs.

A man who made a company so successful that it has more cash than the United States of America. A man renowned for ingenuity and innovation as well as his “intense” management philosophy. He believed in giving consumers what they wanted before they even knew that they wanted it.

And now he is gone.

February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011

With his passing, there have been many articles and videos and all sorts of things commemorating him. Recently, I was advised of this article by BusinessWorld Online that recognized Jobs passing and included the majority of a commencement speech that Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005. I proceeded to find the video of the speech which was much better as a whole than the snippets from the article.

During his speech, Jobs told three stories. The first of which was about how he dropped out of college.  He made the point that you can’t know how the decisions that you make today can affect your future. The second story was of his being fired from Apple and what he did after. He made that point that “sometimes life will hit you with a brick”, but you must keep faith and you must keep going. And that you should find what you love and that you should never settle. The final story was about death and his being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He recalled a quote, “If you live each day is if its your last, someday you will be right.” and asked that you follow your heart and intuition and don’t let others’ voices drown out your own inner voice.

He offered some pretty good advice, now the hard thing is trying to follow it.

There is this article from Associated Press that is talking about Facebook and its upcoming changes to its interface. Some of the changes have already been made, just take a look at your page and you’ll see. And in typical Facebook fashion, they made those changes without giving any warning to their customers. However, what the article really focused on was the way that Facebook was trying to revamp their site as “a new way to express who you are.” The timeline, which is the new interface, is designed to incorporate everything from one’s life, even times before Facebook was launched, and merge one’s offline and online life.

What the top of your Facebook page will look like with timeline...

The fact that Facebook is coming up with new things and being innovative is great. A lot of people really love Facebook and are surely excited to play with the new capabilities. However, I am not one of them.

I see some of the benefits of the new interface; it would allow you to basically have a digital scrapbook of your life, and Facebook says that you should have control over who sees your timeline. And, it is a marketer’s dream! As someone who wants to get into the marketing field, I can tell you that to gain access to so much personal information; it could possibly re-invent the concept of direct marketing.

Yet, as I said before, I am not someone who is excited about the new potential of Facebook; at least not personally. I am a very private person. I have no desire to publicly display my life’s history. I do have a Facebook page, but I post a new picture about once a year. I rarely write anything but Happy Birthday on anyone’s wall, choosing instead to send any real communications via private messages. I really only use Facebook to check in on how friends and family are doing and the occasional Words With Friends game. So, to me, the new timeline is just a way for very private information to be made very public.