I bought a Magic Mouse. My Apple fanboyism compelled me to amend my collection (MacBook Pro, MacBook, iPad, iPhone 4) to include the latest Jobs bauble (Jauble?). But it's not perfect. You see, the Magic Mouse comes with a manual:

And within this manual, there is a page:

And on this page, there is a letter R missing:

I have decided that I want Apple to acknowledge this because it bummed me out, given how much I love Jobsy. I'm sending them an email about it (via their contact form) and will blog their response. If they respond. Which they won't. Right?

I consider myself a writer, but I don't always have time to write. I was complaining about this to a friend of mine, and she pointed out that I write a lot on Twitter. I balked. Twitter isn't actually writing, right? It's one-liners and links. But I started to wonder how much writing I'm actually doing without knowing it.

There are websites that will tell you how often you tweet on average, but that doesn't mean much to me. I needed a visualization.

So I copied and pasted my tweets from Aug. 27, 2010 into a Word doc, omitting the @username portion from @replies (since I don't actually type those out). This is how much I write in a single day:

I'm stunned. If you added line breaks for paragraphs, it would be a solid page of writing. I had no idea. For you numbercrunchers, here's what Word spit out when I clicked on Word Count:

Close to 3,000 characters without breaking a sweat. How many characters do you tweet a day? If you can think of an easy way to figure it out, I'd love to hear it. (My process was a little arduous - bleh.)

I got new frames. Peep the damage below:

Like 'em? No? TOO LATE, JERKS!

You can acquire pets in World of Warcraft. I have close to a dozen. They don't do much, aside from follow you around and make noises periodically. The best pet in the game by far is the "Perky Pug," a special pet you receive after a certain in-game achievement.

He's awesome and I have one. Yeaaaaah!

Here's a romantic shot of me and my pug by a roaring fire in Dalaran. The point is: World of Warcraft is awesome because we get digital pooches.

Ignite Boulder is the biggest Ignite event in the world – and our 11th outing was our biggest yet, with more than 1,300 people moonwalking into Chautauqua Auditorium last Thursday for the big show.

I’m one of the organizers of Ignite Boulder, so here are my thoughts on how Ignite 11 went:

The Venue
The Daily Camera quoted me as saying how daunted I was by the prospect of filling Chautauqua Auditorium and translating our event for the new space. That’s true. It’s intimidating to take something that is working like clockwork and apply it to something unfamiliar. In this case, I think it worked.

Yes, it was warmer at Chautauqua than it typically is at the Boulder Theater. But it wasn’t uncomfortable – merely a reminder that it’s summertime in Boulder. Pass the Kool-Aid, brah.

No one wilted. I can’t praise the Chautauqua crew highly enough for being as attentive and flexible as they were.

The Speakers
When you crowdsource an event’s content, the results will invariably not please everyone. And that’s fine. If you don’t like a particular speaker, for whatever reason, wait five minutes and your omg torture will be over.

Ignite 11 had one of the strongest lineup of speakers I’ve seen yet. Really affecting topics, clearly passionate perspectives, artful slides and an obvious zeal for stage antics. There wasn’t a weak link in the bunch.

Your New Boyfriend Ef
Incredible, incredible, incredible. A sea of friends and people that I desperately want to be friends with. A cast of speakers who are far more clever than I am. A crew of organizers that want nothing more than to put on the best event in town. I’m getting emotional.

This was the 8th time I’ve been lucky enough to drop some puggy science at Ignite Boulder, and it was nearly overwhelming to see so many expectant faces looking at me.

I hope you were one of them.

All photos by Yann Ropars

I'd like to blog a bit more, but I hate Squarespace's default commenting system. So I installed Disqus.

And now all my comments are gone. Which is very boo. So please pardon the mess while I figure this out.

In other news, I recently bought fresh new sneaks. Peep 'em:

This is essentially the last thing I see before I launch into the opener at each Ignite. I look over at Andrew, wait for my cue, try to forget that more than 800 people are staring at me – and put my withered heart and brittle soul into each note.

 Thanks to Matt Gist for the shot.

In a delightful turn of events, Westword selected me as its Twit of the Week. Basically a featured Twitter user from the Boulder/Denver nexus. I did an interview with them via Twitter, which was then posted to the site.

Here's a sample:

Go read the whole thing. It's pure nonsense, but you'll surely love every bit of it.

(If you don’t play WoW, you can skip right over this post, haha.)

Warlock Fun
I have spent the last month focused on my long-abandoned 80 Undead lock. He’s my first and only 80, yet I cast him aside in early 2009 to level some alts and recede from the game a bit as I became more involved in local community antics. In my absence, my sister (rogue) and brother-in-law (DK, mage) got their toons to 80 and well geared, doing all the cool stuff that you can do at that level.

So they were over the moon when my warlock came roaring back in December, coinciding with Patch 3.3, whose LFG overhaul led me on an emblem binge, resulting in my current 2600+ gear score (acc. to Wow-Heroes).

So I’ve been running random heroics each night, learning my class better and steadily rising in the meters. My best DPS so far has been a solid 5400 in Heroic Trial of the Champion. Nothing amazing, I know, but I’m delighted to have progressed so far after having been gone for close to a year. Before I returned last month, I had never run a Heroic. In fact, I had only run a handful of dungeons in the game, mostly the Hellfire Citadel ones. And now I’ve run every single WotLK instance on Heroic.

(My fave? Culling of Stratholme for the dialogue. Or Halls of Reflection because it’s the most challenging thing I’ve done in the game so far.)

Paladin Fun
Before I resumed lock duties in December, I quickly leveled a Draenei paladin to 76 on a different server in the months before. My goal was to use him as a tank and healer upon hitting 80, but I have done neither. In truth, I have never tanked or healed a dungeon with him. I confess to being intimidated by the expectations those roles command of me. With that in mind, I haven’t played him since early December, though I have two really good friends on that server who are probably very annoyed that I haven’t logged on in a while.

So I plan on returning to my pally and at least getting him to 80 soon. From that point forward, it’s a matter of running regular dungeons to get used to tanking or healing before moving into heroics. Having run all the 80 heroics on my lock, I will at least know how the fights go. But doing caster DPS is markedly different from what’s expected as a tank or healer.

So I expect to suck. A lot.

The last time I healed a dungeon was on my 66 priest (Ramps), and I dropped group after wiping 6 times in a row. I was convinced I was the reason, though it could have just been a bad group. Wiping so many times on the same fight (the dragon at the end) is discouraging – especially when you’re the healer – so it wrecked my confidence, and I haven’t played that toon in months.

So that’s pretty much it. I’m loving my warlock and the opportunity to spend more time with my sister and brother-in-law. We often queue up for LFG together (though it takes FOREVER to find a group when you’re queued as DPS triplets) and have a blast racing for the top of the DPS meters.

Zug-zug.

(If you don’t play WoW, but you read all of that – thanks. It’s a supra-nerdy thing to write about, but I love it immensely. I’ve thought about starting a separate WoW blog to indulge all this madness. We’ll see.)

Ignite Boulder 7 was our most successful and feverish outing yet. If you aren’t aware, I’m one of a small group of organizers of the event. We work absurdly hard to keep the whole thing in one piece so that everyone can have a nice night of listening, learning and laughing.

Here are a few thoughts. If you were there, I hope you had fun. If you were not there and live nearby, please explain why you would hurt me so in the comments.

Artful heckling is rad; Clumsy heckling is bad
Not everyone is cut out to be a heckler. If you are clever and witty in real-life, you stand a good chance of being a good heckler. Bruce Wyman springs to mind. If you are only clever and witty online, odds are you’re going to be a lame heckler. Drinking exacerbates your shortcomings. So keep that in mind.

People need stimuli
I work in public relations. As a consequence, I think about people all day long. Audiences, demographics, consumers. I am paid to unearth ways to reach humans with something that will trigger a positive reaction. So it’s pretty apt that I regularly open Ignite Boulder with a blast of jolly nonsense (known as “The Sacrificial Deck”) that sets the tone for the evening – expectation, curiosity and surprise.

Powerpoint is poison
Whenever I describe the event to people, I see them get apprehensive the moment I mention Powerpoint. Yes, the event is essentially comprised of 15 or so Powerpoint presentations (for the record, we convert them to Keynote because it’s oodles cooler), but I really must stop describing it that way. I fear that many people don’t give Ignite a chance because Powerpoint is innately boring and there’s no way they would pay $10 for something like that. Can anyone think of a better way to sell someone on Ignite?

(Photo credit: Jason Janelle)