Introduction to TED

Sometimes people get so used to using acronyms that they assume that everyone knows what they are talking about or that it could only stand for one thing. Such is the problem when you ask people if they have heard of TED. They either ask, “Ted who?” or think it is referring to United Airlines. The TED I am referring to is an organization that helps spread ideas and stands for "Technology, Entertainment and Design.” This will be something that I will be referencing often so I thought I might enlighten those who are unfamiliar.

TED started out as a meeting place where people from those three fields (technology, entertainment, design) could get together and swap ideas. Since its humble beginnings in 1984, the conference has grown to encompass global issues, business, science and the fine arts. Additionally, TED now has its own website that hosts videos of past speakers, a blog discussing various topics and a community of people that comment and discuss ideas.

Some people might read that and think “Snooze-fest” or “this has nothing to do with me,” those people couldn’t be more wrong. Okay, I admit it. I was the one thinking those things. I had first heard of TED on a design website I read and I had no idea what he was babbling about. Then someone sent me a link to one of the talks which was by Hans Rosling (I hadn’t heard of him either) about debunking third world myths. The video was eighteen minutes and I, admittedly, didn’t watch it for a long time. Then one day when I needed to kill some time, I watched it. I was floored. It was amazing, funny, informative and the time just flew by. My interest was peaked and I began learning more about TED and watching more and more videos.

It is comprised of fifty speakers over four days who only get eighteen minutes to present and takes place in Aspen, Colorado. Sometimes they have musicians and comedians perform in between and that can range from five to ten minutes. The only way to go to TED is to be invited. They only let 1,000 people attend and it can cost $6,000 (but this includes books and CDs you get throughout the year in addition to getting to go and an awesome gift bag). This is the point where you think to yourself, “You have got to be kidding me.” Sounds kind of crazy I know, but if I got an invitation and had a spare couple of thousand dollars lying around, I wouldn’t hesitate to go. I almost want to do something epic just to be invited. That's right I might change the world just to be able to go to a conference.

So if you aren’t on the invitation list and you don’t have the money to go, how can you partake in this amazing conference? Good question. They post the videos online for you to watch for free. They are always adding new ones and they have it broken down into categories if you don’t know where to start. The categories are: date filmed, most emailed, most discussed, most jaw-dropping, most persuasive, most courageous, most ingenious, most fascinating, most inspiring, most beautiful and funniest. When you finish watching a talk, you can rate it for others to find or not find as the case may be.

So when you are looking for something to watch and you just can’t suffer through another “who is smarter - you or a hammer?” type shows, turn to www.ted.com and watch a video or twelve. Eighteen minutes is the same length of a half-hour show without commercials and you will definitely learn something new or thing about something in a new way.

TED has made all the videos free to post and link to because they are all about spreading ideas. If you are looking for the right one to start with, here is one of my favorites and it is only 10 mins!

I hope to post more of these videos and discuss them.

Quantum Physics and my Kitchen

Once a year, I try to go through and clean out my kitchen cabinets and hall closets. This year in particular I have been more intent on cleaning because of the move. I look for items that I haven't used in over a year and either put them back into rotation or donate them to charity. I have been doing this since I moved into this apartment back in 1999. This seems like a totally normal thing to do which I'm sure everyone has done at some point. However, I have discovered something odd about my kitchen.

Every time I do this I discover that I have an over abundance of one item in my kitchen. The first time I realized something was off was when I realized I had five turkey basters. Now, I have never owned a turkey baster. At this point, I had three roommates and all of them claimed that they never had a turkey baster and it wasn't theirs. I willing to concede that I may have owned one of them, but not five.

Next, eight spoons that didn't match any of the silverware I owned nor the silverware of past roommates materialized. After that, it was five different kinds of beaters that didn't anyone’s mixer. This time, it’s five strainers/colanders. One of them I know is mine. The other four are new to me including one stainless steel one. It's not like I had a party and people just left their strainers at my house like Tupperware or a serving bowl.

Now, I do this every year and I would have noticed these things adding up. They all seem to appear between the yearly re-organizations. None of them repeat once I've discovered them. For instance, I just have the one turkey baster now. No new spoons or bowls or beaters have re-spawned in my kitchen.

My theory is that since matter/energy is neither gained nor lost that these items are formerly the lost socks and clothes that go into the laundry and never re-emerge. I lose socks and wash clothes and whatnot all the time. I think they are not really lost and instead have been transforming themselves into these random kitchen items. It makes sense because my kitchen and my laundry room share a wall. Now Tupperware would seem to be the most logical thing to transform into because I wouldn't necessarily notice, but my Tupperware is kept in a cabinet in the dining room.

They never seem to transform into anything with any kind of mechanical workings. They also seem to regenerate in groups of five or eight. I’m willing to believe at least one of them was originally mine and maybe one of a past roommate, but I cannot account for the rest of them.

Sadly, these items never seem to be things I can use multiples of. I would gladly lose a pair of pants for some new pots and pans or a shirt for some new cookie sheets.

I Gotta Be Me!

I just wanted to note something before the real posting begins. By real, I mean the posts with some meat to them and not just introductions and warnings about my wacky ways.

While I will be posting mostly about the move, mostly, I will also be posting about my various geeky tendencies and random things I come across in my everyday life. My waking moments aren't all occupied with thoughts of the move. I will still be seeing movies, surfing the internets, reading books, having adventures with friends and watching television.

I have been called a walking billboard as I love telling people about cool stuff I come across. You will be spared no awesomeness that comes my way. I do also like to warn people of the less-than-awesome things that unfortunately cross my path. You will no doubt hear about that too. Hopefully, there will be more good than bad.

I trust that you will come back for the posts about the move and stay for the geekiness that will inevitably ensue.

Where Do We Go From Here?

When last we spoke, the universe had been telling me to take a hike and go to Seattle. Having learned the hard way not to ignore the universe, I have made the decision to move. So now what?

First, I need to decide when this move will occur. Well, you may have noticed by the countdown clock to the right, I have already made that decision. I will be pulling up stakes on August 3, 2008. Why then? My lease is up August 1st and my friends (James and Weena) are getting married here on August 2nd. Therefore, the following day seemed like the most logical choice.

Next, much like the the Cylons (see "Battlestar Galactica"), I need a plan. Thankfully, I'm a pretty organized person and am good at making plans. I need to break the big picture down into categories and break those categories into sections. So here is my rough outline:

Category One: Leaving Los Angeles
Sections: Things I Want to Do/See/Go Before I Leave
Packing/Organizing/Cleaning/Uncluttering
Notifications

Category Two: Transitioning
Sections: Getting stuff/car from CA to WA
Looking for Job/Apartment
Budgeting
Research, Research, Research

Category Three: Settling into Seattle
Sections: Unpacking/Organizing/Cleaning/Decorating
Registrations
Exploring/More Research

The step after that is to make to do lists for each section. On another site (I'll tell you about that later), I have already started making these lists. As I do the various items, I will post about them here. I will try and spare you a detailed post on the organization of my sock drawer, but not the decluttering of my kitchen.

I hope this will serve as a helpful guide to others moving as well as insight into my freaky mind as to how and why I do the things I do. I'll try and make sure I post the good with the bad. Also, I encourage people to post comments especially pointing out any flaws in my logic, things I have forgotten or suggestion you might have to help. Constructive criticism only, please. "You and your sock drawer suck." Doesn't really help me.

This should give you a vague enough idea as to the kinds of posts you'll be finding here about the move. Please come back again and check my progress!

Signs to the Left of Me, Signs to the Right of Me

In my previous post, I mentioned that there are signs that are pointing me out of Los Angeles and toward Seattle. I thought I'd detail some of them out.

I have lived in my current apartment since August 1, 1999. In that time, I have had seven roommates (Anna (2 yrs), James (2 yrs), Jenna (6 mo), Rachel (1.5 yrs), Alex (6 mo), Mark (1.5 yrs) and Kimberly (current)). Somewhere around 2003, my building decided to start the process of converting the building from apartments to condos. Two months ago, the process finished. We got a notice saying that while it is official, they have not decided when they will actually make the conversion. Once they make the decision, we will have ninety days to move out. My lease is up at the end of July and I think it is better that I move out then instead of living in a constant state of worrying about when that ninety days is going to start.

I have always had roommates since I moved out of my parent's basement (make all the jokes you like). Part of the reason is economic and part of the reason was I didn't want to live alone. Well, the second part is less of an issue. When my former roommate, Mark, moved out and before the current one moved in, there was a gap where I was living alone. It wasn't so bad. My current roommate is never here, has no furniture outside of her room and doesn't even use the kitchen that much. It's like living alone since I'm doing all the housework and have all the furniture anyway. The only reason to continue living with a roommate is purely economical.

If I stay in Los Angeles, one bedrooms start at $1000 a month. A couple of friends have been looking for apartments and bleak seems to be the word that best describes the housing market here. I decided to see if this was the case in Seattle. I found several pages of one bedroom apartments (and a few two bedrooms) under $800 which is what I am paying for my half of my apartment now. I could actually have my own place without going broke there or giving up central air or laundry. Did I mention that I have full sized laundry appliances in my apartment? I'm totally spoiled.

I have worked for Disney since March of 2003 (although, I wasn't officially a Disney employee until that December). I have assisted the same boss and worked in a department where I am truly being wasted. While it is nice that it is a pure day job and the money is good, I am now bored and ready to move on. I'm not doing anything that I couldn't do anywhere else. I don't really have any career aspirations that are purely Los Angles based anymore (i.e., movies/television). I was supposed to have an awesome new job as the crisis management site coordinator, but that was given to someone else because of politics which I don't want to get into.

I've casually looked for other jobs in and around my department and at a few other places where I have friends, but everything has come back as a complete zero. I even interviewed at a few places where I knew no one and nothing came of that either.

Then one day, when my boss was in a particularly bad mood, I mentioned to a co-worker that I might want to move out of LA and was thinking about Seattle. To which she responded, much to my shock, "You know Disney has offices up there?" No, I didn't know that. The Disney Internet Group (DIG) has their ESPN offices up there. I did a quick search on the internal job site and there were several job listings that I qualified for. Another co-worker just left to go work for DIG here in LA. I asked her if she knew anyone up there. She said no, but they have been having meetings that have been hinting (badly) that all of DIG might be moving up there soon. On top of that, I mentioned this to another friend, who is a higher up at a rather large company that has offices everywhere, and she said she could get me a job interviews in Seattle with very little effort. These are better job leads than what I had when I moved to Los Angeles.

Well, this seemed promising, but I needed to get more of an economic reassurance that this would be a good thing. I went to salary.com and compared Los Angeles to Seattle. The cost of living is 25% LESS in Seattle. This comes to about $10,000 less to live there than here. I held my breath to see how salaries compared. Salaries in Seattle are 1.5% HIGHER than in LA. You read that right. I'd make a little bit more money and spend a whole lot less.

Another thing that I peaked at was the price of actual houses. Not that I am anywhere near considering buying a house, but I thought I would look. In LA, a small starter house starts around $550,000. Again, you read that right. In Seattle, I saw some really nice homes in the $300,000 range.

So economically speaking, the universe seems to be asking the question, "Why are you still in Los Angeles?"

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes...

Ten years ago in a city far, far away from LA, I was graduating film school in Chicago. I was trying to decide what to do next when the universe basically lit up the sky with a neon flashing arrow pointing toward Los Angeles. It didn't seem very gradual. All the signs came all at once and it seemed like the decision was made before I ever needed to consider it. There were no pro or con lists really. I considered staying in Chicago because it was all I had known, my friends were all there, my family was all there and I had a good enough job. However, there was nothing really keeping me there. Nothing that I couldn't get from Los Angeles - where friends, family and (at the time I thought) a job were all there already. It meant leaving my comfort zone and leaving some friends and an enormous chunk of my family behind, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. The only thing I would do different, if I were to travel back in time, is not bring as much stuff with me and rented a small U-haul instead of putting my stuff on a friend's moving truck.

Los Angeles and the last ten years have changed me in good ways from the person I once was. I left there 20 years old making minimum wage never having lived outside my parents home. I learned the value of 29.99% APR on credit cards and that credit scores need to be higher than a perfect bowling game. Friends you have and think you will have forever can no longer be your friend and that sometimes that is the best thing for everyone. I now understand what a co-worker meant when he said "Never do anything major in your twenties." I've done some dumb things and a lot of them were just from inexperience and thinking I wasn't inexperienced at all.

It is now my thirty first year on the planet. I have been in LA for ten years and a few months. I've looked to the universe to see if all signs are still pointing at Los Angeles as where I need to be. Over the years the neon flashing lights on that sign have begun to burn out and in the last few months it has been spinning around like a weather vane before Mary Poppins appears. In the last few weeks, it has started to settle down and all the lights are on full blast. However, it isn't pointed at LA anymore. It's not pointing at Chicago, either. It seems to have set it's sites on the Emerald City, the land of Starbucks and Frasier, the place located in the Pacific Northwet..err..Northwest, Seattle.

I'm just a big believer in following signs that are put in front of you and lately, I've been getting a lot of them. In the next post, I will lay out some of the signs that are pointing me there and you will see how they are kind of hard to ignore.

Until then I'll leave you with this joke that always sticks with me when stuff like this happens:

It had been raining for days and days, and a great flood had come over the land. The waters rose so high that one man was forced to climb onto the roof of his house.

As the waters rose higher and higher, a man in a rowboat appeared, and told him to get in. “No,” replied the man on the roof. “I have faith in the Lord; the Lord will save me.” So the man in the rowboat went away. The man on the roof prayed for God to save him.

The waters rose higher and higher, and suddenly a speedboat appeared. “Climb in!” shouted a man in the boat. “No,” replied the man on the roof. “I have faith in the Lord; the Lord will save me.” So the man in the speedboat went away. The man on the roof prayed for God to save him.

The waters continued to rise. A helicopter appeared and over the loudspeaker, the pilot announced he would lower a rope to the man on the roof. “No,” replied the man on the roof. “I have faith in the Lord; the Lord will save me.” So the helicopter went away. The man on the roof prayed for God to save him.

The waters rose higher and higher, and eventually they rose so high that the man on the roof was washed away, and alas, the poor man drowned.

Upon arriving in heaven, the man marched straight over to God. “Heavenly Father,” he said, “I had faith in you… I prayed to you to save me, and yet you did nothing. Why?” God gave him a puzzled look, and replied “I sent you two boats and a helicopter, what more did you expect?”

A journey of a thousand pages begins with a single blog

Welcome to "Fangirl Adventures"!

This is not my first blog. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to ruin the illusion, but I've been around the internet a few times. I've kept a regular blog for the last few years on Friendster. I was a columnist, but really it was more like a blogger, for FanboyRadio.com. Those articles have long since been taken down so I might repost some of them here at some point. I've also had a few articles posted here and there over the last few years.

So why start yet another blog? Does the world need another blog? The answer is: no, but I'm doing one anyway. You see I am doing something rather epic in my life right now. For the last ten years, I have been living in Los Angeles and this summer I am pulling up stakes and moving to Seattle. This blog is going to document the uprooting of my life here and starting anew.

Why is it called "Fangirl Adventures" if it's about moving? Well, I needed a name that would encompass the whole process and that I could continue using after the move. Every name I came up with seemed to be taken. I had all kinds of AOL flashbacks trying to come up with a name. My first choice was "Sunlight and Shadows," but that one was taken by a female seminary student. My second choice was "Into the Breach Once More" which is a political blog out of Virgina and third was the title I ended up with.

What is a "Fangirl"? There are many definitions in the urban dictionary. Some more flattering than others. I like "A passionate fan of cult entertainment, especially comic books and science fiction." Basically, a geeky girl, but I should emphasize I'm not a nerd. Nerd implies math skills. From time to time, I might bring up something that lands in the pop culture or geek category since these are my main interests and hobbies. I have non-geeky hobbies like photography and crisis management, but a good chunk of my life is spend on what could be considered geeky things.

While I realize the only people reading this will, no doubt, be family and friends, I am going to try and keep it generic in case someone stumbles across this who doesn't know me. I would love to be picked up by another site at some point and maybe someday paid to do this. In the meantime, I have gone with the necessary evil that are Google Ads. Hopefully, they won't be too obnoxious.

I encourage people to comment or email me with comments. The more feedback I get, the more I can make it better for my readers. You know all three of you. Hi Mom! Hi Dad! Hi Sis!

Please stay tuned. The next few posts will be more introductory until I get this up to speed and work out all the kinks. I have no set day and time when I will post next so watch the skies! or this site as the case may be.

Shivering with antici..........pation,
Kathy