koalateagirl – Page 6

Hair today…

September 8, 2014 by koalateagirl

I have a love-hate relationship with my hair. It grows quickly, which is both a blessing and a curse (my one experiment with a fringe was extremely frustrating as I had to trim it weekly to keep it out of my eyes). I’m never sure what colour my hair is – it’s either light brown or dark blonde depending on the lighting and the season. In the summer, I get gorgeous natural highlights. I’ve dyed my hair twice – not permanently, and not recently. Again, the quick rate at which my hair grows would mean that I’d be forever touching up roots and that isn’t something I want to spend time and money on. My hair is what my former stylist (he retired from the haircut business to teach others how to work magic on hair at the high school trade level) calls “poker straight”. I will never need a straightener. It is also incredibly soft. So soft that clips and pony tail holders often slide out. I’ve had some success with curling irons but it usually involves mousse in damp hair and half a container of hairspray to get a couple hours of moderate curl. My hair is fine – when it is short (at my ears or even at my chin) it seems even finer. So for the last decade or so I’ve kept it shoulder length or longer. Every couple of years I donate my hair to Pantene Beautiful Lengths. The minimum donation length is 8″ but I’ve donated 15″ twice (I still had “medium-long” hair afterwards too). I’m at the point where my hair hits the small of my back so I need to do something about it. This is where the trouble starts.

I’m not a fashionista. I don’t like looking through beauty magazines because doing so often brings up all sorts of body image issues. I don’t know what type of hairstyle would look good on me and though I want a change, I don’t want a drastic one. My best friend has been hounding me for years to get a short haircut. I don’t think that going from below the bra line hair to a short cut would be too drastic for me. I also have a practical need for slightly longer hair – I work with kids who have special needs and being able to pull my hair back so that it can’t be pulled is really useful. I don’t want to have to pull it back all the time and right now it is so long that having it tied back is the only practical option, whether it is in an updo or a braid. I’d love to have hair that didn’t need to be tied back or done up all the time but I’m not sure what that would look like. The other problem is that since my stylist retired, I’ve been bouncing around and haven’t yet found anyone I trust completely. I have had some really bad haircuts in my past when hairdressers didn’t listen to me or when their idea of a trim ended up being 4″ shorter than my idea of a trim. I’m not the kind of girl who washes her hair daily (it’s too soft as it is, and washing it daily makes it even softer and completely unmanageable). I own a blow dryer but have used it mostly to make melted crayon art. I don’t want to buy (or use) a ton of hair products, and I really don’t have time in the morning to spend more than 10 minutes on my hair trying to make it look “right”. I need a style that is pretty much wash and wear.

The final issue is that the last time I donated my hair, it didn’t go as planned. I raised money to support breast cancer research, and donated my hair at a Toronto Argos game. It was my 4th donation so I knew what to expect – two elastics, hair cut in between them. Except the volunteer hair stylist (a friend of a friend) didn’t follow the program and cut 2″ above the top elastic. This made my hair seriously uneven and when it was evened up, it was too short to pull back. I cried for days. It grew back, as it always does, but I don’t want to have that happen again. Given that horrible experience, you may ask why I want to donate my hair again. The answer is simple: it’s something I can do to help others. After the last debacle, while I was feeling sorry for myself after the game, someone approached me to thank me. He told me that a close friend had received a wig through the Pantene Beautiful Lengths campaign and that it had given her a much needed boost in morale at a very difficult time in life. I have never forgotten his words that night or the picture he brought to show me at the next home game of his friend. I feel that donating my hair is something I should do because I can and because it is a small gesture that can help a woman going through hell. So I’m announcing it here – I’m going to donate my hair in the near future.

Now all I need is to figure out what to do with it after my donation. I’m including a pic of what my hair looked like 6 months after my last donation it grew out quickly – it took a lot of fussing with the curling iron to get it to flip and there is a section at the back that flipped the other way so I don’t really want to do this again. Besides it’s not really a style it’s just shorter hair that still doesn’t do anything. My hair looks like that now except it’s a good foot longer.

My Comfort Zone and Why I’m Jumping out of it for BlissDom Canada

September 4, 2014 by koalateagirl

On October 27th 2013, my world was turned upside down. My mum, who was my rock, passed away quite unexpectedly. I had just started teacher’s college and was looking forward to sharing the joys and sorrows of my new career with the woman who had always pushed me to try new things and follow my heart. The last year has been hard. Harder than I ever thought it would be. I am immensely thankful for the support of friends both new and old, online and offline. Were it not for them, I don’t know how I would have managed. My best friend dropped everything and drove up when my dad called her and broke the news so that I wouldn’t have to hear it on my own. A close friend from public school and high school who I’d lost touch with came to the funeral. My classmates were phenomenal – the first week back was awkward because nobody knew what to say but they understood when I rushed out of a class in tears. My online community closed ranks around me and were there when I needed to vent and checked in on me if I’d been silent too long. I found a new online community as well – those who have lost someone close to them unexpectedly. We support each other through our ups and downs and celebrate the good times and try to make the bad times as short as possible. I can’t thank these people enough.

Grief changes everything. It is as if you are looking through the word through a mist. Some days you feel the fog is lifting but other days it obscures everything. I know mum wouldn’t have wanted me to stop my life, but some days it’s just so hard to find motivation to do anything. Routines bring comfort, I was back at school a week after mum died (mostly because my program demanded it), but some things brought back too many memories. It took a couple of months before I could return to my Pathfinder unit. Guiding was something special mum and I shared and while continuing in Guiding was what I wanted to do, the first time I put on my uniform I laid on my bed and cried for 2 hours.

I spent the last year trying to get back in the rhythm of every day life. I moved home after mum died, partly to help take care of dad who had lost his partner and best fried, but partly because I needed him to support me too. It hasn’t always been easy, but we have learned to lean on each other and take life one day at a time. I think we are getting closer to a ‘new normal’. I have battled the twin demons of depression and anxiety and while I’m not cured (nor will I ever be), I am having more good days than bad. I still miss mum every day, I still catch myself thinking “I should call her” when I get news, but I’m adjusting to life without her physical presence in my life.

Given all of that, I was surprised when I found myself entertaining the idea of going to BlissDom Canada. I’m not a social butterfly. I don’t like crowds of people when I know many of them. Interestingly, put me in front of a room full of strangers and I’m golden. I had no problem appearing on radio talk shows to talk about military history, hosting a podcast about Canadian Football, or lecturing to 400 students in an undergraduate class. Once I know more than 10% of the people though, I start getting really nervous and imagining all the things that could go wrong or all the stupid things I could say. It gets bad enough that I have broken out in hives at social gatherings. So why would I want to attend a social media and blogging conference where I would know many of the people either from real life or from social media? The answer is pretty clear – because mum would want me to. Mum always encouraged me to test my boundaries, to push myself out of my comfort zone and live life as fully as possible. She would see this conference as an amazing way to meet people, learn new skills, and have some fun. So I registered.

In the week since I registered, I’ve vacillated between excitement and dread. Financially, it was a stretch to afford the conference fee, but with the discount code from the Yummy Mummy Club and the Early Bird pricing, it was doable. I’m not sure about the hotel – I think it would be really good for me to stay over at the conference so that I don’t have the temptation to jump in the car and drive home, but it’s another expense and the thought of finding roommates brings up even more anxieties – what if nobody wants to be my roommate, what if nobody likes me, what if i make a fool of myself? – so I’m still debating that. I’m reading the posts in the Facebook groups, following the tweets, and reading the newsletters and website obsessively. I’m beginning to swing more towards excitement than dread but I’m still more nervous about this than anything I’ve done in recent memory.

The people I know who are going to BlissDom Canada are awesome. They are telling me how much fun I will have and how nobody will care if i need to escape out of the room for a few minutes to calm myself down. They tell me not to worry about what I wear but, of course, I do. I was never one of the cool kids. I was never what you would call fashionable. Clothes are something to be worn so that you don’t go around naked. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve worn heels. So I worry that I won’t fit in. I worry that I won’t know what to wear for the parties. I worry that I will be over dressed or under dressed or dressed in the wrong clothes. I worry that people won’t like me. I worry that people will decide I’m nowhere near as interesting as I appear to be online (which is pretty sad since I’m not all that interesting online!) and not want to talk to me. I worry that since I took the last year off from blogging (mostly because the thought of one more thing to do overwhelmed me – there are at least 15 posts that I started and never finished), I’m too out of the loop to be at a blogging conference. I worry I won’t have anything in common with the people I thought I knew.

Despite all of this, I’m still going. I have watched the tweets and posts from previous years with a twinge of envy. This year I won’t be reading the tweets and posts from home but from the conference itself. I’m not sure what to expect, I’m not sure I can get through it without a panic attack, but I am sure of one thing: Mum would have wanted me to go. So if you see me at BlissDom Canada with a look of terror in my eyes, come say hi. It’s not you, it’s me.

Thank You

November 27, 2013 by koalateagirl

I think as a society we focus too much on the negative and not enough on the positive. This applies to BlackBerry too. We are all too eager to jump all over the company for a perceived misstep but rarely do we stand back and thank the company and their employees for all of their hard work and dedication to the principles that make BlackBerry the great company that it is.

Today BlackBerry rolled out Channels for BlackBerry Messenger. BlackBerry could have done what other companies have done and said “screw legacy users, if they want Channels, they should upgrade to a newer device”. The fact that they didn’t says a lot about the corporate culture at BlackBerry. Instead of releasing Channels for the new, flashy BB10 operating system and leaving legacy device users hanging, BlackBerry employees working on channels worked long days, nights, and even weekends in order to roll out Channels to everyone at the same time. To me that says that BlackBerry values all of its customers and wants to bring them all the best experience. Yes there was an error in the app world description of channels where it said that OS 10.2 (which at this time is still unavailable from US carriers) was required to load the Channels instead of requiring BBM 10.2. To their credit, within 20 minutes of learning of the problem, the problem was fixed. No company is perfect, mistakes will be made, but the speed with which the mistake was corrected shows that Blackberry cares about their customers. Would BlackBerry like everyone to upgrade to the newest devices? Of course they would. (If you’re reading this and are on the fence about upgrading to BlackBerry 10 – do it! It’s an amazing operating system with both touchscreen and keyboard models.) But BlackBerry also respects their customer base enough to realize that not everyone can afford to upgrade, and that even those who haven’t upgraded to a new device or operating system deserve the best possible mobile computing experience. For that I give a heartfelt thank you.

Thank you BlackBerry for caring about all of your customers and for providing user experience that shows that your customers are more than just faceless sources of revenue. The next time someone questions my loyalty to BlackBerry, I will direct them to this post.

P.S. If you’re an Android or iPhone user, you can still get the best messaging system on the planet by heading to bbm.com, Channels isn’t available for Android and iPhone yet but will be released in the coming months. In the meantime, enjoy the awesomeness that is BBM! (#BBM4All on Twitter).

Blaq for BlackBerry 10

May 10, 2013 by koalateagirl

When I said that I would blog about Blaq later, I didn’t think it would be later today. I am at BlackBerry Live in Orlando next week and I’m not bringing my laptop so I figured I should probably write the review sooner rather than later.

From day 1 with my Z10, I was frustrated by the native Twitter client (Twitter for BlackBerry). I realize that it is as functional as Twitter for Android and Twitter for iOS, but I’ve been spoiled with Twitter for BlackBerry 7. I expected the Twitter client on the BlackBerry 10 devices to be just as functional, and when it wasn’t I was disappointed. I tried a number of other Twitter clients in the first two months I had my Z10: Tweetings, Neatly, RewitQ, and Twitter for BlackBerry 10. Each of them had some advantages but they were either too slow, too frustrating to use, or missing key features (like lists).

As many of you know, I’m a Twitter junkie. I need a fairly robust application to use on a daily basis. One of my favourite features on Twitter is the ability to sort your followers into lists and follow those lists. I follow over 1600 people on twitter, and, though I do Twitter purges on a regular basis where I unfollow accounts that are no longer relevant to me, it can still be a lot to handle. Lists allow me sort the people I follow into groups such as “Formula 1 fans”, “CFL” , and “Journalists” and only follow those streams when I’m feeling overwhelmed. For example, Monday May 6th was the CFL draft and though I love all my tweeps, I was trying to keep up with the draft picks as they happened. I opened Twitter on my laptop, went to lists, and selected my football list. Everything else in my stream disappeared and I could pretend that the world outside of football had melted away for awhile. None of the apps I had on my Z10 before Blaq allowed me to follow lists easily.

Aside from Lists, the other features that I want in a Twitter application are, in order of importance to me:

Multiple Account Support (preferably 3)
The ability to quote Tweets when retweeting
The ability to Mute hashtags (Sometimes, I just don’t want to hear about #PeopleIWantToPunch)
Real time refresh rate.

It’s not a huge or particularly demanding list, yet until Blaq was released no single Twitter application for BlackBerry 10 had all the features I wanted. Right now Blaq only allows you to have 2 accounts but I’ve heard that support for 3 is coming and I still have the other applications so the accounts I use less frequently are set up on those.

Blaq is relatively easy to use. When you first download it, you need to authorize it to access your twitter account, this is pretty standard. Once you’ve done this the screen will pull in your account and change to the main screen. The main screen looks like this:

The green bar at the top is called the timeline progress bar and fills up as you get closer to the newest tweets in your stream. The clock on the green bar shows the time of the tweet you’re on while the clock in the top right shows the current time.

From the main screen, it takes a quick swipe to navigate within the app. Swiping right gets you the most options:

To make it easier to understand what each of these options are, I’ve numbered them.

Mute: Allows you to mute a person or a hashtag. This can be helpful if there is a twitter party going on and you’re not participating. Selecting this option and then “add mute” on the next screen brings up a page where you can enter your criteria for what you want muted. You can also un-mute from this screen.
Search: Lets you search Twitter for a username or hashtag. Blaq imports saved searches but you can delete them at any time.
Me: takes you to your profile page. You can see your followers, who is following you, how many tweets you’ve tweeted, and lots of other fun stuff.
Favourites: When you favourite a tweet, they are marked with a star. You can find them again later by selecting this option.
Lists – All of your twitter lists are here. Currently, you can’t edit lists from Blaq but if that changes, I will let you know!
Retweets – These are tweets of yours that have been retweeted.
Direct Messages – you can read and compose direct messages from here.
Mentions – these are all of your @ replies.
Home – this takes you back to your whole twitter feed.
Compose – Tap this to compose a new tweet.

When you swipe down from the top of the screen, you get a much smaller menu: Accounts lets you add another account or switch between accounts, while Settings allows you to change the font size, set the refresh rate while the app is inactive, and access the tutorial again by selecting Help.

Finally, swiping left allows you to access options directly related to the tweet you are viewing. This is the action that is the least intuitive in Blaq. To access this menu, touch a tweet and then pull left. While holding the menu open, pull the list up or down to access the different options.

Allows you to reply to the tweet.
Allows you to retweet the tweet to your followers. (By default the app will confirm that this is an action you want to do)
Marks the tweet as a favourite (again, the default is set to confirm that you want to favourite the tweet)
Options. If the tweet is one that you sent, you can delete it from here.

Earlier, I mentioned that one of my “must have” features in a twitter app is the ability to quote tweets. You need to select the tweet by tapping it so that it opens up in its own screen. When the tweet is isolated, touch and hold the retweet button (Circled in red below), and select the Middle option “Quote Retweet”.

Touching and holding the retweet button brings up 3 menus on the right:

Classic retweet – a nice and simple way to retweet
Quote – puts the item you are retweeting in quotes – useful if you’re going to modify the tweet in any way.
Retweet via – a type of retweet I’m beginning to use a lot more often – great for websites – takes the text of the tweet and then at the end puts (via @username). It’s a stylistic choice but one that I quite enjoy.

One last thing about Blaq. By default, Blaq connects itself to BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). You get an option on every tweet and retweet to send the message as your BBM status or share it with BBM contacts. I don’t like that option, and so I turned it off. To do this is a little tricky though. You need to go to the Settings menu on your BlackBerry (it looks like a cog) –> Security and Privacy –>Application Permissions –>Blaq and switch “Connect to BBM” to off.

In a nutshell, that’s Blaq for BlackBerry 10. Have you tried Blaq for BlackBerry 10 yet? What do you think of it?

Apps I can’t live without.

May 9, 2013 by koalateagirl

Hi everyone,
It’s been awhile – I’ve been busy with life and spending far too much time with my BlackBerry Z10. The advantage of spending so much time with my Z10 is that I have a shortlist of the “Can’t miss Apps” for BlackBerry 10. These are my favourite apps, the ones I use on a daily basis.

1) Password Keeper – This app was standard on earlier BlackBerry devices, and is a free download for the Z10. It has all the functionality that I wrote about here but is on your BlackBerry 10 Device.

2) BlackBerry Messenger – Another old standard but one that I use daily to keep in touch with friends and family. It’s just so convenient. The Video chat feature on BlackBerry 10 devices allows you to do more than simply type to your contacts, you can actually see them and have a face to face conversation.

3) BlackBerry Remember – I had my doubts on how useful Remember would be. I was so wrong. I use it every single day. It’s better than any other notepad app I’ve used. It allows you to flag emails and put them into a file folder within the Remember App, but more than that, it allows you to add photos, videos, voice notes, and documents to the folder.

I have a BlackBerry Live folder and my airline tickets, hotel confirmation, event schedule, and hotel shuttle emails are all inside that folder so that I can easily find them as I need them.You can assign due dates to items within a folder and never forget a deadline again. You can also pull in contacts so if you are working on a project with a co-worker, you will have their contact info alongside all the information for the project. The BlackBerry video about Remember gives a pretty awesome overview of this amazing app.

4) CrackBerry 10 – I admit it, I’m a CrackBerry addict. I was going to the website a couple of times a day to keep up with the latest BlackBerry news. The CrackBerry 10 app for BlackBerry 10 allows me to catch up on the latest news and reviews in a really nicely designed and user friendly manner. To access the category feature simply tap the CB home button at the bottom of the screen in the app:

Once you do that, you will be greeted with a list of categories – I tend to read everything but if you only want to read reviews, it can be really helpful to go straight to the reviews category. My favourite thing about the CrackBerry 10 app is that it’s built for BlackBerry. I have nothing against Android ports but they don’t always work in quite the same way that apps built specifically for the BlackBerry 10 platform.

5) Blaq – The native Twitter app on the BlackBerry 10 operating system is not as good as the version I had on my Bold 9900. I use Twitter a lot and needed something better. I have used Blaq on my PlayBook, so when it was released for the BlackBerry 10 in late April, I eagerly downloaded it. It took a little getting used to and I’m still discovering little gems like the ability to quote tweets. (You can only do it from inside the tweet itself, not from the main screen) I will do a full post on Blaq soon for all my Twitter addicted friends who need a solid app that works well and is stable

6) Podcasts – I’m late to the podcast party, but I love listening to them as I walk around town. I had a few different Podcast apps on my Bold 9900 but my favourite wasn’t available for the BlackBerry Z10. After consulting some of my fellow BlackBerry Elite members, I downloaded Podcasts for BlackBerry 10. I love how easy and intuitive the app is to use. It also doesn’t drain my battery the way other podcast apps have. The selection of podcasts in the app is pretty good but you can search and manually add your favourite podcasts within the menu if they aren’t on the list. The only complaint I’ve heard is from my friend Nick who listens to a lot of podcasts while riding his bike to and from work – he would like a feature that skips back 5 or 10 seconds in the podcast when you restart after a pause, so that you don’t miss anything. I agree it would enhance the app but even without that feature, the app is head and shoulders above any other podcast app for BlackBerry 10.

These are my favourite (non game) apps so far. I’m going to be testing BlackBerry Travel next week as I journey to BlackBerry Live, and I will let you know how it works on BlackBerry 10 afterwards.

What are your favourite BlackBerry 10 apps? What app do you really want to see on the platform?

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