Are You On The List?

Posted on April 27th, 2007 by gail helen.
Categories: Omnia Vanitas, Sponsored Posts, Random.

I signed up for eFax years ago and then promptly forgot about it, until I began receiving spam faxes in my email. Has anyone else had this experience? Today I read a web release about a company called Martin Worldwide, one of the leaders in the direct marketing industry, who have built a significant “reputation by offering innovative mailing list products to its clients.” They are one of the largest and most successful mailing list providers in the nation, offering customized mailing lists, telemarketing lists and fax lists to small business and Fortune 1000 clients. I don’t know about you, but I find their product, ResponseCom™, both a little scary and yet also attractive. It is described as “a potent, proprietary blend of U.S. Response and U.S Consumer databases, resulting in a multi-dimensional database that offers extreme versatility and over 100 demographic and psychographic selects. The special synthesis of compiled and response data has created an unparalleled, powerful database that accurately identifies prospects with the most active, responsive, and impulsive buying history.” Two words stand out to me — “psychographic” and “impulsive.” I think they must know exactly who I am! And here I thought all the sales letters I receive were based mostly on my (ah hem) prestigious zip code . . .

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.wpd files

Posted on April 27th, 2007 by gail helen.
Categories: Education, Personal, Omnia Vanitas, Technology.

One of the major “grrrs” in my life is the lack of a WordPerfect reader for OSX. Some major papers I wrote which I would love to access, along with my early college jounals and poems, are trapped in .wpd files I can’t open. For years, I’ve carried them around, hoping against hope that I would come in contact with some program or person that could “abracadabra” them back into my hands, but with no success. I recently heard that OpenOffice can handle these documents, and so I downloaded it again in spite of a pretty disappointing experience in its earlier versions. Unfortunately, I need to update a component on machine in order to finish installing the program, but I can’t find my setup disks at the moment. So, as I said, “grrr.”

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Betrayal

Posted on April 27th, 2007 by gail helen.
Categories: Education, Personal, Literary.

Ever since my honors seminar on Beckett & Pinter, I have wanted to see a live performance of one of Harold Pinter’s plays. It was even on my ‘To Do’ list for my year in London, but I never managed to check it off. My intelligent and cultured sister Jillian, maven of all things artsy in Chicago, brought to my attention a few months ago that Betrayal was beginning a run through May. Of course, I am completely unable to handle the process of getting tickets and organizing my free time in such a way as to get tickets, thus the plan lay dormant for so long I figured it just wasn’t going to happen. Thankfully, Jilly is much better at these things than I am. So it looks like I will be going as soon as I complete my finals for this semester. Betrayal isn’t my favorite Pinter play, which is Party Time, but I know it’s going to be a fantastic experience!

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California Dreaming

Posted on April 27th, 2007 by gail helen.
Categories: Personal, Travel, Sponsored Posts, Money.

Another time I was pretty lonely and miserable was when I lived in California. It rained for 90 days straight starting the day I arrived, and I missed my family. To top it off, I never got around to going to the beach or really experiencing the OC by meeting friends or getting involved in anything. I just worked and then went home to an apartment with a man who didn’t ever seem too happy to see me. Things might have been better if he’d had a house to go home to, but the housing market was just insane out there. People move to Southern California for a number of reason, including the healthy lifestyle and the various recreational activities, but unless you’re pretty wealthy, you better not plan on enjoying too much free time if you want to pay for a house in Orange County. San Diego Real Estate might be a better investment — although I imagine it still costs more than most people would like, it’s always nice to dream.

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Another Squirrel Story

Posted on April 27th, 2007 by gail helen.
Categories: Personal, Random.

During my first semester at Loyola, I was pretty down and lonely. I was commuting to the city five days a week during rush hour, and barely had enough time to get my work done, nevermind actually socializing enough to make friends. I spent my only free time between classes sitting on the grass, eating vending machine food (the only kind I had time enough to grab), and watching the squirrels do somersaults from tree to tree. I started feeding them one day, thinking how cute they looked munching on Sun Chips and looking at me as if to say “ca va?”. It was all fun and games till one literally pounced on my foot. I screamed like a little girl and kicked out, sending the poor thing flying into the air and against the base of the tree. I still feel bad about that. But geeze, they have sharp little claws!

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