There, now that all of you are in the privacy of your own home, I’ll begin the story. As I mentioned earlier, I met Jenn before and after the Bringing Sex Out of the Closet session. She had mentioned a party that Eden Fantasys was throwing in their suite. There would be treats and dildo decorating. I knew we just had to attend. I’m pretty straight-laced about many things, but how often can you say you got to go to a dildo decorating party?

When the BlogHer party time approached, B, CutestKidEver and I walked to The Warwick hotel and crammed ourselves into their tiny elevators. (Seriously, those things were small!)

We cautiously approached the room and knocked on the door. Jenn answered and in we went. After speaking with her and Victoria, briefly, we made our way around the room. There were plenty of snacks and buttons:

Some toys to admire. These were not for use during the party! It definitely wasn’t *that* kind of party!

And then there were the dildos along with feathes, glue, glitter, pipe cleaners and other decorating essentials.

A table directly behind the dildos (how many times can I say that in one blog post?) contained chocolate lollipops that were decidedly *not* for kids, condoms (meant to be made into earrings though I’m sure they could have other uses), and some other decorating supplies.

It wasn’t long before everyone got down to the serious business of decorating their dildos.

The creations showed a lot of imagination. There was David. Note the "fig leaf."

There were simple creations:

And very elaborate creations:

Here’s one in the early stages and when it was finished:

There was an angel (not made by my angel):

And, of course, I decided to make a devil:

Which, in turn, prompted the angel’s creator to spruce up her creation. Though many of us had never met before, somehow decorating dildos brought us closer together.

B even got into the act (though this is the only photo she’d allow me to post of her working):

CutestKidEver seemed to be having a blast as well.

Before long, we needed to leave to attend other BlogHer parties. We left our creations in Jenn’s care so that they could dry overnight. The next morning, we headed over and woke Jenn and Victoria up. Jenn apologized for being in her pajamas without any makeup on and we apologized for waking her up. We picked up our dildos and headed back to our room to pack up to leave the Hilton. I later found out from Jenn that we were the only ones who picked up their decorated dildos. Now why would someone want to leave creations such as these behind?

Jenn and Victoria, fortunately, were able to take the remaining masterpieces back with them. I do think it would have been funny to have seen the cleaning staff’s faces had they discovered a dozen or more dildos all dressed up with nowhere to go! On a side note: I don’t think I’ve said/typed the word "dildo" so many times in my life.

Thanks Jenn, Victoria and Eden Fantasy’s for a wonderful party!

This sparked an idea. I understand this technical stuff and pride myself on the ability to explain complex items in simple terms. So why couldn’t I take a subject like “How Does The Internet Work” and, perhaps using some crude graphics, explain how it works without delving into the details of TCP/IP, request headers and other topics that would cause peoples’ eyes to glaze over?

I still have some work to do before I can pull this off. The words will come easily, but I’ll need some graphics. And those might be trickier for me to do. So this might be a once every-other-month type of feature. My other concern is the selection of topics. How am I going to figure out which topics people want to learn about? Well, as this is an Aloha Friday, I bet you can guess how. I’m going to ask everyone out there!

My Aloha Friday question for today is: What computer/technology subjects would you like explained simply?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #53

One of the worst jobs has got to be scrubbing the toilet bowl. First, you need to squirt that foul-smelling cleaner around the rim. Then, you need to wait for it to soak in. Then, you need to remember to go back and clean it off. And you just know that, during the soak-in time, a little one will run up needing to use the potty!

That’s why I was excited over the prospect of the Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Toilet Bowl Cleaner. You attach it to the toilet bowl and a sensor detects when the bowl isn’t in use. When the sensor identifies the appropriate time, it sprays a cleaning solution around the entire bowl’s surface. The next time the toilet is used, it is clean. That’s the theory, anyway. So how did it work?

I took the automatic cleaner out of the packaging and set it up. I was half-afraid that this would be complicated, but it was actually quite simple. I just clipped one end to the bowl and suspended the other end from the toilet’s tank. After putting in the bottle of cleaning solution and giving it a “test fire,” I let it do it’s job.

We have hard water and, as such, will often get hard water stains on our bowl. I knew this was coming so I purposefully left them in place to see how it would do. Unfortunately, it didn’t get these off by itself. After scrubbing the bowl, though, I haven’t seen any sign of new hard water stains appearing (going on 2 weeks now).

The cleaner does a very good job of firing off only when the toilet isn’t in use. In fact, for awhile, I was wondering if it was working at all. The bowl was clean, but I never heard it fire. Then, I realized that the cleaning solution was steadily going down. So there was actual proof of it working even if it was a very stealthy cleaner.

You can purchase Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Toilet Bowl Cleaner from Amazon.com (affiliate link) or from Drugstore.com. But wait, there’s more!

Giveaway:

Thanks to Edelman and SC Johnson, one lucky winner will receive a Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Toilet Bowl Cleaner. To enter, simply leave a comment below answering this question: What is one household cleanup chore (besides the toilet) that you wish you could automate?

You can also earn bonus entries by doing any (or all) of the following items. Just be sure to leave a separate comment for each item that you complete.

• Follow @TechyDad on Twitter. (1 bonus entry)
• Follow @ScrubbingBubble on Twitter. (1 bonus entry)
• Tweet about the giveaway on Twitter. Be sure to include @TechyDad, Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Toilet Bowl Cleaner and a link to this post in the Tweet. (1 bonus entry per day) For example: Automate toilet bowl cleanup. Chance to #win Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Toilet Bowl Cleaner from @TechyDad. http://bit.ly/bLiFYC #Giveaway
• Subscribe to my RSS feed or let me know if you already are. (1 bonus entry)
• Leave a comment on any of my non-giveaway posts from July/August. Leave a comment here letting me know which post you commented on. (1 bonus entry per comment, maximum 3 entries)
• Write a post on your blog linking to this giveaway. Leave 3 comments about this to get credit for all of your extra entries. (3 bonus entries)

To enter, please follow the rules above within the comment section. Contest starts today, September 2nd and ends at Noon EST on September 16th, 2010. You do not have to be a blogger to enter, but must leave a valid e-mail address for me to contact you for mailing address once the giveaway is over. I will select the winner using random.org and contact you via e-mail. You will have 48 hours to claim the prize. If there is no response, another winner will be selected. Open to U.S. and Canada residents only.

Disclosure: I received a Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Toilet Bowl Cleaner complimentary of Edelman and SC Johnson in order to facilitate this review. No other compensation was given. The opinions expressed above are my own. Edelman and SC Johnson is also providing the giveaway item to my readers.

Who the hell blindly contacts a company to ask for free shit w/o offering *anything* in return? Bloggers like these do us ALL a disservice.

This got me to thinking. When I first started TechyDad.com, I’d see companies sending products to bloggers and, I’ll be honest, I thought "Man, I’d love to get free stuff like that." I had fallen into a trap that a lot of people can fall into. They only look at one side of the equation: Blogger Gets Something For Free. There’s a whole other side of that equation: Blogger Reviews Product Thus Increasing Product’s/Company’s Exposure. When done properly, both sides come out ahead. The blogger gets free merchandise and content for their blog (the review) and the company gets exposure, usually in the form of a product review.

Now, obviously, companies aren’t just going to start shipping free products to random bloggers with no expectation of anything in return. In general, bloggers with a bigger following will get more review offers and more expensive offers than smaller bloggers will get. Of course, you don’t need to be King Of The Bloggers to get some great product review opportunities.

First of all, bloggers who are just starting out should expect to recieve nothing for free (unless you happen to have company contacts). For these bloggers, I would recommend cutting your product review teeth on items you buy for yourself or your family. Did your kid get a new game for his birthday? Review it! Did you buy a new kind of frozen meal? Review it! This way, when a company is evaluating whether or not to give you a review opportunity, they will see your past reviews. In fact, this is a good practice to keep doing even when you start getting review opportunities. After all, if you like a product enough, why not give it a little shout out on your blog?

So now your blog has been going for almost a year and you’ve gained a decent following. What do you do? Well, you could join a review group like Family Review Network. (NOTE: I don’t know if FRN is accepting new members or not.) You will recieve possible opportunities e-mailed to you and can apply for ones that interest you. You might not get all of the ones you like. You might not even get that many at first. But it will begin to open doors.

In addition, don’t be afraid to approach companies yourself. I’ve gotten review opportunities out of simple Twitter messages or e-mails. Just be sure that you research the company first, that your messages are professional and that you express how your review could benefit their company. Remember, they’re going to be looking for ways to improve their product’s/company’s exposure. They don’t really care about how you’d love to have a free item.

If a review possibility doesn’t pan out, be cordial. Thank them and ask them to keep you in mind for future review opportunities. You definitely don’t want to burn any bridges. Even if you aren’t going to review Company X’s products, that PR representative might get switched over to Company Y. If they then remember your blog and think it might be a good fit for Company Y, you don’t want their last memory to be a "frell you" letter.

When you do get a review opportunity, make sure you keep your time committment. If, for some reason, you are going to be late, let your PR contact know why and when you expect it to go live. If you find you can’t post a review of the item at all, be honest with the PR contact. Give them specific reasons why. (I have actually done this when something turned out to be not quite what I expected. It wasn’t bad, but just not quite applicable for my situation and therefore I felt I couldn’t give an honest review.) Keep those lines of communication open.

Remember, review opportunities aren’t about free products. It’s about establishing and maintaining relationships with companies. There’s a balance here and any free products that you recieve are just one side of that balance. Focusing on the "free" too much will upset the balance and make it harder to get review opportunities in the future.

Now, before I start too many rumors, I’m not talking about the relationship between B and me. The “long term relationship” is with my camera. I’ve had this camera for about 3 years now and the “great things produced together” were the many, many photos taken. The desire I felt was not towards Louise herself (though I’m sure she’s very pretty, I just don’t desire women other than B). No, the desire was towards her camera. I don’t even remember the exact make or model. Just that it was a DSLR. And it was a beauty.

A little history. My first digital camera was purchased in 1999 just a short while before my sister’s wedding. It was 2 megapixels and had no optical zoom. Yet, it was pretty good for a consumer camera of the time. Before B and I decided to seriously try to have kids, we went on a “last hurrah” trip to Las Vegas. (Little did we realize, NHL was tagging along.) I took 110 photos using my camera. That number is burned into my brain. I just wish the photos were burned in there, because at some point heading home the camera was lost or stolen. We were pretty sure when/where it happened, but were told that no investigation would be done and we would only get a police report to help with insurance.

Luckily, my insurance company was great and I was able to buy a camera with 4 megapixels and a 3x zoom. Before long, I was delving deep into the world of digital photography. I was shooting macro photos, landscapes, whatever I could. A poster I made still hangs on my wall. It depicts a small flower I macro-photographed which, upon examination on the computer, turned out to have tiny ants on it that I didn’t see before hand. The poster’s caption: “Even the tiniest flower contains and entire world just waiting to be discovered.”

During a trip to a local park, I was switching out lenses. Holding my camera in my left hand, I unscrewed the lens with my right hand and then reached into my camera bag with my left hand to get the case for the lens. Unfortunately, I forgot I was holding the camera and I watched in horror as it dropped to the concrete and bounced. Luckily, except for a few scuff marks, it seemed fine. But, over time, it started having more and more problems focusing.

That’s when I bought my newest camera. 4 megapixels, a 12x digital zoom and anti-shake controls so that it doesn’t blur with the slightest twitch. Plus, it does video with sound! (This was amazing to me when I first got the camera as many cameras at that time did video but didn’t do sound.)

Now, this camera has been good to me, but I’ve often fantasized about a DSLR. I would love to have one of those around my neck. At one point, during Sparklecorn, B and a few of her blogger friends wanted their picture taken so I agreed. I was handed a beauty of a DSLR and snapped a few photos. I loved it, even though I only got to take two quick photos with it.

I’d love to run out right now and bring home a nice DSLR, but there’s a little matter of money. DSLR’s tend to be pricey and we have bills to pay for things that are more important than a new camera for me. Plus, I haven’t figured out a compelling argument to get B to agree why I need to plunk cash down for a DSLR when my current camera still works well. Oh, well. Until I can find a nice, used one for not too much money (or somehow land a DSLR review *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*), I guess I’ll just have to continue to have Photo Geek fantasies while I take more photos with my current camera.

While up there, I did what I usually do on rides such as this: I surpressed my fears so as not to panic my son. In fact, I’ve done that a lot over the years. You see, NHL has turned out to be quite the ride daredevil. He likes going on rides that are fast, twisting and make me afraid that one of us will fall out. Yet, in nearly every case, I supress my fears in order to make him happy. (This isn’t to say that I let him do purposefully dangerous things. Just that I know the difference between real danger and my phobia.)

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Do you have any fears that you have had to overcome when you became a parent?

BTW, if you like of The Wiggles or know someone that does, be sure to enter my giveaway for their new DVD. In addition, stop by TheAngelForever.com blog for a second chance to win.

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #52

Here, though the lone dad voice amongst moms, I felt completely welcomed. Everyone in the panel recognized that work/life balance wasn’t just something moms needed. In fact, it wasn’t even something only parents needed. A person might need it to take care of their ill spouse or parent. You can read more about what I learned here from my DadRevolutions post.

After this, I attended the “Creating (or Massively Altering) a WordPress Theme (Int. to Adv.)” session. This I was extremely interested in. I do freelance work on the side and would love to do WordPress theming for people’s sites. Unfortunately, this session was a big dud. During my previous Geek Lab session, I found out that half the room was without surge strips. So I positioned myself at the other half of the room. Unfortunately, after the session was supposed to start, I realized nothing was happening.

We were eventually told that there were 2 sessions in this room. When both speakers speaking at the same time didn’t work (duh!), we were told that the beginners (who weren’t even listed as a session) would have the first half of the session and then the advanced folks would get to work. I was being asked to sit twiddling my thumbs for half a session to possibly learn something before time ran out! Session FAIL!

Needless to say, I left the session. I went into “How to Run a Group Blog for Fun, Advocacy and/or Profit” (where B and CutestKidEver were) but spent too much time trying to catch up so I’m afraid I didn’t learn as much as I might have had I been there from the start.

When the session was over, B and I returned to our room to organize our swag for the return trip the next day and to change for the night’s parties.

When party time came, we met CutestKidEver and headed to the Warwick for the Eden Fantasys “decorating” party. Here, we saw Jenn again. We were presented with…. “adult items” as well as glue, feathers, pipe cleaners and various other items for decorating. There were also chocolate lollipops in various… uh, shapes. It was all a ton of fun. Yes, I took photos during this event. No, I won’t be sharing them… Not in this post at least. Maybe I’ll make a “TechyDad After Dark” post with those. (So people can avoid NSFW images if they want to.)

After about an hour, we left our creations with Jenn to dry and headed over to A Green Affair and Bloggy State of Mind. Unfortunately, these parties didn’t seem as interesting and the Eden Fantasy’s party. We finally started talking about dinner options since we were all getting hungry. We opted to walk around the corner to…..

NYC Pizza FTW!

We waited quite awhile, but it was worth it. We carried our pizza back to the Chill Space and enjoyed some delicious slices and conversation.

We also met CoupleDumb during this point and talked with them a bit. Eventually, we realized that SparkleCorn should be starting up. We got our sparkle necklaces and rings out and went to the party.

We had a blast walking around seeing all of the pop culture posters and standees.

Then, we saw the amazing cake and heard it was from Charm City Cakes. Yes, Ace of Cakes’ Charm City Cakes! Sadly, no sightings of Duff or anyone else from Charm City Cakes. Also, sadly, it won’t be featured in an Ace of Cakes episode. It was delicious, though.

While at the party, we also met up with a bunch of people that B knew and some people we met previously (including Jenn and Dadarocks).

Finally, we attended CheeseburgHer. As I don’t eat cheeseburgers and lounging on a bed with a group of lady bloggers whom I didn’t know didn’t appeal to me, I really couldn’t get into the whole thing. It looked like fun, but I was beginning to get partied out. (Must be getting old, right?) We stopped by Sparklecorn for a bit longer, talked with some more people, then dropped back into CheeseburgHer. B took some cheeseburgers and a steak wrap to bring back to our room. On our way out, I saw Anissa Mayhew for the third time that day. (The second time was as we were entering Sparklecorn, I spotted her leaving.) As before, I wanted to say hi but there were a bunch of people around her and no words came to mind, so I walked on. (Anissa, if you’re reading this, consider this a belated “Hi!”)

B and I retired to our room to get things ready for the next day’s trip home. We were exhausted but felt sad knowing that BlogHer 2010 was over! (Next up, our trip home.)

After this, we went to a local ice cream place for a sweet treat. Here we learned three important lessons: 1) Their small is really large, 2) They have huge ears of corn for sale, and 3) They’ve got cows! In fact, JSL seemed more interested in the moo-ing cows than his ice cream. (Sadly, the cows weren’t out on a return trip the next day.)

The next day, we went to the Altamont Fair with my parents, B’s parents, B’s brother, his wife and their kids (aged 2 and 5 months). Here we went on a lot of rides:

We also saw horses and rabbits:

By far the most terrifying experience (for me, at least) was the ferris wheel. You see, I have a huge fear of falling. So why would I willingly go up 100 feet in one? For the photo opportunity of course! My photo geekery did battle with my falling fear and won. In the photos below, see if you can spot B and our families talking. (For a better look, click on the photos.)

All in all, it was a fun, but exhausting couple of days. It didn’t help that the day after this was NHL’s 7th birthday party. But that’s a post for another day.

In My Purple Toes by Blair Hahn, the father of the story is introduced as having purple toenails. (This is explained in the forward as having happened when a dad brought his teenage daughter to a nail salon for a pedicure.) Instead of being embarassed by his colorful toes, he revels in them. He walks barefooted, showing off his purple toes, in all seasons (though his toes get cold in the winter) and enjoys spending time with his family and their non-purple toes.

I read this book to both NHL and JSL. They both enjoyed the story as well as the little extras within it. (For example, there’s a purple-toed frog “hidden” on every page.) I also enjoyed that the book was interactive in that is asked the child questions (such as “Where are my purple toes?”). When I got to the end, JSL asked me to read it to him a second time. How could I refuse?

In addition to their website, where you can purchase My Purple Toes for $10.99, the author also has a Twitter and Facebook presence. (No word on whether he tweets with purple fingernails.) Also, a second book, titled My Purple Kisses, should be released in time for Valentine’s Day 2011. Finally, a portion of the proceeds from My Purple Toes goes to the nonprofit organization Soles4Souls which collects and distributes shoes free of charge to people in need.

Disclaimer: I did this review as part of a campaign on Family Review Network for My Purple Toes. I received a complimentary copy of My Purple Toes to facilitate my review. The opinions expressed here are my own and no other compensation was received.