iamdez

Twitter Tutorial: What is OAuth And What It Means To You

dez — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:41:30 +0000

As of August 31, 2010 the way that applications access Twitter via your account will be restricted to only one way. Applications can currently access your account if you provide them with your username and password (also known as basic authentication) or if you give them permission to via OAuth. After August 31 the only way an application will be allowed access to your account will be via OAuth.

According to OAuth‘s website the protocol is like a valet key.

Many luxury cars today come with a valet key. It is a special key you give the parking attendant and unlike your regular key, will not allow the car to drive more than a mile or two. Some valet keys will not open the trunk, while others will block access to your onboard cell phone address book. Regardless of what restrictions the valet key imposes, the idea is very clever. You give someone limited access to your car with a special key, while using your regular key to unlock everything.

If you are a Twitter user and use applications to either check your tweet stream on your phone/desktop or on another place on the web (think Tweetdeck or Hootsuite) or any of the multitudes of analytics tools available for Twitter you’ve probably come across a screen that looks somewhat like this (click to see the bigger version):

If you’re already logged into Twitter when you get to this screen you won’t be given an option to login; instead your information will be displayed. For those of you more familiar with Facebook think Facebook Connect.

The short and simple portion of OAuth is that you are not giving your Twitter username and password over to an application developer. Instead you are giving that application permission to access your account through means of a shared key which Twitter identifies as your key for that application. The application is required to have an established relationship with Twitter by means of signing up for an application.

Also required during an application’s sign-up process is whether that application is read only or read & write. If the application is read only then they will only be able to read your information. Read & write means they can do both.

The benefits of OAuth are the security of knowing you don’t need to give someone else your password. Also, you can change your password at any time and you’ll still have access to your already authorized applications. Twitter can also easily revoke the application’s access key to better enable security if an application starts being acting like spam or not in the userbase’s best interest

In that same authorization window user’s are asked if they will allow an application to access or access and update their accounts.

In a lot of ways the advantages of OAuth stop there for applications that have been allowed to access and update accounts. A user still needs to be sure that they trust the app to update their account timely and correctly. An application that updates the account without the user’s express permission even though the user has allowed the application access to the account is still considered to be in violation of Twitter’s Application Developer Terms of Service.

Here is a list of things that an application cannot do and therefore you cannot accidentally do through an application using OAuth:

Change your username
Change your password
Change your email address
Change your mobile settings
- Number attached to account
- Settings for mobile send times
- Settings for following a user’s updates via text message
- Change direct message to mobile settings

This will keep your account generally secure from being changed, but you are still responsible for the content that is sent by the app. This can include:

Status updates
Direct messages
List creation
Following someone
Unfollowing someone
Blocking someone
Reporting someone as spam
List creation
List deletion
List following
Adding user’s to a list

There are more, but you get the idea. In short, the ability of an application approved through OAuth is restricted, but still has the potential to be dangerous. You should only use applications that you trust or that you understand. Look for an applications documentation section or if the app is a small one send an email or @reply to the developer and ask them about their application.

Keep your password secure after August 31st. You will not be required to give it to an application for purposes of accessing your account. HOWEVER there are applications that still require a login, but the use of the same password that you use for Twitter isn’t required.

Preparing For Your and Your Kid’s Future Online

dez — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 02:08:15 +0000

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, suggested during an interview with the Wall Street Journal:

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

The interview isn’t fully about online privacy, but it’s relevant to the future of the search engine and all of our online lives.

A few days later I saw a post from Jessica Gottlieb titled “The Problem With Mom Blogging When Your Kids Are Older.” In the post she gives a generalized example of what I imagine to be a pretty usual conversation that happens between mothers and their near-adolescent daughters. The gist of the post was regarding the need to let her children tell their own story and not do it for them. Even going as far as intentionally misspelling her kids’ names so that the mention of them growing up cannot be found easily with searches in the future. I’ll share a few quotes from her post:

“The stories don’t belong to me any more.”

“I can’t tell you everything, because this is her story, not mine.”

This brings up a very relevant topic in the increase of everyone’s activity on the social web. How do you use the web as a social activity, network, and professional tool and still maintain your reputation with your friends and employer?

There are a lot of complaints out there about people being someone completely different online than they are offline. Often the person projecting a different personality online is identifiable either through an avatar or their real name.

I’m not talking about gaming networks or forum trolls. I’m also not talking about information privacy. I’m talking about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn users and blog authors and the content they create and add to the web. I’m talking about preparing for your future of search.

What are future employers going to see about you or your kids when they go to Google and search for you or them? Let’s not get into the legality of any of this or the morality of it. That search is going to happen and it’s not restricted or controlled by you or who you allow to run it. What will it display?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t just for companies anymore.

A lot of people whose lives often take place in the digital space already know that they need to keep an eye on the what/where/when/who of who mentions them online. Most of these people likely (or should) have Google Alerts setup for their full name, another for their online name. This is an important first step in monitoring your online presence. However, this only notifies you of anything new that matches what you’re searching for.

The Geek Girls have a great Five-Minute Guide to Google Alerts. If you haven’t setup alerts for yourself yet you should read their post.

Background Check?

While it’s a legal gray area to do a background check via social networks or Google it still happens. I’ve seen different percentages reported as far as how many HR managers are checking Google for background information. Which means that more than zero may be using information they find about you online. However, if they can find it online, so can you. You just need to know how and what to search.

Kate-Madonna Hindes is an expert in helping people not only make their resumes better but in helping them network themselves online, usually for the purposes of job seeking. I asked her about some of the biggest things online job seekers should watch out for.

As job seekers join social networks, it’s important to remember the mantra, “once on the web, always on the web.” By acting as their own recruiter, candidates can source information about themselves and see what is showing up under their names or other identifiable information. If information is private, it should not be disclosed to the web in any form.

Being Prepared

Having your alerts and watching what you post about yourself but still being active online can still lead to times when things are posted about you that you don’t necessarily like or that are even accurate. The other possible issue is that something you said is either wrong, strikes a bad nerve, or is taken out of context. If you have control of the content you could delete it, but that’s like trying to hide something. Also, since it was already out there and you already feel the reason to remove it there is reason to believe that someone else saved it as a screenshot or the file.

I asked Jennifer Kane of Kane Consulting how she helps her clients and herself deal with fallouts like this.

The most important thing that we tell our clients, and ourselves, is to be transparent…

Yes, there is a permanence to what you say on the social web and those words and images can come back to haunt you. Increasingly, though they’re coming back to haunt everyone.

When words you say, the things you do and the ideas you think are immediately captured, syndicated and analyzed, lying and reinvention become vastly more difficult. Your best option then is to choose to reveal less, be more transparent and honest about the things you do reveal, apologize immediately if your words come back to haunt you and keep moving forward.

The present is becoming the past so quickly that humility and time will be your best assets for managing your reputation in the future.

Rinse, wash, try not to repeat.

This is all great if you’re working with yourself. The same self that didn’t grow up with Google as a verb or www always around. Today’s kids are always connected and they are going to be the ones creating the awesome stuff in the future when Facebook and Twitter are “that thing my mom uses”. The lessons you teach them now with their life in general could very well help them deal with their own privacy. Jessica had this to add when I asked her how she’s teaching her kids about online safety, decency, and respect for themselves.

When you teach your kids manners it’s simple to incorporate online manners as well. At every age there are different lessons. We teach them privacy fairly early on, as that is a safety issue. Moving forward we teach them the intricacies of privacy, like setting up a fake birthday on your fake email with your fake name that you use for things like online gaming or shopping with gift cards.

The nightmare AND the glory of that web is that we are losing our privacy. My kids love to text, they are far more likely to text than they are to talk, and every parent should embrace this. We gave our daughter a cell phone and explained to her that (like her email) we would very likely read every message going in and out. It is important for every child (and for every adult) to understand that once you have written something down, in any forum, you are responsible for those words. Our children need to know that their words have the ability to elevate or to destroy.

As our children move to more public social networking, our rules, and our guidance will necessarily change and grow with them.

How do you handle your online reputation? What Google Alerts do you have setup for yourself? Have you ever had to deal with fallout from a bad experience online?

What we do online stays online. As we grow into the social web we need to find ways to maintain our reputation online.

I look forward to your feedback.

Twitter Tutorial: @Replies and @Mentions

dez — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:12:11 +0000

I recently contacted a good friend of mine about the way she was promoting posts from other people (sometimes even mine). Here’s the structure of the tweet she would send out: “@name has a great new post about purple elephants ”.

Without knowing it she was restricting the number of people that saw the post because of the structure of her tweet. She’s an extremely smart person, is a geek, yet didn’t know about the following feature.

I was amazed that she didn’t know how it worked but after thinking about it I wasn’t surprised since Twitter is touted as easy to use but there are some hidden features that affect usage that take some digging (or someone teaching you) to find out about.

@Replies

Back in May of 2009 Twitter made an update the functionality of the @reply. An @reply is a tweet that has a person’s Twitter name at the front of the tweet (just like the structure I displayed above). Users had actually invented the use of the mentioning structure to denote the mention of another user in the system so that people would know they were talking about another Twitter user. Twitter added the feature that linked a user’s name when it was behind the @ sign.

The following is taken from the Twitter support article “What are @replies and mentions?”

People will only see replies in their Home timeline if they are following both the sender and recipient of the update.
People will see mentions in their timeline even if they don’t follow the person mentioned – as long as they follow the sender, they’ll see the mention in their timeline (It’s treated like a regular Tweet.)
People with protected accounts cannot send replies to people who aren’t following them, and mentions won’t be seen by non-followers either.
If someone sends you a reply and you are not following the user, the reply will not appear on your Home timeline. Instead, the reply will appear in your Mentions timeline.
Replies will always have “in reply to” listed next to their timestamp. If a Tweet doesn’t have this, it’s a mention.

Assuming you don’t have a protected account here is the breakdown of the @reply structure:

	Following Both Tweeter and @Replied	Following Tweeter Only	Following @replied only
In your stream	X
Not in your stream		X	X

@Mentions

Mentions are a little bit simpler to understand. Technically @replies are @mentions that just happened to be placed at the beginning of a tweet. Both will show up in your replies area. The only difference is that the people who are following just them can also see the tweet that mentions you instead of just the people that follow both of you.

Back to the original issue. I contacted her asking her if she knew that putting my @name at the beginning of her tweet meant that only the people that followed both of us would see it and while I appreciated the gesture I wanted to make sure that she knew the limits that her format imposed.

Twifficiency

dez — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:49:22 +0000

A 17-year old from Scotland has created a tool called “Twifficiency“. James Cunningham (@jamescun) most likely didn’t expect his application to hit the worldwide trending topics, but it did.

The tool gives you a % of efficiency based off of the number of people you follow, your follower number, how often you tweet, and how many tweets you read.

I’m not sure how he gets the “How many tweets you read” metric because Twitter doesn’t have a way to mark tweets as read/unread so it would be interesting to know how he’s coming up with that number, but other than that he has created an extremely simple and viral tool that people are actually using.

On his personal account he said:

FFS. Twifficiency is NOT a scam, it is not Phishing, it is not a password stealer. It doesn’t even log what your score is…

This is probably the reason that his site has not gone down yet. He’s not storing anything. And for his app name to be a trending topic is most likely generating a serious amount of traffic. He’s got an Adsense link ad on the top right of both the home page and calculate page which is going to generate a decent amount of income for the time being.

It’s not the most detailed app in the world but it’s pretty easy to use. If you don’t mind the auto-tweet that it sends out (and seriously, there are worse things in the world).

BTW, my Twifficiency score is 38%.

30, 4th decade, 29.365

dez — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:31:57 +0000

Whatever you call it, it’s my birthday today.

That’s all.

I’ll leave you with two images of what Megan got me for my birthday:

Need Blogs to Subscribe To: Make It Yours

dez — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 20:43:17 +0000

Since I’ve been reformatting my subscriptions to be of a more personal nature I have started finding other blogs based off blogroll links from the sites that I’m already subscribed to. But I want more. Now that I’m caught up on my reading and have been all weekend I want some more. I want to find stuff to comment on.

Suggest yourself* or suggest someone else. Location is no matter, I’ll even pass on a language requirement and use Google Translate if needed.

Turn the above image into a non-issue.

*AKA… this is my invitation to you to market yourself. Just leave a link to your site in the comment, but either way I want to know you’re out there.

CoaFG: 11lb Swing and the Risks of Daily Monitoring

dez — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:07:19 +0000

From Friday, 8/6, to Sunday, 8/8, I gained 11 pounds… As of this morning I was back to 338.8 but still 6.1 higher than I weighed in on Friday. I was still watching what I ate all weekend, but the biggest difference is that instead of staying indoors during the extremely hot and humid weekend we just had I was outside all weekend drinking a LOT of water.

On Saturday Megan and I went to the Uptown Art Fair. I definitely sweat enough while walking around, but I drank a lot of water to keep myself hydrated. On Sunday was the same story. We went to her niece and nephew’s birthday party. The party was an outdoor party (with a pool). I drank a lot of water. All facts aside I’m willing to bet that I drank about 1.5 gallons on Saturday of water and about a gallon of water yesterday while at the birthday party.

With water weighing 8.35 pounds per gallon, I’m going to go with the water weight excuse. I did a pretty good job of watching what I ate over the weekend. This leads me into the risky territory of my current method of weighing myself everyday.

With daily recording I get the data points that I want and have nearly immediate feedback on something I’ve done (eating half a pizza the night before shows in the morning). I go through the same process everyday for weighing myself so that I get the most accurate recording and the most consistent results.

I have been told by more than a few people that I should only weigh weekly but the reasons for that is to get rid of discouragement caused by these weight fluctuations. I’m not getting discouraged as I’m finding out more about myself and my habits as well as understanding my body better than I ever have.

Obviously drinking less water this weekend would have had an impact on the weight, but I’ll drink water over losing weight any day.

You can check out my progress on my published Google Spreadsheet: Dez’s Weight Tracker

CoaFG: Walking in Hot Weather

dez — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 05:33:33 +0000

What’s it like to have almost 30 less pounds and walk around in 90 degree weather? It still sucks, just not as much.

A comparative for you. Before I lost weight I could walk around in hot weather but my clothing would be soaked after only an hour. Now I can go 2 hours and my shirt isn’t completely drenched only mostly.

I’m still going to be a sweater no matter how much weight I lose, but I’m already noticing the lessening insulation that doesn’t allow my body to cool efficiently. I’ve been sweating since I was in 3rd grade and it’s only gone up since then. I used to have my own towels in high school for basketball and they would mop the free throw area after I’d been near it.

I’m just glad that I was able to walk around the Uptown Art Fair with Megan for a few hours and not be totally drenched in my own salt-water ocean. I was even carrying a backpack.

Photo Credit: StayRAW

My shirt was a LOT worse than the post image, but you get the idea.

You can check out my progress on my published Google Spreadsheet: Dez’s Weight Tracker

Social Sharing FTW!

dez — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:04:29 +0000

I used to be a bit obsessed over being the first of my online social graph to discover and share a video. I’m not sure how I got sucked in on it, but maybe it was the recognition or getting the RT’s or the comments on my Facebook post. I’ve become rather bored lately with trying to find the latest funny thing on the interwebs.

Bill Roehl (@garciasn) and I were having a conversation today about our feed subscriptions and what we’ve been unsubscribing from. I mentioned that I’ve now unsubscribed from all but one Cheezeburger Network site. They just aren’t fun for me anymore. I used to have 16 subscriptions in my “Fun” feed folder. I’m down to seven.

But why aren’t they fun?

Here’s a short list:

Repetitive
Strings of not so funny posts
Cross-posting
Too many videos

This brought Bill to say “Social Sharing FTW”. He has a good point. I (and I assume others) depend on their social stream to show them content that they otherwise would not have known about. Without realizing it I had unsubscribed from many of the big news sites out there in favor of discovering them through my Twitter stream or by visiting the sites when I wanted to read something.

I’ve been subscribing to the thought of not treating my feed reader as I do my email inbox, but it’s difficult to ignore a folder that has over 1,000 unread posts in the period of a week. Even harder to ignore is when you have 5-6 folders with that many unreads in them. I’ll never get around to reading all of it, and I hardly get around to reading any of it.

I do however pound through posts of a more personal nature in my “Personal” folder. The content in these posts vary between strategy, learning, personal experiences, and some sales. The reason they are in the folder is because they are written by one person and usually someone that I already have a relationship with (online and offline). These are also the posts that don’t necessarily make it onto Twitter and Facebook by the person that wrote them.

What do you find yourself reading or ignoring?

Photo Credit: masochismtango

Writing On My Own Blog

dez — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:52:39 +0000

I’m going to start taking John Gruber’s approach to commenting on blogs. He’s semi-famous for turning off comments on his blog and taking the approach of “write on your own blog”. It’s not a bad idea. This is why trackbacks exist.

Don’t worry, I won’t be tweeting everything I comment on, but it’s easier for me to find articles that I’ve commented on if the comments exist in a realm where I have control. I don’t comment in a lot of places, but the ones I do have some specific reasons for me being interested in them.

I’ve pretty much quit commenting on the huge blogs (Mashable, Techcrunch) because I don’t really add value. If a story is interesting enough from one of them I’ll talk about it and link to it, but otherwise.

The goals in this approach:

Archiving what I’ve found interesting for future reference
Giving some exposure to the blog I’m commenting on
More content for my site
Comment on more posts

Also, the comments are my thoughts, and content that I’m creating in the first place. I put a lot of thought into the comments I write and they never consist of “Great post! I’ll keep reading”. My comments are my own thoughts and that’s kind of what a blog is for.

Besides that it will give some more insight into who Dez is. Often times I don’t get around to publishing my opinions on things that are happening. I’m not going to turn off commenting on my blog like John did, but it’d be cool if you tracked back as well.

Image Credit: Maia C

CoaFG: Eating More of Good > Less of Bad

dez — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:13:55 +0000

From the time I started this journey up until around 2 weeks ago Megan and I went grocery shopping on a regular basis. 2 weeks ago we kept putting it off. Neither of us really wanted to go and I made the excuse that we could just keep eating the random stuff that we had in the cupboard. It helps that Megan is a creative cook and we still ate good food, but it wasn’t the right foods.

As such, my weight bottomed out and even went up a few pounds. Since I’m tracking daily I generally pay a lot of attention to what and how much I’m eating and I’m starting to notice trends.

The problem is that the food in the cupboards were from before I started this. The foods were mostly devoid of any nutritional goodness. We had some hamburger helper, some brownies, and a bunch of other stuff that we ended up eating. An effect that I noticed almost immediately that I was still hungry after eating my now normal smaller portions. The portions that I had initially forced myself to limit were no longer enough because the food I was ingesting wasn’t doing anything.

We went grocery shopping on Sunday. We planned meals for the evenings and bought lunch stuff in case we didn’t have left overs. I bought my breakfast “foods” (low-sodium V8 and grapefruit juice). I was excited for Monday morning to get back on schedule.

The Result:

I have had more energy in the past three days due to getting back on my regular eating schedule. I’ve added a hard-boiled egg to my breakfast as well now to stave off lunchtime hunger just a little bit longer.

Since I’ve been back on an “eating healthy” food plan I’ve not only lost some of the weight I put on, but I’m back on track again. 24.5 lbs gone total now.

You can check out my progress on my published Google Spreadsheet: Dez’s Weight Tracker

Fruit Through An MRI’s Eyes

dez — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 20:50:16 +0000

This was way too cool to not share.

Someone took the time to put a bunch of different fruits and vegetables through an MRI machine. The results are pretty cool. After this nice little warning I’ll give you the link: The following page is HUGE. With lots of moving gifs that take a while to load. OK, here’s the link: “Inside Insides”

Here’s my favorite (celery):

What Weight Loss Means To Me – Cindy Janovitz

dez — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:21:29 +0000

Today’s post is a guest post by Cindy Janovitz. She is writing about her weight loss journey at Healthy Heart Journey.

——————

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind. ~G.K. Chesterton

When I created my blog back in December, I was accepting an oath with myself to be healthy. At first it was this idea to lose weight and get in shape. That is the easiest way to consider ones self “healthy.” But as I have been going along my journey, it has warped into something different:

Am I healthy as a whole person? How is my mental well-being?

When I stand outside of myself, looking in – the answer is still no. I don’t see that much changing any time soon, but I am working on it. It’s all part of the journey to be a well-rounded healthy person.

Any time a person accepts a treaty with themselves to give up certain parts of their lives for something better there are struggles. My struggles have been pretty huge because last year I gave up a lot of things to lose weight and I did. But the part about giving up certain things (for me it was sweets, desserts, basically junky food) when you finally allow yourself to have just ONE, it opens a can of worms. So as I have been back on my journey, I have been struggling very much with a huge can of worms.

My other big struggle is exercise. When I finish work for the day, the last thing I want to do is hit the gym. I want to go home, crawl into bed and watch television or take a nap; basically anything other than workout. I recently joined the boot camp class at my gym and I have been loving it! I paid a big chunk of change to participate so that keeps me going. Also, having a class of other people working out as well helps me to keep going! The class runs for ten weeks and I am really excited to see the results.

So, all of the above being said, I am taking part in some work for charity:water. My dear friend Erica and I made a pledge to donate $1 for every pound we lose until September. I am personally hoping to lose 20 pounds.

Almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean drinking water. Unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of all disease and kill more people than all forms of violence, including war. – charity:water website.

Why should you consider donating to Charity:Water? Here’s the deal: You get to drink a glass of clean water every day. Or eight, as recommended. As you can see from the factoid above, not having clean water kills. If you donate just $20, one person can have clean water for twenty years

Just take a minute to think about what you spend twenty dollars on each week and consider if just one time you can give up that twenty dollars. That twenty dollars could be a matter of life and death for someone without clean water.

So take one moment, and donate.

Someone’s life depends on it.

Why Do You Delete Posts?

dez — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 01:33:07 +0000

I asked the question yesterday on Twitter:

Bloggers: How many times have you been nearly done with a post and decided you’re spewing bullshit and trashed it?

I was actually a little bit surprised at the answers I got. The overall consensus was that a size-able percentage of posts written end up getting deleted.

Why? For me it’s if the topic starts spinning itself into nothingness or ends up being out of my comfort area from a knowledge perspective. The other reason is if I’m just being picky. I always make sure I leave a post like that as a draft overnight before I publish it to be sure I’m not being unduly harsh

Why do you delete posts before publishing? Respond in the comments

image credit: Mixy Lorenzo

CoaFG: Dez’s Thin Discrimination

dez — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 04:30:52 +0000

Erica had a good point in her guest post “Thin Discrimination: Judging the Fit“. She talked about the judgements she made regarding what skinnier than her people would think of her and how there were specific examples of awesome human beings that proved her wrong.

I do the same thing. I couldn’t believe it when she and I were talking a few weeks ago that she pre-judged peoples’ thoughts of herself JUST LIKE I DO. That’s right, do. After hearing it from her though I realized I had made this mistake many times throughout my personal history.

The biggest example I can think of is when I was dating before I met Megan. I have dated online (Megan and I met on eHarmony) mostly in my life. I was always more comfortable with the arrangement. In normal social situations I find it easy to approach people, strike up a conversation, and generally keep in good contact if necessary. However in situations where attraction is involved I get self-concious, shy, and pretty much wuss out.

This wasn’t helped by the fact that I carefully screened whomever I contacted to try and gauge what their reaction was going to be to me. As in “Were they going to think I was a fat disgusting slob of a guy”… if my brain answered yes, I didn’t contact them. I remember trying to explain to people that I looked like a football linebacker (even though I’m more of a lineman). It was an entirely too awkward time for me. It was more difficult than it should of been. Granted the end result was the best that could have happened, but the process to get there was much too painful.

Someday I’ll stop judging myself. Even while looking at the photos that Erica took of me I found myself picking apart my looks (my belly region). I brought this up to Megan and she didn’t notice.

Why didn’t she notice? Because that’s how I look, it’s me. That’s the person she cares about, loves, and is marrying. He has a belly, she doesn’t notice it unless it’s smaller. I love that, but I assumed the picture made me look fat.

About the pic, I’ll post it here once Erica is ready to display her work with me, but I really really wanted to get this published.

After Publish Thought:

Just because I’m over critical of myself doesn’t mean everybody else is or even cares.