Teresa showed us around and supervised our clown attempts! Thanks, sister! (Randy, you were right; these folks rock)

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If you get to the circus early they let you try on all the fun costumes!

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Here’s Newman. Bless his heart. No word on just how long he would have stayed there doing that had I not finally looked over

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I’m such a sucker for any kind of behind the scenes show or photo gallery. I just stumbled upon this fabulous National Geographic series called Inside the Presidency. It rocks, so I must share.

The photographer, Christopher Morris, offers up some interesting glimpses of AirForce One, The White House – even the Presidential limo. It’s a world so very foriegn to me.

I mean, I’ve got a pretty good idea of how a Governor’s office runs and what all that looks like …but the President! No matter what you think of W or Obama or whatever, these photos make the Office of the President seem just a little more tangible – a little more powerful than it already was in my mind.

Go look at it now!

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Ladies, how the heck do you use an eyelash curler? I’ve never owned one.  I don’t even think I know anyone who owns one.  It looks painful. And it seems it would get rather messy after a few uses – or would it? Not sure if you are supposed to use it before or after you apply mascara.

And if I use one, I have a feeling I’ll end up looking like this:

And of course that frightens me. It would also frighten small children and tea cup poodles.

Sure, I could Google “how to use an eyelash curler” but I’d much rather hear from you. Do you use one? Do you know someone who does? If any of you Nashvillians see Lindsay Ferrier walking around town would you mind begging asking her to throw at little Beauty Uncensored love at this topic?

Back in the day, I used to judge one’s geek savvy on her ability to capture a relevant image from the web and insert it into a blog post.  “Dang, that’s cool. How the heck do you just grab a screen shot of anything you want like that?” I always assumed these pixel posting peeps were using PhotoShop or some other photo editing tool. I mean, I always knew how to grab a screen shot, but how to cut one part out of that image was a foreign concept. And there were many, many times I just wanted to show people one specific thing – not the WHOLE thing.

Then, about four months ago, I discovered Apple Shift 4. My life will never be the same. Truly. I’m like a blogging rockstar now. And when I say “I discovered” it, I mean Dave told me to try it one day with an accompanying look that said, “Apple Shift 4 – duh.”

To be clear, I was like the last Mac user on Earth who didn’t know about this magic potion for image saving. If you Google “Apple Shift 4″ you’ll find 515,000 results. But I also know that many of you folks are Mac newbies and might not be married to a geek; therefore, you may not have been told about this yet.

So here’s how you use Apple Shift 4 on your Mac laptop and instantly add 50 Geek Points to your resume:

1. Find something on the internet you want to save as a jpeg
2. Press Apple (see above), Shift and the number 4
3. You’ll notice a little cross hair icon pop up
4. Hold down the mouse button with one hand and size the parameters with the other
   
5. When you have “drawn” your image area, release the mouse button
   
6. If your volume is turned up you’ll hear a camera shutter sound (cute! I know!)
7. That image is now saved to your desktop and is ready for your use!
   

Here’s a sample of one I just snagged from the Her Nashville masthead:

It’s totally empowering, right?! Now, go forth and capture!

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Holy crap this is bad. Team Newman’s favorite line: “Microsoft, huh? So it’s easy to use?”

Hat Tip: TechCrunch, which observed the following minor detail:

Whoever made the video thought they could fool everyone by covering up the Apple logo and the rest of the laptop with stickers. Or maybe they knew that would be the only way anybody would bother to watch the video.

My questions:

1. Are they serious?
2. Were they trying to be funny?
3. Did the PR/Ad firm that helped produce this “viral” marketing video get fired yet?
4. Is hubby correct when he says that I am actually doing what they want folks to do, which is talk about their Songsmith product on our blogs?
5. Did they REALLY think no one would notice that’s a 17 inch MacBook she’s using?

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