The original thinking when embarking on this Life of Leisure is to take about a year to relax, hang with the kids, and explore the next big idea. Here we are in week 4 and I’m officially bored. I’m obsessed with reading everything on Mashable, TechCrunch, Engadget, and now posting to the Snaptu forum because this application doesn’t work properly on my Blackberry 8350i. I know it’s not working right because I had it on my Nokia E71 and it worked perfectly there. By the way, just sold the Nokia E71 on Ebay, selling my Motorola RAZR on craigslist so I am officially getting rid of all my phones except for the one I’m currently using.

I’ve officially decided I need to return to the workforce before my mind turns into jello. I even begged my sister to let me redo the powerpoint slides she was working on for a company called Isilon. I’m sure this isn’t normal behavior to volunteer to do powerpoint slides just to feel like a contributing member of society. Thankfully, she let me help her and it turns out her boss and the channel manager loved the deck, whoo-hoo!

Laptop Keyboard
My geek girl project for the week is to replace the keyboard on my mom’s laptop. I’ve already done the research and bookmarked the site detailing how to take the laptop apart to replace the keyboard. It seemed easier to replace the entire keyboard than to try to replace the 2 keys which kept falling off her keyboard. We initially took her laptop to Best Buy since it was still under warranty to get the keys replaced. Geek Squad said, they needed to send the entire laptop to California and it would take a month to get it back, then she would have had to pay $100+ to get a couple of keys replaced. I told my mom, no don’t do that. I will order an entire keyboard and replace it myself, should cost under $30. I ordered the new keyboard on Amazon and with shipping it came out to about $28.

I received the keyboard today and my family thought it someone was sending me a birthday gift but it was actually the keyboard. I will update this post with how the installation went once I finish it.

Learning to Create Dynamic Websites
To keep my mind working, one of my goals is to create dynamic websites using SQL and PHP. I’ve come across an ebook from the library which will help me accomplish this using Dreamweaver as a shortcut, score! I already installed Dreamweaver so my next step is getting the server setup with GoDaddy  then I’ll be ready to get started. I can create the static websites but that is unexciting and I want to be able to create forms and get the form data into a database which sends out automated emails, etc. One of the reasons I wanted to learn PHP is to be able to prototype any Web 2.0 ideas.