The new year is when many people start fresh to make positive changes in their lives.  Here is a 2007 calendar for everybody and here are some improvements we'd like to make!

Computious: "I gained a few pounds and know I need to cut back on pizza, but I don't want to!  So I’ll try something new called pizza blotting, which takes some of the fat off the pizza top! Also, I’ll be in better shape to help Sweet & Sour if he starts training for the pig races!”

Serge: "I want to be more patient with girls when they want to talk (they have so many words!), especially since I heard about the study that said many girls have almost THREE times as many words A DAY than boys!"

DotComplicated: "I'm going to practice getting to the point in a conversation in 25 words or fewer, or maybe it should be 15 words…no, 20 words might be better…hmmmm…what about 17…? oh dear….! I also want to be more decisive, but in my case, less indecisive, but life is complicated, you know! Uh-oh, I'm past my 25 words, aren't I? Maybe I need a role model or should speak with some wise women!"

MeiMei: "From now on, I won’t borrow Computious' clothes unless I ask her first.  I thought she wouldn't mind if I wore her 'skinny' clothes since she gained weight after eating lots of pizza this past year.  But I know it’s not polite to do that."

C.C. the Cat: "OK, I promised Computious that I wouldn't play around as much with her computer mouse, especially since I got her into trouble when I crashed her desktop the day before a paper was due!"  But just like 'Cats International' says, 'Cats Just Want To Have Fun'!"

PingPong:  "I definitely have a sweet tooth and I need to eat fewer sweets.  So I'll eat less milk chocolate, but dark chocolate should still be good! And I’ll have some birthday cake to celebrate my Panda friend Mei Mei’s birth of twins! — Oops, well, it will be a little slice of cake!"

Elton the Elephant:  "I'm going to practice my memory exercises, because we elephants have a reputation to uphold!  About a month ago, the Guinness Book of World Records was broken by Lu Chao, the 24-year old Chinese college student who recited nearly 68,000 digits of pi!"

Sweet & Sour:  "I have two resolutions — the first is that I won't play hide-and-seek in the piano any more; and the second is that I won't get too big-headed next year, since in the Chinese Lunar calendar it will be the Year of the Pig (officially starting February 18, 2007)!!"

This posting is written by Computious^® – The Everyday Sage of the Digital Age! – and her little sister MeiMei, her best friends DotComplicated and Serge deFault, and other friends Sweet & Sour the Pig, C.C. the Cat, PingPong the Panda, and Elman the Elephant.   What a group of characters!

The Computious^® product line has fun, unique gift items at the easy-to-use site www.computious.com. See the Holiday Specials!

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Mei Mei, a giant panda from China, gave birth to twins (twins!) and the mother and babies were in good condition, said the people running Adventure World, a zoo in Wakayama, Japan, where the births took place.

One of the twins weighs just three ounces. How adorable!!

Mei Mei, 12, and her partner Eimei, 14, are on loan from China. My friend PingPong the Panda thinks the zoo should name one of the twins after her! And my little sister MeiMei is so proud! The full story is at Associated Press.

This posting is written by Computious^® – The Everyday Sage of the Digital Age! – sister to MeiMei, friend of DotComplicated, and Serge deFault.  Other friends include Sweet & Sour the Pig, C.C the Cat, PingPong the Panda, and Elman the Elephant. What a group of characters!

The Computious^® product line has fun, unique gift items at the easy-to-use site www.computious.com. See the Holiday Specials!

                       
                              © Computious - All rights reserved

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We never met Allison Heinrichs at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, but we’re so happy to learn from her that Santa Claus is real! Some smart people at Carnegie Mellon University did all kinds of scientific calculations on computers to show how Santa uses special powers to do his job! We knew it! We knew it!

Madelyn Fernstrom (she runs the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) said Santa has to be careful he doesn't gain too much weight because of all the cookies kids give him. She got us worried, so we're going to put two cookies instead of three on a plate and skim milk instead of regular milk in a small glass so Santa won't gain a pound!

Thank you, and jingle bells to the really smart people at Carnegie-Mellon who figured this out — professors David Andersen and Hui Zhang and graduate students Vyas Sekar, Dan Wendlandt, George Nychis and Xin Zhang. See The Science of Santa.

This posting is written by Computious^® – The Everyday Sage of the Digital Age! – sister to MeiMei, a friend of DotComplicated, and Serge deFault.  Other friends include Sweet & Sour the Pig, C.C the Cat, PingPong the Panda, and Elman the Elephant.  What a group of characters!

The Computious^® product line has fun, unique gift items at the easy-to-use site at www.computious.com. See the Holiday Specials!

                          
                                  © Computious - All rights reserved

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During the holiday season when we can have a lot to celebrate, I’m grateful to Tamara Chuang for her nice entry today about me in her blog, The Gadgetress. It even shows my little sister, MeiMei, in a sketch called “The e-thinker” and another one showing my friend Serge deFault giving me computer advice. This all started when my blog named Tamara one of the Top Girl Geeks because of her blog and her column in the Orange County Register.

Tamara says she doesn't consider herself worthy of being called a "geek," but she knows more than Marie, my creator, who relies a lot on the wonderful geeks and experts in her life!

Happy Holidays to one and all, geeks, non-geeks, and aspiring geeks!  Here's a copy of the Gadgetress write-up:

This posting is written by Computious^® – The Everyday Sage of the Digital Age! – sister to MeiMei, a friend of DotComplicated and Serge deFault.  Other friends include Sweet & Sour the Pig, C.C the Cat, PingPong the Panda, and Elman the Elephant.  What a group of characters!

The Computious^® product line has fun, unique gift items at the easy-to-use site www.computious.com. See the Holiday Specials!

                                 © Computious - All rights reserved  

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MeiMei:

I know it’s almost two months past Halloween, but since I’m writing about something to do with tech today, I wanted to show off my “digital Halloween” costume as a computer mouse and mouse pad!

I love to sing and make up my own songs, and I found an easy and fun (and free!) way to create my own music.  It’s just like playing the piano, but I do it on the Internet with the Girls Scouts’ “Girls Go Tech” website. Wow!

I also like numbers, so it’s really great that it shows how different ways of putting “zeroes” and “ones” together make different tones.  It’s almost magic!  I heard my teacher say that math and music are alike in important ways, and I can learn more about that another time. Thank you Girls Go Tech!  Now it’s time to compose some music – just click here. You need to have Adobe Flash Player 5, but you can get that for free online, if you don’t have it.

This posting is written by MeiMei, sister to Computious^® – The Everyday Sage of the Digital Age! — and a friend of DotComplicated and Serge deFault.  Other friends include Sweet & Sour the Pig, C.C the Cat, PingPong the Panda, and Elman the Elephant.  What a group of characters!

The Computious^® product line has fun, unique gift items at the easy-to-use site www.computious.com. See the Holiday Specials!

                                                               © Computious - All rights reserved 

Filed under Entertainment, Females/Girls, Helpful Information, Music, Shopping & Gifts, Technology by MeiMei | 1 comment

 
Sweet & Sour the Pig:

PingPong mentioned me in yesterday’s entry because she knew Computious, Serge, and DotComplicated were taking me to see the new movie "Charlotte’s Web," one of my all-time favorite “pig tales” by E.B. White.

I thought this was an excellent movie with stars like Dakota Fanning, playing Fern the sweet farm girl who saves poor Wilbur the piglet, and with the voices of big celebrities, including Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey, Robert Redford, and John Cleese.

This story is emotional for someone like me, since Computious saved me from being part of a sweet & sour dinner delicacy when I was younger.  Although I’ve been scared of spiders all of my life, I wasn’t during the movie — Julia Roberts’ voice is Charlotte the spider’s, and her voice is kind.

Serge likes Dakota Fanning, and I think he may have a little crush on her.  He was really impressed, though, with technical parts of the movie, as the mouth and lip motions of all the animals perfectly matched the words and their sounds.

Computious likes Dakota because in real life she seems not only like a lot of fun, but she’s philosophical, too.  Dakota said that the movie “is about the meaning of life.”  Wow! DotComplicated said she likes Dakota because "she seems nice and not stuck-up." 

Of course, the happy ending made my eyes water and I think "Charlotte’s Web" should win an Oscar (not an Oscar Mayer^®!) … so five pigtail wags!

This posting is written by Sweet & Sour the Pig , a friend of Computious^®  – The Everyday Sage of the Digital Age!  Other friends include DotComplicated, Serge deFault, MeiMei, Sweet & Sour the Pig, C.C the Cat, PingPong the Panda, and Elman the Elephant.. What a group of characters!

The Computious^® product line has fun, unique gift items at the easy-to-use site www.computious.com. See the Holiday Specials!

                                © Computious - All rights reserved

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Readers say I overlooked “regular bears” in my earlier posting The Best Websites from the Viewpoint of a Panda Bear!  I’m PingPong the Panda and today I’ll introduce you to sites that are favorites of bears all over the world.

Travel . . .

I want to visit Wisconsin’s Black Bear Lodge and its Bear’s Den with a full bar (I hope they have eucalyptus leaves for a snack!), pool table, arcade games, darts (be careful!), foosball, a guest Internet station and Wi-Fi too. Then there’s Bear Creek Mountain Club ("Nestled in the Green Mountains of Vermont”) for skiing. I wonder – what is there to do in Bear Delaware and Big Bear Lake in California and Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan?  And I must climb Bear Mountain, in Connecticut and visit Yogi Bear's Jellystone Park Camp Resort in Massachusetts. I can’t miss the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Australia because I like their motto so much: “The earth is not only for humans.” I can’t wait to order my plane tickets!

Investors And Bears . . .

Read what AuctionBytes.com, had to say about The Bear Stearns Internet Roundtable. Oh! What a great name for a meeting! Also, two of their clients – Alcatel and Lucent – are doing financial things that are so complicated that confused people can call a hotline for help, 877-696-BEAR. (It's toll-free!). Worried about the stock market? Read what Chief Bear “Grizzly” has to say at Bear Market Central. Forbes magazine included “Grizzly” in their Best of the Web listing. Hooray! (Hint to Editors: We want to be listed in Best of the Web someday!)

Sports Bears . . .

I heard people say in Chicago, “How about them Bears?” Do people in Kansas City say, “How about those Missouri State Bears?” Basketball fans as far away as China know about the University of Alberta’s Golden Bears! And let’s not forget the Memphis Grizzlies and Baylor Bears. Hockey has the Hershey Bears (chocolate-yum, yum!) and Knoxville the Ice Bears (brrrr). Lots of baseball teams carry the name. There’s the Newark Bears, (where you can see a big bear with kids, but it’s really a human inside a costume pretending to be a bear), Yakima Bears, and Brown University goes so far as to name its site brownbears.com!

Bears & Kids  . . .

Every day people In Pittsburgh create “backyard adventures” by making playground sets, swings and other fun stuff for kids. Check out B.E.A.R. of Pennsylvania. Yea!

Technologies . . .

Some people named their network integration company Bear Technologies Corporation. They say, " Not only do we take care of all of your needs inside your router, we also take care of all of your needs outside your router." How smart are they! So are the people at Smart Bear Software in Texas, who work with Cisco Systems. And let’s not forget Bear River in Oakland, Calif., whose people are in enterprise mobile computing. (I don’t know what that means, but maybe Computious or Serge deFault can tell me!)

Bears in History . . .

Wally the Bear used to promote Kellogg's Honey Smacks — the "honey sweetened puffs of wheat" cereal. You can see a picture of him at Topher's Breakfast Cereal Character Guide. Long live Wally!

Educational Stuff . . .

For information about Black Bears, see Bear Country USA and American Black Bear. For bears who live in snow and ice, see Creature Feature at the National Geographic.

Not Really a Real Bear . . .

Humans created something they named Teddy Bear. If you want to know the history of teddy bears, see Wikipedia’s stuffed toy bear article.

I know I've been writing a lot recently . . . 

Computious came across an article in a British newpaper about a study that said girls talk almost 3 times as much as boys – about 13 thousand more words per day!  She said it wasn't true for all the girls and boys she knew, but it was fun to read and think about.  In my case it seems to be true, but I don't want to a little "hog" and not let my friends get their words in.  Speaking of hogs, I'd like to hear from my friend Sweet & Sour the Pig soon.  I know people like him, because a lady in the hospital in Maryland received a Get Well card with Sweet & Sour on it, and she loved it so much that she wrote Computious and told her how much Sweet & Sour brightened her day!

This posting is written by PingPong the Panda, a friend of Computious^®  – The Everyday Sage of the Digital Age!  Other friends include DotComplicated, Serge deFault, MeiMei, Sweet & Sour the Pig, C.C the Cat, PingPong the Panda, and Elman the Elephant.. What a group of characters!

The Computious^® product line has fun, unique gift items at the easy-to-use site www.computious.com. See the Holiday Specials!

                             © Computious - All rights reserved 

Filed under Entertainment, Females/Girls, Helpful Information, Shopping & Gifts by PingPong the Panda | 1 comment

 
I found a really fun online puzzle at Girls Inc. about how different cultures celebrate holidays this time of year. Hanukkah starts tonight and one of the puzzle clues is about it. They give gifts for eight days in a row!  Do you know why?  Wikipedia can tell you.

I like Girls Inc. because their slogan is “Inspiring All Girls to be Strong, Smart and Bold.”

This posting is written by Computious – The Everyday Sage of the Digital Age!  – who is big sister of MeiMei and friend of DotComplicated and Serge deFault. Other friends include Sweet & Sour the Pig, C.C the Cat, PingPong the Panda, and Elman the Elephant. What a group of characters!

The Computious^®  product line has fun, unique gift items at the easy-to-use site www.computious.com.   See the Holiday Specials!

                                © Computious - All rights reserved 

Filed under Entertainment, Females/Girls, Helpful Information, Shopping & Gifts by Computious | 1 comment

PingPong Writes:
I’m all excited to find out about the 2007 Beauty and Brains Pageant^® taking place next summer in Hollywood. The pageant winner will receive a scholarship worth ten thousand dollars! And there will be first and second-place scholarships, too.

The prize I’d love to win is the six-week workshop on breaking into commercials. I really want to do commercials for the Humane Society, so I’d love to win that workshop! I think I probably need to lose a little weight, but there’s no swimsuit contest! The four areas we're being judged on are: Interview, Business Attire, Evening Gowns, and Community Service. And the final will be held at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences! I wonder who the keynote speaker will be, because at the most recent event given by the same sponsor — Institute for Education, Research, and Scholarships (IFERS) – it was Quincy Jones.

Computious warned me that I may not be old enough to apply. But my mother told me I’m beautiful inside and out, and that should be all that counts! If you want to learn more, visit here.

This posting is written by PingPong the Panda, a friend of Computious – The Everyday Sage of the Digital Age!  Other friends include DotComplicated, Serge deFault, MeiMei, Sweet & Sour the Pig, C.C the Cat, PingPong the Panda, and Elman the Elephant.  What a group of characters!

The Computious^® product line has fun, unique gift items at the easy-to-use site www.computious.com. See the Holiday Specials!

                            © Computious - All rights reserved

Filed under Entertainment, Females/Girls, Helpful Information, Shopping & Gifts by PingPong the Panda | 1 comment

I adore brainy people. If Albert Einstein were alive, we’d invite him over for dinner! I’m Computious, and I find myself irresistibly drawn to people like Lu Chao for his achievement as described in the story, below. Who needs an abacus with him around?

Chinese student breaks Guinness record by reciting 67,890 digits of pi

XI'AN, Nov. 27 (Xinhua) — A Chinese college student has set a new Guinness world record by reciting almost 68,000 digits of pi, or the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle.

Lu Chao, a 24-year-old graduate student in Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in Shaanxi Province, took 24 hours and 4 minutes to recite to the 67,890th decimal place of pi without an error.

He achieved his feat on Nov. 19th last year but was only recently confirmed to be the new record holder by the Guinness headquarters in Britain.

The previous Guinness world record was set by a Japanese who recited pi to the 42,195th decimal place in 1995.

"It was Zu Chongzhi, the ancient Chinese mathematician, who discovered the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, and Chinese should win the pi recitation contest," Lu said.

He started learning to recite pi in 2004 and spent more than 10 hours memorizing and practicing everyday during his summer college vacation last year.

Officials with Lu's university said he had a very good memory and needed only 10 minutes to memorize a 100-digit number.

Lu said he was writing a book to share his experience on improving memory. He has also started a memory training center with classmates.

Source: Xinhua Chinese Student Story and a big thanks to The Biz of Knowledge for highlighting this story.

This posting is by Computious^® – The Everyday Sage of the Digital Age! – big sister to MeiMei,  a friend of DotComplicated and Serge deFault. Other friends include Sweet & Sour the Pig, C.C the Cat, PingPong the Panda, and Elman the Elephant.  What a group of characters!

The Computious^®  product line has fun, unique gift items at the easy-to-use site www.computious.com.   See the Holiday Specials!  

                           © Computious - All rights reserved

Filed under Entertainment, Helpful Information, Shopping & Gifts by Computious | 1 comment