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This morning the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society experienced a devastating fire. In addition to their adoptions center, 15 cats were tragically lost. If you live in the area, please consider becoming a temporary foster home or volunteering your time at the cleanup efforts. Regardless of where you may live, you can make a financial contribution to help them rebuild and get back to the business of helping homeless animals.

Also please consider blogging, tweeting or Digging this article to help spread the word!

From the Examiner:

Following the fire early this morning at the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society that took the lives of 15 cats – all the dogs survived — and destroyed the shelter’s cat adoption center, the shelter is asking for the following help.
Monetary Donations: Any amount will help to pay vet bills and get the shelter up and running again. Hit any DONATE button on the website or mail donations to: BEBHS, 2700 9th St, Berkeley, CA 94710.
Foster Homes for dogs and cats: Please contact: foster@berkeleyhumane.org if you have temporary space for a dog or cat.
Volunteers: In the immediate future, the shelter will have major cleaning and repair tasks as well as animal care. Please contact: volunteer@berkeleyhumane.org if you can spare some time to help once the tasks are organized.

If you live in Marin, here’s another way to help

The Marin Humane Society announced it is going to donate a portion of the proceeds from its Paw Prints dog walk – scheduled for this Sunday, May 23 – to provide some assistance to the devastated shelter.
In an official announcement from MHS, Suzanne Golt, executive director said, “We are heartbroken to learn about the loss of destruction caused by the fire. Sunday’s Paw Prints dog walk offers the perfect opportunity for MHS and the Marin community to offer their support for our friends across the Bay.”

Paw Prints will take place from 9 am to Noon in Mill Valley. Pups and their people are invited to stroll along a one-mile course that begins and ends at scenic BayFront Dog Park, located at the end of Sycamore Avenue off Camino Alto. Agility demonstrations as well as vendors with fun stuff for canine companions will be available. The event fee is $25 for each registered dog.

Copyright © 2010 Jeanette DeHoff

I know that many people out there are ready to hang Facebook out to dry right next to other evil companies after their latest change, but I wish they would stop and think about it first. Not all ‘privacy changes’ are bad! Maybe it’s the tech geek in me; maybe it’s the marketing person in me; maybe it’s a bit of both.

Let’s say that the California Widget Company has a new advertising campaign on Facebook. They’re promoting their latest high-tech product, the Widgetizer3000. Through their Facebook affiliation they can poll the demographics and other profile information to look for things like ‘technology’ or ‘gadgets’ in your interests and if it finds it and you match their target demographics… BLAMO! You get an little ad on the side of your screen for the Widgetizer3000.

This is targeted marketing 101, folks. It isn’t new, it’s just the tools that are new. The same thing goes on in magazines (you don’t usually see an ad for toothpaste in a car magazine but you’ll probably see an oil ad) and newspapers (think about where the sports memorabilia ads are placed) and even billboards (compare ads in your Financial District to the ads in the suburbs).

Is there really all that much harm in others knowing what movies you like or what coffee shop you tend to frequent? Welcome to social living, folks. We asked for it and we got it. If you don’t want to participate, that’s cool too! Don’t share information like your address and phone number or your dog’s name on every website you visit. Practice common sense and guard your identity online just as you would offline.

If you want to know a little more in-depth about the back end stuff, PCWorld did a great article on how the new Likes and Connections work and what you can do to limit what information can be used.

Copyright © 2010 Jeanette DeHoff

I’m going to take a break from talking about social media today. I’m so proud of my latest home project that I had to share!

Before:

This was our sad, strained TV stand before. In addition to the TV, there is a computer and printer off to the side (for watching movies/shows online), our DVR/Cable box, the XBox360, router, cable modem and power strip loaded onto this poor thing. In the large oversized closet is a mishmash of my clothes/junk plus several unsorted boxes of stuff that never got unpacked after the move (2 years ago…).

Since we never use the downstairs formal living room, I decided to turn half of it into my home office, freeing up tons of space in the TV room mentioned above. Things snowballed from there and we decided to empty out the closet and make it into a media center for our multitudes of tech toys.

During:

I call this ‘during’ because it is far from complete. I still want to paint the inside a different color (likely a darker shade of whatever we end up painting the room itself), find a way to conceal the multitudes of cords, take out the cheap-o existing shelf and install a couple of dark wood floating shelves. However, things are far more spread out now and ventilated AND I was able to get the surround sound system hooked up finally. All in all, it’s fantastic so far! The TV room feels much bigger and while the new seating arrangements will take some getting used to, I think it will win us over in time.

Copyright © 2010 Jeanette DeHoff