In celebration of hair, hair salons and bad hair days, the barrista’s at Beck’s Cafe proudly present, Hair Humor. All jokes courtesy of Hair Salon Humor at Becquet.com

MANY people hold down two jobs, so I wasn’t surprised when my hairdresser mentioned to me that he also worked part time at the racetrack. “That’s interesting,” I said. “What do you do?” As he finished styling my hair, he replied, “I groom horses.”

WHEN a new permanent turned out to be a disaster, I phoned my husband and issued a one-line warning: “Don’t say anything about my hair.” During dinner, we discussed the weather, his day at the office — anything but my hair. I began to feel uneasy. Finally, when we were washing the dishes, he said in a serious tone, “You’d better go now. My wife will be here any moment, and she wouldn’t like to find me with a strange woman.”

AS A reminder of my early morning appointment for a haircut, I left a note stating “hair today” next to the alarm clock. The resulting style was considerably shorter than usual, which didn’t please my husband at all. However, it wasn’t until the next morning that I realized just how unhappy he was with my new look. There, next to the alarm clock, my note now read: “hair today - gone tomorrow.”

MY MOTHER was telling her hairdresser about her bad luck with men, after having just broken off with her boyfriend of five years. “You think that’s bad,” the hairdresser responded, “I had a customer who just found out her boyfriend was married.” “You’re kidding!” my mother exclaimed. “How long did it take her to find out?” The hairdresser thought for a minute and began counting on her fingers. “About eight haircuts.”

And it does exactly that.

It’s a no hold barred look at:

• the angst of being a woman and wanting to be liberated and yet feeling intense guilt that she’s not the star hostess she perceived her mother always was.

• the choices women make to be in love and to have children and in how they do that and negotiate that. This will surprise you.

• the anger women feel deep down at how they are seen and even how they see themselves at work vs at home and how that effects them.

It’s a very good book to get a sense for how some women feel today about some very basic life issues and life choices as well. There are some short comings and that’s the point about this book being about “some” women and not all. Virtually all of the writers are just that, professional writers. So we don’t have stories from women who live on the farm and grew up in that community and what they think of life and their choices. We don’t necessarily have the views of women in poverty either. I’m sure there are works in that area for sure, but this is not necessarily one of them.

Overall the book is very good. You’ll learn aspects of women’s lives you didn’t know and many of which you’ll likely to be able to relate to. This is especially true if your a transgender women. Many times it’s the outward expressions that get focused on due to safety and acceptance factors. Sometimes something as basic as getting a job is predicated on if you pass or if you don’t. And let’s face it, having a job and paycheck beat living on the street any day. But it’s our hearts that matter most and from that springs your true life. And people can see that. I can assure you that if you read and think on the stories and lessons from reading “The Bitch in the House” your heart will be changed too.

You get sent a file via email. Could be at work. Could be at home. The file provides you the information you need but now you want to do something with that file or you want to use it in another program that let’s you work the way you want to (or perhaps need to). And what happens to you? Well your stuck. Stuck fiddling and diddling trying to make it work.

This my friends is what is known as a sticky wicket. You need the file so you keep fussing meanwhile the deadline to your project ticks on whilst you are amired in file format fuss. Not alota fun.

Well NOW there is a fun way to fix your function and that way is a service called Zamzar (and did we mention it’s free, we frugal techie’s love free…too bad the cheapskate Becki won’t give us free coffee for writing this column).

How it works is very simple. You upload a file to the service by clicking the browse button on step-1. That opens a little pop up box that lets you explore your hard disk on your computer for the right file. Click on your file and it uploads it. Then you choose what you want to convert the file to. There is a HUGE list. Once complete an email is sent you telling you that the file has been converted. This whole process, even for large files, is amazingly fast. This, my fine coffee swillers, is a service that’ll take away your headaches, not cause you more.

We tested it with PowerPoint files, Word files and PDF’s and it worked flawlessly converting from one file format to another with nary a hiccup. It was the way we like our software; allowing us to quickly grasp how to use it, made our lives easier not harder, and was reasonably priced (in this case free!).

So give Zamzar a try next time you need to convert some files.  It’s a quick and frugal way to easy your file conversion madness.

“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” (Dolly Parton)

“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.” (Ella Fitzgerald)

“I have alot of things to prove to myself. ONe is that I can live fearlessly”. (Oprah Winfrey)

“I think the day of selfishness is over the day of really working together has come, and we must learn to work together, all of us, regardless of race or creed or color”. (Eleanor Roosevelt)

One thing that was NOT very fun when we strolled in this morning though was the message we got upont trying to load a nice Happy New Years 2007 graphic:

Unable to create directory. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

We’d thought we’d solved that technical nuisance back last year. Apparently not. Either that or the move of the calendar to 2007 has confused our otherwise robust (if sometimes slow) data center.

THEN, insult to injury, we found that some of the links from site back back into Beck’s Cafe didn’t appear to work. So,attempting to see where the code might be broken we went to W3C, ran a validation test and *ouch* here’s the answer:

This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!

So we’ll be graphics and photo free for a bit, and a little clunky on internal Beck’s Cafe links from the site map whilst we figure out how to fix all this. Guess we’ll need more coffee!

Now onto our regularly scheduled program.