…lotsa coffee, chocolate and love
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Okay happy readers Beck’s Cafe has just upgraded to WordPress 3.0
It took five minutes, including plug-ins…holy cow!
This should be awesomely fun perking up fresh posts…thank you all for reading by the way. I really appreciate it!
Click over to this link to learn about the awesome wonderfulness that is WordPress 3.0
C O D E I S P O E T R Y
On this Memorial Day, we, the barista’s and writers and IT folks, want to say thanks to the Men and Women who have served in our armed forces to keep the United States of America free. We couldn’t have Beck’s Cafe without their sacrifice. Thank you.
Women In Military Service to America Memorial
Military.com’s coverage of Memorial Day
TAVA, Transgender American Veterans Association
Tags: memorial day
Well Beck’s Cafe is back online at beckscafe.com thanks to the ever vigilant team at A Small Orange, our server host provider. While Beck’s Cafe did not suffer a DOS (denial of service) attack we do know something wicked was afoot.
On May 17th we went to open the door here at beckscafe.com and then a sentence in Chinese Kanji characters showed. It was one line. I thought that was odd but didn’t give it a second thought and tried my site again, that’s when this message came up:
Your connection to this server has been blocked in this server’s firewall
After a few tries I emailed the A Small Orange team and here we are, back in business after a couple of days. Phew! Thanks everyone for your patience! 
Beck’s Cafe welcome our freshest Twitter follower “Stuff Queer People Need to Know” from the great state of Ohio! Reporter, curator, editor and one woman band Jamie’s blog is very well written and gives you the scoop on what is happening in Ohio and around the country. Her material is the kind of thing mainstream media doesn’t generally carry because they don’t have space, time or it won’t sell advertising for them. Hey, she even covered Crossport which is really cool to see! So we’ll be grabbing a cup o’ java from the barista’s here at Beck’s Cafe to check her out and we’d recommend our readers do so too!
By the by, Ohio is also the birthplace of Pink Essence TG social network. We’ll be covering them in a future post and why, if you are a trans-person, you might not want to be on Facebook and might want to consider Pink Essence and (for everyone) Diaspora instead.
Tags: bloggers, ohio, queer, Social Justice
I heard this song on Slacker Radio’s Classic Jazz Channel last week and nearly fell off my chair laughing. It’s the song Powerhouse composed by Raymond Scott…it’s really classic jazz that was so good and so goofy it HAD to go into Cartoons!
Powerhouse Song: Done by a harmonica band; amazing skill!
We had so much fun and learned so much at First Event 2010. About ourselves and about each other. I hugged till my arms hurt, smiled till my cheeks cramped, and loved the pink cloud and blue bedrock of our community. So many highlights it’s hard to process them all. But now that the party is over and we all get back to other priorities a let down can sometimes happen. This is true particularly if you’re newly out of the closet and if First Event was your first or among your first public venues.
You might get bummed as the days progress this week. So here are some tips others have found that can help make life a little less gray.
(1) Look: Did you get a photo of yourself at FE10? Not a glam photo per se, just any photo while you were presenting as you. Look at yourself. It’s not narcissistic it’s like looking at a mirror. Sometimes, when our inside and outsides don’t match and your feeling dysphoric, looking at a photo of yourself can be a nice reminder that who you are inside is who you are outside. This can be a real help for you to get your feet on the ground.
(2) Chat: Friends. You need ‘em and you need to talk with them. Rekindling the memories can be extremely helpful to laugh and get life back on the lighter side when you feel blue as you get further away from your fun and meaningful time at First Event. So chat with your friends DO NOT go back into a shell or into your closet. This is not healthy for you. Virtually, you can chat at TCNE’s Yahoo Group or another good place is at Pink Essence on their terrific chat line. The Transgendered Planet is another good one. These are very safe spaces. Talk on the phone with someone you exchanged phone numbers with. Process your feelings! You need it.
(3) Plan: Your next time out. That’s right. You need to get out and see people. There are many transgender conferences both small and large throughout the U.S. TCNE’s “TG Conference List” is updated monthly for you to find a conference close to you. And there is likely a support group near you in your own city or town or within an hour or two so you can go out and feel safe and not exposed. Tiffany Club, the sponsors of First Event, would welcome you if you can make it to their offices in Waltham, MA. But if they are too far away, IFGE is a great resource to find such places and TCNE has a list as well.
(4) Give: Give back; that’s right, even if it was your first time out you can give back to move forward causes that effect others. And in doing so you give yourself a big emotional boost, banish those blues and help others. What a triple play! There are many transgender rights actions happening all around us, from the national ENDA bill to Massachusetts Transgender Civil Rights Bill (H.1728/S1687). There are many womens issues you could involve yourself in as well, from helping those who are the victims of domestic violence, to womens health issues, to women in shelters (many times with their children). Finally, are there any other trans-persons near you who are homeless or out of a job or who knows what? Reach out to them in some way to help them out. We may not always agree with each other, but we do need to support each other.
This isn’t fantasy, it’s your life..so live it, have fun and if you get the blues, remember to LOOK – CHAT – PLAN – GIVE!
Today is day two of First Event Transgender Conference! I’ll be there today and Saturday and hope to meet some of our readers, friends, frenemies and other assorted cast of characters. By way of disclaimer, I’ve been on the planning committee for First Event for the past three years and this year I’m in an advisory role/webmistress. I might actually get to see a few workshops over the next two days 
And, for those of you interested in this topic, at 11Am I’ll be speaking, along with Gunner Scott, Michelle Madison and Paula Howard on Transgender Rights on a panel called, “The Unlikely Activist”.
Also, if you are not going to the Fashion Show, come join me, Arjay, Michelle, Nancy, Paula, Jamie, and a host of others for an informal community dinner in the Marriott’s Restaurant! We’d love to have you at our table.
Well dear readers the time has come for which you’ve all been waiting, with bated breath no doubt! Well wait no more for Beck’s Cafe is the proud recipient of …….
Many sincere thanks to Staci Lana at Femulate for nominating us!
There are a few rules of course that come with our award, first, yours truly, Chief Barrista, has to:
And so with that we’ll take our new found awardism forward to more blogging, writing and mocha-coffee drinking
Well we haven’t been around much since Beck’s Cafe got hacked. Someone came in via our ATOM feed, nabbed our password apparently and shut us down for a bit. Big KUDOS to my host provider A Small Orange though! They suspended my account to keep the other servers safe, then let me know right away that I had a problem I had to deal with. They worked around my time needs and together we got it done!
So, now to perk some fresh post including an award Beck’s Cafe was honored with to start 2010! We were mentioned in Spirit Magazine back in 2007 as one of Boston’s Blogs To Read but this recent award is very special. Look for our next post to learn why
If anyone has upgraded to WordPress 2.9 and experiencing the following weird behavior:
Then you likely have one of these three errors:
There’s three patches that can be easily applied to fix your hair pulling issues in a jiffy. You can find them over at Semi-Logical under the post: WP 2.9 three bugs, and how to fix them.
You may also find fixes at this wordpress.org/forums support post. Ther are three or more pages of discussions and justifiable complaints but the fixes are there: 2.9 Schedule Posts “missed”
The errors were frustrating, no question about that. But, the wordpress community responded amazingly. The problem happened and in 24 hours there was a fix. Here at Beck’s Cafe we should have waited a bit till WP 2.9.1 to upgrade but we upgraded the cafe to 2.9; lesson learned on first run software. WordPress is open source software, free to download, has a great support community and rocks as a CMS for developing web sites and for blogs. But, as open source, sometimes things get through the development community that shouldn’t. None-the-less, it’s a testimony to the commitment by the wordpress community that things have been tidied up as fast as they have. Now, I definitely need a second cup of coffee
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