In honor of Trayvon Martin…

This post will be short. That’s because there’s no need to draw it out.

In honor of Trayvon Martin, many people co-opted his images to use as their social media avatars or to write articles in outrage against his senseless killing.

I’m sure some folks actually paid a licensing fee to the Associated Press or Getty Images or some other such photo provider to use Trayvon Martin’s image for their own purposes.

I’m also confident that many people in the social media sphere did not.

“We showed that we supported his family by using his image, so what’s the big deal,” someone might ask.

This is the point…

They may certainly exist, but I personally have yet to see one social media account user change his/her avatar to George Zimmerman’s image, and Zimmerman was able to garner over $200,000 in donations for his legal defense.

Trayvon Martin’s father, after some hesitation, finally admitted to Tom Joyner on The Tom Joyner Morning Show, that Trayvon Martin’s family was struggling to pay the expenses for a decent burial for their son.

So this is my question…

What’s wrong with this picture?

 

Many thanks to Tom Joyner for offering the family financial assistance.

Please save my life!

This was the subject of an email I received from an obvious scammer.

Of course I didn’t open it, but I thought to myself, “If you’re that desperate, why would you be depending on me to see and open your email to save your life?”

Since this person isn’t in my contacts, then it was a better-than-good chance that this email would end up in my junk mail folder, which it did, so how seriously could I take the request?

These email scams are outrageous and sad.

Outrageous because I have to wonder who would even buy into this nonsense.

Sad because they wouldn’t keep attempting to breach people’s trust if they hadn’t been successful with other people in the past.

Sigh.

You’re single because you’re too intelligent.

For real, y’all. A dude said that to me. No joke.

I wanted to be offended, but I hate to admit I think it has some merit.

More than once I’ve met men and women in relationships—girlfriend/boyfriend or married—and thought to myself, “Why is he with her? She doesn’t seem like she challenges him intellectually.”

These are men who seem to be at the top of their game, and they have these dull but “nice” and pretty women who stand or sit beside them with nothing meaningful to add to any conversation. I’d hate to say these women are unintelligent, though. Maybe they’re just intellectually lazy; not wanting to dip into their intelligence until they think have to.

I’ve seen shows where women get dumped by their husbands and have to start a new life for themselves, by themselves with or without children, and then they discover that they really could make it on their own all along, because they’ve always had in them what they needed to be self-sufficient, but they didn’t know it because they were raised to think or they learned to think that they needed a man to define them, take care of them, breathe for them. [exhale]

Many apologies to the men who want trophy wives, but I’m not the one.

I’ve had many men in my lifetime tell me I’m beautiful, and I appreciate that and it truly makes me feel awesome, but I’m not dumbing myself down to get a man.

He’ll just be disappointed when the real me comes out, anyway, so why throw up shade in the beginning only to have the veil fall in the end?

It’s always interesting to me when I meet a man who says, “I don’t understand why you’re single. You seem to have so much going for yourself,” and we have an awesome conversation, bouncing ideas and perspectives back and forth, and then dude simply fades into the woodwork, even though he can’t understand why I’m single. Haha.

The dude who told me that I’m single because I’m too intelligent said that men don’t want women who are more intelligent than them because a more intelligent woman may make him feel inadequate in his own intelligence.

Boy, please! That has nothing to do with intelligence. That’s insecurity.

So I tell you what…

If my choice is between an insecure man who wants me to dumb myself down so his self-esteem doesn’t take a hit and being single, I’ll take single for $1,000, Alex.

I don’t believe every man suffers from this affliction, so I’ll wait patiently for the guy to surface who sees my intelligence as an asset not a liability. He’s out there. I know it.

I love my HTC EVO, but…

…actually there’s no but. 🙂

When I first saw that HTC came out with the HTC EVO Shift, I was like, “Dang it! I knew it was going to happen! I knew they were going to come out with an EVO with a physical keyboard!”

They did it, but (ah… there’s the but) they didn’t do it as good as the EVO… Sr.?, if you want my opinion.

Checking out the features of the Shift against the Sr. leads me to believe I still have the better EVO.

What you gain with the Shift:

  • physical QWERTY keyboard
  • chat-style messaging
  • Web browsing with Flash*

What you lose with the Shift:

  • the 4.3″ screen (3.6″ on the Shift)
  • dual cameras (there’s only one 5.0MP (not 8.0MP) camera on the back of the Shift)
  • 1GHz Snapdragon processor
  • HDMI slot
  • 0.1oz in weight :mrgreen: well, it’s true!

* I’m not sure why the comparison shows that the Sr. doesn’t have web browsing with Flash. I can see all Flash components just fine when I browse the web. Someone let me know if I’m missing something, please.

Turning the Shift on its side does allow the Home icons to shift to landscape, which doesn’t happen on the Sr., so that’s something else you again with the Shift.

However, I’m cool with my Home icons not shifting in order to keep my 4.3″ screen (the main reason I wanted the EVO Sr.), my dual cameras and my 1GHz Snapdragon processor. So…

I still love my HTC EVO!!!

Will the real Faydra Deon please stand up?

So a few nights ago, on Twitter, I did a search on my name: Faydra Deon.

I have several Twitter accounts, and I couldn’t remember the exact letters I used for a particular handle. Since I always use Faydra Deon as my actual name, I knew I could find the account that way.

Lo and behold, to my utter amazement, I found an account with the handle @sepesyru using my name, avatar and bio.

This is so not one of my accounts! I wasn’t as angry about this person impersonating me as I was about the content of the timeline. It’s nothing but affiliate links; links to try to get people to buy crap!

Anyone who’s been following me for a good, long while knows that I’m always tweeting that I don’t tweet affiliate links. I’m very adamant about this. I hate those things!

As much as I tweet and autotweet, I don’t try to trick people into buying things so I can make money off them. Maybe I should, but that’s just not in my DNA. I have a “truth in tweeting” personal policy.

You know what, though? Had this account not used my real first and middle name, I still wouldn’t know they existed. It was that they were so bold as to use all my information that led me to it.

I reported the account to Twitter, and I’m grateful to all the folks who have blocked the account and reported it as spam. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes to get the account closed.

I reported it on 06 January 2011.

I’ll let you know when it gets closed.

AN ASIDE: I now wonder if this is why there was a stint when I had people who would tweet me about sending out affiliate links. I was so annoyed by this and I’d go on a Twitter rant about how I don’t tweet affiliate links! If they were under the impression that bogus account was mine, then that’s why they were tweeting me about it. Hm. That troubles me.

I now have a Google Alert set up to notify me if/when “Faydra Deon” is mentioned anywhere on the web.