Who wants a pink iPhone? I do! I do!

You'd think that with all the leaps and bounds that Apple has taken that they'd have the common sense to make custom color iPhones...especially in pink and/or blue for the ladies! Don't they know that if you build it in pink, we will buy it? Sure, maybe it doesn't make any business sense, but you'd have to admit it would be pretty cool!

Yes, I am aware that there are thousands of neat-o colored cases that you can buy for the iPhone but...it's just not the same. I don't want a more protective yet super bulky casing, I like the iPhone for being a sleek and sexy beast...I only wish it were pink to match the rest of the million other pink and blue items I already have. So how does one go about making their standard iPhone a custom color? Well...there is the obvious, you could paint it, but again...it's just not the same.

I turned to ebay, my number one destination to find all things that you can't seem to find in stores (at least not in Canadian stores anyways, urgh) and sure enough my search of "pink iPhone back" came up with the solution I was looking for! Oh ebay, how I love you. It turns out most people refer to this backing as the "housing" and the chrome frame as the "bezel". So I ordered this pink housing kit and of course...decided to attempt this iPhone color surgery myself.

I'm sure there are places in your city that will do iPhone repairs and may do housing swaps, but the one place in Calgary that does repairs...refused to swap out the housing just for cosmetic reasons (another reason why I did this myself!). Bah. After a lot of research when my pink housing arrived, I ended up using this YouTube video as my main resource in taking apart my iPhone http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVKjCi35GGk. How did I put it back together you ask? I seriously just performed the steps in the video backwards which did take a lengthy amount of time to put back together.

I would like to add a note that you simply cannot just "pop off" the housing and do a simple swap, the way Apple designed the iPhone is that all of the components (battery, wiring, screws, etc.) are attached directly onto that housing and you must "gut" your ENTIRE iPhone in order to do the switch. Here's the process in a nutshell:

Unscrew 2 screws at bottom of phone, pop off screen CAREFULLY, open iPhone, unhinge 7 connector straps, unscrew main screws, pop out motherboard, unscrew more screws, pop out speakers, unscrew more screws, pop out vibrating unit, unscrew more screws, pop out camera, pop out battery, unscrew a million other screws, pop out volume button, headset jack/antenna, vibrate toggle button, power button, camera lens, pop off bezel frame from original housing, glue together the new housing and bezel, wait to dry, start screwing in screws to the new housing and do everything I just did in reverse to put it back together.

OI. Once you actually know what you're doing, it takes about 15 minutes to disassemble your iPhone...the tricky part is putting it back together and has taken me approximately 3 hours on both occasions.

The result? A sweet customized iPhone that virtually nobody else has...and all the bragging rights you can handle ;)

REVIEW: Clinique Brush-on Cream Liner

Deep black eyeliner? Check.

No smudging or raccoon eyes? Check.

Long-lasting & smudge-proof. Check.

Pure awesomeness? Double-check.

In my quest (I seem to have a lot of these I know) to find the perfect eyeliner I've come across many varieties of less-than-perfect eyeliners. For some reason, no pencil will stay precisely lined on my eyes (I line my upper AND lower), the bottom line always ends up smudging or bleeding just a little, yet enough to warrant people commenting "are you tired? You look tired."

I like liquid eyeliners about the same as pencils, instead of smudging, they end up flaking off instead, the lesser of two evils? I think not. So here comes along this "cream" eyeliner promising to do all these fabulous things like being long-lasting and waterproof, but does it live up to all its hype? I vote YES!

I've been able to test this eyeliner in many different environments and situations, and this eyeliner definitely exceeded my expectations in all cases.

Test #1: Hot & Humid Hawaii: During my getaway to Hawaii, this product was the only eyeliner I brought along to line and define my eyes, the hottest day must have hit 30 C, popping in and out of the shade sweating like a pig (wait, do pigs actually sweat?), this eyeliner didn't budge, smudge nor turn me into a raccoon.

Test #2: Swimming (chlorinated water & ocean water): I also ended up swimming in the pool as well as ocean and I'm proud to announce that my eyeliner stay put! Except for when I reached up with my hand and viciously rubbed my eye since it was irritated from the salt water, that action proved to be too much for the eyeliner. While much of the eyeliner was still intact, it did end up smudging around, and when I tried to wipe off the smudged part...I only ended up smudging it more!

Test #3: Snowboarding: I simply can't go snowboarding with absolutely no makeup on, are you insane!? I end up dusting a light coat of foundation on my skin and applying eyeliner. With all my pencil liners and liquid liners, by the end of the day it looks like there really wasn't even a point in lining my eyes, smudging or flaking everywhere, all my hard work was for nothing. Let's see how this cream liner works...after a full day of riding the hill, sweating, and being pelted in the face by wind and snow, this cream liner proved to be a great tool in my makeup arsenel. Stay put the entire time :)

Test #4: The Cry Test: Oh woe is me! I sat through some very teary movies and while I ended up crying and my friends left me for potentially causing a scene, my eyeliner sure stay put the whole time! So long as you aren't rubbing your eyes or disturbing the eyeliner in ways it was not meant to be disturbed, this eyeliner is definitely waterproof in my opinion.

So there you have it folks, tried and tested in the most common situations you'll run into, and 4 out 4 situations, I rate this product as a definite 5!

Just for the record, the only other cream liner/gel liner I've tried is MAC's Fluidline and while I did enjoy that at the time, it doesn't stand up to my Clinique Cream Liner. I also found that MACs Fluidline started to dry out rather quickly, within about a month I had only used 1/4 of the pot and the rest of the product was completely dried out, ugh. In comparison, I'm on my 5th pot of Clinique and have not had a problem with it drying out.

Anyways, this post is getting lengthy so all I have left to say is that I picked this liner up for about $17 CDN and it even comes with its own little eyeliner brush, which, I must say, is not your best bet for lining your eyes with, but it's also not an awful brush if you don't have anything else...I've seen worse free brushes people.

Happy shopping!

NES Coffee Table (and it doubles as a working controller!)

I know what you’re thinking…how does a NES Table have to do with anything health or beauty related? Well…it doesn’t! This is a post more to help inspire people than it is about reviewing beauty products. Anyways, for those of you who don’t know what the NES system is, it stands for Nintendo Entertainment System, the first gaming system that Nintendo came out with (this is also the system where the famous “up, up , down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, start” originated from!).

So here’s the story, one day a few years ago I was bored, so bored that I ventured onto YouTube and stumbled across this video of what appeared to be a giant NES controller, my inner-geek was intrigued and proceeded to click on the video…it was love at first sight and I knew I had to have one! The object I fell in love with was indeed, a giant NES controller that doubled as a coffee table…pure genius. It turns out that Kyle, the creator of this piece of art, had blogged about building it with almost step-by-step instructions. I visited his website, put together my own “how to” guide and voila…3 large boards of mdf and 4 months later, my masterpiece was finished! My husband is a big gaming geek and his 25th birthday was quickly approaching, so I decided to dive head first into this project and give it to him as his quarter-of-a-century birthday gift! The only wood-working experience I’ve had was in 8th grade building one of those little dragster cars, so I have barely any experience but I managed to pull it off. Bought some tools (just a basic jigsaw and hole saw and a couple of bits) and away I went!

If I can do this, pretty much anyone can build this sucker. The hardest part was actually piecing together the circuit board for the controller so that the table would actually function as a separate controller, that was a small nightmare in itself but again folks, it can be done! For detailed instructions, check out Kyle Downes’ blog here http://ultra-awesome.blogspot.com/. Below are some pics of the table in different pieces. If this post or my video inspired you to do something creative I’d love to hear about it!

Happy creating!

Welcome (me) Back!

Yowsa it's been awhile since I was on here. And while I doubt that anyone actually followed this blog, I've decided to give it a go at reviving it! We'll see how long this lasts ;)

And as such, I'm going to be doing my best to catch-up on all the YouTube videos I've made and edit them into blog form before posting anything new on here. What's the point you ask? Why would people want to read about my randomness when they can just watch it? Simple, if you happen to be surfing this at work, don't you find it much easier to read this text rather than having to slap on a pair of earbuds (to listen to my video of course) and pretend that you're listening to riveting articles about finance, or world news? Bingo, case in point my friends.

It's not that my life is entirely that interesting, but every so often a fun tidbit comes up that I feel like sharing with the world! Also, in case I miss reviewing something in a video I can simply update in my blog instead of re-filming, etc. So purely selfish reasons I must say!

Anyways, on to the good stuff in the coming days, be patient with me!