Oh Blogs!

There is something so over about blogs, so completely passe, almost like scratching a diary entry into sandstone in Cuneiform.

I began blogging, truly, in January of 2005. Now eleven years later, this crazy thing still exists.

Why?

Why not stop?

I have been working on a book and a play for most of the last twelves months. It has been completely enjoyable. We moved up to the northern woods of Manhattan on the bank of that mighty river--something I highly recommend and settled in. This was followed by a huge breath of relief. We were living in midtown Manhattan, which is simply too much on the system for anyone with ears, especially over an avenue as well used and jackhammered as Eighth.

So in the past year, I have blogged less, because, you know, I have been writing other things.

I kind of thought it would be great to just let the blog fizzle out...but I sort of can't let it.

There are some things...that are just perfect for the blog format.  For example:

A two to ten paragraph essay on almost anything that you feel strongly about, that does not need a ton of research. You just have to be clear. Show a couple of sides of the problem. Then sum it up.

One to eight great pictures that really catches the day. Posting them on Facebook does not feel important enough.

A review of anything.

An old diary entry.

Information about an upcoming show of anyone's at all.


There are few places online where these things work as well. Sure, no one goes to blogs and surfs around any longer. You need to put up a link to each entry on other social sites where all the people are: Twitter and Facebook and...   But once a blog link is clicked on--nothing looks cleaner. It's a one page flyer. A one page leaflet. A one page picture book.

And I still like it.

Call me Grandpa for still creating these entries. The aliens who are reading them out in space do.

Get Their Maws Off Your Wall

If you need to keep certain people from seeing your posts on Facebook, just put them on your restricted list.

Don't want Mom to see you partying?

Don't want people of the opposite political spectrum shitting all over your celebratory posts about your favorite politicians or legislative breakthroughs?

Sick of the alums from your high school who think everything is cute or a reason to praise the owl gods?

Just restrict them. They will not see your posts unless you tag them.

Happy Days are Here Again.

https://www.facebook.com/help/206571136073851

Deanna and Me, Together Forever?

I have a secondary email account I use mostly for these three things:

This blog.

Uploading YouTubers.

Sending drafts of plays-books, etc. as a third level safety backup spot.

Somehow, someone by the name of Deanna Cummings, set up an appleID using that email address. She probably punched it in by mistake, realized it, and then moved on to another Apple ID that is useful to her.

However...once you create an AppleID, it is almost impossible to get rid of it.

So now, this Deanna and I, are connected and I keep getting messages that she has attempted to enter my Apple ID, etc.  But it isn't even my Apple ID.

Frustrating.

So, I did a search for someone named Deanna Cummings on Facebook, sent her a message to please delete her AppleID...however, she isn't even going to be able to do that, poor thing, because Apple doesn't delete AppleID's.

So now--I am connected to her forever?

Annoyance number 247 of the modern era.

Homeland: Haul Out your Ipads for SHO SYNC!

Friends,

Haul out your iPads and download the Sho Sync App and watch Homeland while your iPad interacts with it and asks you all sorts of questions and offers up all kinds of bonus goodies! Interactive television is here.
http://www.sho.com/sho/sho-sync/home

Why? You ask?

Because my hubby makes all this magic happen and it's really quite something. When he tells me about how it's done (uses similar technology as Shazam to hear what is happening and then knows exactly what to do from the sound of the show)...and how the material is all put together...and how the broadcast all happens from the ground, getting beamed up to a satellite and then brought to you by your cable or dish source...I mean, it's wild.

Of course, he does the content. He's no techie.  But really, now...how is it that this is all even possible?

I remember when cable television first came into existence. My best friend from high school, Bruce, got it. HBO. I was shocked. Shocked! A movie? A good one? In your HOUSE? My fave was When a Stranger Calls. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_a_Stranger_Calls_(1979_film)

Homeland premieres this Sunday...so go on!  Give it a whack!

Hunt the Wumpus: It's all Mainframes

Everything old is new again.

Right now, I am listening to some Brown noise (it's like white noise but at a lower frequency) on my computer. My pc is getting this stream from a server somewhere. I guess if I understood Al Gore's interwebs better I could figure out where that server is. I don't know.

But here I am, on earth, with a little noise going...and it comes from somewhere else. Some hard drive or thing or alien in another state.

During unit lunch in high school...that's what they called it because it started at 11:17 AM and went to 11:47 AM (approx)...the entire school was set free to eat. It was madness. My very close friend SS and I, at times, like others who were a bit bookish and preferred things calm, would escape to the science wing and log in to the mainframe computer. It was easy to do. There was a phone, the old kind with an ear part and a mouth part, black, and it was pushed into a black soft rubber suction cup holder and this phone received all its signals from Westchester County, I think Tarrytown, and instructed our terminal what to display.

It was displayed on a dot matrix printer. Yep. No screen. Just paper.

The game we played was called HUNT THE WUMPUS, which was some sort of geometric hunt through a dodecahedron (A polyhedron with 12 equal faces and 20 vertices) and by some process of elimination, you could figure out where this wumpus was hiding. There were rules about where it could move. The secret passageways from one face to another were defined by odd and even numbers or multiples of three, I don't remember exactly. SS often killed the Wumpus. Sometimes it got away. I was hopeless. To this day, I can barely find my car in a parking structure.

But it was a fun way to kill unit lunch (if not often, too, the Wumpus). And it was all done by mainframe.

The game was written in BASIC. You can read about it here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus

It was beyond thrilling to have a phone pushed into a strange device that allowed us to play this game, the dot-matrix white and green striped paper printing out our turns as we typed.

Of course, the difference with a mainframe and a pc is the mainframe does all the computing, too. But, really, it won't be long before you won't both downloading anything any longer.

And if you don't believe me, stand still long enough and the Wumpus will eat you.

Three Apps We'd Like to See

The first App we’d like to see is an obvious one. It’s called the “Warmer Warmer” App and it probably already exists or is in development so let’s see it on my big uncool Galaxy soon. Anytime you park your car (and stick a tracking label on it) or your kid (yeah, use another of the same ones from your tracking label pad) or punch in the needed address or have someone beam you where they are, you pick that for your app to follow and then it plays the game “Warmer Colder” with you.  Obviously more jubilant and frequent in its cheering “Warmer! Warmer!” as you get closer to your destination. And as soon as you veer from the path, “Colder” warns you coldly that you are not doing well. This way, no more maps or annoyances. Just warmer or colder.

I was walking West across the bottom floor of the South Wing of our romantic Port Authority bus station this evening, when an older man about fifteen feet in front of me heading straight toward me started to bob and weave. He did truly go into zombie movement. His feet gave out sideways as if a large hand had swept under him while a soft hand pulled his knees in together, folding them on top of each other. He fell, hit the ground hard, and began to bleed from his forehead (or ear?). Some money and coins fell out of his pockets. He had no control over any of his movement. I went to him.  First responder that I am. Others came over. I went looking for a cop while someone tried to call 911. I found no police out on the sidewalk. I came back in. The info booth had been informed. They called in a cop. The wait: probably only three minutes. He would survive.

But what we need?

An app that catches this guy’s seizure and injects, immediately, something into his system to counteract the seizure or at least blows up a lot of air bags in his clothing.

Right?

No one needs to fall that hard.

Side Note (or the main event): People were quickly concerned and helpful. It was sweet. The vulnerability of it all, watching someone’s body give out because of a brain situation and then slam the rock hard tile…well, the empathy was huge. One woman, with a strong foreign accent, was the one trying to get 911. They were asking her too many questions on the line and she didn’t really understand how to explain where she was. I said, “The South Street,” by mistake, instead of “The South Wing,” and she yelled, “South Street, South Street.”  Lawsy. But she was already fully doomed. My mistake sealed the deal. And here came the cops.

The 911 caller’s frustration, that they did not understand her, scared her. The police were calm and called an ambulance. The older fallen man said he was fine and wanted to go home. But the cops said, “You can refuse the ambulance once it comes. But we have to keep you here until it comes.”  The guy did need an ambulance. The blood was not spouting from his head. More like a small steady bleed.

The cops wanted us all to get away. Makes sense. So we left.

At the end, as I walked to the subway stair, a long haired man, young, about six and a half feet tall, sidled up to me and asked, “Did he have a seizure?”
I said, “Yeah. He was walking right toward me and started to seize and his feet went out and he went down hard.”

And he said, “Yeah. Yeah. I thought—”

And we both felt glad he was taken care of.

I preferred this guy’s calmness to any of the other emotionalism around the event.

There should be an app for the guy who fell so he doesn’t fall.

Another app we need is a “Don’t Even Start With Me” App.

Say you have a new career, gig, vacation touring group, volleyball team, band, marriage, or place of worship and someone close to you decides to cross a line. They want too much power or they are lying to you too much or they are trying to gaslight you or overthrow your position or diminish you in any way—you should be able to open up your “Don’t Even Start With Me” App and for just a few dollars added to your credit card, you can nip this bullshit in the bud. Once downloaded, account made, user name and password filled, and target defined, an anonymous goon delivers something disgusting to the personal residence or desk or hotel room of the offending party. There is no note. In fact, users must remain completely anonymous for this to work. There is just the satisfaction of knowing that you have sent something completely horrible to the person that will really upset them. It can never be traced back to you. In fact, it should have a Snapchat element built in so that all record of the transaction disappears. Your resentment will have found its true way out. You will be in charge, the place you always wanted to be.

You can even increase the frequency of these gifts of horrendosity if they don't get the message the first time, or as the need arises. Clam Puddings. Dead Cats loaded with Vermin. A controlled Tire Fire. A Ball of Hair with Broken Teeth in it.

What is fun, is, as their behavior gets worse, and your giving increases, the annoyer will know it’s you. But will never be certain. But you both know what's what. But you don’t talk about it because no one wants to break the anonymity because everyone loves using it so much and doesn't want to risk losing it.

These will all help.

Unsubscribe in 2014

I just spent an hour deleting crap-strewn emails in my inbox...because I hadn't been at my email, cleaning away, for the past six days...Thanksgiving and all.

We should not have to do that.

I hate to miss things. And all the garbage I get, I did at some point sign up for it. But now...slowly, I unsubscribe.

I think of all those years I lived before there were these interwebs coming at me. And I got so much more read. So much more written. So much more thought about. So much more time in my body and on the ground. Music. Etc.

Madness: Be gone.

I have to stand up to myself and be okay with missing stuff. Unsubscribing is the only way. My closets are next.

Harsh

My blog began eight years ago but it seems like just a few. I do not understand time, exactly. It has always been about "finishing" something for me. If I have to paint a room, then the time it takes to paint a room is the time it takes. And if a blog is a blog, then it just carries on and really has no end, so it feels always young to me.

In the meantime, of  course, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, etc. have grown up all around the blog world rendering most blogs, especially ones of general interest (like Open Trench) into bloated twitter entries.

However, I think carrying on is not a bad idea.

Trying to squeeze bigger ideas into Twitter is impossible. And so many Twitter entries are linked up to large articles. Facebook has become about a cat meowing, "Hang in there Baby, Friday's Coming," and other things cat-like

So the blog--with its awful name and its old time format--is the only thing that really can do what it does. For now.

It was more fun when no one else was public. It felt like you were daring, to put yourself out there to be heard. It also felt more personal. Plus, the written word still was the written word then. Blogs felt like shortish articles/opinion pieces/personal essays.

I blog on. I usually do not like articles that focus on the state and ways of any sort of journalism. However, I have been feeling odd about  my blog and sometimes it is best to clear the air.

To blog is human. To forgive a blogger, divine.

Need a Web Designer?

My Designer is the 3 F's and a C.

Fast, Fun, Fair and Creative.

And for a bonus---Sleek.

http://www.jeffstacy.com

My website, par example:

http://www.doncummings.net/

I recommend him highly. And when he has to update your site he doesn't hem and haw. He just does it.

Sure, there are all these do-it-yourself website apps.  But let someone who does it better than you do it.
Frees you up for other things. And you'll get to have fun with Jeff.

Al Gore's Interwebs: They really did take off.

Orange is the New Black is the New T.V.

I, like so many people who think lesbians are hot, love Orange is the New Black.

I do hope this show brings down the entire cable industry.

Why the hell should I be paying all this monthly money for all the sports that I don’t watch?

Cable T.V. is a tax on all of us so people can watch people manipulate a moving ball.

No interest.

Die, cable, die. It’s a wretched regional monopoly.

I look forward to the fun start-ups that become curators of content that is available online. So I start a company called, “My T.V.”  and you subscribe for, say, 9.99/month. I have you fill out a huge questionnaire or have you do a Pandora-like thumbs up or down and lo’ and behold, your channels are built.

Most everyone will end up having Showtime and HBO. And many of us will not have one single sports channel. Some people will have all those nature shows and some people will be full-blown Kardashian-channel watchers.

Give me my “My T.V.” now. Please.

I wish I could start this company—but my experience has been by the time I think of something, someone has already pulled together the venture capital and is working 150 hours a week to make it happen.  Pass me the remote…

You Know You Want Even More Social Media, Right?

http://www.pe.com/business/business-columns/ask-eydie-headlines/20130608-social-media-finding-other-sites-than-facebook.ece

Hungarians Speaking Chinese

The Common Good might be for everyone to be free to compete and grab as much as they can as their might and cleverness allows…

But this annoying wall between PC’s and Macs simply must stop.

I know, I know---I’m a philistine for pounding my hairy paws hard on the right click button of the mouse for my pc.  The Macs are sleeker. The whole experience a sort of gated community for sound and vision epicureans.   But I’m no high end aesthete, or am I? Not really. Kind of. But hell…I like it easy and cheap, too.

I was a mac fiend for many years.  But during the OS 9 into OS X era, when they partitioned between the two operating systems, I felt annoyingly bifurcated. I believe in LookBacks, forever. Plus, I had a lemon iMac that needed constant patching. It did not work well with my peripherals (or with my profiteroles) no matter how much gum and duct tape I applied.  So I walked (with the chiding of my easily-moseying-along-PC-clad- not-yet-husband).  I walked away from mac about ten or eleven years ago…  

Of course, it followed me everywhere. At jobs. As iPhones. I just shot this movie and you pretty much have to have a mac in post.  And I mean it. One needs all those QuickTime files to speak intelligently to the editor, composer, sound mixer, Jesus.

So this is what I did. I need to have my dailies easily accessible for constant viewing. But the official external hard drive is mac formatted, naturally, and large and precious and cannot be flying around and certainly cannot be plugged into a PC for fear of being completely reformatted. I bought a Seagate GoFlex that prides itself on being able to be read by Macs and PC’s.  One does stand in the aisles of Best Buy and one often mutters, “Yeah, right.”

But I had to give it a shot.  A 1 Terabite drive for 100 bucks that can be read by both formats?  YES!  Give me it!  Problems solved for maybe an eternity.

Home. Excitement. Plug and play you say?  No such luck.

The mac (my cousin/God Son is here with his mac, so we are rolling with that)---continued to see the Seagate as a read only. So you couldn’t write to it. Then, often, the hard drive wouldn’t mount---meaning, an icon for it would not show up. Though, if you went deep into utilities, you did see that it was there. Unplugging and plugging it in sometimes would pull up an icon. Using disk repair in utilities rendered it useful on the mac, but not on the pc. War!

After much reformatting…wiping it out, reloading the software onto the mac (its default really is PC), reloading the factory software onto the external drive, rinse, repeat, plug and plug again…until somehow, magically, both computers can read the drive…I was able to start my copying.

And it is working.

But there is no way of knowing why it didn’t work right away. There is the pain of the two systems attacking each other. And then, there’s the middle pain of the Seagate who promises so much, an easy bi-platform world—that totally did not work and had to be tinkered into reality to match what it advertised. Fuck Seagate and its lying boxes.

Blech.

I think the future is in buying a Mac and having it run windows, too.  This way, you get it all. (You can run windows on a mac. PC’s won’t run Mac OS at all.)

How are we feeling about a Chrome Operating system?   I might be all for it.  Blow up the dreaded PC/Mac war that has been going on forever. Haven’t we experienced enough of those two little ego-boys and their personal war?

Wintry Mix

I remembered the term. Wintry Mix. Well, I didn’t remember it. Adam, my husband, read it out loud from “the paper.” It’s sleet, snow, rain, all combined. It’s very fresh. People freak out about winter. All I think about is how much I love Iceland. How much I like clean air. I’m all for it. Plus, you know, you can’t become allergic to precipitation. Is it cold? Sure. But in about a month, all the flower shops will be filled with tulips and daffodils. I mean, if Holland can get into spring by the end of February and pass that tradition onto us and we can benefit, and we have, how much can you complain?

Use Safe Copy. Use it. It’s only fifty bucks a year. It backs up everything on your hard drive to an outside server. All your docs, music, pics, vids. It makes so much sense. Plus, it backs everything up in the same folders that you have. So it looks the same when you check it out online. And you can access the info from anything. Other computers, phone, pads of all stripes. I’ve been with this outfit for over a year and I love it. Effortless. Safe and amazing.

Safe Copy


Governor Brown and his bullet train from LA to SFO! Thank you! Come on now. Let’s do it! I want a bullet from LA to NY. Please? Could we please? I’d sit for the fifteen hours. Fly through Kansas at 250 miles per hour. Read some. Be thanking Allah I was on the solid ground instead of bumping through the thin air. Plus, the more we fly, the more we warm up the air, the more the air gets unstable, the bumpier the flights get. It’s a negative loop of pain. Get me off that hell tube. Get me on that train.

Henry Wolfe, my friend and talented musician, check out his music. He’s writing new songs all the time. Go to his sight. Download his songs. Buy the tunes online. You can do a search at the iTunes Store under his name. I especially love Buzzards. When it comes up on my iTunes cycle, I stop everything and only listen to that and do nothing else.

Henry Wolfe

I was making a reservation on the phone for a hotel today. I couldn’t tell if the person on the other end was at the hotel or a booking agent. I asked him to just tell me who he was. I was concerned because, you know, it was a random phone number and I could be handing over my credit card info to anyone. Plus, three different windows popped up for the same hotel in comparison. You know, that whole internet assault. So he tells me who he is. I could tell he was lying. Said he was with the hotel. I was annoyed that he was lying so I said I was going to call the hotel directly. I was cheerful and low key but I hung up. He called back and left me a message. He said, “Fuck you asshole. I’m watching you.” It was a threat. What small outfit was he the booking agent for? Expedia. Yes, Expedia, that little travel concern we’ve all heard of. I emailed Expedia to tell them what happened. I got a form letter apology within three hours. Onward. People are in distress these days. And Expedia, even, doesn’t care. Sad world. What next? I ask someone at Citibank to check on a fraud claim and they tell me to go fuck my mother?

Speaking of fucking your own mother…wouldn’t you have to actually get erect for that? What on earth would have had to have gone down in your sexual imprinting that made it so you could get an erection for such a journey?

I am doubling down on the piano and learning all the Gershwin Preludes. They are really beyond my level…but I am using whatever piano lesson techniques I have under my belt, my ease of reading music, along with my O.C.D. to repeat and repeat and repeat the fingering until it’s so in my hands, there’s no way I CAN’T play it. Interesting, playing an instrument. Great place to shove a lot of energy. Clears the mind. And it’s not really creative. It’s tasky. When you finally learn it and you add some feeling to it, that’s a creative thing. But more instinctual than anything else. I dig it. Plus, if you’re learning Gershwin, you can’t really say you are wasting your time.

I am doing so much career stuff right now that there’s little time for writing. (Coordinating. Selling. Yep, it’s like having a booth at the craft fair…except people don’t buy little things all day long. They wait forever and ever…and then finally, there’s one big sale.) Need to write more. I have to mix it up better.

Starting this horrendous habit of small pads with chicken scratch all over them all over my desk. Can apartment chickens be far behind?

If you really want to feel like you did when you were a kid…like all free and like it’s all new and fun, you just have to let go of everything. What made it so fun to be a kid was that you didn’t have a ton of experiences and a mountain of knowledge to weigh you down. You just lived. Of course, assuming you are an adult reading this, you can’t be irresponsible and chuck it all. You have to take care of things as an adult using experience and knowledge. Pretty much. And instinct. But any short or long periods you can steal for yourself to forget it all, you will find yourself laughing a lot and having a good time.

It’s January 20. Ground Hogs are getting nervous.

Kindle Fire Me Up

I did it. I ordered one. It came.

The thing about this Kindle Fire is it truly is the right size for lounging on the couch and reading a book, the newspaper, a magazine. They figured it out. No wonder it is selling so well.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is, it’s so new, the apps for it aren’t there yet. No good app for google mail. No good app for lots of things. But they’re coming. I assume. In the meantime, the web browser, which is okay, not great, gets most things done within the confines of its not so sturdy set up. Again, it will improve soon. You feel it coming.

But really, this thing is all about getting away from the desk, getting into a comfortable chair, and reading, like you used to, back when they had that stuff they used to call paper.

The size of this thing, as I’ve mentioned, is pretty brilliant. Smaller than an iPad (and much ligther) but three times the size of a smart phone screen. It is sleek. Intuitive. Up and running right out of the box. And the kind gnomes at Amazon sent me my Kindle already registered. So basically, I was ready to roll once I hooked up to my Wi-Fi. (One just has to remember one’s password.)

The home screen is hideous---a sort of fake bookshelf, a cartoon version of brownish-gray Pergo constructed into this shelving. Too bad about that.

But the fun thing is, you can fill up those laminate book shelves with everything. Books, magazines, favorite web sites, apps, etc.

Additionally, you can get some free books and really cheap books and get books from your library for free. It goes on and on. So as much as Amazon has made this thing a cash-register-in-your-living-room, it is also highly functional for the library you’ve always loved.

The New Yorker App is amazing and you get to have that app if you subscribe to the magazine in its paper form. Probably the best magazine app I’ve seen so far on anything. This is because there are many choices for how you can access the look of the magazine. Page by page. Or by a list. Or by iconic overview. And it is easy to use.

I will get the New York Times app, too. But apparently there is all this linking that needs to be done from your existing digital account into Amazon. They give you the steps on the New York Times Site. But then, you pretty much lose your NYTimes app for your phone---not that that app was ever worth much—but one could still choose to keep that app if one wants to pay for a second subscription for that app alone. But who the hell wants to do that?

Much of the video looks not so great. Nowhere near the beauty of an iPad. Like Mexico to Canada difference. I don’t listen to music on devices, so I can’t say I even tried that. But video, music, all there, too. There’s a solid Netflix app and a solid Hulu+ app. Music looks like it must be easy. Okay, just tried it. Music sounds very good with head phones. You can upload all your pre-existing MP3’s either into the cloud or into the device for playing. (Remember when we used to only want intermittent white fluffy clouds? Now, all we want is solid cloud cover to make us happy.)

This Kindle Fire is pretty solid and a good size and a good buy at $199. It pulls together books and magazines and all your other media. For a bit of a neaty-pants like me, this means less old magazines around and less yellowing paperbacks.

Plus, while reading, you can look up any word at all. Fabulous. No list making. Immediacy.

The device is pretty useless, except for downloaded books, once you get away from wireless range. So trying to do anything but read a book on it on a plane would be next to impossible. Oh but wait—I hear planes are now all wired up.

(You can also download your ass of-- music and video, etc. etc...but what a bore.)

Entertainment in your house. You never have to go to the mall again for anything but clothes.

What will they think of next? Canned hams? A machine that separates cotton seeds from cotton? Will they upload our brains so we can live forever? Is that the magical creativity of religion, actually? It’s all been a wish, so we pretend it’s true until it is true, but we have to do it, push our brains into the forever realm, on servers, while they keep burning the mountaintops off in West Virginia to keep it all going?

I don’t think we are far away. They can scan my DNA and my memories, at some point, and get them to be virtual. My clone living in the chips. In the cloud, these clouds we have been fantasizing about for so long that we would just hop around on. Note: Must learn to play the harp.

I have the laptop, the phone and the Reader all within two feet of me conspiring to get me to become as digital as possible. Beam me up, beam me down, let’s all beam there together. It was fun being flesh based, for a while. Appointment with forever...

Facebook, Why?

Facebook, complicated Facebook, almost powder blue Facebook, why? Why are you still here?

I thought Google+ would do you in. I was wrong.

I thought people would get so bored. I was wrong again. They just got way into their food and started posting greasy pictures of their daily slop.

Then, I thought there would be an uprising as the pages became increasingly difficult to use, especially with the privacy levels, then the subscribing levels, which are different than friend levels and the lists and what the hell else?

But it sticks and sticks.

I used to love being a blogger because almost no one had the discipline to keep at it. And you put yourself out there. And it felt kind of courageous. Blogging, of course, is the online equivalent of ancient sea sponges. And the next leg up, you know, would have been the coelenterates, but Facebook went all the way to vertebrates and maybe even beyond. Why?

Why doesn’t something simpler replace it? Would it really be so hard to bail (bale?) and start over? I mean, almost everyone on earth dropped AOL.

I’m ready. Hale-Bop, take me to another world.

A Second Blog, Since they are So Cutting Edge

Friends,

There is a second blog. Check it out.

I don’t know what it means yet.

Time will reveal its purpose.

What do YOU know?

Article Schmarticle

Facebook is All Things to All Humans

And now with the subscribe button (imitating Twitter) and the lists (imitating Google+), you have to wonder what Facebook will imitate next.

Maybe little excel sheets or travel pods?

The subwebs of the web are getting filled with plaque and the web, itself, needs some cleaning.

I don’t have time to do it.

Facebook, when are you launching your own browser?

And then, when will Apps and Browsers merge?

I just want to talk to someone.

On the other end of it:

Steve Jobs, how dare you die before giving me hardware portability the size of a key that projects holograms? Selfish.

It is Simply Time to Ask

How many emails are usually sitting around in your inbox?

Me: 50

The long term ones for future use are filed into labels.

Question is, what is worth organizing?
Another question is, is search enough?

Enjoy Yourself. Your Life as You Once Knew It, is over.

GIF.TV

GPlus

I love the free market, mostly because it’s pretty creative…even if it is fueled by greed and ego.

But on the receiving end (no jokes here) it really is a messy load to take.

For example, what will happen when we migrate to Google + ? Will some of us go? All of us?

When My Space got funky and abandoned, at least the bands stayed behind. Who will stay behind with Facebook? Chefs? Lepidopterists? Left handed scribers?

Hard to know.

I once kept my hard drive incredibly organized. Oh wait, I still do. However, there is the creeping feeling that so much of what I make is not just living in my box…but is “out there” somewhere. If those “out theres” change a lot, where do I end up? Or, who am I if I am spread out all over the place instead of a in a stack of neat digital files in my computer?

Next---this war-in-my-box between corporations has gotten better, but mostly because we’ve had to come together. Used to be that a hard drive could come to a screeching halt if you had a peripheral plugged in whose software didn’t quite work with your operating system. Or if Microsoft Outlook received an Uuencoded email from an iMac and the next thing you knew, you were looking at a picture that looked like this: 389nej@^^()&*)%*hiij*&(HNOJOU*HIU( etc.

So it was natural that agreed upon coding and protocols would evolve. Because working together works.

It is the greed and ego that create separate languages. And it is necessary. And then it is rearranged or cannibalized or deftly mixed. (The invisible hand and all that…)—and everyone gets a piece (or not) but the essential move is to standardize. This delineate, promote, combine ride is funky. Clearly. But this is how we live.

I like it. Best if the transitions happen quickly, though, so as not to feel so deeply the clunkiness of change. I would love to live 1000 years from now. Why not? Taking super fast rides into more efficient usages? Or will it be more fractured? I think not. I think we will grow very accustomed to the pace---but also understand that the pace is outside of us, so it can accepted as something fascinating and amusing.

Sidebar: Exercise. It’s good for your mood.