Lift Up Your Hearts!

Please be patient, those of you who sent me the innundation of e-mails that awaited me tonight.  You know the stories you hear about people in a coma who can understand all that is going on around them but can't respond?  It's something like that.  At the moment I can receive e-mail but not send it.  I have no idea why, but I'll be working on it soon.

Maybe after the Scattergories game that is calling me right now....

I think maybe I know why no one has commented on my new bookshelves.  They're currently located under "Welcome" in the side panel.  They are on my machine, anyway.  But I just discovered that not everyone can see them.  My question is, can anyone?

During the 18 months we lived in the Boston area, we experienced three deaths in our immediate family.  This, as I realized how much vital information was being lost, was half the reason I developed an unexpected and almost obsessive interest in genealogical research.  The other half was inspired by the proximity of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) library on Newbury Street.  Although I am now over 1200 miles away from that treasure trove of information, I maintain my membership in the Society, and their eNews letter arrived at my inbox this morning.

Normally I can skim the newsletter quickly, maybe click on a link or two and read associated articles, bookmark an occasional new resource, then liberate my inbox.  This time, however, the missive included a link to a new (to me) blog that is only tangentially connected with genealogy.  Over an hour has since elapsed and I am still on the course begun when I opened that e-mail, now making my own post about The Occasional CEO.

Eric Schultz is the Chairman of the Council of the NEHGS, and The Occasional CEO is his blog.  The link that took me there was to Genealogy, the Idaho Russet, and Innovation, his speech at their recent annual meeting.  Here are a few other interesting posts I found:

I'm Going Crazy...But So Are You — the way we use the Internet is rewiring our brains.

Hey, That's Mine!: When the Other Side Adopts Your Innovation First — what do the telephone, Facebook, King Philip's War, Swiss watches, and IBM have in common?

A Plague of Dead Squirrels, (a.k.a. The Unintended Consequences of Innovation) — what we really have to fear from electric cars.

It's a Messy, Messy World (or, "How the Web Was Won") — the importance of knowing history, and how AT&T (among others) got to be where it is instead of where it could have been.

There's more, but you'll have to find it for yourself.  I need to get on with Real Life (and those e-mails).

Thanks to Andy B.'s suggestion, I just installed the latest version of Firefox.  No verdict on it as yet—it was an easy install, and some of it is seamless, some really cool (such as the security information you can get by clicking on the title bar icon, though the number of websites that identify themselves has been disappointing), and some annoying (changed appearance of some of the icons, which will take some getting used to for someone with the kind of visual memory I have).  Some of the big new features include lots of things you can do from the title bar, and I see that how bookmarks are organized has changed; also, security has supposedly been significantly enhanced.

So far I've liked the evolution of Firefox, unlike Netscape which got more and more annoying with each new version, as they added features I didn't want and which ate up more and more memory and disk space.  Time will tell with 3.0.

Here's a scary article for you:  Emily Gould's Exposed, from the May 25, 2008 New York Times Magazine.  Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur) would definitely appreciate this story of one woman's venture into a world of publishing unfettered by editorial oversight and subsequent free-fall into the Dark Side of Blogging.

I slumped to the kitchen floor and lay there in the fetal position. I didn’t want to exist. I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I’d have to destroy the entire Internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I’d ever made.

Another sad story about a naïve teenaged girl molested by someone she met on MySpace? Not at all. Just an imprudent adult woman seduced by the delights of seeing her thoughts in print.  Scary.

The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen (Doubleday, 2007)

I'm finally reading the book I first wrote about a month an a half ago.  This post is no more a proper book review than the earlier one, since I'm only through the introduction and 3/4 of Chapter One.  I can feel Mr. Keen's keenly disapproving I Told You So look: yet another example of amateurs doing things badly.  So be it.  I just experienced a perfect example of why I have a problem with some of his assertions, and want to share it with you, my minuscule but beloved audience.   Otherwise, distracted amateur that I am, I'd probably forget the illustration before finishing the book.

While I am reading The Cult of the Amateur, Porter is enjoying a G. A. Henty novel, In the Reign of Terror, and tonight he came upon a word with which he was unfamiliar:  louvetier.  Naturally, he asked me about it, since for years I have been the family's reference-book-of-choice.  If Mom doesn't know, she'll look it up and save the rest of us the trouble.  Well, I didn't know, so I went to my handy dictionary.  This is no pocket-sized or student edition, but a thick, heavy Webster's with its own dictionary stand—but it failed me.  On to the next room, and my online references.  BabelFish: No.  Answers.com: No.  Merriam-Webster:  No.  Encyclopedia Britannica, surely:  Not at all.  Yet the combination of Google and Wikipedia, very much maligned in that first chapter I had been reading when Porter's question interrupted me, gave me the answer in a matter of seconds.  I should have tried them first, but I was under the influence of the book.  A louvetier, for those of you who are panting to know, is a French wolfcatcher, master of the wolfhounds and responsible for organizing the wolf hunts.  Wikipedia may indeed be amateurish and prone to bias and error, but it answered the question swiftly and—confirmed by Porter from the context of the book—accurately.

More to come.  I can see there is more to appreciate about Keen's insights than I was expecting, as well as plenty with which to disagree.

Okay, so it may not generate any cash income, but my status as a blogger has earned me a free, one-year subscription to the Encyclopedia Britannica online!  Many thanks to Groshlink for the alert.  I'm grateful for the existence of Wikipedia, the hare in the online encyclopedia race, because of its wide-ranging, rapid-response (if not necessarily dependable) fluidity, but the opportunity to be able to access, and link to, a steady, reliable tortoise like the Britannica is not to be missed.

The application site has been swamped, it is claimed, but my blog was approved for the free account in less than 24 hours.  Try it with your blog, before they change their minds!

Our spam filter usually works really, really well, but the stupid spammers are getting more and more clever, and there were two when I awoke this morning.  I deleted them, but those of you who use feedreaders will no doubt see them.  In case you were wondering, my posts were shanghaied—the spam came from Shanghai, China.  (Thanks, Feedjit!)

More disturbing, however, was that in the process of deleting them I discovered two legitimate comments that had been marked as spam.  I fixed that, but one was in made January and the other in February, so they don't show up in the Recent Comments list.  My apologies to Peter V and Stephan; click on their names to see the posts and their comments.

I've known the Agony of Defeat often enough when it comes to the sport of e-mail balancing, but today I glory in a victory:  My Inbox is empty.

That's rare enough, but not enough to merit a blog post.  Although it seems to balloon to over 100 e-mails with unconscionable ease, and sad to say even 300 if I blink, I can usually whack it down to manageable size, even briefly zero, with a little sustained effort.  And some cheating.

You see, I have this other folder called Awaiting Action, a kind of alter ego for my Inbox.  When I’m hacking through the e-mail overgrowth and come to an item I can’t deal with immediately, I move it into Awaiting Action.  This keeps me from becoming discouraged and giving up, which is a good thing, but organizationally it’s the equivalent of clearing house clutter before company comes by throwing things higgledy-piggledy into a box and stuffing the box into a closet.

Like that box in the closet, it’s out of sight, out of mind, easy to ignore until the next clean up spree when one opens the closet door to deposit yet another box.  Yet it’s not really out of mind; I don’t know about you, but such boxes—real and virtual—haunt my subconscious, the nagging discomfort of things “left undone which we ought to have done.”

This weekend I was inspired—perhaps by Porter, whose e-mail deluge makes mine look like a drippy faucet—to open the closet door.  My Awaiting Action box contained items that had been waiting since 2005.  It had sprouted several subfolders, as if organization could substitute for action, and the contents of each had grown apace.  I picked up my best Ponce de Leon machete and plunged in.

The subfolders are now gone.  The contents of Awaiting Action now fill a mere half page on my screen.  I hope to do better still, but at a more gradual pace, since the remaining e-mails involve projects, some of considerable magnitude, that are not suited to machete-style work.  “Good enough is better than perfect,” and indeed some of the projects are of too low a priority to merit much effort right now.  Nonetheless, I’m determined not to let this box grow beyond a page—no scroll bars allowed.

In the process I reorganized and simplified my e-mail folders, taking better advantage of Thunderbird’s expanded tagging and filtering options.  I like it!  More than that, I hope the new system will help me stay on top of my e-mail at last.  Posting about it is part of the effort, too, providing Accountability, as they say in the 12-step biz.  Feel free to come back and ask me how I’m doing as the days, weeks, and months pass.

Now about that closet….

For those of you who don't read Heather and Jon's blog, I can't resist posting this view of life through the eyes of a four-year-old living in a geek house in this new century:

We happened to get two pictures in the mail, and Jonathan was holding them and looking at them. Then he piped up, "How do you get pictures to look like this?" Like what? This is a 21st century boy—he meant how do they get on paper.

It's another one of those things I lived without just fine, thank you, though now I wonder why I waited so long.  Blame an outdated sense of the cost of webcams; I never imagined I could buy one for under $100, much less under $30.  But thanks to Stephan, Janet, and Best Buy, I'm all set.

It has been great to be able to see Janet when I talk with her, as well as for her to be able to initiate phone calls.  Now I'm having double the fun (or five times as much, depending on how you calculate it) because another of my favorite families has joined the video Skype crowd.  I'm sure the excitement will wear off after a while, but for now I'm enjoying lots of smiles, hugs, I-love-yous, what's-happening-now, and best of all those dear faces and voices.  I love to get those quick little text messages that say things like "Hi! I finished my math and am now going to do writing," with plenty of music note and hugging teddy bear emoticons.

And this morning?  This morning I was the delighted one-person, long-distance audience for a cello concert!

Having discovered FEEDJIT on Stephanie's blog, I had to try it myself. (That's the "Recent Visitors" map in the panel to the right.) It's a graphical (and geographical) peek at who my faithful readers are, and who has wandered in via a random search.  Don't worry, I don't really know who you are, just where you're coming from (which allows me to guess who you might be).  Even that isn't always accurate; I'm certain that all those Portsmouth, Rhode Island hits are actually from Hartford, Connecticut.  And my Swiss fan has only once showed up as from Basel—the rest are all over the map, and I'm certain I don't have a following at the Château de Chillon, despite the hits from Montreux. The greatest problem is that I won't see you if you hide behind a feedreader; until Heather posted a comment, one would have thought I had no readers in Pittsburgh at all.

Still, it's been both entertaining and enlightening.  I'm certain of the identity of those who show up on the map as Oswego and Schenectady, and am delighted to know you read much more than you comment.  :)  I can identify most of my known readers, but am totally mystified by someone in Tempe, Arizona, who read some 20 posts.  Most who find me via a search read the one post and then leave.

The most popular page for searchers is the quick Fahrenheit/Celcius conversion formula I developed when we were in New Zealand and posted for friends who were travelling to Spain.  This was long before it came in so handy for us thanks to all Janet's travels.  Searches for that one come from many places on the globe.  From Rochester, New York it's not surprising to find searches for the Bay Punch recipe.

A great deal of traffic came from Australia, which is not as unexpected as it might be if you have been reading Janet's blog.  I've read many a warning about being careful what you put on the Internet because your boss or future employer might see it; it is just as unnerving to discover that a potential son-in-law has been reading my posts on homemaking and childrearing.  Not that I'd take anything back—and I confess to having found and read his Amazon reviews (the ones that were in English)—but it's still a bit intimidating to remember that what I write is not only read by people who matter, but by people who matter to people I love!

A long time ago (in computer years), we were told that the best way to extend laptop battery life was

• Always do a full, complete charge/discharge cycle; never do partial charges/discharges.
• Always charge the battery with the computer off.
• Take the battery out of the laptop when running on A/C power.

There must have been something valuable about this advice, because our IBM Thinkpad R31 battery is six years old, and only recently has shown signs of deteriorating—and that after we had begun being a little careless with the above procedure, though at that age it may have been coincidence.  Searching around on the Internet I find that people even today seem to be happy with a three-year battery life.

However, I'm sure technology has changed, and I'm wondering if the recommendations have.  The instructions that came with my new computer recommend the full charge/discharge cycle, but say nothing about keeping the machine off while charging.  Although they don't deal with the issue directly, they seem to assume the battery will be in at all times, even when using A/C power.  They do suggest removing the battery if the computer will be off "for an extended period of time" (whatever that is) when on the road, to prevent battery power from draining.

Looking online, I can find (as one might expect) every possible variation on (1) the original advice, above; (2) everything has changed and you don't need to do any of that anymore; and (3) some of it is still helpful, but not enough so to be worth the hassle.  One piece of information I didn't know is that there is a power meter in the battery itself, which is calibrated by full charge—full discharge—full charge, which is why it's important to do that when the battery is new, and perhaps every 30 days thereafter.

With this new machine, I'm inclined to leave the battery in most of the time and not worry about it, after the initial calibration, but anyone else's experience, knowledge, and suggestions would be appreciated.

I'll write in further detail about my wonderful Christmas present from Porter, the outcome of the debate detailed in this post.  But while reading the Safety and Warranty Guide for my new computer, I came upon this admonition and could go no further without reporting it:

Do not operate your computer inside furniture, as this might increase the risk of overheating. 

My mind boggled trying to imagine what piece of furniture I might wish to be inside, even if I could imagine how to get there.  I finally decided this must be a very generic booklet that doesn't realize this is a laptop computer—after all, it did also tell me to keep the cover closed whenever the computer is plugged in.

Porter, of course, is amazed that I am actually reading the booklets—well, most of them.  I'm skipping some of the more boring details, and the parts that are in French.  I did observe that a "Notice for users in the U.S.A." warns, "Handling the cord on this product or cords associated with accessories sold with this product will expose you to lead, a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm.  Wash hands after handling."  Users in other countries are safe, one could conclude.  The computer was manufactured in China, so maybe there's some truth behind a friend's joking remark that China is sending us lead-painted toys as part of a secret military effort to impair our children's brains. 

Okay, back to reading. I do miss the days when computers were shipped with several thick manuals one could curl up with before turning them on, but I'll have to do so soon because most of the manual appears to be located on the hard drive, which is kind of hard to curl up with. Especially inside furniture.

They say trying new things keeps your mind young.  I should be in good shape, having recently ventured into two areas I was sure I'd never touch, finding them useless at best.  One is Facebook, which I had classed—along with MySpace and LifeJournal—as boring, yet time-wasting websites for teenaged girls to gossip and bully each other, and for sexual predators to troll for victims.  But Janet was invited to join by her oboe professor, so how could she say no?  Then she had so much fun finding people with whom she'd lost contact that I decided to see what it was all about.

No doubt it is a good place for teenaged bullying and dangerous liasons, but it doesn't have to be, and I've been surprised at how many friends I've found or been found by already.  I love sending Christmas letters, because it keeps us in contact with friends whose lives for the most part no longer intersect with ours.  I sense that this logic has no appeal to the Facebook generation, which may never lose that contact.  Perhaps the greatest danger (predators and bullies aside) is in being overwhelmed by trivial, shallow contact.  The signal-to-noise ratio is rather poor.  At least in a Christmas letter one is forced by space limitations to keep to the more important issues.

I've been enjoying my Facebook experience so far, mostly for the contacts I've made with people.  It will never replace this blog—I haven't yet figured out how to say something of substance there; I'm sure there's a way, but it's not obvious.  And I doubt I'll get into many of the "applications" that abound; most seem like silly time-wasters to me.  But so far it's been a good experience.

So, too, with my venture into another young persons' game:  SMS, aka texting, aka sending text messages via my cell phone.  I never saw the point, prefering either direct phone calls (faster, easier, clearer) or e-mails (definitely easier to type).  But then Janet discovered that she can receive SMS's for free, and it suddenly became a great way to send her long-distance hugs.  Short messages that don't need to have much substance, but tell her I'm thinking of her.  I can send them when I'm away from my computer, and she doesn't have to wait to get home to her computer to receive them.  I'm funny about it, though.  I hate those texting abbreviations and refuse to send "u" for "you."  I'm slowly being weaned from my need always to start sentences with upper case letters and to include all proper punctuation; I'll let that slip and will even abbreviate some wrds whn im in a hrry.  But it pains me to do so, and thus I'm a very slow texter.  So what?  It still works for me.

However, today's Drabble was irresistable: