as I live a few more questions

Google+ is the New Facebook -- Pass It On!

I have been exploring Google's new social network, Google+, for almost a month now, and it is fantastic!  It's still in beta but it already has about 25 million members.  

If you want to experience it yourself, please click on the following link for an invitation (I've never tried this before so I hope this works!)

 

https://plus.google.com/_/notifications/ngemlink?path=%2F%3Fgpinv%3Dq0KF43JpBr0%3AaM-ILF2xqAY

 

I know, I know....

...I haven't posted here in almost a full year now.  Mostly it's because I have been doing my posting elsewhere, to my facebook account, where I have most of my links to my friends and acquaintances and family members.  I'm still in the process of figuring out if I am going to keep this blog, and if so, what I intend to post to it.  Obviously longer-format material than what I can fit into a facebook post.

This week I also started up a Google+ account, and it's been déja-vu for me, the whole startup of a new social network reminds me so much of Orkut, and Tribe, and Friendster befor that, stuff that happened six years ago for me.  By now I'm an old hand at this sort of thing, but I still get a bit of a thrill as I make the cosil network connections.

 

"You're a problem patron"

Check out the discussion in the chat box to the far right of this screen capture from my new Apple iPod this morning. I tell you this thing is like crack!

Oops!  The picture is a bit too small... here's the conversation:

• Librarian: What is your question?
• Ryan: Hi it's Ryan Schultz I am testing out chat ref from my new iPad
• Ryan: It works!
• Ryan: Call it a test
• Librarian: You're a problem patron
• Ryan: haHahAha Itrue I am
• Ryan: Byebye

I gave in to temptation...

I caved. I *CAVED*. There was a whole row of them at the campus bookstore, and I felt my will-power slipping away. I am now the proud owner of an Apple iPad (64GB, 3G+WiFi; if I'm gonna go to hell I may as well go express!). As far as I know my reputation as the first U of M librarian to buy the latest tech gadget has been upheld. I'll report back on my experiences, and I will also compare and contrast the iPad versus Amazon's Kindle as an ebook reader platform.

I'm back and I'm mobile

Posting from my new toy. I sold my soul to Rogers for 3 years and now I have a shiny new iPhone, and I just installed the TypePad app.

I'm baaack...

Passing of an Era

I know, it's been a long time since I last posted to this blog.  I'm spending most of my online time split between connecting with friends on  Facebook and  exploring the explosively creative 3D space of Second Life, and in addition, I've not felt the pressing need to *blog* anything.  End of an era?  We'll see.  I'll keep this account for now.

Another end of an era:

"IST is examining the possibility of ending modem dial-up access to the University of Manitoba in 2009 on January 1. If this will cause a major problem for you or your users, please contact XY describing the nature of this problem."

Wow.  Changes are happening so fast that sometimes it makes my head spin.  I know that fewer and fewer people are using dial-up modems, but I didn't realize the decline was quite that precipitous. 

I can remember back to 1982/83, when I connected to the University to work on programming assignments using a TRS-80 Model III and a 300-baud acoustic coupler modem.  The lines of the text editor I was using, good old in-house MANTES, were 80 characters long, but the TRS-80 could only display 64 characters, so the lines would all break at character 65.  At the I'm sure I was among the first set of users to conect to the University via modem.  That was.... that was.... 25 years ago.

Holy shit!  A quarter century ago... argh.  How time flies indeed.

I'm baaack...

...ya miss me?  ;-) 

Well, one thing I have discovered in my Internet "diet" (I won't say I was off the Internet completely, because I was checking my email and my facebook page every so often) is that, while you can certainly spend too much time on the Internet, it's also very difficult to live 100% without it nowadays.  As an example, I spent part of August writing fiction for the Brokeback Mountain fanfic community i am part of, and you would not believe how frustrating it is not to be able to quickly check some fact without the Internet handy.  For example, for one chapter I needed to understand exactly how one makes a Molotov cocktail, since one of my main characters has one thrown through her kitchen window (remember folks: conflict drives plot).

Anyways, to get the ball rolling, I wanted to highlight something that I found on my one of my favourite browse-through sites, metafilter.  A comment on a recent post about polygamous Mormons has put into writing something that I have often used in my arguments against those who want to deny same-sex marriage rights to queers because the Bible lays out the guidelines for a "traditional" marriage.  I have argued that there has NEVER been a "traditional" standard of marriage, that it has varied a lot in differnet cultures and eras, and this commenter backs my assertion up:

I'd like to point out - because I've not been given a chance to yet on metafilter - that whether you're a fundamentalist Mormon, a fundamentalist Baptist or a fundamentalist Presbyterian, there is simply no valid argument to be made for "traditional" marriage by drawing on scripture. None. Not in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. The Hebrew Bible is quite possibly the worst place to start - the language it was written in doesn't even contain a word for "wife." It has the designator "his" - as in, "his woman," even for "his first," or "his second" woman and so on. But there's no word for wife. Women are purely property - utterly in the same sense as "his oxen" or "his seventy two slaves and fourteen comely eunuchs." The New Testament is an even worse place to begin - if that's even possible - Paul sure as hell didn't want us getting married. ESPECIALLY (you can tell I'm using science) because the world was about to end - which is what most fundamentalists believe! He says, "Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife." He goes on - "Yet those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that. I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as thought they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as thought they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away."

He also states clearly that marriage is not a sin - but there are plenty of things that aren't considered sins in the Bible (drinking wine in moderation) that fundamentalists avoid.

This has always been something that bothered me.

Of course, I suppose I shouldn't look to the fundies for a bastion of clear scriptural interpretation.

So far that one comment has received an amazingly high number of "favorites" among metafilter readers; obviously it's struck a chord.

Out On Stage

Now this article in New York Magazine (also available here) really hits the nail on the head, putting into print (or pixels) something I had been thinking about for a long time.

You see, I am one of those people who are profiled here: someone who lets it all* hang out online.  *well, OK, not all, but a lot.

But the one big difference between me and the people profiled is this: I'm a whole generation older than they are.  I'm 43, but online I have more in common with these 23 year olds than I do with my fellow fortysomethings. 

In fact, I've given up on trying to interest my cohort in social networking services like Flickr or Digg.  They could care less; most of them don't see any point in participating.  "Why would you want to share your photos with other people?", they ask.

And I see a few (not many, but a small percentage) of people in my generation (e.g. the Boomers and those born in the decade after the Baby Boom) participating in this grand experiment in self-disclosure.  But we are vastly, VASTLY, outnumbered by the crowd born after 1980, the teens and early-twentysomethings.  They have taken to heart one of the things that their elders still don't (or won't) see:  VERY LITTLE ABOUT YOUR LIFE IS PRIVATE ANYWAYS.

Let me explain.  Most of the facts of your life, if you think about it, are available to anyone who has the resources and connections to find them.  Whole businesses are devoted to the task of building and sharing databases filled with information about you: your credit history, your driving record, your shopping habits (Air Miles, Safeway card, etc.), what courses you flunked out of in college, pretty much everything.  That, uhh, "novelty" you picked up at that adult store?  There's a sales record.  That regular rendezvous you're carrying on, that you think your spouse doesn't know about?  Don't count on it staying a secret for very long.  How do you think private investigators stay in business?   

The big difference between the generations is how they respond to this lack of privacy.  Most fortysomethings are uncomfortable, even horrified, about it.  Many of them don't even want to think about it.  But the post-1980 crowd TREATS THAT LACK OF PRIVACY AS A GIVEN, and thinks: "Well, if I'm going to be public anyways, then I may as well enjoy my time on stage and grab a little spotlight."  In other words, the younger generation doesn't see our modern data-mining, lack-of-privacy culture as a problem, but as an opportunity.  Not something to be feared or escaped from (as if you could!), but something to be embraced, a way for them to say "Hey, this is me.  This is what I like and don't like, these are my friends, here are my photos and what I think about that new CD that just came out, and here's my dating profile on LavaLife, and..."

Like I said, most older people don't get it, shake their heads over it, are afraid of it even.  And I find myself in a weird situation of being from an older generation, but living in the mindset of a younger one. 

Last.fm Update

Last.fm (still my favourite Internet radio station) is again working on an upgrade.  One of the new features that I like is something that I had seen earlier on a service called finetune, the ability to stick a personalized radio station into your blog or MySpace page, so users can listen to a stream of your favourite songs without having to go through all the sign-up hassles UPDATE: Whoops, turns out if you don't already have a (free) account on Last.fm, it asks you to sign up when you click on the radio below.    Please give it a try, and send me a comment to tell me what you think.  It's still in beta so there may be a few bugs, oh and this radio app requires the Flash browser plug-in.

As I was kicking the tires on the new Last.fm beta service (the beta test is open to subscribers only, sorry), I came across this terminology that made me chuckle (see right).  Nudge nudge wink wink saynomore saynomore ;-D  (Note that "my neighbourhood" is Last.fm-speak for listeners whose musical tastes are calculated to be the most similar to your own.)

Coming Soon: Breakfast At Tiffany's II

Yes, we're already at the point where we can re-animate dead actors and put them into films using digital 2D-to-3D rendering techniques.  Check out the video:

I just thought this was very, very cool.  Someday soon, doctored videos will become as popular as airbrushed (or otherwise digitally manipulated) pictures.  These sort of animation advances are already having an effect on Hollywood, replacing the often-tedious motion capture of previous years.  And this second video gives you proof of how far the technology is taking film and TV right now (New York Times video, you have to sit through a commercial first, but the wait is worth it).