fauxklore

Celebrity Death Watch: Boro Maa was the matriarch of Matu Mahasangha, a Hindu reformist sect in West Bengal. Carolee Schneemann was an artist. Charlie Panigoniak was an Inuit singer, best known for his version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" in the Inuktitut language. Carmine Persico was the head of the Colombo crime family. Ralph Hall was the oldest person ever to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Dan Jenkins was a sportswriter, as is his daughter, Sally, who wrote a particularly excellent obituary of him in the Washington Post. Jed Allen was a soap opera actor. Raven Grimassi wrote books promoting an Italian form of Wicca. Asa Brebner was a guitarist who, among other things, performed with The Modern Lovers on a couple of their albums. Hal Blaine was a prolific session drummer.

Jerry Merryman was one of the inventors of the handheld electric calculator. I am old enough to remember when calculators were not ubiquitous. If I recall correctly, it wasn’t until 11th grade physics that we were allowed to use them for exams. And those early calculators just did addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and – if you had a really fancy one – exponents. That fancy one was, in my case, the Bowmar Brain, which cost $75. It was only a couple of years later, when I started college, that I got a Texas Instruments scientific calculator. I think it may have been a programmable one. It cost over $100 and had terrible battery life. By the time I graduated, I could buy a Sharp scientific calculator for about $20. That used AA batteries and lasted a couple of decades.

Non-celebrity Death Watch: Another former colleague, Sy Horowitz, died last week. He was a really nice guy, always interesting to talk with during a lunchtime walk on business trips. I wasn’t completely surprised, given that he was over 90, but having lost so many colleagues over the years makes me feel old.

Mostly Better: However, the cold viruses grabbed my vocal chords with them on their way out. Sigh.

Daylight Savings Time: I think I have found all the clocks that need to be reset. I cannot, however, figure out how to reset the owl that is nesting in our courtyard.

For the record, I would favor staying on DST year round. I love lots of light late in the afternoon. Please don’t remind me I said that if you should happen to be in the car with me at sunset, when I am likely to be whining about glare.

Social Media Annoyance: I can’t update my facebook status for some reason. Nor can I see my timeline. So, of course, I have all sorts of clever things I want to say.

That College Admissions Scandal: What I really want to know is how much the students involved were told about what was going on. I don’t think that, in general, students care as much about the alleged prestige of various schools as their parents do. (And, by the way, there are only two schools on the list that I would consider actual elite colleges, but that’s probably my academic snobbery at work.) I know there are students who have unrealistic views of what their dream school is, but it isn’t doing them any favors to get them into somewhere that isn’t a good fit for their abilities and interests. Of course, It appears that in some cases, their interests are partying and skiing, so I can understand why parents might not want to finance their little darling's dream education.

Let's start with a celebrity death. Andy Williams was most famous for singing "Moon River," a song that is notable largely for having a range small enough that even many people who can't sing can get away with it. I have to admit that he fell into the (large) category of people who I hadn't realized were still alive.

My other news tidbit is that Jason Varitek has been named a special assistant to the general manager for the Red Sox. I am very pleased. There are few players nowadays who play their entire major league career with one team. (Tek did do a minor league stint with the Mariners, and had also played for the independent St. Paul Saints. But all of his time in the majors was with the Red Sox.) He is, by all accounts, popular with the players and I hope this move will improve their performance next season.

My main topic today is social networking. I've done this for a long time, having been a big user of Usenet (and a few local bulletin boards) starting around 1985. Back in those days, computer access itself was a significant barrier. And Usenet generally required some familiarity with text editors that had a certain learning curve. I was unusual in not being a computer scientist, though I am an engineer. I remember what a big kerfuffle it was when AOL first gave Usenet access to their users.

For me, being on-line had a lot to do with finding other people who had at least some of the same interests I did. No matter what you were interested in - be it Celtic music or detective fiction or Jewish genealogy, there were people out there to discuss it with. I hung out mostly in a few places - soc.singles, soc.women, rec.arts.books, rec.travel - but no matter where I went, there was interesting conversation. I went to boinkcons and met net folks in person, too. I am, in fact, still friendly with many of those people.

As the net grew, so did the number of spammers and trolls and a lot of interesting activity retreated to private mailing lists. There are plusses and minuses to that. The big minus is, of course, the barrier of entry having changed from knowledge of a subject to knowing the people to get you hooked into those lists and communities. I do use one semi-private board somewhat regularly and I think it could come across as cliquish to newcomers. But, if one opens things up, the trolls follow quickly.

My history with Livejournal is more complex. I first became aware of on-line journals via someone I knew from storytelling who was keeping one. I began reading other OLJs and writing my own at Areas of Unrest to document my preparations for my mid-life crisis. There were a mailing list and a couple of websites for people in that world. And, eventually, a number of those people migrated to LJ, largely for its ease of use. I admit that the ability to tag entries easily was also a big factor for me. At any rate, there were people I knew from other connections on LJ and many of them continued writing interesting things. Some of them still do, though some have stopped writing anything longer than a facebook status.

I resisted facebook for a long time. When I did join, I found it useful for tracking down people I'd grown up with. (Keeping up with local gossip cuts down on the length of phone conversations with my mother.) It's also been fun to reconnect with people from various other segments of my past, e.g. summer camp. I find that some of the groups I've joined function somewhat like Usenet did, with interesting and surprisingly in-depth conversations.

So where am I now? I use facebook a lot. I still post long entries here. I check google+ only sporadically because, frankly, there just isn't a lot there. (I do have a couple of friends who use it and don't use facebook.) I check dreamwidth for the few folks who don't auto-post things from there to LJ.

But what I find most interesting is the growth of specialized sites, many of which have grown away from their specialty. Flyertalk (and, to a lesser extent milepoint) provide useful information for frequent flyers, but also have general social aspects (some of them limited to people with a certain amount of time on those sites). When I first joined Ravelry, I intended to use it to catalog my yarn stash and find patterns. I still intend to get around to that someday, but I spend most of my time on the site on a few of the groups, most of them travel related. (Oddly, Library Thing doesn't seem to have gone in that direction. Maybe book people are more focused?) Anyway, I think those sites work because there is some common bond to start with. Back in the Usenet days, having a modem was enough of a common bond.

I'm not sure what any of this means, but I figure I'll keep doing it as long as it's fun. If nothing else, social networking has helped me meet numerous kindred spirits along the way. That's good enough for me.

1) The facebook glitch for the Voices in the Glen website fixed itself later in the day. I still think their help pages suck.

2) At least the Source of All Evil in the Universe didn't sweep the Red Sox. But I still had to put up with my Yankee fan colleague gloating today.

3) I read a news story last week about an effort by a Conservative rabbi to overturn the law in Georgia which requires kosher products to be certified by an Orthodox rabbi. I agree with that this is an unconstitutional mingling of government and religion. The appropriate approach would be to require disclosure of "who says so" in labeling a product as kosher. (Presumably the same would apply for halal food.)

4) I was fascinated by a detail in the recent case of the murdered model whose body turned up in Southern California. She could not be identified by fingerprints since her hands were cut off or by dental records, since her teeth were extracted. Apparently, she was identified by the serial numbers of her breast implants.

5) I am absurdly busy at work this week. Mondays are always hectic since I'm preparing the weekly summary for our senior leaders. Today I also had two meetings to go to, both of which were productive, but still took up time. I've got all day meetings the next three days and a half day on Friday. I'm not sure how I will get any actual work done at all.

1) I was at a meeting over in the Rosslyn office today, which is on the 26th floor. We were in the conference room that overlooks the river and the National Mall. I have to sit facing in towards the building or I get too distracted by the view, which is not a good thing when both your boss and grandboss are at the same meeting. Anyway, I did look out the window before the meeting and I noticed that the Potomac was completely frozen on the side west of Theodore Roosevelt Island, but the east branch (i.e. the D.C. side) had no ice at all. Presumably that's due to all the hot air from lobbyists?

2) The Washington Post is doing away with Book World as a separate section. It is, apparently, being merged in with Outlook. I'd have thought that Style and Arts would make more sense. This will sound surprising coming from me, but I'd actually like them to do away with their travel section, which has only about one interesting article every two years. (Admittedly, my tastes in travel are not exactly average.)

3) Memorable quote from meeting: "You can't ban people from thinking."

4) In the jaw dropping bad behavior catalogue, one of my colleagues was supposed to have lunch with somebody who was attending another meeting in our building. Apparently, when the meeting was over, the visitor asked if he could borrow somebody's phone to call her to meet for lunch. And the people he had been meeting with refused.

I am absolutely astonished.

5) The most interesting thing I've found so far on Facebook is the group that has to do with the summer camp I attended in 1972 and 1973. There is also a group for people from my home town.

An increasing amount of the spam I receive in my email is in German. It is very annoying that the spam filters on both of my usual email accounts do not recognize it as such. The spam filter at work is more effective. In fact, it also catches all the Russian spam I receive.