Facebook vs. Holiday Cards

Thanks to our trip this year (and this is the last post even loosely based on the trip, I promise) we never got around to sending out Christmas cards.  I felt - and still feel - kind of bad about that.  One friend I know is always late and wound up sending out Martin Luther King Day cards one year.  I doubt I'll do that, but I suppose it is possible.

On our return I got the huge pile of mail from the post office and found lots of cards in there.  As usual, quite a few had letters in them too, and it suddenly occurred to me that holiday cards are, in many cases, an early version of social networking.

Without wanting to offend any of my friends on Facebook, one of the things about that community is that it is largely made up of people I don't see regularly.  Of course, there are exceptions, but in large measure my Facebook friends are more distant in terms of space or accessiblity.  Many of my former co-workers are there, for example, and our paths simply don't cross anymore.  There are even a few people on that list whom I know but have actually never met in person.

Status updates from those more distant connections are a lot like those annual letters from family and friends that you never actually get to see in person.  Great Aunt Betty telling you about her year - the good and the bad - without a lot of context looks a lot like a Facebook newsfeed.

There are minor differences.  Facebook is a bit closer to real time, so I don't get an entire years worth of news all at once, for example, and most of the holiday cards and letters I get don't comment on things political or social, but I found the similarities quite interesting.  If I took all the posts from some physically distant Facebook friend, removed the political and social commentary, strung them together and printed them, I'll bet I'd come disturbingly close to a holiday letter.

Food for thought.  I keep reading articles about the wonder of social networking, how new and different it is.  Not so.  Rolodexes used to do on paper what Facebook and LinkedIn do online, and now I realize that even the status update that goes to a bunch of people is far from a new idea.

Perhaps there really is nothing new under the sun.

Things I Hate: My Own Typos

I apologize, sincerely and completely, to everyone who has read this blog. Every last one of you deserves a medal for slogging through the forest of typos that result from my vague attempts at communication in English. (If I stuck to my native Gibberish I'd probably be just fine.)

Typos are my bane. There are probably still a few in this post that I haven't found. Yet.

Let me tell you a story...

An hour ago I exchanged email with a friend (hi Steve!) and former coworker - a technical writer - with whom I hadn't conversed in a long time. It turns out he has a blog. Naturally I read through some of his blog in the process of this communication. His writing is good. I've added his blog to my RSS reader.

With some trepidation I told him that I, too, kept a blog. A few minutes later he told me that he'd added my blog to his RSS tool. (The main attraction being the picture of me with a fork suspended from my nose.) Uh-oh. Now Steve's a nice guy, but look at it from my point of view: I've got a professional writer reading my blog. This'll be "interesting". I'd better go look at it real quick. From the outside.

And the first thing I noted was that I hadn't posted in 12 days. Even without Steve there as a motivator, that was not good, and I needed to remedy that. The previous - basically content free - post was the result. OK, fine. At least you know I'm still alive.

Then I went back and re-read the post I'd just written and published. Typos. Typo city! And Steve is out there lurking. He really is a nice guy, and I probably won't get email telling me that I have used "it's" where I meant "its" for the 10,000th time. But I could get that email. If not from him then from a few others that have been known to "express themselves" to me in the past. (Hi David.)

So I edited the post and fixed the typos I could find, including the gross spelling errors that spell check was warning me about when I typed the thing up in the first place. sigh.

Then I checked a few of the older posts, just to see how I'd been doing on the typo front.

Suffice it to say that if this was a war between me and the typos, they'd overrun my position years ago, taken my HQ, sacked my supply houses, moved in, married, had kids, and sent them to college. There were a LOT of typos out there.

So I fixed what I found in various older posts. I didn't get to them all, alas, and I probably missed some in the posts I did review. What can I say, though. I don't have hours and hours to spend at it right now, and finding my own typos is just about as easy as performing brain surgery on myself.

But once again I must apologize to all of you who risk reading my words. I'm not nearly as illiterate as they make me look. Honestly! Please accept this blog entry - even if it too is crawling with grammatical boo-boos - in the spirit of contrition in which it is intended.

Special thanks to Steve for causing this, even if it was entirely unintentional on his part. If you want a link to your blog in here, Steve, just ask.

I guess there was one benefit to finding all those typos: I got to add another post to my "Things I Hate" series.

(Now to proofread this before hitting the "publish post" button... shudder.)

High Class Dinners and Cutlery

Yes, that's me. And that's my lovely wife on the left side of the picture. We were at a gathering of good friends who all live nearby. This happened just the other day, and (despite the photographic evidence) we hope to be invited back.

And what, you may ask, is wrong with my nose?

The first response is that the photographer (who will remain nameless, to protect the guilty) is using only an iPhone, and as we all know those don't contain the best quality cameras on the planet. That makes it a bit hard to tell.

But despite that, the full size image just barely reveals that I am doing something few have tried. I've suspended a fork from my nose.

No, really, a fork. Not a spoon. And I did it without glues or adhesives, and without injuring myself in any way. The tines of the fork are distinctly visible on the outside of my honker.

In truth, this photo tells you less about my amazing cutlery suspension abilities than it does about the kinds of people I hang out with.

In any event, we had a wonderful dinner, and we celebrated getting together a bunch of good friends who couldn't - for one reason or another - see each other over the holidays.

May you enjoy such silliness with people you love many times in your life.

Pippin's memorial service

Yesterday was the memorial service for Pippin Seales. Pippin's death was the event that I mentioned on October 12. The one that slapped me back into reality. At this point I can tell you his name because it's been in the local papers ever since he died in a sand dune / cave collapse at Natural Bridges state beach in Santa Cruz.

As it happens, I didn't go to the memorial service. I offered, instead, to stay at the home of Pippin's parents. Apparently thieves read newspapers these days. As a result they know when funerals are taking place, and thus when homes are easy targets. I stayed at Pippin's home to make sure the house wasn't empty, and head off any trouble. Perhaps that's a sad commentary on our times, but it's better to be prepared. Naturally nothing happened, but if my presence gave the parents some peace, it was time well spent.

In some ways I got to know Pippin pretty well in that home. His picture appears in many places, and the evidence of his life was all around me, just sitting in the living room. The love and devotion of his parents was obvious as well. They may live there, but it was clearly Pippin's house.

For one so young - he was only 11 - his life was grand, and his experience broad. He will be greatly missed.

If you're a parent, please give your kids an extra hug tonight. I may be far too sentimental, but the truth is that nothing in this world is certain. Make sure your children know you love them. The same goes for your parents and friends. Spend each day living the way you want to live, as best you can. These are all clichés, I know, but that doesn't make them less true.

Pippin Seales died at his own 11th birthday party, in the company of friends he loved, in the place he wanted to be, and doing what he very clearly knew he wanted to do. That's quite an example. I hope we can all follow his lead.

Keeping Things In Perspective

Yesterday I wrote a whiny blog post about having to go back to work thanks to the economy. A few hours later the universe slapped me in the face.

Good friends of ours suffered a horrible, tragic loss. I cannot include the details here - they aren't mine to disclose - but I can say it's a reminder that life can change abruptly, in ways that no one can plan for.

I'm not a religious person, and this isn't some trial thrust on my friends by some god for reasons no human can understand. This is reality. Plain, simple, random reality. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's awful. Yesterday was the latter.

It put going back to work into perspective, though. I'll shut up about that now.

My Birthday Present

I have some, ah, "interesting" friends.

One couple recently gave me an aebleskiver pan for my birthday. Tonight I used it for the first time to make something almost - but not entirely - unlike aebleskivers.

For those not familiar with them, you can google them, I suppose, or you can just take my word on it that they are a Danish dish, much like a pancake, but cooked in a very oddly shaped pan that results in their looking a bit like two inch diameter baseballs. Usually they are sweet - like a pancake, as mentioned - but they can also be savory if made differently. They might also be filled with fruit or other things to make them even more interesting.

Tonight I tried a simple whole wheat pancake recipe, and it worked out well. My cooking technique needs work - the results looked a bit like misshapen, damaged footballs, but they tasted good, even the filled ones.

My wife doesn't like the recipe I used - she claims she can taste the baking power or some such thing - but it worked for me.

I'll keep playing with this pan from time to time, trying different - and progressively weirder - things. It should be fun.

Thanks to Alan & Irene - the previously mentioned "interesting friends - for the birthday gift!