The View from Here

Google Reader to Be Retired

2013-03-14T09:41:00.001-04:00

Just a heads up to anyone still reading this blog, other than the spammers. Google is retiring Google Reader this summer. I started using it when Bloglines folded. I'll miss it and am now looking for another online feed reader to replace it. A friend suggested Feedly, so I'll probably give it a try.

~~~o0o~~~

Link RoundUp

2012-07-28T13:26:00.001-04:00

Most of the time these days, I share links on Facebook and/or Google+ and forget all about this poor, lonely blog. So I'm going to try to regularly share them here, too. My goal is to do monthly link posts, so we'll see how this goes.

In the wake of the Aurora shooting, words of wisdom from Jay DeDapper.

Jon Stewart is tied with Stephen Colbert for pointing out hypocrisy in today's US political realm. Here he tackles the subjective editing of broadcast speeches, presidential campaign variety.

New York City's unique High Line Park, built on an old, elevated railroad, is nearing completion. The last segment is now ready for development.

Google Mobile and Tablet will let you handwrite your Google searches.

Paul Begala, the only columnist I read these days in Newsweek (where have all my favorite columnists gone?!) -- print edition -- on how the swing voters are the only ones who count anymore in US elections.

I took this science quiz andI got more than half correct, barely. A lot I guessed, correctly, but some of my guesses were wrong. I wouldn't call a lot of these questions basic. And it's been decades since I studied science in school. Still, I'm happy with more than half right. Care to see how much you know/remember?

And finally, though it's a bit on the old news side now, this teen who got Seventeen Magazine to stop photoshopping photos of girls in the mag is awesome.

~~~o0o~~~

The Latest Announcement from Google

2012-07-06T15:08:00.002-04:00

In a year or so, iGoogle is going away. Google has seen the future and it's all about apps, mobile and otherwise, so what iGoogle provided on a Google search page, Google figures you can get via your browser, in my case Google's own Chrome, or whatever else you use to access apps: desktop, smartphone, other portals. In Chrome, I can get them in a navbar or on a New Tab page, depending on the app, so I've started adding to Chrome the ones I use via iGoogle. I'm going to miss iGoogle. I've loved seeing everything there while I searched. Ah well. The internet is about change and this sure is one of them. Let's hope this change is about progress and not losing something we'll really miss.

~~~o0o~~~

Good Advice

2012-07-06T15:02:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I know. It's been too long since I've posted here. I've been too busy enjoying retirement to have deep thoughts to share.

But I do want to share this post from The Bitchy Waiter, one of my favorite blogs. He has a lot of good advice, especially this:

"A smile will get you far in life. When someone sits in my station and has a sour-puss look on their face and then tells me they want the happy hour price for their beer even though happy hour ended five minutes ago, I am not going to do it. In contrast, if someone is friendly and smiling and asks nicely, it is very possible that I will simply hit the happy hour beer price for them. A smile makes a huge difference."

That, I must admit, was something that I did when I worked. I wouldn't go against library policy, but I was more inclined to be extra helpful or do a favor for someone who was pleasant, polite, and just plain nice. I would never do anything extra because someone demanded special treatment, was rude, or worse, obnoxious. Be rude to me and you got only the service I was required to perform. Be nice to me and I'd double check with colleagues, look in the back to see if anyone had returned the book and it hadn't been shelved yet, do a longer computer search even if I was supposed to do no more than a quick search before making a referral, and so on. And I'd do it with a smile.

I'm not sure when people got it into their heads that being demanding and rude was the best way to get what they want -- and it's not just kids; I've encountered this behavior in the last decade from teens through septuagenarians (people in their 80s and 90s tended to be nicer) -- but the only time it works is when the person providing the service is fearful. Fearful the rude person will complain about them and cost them their job. Fearful of confrontations. Fearful of the exchange growing nastier. Fearful the rude person will get violent. There's a way to deal with these sorts of people, but not everyone gets that training.

Clearly, enough rude folks have learned rudeness works for them because they continue to engage in it. But really, it's the nice people who get the real respect, the real service with a smile. Sometimes, the service provider can't do what you want because it simply isn't possible and no amount of intimidation will work. So, wouldn't it be better to have a pleasant encounter than an unpleasant one?

~~~o0o~~~

The Future of Search

2012-05-16T14:12:00.001-04:00

Google plans to make it unnecessary to leave the search results page, unless you really want to. I have to admit that when I'm in a hurry for simple answers, this would be ideal. I already use the website descriptions on the search results page to see if the info I want appears there.

~~~o0o~~~

More Changes at Google

2012-04-11T16:19:00.002-04:00

Google+ is getting a new, streamlined design. I had to reload the page to see the changes and not everyone will have them for a few days, but it looks pretty good.

~~~o0o~~~

Oh Noes, Pinterest

2012-02-23T17:12:00.000-05:00

Anyone thinking of using Pinterest should read this post about copyright violations and licensing on Direct Match Media. I'd been thinking of trying it, but now, I won't.

The concept of Pinterest -- an online pinboard -- is a cool one, and I know a number of people using it. It can get unwieldy to keep adding links to browser favorites, especially if you use more than one device to browse. Link sites like delicious are just that, lists of links, though their redesign has gotten jazzy with stacks and images.

Reblogging or reposting is a big thing these days. Tumblr excels at it. But Pinterest, with its policy of claiming the license for what you pin of your own creation and putting copyright infringement on the user for any violation of what you pin is going too far, in my opinion.

It should be no surprise that in social media, the user is also the content provider. I've read discussions of this all over the web -- and no, sorry, can't cite sources because I hadn't planned on posting about it, so therefore, didn't keep track -- and it's been clear to me for a while. We users upload photos to photo sharing sites like flickr. We post prose, poetry, photos, drawings, etc. to our blogs. We write about our passions and we converse with others who share our passions on blogs and message boards and on our social media pages. We swap recipes and craft tips, share family photos, play games, post links, and so much more on sites like Facebook. We share videos we like and even ones we make on YouTube. We need the sites for their software to allow us to upload and organize all our creative efforts and they, in turn, often reward us for using them by showing us paid ads that we can opt out of by buying a "gold" or "pro" or "enhanced" or whatever they call it account, while others simply use our content to interest investors. Not all sites shower us with ads. Blogger doesn't, but Google has other places where they do, using AdSense for example, where the user can also benefit. But if we users didn't provide content, these sites would cease to be.

AOL never really got this concept. They destroyed the community they had on all their various message boards til few remained. They didn't keep up with innovations in blogging, so their journals community died, helped along by having ads rammed down the users' collective throat. To recover market share, they moved to other sources of content, official sources like studios, providing news, weather, entertainment, sports, not dissimilar to what Yahoo! does. And Yahoo! too, needs to keep evolving to stay relevant. Because there are so many ways today to get that official content, including people who blog it or reblog it, post it or repost it, sharing it with strangers via blogs and friends via Facebook.

See a trend here? We're back to user-provided content, even if a LOT of it is repostings (and often of old material!).

So, be wary of what you post. You have no idea where it may end up. If you worry about your copyright, keep your work offline. But I also believe in a free, vital, unhindered, uninhibited internet. It's going to be years still until things sort out re: the internet and copyright, so for now, pay attention and don't assume everyone else is playing fair. Read the Terms of Service before using a new service. And don't be surprised if your precious photo or story ends up somewhere else, no credit back to you. You did release it into the wild, after all.

~~~o0o~~~

Google's New Privacy Policies

2012-01-26T00:27:00.000-05:00

Google is previewing their upcoming privacy policy changes, to take effect on March 1st. They're mailing the info to all Google account holders. In theory, I don't have problems with what they're collecting. It's an inevitability of the social web. This is where things are going. But I'm leery of having this data collected about me, especially through a mobile device when/if I use Google services. There is a bit of Big Brother feel to this, even though tailoring ads and creating a consistent identity for account holders across all services sounds okay.

And it's hard to complain about anything you post publicly or have in your public profile showing up across Google services. It's naive to think public posts can be restricted or have a limited audience. Public is public. I'd opted to not combine my Blogger account with Google+ because I wanted to keep my blogs more anonymous. Now, I'm not sure it it will stay that way.

As for tailoring ads, I'm mostly oblivious to advertising other than the pulsating, animated annoyances and those just cause me to immediately hit the back button. I don't pay much attention to suggestions, either. Sure, sometimes a suggested person to add to one of my G+ circles really is someone I know, but I prefer to discover such connections in person with my friends. I let people know I'm using certain services, they let me know what they're using, and we go from there. I use various services, even within Google, in different ways and I don't need, or particularly want, the kind of consistency and synergy that Google is pushing.

One thing that I'm really ambivalent about is the ability of the Google browser to figure out what you're really searching for based on your likes or previous searches, etc. So, to expand on an example they gave, if you search for Jaguar, Google can figure out if you mean the animal or the car. But what if yesterday, I was interested in the animal, but today, I'm interested in the car. If the search results are geared to yesterday's search and brings them up faster, it does me no good, though it does benefit the person checking the same use of Jaguar each time. And when I search, I would use Jaguar Animal or Jaguar Car, anyway, so I should get mostly relevant search hits and this doesn't much matter to me. But it's the sort of thing that can really start to bug me. Because I kinda resent Google using my likes elsewhere -- ie, if I mentioned liking the Jaguar Car in an email and now want to search the animal Jaguar -- to tailor my search results, as if it knows me and my interests better than I do. And if I want to share something, I just copy and paste the link into the appropriate service, be it email, Facebook, Google+. I usually have those windows open in my browser (Chrome!), anyway. And I'm not much of a mobile user, at least not for sharing stuff. Mostly for looking up things I need to know, reading email, or checking Facebook.

I'm also reconsidering my desire to buy an Android phone. I don't particularly want an iPhone, either, which leaves me with a bit of a dilemma. I'm not ready to call Google "evil" as some have lately, but I'm not really happy about all this, either.

~~~o0o~~~

Picnik is Closing

2012-01-20T16:57:00.001-05:00

Picnik, now owned by Google, is closing in April. The editing services are now part of Google+ and that's what they're going to concentrate on. I understand the corporate decision to consolidate, but I have mixed feelings about it. Picnik was great when I was working. I could easily and quickly edit photos for free to upload on the library's website and Facebook pages by using Picnik. The library wasn't going to give me the software to do it, and the old MS Paint was gone after we got WinXP. Only the graphics department got photo editing software, so to have a good, dependable online service that let me do for free what I would otherwise need software for and didn't require me to have an account there or anywhere else, was really useful. Sure, I guess there are other free photo editing sites out there, but there's only been one Picnik. I'll miss it, even if I don't need it much in retirement since I have Photoshop.

~~~o0o~~~

Stop SOPA

2012-01-18T01:19:00.002-05:00

In typical "toss the baby out with the bathwater" form, the US government, prodded by lobbyists for studios and other content owners/providers, wants to stop piracy by controlling, even censoring the internet. The internet is dark in places to day in protest. Read about it on Wikipedia.

~~~o0o~~~

Blogger Gets Better

2012-01-11T21:38:00.000-05:00

Blogger now has threaded commenting! I've been wanting this for a long time. It's the best thing about LiveJournal. You need to have embedded commenting and your feed has to allow full posts, but there's nothing else you need to do. Blogger has done the rest. Now to take it for a test run.

~~~o0o~~~

New Way to Search

2012-01-10T16:43:00.001-05:00

So, Google has changed search to include "your world." I'm sure this is great for a lot of people. I'm not one of them. I don't care what my friends think of something when I'm searching. If I want my friends' opinions, I can just ask them. When I search online, I want pure data, or maybe I'll look for a review... by someone I don't know, preferably, so I don't have any preconceptions about their opinions. Because, again, if I want my friends' opinions, I can ask them.

So, except out of curiosity, I probably won't use the new search features much if at all. But you might want to try 'em. You might even love 'em.

~~~o0o~~~

What Scares Me

2011-11-20T23:57:00.001-05:00

A friend on Facebook posted a status to remind everyone that no political party is all good or bad, that no police department is all good or bad. And that's true. I never have disputed it. But the majority of Republicans in office right now, especially in Congress, and especially in the House of Representatives, have me scared right now. With some embellishment for this forum, where I can be a bit more verbose than on a friend's FB wall, I posted the following.

I'm not angry. I'm scared. I'm scared of what the country is becoming. I'm scared that a political party is holding the government hostage to hold the president to one term and, I fear, might be disguised or even suppressed bigotry, perhaps unknowingly, by people who just can't accept a black man running the country and are mistakenly of the opinion or are rationalizing their opinions by thinking of it in political terms.

I'm scared that the police in my city are out of control. I'm scared that my freedoms online are being threatened and that many of the sites I enjoy, for free, might be gone, or will charge more than I can afford or would want to pay. Okay, that does make me angry. And I never thought the day would come when I'd be this scared and angry, this fearful of losing my rights, of us all having our rights violated and compromised. What's been going on in recent months is shameful. And I fear the day that I won't be able to post something like this, to voice my opinion, be it anonymously or under my full name. And that would be more than a shame. It would be a tragedy.

~~~o0o~~~

Fight Internet Censorship

2011-11-18T17:53:00.001-05:00

It's amazing how corporate entities keep trying to control the internet. They see it as a business tool for their use and their use only. They don't want people posting negative comments about their products. They don't want people making mashups of movies and tv shows and music and other derivative, yet original creations. They don't want repostings of their intellectual property.

Now, I'm in favor of intellectual property and copyright and trademark, but the internet and the people who use and post to the internet are not hurting any of that. And once censorship starts, it's hard to stop. Perhaps political censorship will be next. Perhaps you'll be subject for investigation if you post something negative about the government.

Recent years have seen attacks on freedom and civil rights. The overreaction of police and city governments to the Occupy Wall Street movement is just the latest in a long line starting with the aftermath of 9/11 in the U.S. that saw the creation of the Patriot Act and the body searches conducted by TSA agents at airports that probably don't do a bit of good. It's part of the same mentality that thinks waterboarding isn't torture and actually yields results, never mind that someone being waterboarded is as likely to tell falsehoods as they are to reveal truths because they'll say anything to make it stop.

So we need a free internet to protest such activities, and to enjoy life, share our passions, be creative. If the internet censorship law is enacted, sites like Tumblr and others could be forced out of business. Here's what Fightforthefuture.org has to say in an email I received today:

"Last week there was a small meeting at Mozilla to discuss SOPA, the Internet Censorship Bill.

It was eerie. The DC groups were practically screaming "this bill is the worst we've ever seen, and we can't stop it" -- while everyone else had barely heard of it. The consensus? We needed to wake people up.

Well, this week the Internet woke up. *You* woke the Internet up.

Check out the numbers and screenshots from American Censorship Day.

Over 80,000 Tumblr users called ther representatives. SOPA was a trending tweet in the U.S. and between the Electronic Fronteir Foundation, Avaaz, and Demand Progress (groups that are just now working together!) we sent Congress over 1,000,000 emails.

The scary part? We still might lose. Though growing fast, our coalition still isn't strong enough.

The bill is backed by an unholy alliance of Hollywood, its unions, drug companies, and the Chamber of Commerce. They are pouring money into it, and they've been working on this for years. Yesterday, big players like Tumblr, Mozilla, Reddit, BoingBoing and even 4chan came out strong on our side. Now it's your turn. We've got to dig in and go viral.

Can you tell 20 friends about the Internet Censorship Bill?"

I've signed. Here's where you can, too.

~~~o0o~~~

Vote!

2011-11-07T18:58:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow is Election Day in the U.S. And while these "off" year elections tend to draw low voter participation, it is important to make your voice heard. It's easier to complain about government activities when you've had a say in who represents you than not. If you don't like who gets elected, you have no right to complain if you don't vote. Just sayin'.

In other news, Google+ is rolling out Pages!

~~~o0o~~~

Facebook Redesigning Profile Page

2011-09-22T14:35:00.001-04:00

Facebook is just full of announcements this week. Here's the latest, about redesigning the profiles. Some things could be very cool, like listen to the same music as your friend, which would require using the ticker and whatever music app your friend is using at the time. Likes, etc. will be in the ticker, not cluttering up the feed, but I plan to hide the annoying ticker, which I'm mostly ignoring now, anyway, so I'll miss out on all that. Still not sure how I feel about the new Timeline. I don't think of FB as a place for my life story. Really. That's not why I use FB. I use it to communicate with folks, play games, keep up with entertainment media and causes I'm interested in. I'm involved in too many other sites to want to give them up to put everything here. And I distrust using just one service for all, anyway.

The music thing, though, while cool, is irrelevant to me. I either have the TV or radio on when I'm online. Sometimes, late at night or at work, I use Pandora, which I adore. I can't see why I'd want to listen to music, or buy books, or do much else through FB. I'm not going to abandon sites I love just because FB added that functionality.

Facebook's new profiles are, in their words, going to be more visual. Big photo upfront as your "cover." More visual usually means less accessible to the visually impaired and blind users of a site. So, not a good thing in theory or in practice. It's alienating, even if there's enough text for them to access via a screen reader.

I want more functionality for Google+. I want more of my friends there and I want the causes and TV nets and the like there, too, with the equivalent of fan pages. I want the games I play on FB to be on G+, too. Then I would just need to check FB for the few folks who haven't made the move to G+.

~~~o0o~~~

Facebook Fail

2011-09-21T15:51:00.001-04:00

Facebook is rolling out changes to the site, starting with a redesign of the feed page, which, IMO, sucks. A cluttered page is more cluttered, with a right sidebar ticker that scrolls status updates ala Twitter, and a top news and recent updates that splits the middle section into a top and bottom arrangement, giving folks more places to check for updates. They've also added Smart Lists intended, I guess, to replace one's own lists, of friends. Smart Lists basically decide who should be in them: Friends, Family, etc. based on the same fuzzy FB logic that decides what should be a Top News item. Everyone I know on FB prefers to just see a straight list of everything from everybody and if we want to hide an app or person, we can.

Google+ is now open to the public. The timing is noteworthy. Will people make the switch? Dan Lyons on the Daily Beast has some thoughts on that.

If I could only get all my friends onto G+ and the games I love to play, I'd give up FB in a hearbeat.

~~~o0o~~~

Social Media Redux

2011-09-07T15:20:00.002-04:00

Posted this on Google+. Thought I'd post it here, too, since I haven't posted here in a while.

There are people who will keep trying new social sites, like me! And there are people who will start with one and stick with it and not venture elsewhere. And folks who will avoid social media like the plague. And others who fall somewhere in between. Facebook has become the site most people I know use. Some had used something else prior, but most started with FB, some because I talked them into it. Many of those barely use it, except maybe to read what others have to say, or to chat privately because I never see anything posted by them other than their latest friend-adding. I do not expect to see these people join G+. I posted about my G+ invites on FB and those interested have joined. That's where it ends, I think.

So, what do I use this for? To chat with yet more new folks, the way I ended up doing on FB with people I met for game-playing. But my friends and colleagues who do use social media are on FB, not here, so my attention is split, my posting is split. Or duplicated.

LiveJournal was once a big thing. For so many people I know, it remains the only thing. If they have a FB account, they use it for family updating, or photo-sharing, or to promote their writing, art, photography, etc. LiveJournal is where they feel safe to kick back and share thoughts and ideas and experiences via friends-locked posts and the threaded comments. I loved LJ enough to pay for a permanent account, yet I hardly post there, anymore, and barely read my Friends Page, anymore. Not due to boredom or loss of interest, but lack of time. There are folks on LJ I follow who I don't follow elsewhere. But something had to give.

I wonder sometimes if, once I'm retired, I'll be spending all day online, devoting x number of hours daily to each social site I use and blogs I read. Will this be my life, or will I make time for real life activities, too, maybe catch up on my book reading. And now I'm feeling the urge to blog this. Because my blogs reach a whole different audience. And should I put it on my FB page, too?

~~~o0o~~~

New Blogger

2011-07-07T21:44:00.000-04:00

Wow, it's completely different here. I don't know if it's in regular Blogger yet, or just draft.blogger, but I've got the new interface and it's awesome. It'll take me a while to learn where everything is, but it's so easy to get stats and a lot fits on the page. The font is also small and light and a bit hard for me to read, but I'll likely get used to that.

I imagine it's all part of the total integration of Google's products now that they've got Google+ in beta (and let me tell you, it's a pain to keep typing that plus sign, having to shift and all). Google+, which I managed to get, is rather cool. Not many people are on it now, so it's hard to judge, but I can see it competing evenly with Facebook, maybe even overcoming the FB juggernaut one of these days. Google is cool. FB isn't really cool and has had more privacy issues than Google has had. Or so it seems.

~~~o0o~~~

On Friendship in the Social Media Age

2011-07-01T16:39:00.001-04:00

Gonna get a bit personal, without going into recognizable details. My best friend, hereafter referred to as ex-BFF, and I have agreed to let our friendship die the natural death it's been heading for over the last few years. We've been friends -- real life friends -- for more than a quarter century, so it's a bit sad and shocking, but also a relief, given the tension of the past few years.

She was my 3rd official best friend. There was the one in high school (and with whom I am now again friends) and the one from one of my first full-time jobs. And ex-BFF has already been replaced, by someone who over the past few years of tension between me and ex-BFF, slid almost unnoticed into the slot.

Ex-BFF and I became friends first as penpals. We had interests in common and discovered each other through shared interests. We lived only a couple of hours away from each other by train, so we arranged to meet and hit it off immediately. And yet, there were signs, as I look back, of problems.

With new BFF, I've never felt tension. We have political arguments and we back away from that when things get too tense, but it never makes me feel irritated with her. But with ex-BFF, I felt irritation at times, more so as the years progressed. And I know she felt it, too. The time she slammed the phone down, then called back to see if I'd realized she was annoyed was my first sign. And I ignored it. Only when I realized the things we had in common that formed the foundation of our friendship were gone did I see the truth. Our friendship was dying and we were doing nothing to nurture it. Our lives had grown too complicated. Our schedules were too different. Did we grow apart? Did we develop different interests? Or did our differences that once didn't matter become things that couldn't be overlooked or ignored any longer? Unless we found replacements for what was gone, and ways to make the differences not matter again, our friendship would not be nurtured; it would flounder and die. And I couldn't get her to talk with me about it.

And then came the comment on Facebook.

I'd talked her into trying FB, see, because that's where I spend much of my online time. I prefer keeping in touch with friends there than composing long emails. Quick status updates, links to things I like, etc. And FB allows a bit more interaction than Twitter. So she joined FB.

I have a lot of friends I've met online. Some of them, I've even gotten to meet in real life. A few I met through flickr and we've gone out on photoshoots together. I've met a couple of people I know from my AOL days. From the early days of AOL message boards, to today's myriad social networks, I've become comfortable interacting with like-minded and/or interesting people online. A lot of my old schoolmates are on FB as are former work colleagues and friends I've made through my hobbies. Some are on more than one network, typically FB and flickr, and sometimes, LiveJournal, too, and I find it easier and faster to dash off a status, have my main blog post to FB, and leave comments on other people's posts and statuses, than it is to type emails or even type in chat mode. And FB lets me send messages like email, chat, and comment. It's rather versatile. And BFF ventured into that. She wasn't forced, but she gamely jumped in and has been using it, if more sporadically than I do. Still, all was fine. Until a week or so ago.

I was very stressed at work and posted a status on FB to that effect. She left a comment I took seriously but instead apparently, had been meant as a joke, a bit of tongue-in-cheek repartee. But that's not how things can come off online, especially when someone's venting and looking for some cyber hugs or support. I over-reacted and left a comment she took as scolding. She emailed me, said she was hurt and upset.. I emailed back that I can say what I want on my wall. She doesn't have to post on my wall if she doesn't like my responses.

Harsh? Probably. But I would probably not have commented like that on her wall. I wouldn't joke on her wall, either, if she posted she was stressed and her day sucked. I didn't hear back. I wrote again, and told her if she'd just asked me to delete my comment and hers, without scolding me, I would've done just that. As it was, I'd already deleted both. But the issue brings up the matter of "wall etiquette." I think I have the right to say whatever I want on my wall, but I should be more respectful on other people's walls. I'm very cautious when I post elsewhere. On my wall, my sites, my blogs, I pretty much say what I want. Same as I'm doing here, now, pretty much. I don't try to be hurtful, not on my wall/online places, but yeah, sometimes, people get hurt. Is it really that much of a difference to be hurt by a public (in the sense that it's public to my friends, as my posts, comments, etc. are restricted to my friends) post or comment on my wall vs being hurt by an email only two of us see? Painful is painful. She said she was embarrassed and deserved a public apology. On her wall, I would've done that if I thought I had anything to apologize for, or at least, sorry I overreacted! But even though I still feel I had nothing to apologize for, I certainly wouldn't do it on my wall.

These nuances of cyberlife are a bit confusing and I suppose we each have our own ideas re: what's proper.

So, the friendship is over. She felt the need to email me and say she had a longer email written and decided to not send it. Why mention that? Why not just say whatever you have to say, be it the original, longer version, or the shorter "let's just end this" version? Do I need to know there was something longer, something that likely would've been hurtful to me? No. Nor would I feel the need to tell that to someone unless I wanted to stick it to them a bit, dig that verbal knife in and twist a bit without actually saying the hurtful thing. Nuances can be as painful as barbs.

There are, of course, other considerations when a BFFship is over.

Do I tell mutual friends?
Do I go to places where I'm sure to run into her with our mutual friends also there?
And in the age of social media, do I unfriend her? She hasn't so far, unfriended me.

These issues never came up with the other former BFFs in my life, as we hadn't had mutual friends at the point of departure and social media was science fiction.

So, it's over and I'm sad and relieved, but mostly relieved. And I think of all the things I'll miss, I'll miss her waffles most.

~~~o0o~~~

Favicons!

2011-06-08T18:09:00.000-04:00

Draft Blogger News: We can haz favicons! I'm giddy with excitement. Now to pic graphics for them.

~~~o0o~~~

Tumbling

2011-05-09T21:01:00.000-04:00

Tumblr created Share on Tumblr codes for websites. Here's the code if you want to add this to your site or blog.

~~~o0o~~~

Dynamic Views

2011-04-19T17:47:00.000-04:00

Blogger has come out with a way to choose how your blog is viewed and now Google has added an extension for Chrome so the reader with it can choose how to view a Blogger blog. I haven't had the chance to play with any of this yet, but it sure sounds cool. The views are: Flipcard, Mosaic, Sidebar, Snapshot and Timeslide.

~~~o0o~~~

Why Not Researching Before Sending Resumes is a Bad Idea

2011-03-29T16:55:00.000-04:00

We get resumes faxed to us all the time. We're merely one branch library in a larger system. Our library system's website has a page devoted to people looking to be employed by our great institution and how to go about it. So when we get a resume with the following at my humble branch, it's hard to not snicker.

This person seems to be seeking a management position, a position usually filled from within, and if from without, there are targeted ads seeking such employees. And then he notes:
"I am attracted to your organization because it is a fast growing, innovation organization..."
Somehow, those aren't words I normally associate with our century plus organization. We're a library. We are not "fast growing," whatever that could mean for a library. As for innovative, well, we do try to stay on top of the curve, or at least with the curve, but ahead of it? Not so much.

And anyone looking for a job with us who can't be bothered to research where to send the resume, and sends it to a branch that has no control over hiring other than for kids who shelve books, well, sorry, but I'm not forwarding this to the people who do handle hiring.

~~~o0o~~~

Follow by Email

2011-03-27T13:11:00.000-04:00

Blogger has added a follow by email gadget, so I'm adding it to my blogs. Over there, in the sidebar. I don't know how many people prefer filling up their email inbox with blog posts rather than read the posts via a feed reader, but still, just in case, and because it's a simple little thing, here goes.

~~~o0o~~~