From this, to almost caught up - I have reached December 24th in my inbox, and resolve to answer all of my email from 2006 by January 15th. And I would be done now, except that I had to take a break to write thank you notes for the holidays!
Current email, inbox: 1468
Caught up to: December 24th, 2006
Need: 1468 smart things to say, to complete this task!
Manhattan Society: If I was writing one of those ‘chick lit with a shoe on the cover books’, this is where I would be starting my research.
BC Dome loses roof: of course the irony is that the BC contractor’s association had a convention booked here starting next week.
Software for starving students: Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (but available to anyone). We’ve gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a fully-featured office suite, a cutting-edge web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, utilities and more. I am not starving, but still appreciative! And the Mac and PC version is a nice touch! Via Digg
I try to donate a little money every month to a different charity. The amounts are small, but regular giving is important to me - like flossing and vitamins, giving is a good habit to cultivate. In December, I try to pick one or two charities for larger donations, as a way of balancing out the constant ‘buy buy BUY Things equal Love‘ message of Xmas that I feel bombarded with from about the middle of October onward.
This year, Half the Sky was our December charity, and then we sponsored christmas for some children (so much fun, by the way, to get their letters and go shopping! I spent more time on this project than I did presents for my family!) and sent care packages to soldiers. In the past, I have always meant to donate to heifer international, but hadn’t yet - they were on my future giving list. After all, how fun to give someone honeybees, or geese, or a water buffalo. Except….you aren’t. I received their catalog this year, and the copy is very, very misleading, according to Philip Greenspun and Michael Stillwell, who read the small print, and discovered that, “you find that your purchase is “symbolic” and “represents a contribution to the entire mission of Heifer International.” (Quote from Stillwell). Not quite as much fun, is it, to contribute to a general fund that one day may provide stock animals to families than it is to buy a flock of geese.
And as always, I am a huge fan of charity navigator, for evaluating one’s charities of choice.
I have this idea just swirling around in my head about how the web makes history editable in a way that it never has been, before. Yes, history, written by the victors, but now? History is written (and edited) by anyone who wants to, really, which is one of the reasons that I applaud danah boyd’s idea to start recording the history of social networking sites (see this post) - get it down now, so that there is a record of what happened and when. What got me thinking about this is a blog I happened on the other day - really, a great essay about the importance of blogging - so well written that I bookmarked it to post here later, except….to make his point that he was an ‘expert’ in the field of blogging, the author pointed out that he was one of the ‘first bloggers’, and his blog was started on a Diaryland site in the mid 90s.
Which makes him an expert in revisionist history, since blogs didn’t exist in the mid-90s ( it was all about the personal home page back then!***). And semantics aside about what the form is called, Diaryland itself was created in September 1999. Needless to say, I am not linking the essay, or the author, even though I am intensely curious about how he has managed to bend time itself to make his claims true.
***randomly, now - Does anybody remember the documentary movie called Home Page, from 1998? I have a copy, and love it, mostly because I was such a fan of Justin Hall and his links.net webpage, and of course, everyone loved Carl Steadman, who definitely wins the ‘longest time between redesigns’ award, since i just googled him to get that link, and found his site exactly the way I remember reading it back in the late 90s. Can you even imagine trying to make a movie like that today, now that CMC is completly mainstream, and with the advent of vlogs?
My Death Space: What happens to your MySpace when you die? But when you think about it, wouldn’t it be an awesome business idea to run a digital funeral home - a place that would notify all of your online forums, friends, and games, your Second life pals, your /. enemies, etc, that were gone. Maybe they could write your last blog post, tell the world what happened, why you just disappeared one day.
No one’s hotter than a New England Gansta.
World of Warcraft: a cautionary tale about the pull an escape from reality can have on you. Well, this really puts a damper on my Kingdom of Loathing addiction.
Top 10 Reasons Why Your 5 Tips About 7 Cutting-Edge Technologies will annoy me.
Of a sort. Wordpress is installed, and I am entranced by the notion of ‘themes’. Design is dead, long live the template! Now I just have to figure out how to edit those links up there - ‘about’, ‘contact’, etc. Hmmmmmmm………that might be best left for another night.