More Old Tech

Speaking of old tech, does anyone remember Epinions?

It's still around, actually, so even if you've forgotten it or never heard of it, you could check it out today and get in on the action. These days, naturally, it has an RSS feed, which it did not back in the day when I was participating. 

It's a website where members post reviews of things--products, movies, books, locations, companies--and make money based on how helpful other members (and, I think, random visitors) rate the advice.

I joined back in 2000, and when I think about it, it was really a sort of proto-blogging scene. 

You're only writing reviews of specific things, so it's a limited-focus blogging, but you'd get a group of people whose writing you enjoyed and whose posts you'd always be sure to read (with a 'trusted' list that showed up on your profile much like a blogroll), and people would insert bits of detail about their lives so you sort of got to feel you knew them, and you could leave comments on each others' posts, and so forth.

So come to think of it, I was essentially blogging years ago!

I gave up Epinions after a couple of years, when they were having some technical issues and one day my most recent hard-written posts disappeared, leaving only the sad empty shells of the titles on the screen. I always spent a lot of time crafting my reviews, trying to get just the right turn of phrase and so forth, so losing all that work was significant.

I didn't have the heart to rewrite those two posts, but the lonely little titles, which I couldn't bear to just delete, haunted me so that I couldn't work on anything else either, and I never wrote there again. 

As you can perhaps tell, it was a very traumatic experience.

I blame the lingering scars of this event for my failure to take up blogging, even when all the cool people were doing it, until I was obliged to by course requirements. 

Every now and then I think about returning to Epinions. I do like to tell people what I think about things, after all, and I always like to make a little money. (A lot of money would also be nice, but seems to rarely be associated with telling people what you think on the internet.)

But I have a lot of other things to do these days, so in all likelihood this will not happen. 

Cool Old Tech

I and my gracious spouse went out to look for Thai food yesterday, as one does.

We checked the internet--as one always does--and then went boldly off to a place we found in Reading, which turned out to be closed. One should have used the phone to confirm their hours of operation, but that was way too old-fashioned.

So it was off to the next town, where we vaguely recalled from the internet that there was a Thai restaurant, but didn't know exactly where.

Fortunately, as clever people are no doubt aware, one can send text messages to Google (46-6453) from a cell phone and get convenient answers. This is not a new development (I myself have known of it for over a year), but it's always a fun one. I find it works best with simple queries. Definitions of words, factual questions like dates, locations or sports scores. Advanced functions and complex terms tend to produce unsatisfactory results.

But you can certainly text "thai restaurant wakefield ma" and get a response with the address and phone number of said restaurant!

Sadly, the story does not have a happy ending despite the awesome convenience of texting Google, because the Wakefield one was closed too.

We thought of going to Lexington, where we knew there was an open restaurant because I got its number from Google text and then called, but there was a lot of traffic on the highway. Eventually we gave up.

Perhaps later this week we'll go into Boston, where we know there are fine and delicious Thai restaurants and where we should have just gone in the first place yesterday, only we were trying to avoid the hassle of going into town.

Oh, the irony. At least I got to send some text messages.

Good News About Fiction

I am extremely pleased to hear, via Stephen's Lighthouse (where the post title presciently states "you'll like this post"), that research suggests reading fiction is good for social skills. 

Call me an anti-social misfit because I was huddled in a corner with a book all the time, will you? (Being homeschooled didn't help, since everyone sort of assumes kids who aren't in school have no social skills, because clearly children will never encounter other human beings outside of a school setting and will therefore have no opportunity to interact with them.) 

Yeah, well, you're wrong, because I was learning about how people relate to each other and why they do things and so forth. To quote researcher Keith Oatley at the University of Toronto: 

"Fiction is really about how to get around in the social world, which is not as easy as one might think. ... People who read fiction give themselves quite a bit of practice in understanding that. And also, I think reading fiction sort of prompts one to think about these questions - you know, what are these people up to?"

I think this is pretty cool, and am interested to see what the researchers find next. As the article wonders, 

For example, most of their research has focused on fiction in general. But would they find similar effects if they looked at biographies? And do sci-fi tales about chasing aliens through the galaxy have the same benefits as Alice Munro's short stories about love and loss? And what parts of the brain are stimulated when literary simulation is in full effect?

I, for one, look forward to finding out more. 

So I'm pleased to hear that fiction (as well as nonfiction, which I also love and enjoy) is getting some respect, although I have to say, I was going to keep reading it anyway just because I like it, even if all the clever people scorned me for my low, intellectually crude tastes. 

I'm anti-social like that.

Speaking of Social Networking

I just heard the exciting news that MLA is now on LinkedIn (thanks to the no-doubt awesome Brandi Tuttle). 

And OMG, I'm on LinkedIn too! 

MLA and I should totally get together and chat about stuff we like. Although my profile is ugly because I don't check it that often and can't be bothered to brighten it up in whatever way one can brighten profiles on that site.

Possibly I will not be cool enough to hang with MLA.

Just Another Pretty Facebook

I've found Facebook moderately helpful as a sort of medium-level social interface: I don't use it for many heart-to-heart conversations, but it helps me keep in casual contact with people I would otherwise not be in contact with much at all.

This was particularly interesting to me as a distance student while I was working on my degree, since I was able to add as friends some of the people in my classes in different parts of the country. We could then do the internet equivalent of waving hello to each other in passing, occasionally stopping to chat. 

It's not that we're becoming bosom pals through social networking sites, but we're acquainted. 

I'm now finding that helpful in another situation as I prepare to leave one job for another. I know a lot of people in my current job, and one always says "we'll keep in touch," but everyone knows that most of the time you don't.

Now we can link up on Facebook before I go, and we'll automatically keep in touch, at least a little. And being a little bit in touch may make it easier to send a quick note and ask if someone wants to have lunch, or whatever.

It will be interesting to see if that will make for a different experience leaving this job, than the last one I left, when all we had was email. 

Riding the Salmonella Wave

And other waves of disease, of course!

I've seen HealthMap before, but was reminded anew of its coolness by Learn to Live. It's a nifty site compiling reported incidences of various and sundry ailments around the world and locating them with a little ballon on a map. 

I had to try it on salmonella, and saw a dramatic visual representation of the rash of cases in the US, Mexico and the Caribbean recently. 

It's quite a cool site: you can zoom to specific countries or regions, see the information in several languages, read the news stories on which the little location balloons are based, and select any or all of a variety of sources for the news. 

For keeping up on what's new in illness, it's a good find. Sadly, it does not appear to have an RSS feed, but I suppose it updates so often that would just be terrifying, and one could probably build a feed for a specific location and/or disease if desired.

Water Bottle Smackdown

I am relieved to hear, once again (this lively and thorough discussion, including coverage of common beliefs like "if you feel thirsty, you're already dehydrated," from Junkfood Science), that there does not appear to be any solid scientific evidence for the notion that all humans should be drinking at least 8 8-ounce glasses of water per day to stave off dry, parched brains and eventual desertification. 

I had heard this previously, and pretty much determined to feel OK about drinking water whenever I'm thirsty and not worrying about it otherwise, but I'm always pleased to hear that I'm already doing whatever it is I should be doing. 

I do carry a bottle of water with me if I'm going to be wandering around for a while without ready access to liquid and think I might get thirsty, but aside from my five daily mugs of tea (which, come on, is already enough liquid to drown a small animal), I don't go out of my way to suck down the stuff, and I'm still functioning so far.

Besides, I've read that potable water is likely to be the next big shortage (I like to keep up on potential approaching disasters), so why encourage people to get in the habit of swigging gallons of it if they don't need to?