Second Thoughts

Three Typepad Annoyances

I've always loved Typepad. I've never wanted to leave it, since I found it, and I don't plan to leave it now, but it's annoyances have gotten to me lately.

I don't even mean the RSS Feed glitch that is making the posts larger than life on most portals. That's annoying, but no one seems to fix it and in the end, well, I guess it makes the feed owner shut off Typepad blogs or people just put up with it. It's annoying that World of SL has a feed the displays typepad not with its "above the fold" first part, which would make a blog cut short and smaller to deal with, but dips down further into the "below the fold" part. I am not even going to bother to try to fight that because it's not doable, I guess, but just...annoying.

But I've developed a set of 3 pet peeves about Typepad that I feel I really need to publish and not just file as a "feedback" that will likely be ignored, or get a polite answer (they are very good with CS and politeness) but go nowhere. In part, I want to publish this so that others using Typepad can respond and explain whether anything *can* be done about these annoyances.

My third annoyance isn't common to Typepad alone -- I think most blog software is set up this way with this friggin annoying domain-name stuff. I guess there'd have to be access to some cloud server somewhere that would pull up an interface with all your blogs and whatnot everywhere to enable you to manage them. And no, OpenID isn't that, because that's cumbersome and doesn't work (paging Gwyn L, who has a blog where it never works for example).

E-Mail is Obsolete

I've thought that e-mail was obsolete for a long time because it's so wasteful, stupid, and annoying. I guess that's how things that are free on the Internet always get? I used to spend hours reading and answering email, it seemed important. I used to look forward to reading it. Now I loathe it, and try to avoid it except perhaps half a dozen times a day just to fish out the really important work stuff from the sea of spam and idiocy even from people who are in fact important and from whom I do want to hear, when they stop sending me like 30 clippings from newspapers I already read on their web pages.

I long since stopped using the proprietary email systems like Outlook Express after having one too many nasty experiences losing all my email, where everything in fact was being kept (and that's how most people do it frankly). A computer geek reinstalled everything after a crash and forgets to save the dbx files out of Outlook and installed a new outlook over the old one. Grrrrrr. Since that time, I've struggled to save the dbx files out somewhere but they're hellish to try to read through later. After one more crash losing everything because I couldn't be bothered to try to fish out the files to save, that was it, I moved entirely to Yahoo and Juno online, the latter of which costs something to keep all that stuff on their servers (Yahoo is free and better, because it searches on key words better through the entire deck of emails.

I noticed Scoble referring more and more to how he hated email and didn't use it. I saw his reference today to "Feed Bankruptcy" marking everything as read. That concept of marking things as read or not simply never caught on with me 15 years ago and it won't catch on now. I realized that I just don't hardly use email anymore for anything substantive. I don't use a cell phone to talk live, either, or I'd go nuts and never get my jobs done. but email is not helpful.

That is, I have 4 email accounts, one of which is tied up only with news groups that spew out gadzillion numbers of articles, clippings, comments, etc. every day -- better they just be off by themselves where I can tune in once or twice a week. I have two others mainly for SL and related business. And the most important one for real-life work and family, which inevitably fills up not only with spam but newsgroups and discussion groups somehow escaping the confines of their other mail box.

Several times a day, I go in and try to do battle with these mail boxes, hoping to spot the authentic communications among the zillions of clippings. It's the ability to send news clippings and comment and discuss them that is the worst clutter factor now, that and those kind of people who feel they need to send you a picture of a cat and a funny joke at least once a day.

I realized that for "real" communications I go to:

o Skype -- not to call people, which is annoying, and I hate when they jam on me with calls, especially when I'm already on the other line, but I use their instant IM to reach people because I know they'll read it there
o Facebook -- very, very clear channel of inbox communications which are almost entirely spam free. Even the FB spam comes into a more general area, and if you signed up for an overly gregarious group that is spamming your inbox, you just leave it -- and it lets you leave and is really gone (unlikes so many other things related to email.
o Text messages on a mobile phone -- I don't like this, but other people especially kids send them

(If I were half my age, I might use AIM, but I just don't like all that instant stuff, so you could add AIM too if you like, or Meebo).

Last summer, when my family was off camping, I didn't hear from them for nearly a week and was getting worried. My usual technique in these cases when people go out of the reaches of cell phone and wireless coverage is to use Google with terms like "bear" and "eaten" and "tourists" and "11-car pile up" and "priced to sell immediately" and "arrested at border" combined with our last names. That system worked at least twice in my life, unfortunately, so I find it handy. It's also a handy way to catch your relatives selling on Craig's list something that you thought Mom had meant for you to have...

In any event, I couldn't seem to turn up my son at various e-mail addresses until finally, I realized that what I simply had to do was leave a Facebook message. That was answered within 6 hours. Why? Because even out in the boondocks, he bicycled like 11 miles to some grocery store in the middle of nowhere with one computer online that he used to check his Facebook, and didn't have time to check anything else or use the pay phone even to call collect, I guess.... Priorities, priorities. So Facebook is now my preferred message board.

What would they have to do to get email working again and make it an acceptable application for business, which it is rapidly ceasing to become? (Twitterers virtuously tell you they have beaten their 100 email messages every morning, but I'm not impressed, because I know they are a nervous wreck and that the nerves will play out somewhere else...)

Science Fair

The other day I went to my kid's science fair over at the school, and saw the usual collection of algae and mold growing, and plants that people had played rock or classical music to, and taste tests to show the difference between fat and fat-free.

You can see a lot of how awareness has changed since our day, of course, with displays where the kids matter-of-factly write, 'Because of pollution of the environment, we'll have to stop using detergent, so we better learn whether lemon or vinegar works better to get out stains." Kids see right through advertising, and write earnestly that they weren't buying that Fab or Tide or All got out stains better or left clothes downy fresh. They put it to the test.

But what have to be the most interesting displays kids are doing these days -- say, 10 or 12 years of age -- are studies of the effects that video games are having on themselves, along with their steady diet of loud music on i-Pods and Sony Walkmans (which I'm informed are utterly obsolete and ridiculous now, since everybody has an i-Pod, or at least a Mylo).

One kid with the map of Ireland written all over his face, the kind of freckled, jug-eared little kid that will probably grow up to be some kind of geeky science type or at least top insurance adjuster in his district some day, decided to test which video games would make your heart beat faster.

The Two Cultures

The setting for the Sheep's CSI:NY crime lab.

Remember the Two Cultures of C.P. Snow? Sorry to give you a Wikipedia on that -- it comes up first all the time! You can try other versions of the story here (which unconsciously refers to Lysenkosim), or here. There's even a kind of subterfuge afoot to introduce a Third Culture which is merely the Second Culture (science) trying to prevail again.

Imagine, Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalogue guy, writing this sort of patent nonsense, a glass of Kool-Aid in hand:

"Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly."

Ugh.

Here's an interesting debate on the JIRA which is in a way about the Two Cultures, except I would submit that the extremist sect within the open-source movement isn't really the original Second Culture as understood some years ago, and would likely be repudiated possibly even by Snow. And BTW, even Wikipedia's article on Open Source lets you know that it is a school of thought -- nay, even a sect, or group of sects, or collection of sect-tending thinkers. You would never know from hanging around Second Life that even within the movement, Open Source has intense critics, like here or here or my favourite, Bezroukov, bog ego sokhrani, here.