Eons ago, in internet time, there was a website called Spybot. It would troll the websites that you specified for changes and then send you an email when new content appeared. It also had an open-ended search engine that would constantly query the major engines for new references to a keyword. Wanted to know all new website mentions of “Star Wars” or “mushroom pizza” or “Grillo”? It would find them and email you the results. Wanted to know whenever a certain television show was on, no matter what the network? It would do that as well and email you the results.
Spybot no longer exists, due to massive bandwidth constraints and a severe lack of turning a profit, but from its ashes arose Rich Site Summary, or RSS, which does pretty much the same thing — summarizing new content from specified websites — but through an RSS reader rather than through an email update. Demonstrating the limit of my understanding of this wacky technology, RSS readers completely befuddle me. There’s all this information, all over the place, and I don’t quite get where it goes. It’s probably just me. The upper limit of my understanding is my iGoogle page, and that’s just limited to the three most recent stories, which is enough (and I don’t have that many feeds, which don’t get updated too quickly anyway).
There is an RSS feed for this blog. This blog is also linked to my Facebook page — whenever a new entry is posted, it (eventually) shows up on my profile. Recently, a number of my Facebook “friends” have discovered the blog through individual entries, and have posted comments … but as comments to the entry on the Facebook page, not to the original posting on this site … because, since they can read the entry through the Facebook page, why bother clicking through to the original site? Therefore, if you are reading this entry on the original site itself or through the RSS feed, then you may not be aware that there are comments attached to the entry that may have been left on the Facebook site, unless you are also a “friend” on Facebook and are looking at the entry on both sites (and, really, yeah, I’m sure that there is enough time remaining in the universe to spend on that activity).
But then, I started to think about the situation, the technology, and how different people’s pages can all be linked together through Facebook. I’ve seen profiles where people have linked their blog, their Flickr photostream, their Twitter accounts, and all the other various personal accounts on other sites in one place. So, in order to follow the antics of a particular individual, there is no need to individually RSS all of their pages and coagulate all of the data in an RSS reader … just go to their Facebook entry and everything is there in one place.
Additionally, people on Facebook seem to like to share things with other Facebook users … not only every aspect of their personal lives via their “status updates,” but news stories, videos, and other stuff that they may have found while trolling the interwebs … and all of this is relatively easy to post on their Facebook “wall” for friends to view, inspect, and, perhaps, comment. So, while not necessarily serving as a site where all of your “feeds” are updated, Facebook can serve as a site where new content (assuming you have the same tastes as your “friends”) is delivered to you in much the same way that RSS functions.
At least, that’s the point that my dream was trying to make. I don’t think that Facebook is going to replace RSS, because there are those who absolutely refuse to be on Facebook, and sorting through all of your friends’ content for stuff that you like might be a bit of a hassle, but for some people I know, Facebook will work for this purpose.
Comments? I’d prefer that they be left on the main site rather than on Facebook, because that way they remain linked to the original entry. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter … sometimes I am surprised if I get any comments at all …
Two dreams last night, both of which involving Facebook and me blogging about them. Yes, for the first time, as far as I can recall, I actually dreamed about blogging about the dream itself. Scary, frightening, and disturbing all at the same time … especially considering that the dreams were about Facebook. Erghh.
The second of the dreams, however, actually made an interesting point about Facebook, and I’ll discuss that in a separate post. The first dream was about a friend who had signed up for Facebook for the purposes of letting her son play That Farm Game, and she wasn’t going to get involved with the whole social networking thing because she thought that it was moronic, and yet, over the course of a week, she started adding friends, and taking quizzes, and sending gifts to friends, and becoming more and more engrossed with the whole Facebook Experience. The thing about this dream is that it is completely true! She knows who she is …
Why I am dreaming about all this, I am not entirely certain, although it probably has something to do with poking around Facebook at 1 in the morning when no one else is online …
As I have been reminding people, once the temperature hits 95 degrees, then anything hotter than that is just relative. IT’S JUST HOT. I was walking up to the bank yesterday afternoon around 4:30pm and the friendly temperature display read “105″ … factor in the heat index we get around here, and that probably would have placed the temperature at around 120 degrees. But did it really feel any different than 100 degrees? No, not really … it was just hot.
But the physics of heat and automobile interiors can be an interesting subject.
Last week, two cars were parked in the parking lot of the local compressor factory. Both had their windshields blown out. From the inside. Security cameras caught the event, and it was completely spontaneous … one moment, clear windshields; next second, no windshields and glass everywhere. And with both vehicles, the windows were rolled up tightly. Everyone always says to leave the windows rolled down slightly in order to keep the windshields from cracking. Someone explained it to me the other day, saying that the people driving the cars into the parking lot were probably running their air conditioning, and then they sealed the car tightly with the windows rolled up, so that there was an extreme difference in pressure between the interior of the car and the hot exterior, and since the pressure inside the car had nowhere to go as the outside became hotter, it exploited any weakness in the windshield glass that it could find, and it found one.
A customer came into The Store the other day with a severe burn on her leg. She told me that every morning she gets a cup of water at McDonald’s to take her pills. She drank about a third of the water and left the rest in the cup holder in her car as she went to work. Eight hours later, when she returned to the car after letting it sit there all day in the sun, she knocked the cup over onto her leg, and the water was boiling hot. It became hot enough in the car to boil water.
And hey, it’s just the beginning of July! The hottest month of the year is yet to come, a fact that I was constantly reminding people in April when they were griping about the “heat” …
Number of raw images shot during KY June 2009 = 663 (625 on the digital camera, 38 on the iPhone camera). Once the images are processed, it usually turns out that 30% of them are usable, so we can probably estimate that 200 pictures will come out of these seven days.
In comparison, number of raw images shot during KY June 2008 = 859, over approximately the same amount of time. But there were a lot of archival shots from Richmond as well as the Lost Sea in that batch.
Here is one fairly interesting statistic: the number of raw images taken on the first day, which includes shots on the road in Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky. 2008 = 154. 2009 = 56. The road was definitely more interesting last year, or I was just more trigger happy than this year.
Photos from the 2009 Invasion of the Bluegrass State are coming soon to the Flickr page! And, after that, maybe I will get around to posting the 2008 photos as well! Yeah, haven’t quite gotten around to that, heh …
Last night’s dream featured a reading of Lori-Lyn Hurley’s blog, in which she had scanned in, for everyone to see, a handwritten letter that she had written to a mail order company from which she had ordered a pet rock. The box had been tampered with and had arrived with no rock inside. The letter, four pages long, was written in a childish scrawl, uneven and crooked … which is odd, because I actually have never seen Lori-Lyn’s handwriting.
Does Lori-Lyn ever get her pet rock? I do not know. I think that the greater question for analysis is why was I dreaming about Lori-Lyn’s situation in the setting of her blog? It’s not like I haven’t met her in person and would not know how that experience would be. Maybe it is because via the computer monitor is the most prominent way that I know her and that is how she translates in dreams?
Or maybe it is because, during our last visit, we were distracted entertained by the Woody and Tracy Show …
Jeffrey Scott Holland is a musician, writer, artist, filmmaker, and, most recently, creator and owner of a theatre company. For years, his trademark appearance always included a hat of some sort perched atop a skull that was covered with thick, dark, almost jet-black hair.
The image presented here was taken on the afternoon of June 19, 2009 in Louisville, Kentucky and features Mr. Holland’s summer hairstyle, as the month of June in this region of the Bluegrass State has proven to be extremely hot and arid.
He likens his appearance to that of David Duchovny’s character Charlie Runkle on the Showtime television series “Californication”. I would agree that comparison is apt.
No, he is not going bald, nor stricken with some disease. Although after spending the afternoon lurking with Retrovirus and Opportunistic Infection, we both might be coming down with something …
This is my friend Stephen. I have known him since Elementary School.
We had some interesting times together throughout high school, namely through our escapades as members of the Model High School Band. Stephen had long, curly blonde hair back then, as did many punk kids back in the 1980s. He’s in the lower lefthand cover in this photo. I remember that he was one of those angry kids hanging out in The Pit, one of those cool kids that didn’t quite fit in but conformed enough to remain in our tight-knit little private school.
I hadn’t seen Stephen since, oh, say, maybe 1990 or so, when Shay Quillen and I got together with him to record some tracks for Shay’s first (and only, IIRC) solo album recording.
Very recently, Stephen was diagnosed with brain cancer. The tumor was excised and he is currently undergoing chemotherapy. His prognosis is very good. I can personally say that he looks fantastic and I feel that, with his extremely positive attitude, he is going to make it.
A similar type of cancer had been fatal to his mother, twenty years ago. Medical technology has advanced considerably since then and there are treatments available that were not available two decades ago. However, while medical technology has advanced, so has ways that people communicate with each other. As soon as he was diagnosed with his condition, rumors began to appear in various venues on the internet. I heard various stories on Facebook as well as through private emails that people would send me, of a dire fate that was before him and of certain timetables for his expiration. His own silence on the issue on his Facebook page lead many to believe that he was no longer with us. But, you know, if I just had part of my brain cut out of my head, I don’t think I would want to be hanging out on Facebook either.
One of my goals for this year’s Kentucky trip was to visit with Stephen and see how he was doing. Stephen gave me his blessing to post this photo and this story and to inform the three people who actually read this blog that he is doing okay. Let us end any further rumor and speculation concerning his condition. His positive attitude towards his situation is inspiring and we should all be inspired to send positive feelings his way. I, most definitely, am looking forward to visiting with him again on another annual Kentucky trip.
Be here starting at the unholy hour of 5:00am CST when we will attempt to post a new image at the top of every hour (until we decide that we have had enough) through the magic of cellular internet and an iPhone 3G (with the latest 3.0 update, as if that makes the slightest difference). As always, the same rules: Whatever is in front of me, unless extremely indecent, will be photographed at the top of the hour.
The new image will eventually appear in the “Most Recent Flickr Upload” on the sidebar to the right, but to be sure that you catch the new image as soon as it appears, keep an eye on my Flickr photostream. They will be tagged “OHP061809-X” wherein “X” represents the time. Hopefully. The battery is fully charged …
