Campfyre Stories

Ok, I get it, I really do.  I get it enough to have become a "productive" member of the time sink known as Facebook.  I don’t garden in real life at all, in fact, I kill plants just by looking at them, but I do the virtual garden thing.  I have more friends who are members than I expected and I know a lot of the people from the "People you know" thing, even if I don’t particularly know them very well.

But there are a few things I just don’t get.

I mean, as long as I know the person who’s requesting the "add" from me, I’ll add them, but somewhere along the line I think that the whole business of "friendship" got lost.  Not that these people aren’t my friends, in fact, a lot of the people on my friends list are really more like family and extended family, but I wonder about old high school acquaintances…  I have several on my list right now and if any more invite me, I’ll surely add them, but a couple of them I can’t really recall.  I know we went to school together, or at least together-ish, but I don’t think we ran in the same crowds or went to the same social events.  There are only one or two that I would actively seek out to spend time with as adults, and they’re the ones I tended to seek out back then.

I guess I just don’t know what the rules are.  I noticed a bunch of people from high school who I liked or respected way back then, but I had to really search to remember who they were.  Should I add these people I could barely remember, in the hopes that they’ll actually remember me?  I think not, only because I wouldn’t want to think of myself as that unmemorable.  Again, it’s not like we were really *friends*.  Of my actual friends from high school, the vast majority of them have pretty much disappeared on the face of the planet as far as I’m concerned.  The few who haven’t are already on my friends roster.  I guess I expected Facebook to be more about renewing old friendships than creating new ones, or the semblance of new ones.

To further complicate matters, I can’t even really place most of the women.  I mean, those who married and changed their names I may not ever figure out who they were way back when.  Even more bothersome is how many more of the women have protected or hidden profiles, so I can’t even look at see if it’s someone from high school or old pictures or something that will jar that memory in.

Again, if they friend me, I accept, provided I can figure out that I do, in fact, know them.  But it all just seems rather odd to me.

I don’t feel like I’ve bolstered very many of my friendships through here, although I do feel like I have some fine delicate thread that connects us, one that is both easier and harder to sever than the ties with the people I see or speak with on a regular basis.  I suppose it will make it  harder to actually LOSE touch with most of these people, but it’s just as easy to fail to communicate with someone on Facebook as it is to not call, not email, not contact by any other means.

I don’t know.  Conceptually, I like it.  I like the idea of what it’s supposed to be, but the reality of it seems lacking. 

Eh.  At least it’s still less ear/eye-bleedingly painful than MySpace…

I am coming to believe that Unix is not something you learn, but something you ARE.  No, no one actually said this to me, but in an attempt to follow the oh-so specific instructions of "In your free time, start learning Unix", that’s really all I’ve learned.

I’ve tapped my sources and asked around for a place to start.  Give me a link to a basics guide, I’ve asked, and no one can seem to do this.  They want to help and show willing, but when it comes to actual documentation or sources, it’s all…  "Well, what exactly do they want you to do?"

The problem is that what they want is "In your free time, start learning Unix."

It’s like to make me cry.  I don’t understand it and I have no idea where to go to get an explanation other than "want me to stand there and tell you what to do?"  Well, yeah, I do.  If it will help.  And to top it all off, I left my "For Dummies" book at home.

I can’t remember feeling more stupid.

I am not Unix.  At all.

I always really liked the concept of Twitter and was an early sign-up for the service, but I think I’ve posted maybe twice to it.  Why?  Because I can’t make it work with the browser on my Treo.  Same thing happened when Kevin Rose came out with Pownce.  I figured, well, I can’t get Digg to work for me, but maybe the lifestreaming thing will be lighter and my phone will handle it.  Not so much.

See, the thing is that my phone really is pretty smart, but the websites I want to access simply do not achieve the same level of intelligence as my Daisy does (*preen*).  As a result, I’m pretty limited, and since I keep my plan with a limited (but sufficient) number of text messages a month, I don’t want to be forced to blog-lite via text.  Also, I HAVE the internet service, right?

So I was playing around on Digg and one of my "friends" shouted me a story about a new lifestreaming toy site.  This one actually works on my phone and I quite like it.  I’m also drawn to the just-finished-beta, nowhere near done aspect of it.  I like getting in on the ground floor of things that work for me, and this does, so far anyway.

The service is called Plurk and it’s just enough different from Twitter and Pownce (which are not really all that different from each other) to warrant taking a peek at it.  The timeline feature is pretty damn nifty.  I figure I want to share this because I’ve been trying and trying to find something like this that works for me and it’s pretty refreshing to think maybe this one will do it.

Attention anyone who communicates in writing!

The entire point of communication is to be understood by the people with whom you are communicating.

Teh hole point of cummunication is 2b understood by teh ppl your talking to.

You may not like it, but I’d bet that you understood the second sentence as well as the first, laden though it was with spelling mistakes and incorrect grammar.  If you understood what I was saying, then my grammar was sufficient to the task.

The extent of your vocabulary doesn’t matter.  The more $.50 words you use, the fewer people who will understand you.  If you use jargon, people who are outside of the area to which that jargon applies will not understand you.

All of this applies to any form of written communication, be it email, internet postings, submitted papers for publication, etc.  It doesn’t matter what your purpose in writing is, the ultimate issue at hand is whether or not your audience is going to understand what the hell you’re trying to say.

The entire point of communication is to be understood by the people with whom you are communicating.

Teh hole point of cummunication is 2b understood by teh ppl your talking to.

For the most part, we fall somewhere in between correct grammar and internet-speak, perhaps leaning to one side or the other.  "They" say that the optimum reading level for which to write is 8th grade.  What that means is that when you write for a general audience, you should be writing in such a way that anyone with at least an 8th grade education can quickly and easily comprehend your point.  While this may seem "dumbed-down", you have to consider that the vast majority of Americans do not read on a regular basis.  They are literate, but not literary.  The 8th grade reading level assumes that *most* people will be able to easily understand you.

Even more than not being understood, a big problem with writing at a high-level is alienation.  If you are trying to make yourself seem smarter by using obscure or uncommon words, one of two things are likely to happen.  Either your audience will look up the unknown word (if the meaning cannot be garnered from the context) or their eyes will glaze over and they won’t take in what you’re attempting to convey.  There is a limit, however, to the extent to which people will go to understand the words you choose.

The problem comes in when people perceive you as using too many high-level words or phrases.  In the attempt to be seen as intelligent, people who are actually intelligent will begin to suspect that it’s merely a ruse and you’re using those words in order to seem something you’re not.  People who are less intelligent (perhaps than you actually are) will perceive you as pretentious and looking down on them.  Either way, this causes you to become alienated from your audience and, regardless of the validity of the points you’re making, you become irrelevant to the situation at hand.

The entire point of communication is to be understood by the people with whom you are communicating.

Teh hole point of cummunication is 2b understood by teh ppl your talking to.

Grammar nazis on the internet, then, are actually hurting the cause of writing by picking apart incorrect grammar when it already was sufficient to the task of being understood by the target audience.  If the information being conveyed is readily understood, then your work is complete.  If the information being conveyed is well-structured, grammatically correct and filled with high-level vocabulary and it is not easily understood, or it is easily misunderstood, then you have failed in your attempt to contribute to the greater discussion.

Get it?  When it comes to basic communication, it is less important to be correct than it is to be understood.

The problem with l33t-sp33k is that it is hard for many people to understand and/or decipher.  It should be considered a niche dialect of English and not fitting for general communication.  The problem with aLtErNaTiNg CaPs or ALL CAPS is that it is difficult to read, and therefore to understand.  It’s not cute, it’s not clever, it’s a lot of work to go to for people to not understand you.  The problem with poor grammar and bad spelling is that it causes some people to be compelled to prove themselves smarter than you.  That said, unless it is really atrocious, it doesn’t actually cause or facilitate a lack of comprehension.

Again, if you understand what I am saying to you, then my grammar is sufficient to the task.  That is the only thing that matters.  If you’ve decided to write in such a way that people will have difficulty understanding what you have to say, then you might as well say nothing at all.

At the very least, others will wish that you had.

…said the man behind me on the bus.

But it’s not.  Not really.  I mean, sure, technology is prevalent in our lives nowadays and certainly, it’s a higher technology than, say, the technology in a VCR or an answering machine, but that doesn’t make it actually high technology.  In fact, high technology is now and has always been inaccessible to the everyman.  You have to work with military contracts or medical research or something similar to even be aware of a lot of the HIGH technology that’s out there.

MP3 players, digital cameras, DVD players, flash drives, personal computers, etc., etc.  This is not high tech, not by a long shot.  This is medium tech, it’s not cutting edge, but it’s not quite "primitive" either, and everyone has access to it.  You might be able to make the case that something like Blu-Ray is the highest tech of storage media or that gaming technologies can be considered hi-tech, but I can’t imagine that you’d successfully be able to argue that something that available isn’t already being surpassed by another technology that few are even aware of.  This is the stuff of science fiction, kids, and it’s coming soon to a box store near you.

The context of the guy’s statement (which wasn’t made to me, I just happened to overhear) was that computers are everywhere.  That you can’t do much of anything without having to work with technology on some level, and I understand the point that he was making, but I can’t reconcile this idea that technology that has become commonplace and that, really, hasn’t changed all that drastically in this decade is still considered "hi-tech".  I mean, is this the type of guy whose VCR clock is STILL flashing at 12:00 because he can’t figure out how to program it?  On some level, it wouldn’t surprise me.

I don’t know…  the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that hi-tech can’t actually exist in our real lives, or not for long.  I’ve been brooding on this and trying to come up with a workable definition, but it’s all just so subjective.  Surely components to things that are no longer hi-tech may be invented or revamped in hi-tech ways, but does that make the overall product as hi-tech as the component?  I suppose that may be true for some people, but without major changes, I don’t think it works.  The whole auto-park feature on cars is pretty hi-tech, but that doesn’t make the actually car all that hi-tech unless it’s decked out, even then, you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that not having to parallel park makes your car, as a whole, hi-tech.

The further we progress, technologically, the more difficult (for me, anyway) the standards for a definition of "hi-tech" actually become.  I mean, cutting-edge needs to be a factor for sure, but what about older inventions that have only just found their niche in the mainstream?  What to think about technologies that are unarguably something "new and different" but just don’t work right?  What is an innovative leap great enough to render the previous version of whatever all but obsolete?

It seems to me that new terminology is needed to sum up technology.  I mean, sure, a pen and paper are unarguable LOW technology, but does that mean that a standard $3 calculator is, by default, hi-tech, simply because it is higher than some wood pulped/carved/molded into a workable shape?  I think not.

But the bottom line, for me, is that I don’t think that it matters how old you are or what you’ve done for a living.  Unless you’re spending your days gaping stupidly at things like automatic doors, digital watches and the ridiculous number of channels available on cable, you’ve got at least some perspective on the issue.

Surrounded by technology?  Absolutely, we are.  Does that necessarily make the technology HIGH?  Not really.  Once it becomes a part of the daily lives of most people, once it becomes easily attainable, it loses it’s cutting-edge value.

If you’re anything like me, you search a LOT.  Probably you’re not anything like me, but most people search from time to time, so here’s a thing I want to share.

http://www.goodsearch.com/

This is a charitable search engine.  Whenever you search, it donates $.01 to the charity of your choice.  I’ve been using it exclusively since my mother sent it to me because my brother’s school (Harriet Tubman Free School - Albany, NY) is on the list.

It uses the Yahoo! search engine, so it’s pretty reliable in terms of results, but it’s also an excellent way to help out small organizations that can use your support.

Now, I certainly recommend donating to my brother’s school and supporting alternative school choices, but the list is extensive and you may find that’s there’s another worthy cause that you believe in.  Or, maybe you’re involved with a non-profit organization that could benefit from this neat and useful website.

In any case, I wanted to share this with all of you.

How is it that we have gotten to the point of complaicent discomfort in our long-distance travel?  That we not only accept, but EXPECT for travel to be unpleasant and we pay through the nose for it?

This article, once again, hammered that point home to me.  Millions of people fly every year to visit family, friends, or just for a vacation, but they also wait forever in lines where they are suspected and inspected in ways that don’t even actually increase the security of the flights.

Which brings me to my point, when almost every technologically-advanced country in the world, except us, already has a high-speed rail option, which is comparable on short (3 hour) journeys to air travel and significantly more comfortable for the even longer trips.  Within the US, however, high-speed rail is only a theory, maybe in the so-called planning stages.

Further, people have been convinced that people wouldn’t use HSR *even if it were available*.  Except that more and more people are UP IN ARMS about their treatment by the airlines.  Even those trips that would be a little longer would be shorter trips than the ones that are delayed overnight where one *might* get a motel room, but probably not.

People have been convinced that the reason the railroads haven’t been successful is because they can’t compete, but they can’t compete because they’re not capable of long-distance travel that takes less time than it takes to drive.  There are plenty of people who would rather not fly, for whatever reason, but simply cannot take the train several thousand miles because of time investment.  With HSR, this would be less of an issue.

How have we, as a nation, come to the point where we will stand in ridiculous lines, take our shoes off, be subject to random searches, not be allowed to take water or toothpaste or whatever on board with you, while studies have shown that these measures don’t prevent terror-related activities?  And not only do we do this, but we pay ridiculous amounts of money for the priviledge to do so.

Where’s my damn bullet train?  There are places I’d like to go and people I’d like to see, but I’m unwilling to go through all the hassle for the sheer amount of money.  I’d rather keep closer to the ground and not travel with the same level of comfort as a Greyhound Bus.  I want my bullet train!

Woe be to those whose email address I have (not from comments, I mean you’ve given me your email address for actual correspondence) for their time shall be wasted to the end of eternity.

I start spam.  Not the annoying spam, I mean the kinds of things that were really cute, the first time you got it, back in 1996.  I rarely forward anything and, frankly, most of the stuff that gets forwarded to me are things I’ve seen before.

But random crap on the internet finds me.  All.  The.  Time.  So I share it.  And I’m usually the first one to share it, and about a year or two later, it comes back to me and I reply saying "Didn’t I send this to you back in…?"  And, of course, I not only did, but I saved the original spam in my Sent Items folder.

This weekend a friend of mine posted that he was going to start blogging via email.  And the heavens opened, the clouds parted, a chorus of angels sang and a ray of sunlight came through and BONKED me on the head.

I mean, I wasn’t using my review blog anymore, anyway…  it was just sitting there not doing anything, and people who aren’t on my list should be able to waste time on the crap I send to people I know, too!

It was just obvious.  Now whenever I send cool spam out to people, I can auto blog it via email to a direct archive.

And let me just say, my email thanked me for it.

I was writing out some birthday cards to friends out of state this weekend and it got me thinking about how much I really miss writing letters to people.  When I was younger, I had many a pen pal and even held most of my long-distance relationship with my (now ex-) husband via letters, cards and packages.

These days, with friends all over the country, I still send more mail than most, usually in the form of small, strange packages to friends who may need a pick-me-up, but living in the age of email, blogs and social networking, few people respond to such outreaches.

I know I’ve spoken in the past about my love for postcards and how I ask everyone I know who goes on a trip to send me a postcard, but even that is so much less than a well-written (or even just well-meant) letter.  It’s easy to breeze off a few lines of update and say "this is what’s going on", but a real letter takes the time to convey more, I think.  It takes that extra effort and a little bit of care, but few people do it these days.

I stopped, several years ago, sending out holiday cards.  Mostly because my list became unmanageable. I think I make up for it in sending mail to people throughout the year, but a lot of people get missed because I don’t have their address or because they never actually return the favor.  Even Thank You cards have become something that few, if any, really think about anymore, except for the protocol of traditional weddings.

It truly is a lost art, and this couldn’t have been made more clear to me than when I asked Spawn to send a letter or card to his grandmother, who is currently living out of state, while working on a degree.  He didn’t even know how to send or format a personal letter and, despite my attempts to explain it to him, he simply became more reluctant to do it and less receptive to understand it.  He did wind up sending her a birthday card, and writing a thank you note for a birthday gift he received from an out of state family member, both of which were received with surprise and pleasure.

I get excited whenever I get an unexpected card, postcard, package or letter.  I’ve always been exceptionally fond of receiving postal mail, but it seems like it comes less often and farther between.

Why does it have to be an either/or situation, a replacement of something that is meaningful for something that is often careless and not thought out?  I don’t believe that the $.41 is that much of a barrier and, with mailboxes readily available, it’s really not all that difficult to mail a letter.

The immediacy that we demand of our communications, whether it’s free long-distance from our cell phones or an instantaneous email has really lowered the quality of the information that we share with others.  You can’t send stickers in an email, and rarely do we freely poeticize our words on the phone.

I may be old-fashioned in this, but to me, mail is something to be treasured.  I only wish more people would participate in something that is so meaningful that you really have to think about, and hold in your hand before it goes into the recycle bin.

This internet age that we live in has really allowed for many people to recreate themselves as they see fit.  Even those who convince themselves that they are the same person both on and offline are only fooling themselves.  It’s that measure of anonymity that allows us to be a little more free with our opinions and thoughts and to say things (in ways) that we would never say to someone’s face.

For me, I’ve carefully cultivated my online reputation.  Searches on FyreGoddess turn up infinitely more results than searches on my real name.  When I’m online I’m not anonymous, I am someone else, someone mostly separated from my real life self, less self-censored, more argumentative, and about as guarded on both sides.  It’s a persona that I have spent years setting up.  There are a lot of people who know (or have known) FyreGoddess, but do not know the person behind her at all.  I fully intend to keep it that way.

But I’ve been thinking about that lately.  I’ve been thinking about how many people have these dual personalities that are kept fairly separate from each other.  I was thinking about how many people I "know" only by their screen name and how many teenagers and young adults have to track both real names and screen names of their friends.

Our names are given to us by our parents and our RL nicknames are given to us by family or friends, usually when we are very young.  It’s a rare case that someone chooses their own name, but I wonder how far we are from the point where people are called (verbally) the name they choose on the internet.

John, Mike, Jason, Mark, Brian, David…  these are all names of people I know, but those six names are the names of probably 15 people I know.  It seems that there always has to be a descriptor to it, so it will be their last name or initial or maybe something VERY descriptive and almost an in-joke ([Name], the viking) so that we know who we’re talking about.  With a handful of people, I’ve just started calling them by the name I use on the blog, because otherwise it turns into an explanation.  I met a man named Jason not too long ago and, when introduced, told him "I’m sorry, I can’t call you that, there are just Too Many Jasons."  He laughed and said, "That’s ok, you can call me [his nickname]."  Thank goodness he took it in stride.

Even my own name is common enough that there are Too Many.  If people want to call me FyreGoddess in real life, they’re welcome to and I will respond.  There are several people who do already, usually because they need a light, but regardless, I see it happening.  I also know people whose handles are based on their real life nicknames because they already had a name that they liked enough to be semi-anonymous online.

But it’s not only about common names.  One friend of mine has a highly unique name, but Miz and I still sometimes refer to her as an old screen name, one she no longer even uses.  Thus does the anonymity lessen to some degree and translate into the real world.

Certainly some people have disposable screen names, but there usually comes a point in time where we’ve decided on a theme of the more permanent ones.  Once we find that one that suits us well, we reuse it and, somehow, start integrating it into our real life personalities, which is remarkably simple, since we’re generally using something that already expresses *something* about ourselves in the first place.

It’s interesting to me that of all the information that I make public, which is a lot, it’s mostly only the names that I shield.  My name, the names of my friends and family, the name of the company where I work…  these are the things that would enable others to actively find me.  It’s that idea that someone knowing your real name has power over you, well, it’s absolutely true.  Someone who knows my true name or the company where I work would open up possibilities that we hear horror stories about online.  So we keep our true names hidden and give out names that may more truly convey who we are.

But onto my point (which I had forgotten, or maybe it wasn’t my point at first, but it is now).  I mean, how anonymous are we, really?  I am sometimes accused of hiding behind a screen name in order to say some of the things I do, and only feeling comfortable saying them because I am *anonymous*.  But how anonymous can I really be when searching on my screen name turns up so much more information than searching for my real name does?  If anything, it’s my real name that’s anonymous, since no one online would know who the hell I am if I wrote using that.

Does it make the things I say any less valid, if I say them using an established online handle?  Or does it actually make them more valid, since I have spent years cultivating the reputation that my name bears (for good or bad, depending)?  How can I (or anyone really) be hiding behind some semblance of anonymity when people know you by the handle you use?

I think it’s just a case of separating yourself depending on the world you’re in.  If I don’t have my inflections, my body language, my physical and verbal mannerisms, then all that’s left is the persona of FyreGoddess, the disembodied words that flow out onto the internet.