Google Closes the Notebook

Nearly a year and a half - that is how long I have used Google Notebook, the handy browser plugin that allows you to quickly clip sites and make notes while browsing the internet.

THAT"S ALL OVER NOW... Google has stopped development, and is not supporting new users, though apparently I will be able to continue. If anyone knows a comparable tool I'd love to see it. Notebook is fast, accessible, organizable and sharable in the 2.0 way. A wiki may be the next closest thing, but (oops...) that'll be new to me.

Face The Book

Last year around the Holidays, I was inundated by Facebook emails from friends and even people I knew only remotely. These requests to view their profiles drew an emotional response from me that went like this, "I need to get on this network, my friends are running ahead of me and if I don't grab the baton I'll be left behind, forgotton." A stress response heightened by acceptance that I wouldn't be joining them in the social note-passing reverie any time soon. I would be swimming, and taking walks with the kids, and going to the bookstore, and learning to surf - none of which would happen online.
The thought of sharing these things online excited me. Reflecting on the doing of life is a healthy part of the whole experience, and blogging is just journaling in the public eye, unlocking our diaries, opening up.

I still have not joined the network: my friends are waiting, the party is being missed, and my sense of loss grows each day. Maybe tomorrow I will get in, or maybe canoeing will get in the way.

Delicious not so tasty

I just removed the delicious bookmarking tool in firefox. It is so good to have the old bookmarks bar back, in their fuddy-duddy folder structured way.

I keep thinking, "Don't complain, don't sound whiny, don't critcize", while moving steadily in the direction of hating technology in every way. How do I make this sound positive? Technology is getting more annoying daily. Hourly - no, by the minute! And it's the pace of aggressive change that is the root of it.

I was looking at a site about "The Hero's Journey" that had the copyright date of 2000 - ancient in internet time. A colleague told me he thought that some exciting new web 2.0 tool he found a month ago might already be out of date, "Man, that is so last month!" How fast can it get? We know this isn't true in practise, because we still study all the masters, the wisdom of those that came before from ages and ages past. None of what we take for granted today would exist without it.

What's hurting my brain is the feeling that there is no time to stop and use what exists. The gap between doing and looking forward is widening. These things are cool, yes, there's some cool stuff, but nothing is cool enough to not look forward to it being improved, and soon after made obsolete. I'm afraid I have to admit it: I'm sick of learning new things. NO, scratch that, sick of throwing away what I already knew.

I thought I was a liberal minded innovator. NOPE. Turns out I'm a conservative who wants standardization, so I can rely on something being there where I left it when I went to sleep.

Printer Jargon

Instead of the mapI had just printed out a minute before, the printer spit out a sheet of paper with the following message:
PCL XL error
Subsystem: KERNEL
Error: ColorSpaceMismatch
Operator: VendorUnique
Position: 9

With this valuable information, I could do....what?

Banned in China

Walking the hill behind campus, bearly bearing the pollenating micro-monsters, there’s a target bag under one of the Junipers. I instinctively pick it from under the branch, and start marching for my truck. I will keep this bag, it is a large and thicker, more durable kind, and since they will be scarce in a few years, their value is obvious.

This is pre-garbage mining.

Act as if the whole earth’s resources have already been used up, and the old toy planes, broken chairs, paper piles, are shaped into the new. Mashuped structures of collaged woodpulp pop up where there was drywall, and freshpoured concrete is multicolored mud stew. It really is treasure trash, all reformed.

You have been locked out

From Spring 2008:::

My Gmail account, and therefore my budding Googler lifestyle, had been abruptly shut down. I feel so wronged, all I have to do is attempt at logging in again, and the blood boils over. I have done nothing wrong, as I wrote in my “contact us” message, and the resultant auto-reply did nothing to assuage my feelings. I feel so angry.

It’s the spammers. I have been getting a ton of wonderful offers to have my various parts enlarged, supercharged, pumped up and fully engorged - all at an amazing price! Over and over I duly mark them as spam, hoping that my diligence will identify and purge them forever from my inbox. But now, NOW I have been shut out of the entire G0ogle-verse on a whim. I feel so wronged. Unjustly accused and banished to the abyss of emptyness. I am innocent - can I get a witness!! hey there!!! You see, if they think you’ve been up to some spamming or using software that jacks-up your email to some ignoble purpose, you’re in trouble. And should be. BUT I am not doing that, ok?

Perhaps worse, I feel so … dependent. There was I time I didn’t even reply to an email for weeks. That’s changed, and with the embrace of new internet tools comes a new reliance on communicating by asking people to “check online”. I have lately come out of the techno cold and started (as you see) blogging. And calendaring like a mo-fo, I can’t wait to update the location of this Friday’s school assembly so my mom can check it and stay on top of things. Online photo albums, I love it! the shots linked to the map so you can see exactly where my son almost fell to his death climbing a rhyolite slope, and captioned to tell you all about it. Google notebook now keeps all of my notes intact, available and ready to share anytime. Cool! The team now nows exactly who has snack duty on what game. Are we organized or what? BUT NOW I”M LOCKED OUT.

And saddened.
Maybe it wasn’t the spam. Maybe it’s an innocent mistake and tomorrow my tummy will be all better. I hope so. I feel sick wondering if the reputation of my user ID has been tarnished.

If you have a life on the internet, you get pretty messed up if it goes down. And many many many people have a life on the internet way bigger than mine. It’s pretty scary to be so suckled to the electric teat.

“If you don’t articulate your conscious desires, your unconscious patterns will come true.” - Brezney’s Psychiatrist

I wanna go Viral!

Everybody read this and digg! it and delicious it and make me internet famous, if not rich.
As the internet's popularity contest races on, it's 15 lines of fame for every blogger that makes it to the top of the pile.