Oh Holy Christ on a Cricket!

I've seen the face of evil, and it's a cave cricket.
That ugly bastard up there lives in my apartment. They're relatively harmless except that every time you see one on your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, a tiny portion of your soul shrivels up in horror.

They don't chirp. They don't (thank God!) bite. And in fact, they don't seem to do much at all. They do move like lightning when you go to squish them though. Fair enough, I guess. I'd move too if I were being squished.

However, they look like a cross between a cricket and a hairy spider - which, in case you're interested, is actually the recipe for unadulterated evil. They look just wrong and I hate them.

Apparently you can get rid of them with caulking and maybe an exorcism.

What's a blog?

So I got a question from a loyal reader and family-member that went along the lines of "what the hell's this 'blogging' thing all about anyway?"

Obviously, she's reading this blog, so she's at least vaguely aware, but it's true that the term blog gets used a lot to mean similar, but subtly different things. I thought I'd take a shot at answering the question here.

It's a technology:
When I worked for the uninitiated, their conflation of the technology with the trend was the hardest part to get around. At its most basic, a blog is some code on a server that makes it easy to publish chronologically ordered articles on a web site.

Generally there are a couple of screens for writing, editing, and managing the "posts", and it's all set up so that you don't have to know an <i> tag from an <em> tag to do anything.

A user writes a post or two, publishes them, and sends a link to friends. When the friend shows up to the main blog page, they see a list of all posts from most recent to oldest. Clicking on any post's title takes you to a "permalink", which is a fancy way of saying "a page with just one post on it". Generally, comments about a post live on the post's permalink page.

It's important to separate the tech from the phenomenon, because you could use blogging software to publish stuff that wouldn't really qualify as a blog. Anything it makes sense to publish in chronological order will do. Daily sports results would work fine, but they wouldn't set CNN on its ear as Bloggers have.

It's a phenomenon:
Any jackass can publish anything. Look at me for instance.

It's important to note that "anyone" includes Fortune 500 companies as well as schizophrenics and hobos. Who publishes and why has a distinct impact on the blog's reach and content. The fact that anyone can publish means a lot of people have, so there's a wide variety of blogs out there. However, most of them, certainly the ones you hear about, have fallen into a few categories ....

Friends and family blogs, like this one, are good for people who are far from loved ones, are crap at writing letters, but want to keep folks apprised of what's up in their lives. Basically it's stuff I want people I know to hear from me.

Diary blogs are about people's cats and are narcissistic in the extreme. No one cares about your cat! Focusing on the fact that your readers (if they exist) are people, not the ether, should turn a diary blog into a friends and family blog.

Corporate blogs, are a mixed bag. Sometimes a CEO is blathering on about whatever comes to mind. Other times, a blog is part of a larger web-site and deals with specific issues. An example of the latter would be any of a number of Consumer Reports' blogs (e.g.: http://blogs.consumerreports.org/electronics/)

Pro Blogs are sites that started as blogs and became proper publications. Imagine a broadsheet turned into a proper paper and you've got the idea. Blogs like engadget and gizmodo are examples.

They have no non-blog presence, like CR does, but they command a big audience. They're what all the fuss is about when people talk about blogging. They are also what aspiring bloggers are aiming to be when they start their puny little humor blogs. Ahem.

A lot of new publications recently have taken this form simply because blogging software is easy to come by and convenient to use.

RSS
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is confusing to most people.

It is basically a way for a user to find out when there are new posts on a blog you like. It's a bit more involved on the publisher's side because RSS is a format you can use to package up all your content so it can be used and displayed elsewhere. This "atomization" of content has had a lot of impact on the Web because, by providing a standard, RSS has made it easy for one site to seamlessly integrate content from other places on the Web.

From the user's end, you usually see images like this: . When you click on them (this one's inert, but try at the bottom of the main page), your browser or some other program like your blog reader, or sometimes Outlook or another email program (I understand) will help you pull updates about a blog into a spot where it's convenient for you to read up on them.

Twitter?
Twitter started as a "micro-blogging" platform, which meant you had to keep your posts to 140 characters or less. Twitter's too much to get into here, because functionality not found on most blogs altered the way people interact with it so it's no longer just a micro-blogging tool.

On owning a cafe that offers wifi

Does anyone know if there's a device or program you could use to alert you when your wifi is down? I guess you'd need a bit of software on your wifi enabled smartphone trying to access the internet - but only via the wifi. It would buzz if it couldn't, thereby alerting you that your local wifi was hosed.

Someone needs to build this device or software for cafe owners. Failed wifi is becoming the number-one reason I won't go back to cafes now, which sounds lame, but every cafe offers coffee and tables. Besides, nothing pisses you off at a cafe like losing Internet and not knowing when/if it's coming back.

Doug, build this and we'll be rich I tell you!

Oh Double Snap, My New Article

Some people (Jessica) never pick up their damn phones; Other people (Lynda) text while people are talking with them; And yet other people (me) noodle way too much on their iPhones.

If this stuff honks you off as much as it does me, you should probably look at (and vote for) my article on MSNBC, 10 smartphone tips for dumb people.

There, now everyone's happy.

Oh Snap! My Article

I twooted it, and emailed some of you, but I forgot to mention here on my blog that I had another piece published by MSNBC.com.

This one is about my turbulent relationship with my iPhone. I've already been taken to task over it by people who feel like I'm a sexist who hates autistic kids, so no need to comment further on those points, thanks. (The criticisms were actually helpful. I'm not just being glib here.)

It's over here "jump-linked" on your Internet box.

There may be another piece some time next week which I'll be less feckless about bringing to your attention(s?).

Digits

I met someone at a bar tonight, and I kind of have a crush.

For this to make sense as a blog post, you have to understand that I'm terrible, like apocalyptically terrible, at picking people up at bars ... or clubs ... or, well let's not varnish a turd, anywhere. I'm awful at it. There are middle-schoolers with more game than yours truly. I'm fine in a relationship, and I'm not awful at meeting or even attracting women, but I'm more of the friend-of-a-friend, someone-you-know-from-a-group, kind of guy. I fail at bars.

That's a large part of why I met this woman through the happy expedient of finding my friend talking to her and her buddy when I returned from buying said friend and myself drinks at the bar of a hip D.C. establishment. She'd struck up a conversation with two women standing nearby and was engaged in a lively conversation. I was in awe. Surely it's not that easy. What does one open with? That's not even the set-up for a joke. I suck at this.

No joke, I'm congenitally awful at this game and lack any sort of meaningful practice.

I'd heard that women make the best wing-men and sort of stored it away academically, like the fact that the temperature of the Sun's surface is 5,778 Kelvin, but now I can confirm they are at least WAY better than I am. Which is sort of like being able to dunk over Vern Troyer, but whatever.

We four chatted, and then I found myself having a side-conversation with just one of these delightful women. I'd known going in that she was stylish and attractive, but she turned out to be funny, thoughtful, and smart as well. We talked about the law (her vocation), Hannah Arendt and her observations of the banality of evil at Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem (like you do; shut up!), Roller-derby, and emotional manipulation (because I'm awesome at flirting at bars, as I've already made abundantly clear). I managed not to overhype myself as I'm aware some guys do, nor to say anything too goddawful stupid - a pitfall for me at the best of times.

The feedback was good, with the proper looks, the appropriate laughs, the slightly-too-slowly-averted eyes and so forth.

So when it came time to go, I understand you're supposed to ask for a number or something? Did I, you might ask. To which I have to ask, have you not been paying attention? No. Of course I didn't. I'm a goddamned monkey. Did she follow us out and give it to me anyway? Yes, yes she did. Thank Christ.

Now I have to find a way to tell her I have no job, or I guess, find a job. And before you chime in with helpful/hurtful advice, let me agree that with that first paycheck from my new job I should and will buy myself some goddamn balls.

Anyway, the other important part of this post for those who know me is that I have a legit crush and attraction to this woman I just met.

I was actually wondering recently why I haven't had a really crazy crush for a long while (because actually I am neurotic ... and a girl). Part of it has to do with who I've met, but I think really it comes down to this: It's hard to have a crush on someone you know too well. When you meet people through friends you often know too much about them.

The crush, in many ways, is you projecting your idealized version of someone onto a relatively blank canvas and getting psyched. If you already know them too well you can't get too excited because you already know they hate the poor or were confused by The Usual Suspects or believe in astrology or whatever.

Anyway, I'm psyched at the very least for the crush while it lasts. As for "next steps", I believe I'm supposed to call her and propose a sensible date or something.

I'm fucked.