Okay i have to admit this - I haven't carved a pumpkin in like 25 years. And guess what: you do forget.
Luckily jenna and I went over to our friends' house where they took over with newspapers, direction, scooping, pumpkin seed separation techniques, salt, seasoning, seed baking, pumpkin face design and modification, and make-sure-no-one-gets-eviscerated safety techniques.
Did I mention how smart our friends are that they knew to put glow sticks inside the pumpkins, and how cool a green glowstick looks inside a jack-0-lantern? Very Halloween 2.0ish.
Meanwhile I've moved most of my email activity to gmail to see how that goes. I haven't NOT used Outlook in like a hundred years. I was telling my good friend RB how havin' all these email locations was starting to confound me.
And he says what are you using. And I says, I'm using Outlook of course, then I have gmail and bellsouth webmail, got my blackberry and stuff too. RB says to me he says, "You still use OUTLOOK?" And I says to him, "Wha--yeah. The problem?" And he says, "Outlook's a problem. Close that shit up. Lose it. Jesus."
So he told me how to make my ewriter email go over to gmail and then he told me how to get my gmail on my blackberry and we did all that over google talk. Shit if he ain't worth something nohow, that RB. Dat's collaboration.
(p.s. His birthday's November 12th. shh don't tell him i said.)
In other news, blogger's been up and blogger's been down, and i think this is the migratory weekend for us old blog*spot plus accounts, those of us stupid enough to pay $180/year for hosting back in 02 when the web was all "e" and sheep were nervous.
Now they about pay you, what with the hoodie i got not too long ago.
And I hear the washington post says myspace is losing it's cool factor. Well let's see, they haven't actually DONE anything with MySpace yet, so I think that assessment might be a little early, and maybe when they DO actually do something that, you know, makes the site work, we might be surprised how hip it gets.
And p.s. who says myspace's core audience was supposed to be teens? And what is a core audience online? And what comes first the community or the core audience--it's a chicken/egg typea deal.
When it comes to teens, the most customizable spaces will win out. When it comes to the rest of us, we'll go where our friends go, and myspace is home to music makers and artists of all ages--and some freaky literary folks to boot. But again, they have to start, you know, finally DESIGNING MySpace at some point so that, you know, it works.
I defined MySpace as the Internet's intranet about six months ago. Some folks said that was brilliant. Who am I to fight them.
Part of the draw for me with MySpace is that it doesn't work right 40-60 percent of the time. Finding ways around, through, and among are some of the best times on myspace. searching and getting lost in the pages of new friends because search doesn't work. waiting so long for it to respond that you forget what you were doing. trying to get the music-playing widget to work right. FORGETABOUT making the HTML in your emails look good--I use Qumana for that AND for tagging in MySpace. Just copy the source code over in one-fell swoop. Otherwise, I'd be like aaaah.
Reports of second life's demise have also been premature. These dramatic proclamations--they are what give web commentarians stuff to write about. But in the end, as long as social networks are there, people will be there to live in, exploit, love and hate them.
Look at Orkut. Started with a few popular silicon women and Internet goodfellows like Marc Canter and Joi Ito racing to see who could get more friends or kicked off faster. Now it's active members are mostly our Brazilian brothers and sisters doing whatever it is they're doing. Does that make Orkut less valuable? Is the world flat?
Who populates what social spaces and why, and for how long, will always be a work in progress, the fun of being here, something to roll around.
Pumpkins, people, wifi rabbits--everyone needs someplace to call home.
