Day 116: So far so good

Pretty well all of us in McGill's MLIS program seem to share a kind of quirky personality trait: extreme unfounded anxiety. The vast majority of us blow every assignment out of proportion and panic about finishing it, panic about whether we've done it right, obsess, obsess, obsess.

Lesson 116: It's a good idea to have a quick and easy way set up to check your course standing.

I have an app called iStudiez Pro that will not only remind me of when my assignments are due and keep track of whether they're group or solo; it also keeps track of the weight of each assignment and allows me to input my grade for each one and see an up to date assessment of what my grade likely is in that class.

This is a Very Good Thing around the end of semester. With all the final projects due, it would be easy enough to panic and succumb to anxiety, so having something easily available that tells you "no matter what you do right now, you couldn't fail this course if you tried" is invaluable.

Based on the mark I got on my take-home portion of the metadata exam, I think I can hit at least an A- by getting 50% or better on the final paper.

Based on all the As I've gotten in web systems design, I just need to finish the group assignment and I'm golden.

That means that the only wildcards are Archives and History of Books and Printing. I've done fine on everything so far in Archives, but I still have two major assignments (term paper and take-home exam) to do. History of Books and Printing is a great course, but is only evaluated on one project, and I don't present mine till the last class of the term.

But all this to say, it's best to give my logical mind as much ammo against my panicky headless chicken mind as possible. So when part of my brain goes "OH GOD SO MUCH TO DO I'M GOING TO FAIL AT EVERYTHING AND BE A FAILURE" my logical mind can lay on the smack down and tell it to shut it's trap; there's nothing to worry about.

Day 115: Off the beaten path

Granted, I haven't been at McGill long, but still, being just about done my degree it feels strange to find something new out of the blue.

But that's just what I've done.

Lesson 115: On the first floor of McLennan Library, is a little room, filled with librarians. Just sitting at their computers. Waiting.

They're waiting for you to visit them and ask a question, and they'll help you find whatever information you're looking for.

Granted, you can do that walking up to pretty well any reference desk, or librarian, which is something a lot of people don't realize to begin with. But they've actually got this whole little room set up just for librarian consultation.

It's so quaint! So useful! So fantastic!

Day 114: Flu Shots are a Bad Idea for Me

Lesson 114: The first time you get a flu shot, your body reacts more severely to it than any time afterwards.

Some people react to vaccines as though they've gotten sick with the disease being vaccinated against.

I am one of those people.

Apparently with the flu shot, it can be really bad the first time you ever get it, but will be better any other time you do. I certainly hope that's the case, because this business is only supposed to last 1-2 days.

I'm on day 3 since my shot, and I'm actually having mild hallucinations. Words are dancing on their pages. It's kind of sickening to watch.

I am unimpressed.

Those viruses were dead, body! You don't need to kill them deader!

Ow....

Day 113: The Artist Formerly Known As

Day 113 of my updates, and the 13th day of the month; all at the same time! Feels like some sort of celebration is in order!

Actually, celebration may be in order, just not quite yet. Because...

Today is the day I finally get around to fixing up this blog! You may have noticed that I haven't updated in quite some time. But this doesn't mean I haven't been writing. Oh no! I've been keeping notes, jotting down outlines... the posts have been here. Languishing unpublished. Waiting for me to have the time to give them a last look and hit publish. But between the absolute ridiculousness of my internet situation, assignments and midterms, schlepping back and forth to Ontario so often, and of course work, I haven't had the chance.

So what I'm going to do is get all the missed posts up, and provide a summary here linking to the most interesting posts.

When is a book not a book?
So that's why Canada's so ugly...
Websites are like Bicycles
Paper is not Vegetarian Friendly
ACCESS 2012 was a hell of a time!
Vanity Presses and Blogging
Bewick, Wood Cuts, and Money

As for today?

Lesson 113: Hokusai, and in fact Japanese woodblock printers in general, were the original Artist(s) Formerly Known As.

Japanese woodblock prints, like the famous image "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" by Hokusai, were sort of like posters for that age.

You could hang a picture of your favourite kabuki actor on your wall, or a picture of a beautiful woman.

But the artists of the prints changed their names like socks. They'd take on syllables of their mentor's name to show mastery of their style, inherit their mentor's name when he retired, take on a new name if they came out of retirement.

Hokusai went through an absolutely prolific number of names. When he eventually retired, he passed on his name to an apprentice. However, when a relative squandered their money, he needed to return to working life, but couldn't take his name back from the apprentice, so he changed it yet again.

I don't think I could be a scholar of Japanese printing... keeping track of the constant name changes would make me dizzy!

Day 112: This is the day that never ends... it just goes on and on my friends...

Yet another low-lesson day. But let me put it this way: Metadata is a trap. Don't fall for it! Don't do it!

Lesson 112: Encode an EAD finding aid in XML is not a test. It is not an exam. It is a race.

I did that paper.... which we wound up getting 24hrs earlier than initially promised (thank goodness), but with two books listed to reference for writing the discussion (for 60 people to use in a 48hr period??? WHAT?) that weren't even actually on reserve because they were out (due on Friday at midnight, meaning the request for them to be put on reserve was only submitted Monday, or even Tuesday). Luckily, she was informed (likely by about 40 people emailing in a panic) and put up pdfs of articles for us to use instead (thank goodness).

Can you hear that gong a-ringing?

Then into the in-class portion of the exam, the .dtd file we needed to use wasn't even actually retrievable from the MyCourses system. And once that was solved, it was less a test of skill, and more a test of how quickly you could type, copy and paste.

Listen to Admiral Ackbar. It's a trap, I tell you, a trap!

Teach yourself metadata using w3schools, and reading over dublincore.org. Learn to use Altova XML spy by encoding metadata for documents you find around the web.

You'll get all the learning with a fraction of the headache.

You're welcome!

... Now that my brain's turned to goop, I'm going home. Peace out.

Day 111: Money money money money! MONEY!

In class today, one of the presentations was about an engraver named Bewick. Before Bewick, detailed illustrations in books were done with engraved metal plates, while only childrens' books were illustrated using wood blocks. This was because the grain of wood blocks meant that illustrations could only reach a certain amount of detail before you would just splinter the grain and ruin the image.

However, Bewick had the great idea of turning the block on its end and carving in the end of the grains rather than along and across the grains on the side of the block. This meant he was able to make gorgeously detailed wood block prints. He was actually able to make such detailed engravings in wood that they were able to use them to print money.

He also created the book "A History of British Birds", entirely illustrated with his gorgeous engravings, and really providing an everyman's guide to ornithology.

Lesson 111: Wood block printing was preferred to metal plate engraving for printing money.

This was because when a wood block was made of a super hard wood, like cherry wood, you could make millions of prints before the block couldn't print clearly anymore. Metal plates lost the ability to print clearly much much quicker.

The reason they used metal plates instead of wood blocks was because the extra detail you could get was very good at discouraging counterfeiting.

However, with Bewick's new method, you could get the detail needed to stop counterfeiters with the durability to print in more economical batches of money.

Everybody wins!

He also did the most adorable engravings of bats... Bats for Bats 2012!

Days without numbers: Seriously!? November already??

Our metadata exam from hell is next week. But I am feeling way too miserable to be in class. Studying from home, and catching up on the Assassins Creed franchise will have to do as alternatives.

Jon has told me I have to finish playing Assassin's Creed II, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed: Revelations before I'm allowed to play Assassin's Creed III, which I bought the other day.

Guess I've got my work cut out for me...

Since I'm not in class, this day has no number.

Day 110: The Origin of Blogging?

I had wanted to make my own Hallowe'en costume this year. I was going to go for Batgirl, or a Weeping Angel. But ultimately, lack of resources and man hours nipped that plan in the bud. So I ordered a slammin' Batgirl costume online. But still no Hallowe'en costume. No sign of it.

I think this is going to wind up being another inpromtu costume Hallowe'en.

But the show must go on!

Speaking of, today's lesson is one of those realizations I came to rather than a lesson I was actually explicitly taught.

Lesson 110: Vanity Presses can be viewed as a pre-cursor to modern blogging.

In the 1700s, wealthy aristocrats with too much time and money found a new hobby in this interesting new toy: The Printing Press.

They didn't necessarily have anything they wanted to print, no writing of their own, or particular author they wanted to be a patron to. They just knew that this printing thing was catching on, and they wanted to print something. So they made so-called Vanity Presses and printed beautiful books just to print something.

One of the most well known was called "Strawberry Hill Press". You may remember last year, I mentioned one Horace Walpole who's credited with bringing the term serendipity into use as we know it. He also opened one of these Vanity Presses out of his estate, Strawberry Hill. He had all sorts of grand designs about the castle, the press and his collections, etc.

But isn't that basically what we do with blogs? Lots of people don't know what they want to blog about, but they want to blog. We don't know what we want to say, but we want to say it. We have a new technology, and we want to use it, we want our voices to be heard.

I would totally run a Vanity Press out of my basement... Anyone know where I can buy myself a printing press?

Wait a minute, I live in an apartment... anyone know where I can get myself a basement?

Day 109: Metadata will be the death of me

They said at Access last weekend that "A URL is your contract with the world". By putting something up online, you're agreeing that it will always be at that URL, and if it moves, you'll leave breadcrumbs to lead the user back to the material.

Similarly, I've always understood that a syllabus is a professor's contract with their students. "This is the class, this is how it will be taught and this is how you will be evaluated". It can only be changed in exceptional circumstances and for very good reason.

Lesson 109: Good form or no, some people will break contracts no matter what.

We've been informed of yet another change to our course (or is it a change? no one seems sure).

We now have a take-home essay portion to our mid-term, due immediately before our in-class portion. And we'll have about 24 hrs to do it. Work? Class? Irrelevant. 24 hours. Make it work.

So basically, the majority of us are being told that we are required to pull an all-nighter to write the take-home portion before going into class to do the in-class portion.

Everyone seems pretty resigned to their fate at this point... *sigh*

Day 108: Conference Learning

I was too excited about the ACCESS conference to post at all on Thursday. And today? Wow, my brain is buzzing!

So many interesting ideas! If you'd like to look over the interesting topics we covered, you can check out the tweets, photos and liveblogs here.

I wound up looking over a #AccessYUL tweet chart one of my fellow attendees put together, I realize I probably owe my followers an apology. With 96 tweets, I was the most prolific tweeter at ACCESS. So if you were interested, I'm sorry for dominating the discussion. If you weren't interested, I'm sorry for flooding your feed with stuff you found boring.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't!

As for what I came away from the conference with? Well, I have a bit of a wishlist now:

• 3D printer with chocolate instead of plastic
• a visit to NCSU's Hunt library
• the means to put together a BiblioBox to give my massive eBook collection new life

Too overwhelmed for lessons though. No lessons today.

Day 107: A Primer on Printing and Paper

Alright, so this won't truly be comprehensive enough to be considered a primer, but I just couldn't resist the alliteration!

I've briefly mentioned paper and book-binding before, but now I'm going to talk about paper and printing

Lesson 108: Paper can be made from any vegetative natural fibre.

When I was talking about scrolls and codexes, I mentioned that they used to make "paper" called vellum, which was treated calf skin. That's what they used for the longest time in book-making.

Paper as we know it was invented in the 2nd century in China, where they used it mostly for packaging. They also started using it for many of the purposes we use paper today; they made toilet paper, paper money, and even printed books. Arab traders learned the process in the 8th century and brought it home. They built paper-mills, made thicker pages and used the paper to make much lighter codices with silk covers able to do away with the heavy covers and clasps that had been needed to keep the vellum books from becoming wedges.

In the 11th century, the process finally made it to Europe.

In the beginning, the Chinese used hemp, and bark from the paper mulberry. In Europe, they used hemp and linen rags. Eventually cotton caught on too. It wasn't until the 19th century that they started using wood pulp like we do today. But where the rag paper was stable and lasted a long time, wood pulp paper is by default acidic and degrades quite badly.

But really, paper can be made of any cellulose, any natural vegetative fibre. You could make paper from the vegetable peelings you threw out while making dinner, or the grass trimmings from mowing the lawn. Heck! There's one company that makes notebooks out of paper using elephant poop as the source of vegetative fibre. The possibilities are endless!

Another fun fact: the paper they made for printing (I can't speak for modern processes) was *not* vegetarian friendly. Paper that had just been made, so called "fresh leaf", would actually wind up absorbing too much ink to print correctly. Kind of like trying to write with a sharpie on toilet paper; the ink bleeds out and becomes a formless jumble.

Instead, they'd treat the fresh leaf with gelatin so the ink would rest on the surface instead of leaking out all over the place.

So that's one more thing for the vegetarians: no Jell-O, Oreos or printed books.

That's harsh, man!

Day 106: Fallacious Fallacies

They did a study.

It's kind of a catchphrase of mine at this point, but hear me out.

There was a study done, and what they did was they asked people to draw bicycles.

They asked all sorts of people; daily bike commuters, avid cyclists, couch potatoes who only ever see bicycles on their TV screen... but all these people had one thing in common.

Barely any of them were able to draw, or even point out, an accurate sketch of a bicycle. Whether they biked every day, or hadn't been on one since their training wheels were taken off, they couldn't independently identify what an actual bike looked like.

They'd accept drawings of bikes as accurate even though the cross bar was positioned such that you wouldn't be able to steer the bike, and all sorts of other structural issues... Whether asked to draw one from scratch, given a partially completed drawing to finish, or shown a selection of completed drawings, failure was the norm across groups regardless of how interaction they had with bicycles.

Lesson 107: Just because you know something really well doesn't mean you can recreate it.

Much like thinking you can draw a proper bike just because you ride them regularly, people have the same thinking about websites. I'm guilty of it myself. We've used enough websites! We know what works and what doesn't! It's easy! I can do it!

But no. No you can't. No I can't. Not without the right training. Bike designers have to learn all sorts of things to know what does and doesn't work, and to learn what can be improved where and in which ways. Web designers need the same.

Just because you use the internet, doesn't mean you can shape it at will.

Day 105: Canadian Architecture is Brutal

Oddly enough, studying books and printing can easily turn into studying architecture, by way of studying typography.

It makes sense enough when you really think about it, but it is kind of roundabout.

You see, a dominant architecture demonstrates the trendy aesthetic of an era/region/culture. The same kind of design principles that influence the architecture also influence what fonts look like and which ones are popular.

Gutenberg was German, Gothic architecture was huge, and he was trying to recreate the look of Gothic manuscript. So his font was Gothic.

But when the Italians took the title of Capital of Printing away from Germany, they hated the Gothic font as much as they hated the Gothic architecture. I mean, how many well known Gothic cathedrals, etc, are there in Italy? So they developed pretty, dainty little Roman fonts, and used sweeping italics.

And so architectural preferences have marched hand in hand with typographic preferences.

Lesson 106: Canada really latched onto Concrete Brutalism.

Scott Library at York University

And honestly, I don't understand why. That shit's hideous! But the main library here at McGill, the library at York U, buildings across the country are these huge, imposing, blocky monstrosities with exposed, raw concrete everywhere. No thank you!

I suppose it probably has something to do with under-emphasized windows being friendlier to insulating for our Canadian winters, but still. Yuck.

Luckily, Bauhaus, also called the new International style, started catching on. It's still very minimalist, with no ornamentation, but at least it breaks up the concrete a little with steel and glass.

Place Ville-Marie

Just look at Place Ville-Marie in Montreal. Sure it isn't the prettiest building, but at least it isn't a complete eyesore!

Photos from Wikimedia Commons

Day 104: For the people!

I tend to spend most of my Thursday with a glazed look in my eye and a little rivulet of drool escaping from the corner of my mouth. But I'm trying to keep it together well enough to provide you with decent lessons.

Today's lesson is from the Wonderful World of Webdesign.

Lesson 105: Don't build a website just to implement cool new tech. Build a website that people want, using the cool new tech.

While some tech developments find their markets, just building a website to show off the latest and greatest without thinking about how your users use your website is a good way to waste a lot of money for nothing.

I mean, for instance, if you're managing the website for the Anywhereville Senior Centre you don't necessarily want to jump right on the bandwagon with every tech thing that comes along. Is your average user even on Twitter, or Pinterest, or whatever new tech trend that's cropped up?

If they aren't, why do you need to be?

It's a good guideline at least.

Day 103: When is a book not a book?

Books have not always looked like books.

But we knew that, right?

We knew that in Egypt, their stories were written down on walls and in scrolls of papyrus with pictograms. Ancient civilizations wrote on clay and stone tablets, or in wax on wooden tablets. Eventually they wrote on some form of "paper", though maybe not the pulpy kind we use today. They wrote on vellum, which was paper but made of calf skin. They wrote on paper made of rags.

Books have looked like pillars. Books have looked like walls. Books have looked like tapestries. Books have looked like scrolls.

And finally, books started looking like books. That's the codex form of books. But that form didn't really start showing up until the 2nd century and didn't really catch on until the 5th century.

But how did we go from spooling whole books on scrolls and having to scroll through the whole thing to find what we're looking for to these bound piles of paper that we can open to any point? What other forms could books have taken?

Lesson 104: In Burma, they created "Palm Books".

Turns out they did them in other places too, but today in class we got to see some Burmese Palm Books.

Basically they'd take palm leaves and cut the writing into them, then dry them and rub ink on them to dye the cuts. Each leaf would be numbered and they'd be bound between wooden boards. The string binding it all together was left long enough that it would wrap around the book holding it closed. To read it, you'd untie it and the pages open by fanning out.

They're really beautiful.

There are just so many interesting little anecdotes and entrancing particulates of information in the history of books and bookbinding....

Books used to need straps and clasps to hold them closed because vellum would swell when it got humid and deform the book into a wedge; unless a clasp was keeping it boxy and rectangular.

Paper as we now know it was developed in China and used by Arabs in the 8th century and didn't catch on in Europe until later.

Independent of all of this, Meso-Americans made codex style books where they whitewashed the pages before writing on them.

This class just speaks so much to my nature as an encyclopedia of useless knowledge!

Day 102: Regrets Abound?

Hardly even a question now... I'm going to hate Thursdays more than any other day of the week. I have class from 11 in the morning till nearly 9 at night. It's going to be one heck of a day...

Part way through the summer I was offered the opportunity to take Metadata and Access. A course I was very disappointed to have missed out on due to some course sign-up shenanigans. But ever since I dropped Public Libraries in order to take up that offer, I've been wondering if maybe I'm just going to regret taking it. Metadata's a necessity for me, and the four-day weekend thing is going to be nice. But the headache-inducing Thursday alone may not be worth it. We'll see how this semester pans out.

My lesson today wasn't really library school related, despite having three classes. No, today's lesson was about building your own computer. See, a friend of mine back home helped me put together this brand new desktop for myself, and it's part of the reason my posting this week has fallen by the wayside.

I had originally wanted a hackintosh, that is to say, a self-made machine running Mac OSX. It's called a hackintosh because Mac OSX will not run on non-apple hardware, so to do it you need to hack the OS a bit. But ultimately, my friend and some of my online research convinced me that it's too finicky for me to try and have as my primary machine. So instead I've gone with a Windows/Linux dualboot system. It's just been so fun tinkering with it and making things work and smoothing out all the wrinkles that I hadn't put aside the time to write my posts for the week. Shame on me. But I've learned a lot about the workings of my computer, the ins and outs of the software and hardware... just as I had hoped I would.

But the biggest lesson of all has been about Maximizing versus Satisficing. It's something we talked about in class a bit last year, so not completely unrelated to library school. The basic idea is that when ever you're doing something or making a choice, you can be a maximizer or satisficer. Maximizers try to achieve some absolute objective ideal of "The Best" that doesn't really exist and isn't achievable. While Satisficers try to achieve their own subjective ideal of "Best for Them".

So bringing this thought to the computer I've built, today I was trying to finally make my decision about which distribution of Linux I should install. Now for those uninitiated into the bizarre world of online discussion, the best way to start a fight in a group Linux-minded people is to ask which distribution is "The Best". "Ubuntu!" goes the cry. "No, Debian!" shouts another. "No, OpenSUSE!" says another still. And the argument goes in circles as they debate about what file structure is most efficient or which one is too mainstream.

As someone who is very much a maximizer trying desperately to curb those inclinations, I have spent more time than I care to admit poking about and reading online trying to decide which distribution I should use. When finally, I realized...

Lesson 103: It doesn't actually matter which is "Best"; which one do I want? 

Which one is going to be easiest for me to use? Which will be the least hassle for me and what I want to do on the machine? Which am I going to have and find the most support in? These are the questions that are going to get me the best experience in the long run.

It reminds me of one of my nights at a pub while I was back in Ontario. I ordered a Rickard's White and one of the guys I was with was just absolutely appalled and started giving me a hard time because it's "such a bad beer". I just couldn't understand why my choice in beer was causing him such obvious offence. I wasn't forcing him to drink it. By ordering it I wasn't stamping it with the Veronica Seal of Approval and declaring it "The Best Beer to Have Ever Been Brewed By Mortal Hands". It's just that of the options given, it was what I most felt like drinking.

On the whole, I think I've been much too governed by that kind of thinking; that my every choice has to be the objective best and absolutely defensible one. Why shouldn't I just be happy and satisfied choosing what I want for myself? Maybe it'll turn out that there was a better, more perfect choice I could have made, but that shouldn't make me any less happy.

Day 101: Back to School!

So here we are... everyone else's "last first class" is my "first class" of the year. Creates kind of an odd disconnect, but there you have it.

Today was History of Books and Printing, and while I'm really not a fan of the standing-around-tables-for-two-hours format for a class, I can already tell I'm going to learn a lot from this class! A lot of really interesting and arcane factoids; my favourite flavour! Lets start this school year off with a bang, shall we? Multi-lesson first day post!

But where do we start with the numbering? It's such an arbitrary numbering system to begin with; do I continue and make this lesson 101? Or do I serialize and make it 2.1? Maybe just start straight from 1 all over again? Bah humbug, I hate decisions.

Lesson 101: Italics presuppose eyeglasses.

Kind of an odd, almost throw away line from my professor. Italics were developed by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, who was kind of a big deal. While we now use them to bring attention to important segments in a text, they were first used to fit more printed words onto a single page so you could have smaller, more compact volumes. However, since the type is so small, it assumes that anyone with less than stellar eyesight is having it corrected by lenses.

Lesson 102: Books printed as someone raised in a Western context expects them to look are printed in the Venetian style, that is: each page containing one column of full justified text, often filling the page to margins which are slightly larger at the bottom and outside edges

There's a long thread in the history of printing that leads back through a few idealistic revivals and notable presses, and when taken right back, it's those printers in Venice who printed books more or less as we now expect them to look.

I was trying to find a good picture to illustrate what I mean, and I found someone has written a great post about Aldus Manutius and his printing, and rather inexplicably taken a few pictures with one of his books in a bathtub. You can see that here.

Old books are just so cool!

Pre-post Madness

My busy busy summer is coming to a close now, and I'm back in Montreal after spending the last two weeks in Ontario seeing all my wonderful friends and family before I buckle down and get back to class.

This won't be a lesson post, but I figured I'd take the opportunity to explain a little about my summer, and what my posting schedule is likely to look like this year.

You may have noticed this blog, despite my aspirations to keep summer lessons going, has been all quiet over the summer months. While I learned a lot at my practicum, I really had no time to breathe, let alone post. I was working full-time and doing the practicum in the evenings, so my weeks were almost entirely working and sleeping.

I did get to volunteer for a week at a Venturer Scout event at the beginning of July and take the aforementioned two weeks in Ontario though, so it wasn't all mind killing insanity!

I really should have started posting last week, since that's when classes started, but I have a terrible revelation... I skipped my first week of classes. I can see you now, all shock and awe and horror. I know, isn't it awful? But my sister, the mastermind (?) behind Out of My Ordinary was leaving for Botswana this past Saturday, and I wanted to be sure to see her off. She'll be there for the next 8 or so months watching elephants out her bedroom window I'm sure.

Also, this year I've been blessed with an amazing schedule... I work Tuesdays and Wednesdays 9-1, and only have class Tuesday and Thursday afternoons (well into the evening in the case of Thursday). Which means I get four day weekends! Woo hoo! It also means that in general, I'll be updating this blog on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and maybe the occasional Wednesday if something particularly interesting happens at work.

Hope you all had an enjoyable summer; lets get on with this school year!

.... My last ever? *gulp*

Summer Lessons: The Cardinal Sins of Internet Browsers

I'm feeling especially grouchy today. Maybe it's because a fire alarm was going off in the hospital I work in and it gave me a headache. But regardless, it's inspired me to be rather snarky. I apologize in advance...

Watching people use computers, and watching people teaching me things on computers has brought to the forefront of my mind some things which should really never be done when it comes to browsers. I'm going to start the compilation of a list here, and I may add to it as I see fit.

1: Thou shalt not open, and especially not go out of your way to open, Netscape or Internet Explorer when Chrome or Firefox are offered to you.

It just gives me the chills that I've even seen this happen... perfectly good browsers waiting on the desktop to be used, but you're going to go into the program menu just to open IE? I shudder to think.

2: Thou shalt not enter the address "www.google.com" in the address bar of Chrome in order to go google something. It's GOOGLE Chrome. 

Really? Congratulations, you just divided by zero.

3: Thou shalt not type "http://" before a web address. Even typing out "www." may be taking it too far, but for that you can be forgiven.

Your browser knows these things. Unless you're worried about secure browsing and you're afraid you won't automatically be redirected the "https://" (the s stands for secure!) it's just nails on a chalkboard unnecessary.

Summer Lessons: A Project in Connection

I'm considering starting a project.

I'm going to make myself a little kit. It will have envelopes, paper, pens, stamps... and every week, I'll write a letter to someone. Maybe it will be a friend, if I can get enough of them to send me their up-to-date contact info. Maybe it will be family. Maybe it will be a politician, or a celebrity, or someone I know of who's incarcerated. Maybe it will be someone I remember from long ago.

But I'll write a letter a week.

Connect with people in a personal, if archaic, way.

I hate when people knock on technology and decry our use of it as being too wired, too impersonal... Humans are social creatures, and much of our use of technology is simply extending that even further. I even read a great article which refers to the proprioception that arises from the use of social media.

But that being said, sometimes being a sprinkler gets tiring.

All that whirling, making sure every blade of grass gets watered. Sometimes you have to get out the spray bottle and give specific plants a little TLC. A lot of our relationships are like grass; make sure they get enough water and you don't really run a risk of them shriveling up and dying away. They may not thrive into towering trees or flowering shrubs; but it's grass, that's not what it's for. Not every relationship in your life can, or should, be monumental. Heck, the human brain is only cognitively capable of maintaining 150 true friendships.

But some plants you baby and pamper. You tend them carefully. Not because they're more important than the grass; but because they're the ones you want to see thrive.

I guess I just want to make a point of doing that in my life.

My family never was very good with plants.