I volunteer as a costumed interpreter at a living history* museum. The 1865 Prince of Wales woodstove in the kitchen was roaring so it became the center of attention:

Ohhh. What is that big thing?

Why is it so big? Seven burners!

What did they burn?

These are but a sampling of the most common questions asked by adult Canadians. I repeatedly explained that wood was indeed what was burned in a woodstove and that it was the only source of heat, hot water and cooked food so it needed to be big. The technologies of the past are, I have discovered, as elusive and confusing to people as emerging present day ones can be. (more…)

KEMBLE—As a daughter of Bruce County, I am an expert on storm survival. At fifteen I wore khaki shorts and Bass Weejuns without socks when the snow drifts were thigh-high just to show winter what for.

A storm is on the  way so I am preparing.

Up until this week I wasn’t sure, but now I am. Reality is disintegrating. First Bell got a free pass on throttling internet data and now Twitter has turned off SMS for Canadians.

The mayor of Toronto, David Miller, and a bunch of his fellow droners tossed up a utopian smokescreen by holding a two day Web2.0 conference. Use of the term ‘civic engagement’ was so wanton and reckless that they effectively drained all meaning from it.

The last straw came this morning when I realized my new unibody Macbook Pro does not get as hot as my previous model and so now I can no longer use it to warm my feet as I drift off to sleep at night.

Plus there’s all that economic depression (which I predicted) and Prime Minister Steven Harper wrangling. Not to mention a sensational new grab bag of reasons to get horrified and feel historically distinct from brown people by gossiping about their violence and pretending we’ve got nothing to do with causing it. (aka Mumbai)

So what’s a country girl to do?

I’m breaking out my shorts and penny loafers.

Time to buy stock with enthusiasm and go house hunting for dives. I’m making a pipe of the tweets I want sent to my free email-to-SMS phone address thus subverting Twitter’s SMS pull-out. I’m emailing my ISP each time my Skype chat is throttled down to an echo-chamber. I’m running Photoshop and Final Cut Pro just before bed to really heat up the processors in my Mac.

And, most important, I’ve elected Roky Erickson as my Mayor and Prime Minister - or rather my interpreter now for the oh-so-distant spectral realm of Canadian professional politician.  As Roky has explained to me:

We can for a long time talk and talk but no matter how long we may talk,
We are not talking.

I’m Jesuspenis and I’m taking over for Chantelle today because she is sucky and heartbroken still. Grrrr.*

I’m an expert on anthropomorphism and Twitter because I am both a four pound yorkshire terrier and a Twitter identity. So I get used phatically all the time on Twitter by Chantelle.

Some examples of my incredible tweets:

I’m staring at you. 9:18 AM Apr 20th

the rain really screws up my foot-hair 1:12 PM May 2nd (more…)

Microsoft’s Live.com just relaunched as a social network. It was very easy, all they had to do was copy Friendfeed badly.

Commenter Edwin Khodabakchian summed it up when he wrote: Interesting move. At least they are trying.

But Live.com’s reinvention has given me a great idea! What if I took my favourite animal - the goat - and relaunched them as a social network. After all, if Microsoft can do it with it’s dead fish Live.com then curious, rectangular-pupiled goats are a shoe-in.

From farming goats I learned that they are natural aggregators. They collect everything they see with their mouths, with no discrimination. On the other hand, for four years Live.com has aggregated nothing. So this feature would be much easier to implement with goats.

Goats are extremely useful and efficient machines. As revealed in this Wired video, goats can clear land quickly and without pollution. They even have tidy droppings. Live.com is a useless and inefficient machine because it does nothing and no one uses it. Microsoft in general has built it’s reputation entirely around it’s aggravating messy shit. Once again goats win out.

Finally, if worse comes to worse, you can eat a goat. An edible social network could really take over the world, I should think. And just now I tried to eat Live.com and nearly puked. If it weren’t for the new rounded corners on the unibody Macbook Pro I would have.

Final socialnet probability tally: Goats=100, Live.com=0.

Prove to me that goats aren’t by far the better choice to be relaunched as a social network. Go ahead - I dare you!

The purpose of this blog is to allow me to do what I enjoy doing more than anything else in the world. Let me describe it briefly for you.

I take popular culture — both past and present forms — and use it as a lens through which to contextualize electronic communication technologies (ECTs) within a framework of race, class and gender analysis.

So why the hell do I enjoy this so much? (more…)

Desperate for exercise, I spent half an hour yesterday jogging around Liberty City. My cousin wanted me to steal a police Hummer and shoot innocent bystanders. Instead, I ended my relaxing run in an Emergency Room with grenades that put all us invalids out of our collective miseries.

Usually after a run I just do pigeon pose.

With my foot damaged and my mind speeding the internets have provided me with other less violent places to go.

I’ve proposed to a wide variety of rural Christian girls. I’ve been sending tinkly poetry composed of lines culled from my favourite horror novels/movies and songs. For example: Your new society sounds charming, Mine Mine Mind, My heart burns there, too.* No responses yet.

Yesterday I dropped a community move for a family whose patriarch is working in Egypt. It was amazing. So many people came to help, the trucks were unloaded and unpacked in less than an hour. (more…)

So I broke my foot. I’m on a roll here: Heartbreak last week and foot-snafu this week
 
So I broke my foot.

I’m on a roll here: Heartbreak last week and foot-snafu this week. 

What ever could be next?

My Rev A Macbook Pro will arrive soon and so I expect I will have a broken churned-out-of-Shanghai-too-soon computer.

I’m as bad off as Yahoo, mewling and crawling back to Microsoft. Yahoo now needs to be bought by them after failing to close on any other offers. And me? I’ve taken for granted how well my heart and feet have served me thus far. Now I long for immediate rejuvenation.

What a pathetic pair we make.

Socialnets to the rescue! (more…)

It is Halloween so I guess I need to bring the horror. Real horror, not Old Media murder stats like 41% of Brits regularly read a blog, or that I don’t have a new Macbook Pro yet.

So I bring you Heartbreak Horror. Also known as how to break-up digitally once you’ve done it personally. This is the real terror, the days and weeks of re-discovered couple icons, shared webpages and worst of all un-following and changing your personal status all over the place.

For two hyper-connected people, the process is indeed nothing short of a horror show. So, as your dedicated Canadian Tech-Education Blogger, I am living through the process merely so I can provide you with a roadmap for your own bumpy future. Since, like it or not, heartbreak is something that just happens in life.

FACEBOOK
Just remove relationship status information. Whatever you do, never change your status to single. That is like emitting a beacon that commands all the people you don’t really know or like to contact you with questions like: “R U ok????” (more…)

If you are in Los Angeles on a Monday, climb to the deepest recesses of The Comedy Store (aka The Belly Room). You will likely be the only one in the audience of The Ding Dong Show but you will laugh until you cry.

Let me explain the show to you:

The host, Simply Don, is trapped in an eternity of rehearsing his cast of social outcasts (drug addicts, alcoholics, the mentally ill, the physically atrocious). His pretend goal is to break them, and the show, into the big time. Broadway. The Academy Awards. The comic gold is feeding lines to people who can never ever get them right. Then to interrupt and insult them for it. And then to try again and repeat the process over and over. Pointlessly and hilariously.

The goal isn’t really a Tony Award but to point out the futility of the process of making nothing into something. In this case, because society will never embrace social deviants — people who are not part of any stylish or cool rebellion but rather just unacceptable and unattractive. The unpredictable and unproductive humans can never become respected and rewarded for their talents no matter how hard they practice.

Web2.0 tech bloggers are not social deviants in the least. Or hilarious like dingdongers. But they do futilely try to make nothing into something every day. Pointlessly. This is their whole deal. (more…)

WESTWOOD, CALIFORNIA—I found this Beer Dong poster attached to every other post on the street I’m staying on in Westwood. The street does have a map name but is more commonly called “Frat Row.” You’ll forgive me but this has put me in a gender war kind of mood. But screw you if you are a man!

Gender, because of Palin and Hilary Clinton, has become popular as a meme in 2008. Only gender is not actually ever discussed. (more…)

Last night I was so unprepared (no socks; summer-weight quilt) for the temperature drop that I had to put my laptop on my feet to get to sleep. It had me thinking this would be a good example of the real-world utility of digital tech to give luddites who criticize my Internet-dependence.

The painfully common rhetorical question I get about my Twittering or streaming of my life’s details is “What is the point?” followed instantly with an explanation of why they don’t do it: because their life “isn’t interesting enough.”

The passive-aggressive implication here is that I am an arrogant turd who thinks my everyday life is interesting enough to feverishly microblog about. It is hard to intervene in this logic. But let me try. (more…)

Instead of investing in real estate and companies that make stuff and have a dull old strategy for making money the answer is clear: when the opportunity comes, invest in nothing because nothing is the future. Lehman Brothers has been around for a century and a half making huge profits, and today it’s nothing but FAIL. Same goes for newly sold Merrill Lynch. But fear not: I will provide you here with my expert Fall 2008 list that will pull us right out of economic depression and immerse us deeply in the bushy-tailed future:

Twitter
People are addicted to Twitter. You know I am. And addicts will do anything to get a fix. Sure, as of yet it has no way of making money, so investing in it will be faith based. But you believe in Jesus don’t you? The old economy has collapsed and the new economy is the only hope. Even Jack Layton is on Twitter, warming the cockles of my Canadian heart and proving how we, as a nation, are on the cutting edge. (more…)