We had our landline through a place called Packet 8, a VOIP / internet telephony place that one of my uncles tipped us off to. Until his recommendation, we’d never heard of them, and truth be told, I’ve still never seen anything about them in any form, online or off. Despite the fact that I’d never heard of them (something which always gives me a bit of hesitation when it comes to service places), they ended up being quite excellent. $30 per month for unlimited calling anywhere in the country¹ – not bad at all. And I never had to call them to say “hey, something is broken” – we hooked up their converter box, plugged it into our phone, and forgot about it.

They were able to impress me once more yesterday when we called to cancel our service – they didn’t harass us to stay. They simply asked us why we were cancelling and we answered with the truth. The lady said, “Okay, that’s fine”, and went about cancelling our account. I recall when we cancelled our service with Verizon to switch to Packet 8, the Verizon rep. practically offered us his first born to get us to stay, long after we’d made it clear we were switching.

So, kudos, Packet 8. You guys rock, and if we ever have need of a landline again, we’ll be in touch.

1. I believe it also included unlimited calling to Canada as well, but I’m not sure – the one good friend I have in Canada, I talk to online.

I recently was hunting a particular book, Russisch ohne Mühe, or Russian without Toil. It’s one of the older courses made by a company called Assimil, and is supposed to be far superior to their modern, “updated” Russisch ohne Mühe heute (Russian without Toil Today). This particular book was first printed in 1971, and as far as I know, Assimil no longer publishes it; they’ve abandoned it entirely in favor of their updated course.

Furthermore, it wasn’t exactly at the top of the bestseller lists when it was new. Let’s face it, the consumer demand for a product which teaches Russian with a German base can’t be that great. However, it actually surprised me just how few copies are floating around. WorldCat, while certainly not exhaustive in regards to libraries, lists a mere three copies worldwide.¹

However, despite its relative rarity, as I type this post, the book is on its way to me. It’s coming from a small bookseller in Germany, who sells at a site called booklooker.de. I found her and booklooker.de via bookfinder.com. Finding the book was only the first step though, of course; she of course had to be paid, too! Being in Germany, she obviously wanted to be paid in Euros. I was able to do so by paying her via PayPal; they took care of the conversion stuff for me. Instantly, of course, with no charge added.

All of this sounds rather run of the mill for the internet, which, ultimately, I suppose it is – but when I stopped and thought about what I was able to do and how easy it was, it made me shake my head. Before the internet, how in the world would I have found a now out-of-print book in Germany? If I had been able to find it – which is unlikely to begin with – how long would it have taken? How long would it have taken from the beginning of my search to me actually getting the book? For my recent transaction, assuming the book doesn’t get lost and shows up in the approximate timeframe given, the entire process – from finding the book to it showing up in my mailbox – will amount to a couple of weeks. Two weeks to find a rare book and to have it delivered from over 4000 miles away isn’t too bad at all!

This whole experience has also brought to my mind a big question which I touched on above: before the internet, how did people find rare or out-of-print books? Were there services that would contact a range of used book sellers to find out if the book was available? Did you have to do this yourself? Did you just not get the book, period? In the case of this book, I think even if book-hunt services existed, it would have been difficult to get the book. There were two sellers at booklooker.de who had the book; the one I bought from, while she had 15,000 books listed, specifically stated that to stop by her place and see her books required an appointment, which leads me to believe that she just has a bunch of books in storage, rather than a physical shop. The other guy? He had 3 items listed; he wasn’t really a shopkeeper of any sort, just some guy who threw a few items online to try and sell them. In either case, I think they would have both been overlooked by a book-hunt service.

1. Which are, oddly enough, in the Netherlands, where Dutch is the official language, not German.

I just mixed bleach / vinegar / salt / and liquid dish detergent in hopes of creating a super weed killer. I mixed the stuff in a fairly well-ventilated room, and then sprayed it on some weeds outside. Now I just read about chlorine gas resulting from the mixture of bleach and chlorine, and I’m suddenly feeling light-headed (hypochondriac). Am I going to die?

I’m kind of curious if the whole post was meant in jest, or if they were serious. If they were serious… well, they’ve got me puzzled; hopefully not many people think along similar lines as him/her. As others in the MetaFilter thread pointed out, MetaFilter is not 911 or the Poison Control Center. If you’ve done something that you think might be dangerous or fatal, particularly if it involves poisonous gases, probably the last thing you need to be doing is hopping on MetaFilter and writing a post. Okay, well, maybe the last thing would be to stand in the room where you mixed the stuff and inhale deeply, but you get the point.

The post makes me wonder about how often people turn to the internet when perhaps another approach would be more practical or effective. I know I’ve caught myself bending over backwards trying to find a local phone number via Google, when I’ve got a phonebook 20 feet away in a drawer. I’ve also – yes, I’m ashamed! – poked around on amazon.com, trying to find publishing information or some such about a book that is on my shelf upstairs in my room. Admittedly, I usually do that when I’m downstairs, but still, it’d probably be faster to just walk upstairs and yank the book off the shelf. But alas, turning to the internet for information is such a strong habit, it’s hard to break.

I haven’t, however, turned to the internet for emergency help. If my house catches fire, I won’t be posting to MetaFilter, asking what the best course of action is. That’s taking things a bit too far.

Also, a comment from the thread I linked to:

Dear Metafilter, I think I may be dying. Can you tell me if

Heh.

When I went to the unsubscribe page and submitted my email address to be removed from their list, I was shown this:

Your email address has been successfully opted out from Barnes & Noble promotional e-mails.
Please note that this change will be in effect within 10 business days. Thank you.

Is there any legit reason for it taking up to 10 business days? Technically speaking, I don’t see why it would take more than a few minutes, at most. I would assume that the email addresses are stored in a database, and when it’s time for a promotional email to go out, their system pulls the addresses out. While I’ve only dealt with MySQL databases, I can’t imagine that a database system which required 10 days processing time to remove one entry would be very efficient!

I suppose the reality of the situation lies in one word of that sentence: business. By telling their advertisers they’ll keep email addresses in the loop for 10 days after someone requests to be removed from the list, Barnes and Noble is probably making a heap of cash.

Oh well – certainly not a big deal, but it is something to chuckle about. I note that it doesn’t take 10 days for the ad emails to start showing up after you’ve signed up for a service of some sort.

I know what’s causing the problem, though: tagging. I’ve been using the Simple Tagging plugin for a while now, and apparently, it doesn’t play nicely with 2.3.1, because 2.3.1 comes with its own tag functionality built in. I suppose if I’d read up on the latest version of WordPress before upgrading, I would have known that. Alas, I like to live dangerously.

At any rate, I’m now left with a crappy selection of choices:

A. I can leave the error up above and continue to use Simple Tagging (basically not an option, because that error is pretty yuck, and I like things to work smoothly);
B. I can lose all of my tags that I’ve applied, and start over from scratch.
C. See below.

I know, there are some of you in the crowd going, “well, just import the tags from Simple Tagging, and then get rid of the plugin.” A fine idea – I’m just not sure that’s possible. It appears that Simple Tags is the successor to Simple Tagging; Simple Tags works with 2.3.1, and Simple Tagging does not. So, I’m now poking around, trying to figure out if there’s anyway for me to keep my tags, possibly by installing Simple Tags, importing my tags from Simple Tagging to Simple Tags, and then importing my tags from Simple Tags into the top-level, WordPress approved tags area.

Simple my ass.

So – if my system here explodes and you see bits of my blog floating around on the internet, you know what happened.

Update: All fixed. I wasn’t looking in the right area in WordPress for the tags importer. I found it; imported; and now all is well in the world – at least in my little digital corner of it.

P.S. WordPress makers: why, oh why, will you not make TinyMCE’s Full Screen function part of the standard offering on the editing window toolbar? Why?

We talked a lot about the state of public education in America (not good), and how things have changed since he was in college (early 80s, I believe). Him talking about researching stuff for his papers made me realize something which had hitherto never occurred to me: research used to be a lot more difficult, and a lot more time consuming. Certainly, if you’re really going to be digging into a topic, research still takes a considerable amount of time. But with the internet and huge conglomerations of academic journals (EBSCOhost, I’m looking at you), complete with full text search, finding some initial sources is fairly quick. With EBSCOhost alone, I can search across something like 5,000 academic journals, all at once, and have results back in 5 seconds or thereabouts. Not only is one able to search that many journals at once, but with that search, one is also searching across time. Many of the journals go back at least 10 years, and all of those articles are brought up within a search.

That’s quite a different picture than what the preacher told me about his researching: heading off to the card file, looking for his subject, and then going to the stacks; finding a book, browsing through it, and then going from that book to another via the bibliography. And that’s just with books – with journal articles, it was even more time consuming. The preacher and I didn’t talk about journal articles, but a friend of mine (hi, Chantal) was willing to fill me in on how it worked: you’d check a journal index, usually published yearly, to find journals on the topic you were after. You’d then have to hunt down the journal(s) in question, and basically dig through them to see if there were any articles you could use. Chantal said that her university had all of the journals she ever needed, but I’m sure folks who attended smaller universities / colleges ended up having to request journals via interlibrary loan or a similar system. I can just imagine waiting 2 or 3 weeks for a journal to arrive, just to find it didn’t have anything in it you could use.

Thinking about these two means of researching brings to mind two different fictional scenes: one, showing a Star Trek computer fellow bringing up reams of information – exactly what he needs, of course – with a few key strokes; the other, showing Gandalf sitting down in the libraries of Minas Tirith for days on end, sorting through document after document, hoping to find some scrap about what he was after. Certainly, perhaps these two scenes are exaggerations of how things were pre-internet and how things are now – but I don’t think the exaggeration is that great. It really is amazing how the internet has changed things.

I am, however, still holding out for my hovercraft vehicle…

For example, recently on MetaFilter, I saw this:

I just mixed bleach / vinegar / salt / and liquid dish detergent in hopes of created a super weed killer. I mixed the stuff in a fairly well-ventilated room, and then sprayed it on some weeds outside. Now I just read about chlorine gas resulting from the mixture of bleach and chlorine, and I’m suddenly feeling light-headed (hypochondriac). Am I going to die?

Okay, in an instance like this, going to Ask MetaFilter and probing the hivemind is not the solution. The solution, if you truly are concerned that you just took in a bunch of chlorine gas or something other poison, is to call a Poison Control Center, an ambulance, or something similar. Here’s a similar thing I saw on Ask MetaFilter:

We just figured out our house was burgled. One laptop and a necklace or two missing. No one is in the house. We can see where they got in and we’ve secured it. What should we do now? File a police report? What about the laptop? Any identity theft steps to take? We changed the email passwords and stuff… Other suggestions welcome.

This isn’t as bad as the chlorine gas one, but it’s still pretty silly. If you discover that someone has broken into your home, the first step (in my mind, anyway) would be to call the police and file a report – not to hop on Ask MetaFilter.

I’m really not trying to come across as a dick here, but it’s like the internet causes folks’ brains to short circuit sometimes. They forget that there’s a world that exists offline; they think that all of their problems should be solved online.

I’m just waiting for the day when I’m browsing the feed items from AskMetafilter, and see: “Okay, I’m in a building. It’s on fire. What does the great hivemind recommend I do?”

Come on, people. Common sense. Use it. Then again, I suppose there’s a reason that Greeley’s quote, “Common sense is very uncommon”, lives on.

Perhaps I’m being pessimistic; perhaps I’m being an old “stick in the mud.” But the idea of, for lack of a better word, collecting friends on these sites doesn’t appeal to me. It’s almost as if friendships aren’t the key point; the key point is to collect friends, to increase your number of contacts. Have you known this person your whole life? Add them as a friend. Have you talked to this person a few times at work? Add ‘em as a friend. Did you bump into this person while walking to the store four months ago, and you’ve not seen them since? Add them as a friend!

All of the social networking sites I’ve used have had a similar quality to them, and that quality, I think, is hollowness. There’s lots of flash – everyone has their little mood indicators, their 16×16 avatars, their favorite song listed. But am I really coming to know these people through all of that crap? I don’t really think so; or rather, I could come to know them a lot better through another medium, say, email. With email, people can send me messages, and I can send them messages; the difference here is that when I send them an email, they don’t get an email saying that I sent them an email, requesting them to go to a different website to login to read my email. The email is just there. And, if you don’t know what I’m alluding to, sign up at Facebook or MySpace, and have someone send you a message. You have to go through that nonsense every single time. This can become exceedingly irritating when you and another person are sending fairly short messages back and forth to each other. It’s always nice to spend a few minutes going to another site, logging in, clicking on Inbox, just to read “haha, yeah” or something similar.

To be fair, Twitter was fun for a while; for a few days, I was twittering (tweeting?) like mad, and so were all of my contacts / friends. But then I came to see Twitter as just another timesink. Sure, it could be fun, but if I really wanted to communicate with my friends, I think I’d be better off hitting them up on an IM or through email. No middle-men websites required. Especially middle-men that dictate 140 characters or less.

But, like I said, maybe it’s just me. Clearly, the sites have something going for them, otherwise they wouldn’t be such smash hits. But I personally don’t enjoy them. I don’t find them filling. Real friendships, real communication, real discussion – these things are like a full mean, with steak, baked potato, some broccoli and carrots, and a bit of dessert. Twitter, MySpace, Facebook – popcorn. Tastes alright, but is certainly not filling at all.

By the way, a hat tip to Nils, who wrote this post, which is what got me thinking about this topic. His post is quite good, so go read it. Go on. Get outta’ here.

For this year, I’ve seen two so far:

On the Gmail login page, they’ve announced a new feature: Gmail Paper. The concept is fairly cool sounding, actually: select any of your mail you would like in paper form, then click Paper Archive. After that, Google will print the mail out, box it up, and send it to you. Furthermore, they say that’s completely free, due to it being covered by ads printed on the pack of the mail. Truth be told, I almost thought it was legit, until I came across this:

But what about the environment?
Not a problem. Gmail Paper is made out of 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum, and thus, actually helps the environment. For every Gmail Paper we produce, the environment gets incrementally healthier.

Post-consumer organic soybean sputum, huh? If my mail is going to be printed on that, I’ll stick to the digital form, thanks. Lastly, Google paid a little bit of homage to the Lord of the Rings movies:

Keep it secret, keep it safe? That sounds like a Gandalf phrase if I’ve ever heard one!

The other new feature they’re offering is Google TiSP. It’s free wireless internet access which is provided through… your toilet. You just have to read about it. Snippet, though:

Within sixty minutes — assuming proper data flow — the other end of your fiber-optic cable should have reached the nearest TiSP Access Node, where our Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers (PHDs) will remove the sinker and plug the line into our global data networking system.

Heh. Plumbing hardware dispatchers. I love Google.

Joostâ„¢ is a new way of watching TV on the internet, which uses new and established technologies to provide the best of both the internet and TV worlds. We’re in the process of making it as TV-like as we can, with programmes, channels and adverts. You can also see some things that we think will enhance the TV experience: searching for programmes and channels, for example, as well as social features like chat. There are many more new features to come!

You can read more about it at their FAQ. If you’d like the invitation, just drop a comment here and supply your email address. You’ve got until the 22nd, which is when the current invitation system goes “boom!”

By the way, just put your email address in the email box, instead of in the comment box. That way I’m the only one who will see your address, and I promise, I won’t spam you (much).

Update: Just to let everyone know, I no longer have a free invite, so.. well, quit trying to comment on this post for the invitation!

Update #2: I’ve disabled comments on this post. Apparently people are too busy clamoring for a Joost invite to read the part of this entry that says I DON’T HAVE ANYMORE.