Q.: You write from 10AM til whenever. Is research a separate activity?
William Gibson: I don’t regard research as a separate activity. From anything. Everything is research. Relatively little great stuff turns up for me as a result of deliberately looking. Life is crowd-sourcing. In a good way.
Q.: The reason I ask is that research tends to wander off into the weeds so easily, especially on the internets.
Wililam Gibson: But they hide the good stuff *in the weeds*!

(via William Gibson’s blog)

I recently realized that I can improve the humor and bite of my Facebook postings by merely omitting any emoticons I’d planned on using.

Google is more than a search engine; it’s got a bunch of handy built-in tools accessible merely by using certain keywords in a regular Google search. Don’t most people know about these? If not, there’s a list of them here. Applications and websites exist to do the same things as these shortcuts but I prefer Google’s because they’re “self-contained” in any browser with internet access. My top-three most-used are these.

1. Dictionary Definitions
   
   Example: define: lenticular
   
   I use this feature constantly at work because unlike my Mac at home, there’s no dictionary application I like on my Dell. (If you even think of suggesting Word’s built-in dictionary/thesaurus, I will punch you in the neck.) If you use this feature without the colon, you only get the first definition if there’s a list of them; I prefer using the colon to get (typically) a bunch of definitions from various sources.
2. Weather
   
   Example: weather cleveland
   
   Much more efficient than slogging through a variety of screens at weather.com. Gives you the current weather, condition, wind and humidity, as well as the highs/lows for the current day and the following three days, plus graphical representations of the condition.
3. Unit Conversion
   
   Example: 3.60 cm in inches
   
   I used this one just a bit ago to determine the face-size of a watch I was considering buying. (It’s 1.41732283 inches, in case you were curious.) Many units are represented, so you can even do cooking conversions: 8 tablespoons in cups. And I appreciate that Google can convert numerals from Arabic to Roman: try 2008 in roman.

Happy Valentine’s Day! This Candy Heart Generator is big fun. (Although my candy background urges me to tell you that these chalky treats are rightfully called “conversation hearts,” a phrase I wrongfully assumed the New England Confectionery Company had trademarked.)

I enjoyed the challenge of the six-character limit for each heart’s two lines of text. My most successful coinage so far, as determined by the amount of laughter it elicited from O., is this:

ANAL
PIR8

The Zogby/463 Internet Attitudes Poll released today reveals that “One in four Americans say the Internet can serve as a substitute for a significant other.”

This intrigued me. I certainly dedicate enough attention to the Internet for it to be considered a significant other. But I’d never really hung out with the Internet as anything more than a casual acquaintance. So I posed some statements and questions to the Internet via Google and culled its answers from among the top search results. What follows is our conversation, edited for style, clarity and length.

Jason

So... How’s it going?

Internet

You know what I’m going to say to that? Fantastic. What could be better?

Jason

Well, want to get dinner sometime?

Internet

I get a lot of, ‘We should hang out’ or ‘Let’s get dinner some time.’ I get it so often that when I hear it now, I usually just brush it off as someone else trying to get nice.

Jason

O.K., how about a movie?

Internet

If you look at market studies, home theater systems are a phenomenon on the rise. More and more, people are starting to reserve space in their homes for an ultimate entertainment experience.

Jason

All right, let’s stay in and watch a movie on DVD.

Internet

Let’s watch The Wire, O.K.?

Jason

I’ve never seen that. Is it any good?

Internet

Yes it is. I think it might have legs.

Jason

Should we get some pizza?

Internet

I’m usually a Pizza Hut girl, but guess what? Domino’s has an Oreo cookie dessert pie, so this girl is going to cheat with the competition!

Jason

You are starting to freak me out.

Internet

Can you prescribe me Chlorpromazine? The trendy antipsychotics don’t agree with me.

Jason

Maybe we should just be friends.

Internet

But friends shouldn’t treat other friends like that. You’re not too friendly when you act like that.

Jason

I’m going to go now.

Internet

Talk to you lata!

Jason

Yeah, I’ll call you.

Google is the Mad Libs of the 2000s. Here’s the current Google-abuse game making the rounds at work: in double-quotes, Google “[your first name] was arrested for”. Hilarity ensues. For example, the top-10 things Jason’s been arrested for are:

1. punching a man who he thought was after his girlfriend.
2. public intoxication and drug possession in Des Moines.
3. an unthinkable crime: murder. It didn’t make sense. Jason was a respected Navy officer.
4. misdemeanor battery after an altercation with a tow truck driver in September.
5. bootlegging, and fined $1,500.
6. underage drinking in Greenville, North Carolina last week.
7. embezzlement.
8. beating Joumana¹.
9. felony theft.
10. for Brian’s shooting. He was handcuffed to a railing and left to die until Nikolas found him.

¹ Which isn’t as bad as beating Joumama. Ha ha! [back]

I only today caught up on last Sunday’s New York Times Style Magazine, a seasonal supplement I read if I have time. Mainly I avoid it because it angers me that I will never have a salary large enough to be considered among the magazine’s demographic, people who can relate to articles with leads that begin like this: “When the architect Annabelle Selldorf designed her dream kitchen in her weekend home in East Hampton....”

I felt better reading a one-pager in it by Alexandra Jacobs, an editor for The New York Observer, who writes that she “abohor[s] music’s slow seepage into every nook and cranny of American life,” particularly when she’s dining. Aside from taking a position I disagree with, and it being a trend piece that seems to base its trend on something that happened only to the author and a few of her friends, her article contains the most winceworthy simile I’ve read recently:

While entertaining, he simply summons a station of streaming commercial-free indie rock through his computer, like a school of salmon over that great river of the Internet.

Like a school of salmon? This phrase brings the author’s whiny enterprise to a halt. It doesn’t seem to have been made in jest (although possibly ignorance, in that venerable mainstream media tradition of being five years behind on general knowledge of technology and pop culture).

It’s so bad, I’ll conclude with this photo of a salmon striving to justify its small existence, much like Alexandra Jacobs writing.

I remember when I was a kid, it drove me nuts to hear a new song I liked on the radio, then not have the DJ mention its name or who sang it. Usually those guys wouldn’t shut up, breaking into chatter during the song’s outro, most often when I was trying to record a clean copy of the song on my one-deck Panasonic boom box.

I’ve found now, with the search powers of the internet, that it’s easier than ever to track down any song, even one that I only know a vague phrase from. For example, I enjoyed a particular pre-movie tune played at Film Forum one recent evening, so I scrawled down a sentence of the lyric in my Moleskine: “If you’re ever gonna kiss me, it had better be tonight.”

When I got home, I Googled the lyric in double-quotes with the added word lyrics. Once I got the name of the song, I plugged it into the iTunes Music Store and listened to a few of the 30-second samples to find out which version of the song I’d heard; this particular song was a standard and recorded by a number of people. I solved the mystery in a few minutes, whereas in 1986, I’d have had to wait until the weekend for the American Top 40 to have Casey Kasem tell me who was responsible for the marvelous composition I’d heard days earlier, probably “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” by Billy Ocean. That’s the progress of technology for you.

The song, by the way, was “It Had Better Be Tonight (Meglio Sta Sera),” a Mancini composition originally from the Pink Panther soundtrack, although the version I heard and appreciated was by Buddy Greco, with half the lyrics in English and half in Italian. I like it because it reminds me of They Might Be Giants’ cover of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” another gleefully chugging jitterbug of a song.

• “It Had Better Be Tonight (Meglio Sta Sera)” by Buddy Greco (1.8 MB mp3)

An article from late March in the St. Petersburg Times of Florida, “The Endangered Joy of Serendipity,” by William McKeen, quickly became a meme, which is internet-speak for “a herd of nerds write about it on their blogs.” So here goes.

As might have been expected, the author, who is chairman of the University of Florida department of journalism and apparently the age of your dad, was taken to task for bemoaning the evaporation of serendipity in a world of music downloading and web sites that have “replaced human conversation.” He sealed his fate as a fuddy-duddy by championing libraries and bookstores as enriching places in which to browse and discover unexpected but engrossing detail. In short, he wrote, “Technology undercuts serendipity.”

Duck, buddy; the nerds zinged back, steaming that the internet can quickly and easily lead you off on crazy and unpredictable paths of serendipitousness. It’s the best for that, in fact, they seemed to suggest.

Both sides have valid points and here’s what I think:

1. Most information on the internet is one big circle jerk. The most popular blogs aren’t content generators, they’re content aggregators. A site or story gets linked to by Boing Boing or Fark, and lickety-split, other blogs link to it, and then still other blogs link to those blogs, and so on. The most popular information reigns. Now, nowhere does it say that information discovered via serendipity must be unique. But to me it should at least be unexpected, and not something that 1,001 white people are already dissecting.
2. Media other than the internet still have the upper hand in serendipity. McKeen chose some unfortunate examples to illustrate his point; libraries are always the death knell for arguments like his. “Browsing the stacks is one of the most overrated and abused examples in the canon of things-we-used-to-do-that-were-so-much-better,” fumed Steven Johnson in his blogged response. I’m reminded of Nicholson Baker’s report on the library that had embraced its new computerized reference system so fully that it disposed of its card catalog by tying each card through its punch hole to the ribbon trailing a helium balloon, then released and spirited away by the wind. However, the introduction of McKeen’s article wasn’t mentioned by any of the rebuttals I read because it’s correct: print versions of newspapers are better than online versions at finding unexpected information. And I said unexpected. I agree that, say, The New York Times online or Google News are fine briefs on what’s news. But until screens get larger and technology more robust to display more than an average of 1,000 words per screen, I’ll prefer the newsprint version of the paper, where my eyes can dart here and there, picking up words, phrases, names, photos and illustrations of interest, where I can skim two stories and move onto a third, jumping to the last few paragraphs where I may find an engrossing cache of description or detail, in the time it takes to scroll one screen of one article online.
3. I don’t know about you, but the internet is killing my ability to focus and concentrate. I flit from site to site, unable to digest anything more than a few hundred words of text. And how much knowledge do I retain? Little. My home internet connection has been down lately and I’ve found myself jittery from lack of surfing. But I soon moved on to cutting into that pile books accumulating on my bedside table and found myself more attentive and comfortably engrossed. Concentration can inspire serendipity.
4. Which brings me to the point that there’s still plenty of value to browsing books and bookstores for information. Despite the strides of Amazon.com getting sample pages and searchable versions of books online, I enjoy paging through books, reading author quotes on the jackets and then skimming books by those authors, grabbing books I remember reading about or just because I like the cover design. Seeing what other people are reading or asking the store’s staff for recommendations can also be beneficial.

Perhaps the larger lesson to be learned is that the physical world is no better or worse at serendipity than the one online. It’s just that it’s now often a lesser or forgotten option, perhaps because it requires effort and often direct human interaction. There’s still something to be said for non-text based serendipity: walking down a street you haven’t before, checking out a new shop or restaurant, heading out into the city with no purpose in mind, just to see where you may end up.

There is additional internet network-naming nerdery going on within wi-fi distance of my home computer, referencing the four-armed Hindu god of wisdom. I’m Argo, as you will recall.

The internet stuff is spooky.

Kurt Vonnegut, November 5, 1995

If Murakami were so inclined or Cortázar alive, I’d want him to write a story about an internet that forgets, a living mind.

On this internet, blogs would shed entries as they aged alongside their author. Some text would grow small and indistinct, but certain passages in desert places would glow like embers in a dying fire. Language would be forgotten, sentences would decay, meanings would invert. Some passages would mesh and recur as dreams, while others would advance in time as déjà vu. Florid details of youth would be compressed into dry generalities. Searches would lead to inaccuracies and dead ends.

The internet now never forgets. It’s sometimes referred to as a hive mind, but other than its general unreliability for accuracy and penchant for trivia and frivolity, it’s like no mind I’ve ever known, expanding infinitely into distant inky reaches.

I keep getting these damn “You Win 1-Liter Coke Product” caps on the 20-ounce bottles of Coke products I drink for lunch. But the thing is, at least in Manhattan, there appears to be no such thing as Coke in a one-liter container, which if my math and memory are correct, would be about the size of those glass bottles all soda used to ship in.

The best part about this was that just now, when I Googled for availability details and subliminally mistyped “one-liter Pepsi.” Half of the top-ten results referenced the following quote from 2004 that contains more detail than I sought:

Retired rapper and Beyoncé fiancé Jay-Z has ‘the biggest dick you will ever see in your life, but boring,’ according to U.S. mag Ozone. For their November sex-themed issue, the hip-hop mag asked people to spill the beans on famous people they’d shagged. And spill they did. While Jay-Z is supposed to have a penis ‘like a one-liter Pepsi bottle... It could block the sun,’ the mag’s informant says he’s boring in bed and ‘screams like a bitch when he busts.’

I think this is my new favorite penile simile, narrowly edging the Lenny Bruce classic, “like a baby’s arm with an apple in its fist.”

My high-speed internet was finally activated today. What a long, irritating trial that was.

I ordered DSL service from Verizon soon after I moved in October and after three postponed activation dates, threats from myself, speaking with managers and receiving pleading “please give us another chance” letters, the service was switched on December 24.

Naturally, there was something awry with my telephone jack, which necessitated a service appointment. The technician bailed on the first scheduled appointment on Tuesday without explanation, then showed up today and fixed it. Props to my super, Rodolfo, for letting the guy in with my spare set of keys. I wasn’t about to wait around my apartment “between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m.” for some jackass techie to maybe show up.

I still had to spend a half hour on the phone after work today with a patient tech service rep because the CD-ROM Verizon supplies Mac users to configure the modem doesn’t work under the Tiger operating system. (It claims one doesn’t have administrative access privileges, even if one is the sole user and therefore administrator of one’s computer, as is my case.) I had to configure all of the name/password stuff and networking preferences manually.

I hooked up my Airport Express and nerdily christened my new wireless network Argo. Soon after viewing some pornography online to ensure the connection was working, my Mac stubbornly refused to locate the wireless network, although if this is a true and persistent problem, it will be the first that hasn’t been Verizon’s fault. I can still surf the web if I plug my Ethernet cable directly from my PowerBook into the modem, so now it’s just getting the wireless bit up and running, and I’m set.

I can honestly say I missed the internet the past two months at home only for checking the weather, directions and movie show times. I admit it was a pain to compose blog entries at home, then cart them to work for uploading during my lunch break. But on the whole, I spent most of my no-internet wilderness time reading books. Although as an omnipresent and all-knowing reference oracle, I welcome the ’net back into my home life.

Gah! Banana Republic’s website doesn’t work in Safari? How hard can it be to write code for one of the most standards-compliant browsers? What will all those thin WASPs and Asians with their PowerBooks do when they want to online-order something form-fitting and expensive, made of the finest Italian cashmere?

I imagine some fans of the Republic use the now sassier-than-Safari Firefox, which is compatible. And since this incompatibility was first discovered in October, Banana Republic has added the hopeful tagline, “We’re working on supporting Safari. Please check back soon.” But, here we are, three months later, and still nothing for Safari.

Humorously, there’s not a go-no-further warning when I try using the still-supported Internet Explorer 5.2 for Macintosh (Microsoft is officially abandoning the browser this Saturday, citing competition from Safari). However, the site doesn’t work under Explorer either—clicking items for details and potential purchase brings up a curiously blank page.

Among the 40 messages awaiting me in my Inbox upon my return from Thanksgiving vacation this morning was this spirited attempt at spreading a worm via a zipped attachment named list.zip. Here’ the email’s text:

From: Department@cia.gov
Subject: You visit illegal websites

Dear Sir/Madam,

we have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal Websites.

Important:
Please answer our questions!
The list of questions are attached.

Yours faithfully,
Steven Allison

++++ Central Intelligence Agency -CIA-
++++ Office of Public Affairs
++++ Washington, D.C. 20505

++++ phone: (703) 482-0623
++++ 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., US Eastern time

Illegal websites? I wasn’t aware there was such a thing here; this isn’t China, after all. I suppose the content on a site could be illegal, like if someone’s abusing trademarks, selling bootleg Disney sweatshirts or spreading viciously libelous rumors about Lou Diamond Phillips, but a site itself being illegal? The worm authors could have cast a wider net with a subject-line like “You visit porn websites” or “You visit cretin Flash-animated sites that your Mom and coworkers email you links for.”

Also, the phone number is a legitimate one for the CIA’s public affairs/press relations office; when you call it, a recording says, in effect, to just delete the damn email and stop bothering Steve. Ha ha!

Bruce has the wrong email address. I got this from him on my Hotmail account:

hey mate good news about the little one. hope she doesnt have your looks??? we could be right behind ya, planning for this time next year. hows things going in swansea? ros and i bought a place in papamoa, areyour olds still there? are you home for xmas?

take care mate hi to viv

Bruce

With the “mate”s and “olds” (parents), I wonder if this message hurtled to me from down under. I see that at least one Swansea is in southeastern Australia (there’s also one in Wales, one in Canada and a few in the U.S.) and Papamoa is a popular retirement city of white sandy beaches in New Zealand.

Internet access was down most of the day at work, a connection issue with Verizon’s end of our T1 line. A few people left early to “work from home,” they claimed, implying they were stymied without the internet. Our receptionist was edgy because she always checks her horoscope first thing each morning online; fortunately, I had picked up a tabloid paper on the way to work, so I leant it to her, and after reading her day’s fate, she was less jittery.

I hadn’t fully realized how much I used the ’net until it wasn’t there. It was the minor web-based things I immediately missed, like updating my blog and reading those of others, which I often do over my morning coffee if I arrive to work early.

But as my work day began, I went through Google withdrawal. I regularly use it as an all-purpose spellchecker (I type "laise fairee" and Google pipes up: Did you mean: "laissez faire"), as well as a fact checker and especially a White Pages. Several times I needed to call a company where I only knew its name and the city in which it was located. Normally, I would track it down on Google in five seconds. Instead, I had to call the oldschool (xxx) 555-1212 information line, like in the good old days.

I never thought I’d miss perusing the Yahoo! News over lunch at my desk like I nearly always do, which made me realize the internet is my sole source of hard national news Monday through Friday.

Email to and from addresses outside our company was down, too, so I uttered many phrases over the phone along the lines of, “Can you email me that? Uh, I mean, could you read me that over the phone and I’ll write it down?” Most of my job is crafting mighty prose in Word and talking to people on the phone, so I didn’t miss email too much, but I do like it for conveying simple, quick facts. None of this “1,001 word message” or “infinite re:” bullshit that would be better served by a minute-long phone call. Still, I find a surprising number of businesspeople opt for email where a call would get the job done more quickly; apparently, the internet has stunted them to human-to-human communication.

Since in-house email was working, a coworker of mine in the production department and I amused ourselves by rapid-firing each other random photos from our computers’ Pictures folders, since we couldn’t send each other idiot internet links to photos like we usually do. She sent me one of her boyfriend dressed like Tyler Durden and acting crazy inside a Salvation Army thrift store, which was good, but I think I won the contest with this photo of what would appear to be a young Jerry Orbach dressed in a space-age leisure suit.

Penis-related email subject from my spam folder or PJ Harvey song title?

1. You Come Through
2. She Knows
3. It’s You
4. Permanent Size Growth
5. Beautiful Feeling
6. Make It Bigger
7. Meet Ze Monsta
8. Bigger is Better
9. Man-Size
10. Size Does Matter
11. This Is Love

PJ Harvey Song Title: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11
Spam Subject: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10

If you correspond with me via email, you may have noticed I’m not the sort to forward chain letters, photos of cats, conspiracies quickly debunked on Snopes (a.k.a the “Urban Legends Reference Page”), or links to idiot Flash animations.

But that’s not to say I don’t appreciate the funny and strange stuff the web has to offer. This girl I work with frequently forwards me weird links and I always try to one-up her with my own. We usually fire off a minimum of two and sometimes as many as eight daily, usually before work or during lunch, lest you think I shirk at work. Some are “global,” while many are NYC-based (we’re a selfish bunch). They range from groans or quick, one-off laughs to genuinely handy or inspiring deposits of information.

A lot of the best links originate in that best-of-the-best weird-links depository, Boing Boing. I get a lot of mine serendipitously through link-farms such as del.icio.us or from top-secret sources. I decided to pull my three favorites from each month of this year’s first half. I typically have a disproportionate number of Boing Boing, Flickr and Wikipedia links, but I’ve attempted to under-represent those here. Have fun and enjoy ’em while they work.

January

1. Photos of girls eating sandwiches. Is it just me or are these strangely erotic?
2. Make deadly weapons out of office supplies. The “60-second shiv” made me laugh out loud.
3. A New Yorker profile of Johnny Carson. From 1978.

February

1. A cat gnawing on a hot dog. “Smelly cat, smelly cat/What are they feeding you?”
2. The life of a Times Square McDonald’s bathroom attendant. This locally based group of merry pranksters rocks. Check out more of their escapades, including mass subway de-pantsing, on their site.
3. Take better digital photos at night.

March

1. Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974. I am suddenly not hungry. Maybe that’s how Weight Watchers works.
2. Create your own comic strip.
3. What song was #1 when you were born? And what does it mean? (Mine’s Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle.” My god, what a weenie song that is.)

April

1. The New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Strangely addictive. The inspiration for my popular blog entry, “95 Years Ago.”
2. Express Train. Travis Ruse takes one photo a day in NYC’s subway system.
3. Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey. Remember these? From Saturday Night Live? Ha ha!

May

1. Photoshopped romance novel covers.
2. Random live webcams. Select the “Display Mode” menu at the bottom of the page and change it to “Animation of last snapshots.” Marvelous.
3. Baby’s first T-shirt. Warning! Not-for-Republicans-style humor!

June

1. Rejected “Love Is...” comics. Warning! Not-for-Mom-style humor!
2. Stuff On My Cat. Self-explanatory.
3. John Doe, worldwide. Steve, a previous boss who’s British, says “Fred Bloggs” instead of “John Doe.” And I thought it was just him.

Before yesterday, I had never been phished. Now that I have, I understand why people like my Mom are leery of ordering stuff off the Internet.

It starts with an email. Lord knows how these cretins knew I had just used PayPal to order something off eBay (they better not be in cahoots with the seller or heads will roll). But the email, shown as being sent from update@paypal.com, is very official-looking, with the PayPal logo and type styling. (In retrospect, however, I notice that the wording is a bit Engrish, namely “Please update your records in maximum 24 hours” and not one but two sentences beginning with “Failure to update...”)

Gosh, I better update my billing records quickly. If I don’t, I might not get that CD I just ordered, featuring two of my favorite one-hit-wonder songs from the ’80s: “Major Tom (Coming Home)” by Peter Schilling and “The Promise” by When In Rome. You can understand my concern, I’m sure.

Clicking on “Please click here to update your billing records” links me to an official-looking PayPal page where I’m not asked to log into my PayPal account in order to correct my supposedly faulty billing information, but I am asked to key-in every last shred of my personal details, including the aforementioned Mom’s maiden name, as well as my credit card info.

But what’s this? That web address doesn’t have the word PayPal in it anywhere: “http://80.53.195.18/icons/pp/update.htm?...” Let’s try going to the site from which the page is originating, the obfuscated http://80.53.195.18.

Jiminy Crickets! Why, that’s not PayPal at all, but a site belonging to some Polish hackers. I’d insert some joke here about Polish hackers if their ruse hadn’t been done well enough to likely trick an unassuming novice computer user.

May 4, 2005 Update: Today’s Onion has a story about President Bush’s identity being stolen “when he responded to an e-mail from paypal783@hotmail.com asking him to comply with PayPal security measures by entering all 12 of his credit-card numbers, his Social Security number, his passwords, and his personal identification numbers.”

May 12, 2005 Update: According to an Associated Press story today, “Next week Denver-based First Data Corp., one of the country’s largest electronic financial transaction companies, plans to release survey results showing 43 percent of adults have received a phishing contact. Five percent of those adults gave up personal information.”

There’s something calming about the fact that Bill Gates gets four million emails daily (mostly spam), according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and as reported in an AP news story today. Microsoft has “special technology that just filters spam intended for Gates” and has, literally, according to Ballmer, nearly a whole department that ensures “nothing unwanted gets into his inbox.” Dang.

The revelation of Plain Layne is amazing, particularly after reading Pattern Recognition. It combines all the elements of a great thriller: sex, deception and the Internet. “In short: Anais Nin, I’d like you to meet William Gibson.”