Compendium 5/18/2010

Not a whole lot going on these days, or I'm too busy to write about the following topics separately:

• Owen celebrated his fourth birthday a few weeks ago. Unbelievable how time flies. It seemed like he was just coming home from the hospital...or was that Wyatt? Seriously though, I can't believe I have a four year old boy!


• I haven't written up any reviews of The Pacific lately. I've enjoyed the miniseries immensely, I hope to finish watching the last episode tonight. The miniseries really began to grow in intensity, with hopefully a strong finish.


• More education shenanigans, sort of: Our local county council basically underfunded the county dog pound. This brought the ire of many local residents who attended council meetings, wrote letters to the editor, and so on. Yet the school board has severe budget cuts and no one says a word -- school board meetings ill-attended, no letters, no protests. That shows you where the priorities lie here in Darlington County.


• I co-presented a workshop for the LIBRIS 2010 conference last Friday. It was really seat of our pants, because of a death in the family of my co-presenter, but she decided to do it at the last minute. It went really well and we had some good questions and discussion.


• Lisa finishes school next week, so my manic mornings will be done until August! Yay!
  

Random Musings

It's been a while, so naturally I have a few things on my mind.

1. For one reason or another, we found ourselves in Florence (SC) the last two Saturdays. I really haven't been there in quite some time, perhaps since early January. Florence has the closest Target, Best Buy, big book stores, and so on. We go there anytime we need to get those (many) items that aren't available in Hartsville. I am pleased to announce that both the mall and other stores (Kohl's) appeared to be fairly busy. The mall actually looked busier than it did in late November, at the height of the Christmas shopping season. Even if it's people spending tax refunds, I'll take it. It's good to see people spending money again.

2. In an interesting profile of Billy Corgan in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine (links to the TOC, article isn't online yet), former Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlain talks about his departure from the band. Nothing earth shattering there, or that Corgan's ego is still firmly in place despite being a pop culture non-entity since 1996. Chamberlain had an excellent quote about the current state of music:

"Music is such a small part of people's lives now...People don't sit around like they did in the Nineties and stare at album covers and think about Kurt and Billy."

This got me thinking about popular music -- do kids today listen to music the same way we used to back in Nineties? Or is this a disgruntled rock star venting about his former boss?

3. Maybe the most interesting thing about using Facebook is having friends from disparate universes argue with each other. For instance, an elementary school friend that I haven't seen since the other Bush was the P.U.S.A. got into a debate with my brother-in-law. Wild!

4. I'm not surprised that Darlington County had one of the lowest rates of return for the 2000 Census. The level of ignorance around here is stunning. Filling out the form takes minutes and might have made a difference here.

5. In related news, my wife had a PTO meeting last week -- staying at work until 7 PM, making for a 12 hour day -- and only two of her kids' parents showed up. Baseball practice > School function, evidently.

6. Wyatt will soon be 18 months old and Owen will be four in May. Unbelievable how time flies! We've been trying some gluten with Owen, and we haven't seen any negative results. We actually spent the night with my parents and he didn't have an issue with the cat, either.

7. We've finally started seeing signs of Spring around Hartsville. It has been the longest, coldest winter that I've had since leaving Pittsburgh in 1990. It rarely made it out of the 40s from late December until the end of February. Several weeks during that time, the temperatures never made it out of the 30s. It snowed three or four times, twice with significant accumulation. We had an ice storm, knocking out power for six hours. So weird! But I've really appreciated upper 50s-low 60s the last ten days or so.

8. The Pacific miniseries has started on HBO. Not surprisingly, it is excellent and I really enjoyed the first episode. HBO is streaming the first episode, but will make you buy HBO or maybe pay for the streams after that. Great marketing move for them -- and I think a unique one at that. They control their programming pretty tightly, so this is a big step forward (from my standpoint).

A Rant about how no one cares about what I say

Tee hee, silly title, right?

It really doesn't have to do with this blog, at least entirely.

I'm just trying to figure out why people decide to participate in certain online conversations and not others, in social media like Facebook and message boards.

I could post a link to the most amazing article that has pertinence to most of my Facebook friends, but it goes unremarked upon and unnoticed beneath all of the infantile and ridiculous quizzes. (Fortunately, I've discovered you can hide quizzes without hiding the friend). Because I really don't care what video game character you are, or what you just did in Mafia Wars.

Yet an acquaintance posts something about a nefarious bodily function, and she gets 10 replies... a genuine conversation.

It isn't unique to Facebook, either. This has always happened to me on various message boards, dating back to the mid-1990s. I've used dozens of screen names, so I don't think people see my name and ignore me...

Maybe I just don't have anything interesting to say? Why do some people's opinions mean more to others, especially in an online environment?