Life 2.5

Away Message

2007-05-28T04:33:00.000-07:00

Life 2.5 comes to you from the English countryside today, where she's on a bit of a vacation and visiting the boyfriend. South England is a lovely break from New York City. Everything is a green here, and I've been eating a lot of dairy products from local cows. I did one obligatory touristy thing (Stonehenge, no less) just to make it feel like I got my airmiles worth. What's most fascinating about Stonehenge, is that they really have no idea what the place is about. As you walk around the rocks with the little info headset (mine broke -- call the Tech Police), the voice coming out of the headset really can't say for sure just why they put the rocks like this thousands of years ago. It must have been hard, real hard, to transport these heavy rocks, shape and arrange them like so, that the voice can say with some certainty. Other than that, maybe there was a parade, a religious ceremony at the place, who knows? Really, we know that Stonehenge required some sort of great, ancient technology and strength to be built, but we have no idea for what purpose.

Which, sort of brings me to a great link for today: Sherry Turkle's piece in Forbes, "Can You Hear Me Now."

Turkle writes:

Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected--or more alienated

Me: Collarless Worker

2007-05-22T20:23:00.000-07:00

Since I finished my semester a few weeks back, I've been spending a lot of time in pajamas and comfortable cotton separates manufactured by American Apparel. I've often planned my days out based on just when I'll attend my 90-minute yoga class. That's not to say I haven't been working, I have -- just from the comfort of my apartment-pod. I am, what I'd call, a Collarless Worker. I'm juggling some freelance research stuff, a little reading internship, working on some of my own stuff. I spend a lot of my day reading . It feels luxurious, but it also seems to make me a bit neurotic and dependent on iChat for human contact. When I lived in Los Angeles and was deeply entrenched in the 9 to 7 corporate life, commuting 2 hours each day in my reliable Japanese automobile, I was often fascinated by and jealous of my friends who eschewed the regular workday drudgery, who woke up late and worked odd jobs. They didn't strive to be part of the corporate, white collar world, nor did they take a regular, blue collar job to pay the bills and provide some sort of physical satisfaction and peace. They existed in an employment netherland, looking for the job that would be done in pajamas. The were Collarless Workers.

I will soon be abandoning my Collarless Worker lifestyle. I've taken a temp research job that will actually require me to get dressed (professionally!), get on the subway, ride an elevator, and have a security card. What's a girl to do? More pertinently, what's a girl to wear? We'll see people, we'll see...

It's Been a While

2007-05-07T20:50:00.001-07:00

Greetings dear readers. It's been ages, hasn't it. Life 2.5 isn't having the best of nights. Her darling PowerBook, Sylvester (so named because he is shiny, silver, aluminum) jumped off the desk earlier this evening and suffered some severe cosmetic damages. He looks pretty roughed up, but seems to be functioning well. He played a pirated episode of the Sopranos just fine, but I'm still sad and worried. Please, keep us in your prayers. There is a reason, a very good reason, that Apple laptops now have cords with little magnet connectors so that when you trip on your cord, it doesn't fling your computer to the floor. Life 2.5 is nothing if not clumsy.

In other, less narcissistic news, I wanted to share these stats from the WSJ with you all (note the groovy nicknames the Pew has come up with):

A survey about the technology people have, how they use it and what they
think about it shatters assumptions and reveals where companies might be
able to expand their audiences.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that adult Americans
are broadly divided into three groups: 31% are elite technology users,
20% are moderate users and the remainder has little or no use of the
Internet or cellphones.

But Americans are divided within each group, according to a Pew analysis
of 2006 data released Sunday. The high-tech elites, for instance, are
almost evenly split four ways into:

* "Omnivores," who fully embrace technology and express themselves
creatively through blogs and personal Web pages.

* "Connectors," who see the Internet and cellphones as communications
tools.

* "Productivity enhancers," who consider technology as largely ways to
better keep up with their jobs and daily lives.

* "Lackluster veterans," those who use technology frequently but aren't
thrilled by it.

John Horrigan, Pew's associate director, said he started the survey
believing that the more gadgets people have, the more they are likely to
embrace technology and use so-called Web 2.0 applications for generating
and sharing content with the world. "Once we got done, we were surprised
to find the tensions within groups of users with information
technology," Mr. Horrigan said.

Many longtime Internet users, the lackluster veterans, remain stuck in
the decade-old technologies they started with, Mr. Horrigan said. That a
quarter of high-tech elites fall into this category, he said, shows
untapped potential for firms that can design next-generation
applications to pique this group's interest.

The moderate users were also evenly divided into "mobile centrics,"
those who primarily use the cellphone for talking, text messaging and
even games, and "connected but hassled," those who have used technology
but find it burdensome.

Mobile companies, he said, can target the mobile centrics with premium
services, especially once faster wireless networks become available.

The telephone study of 4,001 U.S. adults, including 2,822 Internet
users, was conducted Feb. 15 to April 6, 2006, and has a margin of
sampling error of plus or minus two percentage points.

Front Page News?

2007-04-11T05:45:00.000-07:00

This past Monday, Life 2.5 was stunned by what made the front page of the NY Daily News. I just want to repeat, FRONT PAGE. LEAD STORY. IMPORTANT.

It's this girl.

Adriana Dominguez's story is now making the rounds in the conventional news and the blogsphere.

The question is, why do we care? Just what is the story here? Why is this front page news? (albeit the front page of NY Daily News, but still)

A friend of mine in Adriana's class at Brooklyn Law forwarded me this video weeks ago. I was amused. It's totally amateur (though it was originally done for a Playboy series, it's very lo-fi). It's a sort of interesting but depressing cry for attention that you can't help but watch. And she's a cute enough girl.

If only I had known as a struggling journalism student that this could have been my big break. I could have broken the Adriana Dominguez story!? Can you sense the regret in my Arial type?

Except, just what is the story here? Young woman gets naked for Playboy? I believe that's been happening for several decades. Playboy's been around since the 50s. Young woman gets naked on the internet? That's new?!

The video is decidedly tame. Dominguez isn't having sex with anyone or anything. She's not masturbating. There is a "risque" moment where she holds a bunch of gavels. For the most part, she's just frolicking.

The attraction seems to be the idea that this will ruin a smart young woman's legal career. Dominguez is in her third year of law school. She's the treasure of a student organization at Brooklyn Law. Just what organization? The Legal Association of Activist Women (LAW). She went to an Ivy League school for undergrad. And now, has she thrown it all away?

I doubt it. Vanessa Williams lost the crown, but she's done alright. The video isn't any racier than a lot of MySpace pages out there. If you google Adriana Dominguez, you don't really get to the video. You get a lot of links to other Adriana Dominguezes. As of writing this, the naked law student Adriana Dominguez didn't come up until page 3 of my google search, and I didn't get the actual video. (admission: it's taken me a few days to post this because I couldn't find the original email I had received with the video)

Really, I think the press is searching for another tired story where someone's life is (supposedly) ruined by what they did on the internet. The sort of article that you can send to all the "young kids" you know as a moral lesson. Something that will inspire them to get off MySpace/stop blogging/be careful what they email.

Ms. Dominguez will probably be fine, so long as she passes the bar. I think we'll all be fine, provided we don't get too excited about about an adult woman frolicking naked.

KarlRoveTube

2007-03-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

If you thought yesterday's MySpace was shocking...well, today, Life 2.5 really has no words for Karl Rove's YouTube rap video. If you are reading this on a feed, you will be spared the madness. And now I give you...MC Rove

McCainSpace or MySpace, a place for old politicians

2007-03-28T19:28:00.000-07:00

Are you like Life 2.5? Do people over 50 on MySpace make you a bit uncomfortable? Those over 65 even more uncomfortable? Old republican politicians really, really uncomfortable?

Whatever your answers to the above questions, you should not miss John McCain's MySpace page.

If only, we could have been there yesterday when this went down:

McCain's MySpace team (interns!) didn't credit the designer, Mike Davidson, for the MySpace template they used. In playful retaliation, Davidson played a bit of a prank on the McCain camp, and added a "pro-gay marriage (especially between hot chics)" message to his page.

What a beautiful use of technology!

Note: John has just 3,016 friends, as of this post. Perhaps he should talk to Dane Cook.

And Also, It's not really YourSpace

2007-03-22T08:47:00.000-07:00

So, Life 2.5 found this piece from Tuesday NYTimes fairly hilarious.

"MySpace Restrictions Upset Some Users"

In case you didn't get the memo last year, MySpace is pretty over.

A few fave bits from the article:

As for Ms. Tequila, who wrote on her blog that she was a personal friend of Mr. Anderson, the MySpace co-founder, she wrote that she felt bad about blasting the site but that she could not stay silent.

“You guys used to be so cool,” she wrote of MySpace. “Don’t turn into a corporate evil monster.”

Dear Ms. Tequila, Life 2.5 writes, I think your "friend" Tom Anderson turned into that "evil corporate monster" in July of 2005 when he got a bit of cash from Mr. Rupert Murdoch (Mr. Evil Corporate Monster himself?) for that little "place for friends" he created.

Should anyone be surprised that MySpace is corporate now? Please. Let's all put on our thinking caps.

Another fave snippet from the article:

“We probably should have stopped YouTube,” Michael Barrett, chief revenue officer for Fox Interactive Media, a part of the News Corporation, said in an interview in late February. “YouTube wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for MySpace. We’ve created companies on our back.”

Oh Mr. Barrett, think of all the puppy videos and copyright infringement you alone could have prevented. If only, if only...

And a final bit:

MySpace says that it will block these pieces of third-party software — also called widgets — when they lend themselves to violations of its terms of service, like the spread of pornography or copyrighted material. But it also objects to widgets that enable users to sell items or advertise without authorization, or without entering into a direct partnership with the company.

Should people really be complaining that they can't sell shit directly from their MySpace page? Yes, MySpace was originally about musicians self-promoting, but it wasn't really supposed to be about commerce, even indie commerce. I mean, people, register you own domain name and pay a few bucks a month in server fees if you want to hawk your albums online. You could just link to it from your MySpace page! I'm sure your html skill are all tuned up after creating your beautiful MySpace page!

Mobile Future

2007-03-18T10:18:00.000-07:00

This just in from the future! Someday soon, your cellphone might remind you to use a condom. Or lay off the taquitos. This Stanford News piece outlines how cell phones (assuming America catches up with using cell phones the way the rest of tech-nations do) could be used as little persuaders in your purse, with applications not just for advertisers (because we need more places for advertisers) but also for health and wellness.

Sharing Is...

2007-03-13T21:30:00.000-07:00

Darlings, it's been ages. The "real" world has been cutting into Life 2.5's time online as of late. She's been busy reading about the fall of the Soviet Union, and perhaps, also catching up on The Sopranos. Meanwhile, in cyberspace and the courtroom...well, the big and not so shocking news of the day...
***Viacom Sues Google Over YouTube Clips***

Oh, how we knew it would come to this. Since the WSJ website is not-so-friendly to the non-subscriber, I'll paste the best bits of the article here. All in the spirit of copyright infringement!

While the suit was expected -- Viacom in February publicly accused Google of copyright infringement -- it raises the stakes in the running scuffle between Google's YouTube and media companies over copyright clips posted by users to the video-sharing site without the consent of the clips' owners... The suit accuses YouTube of using technology to "willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale ... and profiting from the illegal conduct of others as well.

Silly Viacom! As if google had figured out to make YouTube profitable.

Viacom says it decided to file suit because its request last month that YouTube remove Viacom clips failed to keep them off the site. As recently as yesterday, one of the most viewed videos on YouTube was one from "The Colbert Report," owned by Viacom. The media company says it spends "tens of thousands of dollars" a month searching for its programming on YouTube so it can request its removal.

Again, silly Viacom! Tens of thousands of dollars each month searching YouTube?! This really sounds like something a flock of Millenial interns at Viacom could be doing gratis. Prime intern season is nearly upon us.

In brighter copyright news, Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem announced yesterday that he will be giving away the rights to his latest novel for free to one fortunate filmmaker. Interested parties can email proposals for their cinematic adaptation to Lethem via his website.

Speaking of filmmakers, Life 2.5 has many film-industry friends in Los Angeles. They're currently her biggest audience! But, Life 2.5 has also conquered three new continents this week, staking e-claim to Australia, South America, and Africa. Hello Australia! Hello Egypt! Hello Brazil!

Only Antarctica remains unconquered.

A Trip Down (Random Access) Memory Lane, pt. 1

2007-02-27T23:04:00.000-08:00

Per YouTube-sual, this post contains a not-to-be-missed video. Don't feed me, READ ME.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen's coin-operated.com brought this YouTube piece to Life 2.5's attention.

Yes, that new-fangled internet.

This got Life 2.5 thinking...and soon she was taking a magical trip down (random access) memory lane, thinking about her personal tech history.

And then she realized, it might be boring and narcissistic of her just to blab about herself, so she's interspersed some broad facts in here as well. Please share your own tech memories in the comments section. It will be fun! (note: exclamation point used ironically)

When I was young, real young (I'm 6-8 years old. It's the mid-80s) we had an Atari. I've no idea which model. It hooked up to the television. You could play games on it, but you could also type on it. My mother gave me this book called "computer programming for kids" or something. It allowed me to use programming language to make my Atari do anti-climatic things...like make a dog's head out of hyphens.

Not long after, I went to some kind of kid's tech summer camp at Cal State University Sacramento. I took a class in something in a program called Logo, which was a graphic design program which involved manipulating a white triangle called a "turtle" to move around a black screen drawing lines and arcs with simple geometric commands.

Wikipedia says:
Logo was created in 1967 at BBN, a Cambridge, Massachusetts research firm, by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert [1]. Its intellectual roots are in artificial intelligence, mathematical logic and developmental psychology.

The idea is that a turtle with a pen strapped to it can be instructed to do simple things like move forward 100 spaces or turn around. From these building blocks you can build more complex shapes like squares, triangles, circles--using these to draw houses or sailboats.

Sometime circa 1994, we get an exciting Christmas present at the Eber house. A new phone line and AOL! Come to think of it, big family Christmas presents were often tech-oriented in the Eber house. Dot-matrix printers. Laser printers! Big boxes!

Wiki says: In February 1991 AOL for DOS was launched using a GeoWorks interface followed a year later by AOL for Windows. In October 1991, Quantum changed its name to America Online. These changes coincided with growth in pay-based BBS services, like Prodigy, CompuServe, and GEnie. AOL discontinued Q-Link and PC Link in the fall of 1994.

Oh my, don't even get Life 2.5 started on DOS. She likes to forget all parts of her tech life pre-Mac.

It's hard to recall just what we did with AOL in the beginning with its blazing dial up speed. I remember my mother wanting to use it to look up everything, the phone number for the pizza place for instance. This would frustrate me endlessly. Mother, just use a phone book. The Internet is not for such things.

As rambunctious high school freshman, my girlfriends and I took to AOL in lieu of prank calling on a wild Saturday night. We were probably the inspiration for that Hard Candy movie. We liked to go into chat rooms and harass dirty old men. Little did my parents know what had become of the Internet.

1998 -- I headed off to college and my ethernet equipped dorm room. Do you remember what a big deal it was to have an ethernet card and cable, and there was always someone stealing ethernet cables from classrooms. The Internet is suddenly fast man, real fast.

1999 -- For my introductory film production class, I had to learn PhotoShop. Our teaching assistant makes us all buy these fancy floppy discs called zip discs. They are smaller and less floppy. I think it's the first time I don't save to the desktop.

Zip Disks were introduced in 1994. At best, they could hold nearly as much as CD. They set you back about $25 in 1999.

Oh vey, Life 2.5 is getting tired. And this post is getting a bit long for the eye. So, let's take some inspiration from mediocre televisions shows like Grey's Anatomy and Studio 60, and just say To Be Continued...

BlueTube

2007-02-21T03:17:00.000-08:00

(note: feed readers, this post contains video. go to real blog to see videos!)

Well, this is a new use of YouTube we didn't see coming. JetBlue CEO and Founder David Neeleman used ye old YouTube on Monday to apologize for Jet Blue's sins of the past week (see: cancelling a bunch of flights, people sitting on an icy runway for 10 hrs, etc)

Just over 33,000 surfers had viewed the video as of this post. I think Neeleman gives a sincere apology here, and his casual, slightly rumpled, white button down lets me know he's on the ground with me.

I kind of wish this would have happened to another airline...any airline but JetBlue. I like JetBlue. Without JB and its 5hr direct flights from California to New York with 100 channels of DirecTV, I never would have started watching Top Chef. Though, perhaps leading me to watch Top Chef is something Neeleman should apologize to me for. (see watching Salman Rushdie's wife pretend she is familiar with both cooking and eating food while wearing trashy outfits)

I wonder if the people trapped in the plane for 10 hrs on the icy runway had working mini TVs with DirectTV? Was there a Top Chef marathon on? Were mini Toblerone bars and Taro chips handed out? There are worse ways to waste a day.

Before any of my hundreds of readers freak out, I just want to clarify my e-tone. Sarcasm people, sarcasm. (when in doubt, Life 2.5's tone is sarcasm)

Speaking of readers, I want to give a shout out to the 4 readers in China google analytics claims I have.

Hello China!

Back to YouTube and JetBlue. If you search under "JetBlue" on YouTube, the apology video doesn't come up until the 5th page.

In the meantime, the first page is filled with scary emergency landings and near disasters

and on the 2nd page, there's a clip of Bill O'Reilly summoning his rage for JetBlue...rage he might have better directed at the government for their handling of Hurricane Katrina...watch the clip and imagine that Bill is really talking about the people trapped in the Super Dome instead of the dude trying to get to Aruba

Couldn't Jet Blue have paid google off so that their apology would come up higher in the search under Jet Blue? Or maybe have tagged their video better?

I'm looking forward to all the new apology terms and puns this will create: epology, ApologyTube, re:pent...send them in people, send them in...

Meetup, Metup, Metaup

2007-02-19T23:33:00.000-08:00

Life 2.5 had a lovely time (and a few vodka sodas with lemon -- official cocktail of Life 2.5) last night at her first ever Meetup event, the monthly NY Web 2.0 Social Networking Tech Meetup. It was all dizzyingly meta: people creating new social networking sites meeting through an old social networking site to get together at an actual bar, Mixx lounge, to then network for the business of social networking. And there was a flat screen TV!!!

Most in attendance were startups. A handful gave presentations on the flat screen TV, which was hooked up to a laptop, a Dell I think. I would have preferred an Apple laptop. We were in the West Village afterall.

Some old dude there had an Apple laptop -- one of the new black MacBooks. I kinda felt embarrassed for him. A) it wasn't a MacBook pro and this was supposed to be a place for ProFessionals. B) - and more importantly, the black MacBooks cost like $50 more than an equally equipped white MacBook, and I think that they convey a misplaced vanity. Spend the 50 bucks on a better haircut or a shoe upgrade. Let's not let techno vanity be our only vanity.

The people giving the presentations had a set amount of time, they were on the clock. The clock being an old-fashioned egg timer, charmingly lofi. It was sort of like the Oscar speeches, but Nicole Kidman did not present.

One attendee was from google. You've heard of google, right. They're like this kooky little search engine out of NorCal. And they control your whole f****** life via a single password.

Anyways, everyone had questions for Mr. google programmer, myself included.

Q: What's it like man, what's it really like?
A: There's a chef. The food is free and it's tasty. Free arugula!

Q: Is it just like that New York Times article on google?
A: Nah. The free food is cool, but my new programmer friend said worked reasonable hours (about 50 hrs/week) and was let out to play.
(re-reading this article right now, Life 2.5 is annoyed by the use of the word "campuslike" -- silly NY Times reporter, it is not like a "campus," it is a campus. where have you been with Silicon Valley lingo?)

Q: Is there a dog run? Can I bring my puppy to work at google?
A: No dogs spotted in the google Chelsea campus. Probably at the Mountainview campus.

Q: Do I have to kite surf after work?
A: Only at the Mountainview campus.

Afterwards a half dozen of us cruised over to Surya for some Indian eats, after text messaging google to confirm the address. How very Web 2.0.

Tomorrow, or whenever I next manage to get my head above the graduate school waters, I'll give a brief rundown of the presentations and critique the business cards I collected.

I AM WATCHING YOU

2007-02-18T20:28:00.000-08:00

*Note: this post contains a magical video element that will not appear in RSS feeds. Please visit the full blog to see the video artistry.**

Yes, I just want everyone to know...I AM WATCHING YOU.

By that I mean, google analytics has successfully been installed on this blog. I will know where you live ( a vague proximity) and how you came to me (directly, through Atheism News, via blogfolio, etc).

I was talking to my boyfriend in England today. And he made it seem like he was keeping up on my blog. But, a look at my google analytics report told me that in fact all of my readers were either in New York, California, or the Pacific Northwest. No England. No Europe. At this point, Life 2.5's audience is strictly limited to North America.

We live in a surveillance society. Life 2.5 is watching you. You best be reading.

Is Havidol Right for You?

2007-02-18T15:28:00.000-08:00

Australian Artist Justine Cooper has created an ingenious website to accompany her current exhibition at New York's Daneyal Mahmood Gallery.

I haven't seen the gallery exhibit yet, but the website is a brilliant parody of pharmaceutical ad campaigns. This page with a quote from "Path of the Warrior" is a fave.

Life 2.5 thinks this is a exciting and hilarious use of media for an entertaining critique of the pharmaceutical industry and the modern age. So do her fellow surfers, over a quarter of million peeps have visited the site according to Cooper.

Not really YourTube

2007-02-13T19:56:00.000-08:00

google/YouTube banned Nick Gisburne, a popular atheist commentator when he posted a video that criticized Islam by listing every instance of cruelty in the Koran. If you try to find Gisburne's piece on YouTube, you'll see that his account has been suspended. You can catch the video in all 9 minutes of its glory on Atheism News.

I tried to watch the video. But, honestly I've only made it about half-way through. The nine-minute piece consists of quotes from the Koran coming up on a black screen while a songs from the Matrix plays in the background. Most of the quotes don't stay on long enough to be read fully, or much at all, while the minimalistic visual style fails to achieve an effective sense of textual bombardment either. I'll watch the last half later, but until then that's my film-school analysis of the piece.

Back to google/YouTube's decision to pullt he video down and suspend Gisburne's account. Yes, it's a shame, but I really wouldn't expect anything more from google at this point. when it's profitable and/or safe, google embraces censorship. remember China? Here, I'm sure they wanted to avoid having a fatwa on their hands. They've chosen to disobey the law of the blogosphere instead, and the consequences remain to be seen.

as the reactions play out online, i type to you from my google blogger account, freshly reminded that the web isn't really the utopia of freedom of expression we like to think of it as...and then perhaps the backlash will remind me that it is.

You're Kidding Me

2007-01-29T19:25:00.000-08:00

I'm really getting tired of reading about the dangers of social networking sites. Yes, sites like MySpace and Facebook offer youngsters the opportunity to meet some of society's finest pedophiles and serial rapists in the convenience of their own home. But, if you're the parent of a youngster, it's your responsibility to make sure your offspring don't leave said home to go meet up with their new sexual-assault prone friends.

It's really that simple.

Now, a Georgia state senator is proposing a bill that would require social networking sites to notify parents before children could create an internet profile.

Even, if this idea sounded good in theory (which I think it doesn't), how in the hell would such an idea be implemented? Imagine how easy it is for the youth of America to get their hands on say, an R-rated movie. Imagine how exponentially easier it would be for a kid to get do stuff online that's forbidden. If we've learned anything from methods like Age Gate, restricting content is easy for underage users to get around, and the restrictions tend to effect adult, less tech savvy users more than their younger, intended targets.

The article says "The bill also has no provision about children who lie about their birthdate when they register for the site." What, savvy, profile-creating, html-using kid isn't going to do just that?

Cecil Stanton, the creator of the bill "said the bill does not tell the companies exactly how to ensure that minors don’t log on without parental permission. The companies can figure that out on their own, he said." Right, Cecil, right. You know, if you're going to create a bill about something, maybe you should know a bit more about it then say...I've heard the MySpace is dangerous...the kids today are meeting some bad folk on the MySpaces.

I just can't imagine this level of ignorance being permitted in legislating on any other subject. Such ignorance speaks more to the problem than to the solution. Maybe it's time parents and adults educated themselves more about what's going on in cyberspace, rather than passively putting the responsibility to protect their children in the hands of MySpace.

New Apple Widget?

2007-01-28T20:17:00.000-08:00

Don't miss the latest in online communications...widget romance

Tech Police

2007-01-27T21:52:00.000-08:00

So, this will be a post, and probably a reaccuring title, where I will essentially just complain about what I'll call "inelegant interfaces" -- that is anything I encounter on my computer that seems poorly designed, is not intuitive to use, is just plain ugly or lazy, etc. As a mac user, I know that most things on my computer always have the potential to be easier to use, more efficiently designed, and often times cuter.

Today, I would like to complain about a few aspects of blogger that are a bit weak. Since I am using blogger to write and post this, this is a sort of meta post. (cue digital "twilight zone" music)
1. blogger is nearly forcing me to use Firefox. I know many people love Firefox. I am not one of these people. Call me crazy, but I prefer Safari. Honestly, the only reason I prefer Safari is that I simply like the look of it better. Firefox doesn't really please my eye. The tabs for the different windows, while efficient, are also a bit ugly. Anyway, turns out many simple features of blogger just don't work within Safari -- such as the simple text formatting buttons. These just don't exist in blogger on Safari.
2. I don't like the standard font selection in the post window. Again, petty, really petty. But, it would be just lovely if Helvetica were an option, as I consider it my signature font, a classic beauty of a font.

Welcome

2007-01-27T21:38:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Life 2.5...the blog. Yes, it sounds like an exciting movie sequel, doesn’t it? But, then it’s a blog, Wow!

What in the world do I mean by Life 2.5 exactly? That’s a fine question. First and foremost, I think it sounds incredibly catchy. More catchy than even that catchiest of technophile catchphrhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifases...Web 2.0. In terms of digital catchphrases, think of “Web 2.0” to “Life 2.5” as “Panther” to “Leopard” – both hip and trendy, but one even cooler than the other.

My digital irony aside, I’ll be looking at interesting and unique ways people are using the internet in New York City and beyond, and examining what new issues are raised in these digital endeavors. Our age is defined by two worlds – the digital or virtual world and the physical world (the real world to some, the “real world” to others). I’m particularly interested in the lines between these worlds as they blur, disappear and conflict with each other.