American in Spain

Today I stumbled upon a website that is rather incredible. The technology to run it is utterly unremarkable. What’s amazing is that the internet is becoming so ubiquitous that such a sight is possible at all. The site is called OMGICU, which is teenager/text message language for “Oh my god, I see you”. The way it works is that, when you spot a celebrity, you submit a sighting report to the site, saying who you saw, where you saw them, and what they were doing. Obviously only a small percentage of the users of the site, mainly those living in Los Angeles and New York City, will be submitting sightings. The key is the service that minority will be providing for the other curious majority. The whole point of the site is that you can follow a celebrity that you are a fan of, and get real-time updates of what they’re up to. Amazing!
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internauta: n. a user of the internet.

Just like an astronaut navigates the stars (still only figuratively, unfortunately), an internauta navigates the complex network of tubes connected computers collectively known as The Internet. The threshold to be considered an internauta is more or less being able to send and read email and watch a video on YouTube. I mainly hear the term on the television news when talking about users of a certain website.
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Back in April, my friend sgazzetti sent me an invite to particpate in a new social networking site I’d never heard of, called Aardvark [vark.com]. I’ve been using it for several months now, and I must say that I’m very impressed and fascinated. Aardvark is a question-answering engine that uses its users to answer the questions of other users. It functions on several principles…
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Dear NASA Webmaster,

Your organization has been using the internet for at least 20 years, way back before there existed a World Wide Web or even a Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Even I remember the days when Gopher was the most user friendly internet service. In the intervening years, however, you may have noticed that a few unwritten standards have cropped up.
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Yesterday, I was just doing a simple google search for…hmm, I can’t remember…and I tripped and fell down the YouTube rabbit hole. Ninety minutes later, I emerged with some serious respect for this spidery-fingered asian kid named Sungha Jung. Just as an article I read the other day pointed out, this kind of stuff, not corporate produced television, is what YouTube is all about. Check out this kid.
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My Uncle Steve sent me a link to this Reddit discussion about his domain name. It’s pretty darn funny. I’ve quoted my favorite bits below, but I recommend reading the rest.
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Several dozen times now I have come close to starting a blog or twitter account or Facebook account for my 77-day-old daughter, and updating it as if it was her talking about herself. But there’s something that always stops me. It feels vaguely unethical. Like I’m not sure that I would have wanted my parents to do the same to/for me. The Golden Rule and all that. It would be cute as the dickens, of course, and it would help separate my own identity and thoughts from all the reporting on her activities. Let’s face it, the Offspring post category has rather exploded around here lately. It’s one thing to do it for an inanimate object, but eventually she’s going to grow up and participate in the social internet world, and maybe she won’t like having these old accounts (and scatological status updates) lying around?

Can I get some opinions from my audience about this? Would you do it for your kid? Would you really enjoy reading Nora’s status updates from a separate account? Knock me off the fence.

I dedicate this post to my high school World Literature teacher, Glenda Stephens, who crammed way too much Greek mythology into my head. As with many good teachers, I hated it at the time and have been grateful ever since.

My favorite lolcats are the ones that are way over the heads of most lolcat viewers.

The photo was found on the internet by my friend, Seth. The caption is mine.

It’s really simple. I want my contacts organized in groups, just like any RSS client. When I open up my Twitter client, I want to go directly to my friends’ new tweets before reading my celebrity or news tweets. I care more about jagosaurus or sgazzetti are up to than what celebrities like Wil Wheaton or Penn Jillette or John Hodgman are doing. And I want an unread count for each group, like most RSS readers give. The total unread count should be shown in the dock icon.
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Below is my Twitter feed posted during the birth of my daughter, saved here for posterity.
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