Internet

Wasp Stings and Social Media

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We had a problem at the farm yesterday.

I got home a bit early and decided to clean up a deck that had become overgrown with weeds. We had wooden lawn furniture on it. I moved the furniture out of there and cleaned up the area. Later, my kids were playing on that deck and all of a sudden my youngest came screaming into the house in all sorts of pain. She had received three wasp stings on her ankle. The wasps were swarming. I have no idea how I didn’t get stung that whole time.

This morning we saw the wasp nest embedded in the underside of one of the wooden tables and took care of it.

When my youngest was in agony we instantly grabbed our phones and went online and to facebook, to find a cure of some sort. We should have had some sort of sting medicine in the place but didn’t.

Just like when our dog got skunked, we found an instant solution – it was a paste of baking soda and something else. It worked pretty well.

I am blown away at how much information is available at one’s fingertips. A lot of people know a lot about a lot of things.

The Way We Do Business Today

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With the employment prospects being what it is these days, I have read repeatedly in the last couple of years that really enterprising individuals are tempted to turn indy and go free-lance. They look to establish a small enterprise, vending whatever talents and skills they possess as a so-called ‘independent contractor’ to the public at large, and earn a living thereby, rather than scrounge and maneuver and hope for a paying job on the bottom rung of the corporate and/or government establishment. Pardon the sarcasm it seems that certain large and well-connected established corporations these days are almost indistinguishable from the government, at least to judge from the rapidity which which the well-connected move back and forth.

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Bowdoin: In 1825 & Now

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I don’t know much about Bowdoin. This seems, unfortunately, to be expected. I like the donor’s response – the president’s petty grandstanding is an overreach that motivates. Smugness enrages.

Today we skim over Longfellow, but once readers looked forward to his next narrative poem as an event. Longfellow also took academia and his languages seriously – developing a modern language program at Bowdoin; Harvard then drew him away to develop a similar program for them and he did. As we read a poem or two, I mention his Morituri Salutamus. Longfellow’s theme is similar but he hasn’t the power of Tennyson’s Ulysses. However this occasional poem is personal; his classmates, the classes of 1824 and 1825, at Bowdoin were some of his closest friends all his life. While he was the most popular American poet, a classmate and friend was Hawthorne. The novelist also remained intensely grateful and loyal to Franklin Pierce; a friendship begun at Bowdoin lasted until Hawthorne’s death. A fourth gained his fame more indirectly: Calvin Stowe’s interest in theology was shared with the famous Beecher family; his wife became a novelist with the broad audience Longfellow found. Clearly all were shaped by those years at Bowdoin.

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Google Reader: The End

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Google will discontinue Reader, their online newsfeed reader for  RSS  and Atom, on July 1, 2013. Reader users must find a replacement.

Google is killing Reader as part of a spring cleaning ritual where products with little following are sacrificed:

We launched  Google Reader  in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined.

Finding a Reader replacement is complicated by why Reader’s usage declined: those who used newsfeed readers to follow blogs and other web syndicated content now use “social media” like Facebook, Twitter, or even iTunes. A small minority even use Google Plus, Google’s most recent try at “social media”.

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