Some Internet-Related Stuff

OK...call me a slow learner, but where has Google Reader been all my life? Actually it's been right on my desktop. I started using it a year or so ago when I was watching more video blogs than I watch now, and just never got the whole "reader" thing so stopped using it. My god, I was so wrong!!!

A "reader" (there are many of them; Google Reader is only one) allows you to subscribe to the blogs that you read on a regular basis. Now this is where the difference between "blog" and "journal" comes in. Initially the difference had to do with content (journals being chronicle of a person's life, blog being an indepth discussion of internet material), but now I think that it is mostly structural.

With a blog, where all your entries are run together, in reverse order, the latest one preceding the others on the page, you can tell when a new entry has been made. A journal, like Funny the World, which has a front ("splash") page which directs you to the list of entries that you'll find on subsequent pages, is a different format and you can't really set it up for subscribers (which is why I set up the mirror blog to this journal, Airy Persiflage, for those who complained that they used readers and couldn't subscribe to Funny the World).

(This is boring the hell out of you, isn't it?)

ANYWAY, the whole point of this is that I was playing around with Google Reader yesterday and subscribed to all the blogs that I read on a regular basis. There are some which are still in "journal" format, like Jim's Journal and Nilknarf News (to name just two), which aren't able to be subscribed to. But most of the ones that I read could be added to the list.

Now, the neat thing about this (for those of you who are still following me and who haven't been using readers for decades already) is that now you just open your Google Reader and there, like bookmarks, are all your blogs but if there has been a new entry since the last time you checked, that blog will be highlighted. So that means you don't have to check every single blog every single day. Google Reader lets you know when there is something new to read! This shaves...oh...minutes...off of my day, because I don't have to go to each and every blog to see if there is new content. I just look down the list on Google Reader and it tells me instantly.

This actually means that I've now added more blogs to my list because the ones that were way down on the bottom I didn't get to all that often because I got so tired checking all the ones at the top of the list. Google Reader has allowed me to clean up my bookmarks significantly.

Why did it take me so long to discover this wonderful tool???

And while I'm asking "how come" questions, I am finding it curious that Michele, who has one of those "question of the day" sites has hundreds of hits every day, but Indigo, who asks questions on That's My Answer has less than a dozen regulars. All you people who find it fun to answer questions, hop over to her site and check her out! She's more consistent than Michele.

Some of the recent questions that people have answered:

• if you were to play tic tac toe, would you be X or O?

• Do you have anything that you keep to remind you of somebody important to you?

• Would you rather be 6" taller or 6" shorter than you are now?

• How many hours do you sleep each night?

• When was the last time you played on the swings? Went down a slide? Built a sand castle?

See? Fun stuff. Try it out. It's addicting.

OK. It has to be mentioned.

When Paul did his last monologue show, Sedona, Arizona, the most difficult segment to watch was his segment on David's death. It was particularly difficult because Walt and I hadn't been in the hospital when David died and nobody told us the extent of his injuries, which I learned for the first time in the theatre when Paul described them in detail in that segment.

But he started the segment saying that he wanted to talk about it because he and I had never discussed the details surrounding my sister's death in 1971, and throughout his life, people hardly ever mentioned her. He felt that, to him, Karen was just "the one who died" and he didn't want Dave to become just "the one who died" so he wanted to talk about him.

Well, today is the 9th anniversary of Paul's death...and next month, on the 18th of May, we will commemorate the 12th anniversary of David's death. I'm wondering if when Brianna is in her 20s she will feel that they were just "the ones who died."

So, Paul, I'm talking about you again. You definitely are more than "the one who died," but you have to understand that we have all moved on and that you haven't done much in the past nine years to warrant conversation.

It doesn't mean we don't love you or miss you.