Vacation.  Breathe in, breathe out.  Breathe in, breathe out.  Decompressing from the stress of work and shifting gears is not easy.  The first Monday of my summer holidays was spent looking for things that I misplaced and trying to organize the house for vacation mode.  As a professional librarian with twenty-seven years of experience, organization should be second nature to me, and it is…at work.  Home is another story.

Getting ready to frolic requires reservations, itineraries, changing money, preparing the housesitter/dogsitter, getting the animals to the vet, making lists, packing…wait a minute. Organizing is what I do for a living - why am I spending days of my vacation doing what I do at work?

Then there’s helping my children organize their lives. When you have kids in university, they invariably move, and they move once a year so there’s the packing and organizing of someone else’s stuff which requires lots of questioning and hence lots of arguments about what to throw out, what not to throw out and the best way to organize stuff. No matter who you are, you will eventually have to organize someone else’s stuff.

It’s somewhat amusing to me that my last rather serious column was about organizing your parents’ stuff or getting your parents to organize their own stuff so that life doesn’t become a complete and utter living hell when all hell breaks loose.  Yet, the other side of the coin is that no matter how organized you think you are, life has a way of throwing challenges at you that makes that old British game show, The Weakest Link, look like child’s play.  It’s always best to leave room for the unexpected because it’s coming and it’s darn well going to get you. Don’t be The Weakest Link

Travelling is an invitation to the unexpected which is both its attraction and the thing that causes many people to just stay home, put their feet up with a cold beer, and watch whatever game is going on TV.  That’s the safest bet but without the unexpected, life just doesn’t have any spice.  The older I get, the less I like the unexpected, so that’s why I comfort myself with lists, research, and planning so that I can get the most out of a travelling vacation that I can get while still maintaining the point of view that if things go out of whack, you just have to go with it and see where you wind up.

One of my first adventures was nearly ruined because I was bound and determined to see the Sistine Chapel, the Tower of London, the Eiffel Tower and all those sights that we expect to see.  I soon learned that sitting in a café with new friends and watching the world go by was far more fun and gave me more insight into a new culture then rushing off to tourist sights. When I went to India this year, I found the Taj Mahal very beautiful, but it wasn’t the highlight of my trip – singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star to a mentally handicapped little girl in an orphanage was.  Her smile will always stay with me even though I didn’t take a picture of it. 

There’s no doubt that organizing stuff can make a trip safer and more fun, but leaving room for the unexpected will always allow for the opportunity of a magical memory and apart from relaxation, that’s what we really hope for when we travel.

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 This has been a sad time of year for a few of my friends as they have either had parents who have passed away, parents whose chronic age-related illnesses have gotten worse or parents who have been forced due to deteriorating physical and mental ability to move into a nursing home.

Someone once told me that no matter how old you are, you are still someone’s child, and even in middle age, I find that I miss my deceased mother’s guidance and the guidance of my father who is suffering the ravages of dementia. He does know he’s losing it and it saddens him. There is no question that no matter how old you are, it’s tortuous to watch your parents come to rely on you instead of it being the opposite way around, the way it’s always been for most of us who have had parents who did their best to bring us up.

What is so difficult for most families, however, is to undergo this kind of pain and to make matters worse, deal with disorganized finances of parents who could not face the fact that someday they might not be able to take care of themselves.  This was the case with my parents.  Although they had made out a will, they never created any trust funds, always kept their home in their own name, and never discussed any of their finances with my sister or me.  They assumed that they would live in their home until they keeled over. 

Then my mother’s cancerous tumour burst in her colon and as I sat with my father in the hospital while my mother was in surgery, it became all too apparent that Mom had been hiding the severity of my father’s dementia so that they could continue living in their own home.  Both were in their eighties and once they both came out of the hospital (yes, Dad had to be hospitalized at the same time with heart and respiratory problems), my mother and father had to be moved to a nursing home, which in the United States can cost $10,000 a month…each!

The usual practice below the border is that once placed in a nursing home, the elderly run through their money quickly, voluminous forms are filled out, and they go on Medicaid.  They lose the ability to pass down money, homes, etc. to their family.  I remember a horrible moment in a nursing home room in upstate New York with my parents and their elder care attorney when after learning what the nursing home would cost and what Medicaid would eventually take, my mother looked me in the eye and said, “You would have been better off if we had died.”  Sadly, if my parents had faced up to age and been better informed, this might have been avoided.

Firstly, colon cancer – if Mom had gone for regular checkups, the polyp that turned cancerous could have been removed, but my mother was too frightened to go to the doctor.  Secondly, if my parents had kept up with their taxes and if they had gotten financial advice when they were in their sixties or seventies, they could have made provisions to protect their family estate so that they wouldn’t go through the pain of watching the government take their home and all their savings.  We, their children and grandchildren, might have had more time to focus on their care then spending hours on the phone trying to settle matters and not fight with one another about the best way to deal with all the issues that we had to face. 

It is very difficult for all of us to face old age and death.  We don’t like to talk about it and we don’t like to think about it.  As I get older, I can understand how difficult it might be to talk with my children about these matters, let alone trust them with my finances, but if we love our children, this is precisely what we must do.

If you are in your sixties or seventies, I urge you to take a deep breath and make plans for illness and incapacitation so that things work smoothly for your children and so that they can take care of you instead of taking care of your money.  It’s the kindest thing that you can do for them and they will praise you for it, and you will keep your children from the kind of battles that might keep them from talking to each other for years. On the other hand, if you’ve done this already, kudos to you…go play with your grandchildren.

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The good news is that Bangladesh has lifted its two-week ban on Facebook.  The bad news is that nine activists died in a flotilla carrying humanitarian supplies for the citizens of Gaza.  The good news is that, five days later, when the Israeli army boarded the Rachel Corrie ship, no one was hurt.  The bad news is that the Egyptian Supreme Court has upheld a law stripping citizenship from any Egyptian man married to an Israeli woman and there are approximately 30,000 Egyptian men who are married to women with Israeli citizenship as during the Iraq war, Egyptians found work in Israel and subsequently married women of that country.

The bad news from the Middle East keeps getting worse and the good news is so mild in comparison, so scant, that even a cautious optimist like me has to throw up her hands and try not to read too much news on the Internet.  There is so much conjecture and hot air fuming out of my TV and computer these days that I can scarcely breathe in my home.  I would like to throw a verbal temper tantrum but I would only be adding to the pundit global warming that is going on these days.

The Middle East isn’t the only problem: go south of the border, very south of the border to the oil-drenched shores of Louisiana.  The good news/bad news rollercoaster there is not buying friends for the folks at BP or for President Obama.  One day, capping the leak with mud failed.  A few days later, we hear that the containment cap placed on the gusher trapped about 1.67 million litres of oil…but the oil is still coming out.

I like a scapegoat as much as the next guy but if you’re going to pick between Mr. Obama and BP Chairman Tom “I’d like to get my life back” Hayward, I know which one I would choose to throw the rotten tomato at.  How he could fit a very big foot like that in his mouth is a question for physics.  When you think how many men died on that rig, how many livelihoods may be ruined by this disaster, it is hard to pity Hayward for losing quality time at the ski hill or golf course when so much of the Gulf of Mexico is likely to suffer damage that, some experts are saying, will not be fixed in our lifetime.  Perhaps this is a pessimistic assessment. The damage to fish stocks, animal and plant life may be understood better next year at this time, but right now, it’s looking very bad. Blaming Hayward may feel good, but what does it accomplish?

With all this bad news, the world desperately craves someone to blame, so making scapegoats of Obama, Hayward, the Israeli people, (instead of the Israeli government) seems to be a simple reaction to complex technical and political problems.  This is where we all get into trouble. 

There is no question that we need to hold guilty parties accountable for their actions and that measures have to be taken to provide equitable solutions to people who are suffering, whether it’s the people of Gaza who are living in an economic hell, the Israeli people who never know when a rocket will be lobbed on them, the widows and families of the men who were killed on that BP oil rig, and the people who make their living from the waters that still have gallons of oil gushing into them.

Regulatory agencies that are supposed to ensure the safety of offshore drilling need to do their jobs instead of kowtowing to the oil industry.  Politicians need to stop posturing and start negotiating in an atmosphere of mutual respect and a willingness to protect human life and the dignity of human life.  Until people do their jobs right, this planet and its inhabitants remain in a perilous state, and no amount of pointed fingers will change that.

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As of last week, Facebook has been banned in Pakistan.  While this is a blow to freedom of speech, it is also a perfect example of how a world made small by technology is open to culture clashes that can eventually cost people their lives.

The ban is a reaction to a Facebook page entitled, “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” that encouraged people to draw Mohammed on May 20^th.  Graphic representations of the prophet are strictly forbidden in Islam, so you might wonder why anyone except a drunken college student would come up with that so-called bright idea. When it comes to religion knee-jerk responses are so easy to snuggle up to, and this was yet another knee-jerk response made in protest of fundamentalist Islamic groups who threatened the producers of the cartoon, South Park, for depicting Mohammed in a bear suit costume.  You may ask yourself if someone else will up the ante with another over- the-top response.  You bet!  Holland has a popular anti-Islam party which according to the Associated Press is one of the fastest growing political parties in that country, and what’s the response to that?  Associated Press reports that, “ …an alleged al-Qaida militant detained in Iraq said he had talked to friends about attacking Danish and Dutch teams at the World Cup in South Africa next month.”  And so it goes…

I blame all this on the loss of a value and a word that is old-fashioned, civility which is a stately way of describing the act of being polite.  Civility on television, radio and the Internet has gone right out the window.  American talk radio is certainly inflammatory which may attract listeners but does more to harm public discourse than anything I can think of.  People interrupt one another without hesitation, and trading insults is the main agenda for all parties.  Call Obama a Communist, a Fascist, Adolf Hitler reincarnated and you will probably attract listeners but as far as engaging in serious political analysis, forget it.  Talk radio sounds like a bunch of bullies participating in mindless name calling.

Civility has been replaced by shock.  Insulting major religious figures may be amusing to adolescents and adults who can’t quite climb out of adolescence but in the end, it has needlessly increased tensions between East and West among factions that are just crying out for a reason to up the ante, and this is all done in the name of profit.  The producers of South Park have to satisfy the appetites of fans who crave that kind of material and this need supersedes any form of common sense.  It’s all about entertainment and entertainment is all about money.

I am not advocating surrendering our freedoms because we are threatened by people for using them.  Art will always call into question our most sacred values and the conflict will always exist between freedom of expression and religious expression.  Yet even the makers of South Park would be loath to call what they do art.

If people are going to wave the freedom of expression flag, then let’s hope that it is waved every now and then with some seriousness, and for a purpose that is just a few notches higher than entertainment with shock value.  If as much effort was put into finding common ground between East and West as in finding fault with another, we might make some headway, and that can only happen if people actually start to listen to one another respectfully.

Maybe civility is as old fashioned as costumes in a Jane Austen movie but without it, we’re all just a bunch of mindless louts shouting at one another and getting nowhere fast.

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A funny thing happened on the Saturday before Mother’s Day. I was upstairs working on the computer when the doorbell rang; my husband answered the door, and within seconds I heard my son’s voice which was strange because my son works in Ottawa. I came downstairs and there was both my son and daughter. My daughter ran up the stairs from our entrance and yelled, “Surprise,” extending a bouquet of daisies. I burst into tears and hugged them both.

They came at a great time. This was my second Mother’s Day since my own mother, Lynne, passed away. I think it was worse than the first one. Seeing my own children was a wonderful consolation after the weeks of Mother’s Day advertisements that depressed the heck out of me.
Mother’s Day was a big deal for my mother – heaven help the child that forgot it. In later years, emails and FTD florists took the worry out of realizing three days before that Mother’s Day was coming. A credit card and a phone call would send a new plant or bouquet of flowers my mother’s way and she always appreciated it. Every year, she told me that I shouldn’t have, but I knew that if I didn’t send something, I’d never hear the end of it. That was one of my mother’s endearing quirks; she simply wanted her children and grandchildren to pay attention to her and to express their love in one way or another. It took me a long time to understand it.
It also took many years to establish a non-combative relationship with my mother. She had a very vivid personality, so vivid that it’s hard to believe that she’s gone. My mother was the life of any party, she water skied and spent the summer in a bathing suit when all the other kids’ mothers were playing cards and she had the richest, most beautiful singing voice. Though I inherited her love of music, I didn’t get that voice, only a shadow of it.

Over time, I find that I’m taking on many of her characteristics. When my father tells another of his improbable stories, I can hear my mother’s voice saying, “Sonny, you know that didn’t happen.” I can feel my face take on my mother’s expression, the rolling of the eyes. It’s all that I can do not to say, “Dad, you know that didn’t happen,” but my father is ninety-one years old. His stories are overwhelmingly exciting. When I hinted to the nursing home staff that they were also untrue, I could see their faces begin to fall. I had to catch myself. He’s ninety-one and he’s entitled to an audience.

Coming from a home with two gregarious and charming parents was not easy. Everyone seemed to compete for attention and believe me, there’s still a fair bit of emotional baggage that my parents’ children and grandchildren are dealing with. Yet my mother was absolutely right when she said over and over again that I would miss her when she was gone. Of course, I miss her. Two years on, I’m still surprised to come home from work and not have a message on my answering machine with her usual, “Hello, it’s your mother. I’ll talk to you,” followed by the click of the phone hanging up. I miss my mother terribly.

It only makes sense that when my children surprised me on Saturday, I was thrilled to see them. They reminded me of the role that I have to play and I try to never ever say that they will miss me when I’m gone, because of course they will. Our bond is bigger than our disagreements.
I imagine that this isn’t going to get easier as the years go on. It is a pain that I will get used to every Mother’s Day, and there are some of you out there who have lived with this for years; you know this pain better than I. About six months, before my mother passed away, I thanked her for the wonderful life that she gave me; I’m so glad that I did.

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A new season of Dr. Who started on the Space channel last week, and it makes me happy to see the Time Lord back even though the latest incarnation is so young looking that it makes it difficult to believe that he is thousands of years old and wise in all things. Still, I am willing to cut the new and baby-faced Doctor a lot of slack because I’ve been following Doctor Who for a long time.

I first “met” Dr. Who in Hedon-on-Hull, England in 1979 when I was twenty-four and about to begin my great adventure of crossing Europe. My husband and I had only been married for two years, but we worked and saved money for a European trip. Just before we left, we bought forty acres with friends of ours in the Eastern Townships with the hope that we might live there some day.

During a three-month stay at a long-suffering friend’s house (and I subsequently named my first child after this kind friend), I discovered the joys of British television and there were two very different shows that particularly struck my fancy: Dr. Who and All Creatures Great and Small. Both shows do share one thing in common; they tell stories that take you “somewhere else.” This is obvious with Dr. Who as the stories leap back and forward in time. All Creatures takes place between the 1930s and 1950s in a gentler world where people were more or less polite to one another and courageously struggled to get by on very little. Mrs. Hall, the vets’ housekeeper, would have been outraged at the loose morals and wastefulness of today’s throwaway society.

I am still amazed at how many story lines the Dr. Who script writers can come up with, particularly with villains who look like Hoover vacuum cleaners turned right side-up, the Darliks, and whose main line in every script is “Exterminate. Exterminate.” Since they can only say this in a monotone voice, forgetful and tone-deaf people everywhere would have no trouble with a sing-along-with-the-Darliks album which no doubt would be called, you guessed it, Exterminate.

As actors are prone to coming and going and not wanting to waste their precious talents on being stuck in a childish science fiction show like Dr. Who, the writers came up with the ingenious idea that if Dr. Who was about to die, he would morph into a new person who would continue in the battle to save the universe from evil-doers and megalomaniac robots who also seem to share his abilities to go back and forth in time thus explaining, for example, why aliens might be attacking Earth in the nineteenth century.
The first Doctor Who that I watched in the 1970s was the inimitable Tom Baker who wore a ridiculously long striped wool scarf and was followed by his female companion Ramana and his trusty robot dog, K-9. His huge eyes could say volumes. Peter Davidson, the actor who played Tristan on All Creatures Great and Small, soon followed Baker; my young son and I watched him together and dubbed him the Tristan-Doctor. Until the present actor, Matt Smith took the part, Davidson was the youngest actor to be cast as the Doctor.

Each actor who has played Dr. Who coincides with a different point in my life and every time that a new one takes the part, I am convinced that he just won’t do. I felt exactly that way when David Tennant took over for Christopher Eccleston who quit Dr. Who after only one season, but over the five years that Tennant played the part, I warmed up to him because he was nuts, plain and simple.

The main prerequisite for playing the part is the ability to portray a brilliant maniac which Tennant did so very well. If an actor can do that, and if the writers can keep spinning impossible stories, the die-hard fans like me will watch and keep watching for years to come.

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On Easter Sunday, before going out for dinner at a friend’s house, my husband and I went down to the Old Port in Montreal and I did something that I’ve always wanted to do.  It may sound crazy but I’ll let you in on the secret: I spent an hour taking photos of the large silos that are on the Highway 15 as you come into Montreal on University St.

Remember how beautiful and warm it was on Easter Weekend? On that day in Montreal, the sun was warm, the sky was a bright blue and there were very photogenic puffy white clouds in the sky.  I even took a few shots through the car window with my Blackberry, uploaded them to Facebook as we were driving down the Eastern Townships Auto route and within minutes, my friends in San Francisco could see the snow on the ski hill in Bromont…and one commented that she liked the shot!

The speed of the technology that we live with still amazes me.  In fact, I’ve just seen a Skype phone advertised. If you can catch broadband wireless, you can have a videophone conversation with someone anywhere in the world on a small phone.  If we had flying cars, we’d be the Jetsons!

The park at the Old Port was crowded with people going for walks and riding their bicycles, but as soon as my husband and I crossed the bridge to the silos, we were truly in a no man’s land.  I know this because a Montreal Amphibus bus went by on its way to the water and the tour guide explained that only drunks and homeless people hang around here.  We did get a lot of strange looks so I played my part and waved to the tourists in hopes that they would return home and tell their friends that Montreal drunks and homeless people are very friendly.

Today’s digital SLR cameras allow you to shoot in different formats and I’m just learning to understand a few.  Most people are familiar with JPEG photos.  This is a compressed format that allows you to send photos in small sizes that make it easy to email, for example.  Another format that is much bigger in size is called RAW.  The advantage with RAW is that the data in the photo is saved in an unprocessed format.  You can manipulate your photos in a program like Photoshop or Aperture (that’s the program that I bought with my Mac; I’ve tried to use Photoshop and I think you need a one year course to understand the program). With these programs, you can fix problems with colour and exposure without degrading the quality of the original digital file.

Because I’m a hobbyist and not a professional, I am sometimes very happy to make a few corrections on a copy of the photo in iPhoto and then either have them professionally printed or just upload them to Facebook to share with my friends.  You can get great snapshots with JPEGs.  All the photos that I have taken on my travels have been done in JPEG and though some of my old film photos may have been slightly sharper, I get many more all-around, better quality photos shooting with a digital camera.

iPhoto makes it very easy to upload photos to Facebook.  You just highlight the photos that you want and click on the Facebook button on the bottom right hand corner of the screen. That’s all you do! I just discovered that the photos don’t even have to be next to one another to select them– you simply hold down the command key and click on the photos that you want to select.

The fun of taking photos is not only the finished product; shooting pictures forces you to really look at what’s around you. You have to focus your mind as well as your camera and on a beautiful day, that’s not hard to do.

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I'm utterly ashamed of myself.  No, not because I'm reading Julie and Julia, which is admittedly, a fluffy sort of book, but there's no harm in that.  The woman swears the way I swear, but there’s no shame in that either. I do not and cannot imagine myself taking on the project that she took on, namely, cooking all the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child in 365 days.  I'm not even ashamed that I can't cook.  It's that the woman did the recipes, blogged about her experiences and then headed off to work from Queens to lower Manhattan for a mind-numbing day as a secretary in an office.  She did all that and rode the subway both ways, for God’s sake.

I'm not knocking secretaries; my mother brought home the bacon (okay, so we didn't keep kosher - Mom loved bacon and served it every Saturday morning, kinehora).  Julie Adams spends much of the book bemoaning her life, first as a temp secretary than as a secretary for a government agency doing post-September 11-memorial work.  Her original intention in coming to New York was to be an actress.  The kvetching is hers not mine and everything comes from that kvetching.

As she approaches thirty and discovers that she has cysts on her ovaries that will probably make conceiving a child difficult, she hits biological clock despair.  Through a series of visits back to Texas and conversations with her husband, she resolves to begin the Julie/Julia project, complete it in 365 days and blog about it.

I just can't get over the fact that someone would cook and wash dishes in a crappy apartment till eleven at night, get up in the morning and blog about it and then go to work.  This is the kind of commitment that is beyond my comprehension.  Yet when I look back at that period in my life, I destroyed my voice by singing/screaming in a New Wave Band that was just as bad as my singing/screaming.  The late-twenties bring on a late-youth crisis that can be resolved innumerable ways.  Her way was definitely more popular and lucrative than mine.

One thing that attracted my attention was how Adams received comments on her blogs almost instantly. I guess when you actually are doing something and writing about it, it will attract more attention than writing a blog for older people who are first learning about technology, I mean how would they even find my damn blog anyway.  I’m taking this book personally!

I’ve had quite a few colleagues tell me that the movie is much better than the book as it focuses more on Julia Child’s experiences in France which are far more interesting to them.  I think people are probably taken in by Meryl Streep playing Julia Child, and everyone knows what a commanding actress Streep.  This is a bit unfair to the original concept of the book which is to look at an every day young woman who rises above her despair in a novel and entertaining way.

 A certain flair for cooking would be a prerequisite for this project.  I've often thought that I could be a hit as someone who no one could teach to cook.  Pair me with Jamie Oliver, and watch the comic antics ensue as I chop off a few fingers and set the stove on fire, oh yes, and scream for my husband who is the real cook in the family.  Jamie knows better than to take me on.

I’m enjoying this book.  It’s funny and there’s also the message that when life is really crappy, you can find something to get you out of your funk and back into a place where you can derive pleasure from life again; in Adams’ case, it’s eating very fatty foods and chopping up live lobsters.  As someone who is willing to eat lobster as long as someone else chops it, I would recommend this book to those who are not afraid to read a book that involves food, sex, whining, soul searching, New York atmosphere, and a little bit of Julia Child’s life thrown in.  It’s a decent vacation read which has inspired me to blog about something other than web sites.  On the other hand, you couldn’t pay me to make calves foot jelly, which is really made from a calf’s foot.  My daughter may have the right idea about being a vegetarian.  

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While there is a saying, “Physician, heal thyself!” I have yet to hear a saying, “Patient, heal thyself,” yet every day people are falling victim to this syndrome by searching out information on their health conditions through Google or Yahoo.  Anytime someone that I know comes down with a chronic condition, they always seem to know better than everybody else because they’ve gone through a few web sites and not only have diagnosed their own condition but come up with a cure.

Here’s another truism: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”  The Internet is a very powerful fraud magnet and if you are suffering from a chronic health condition, you are probably at your most vulnerable, and may be open to trying some remedies that you’ve found on a web site.  This is a very bad idea and I beg you to think twice before parting with your hard earned cash.  At least, speak with your doctor and use your judgement before embarking on a journey that may wind up with an unhappy ending.

 Just recently, I became afflicted with a condition known as tinnitus, which is a constant ringing in the ears.  It’s actually like having crickets or cicadas hanging out there. In my desperation, I did something that I knew darned well that I should avoid.  I Googled tinnitus - big mistake.  I know that this is usually an incurable condition but I still searched on the Internet and found the usual advice that you will get no matter what ails you: quit drinking coffee, don’t eat chocolate or strong cheese.

That’s just great.  Not only will I continue to have an annoying sound whining at me 24-7, now you’re going to take away from me those last comfort foods that give me some kind of pleasure.  My friends, whether you have digestive troubles, tinnitus, or migraine headaches, you will be told to cut out chocolate, coffee, and cheese; it’s just no fair.  Yet on the sidebar, all kinds of remedies can be bought to cure everything from warts to tinnitus if you just give them your credit card number.  Yes, I may be desperate but I’m not stupid.

Facebook is another dangerous place to announce your illness.  I have a friend from my long past who is a follower of herbology and who swears that if I use a herbal concoction – and cut out chocolate, coffee, very cold foods like ice cream and some vegetables – I will be cured because my tinnitus is a symptom of weak kidneys and these herbs are the solution.

Now if I carelessly post the message that I’m enjoying a cup of coffee while perusing my Facebook page, I get a harassing message from my friend reminding me that I’m only damaging my health by drinking that cup of coffee.  It’s enough to make me cut my membership and go into hiding from overly well-intentioned Internet friends.

So here’s the deal: Make sure that you’re getting your health information from reliable sources, consult your doctor and don’t complain to your friends on Facebook because it will come back to haunt you in the end. Then go eat a Mars bar, and enjoy it.  

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It’s bad enough for a media addict like me to have a wide variety of TV channels to keep me off the guilt machine (read exercise bike or more appropriately, elliptical trainer), but now my computer offers the possibility of having all or most of the TV and/or radio shows that I’ve missed at my disposal.  Not only that, most of it is free, legal and offered by the actual distributors themselves, so that I don’t have to suffer the eternal guilt and damnation of having downloaded illegal shows.

You may have heard podcasts mentioned on television and radio and wondered what they are.  In these days of iPods, everything is somewhat pod-related but a podcast is actually a digital media file which can be downloaded to your own computer, transferred to a portable device such as an iPod and used whenever you like.

iTunes, as most people now know, is the Apple online store where people can buy music, movies and television shows if they can find their wallets and then locate their credit cards.  The iTunes store also offers free podcasts and there is some very interesting material to be had.

Most of the CBC radio shows have some kind of podcast available on iTunes. You can even set up a subscription to one and iTunes will automatically download the show for you once a week. I just think it’s great for catching shows that I’ve missed.  For example, I’m a Van Morrison fan, and Jian Ghomeshi interviewed him a few months ago.  One of my colleagues at work told me about this so I went to iTunes, searched for the CBC radio show, Q, and before you know it, I had downloaded the show for free.  Even though I didn’t have time to actually listen to the show when I downloaded it, I was able to put it on a few days later when there was nothing on TV.

Another form of catching shows is through streaming.  Many television stations like CBC, CTV and Global allow you to go on their web site and watch shows that you might have missed.  With computer screens getting bigger and sharper, this is not such a bad way of keeping up with your favourite TV show.  The difference between streaming and podcasting is that you don’t get to download and keep the show when it is streamed. The web site broadcasts the show to you and you just watch it, much like watch a TV show without taping it.

There are web sites that stream that are not completely legal and I admit to trying it out; it was an amusing experience. If it wasn’t for surfthechannel.net, I would never have fulfilled my goal of watching every episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine which was being shown on the cable station, Space Channel.  Every time I missed an episode, I was able to watch it through surfthechannel.net.  The only problem, if you can call it a problem, was that I had to watch it with Japanese subtitles.  I honestly believe that it enhanced the experience. 

Sometimes it is frustrating when the Internet is streaming slowly so that you have to wait for the next bit of the show to load up.  The best way to get around this is to walk away, do something else, and come back when the whole show is in your computer’s temporary memory cache.  Now you’re ready to watch the show without any interruption unless your spouse comes over to chastise you for having nothing better to do with your time than watch every episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine.  

Possibly you might want to do what teenagers do: open another tab on your computer with a more serious and weighty web site and flip to it when you hear your spouse’s footsteps.  As soon as your spouse has satisfied himself or herself, you can quietly go back to the show.  I, of course, would never dream of doing such a thing and have never done it.  Now, I’m going to flip to last week’s episode of House.  Happy procrastinating.

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As most people are discovering, cyberspace may now be entered in a variety of ways: by cable, through phone lines, by satellite and now by the wireless telephone network.  By making the Internet accessible wherever you go, through your iPhone or your Blackberry, someone can make more money out of you and you are almost never alone.  You can become addicted to perpetual accessibility.

My cell phone contract was about to end, and did I weigh out the options?  Yes, I did.  Did I opt for a pay-as-you-go plan, since five days a week I am at work and never pick up my cell phone?  Was I prudent and thrifty?  No, I was not.

It started out with my love for my birthday present, the iPod Touch.  If I loved the iPod so much, wouldn’t I love an iPhone even more?  If I was a crazy spendthrift, that might be the end of the story, but I knew that even I, Apple gadget-lover that I am, could not justify buying the data plan that would come with the iPhone.  Indeed, if I was a true addict, I would have gone out, paid a few hundred dollars for an iPhone with the lowest amount of gigs, marched into the Telus office and started negotiating.  My other option would have been to get an iPhone for $100.00 then buy the $50.00 a month phone and data plan, which would have finally cost me, with taxes, about $67.00 a month.

Ah, the salesman saw me coming.  He said you’ll be paying close to $70.00 a month for your phone, and I know that I can’t justify paying that kind of monthly price for what is really and mostly…a toy.  Yes, cell phones are practical in emergencies and when you’re on the road, but gadget babies like me want and crave the gizmos, what they call apps, but what you and I would call toys.

            

When he saw that I had accepted that the iPhone was not to be, he soared in like an eagle after its prey.  He offered me a Blackberry for no charge, plus unlimited usage of Facebook, MySpace, MSN and Blackberry Messenger for $40.00 a month and he threw in caller ID and he threw in unlimited calls and texts to five numbers…and this was how, I, like many before me, acquired a Crackberry!  One of my good friends calls it a Crackberry of course, because it’s as addictive crack cocaine.

           

Yesterday, I spent hours setting up my ring tones so that there would be a different bell or whistle for each type of message. I know all too well that this activity was a waste of my time as I usually put my phone on vibrate so as not to annoy others, but as I said before, it’s a new toy, gotta play!

Once my children discovered my Blackberry pin number -this is like a phone number that only Blackberry users can use to send messages – they began to text me all evening with tips on how to use it, and then, with updates on where they were and what they were doing.  I was actually texting back and forth with them while they were carrying on conversations with friends.

 I find this a frightening prospect: will I become one of those people who always has my Crackberry in the palm of my hand?  Will I never give family, friends, and acquaintances my undivided attention because there is always someone messaging me, always a new notification on Facebook letting me know that someone has found a kitten while playing Farmville a Facebook game?  Will I turn into a rude middle-aged copy of a techno-addicted teen who can’t let her Crackberry go?

I hope and pray not.  Right now, the pretty new Crackberry is turned off so that I do not give into temptation and see what the latest post on Facebook is.  If I were a really mature person, I would have opted for a mature plan which would have given me access to my email, my grownup email, but what’s the point?  Most of my emails are Facebook notifications anyway.  Oh, well, at least the next time I get a flat tire and call my husband for help, I can give him a feeble justification for having a cell phone, a pretty red cell phone with a pretty screen and access to Facebook.

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I have too many email addresses.  I have a work address, a home address and three webmail addresses with the top three webmail providers: Gmail, Hotmail/Windows Live and Yahoo.  Webmail is very handy in that you can pick up your email anywhere at any time - you just log in and go.  When I went to India, however, there was major confusion among my family members.  Which email address should they write to me at?  In my travels, I’ve often found that some email addresses are harder to get into than others.

In writing this article, I Googled “compare webmail” and found three interesting sites that reviewed Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail:  consumersearch.com, ghacks.net and techcrunch.com.  I found that all three of these techie blogs said pretty much the same thing about all three.  So, here’s what I found:

Yahoo Mail has the most users - I would have guessed that it would be Microsoft’s Hotmail.  Yet hands down, all three blogs preferred Gmail as the best free webmail service.  Free is definitely the operative word as $20.00 a year will buy you greater amounts of storage and email service with little or no advertising.  Apparently Yahoo’s pay service cuts advertising completely while Hotmail will still show you Microsoft advertising. 

For the everyday person who doesn’t receive hundreds of emails a day, I don’t see storage as an issue.  My Yahoo account was my first email account so I started storing important emails in folders and after a few years, I still seem to have oodles of storage space to go.  The advantage with Yahoo is that you can do several things at once and have tabs at the top of the screen so you can go back and forth and look at several email messages at once without having to reload the page.  Unfortunately, every time I send an email, Yahoo puts advertising at the bottom of it and I really don’t appreciate that.

I like the Hotmail screen because, of all three, I find it the cleanest looking. If you’ve ever used Outlook Express, it’s very much like it in terms of having access to a calendar and reminders.  There is advertising to one side for dating services but I don’t tend to clue in to it very much although I suppose my subconscious mind is probably working over time trying to discern what I really want to buy and works at ignoring the lovely lady who wants to date someone, but not me.

All three reviewers like Gmail best.  I agree with them that, of all three services, Gmail loads up the fastest and when you’re in a foreign country working on a ten year old computer, that is really important.  Gmail also offers a great deal of storage space.  I can’t seem to use more than 1% of the space that I’m allotted but I do tend to delete old messages. All three also claim that Gmail has the best spam filter and I would agree with that. I get almost no unwanted email there. 

My own beef with Gmail is that I often find it difficult to locate the reply and forward buttons or to find the actual email that I’m composing.  This is because Gmail is the only one of the three that shows you all your correspondence in one screen, and if you’re not used to it, it can be somewhat confusing.  Yet, over time, I’ve noticed that the more you use Gmail, the more you understand its ways.  Gmail also allows you to colour code and label your emails for easier recognition.  This isn’t something that I tend to use much but others do find this useful.

In short, Gmail seems to be the way to go according to the tech-mavens, but I think that most people just get used to the one that they’ve used the most, and stick to it. If you’re just starting out with a webmail address, Gmail may be your best choice.

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Two weeks ago, I wrote about holiday gift items such as cell phones and cameras.  Over the course of the last week, I’ve had the occasion to realize that if you want to give someone a headache, give him or her a cell phone.  When it comes to service, cell phone companies figure that, once you’re in their clutches, they have you over a barrel, and there’s nothing that you can do about it.

In Europe, it seems to be understood that one’s own country is not the only country in the world, and that someone who owns a cell phone would probably need that piece of equipment to communicate with others when abroad.  North American companies seem to think, however, that no one goes over the border.  Canadian and American companies have some sort of perverted agreement that if you use a cell phone out of your respective country, they have every right to charge you the most extreme prices that could possibly be allowed: over one dollar per minute of air time PLUS long distance charges.  I find it impossible to believe that the cost of making a phone call goes up exponentially as soon as it crosses the border, but it seems to me to be a very profitable excuse for mobile phone providers.

I have to go down to New York City to visit my father frequently and I’ve found only one  American phone company that seemed to have a plan that wouldn’t lock me into a contract, Virgin Mobile USA.  As long as I topped up my phone with twenty dollars once every ninety days, I could keep my phone number.  This seemed reasonable until I found out that there was one big hitch.  I lived in Canada.  Virgin Mobile USA would not accept a Canadian-based credit card.  That seemed crazy to me.  The only way to top up your phone if you are a Canadian with an American cell phone is to go down to the United States, buy a phone card and call in the pin number on the card or enter it on Virgin’s web site.

For a variety of reasons, I was unable to visit my father and was getting emails and messages on my answering machine from Virgin that I had better top up my phone or lose my number which meant buying a new phone, telling everyone that I had a new number when in the USA and going through a great deal of inconvenience. 

 Luckily, my son had to be in the United States so I asked him to buy me a card and give me the pin number so that I wouldn’t lose my phone.  He did so.  When I entered in the pin number, the web site told me that it was not a valid number.  So, I called Virgin Mobile USA’s phone number. 

A very hip computerized voice answered my call and offered me a variety of options, none of which would allow me to speak to a living person.  I screamed and yelled until finally the computer figured out that I wanted a “live adviser” which I would presume to be better than a dead one.  My live advisor found out that I lived in Canada and instantly suggested that I call Virgin Mobile Canada.  It took nearly ten minutes to convince her that I was using an American phone with an American number which I only used in the United States of yes, you guessed it, America, and that Virgin Mobile Canada would just send me right back to Virgin USA.

When I asked to speak to a manager, I was put on hold where the music of choice was rap music, and the music system was badly in need of repair as it crackled and changed volume repeatedly, probably a great means of getting people to hang up as one can only take that kind of torture for so long.  I never got to speak to the manager, by the way, she was busy!

I was finally advised to fax or email a scanned copy of the card which my son kindly did for me.  Two days later, I got the following rather terse email reply:

Hi Mrs. Goldfinch,  While reviewing your attachment, the top up card that was purchased is for Verizon Wireless Prepaid and not for Virgin Mobile USA. I apologize for any confusion. Thank you.

My son told me that he bought the only Virgin card in the store and as far as confusion goes, my son has a B.Sc. in Biochemistry.  He knows stuff that I can’t begin to fathom.  If he can be confused in the process of buying a phone card, what hope is there for the rest of us?  More-over, THEY HAVE MY MONEY.  If a computer can answer my phone call and transfer my call to a so-called live advisor, why can’t it transfer thirty dollars from Virgin Wireless Prepaid to Virgin Mobile U.S.A.?  It is a mystery, and the ways of cell phone companies are mysterious to any consumer who can’t fathom how they can get away with such murder.  Miraculously, they do.  Taking someone’s money without giving anything in return is what most consumers would call robbery.

Apparently, a new company, Wind Mobile, is being allowed to do business in Canada and rumour has it that the competition is going to make cell phone prices drop.  The media has advised people not to lock into contracts, now as prices will be dropping so keep that in mind when you shop, and remember, cell phones are the gifts that keep on taking…your money, that is.  

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The one thing that is sure to botch up Christmas morning is an electronic gift. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here. Everyone is a good mood opening presents delighted with the new laptop or cell phone or iPod and then the inevitable happens. It doesn’t work. It’s incompatible with your operating system or a part is missing or you were too tired to read the instructions properly so you messed up the installation. Electronic presents are an invitation to frayed tempers and general crankiness. Yet we keep on giving these because they’re flashy and they say that we care about the person enough to spend a lot of money on him or her.

It goes without saying that some of you who read this column will be swayed, as I am, by flashy television advertising and will be in the market for a cell phone, camera, iPod, etc. I know that I was fairly impressed with my American niece’s iPhone and started dropping a lot of hints to my long-suffering family…until I found out that hidden cost of the iPhone, The Plan.

I am a fairly light cell phone user. During the week, I hardly use it at all as I have a well functioning land line both at home and at work. I tend to turn it off. Teenagers and young adults do not understand this as they keep their cell phones perpetually on and forget to charge the battery. This is something that adults fail to understand when they try to call their children. It is an electronic generation gap.

The other part of the cell phone generation gap is cost. Neither of my adult children have a land line which is sensible because they are always on the go. So they are used to spending probably well over $70.00 a month for their phones. Given that my phone is usually turned off, $70.00 seems exorbitant but that’s what it will cost me to keep an iPhone alive, according to a column by the Globe & Mail and that’s just the minimum. It will cost more if I want to have voicemail on my phone (something that I like to have with a 90 year old father in New York City) and a reasonable texting plan which I need for my children who don’t live in the Townships anymore. Needless to say, I will be replacing my cell phone with something other than an iPhone though it saddens me as it is great to text with and you have easy access to the Internet everywhere with it - if that’s what you want.

In the camera area, I must say that I am very impressed with my little Canon Powershot. If you know someone who is about to go on a trip, it’s a great little camera. The photos are reasonably sharp and the camera is very easy to learn to use. I got it just before I went to India, played with it for one weekend, and was banging off pictures for the rest of the trip.

The small size is a real advantage. I have become accustomed to lugging heavy SLR cameras whenever I want to take pictures and though these give you amazing versatility and a wide range of options when you take pictures, they are huge and when you take a picture, you stick out like a sore thumb.
When I travel, I like to take candid pictures of people on the street. India was great for this. With a small camera, I was often able to take the shot quickly and slip the camera back in my purse. The Powershot is light weight and its automatic functions make it very easy to do this. It’s true that the folks who had a heavy Nike SLR came back with sharper photos of the Taj Mahal but the bonus for me was two weeks of comfortable travel without a sore shoulder. Besides, I got some very nice shots of the Taj Mahal too so I’m not complaining.

So if you must shop for electronics, I’d say that a digital camera is a safe bet for a more relaxed Christmas morning but be warned that cell phones are a gift that keeps on taking all year long and make sure that you know what you’re getting into.

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“You haven’t written a column in a long time,” someone mentioned to me in passing. Yes, that’s true and I have some good excuses. I was chaperoning a trip to a student conference in India which included a one week pre-conference tour. It took me two weeks to get over jet lag and catch up at work and being a procrastinator, it’s taken me about another two weeks to decide what to write about.

The good folks at The Record have asked me to give my column a focus and in the last few months, my focus has been the world online: the Internet, cell phones, and the new technologies that are related to that world. Of course, coming back from a land and culture that seems so different, almost the complete opposite of the one that we know and love in Canada, I want to tell you about it.

One way that I can merge both of those is to give you an edited version of an email home. Now, at the time that I wrote the email, it was about 5:30 in the morning and the sun was just starting to come up. The overnight temperature probably hovered at about 30 degrees and that estimation might be on the low side. Day time temperatures rose above 40 degrees and the days were utterly scorching. I was told that this was hot weather even for them in October and all I could think of was that it would be impossibly hot as a summer day in the Townships! Early morning and night were the most comfortable times of the day, particularly because my students and I were staying at a boarding school in rooms in which there was no air conditioning.

The heat alone made it difficult to sleep but the fact that I was actually in India made it nearly impossible to sleep. Even after a week of adjusting to the fact that India is nine and a half hours ahead of Canada, I slept very few hours a night which explained why I was often in the dormitory’s computer room at sunrise typing an email to my husband on vintage computers from the 1990’s. The following email, however, was typed on a hotel computer, equally as old after one of the most challenging days of the trip:
Hi again, 

It's 6:15 here so must be 9 something or  10 your time.

I went to the Agra Fort today and just as my camera battery was dying, we went to the Mother Teresa Mission where there were mentally handicapped of all ages and orphans. We were all scooping up infants and holding them. The babies' legs were like twigs. The baby that I picked up had a very runny nose and a big smile. I couldn’t help thinking how much his life might be changed for the better if I snuck him back into Canada, even though I’m too old to start childrearing again.

As I was bouncing the baby around, I sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to the baby and to a girl who looked very badly off. She begged me to sing it over and over with her hand gestures. She smiled so widely while I sang. I almost cried - it was an amazing feeling to give someone a moment of happiness just by singing a nursery rhyme.
 

 The worst moment for me was meeting the little boy, Rahul, who had lost a leg and whose other leg was bandaged and badly scarred.. The scar on his stump was very difficult to look at yet he had a very bright face with a huge smile. He was selling water to a train and the train ran over his leg. He was 10, 12? It was all I could do to keep from crying. The sister said that Rahul had been in the hospital for 6 months and then the hospital handed him over to the Mission. The sisters are caring for him but they cannot afford to pay for any further medical care which is worrisome because his other leg was bandaged and there was a large stain on the back of the bandage that didn’t look good to my untrained eyes.

I got some pictures of the mission and one of my travelling companions took a lot of photos and promised to share these with me. I think people need to see them. The sisters here are caring for what is considered to be the dregs of this society. We were all blown away.

We collected the equivalent of 400$ U.S. from our group so the visit was well worth it for the sisters of the mission. That might run the place for a month-they run strictly on donations.

Love,
Ellen

I have to tell you that one month later that little boy Rahul is still very much on my mind so I have written to the mission asking permission to provide help, not an email, but good old fashioned snail mail. I have shown my school, friends and family the one photo that I have and many people are interested in donating money to see that he gets medical care and perhaps - and this is my big hope - a prosthetic leg. If not that, at least crutches that will help him get around. Right now, this poor little boy can only crawl.

I can’t help thinking that this is a problem that money can solve. You and I cannot help all the poor children that I saw begging on the street. If you saw Slumdog Millionaire, you have a pretty good idea of the brutality that children experience each day. One of my own photos shows a young girl with a baby slung around her shoulder who is standing in the middle of traffic in 40 degree heat and begging from car to car every time the traffic light turns red. I cannot help her though I somewhat callously took her photo from my seat on the air conditioned bus so that I could tell her story or the story of that moment to others. Yet I do know where Rahul is and I think that he can be helped.

I hope that the sisters agree to this and I hope that I can find the way to funnel money to the right organization who can help Rahul. It’s not enough to feel sorry; sometimes you have to put your money where your mouth is and get a job done no matter how tough it looks at the beginning.

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If you love film or TV shows or music videos or even stupid movies and you are hooked up to high speed Internet, you are probably half way to confessing your state of addiction to the web site, Youtube.com. Everybody shows up on YouTube sooner or later. You can watch both the United States Supreme Court and the Pope on this web site. Anyone who has a webcam, can play guitar and carry a tune has probably filmed himself or herself and posted the video on YouTube.

I am always amazed that no matter how obscure I think something may be, I will find a video of it there. In fact, when I was first let loose on it, I spent hours searching for old videos of Laura Nyro who was my favourite singer in high school and yes, Joni Mitchell too and found a lot of films to choose from. I’ve watched old episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on YouTube and looked at videos of San Francisco to help me with a piece that I’m writing. If you can’t be there, you can get a good idea of an area by watching a video of it.

Of course, there are issues of copyright infringement that get film and television companies a bit hot under the collar when they find their material illegally posted on YouTube. Viacom has sued Google for a lot of money. Where’s the profit in people having access to your wares for free? Apparently, even here, some companies have adopted an if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them attitude. One company, CBS, has allowed it and found an opportunity for making money by placing advertising in with the videos. Ironically, CBS is Viacom’s “sister company.”

While YouTube may be quite entertaining, there are some very real dangers that everyone should be aware of, particularly teenagers. We are living in an era when we are all Big Brother. Anyone who has a cell phone that is equipped to make videos can very easily film someone and post that film on YouTube almost instantly. So if you’re at a party and you stick the proverbial lampshade on your head and feel inclined to shimmy and shake to the delight of your equally inebriated friends, you may find that one of them thinks it’s an absolute hoot to post you on YouTube that night. The next day, you may think that film clip is humiliating and a prospective job opportunity might crumble into dust.

YouTube does have a privacy policy and people can request an offending video be removed but sometimes the consequences can become serious very quickly. At the beginning of August, YouTube was in the news as people were outraged by a video of three men in Saskatchewan shooting ducks and howling with laughter. They were finally arrested and faced conviction for breaking both provincial and federal wildlife laws. For these three, the consequences will live with them for a long time to come but of course, they were stupid enough to post the video in the first place so they have only themselves to blame.

As for the rest of us who prefer not to look like idiots for all to see, we will continue to find videos of children falling down or cats tumbling into toilets on YouTube. If you’re bored and you like that kind of thing, there will always be something to amuse you. A word of caution: if you’re at a party and you find someone holding up a video camera or cell phone at you, common sense would dictate that you drop like a fly and play dead. With any luck they will probably walk away. Stay still for a very long time just to be sure.

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Wikipedia was founded in 2000 to be a free online encyclopedia in which anyone could contribute information. When interviewed on CBS founder, Jimmy Wales commented, “I mean, writing an encyclopedia as a hobby is obviously a fairly geeky thing to do. The real core thing that people believe in is free knowledge. So people can copy or modify it, redistribute it."

His belief that knowledge should be freely distributed has grown like a weed and the search engine Google has helped. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself. Search anything from rain to corn to Barak Obama on Google. The Wikipedia article on that subject will come up near the top of your list. To prove this to myself, I just typed the word Obama into Google and the Wikipedia article on Obama was third to the top.

No wonder elementary and high school students love Wikipedia. Who needs to go to a multi-volume encyclopedia and struggle with the alphabet when in two clicks of your mouse, you can have the information that you need for that pesky school project? Is this such a bad thing?

No…and yes. Wikipedia is great when it’s right and it usually is. According to one study done by the journal Nature in 2005, Wikipedia was only slightly less accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica. It averaged about 3.86 errors as opposed to Britannica’s 2.92. (Britannica did argue that the study was flawed.)
For looking up a quick fact, Wikipedia is great. When you want to know who the youngest president of the United States was or which album I Want to Hold Your Hand was on, Wikipedia is a fast way to get these answers. For more intricate search questions, the quality of writing can get in the way of comprehension. One teacher that I met at a conference expressed the opinion that the writing on Wikipedia is often over most students’ heads.

The problem with Wikipedia is that there is very little editing or proofreading. When I looked up the singer, Rickie Lee Jones on Wikipedia, I found an extremely poorly written article rife with grammatical errors and typos. As for fact checking, it’s a catch-as-catch-can situation. Other Wikipedia writers can correct each other’s articles.

This open editing can lead to vandalism. In one famous case, comedian Stephen Colbert changed an article in the course of his show and said that, “…any user can change any entry. And if enough other users agree with them, it becomes true." In another case, former Kennedy advisor, John Seigenthaler, Sr. was accused of being involved in Kennedy’s assassination. This was quickly corrected but other articles continue to be attacked. Birth and death dates have also been found to be incorrect.

Young people are often tempted to plagiarize text from Wikipedia into their essays as it’s so easy to copy text from Wikipedia and paste it into a Word document within seconds however the vocabulary almost always gives them away.

My verdict on Wikipedia is that it’s a great source of information but you should always look further. Other web sites can be far more reliable than Wikipedia and can be used to back up what Wikipedia has to say. If you’re a parent arguing with your child about using Wikipedia for a school project, just let your child know that a teacher will be far more impressed if they use a book (remember books?) as a source too. Books that are targeted toward a child’s age group will also be easier for them to understand.

Like it or not, Wikipedia is here to stay and as with anything else on the Internet, using it right will save time and may just help you win that argument that John F. Kennedy was the youngest president elected to office. Now go find out who the youngest president actually was.

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I can’t believe Michael Jackson is dead.
Michael Jackson is dead?

This snippet of dialogue did not take place in a face to face conversation. It passed over the course of a few hours on the social networking site, Facebook. Millions of people all over the world are using free web sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and many others to communicate with their friends, family and with people that they may have never met. Through Facebook, I have tracked down and been tracked down by people that I knew in elementary school and high school and have renewed these friendships. Whereas Facebook used to be the exclusive domain of high school and university students, we middle aged types have invaded and we like it. Many writers say that the young will just move on to other social networking sites but one of my uses for Facebook is to stay in touch with former students and it’s working well for that.

Interestingly enough, social networking sites are now becoming a means of obtaining news and commentary and a means of mobilizing social action. In a short article on a blog for newspaper editors, Ellyn Angelotti pointed out “…that it is more likely that people would look at what their friends and social network would suggest, as opposed to editors.” I found a poignant example of that this week in relation to the way that I found out about the need to boil tap water in Lennoxville. I happened to check my work email address and found an email advising all employees that the water supply was contaminated with bacteria and that it would be necessary to boil our cooking and drinking water.

When I went on my Facebook page, I found a lively discussion going on by a few of my Lennoxville acquaintances in my newsfeed. In the case of the Lennoxville water situation, 5-7 people commented on how Lennoxville might have communicated the water situation more effectively. One person gave a brief summary of her visit to the borough office to express her concerns. In turn, others commented on this.

This is a local example of how Facebook is used the world over for discussion on the bigger issues. There are citizens’ groups, fan clubs, student organizations, etc. on Facebook who can also issue invitations to events to its members who can in turn simply click on yes-or-no buttons to indicate whether or not they will participate in these events.

While this looks very democratic, some countries - for example, Russia and China - are expressing concern at the way the Internet might be used to convey anti-government messages. There are many reports of citizens being arrested for email messages and postings that are perceived to be out of line. While no such threat appears to be apparent in Canada or the United States, North American critics of social networking sites have grave concerns about issues of privacy. Users of Facebook are no strangers to these discussions as the controversy of ownership of photos and text showed some months back.

With the advent of censorship and DDO attacks on web sites, both governments and independent groups with an axe to grind are finding ways to circumvent the democratic possibilities of the Internet. An interesting article on Internet and power in the magazine, Dissent, gave examples of government sponsorship of DDO’s in China and Russia which were able to crash web sites and private parties have been able to crash web sites published by gay organizations as well. We need to watch this situation very carefully and how North American governments will look to control the Internet.

Sites such as Facebook hold a lot of promise to help people stay in touch with another, particularly for people who are shut in due to physical disability. As baby boomers get older, Facebook will help us be in touch with the world and each other and if history is any example, we will not be silent.

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Thanks to Sadie the Foodie,blogger extraordinaire and a former student of mine, I succeeded in finding a new template for this blog and then installing it.

This leads me to believe that messing around with technology is much like the old days of teenagers hanging out together with guitars in the 60s and 70s. You hear a wacky chord you like or discover that someone else knows how to play an approximation of Black Bird and then in today's parlance, you "copy and paste."

This kind of free association and learning is what the Internet is all about. People have a question, people Google the question and if people are the slightest bit discerning, they will find the answer from a reliable source.

I'm excited by this kind of learning. The sort that gives you the quick answer to the question and gets you running in the right direction. How much of this kind of learning is deep learning is another story. When we read news on the Internet, when we satisfy our curiosity about what's going on in the world, how much critical analysis do we actually get?

I'm not saying that it's not out there. There are many more pundits (far more learned than I am) who do provide a myriad of opinions and analyses as to what is going on in the world today on numerous websites. Do we read them? Do we take the time to go further than the one minute YouTube sound bite? Why should we when the sound bite is so much easier to digest than a 3 screen New York Times editorial?

Just today, I mentioned to my husband that I saw a headline that hog workers in Saskatchewan were coming down with a new flu virus. He was on his laptop too so while I meandered off to see who had written what on Facebook, he actually checked out the article that I referred to. This is what the first two paragraphs had to say in the article on the CBC website:

"Two workers in Saskatchewan's hog farm industry have tested positive for what health officials are calling a "novel" strain of flu virus and have fully recovered, government officials reported Tuesday.

Dr. Moira McKinnon, the province's chief medical health officer, stressed that the virus identified was "non-pandemic," adding that the two workers did not contract the H1N1 swine flu virus currently in the news."

Now if I had not bothered to read any further, I might go around spreading a nice fat juicy story that the H1N1 virus is mutating into a new form and just sharing the fear that goes with it like the gossipy Typhoid Mary that I am. Back in the 70s, without the communications technology that we have now, it was pretty easy to spread the rumour that Paul McCartney was dead. Imagine the havoc that we can wreak with the Internet.

The Internet can be used very successfully for finding out quick fix answers to why your iPod is frozen and how to find a lovely new format for that blog that you’ve been keeping but I am less confident in its ability to help us find a solution to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine and what is the real answer to life, the universe and everything. Learning is more than finding out quick solutions to today’s snags. The Internet can certainly help us to communicate with others, to share serious information; we just have to be willing to take the time to do just that.

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I've recently been asked by the Sherbrooke Record to continue my columns but slanted toward older, novice users of technology. Here's my first column.

Welcome to a new and slanted toward technology version of the original Somebody’s Mother column. As a middle aged Mom type who loves gadgets, computers, the Internet, cell phones and all kinds of electronic toys, I hope to introduce you to some of the ways that technology can keep you informed, keep you connected, and yes, keep you entertained.

Since there’s no place like home, I thought it might be best to kick this series of columns off with the home page, that place that your computer goes to when you click into the Internet and get ready to dive into the cyber-universe. Many different websites will compete to get you to pick their site to be your home page. This only makes sense as the web page developers sell advertising space and they want you to get their message. While much of the Internet may be accessed free of charge (it reminds me of the old days of getting TV stations for free with bunny-eared antennas), advertising is what makes the Internet go and websites like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and My Space want you to click on their site as opposed to anybody else’s.

You can use a home page for a variety of purposes. Many people have a plain old Google search page as their home page but a home page can do a lot more for you than give you access to the world’s most popular search engine. You can get the latest news headlines, your horoscope, local weather, entertainment news, currency exchange rates, your favourite comic strip and so much more. If you have stocks and can figure out what your stock symbols are, you can have updates as soon as you turn your computer on. You can have the weather of all the cities that your family members and friends live in. As Canadians, we like to know about weather.

Putting a home page together is very easy and one of my favourite ways of procrastinating more important tasks is picking a new theme or background for my home page. Years ago, I chose Yahoo as my home page because it offered all the goodies that I just mentioned plus the possibility of picking seasonal themes. Google now offers the same possibilities at iGoogle.com. In fact with iGoogle, if you’re the kind of person who likes variety, you can have a different theme every day. There are people out there who apparently have more time for procrastinating than I do and they upload their latest designs. iGoogle allows you to pick Theme of the Day so that with little effort on your part, you get a snazzy page that someone has worked hard to produce. Once you’ve picked your content, there’s options for creating a colour scheme or if you’re an avid sports fan, you can even pick your favourite team’s colours. My own Yahoo home page sports a yellow and blue beach scene with colourful sailboats.

If you can click a box to check it off, you can make your own home page with the content that interests you. Have a look at both iGoogle and Yahoo and see which you like better. Very cleverly, iGoogle has its most popular content in a big blue box at the top of the page with boxes for you to check off. You can pick which city you want to get your weather for, and yes, Sherbrooke is one of them. If you would like to try Yahoo, you can simple Google…or Yahoo My Yahoo and if you click on “I’m New Here”, it will guide you in setting up the page.

One of the advantages of the computer and the Internet is that there are many options for setting things up in the way that it is most convenient and pleasant for you so don’t be shy. Finally, once you’ve done all the work to set up your page the way you want to, go into your browser’s menu (whether it is Explorer, Firefox or the Mac Safari) and set your new page as your home page. The easiest way to do this is to go to the Help menu and search Home Page in the help menu index. It should give you easy step by step instructions on how to make the current page that you’re working on your home page. Good luck and have fun.

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