Mac User from Hell

The mother of all storms blew through St. Louis yesterday. It knocked down power lines, closed highways, left whole blocks dark, and interrupted my Internet access. You would think I would have figured out when my electricity went off that, perhaps, just perhaps, when I rebooted and couldn’t connect to my website, e-mail, or iDisk (my cyber backup system up there in the Apple’s private cloud), that it might have had something do with cable being knocked out by the storm. I believe the appropriate word here is Duh!

But, no; I just went crazy unplugging and replugging little black boxes, running around the Apple/MobileMe website to no avail (you can only get there on Safari, not on Firefox), and calling every Apple tech supportnumber on my list. Thank God, these guys are all hired for their patience because I am the Mac user from hell. Everything that goes wrong pitches me into panic mode. Ohmygod, __________ isn’t working. I think I’ll go ballistic. (Should one confess to such things on her blog? Well, I’m probably not alone in this form of insanity.)

The more little gadgets and capabilities I own, the worse it gets. Once upon a time, I had a little box called a Mac SE, which gave way to ever bigger boxes and then back down in size to just a monitor and then to even smaller MacBooks. The littlest Macs are iPhones and iTouch/iPods, but I haven’t gone there yet. There’s no telling what could go wrong with something I can hold in my hand.

So, after much teeth gnashing and nail biting, my cable is back up, my Internet connections are working, my junk mail box is full again, and my iDisk is back in its cloud. What more could one ask, except maybe for the sun to shine on a weekend, since it is June; and, at this rate, I will never get a tan. But I digress.

Really, at the moment, until the next storm, it’s all good.

Confessions of a Web 2.0 Addict

I’m trying to remember how it all began. I think it started innocently, as these things usually do. I went to a St. Louis Publishers Association meeting, and Bob Baker, the speaker, was doing a presentation on something called “social networking.” It was intriguing but confusing. Even with the handout, I had no idea what he was talking about. “This is Web 2.0,” he said, if one can actually speak in italics. “If you’re an author, you must have a presence on the Web.”

I got the idea that a website is not enough to create that presence. Apparently, one also needs a blog, podcasts, a newsletter, an identity on Amazon, and memberships in such things as Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Gather. I’m not much of a joiner. I was overwhelmed.

I don’t remember when I attended that presentation, but I know it was pre-twitter. Since then, I’ve come a long way, baby. I have two blogs, a newsletter, and lots of memberships. I started a group on LinkedIn; I have a page on Facebook where my daughter’s friends write on my wall; and Amazon is #1 on next year's marketing plan (podcasting is #2). But what really blows my mind is the amount of time I spend micro-blogging on twitter. You’d be surprised at how much you can say with only 140 characters. Well, maybe you wouldn’t, but I was.

You can probably tell that I’ve jumped feet first into Web 2.0, astonishing young and old alike with my computer prowess — young being my daughters, who think I've lost my mind, and old being my contemporaries, who agree. What nobody told me about blogging and tweeting and joining is that they are seductive and addictive.

They are not just a part of marketing; they are a way of life. All day long and into the night I hear twitter making bird sounds as it informs me there is a new tweet on my TweetDeck. My e-mail is full of the latest blogs on blogging and tweets about twittering. I am constantly updating my e-mail list and planning my next newsletter or blog post. I have printed out so much advice on how to do it all better; I could start my own recycling plant. Only as I write this do I realize how far gone I am.

I am truly addicted, and I have no idea how Web 2.0 addicts recover. Everything I read tells me to blog and twitter more, not less. I guess I’m lucky because I don’t send and receive tweets on my iPhone or Blackberry, only because I don’t own them. But it’s only a matter of time.

It is almost midnight on New Years Eve of 2008. I’d love to say I’m resolving to cut down in 2009, but I'm not sure I can. This is bad, very bad.