CurrentMom

Google Tries Social Again with +1

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Technology Thursday

There are very few things I like about Facebook. But one of those things is the 'like' button. While it would be easy to spin up a post lamenting how such simple interfaces trivialize human relationships, I find just the opposite. On FB, and other places that allow quick one-click acknowledgements (Metafilter, for instance, has a similar option that lets you 'favorite' comments in threads), I find it a very useful feature. It lets me quickly let someone know that I read or liked or observed or noted that thing they wrote, and to do so with a positive spin on it. And sometimes that's all that needs doing. In a face-to-face conversation, we might smile or nod, but online text-based conversations don't easily allow for that. And there have been many times in other online conversations where I've wished for a 'like' button -- it's a vast improvement over an endless stream of "ditto" and "me too."

Google's had a number of 'failed' forays into the social media space. They're rolling out a new attempt, called +1, which is going to act somewhat like the Facebook 'Like' button, apparently. But it's going to cover the whole web (more or less). Here's what the Googlers themselves say about it:

A Working Mom's Working Weekend

Work Wednesday

My husband and I are fortunate that our jobs don't require us to work on weekends. Usually.

But last weekend was a working weekend for both of us. My husband's facing a deadline in a case he's working on, and I have a project that's overdue, a conference presentation today, and an overseas work trip scheduled for the week after next. (And did I mention my son's 5th birthday celebrations coming up this weekend?)

Now when I say it was a working weekend, I'm not being entirely accurate. Long ago, when I was young, single, and an associate in a private law firm, I did spend many so-called "days of rest" entirely at work, emerging only after dark, and even sometimes not until it was getting light. Not every Saturday and Sunday, of course, but working weekends were a standard stint. 

Given the hole I was in, I would have relished the opportunity to relive that long-ago drudgery. But I couldn't. There was religious school, tae kwon do, ice skating lessons, the school book sale, and the two kids that go along with the activities. Then, there was my husband's desire to get some work done, too.

A Mindful Moment

Therapy Tuesday
Photo by: dcjohn

Indulge me. As author of today's blog post, I'm calling on all parents to create a "mindful moment" for himself or herself. A moment is something that lacks strict definition in terms of a quantity of time. It can be a second; minutes, hours...I will leave the time allotment completely up to you.

So what is a "mindful moment"? After all, shouldn't you understand what I'm asking you to do? That is another beauty in this concept: it's whatever you think it can be.  For some, it might be getting a chance to read the paper without doing a hundred other things. For others, it might be all out bliss in a yoga class. It could be a hot bath, time alone, driving and listening to the music YOU want to. There is no strict parameter for how you define how you spend your moment.

Why am I even asking this of you? Well, for your health. Part of your health includes your sanity. More and more studies are confirming what yoga enthusiasts intuitively know: yoga makes them feel better. The ability to be present and perform a task (whether it is a yoga pose or breathing rhythmically) shows positive effects on mood.  Additionally, meditation (of which yoga is a type of) can actually increase your brain's gray matter. Anyone with children knows that they can take their toll on your level of patience. Hence, my call for a "mindful moment."

Still not sure how to accomplish this task?  Here's a quick suggestion. Sit in a quiet place and allow yourself to get comfortable. Close your eyes. Focus on your breathing. Inhale while slowly (and silently) counting to 3. Hold that inhalation for 3 counts. Then exhale for a count of 3.  Repeat this cycle at least 5 times.  

There, that was a mindful moment. Not so hard! 

 

Star Trek: With the Next Generation

Sharing Saturday

I have one of those little quirks that take people by surprise when they find out, especially since I am not an adult who you would normally peg as a sci-fi kind of person (because I'm not.)

I love Star Trek.

When I was in junior high school, at the peak of my William Shatner crush and my fandom, I could name all 79 episodes of the original series (there were no spin offs yet.) I would travel into the city to visit the Star Trek store, some little New York storefront where some crazy Trekkie collected paraphernalia.  I read the Star Trek books. I owned a Tribble. 

I never went so far as to go to a convention. By the time I reached high school, and met some real Trekkies, I realized that this was not a club in which I wanted membership. I was not a science fiction/AV nerd-type – I was more the angst-ridden poet, the Virginia Woolf groupie, the English major in search of her Heathcliff. Not to mention my Annie Hall look-alike contest, which went on for the better part of my junior year.

But there is something about Star Trek that grabbed me and never let go. And I think that I've finally discovered the attraction.

Understanding Energy and Radiation

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Technology Thursday

It is hard to wrap my brain around the scale of the human tragedy in Japan. This is especially so coming on the heels of a spate of such large-scale disasters including Katrina, Pakistan, Haiti, the Gulf Oil Spill, and so many others that slip our minds once the news cycle turns. So I tend to think about things that maybe I can get my head around, such as nuclear power, methods to improve disaster response, funding for earthquake, volcano, and tsunami monitoring (don't get me started), and so on.

Like many, I'm fairly conflicted about nuclear power. While I usually hate couching things in an wishy-washy anodyne "middle" ground (it's often just a lazy copout), I think it's neither as safe as its proponents would like us to think, nor as easy to avoid as its detractors would like. I don't believe there is any way to realistically satisfy the anticipated energy demands of the United States without the use of nuclear power. At the same time, I have grave reservations about whether we're making appropriate forward progress toward a cleaner energy future. And it's abundantly clear we're not doing a jood job at all figuring out how to manage and store waste products.

Awhile back Jon Udell wrote about how our conceptions of energy usage are poor, or really, non-existent. What does it mean that a device will use 9 Watts an hour?