bouncingboomergirlgeek: fyi & fwiw

Hands Across the Clouds

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I have been exploring server-based apps online the last few months, trying to help an offline group with 100+ members develop a platform for sharing news and schedules. As with just about any volunteer entity, there is, to put it politely, a wide range of computer comfort among its members.

On one side there are the fast adapters who are quick to learn new things and find it fun to do so. In the middle, there are the semi-techs, or later bloomers, who may know the basics of a few favorite functions such as email and word processing, but not a whole lot more. On the other end of the spectrum are the semi-Luddites with high computer anxiety who mouse around reluctantly.

And the icing on this layer cake is that all of them use an assortment of software and CPUs, old and new.

In short, it's an IT management nightmare to get them all on the same page doing similar things online at a similar time. What seems like the simplest instructions aren't so simple at all for those who are flying blind and clicking by rote without much of a mental paradigm.

If they all stuck with their own applications and their old computing habits, supporting them all would become more than a full time job. That's tough for any entity run by volunteers for free.

1.3 Ego-Surfing and "Namerology"

/from our cyberlife dept./

Hearing about Numerology among the Chinese viz the Olympics got me to musing about "Namerology" as revealed by ourselves on the Internet.

In an era where it's so easy to go ego-surfing, it 's natural to start wondering if those who are "name twins" share anything more than the obvious correlates. This goes double if you think your own first and last is not entirely common.

My ego surfing has had a few surprising twists. First was the fact that my maiden-named self was much more common (and active online) than I would have guessed when I first looked in the 90s, and some of them were up to things (example below) that might make my mother blush. Then on the flip side in later life, I found that my later-named counterparts were also much more numerous than I would have guessedd, which I suppose I can count as a blessing for privacy.

Over the years, I adopted assorted handles and pen names for various aims, but now it's starting to seem like a good idea to add a twist to your sig if you want a high ratio of signal to noise around a specific identity. Unless you want the "real" you to live 10 pages deep in the list of Google hits, your primary name online needs to make a mark of some kind.

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