Saturday, April 24, 2004

In a Rheingold State of Mind Time continues to fly around here. I accidentally trashed some postings (and a few MB of mail) when I accidentally downgraded my SuSE Linux installation and reformatted that part of my drive. Did I mention that was by accident? Oh well, now I'm back in Windows (98!), using Radio in Mozilla 1.7 RC 1. I've been in an upgrade frenzy these last few days, grabbing the latest Mozilla build, my Bloglines Notifier 3.0 (that tells me when the most interesting blogs in the reader have new stuff), and Opera 7.5. I'd almost stopped using Opera altogether, since I got  tabbed browsing and popup control in Mozilla (and Firefox) , and similar functioning (and programmable key bindings) in Konqueror on the Linux side. And all this without ads, guilt and the occasional quirky behavior at some sites. But I'll tell you, offering free blogspace and a (not very good, but serviceable) blogging tool at My.Opera.com is an attractive item. For those of you who may be interested in my non-technology political rants, you can find them now here at Politics in the Metaverse. But that's not really why I'm writing here today. And it's not (solely) because I should be working on my new book project and am engaged in traditional work-avoidance behavior. It's just that I've been having Howard Rheingold following me around lately. Actually, I wish that were so, but it's been one of those interesting coincidences that these different things have been happening. First, some history. I'm not sure anymore whether I read The Virtual Community first and then visited Electric Minds, or the other way 'round. But it was the mid-1990s, I'd just gotten my first real Internet connection by way of my spiffy 2400 bps modem and my job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I was craving community. Electric Minds was a terrific place with all sorts of interesting people. I was a charter member, offering general thoughts about the direction of the community and more than a few banal posts like the ones you read here. I led a discussion there around a book about the Thomas Pynchon listserv written by a one-time Pynchon associate now living in Mexico that eventually drew the author in. And somewhere around that time, Rheingold and I exchanged email, and I hoped to someday welcome him to Madison. Didn't quite happen that way, but each of us eventually fell away from Electric Minds for different reasons. I wasn't surprised to hear that Howard had gotten into blogging, and I've been reading the SmartMobs blog for quite awhile now. My wife got me Smart Mobs, the book, for Christmas, and I finally got started reading it this week. As always, there is much to think about in this book, though there is a little more of that "I have seen the future -- and it works" ego at work here than I remember in the earlier book. So now I've been spending more time at the blog, finally understanding the categories. Today, my wife insisted we hit some rummage sales, which we did. We wound up at a moving sale; this woman had just sold her house and was getting ready to join the condo scene. She had some great vinyl records  that were pretty tempting, but eventually found her stack of books for sale (I always gravitate to the books). Here was a hardly-touched copy of  The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, edited by our Mr. Rheingold. When I opened it, it was inscribed "To Deborah, Howard." Turns out she occasionally helps out a friend who handles book-tour logistics for writers coming to Milwaukee. Well, this was so cool. Deborah really liked Howard, who wore his famous painted shoes to the gig. She showed us several other signed books from people she'd met, but this was the coolest. Yeah, I'm rambling. So again I get virtually close to one of my favorite people I've never met. Here's hoping that one day I'll be able to welcome him to my other home town again. 9:37:14 PM    comment []