So I spent much of yesterday attempting to compile my meager thoughts about l’affaire Frey into something halfway worthy of a post.  After all, this little crisis around the truth value of the memoir is hardly the first such I’ve encountered, but this particular one seems different, somehow, and not simply because the great and powerful O got personally involved last week, giving both Frey and his publisher, Nan Talese, the talk-show smackdown.  Given my longstanding interest in Oprah’s interventions on the literary scene, I could hardly let the occasion go by.

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Via unrequited narcissism, the affirmation I’ve been waiting for:

The cyberworld expands people’s social networks and even encourages people to talk by phone or meet others in person, a new study finds.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project also finds that U.S. Internet users are more apt to get help on health care, financial and other decisions because they have a larger set of people to whom they can turn.

Further rebuking early studies suggesting that the Internet promotes isolation, Pew found that it “was actually helping people maintain their communities,” said Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociology professor and co-author of the Pew report.

The study found that e-mail is supplementing, not replacing, other means of contact. For example, people who e-mail most of their closest friends and relatives at least once a week are about 25 percent more likely to have weekly landline phone contact as well. The increase is even greater for cell phones.

“There’s a certain seamlessness of how people maintain their social networks,” said John Horrigan, Pew’s associate director. “They shift between face-to-face, phone and Internet quite easily.”

Meanwhile, Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant contacts—a median of 37 compared with 30 for non-users—and they are more likely to receive help from someone within that social network.

A nice thing to read after a full day of meetings, a drink with a former advisor, and dinner with my sister.  Except for the part about the telephone—don’t get me started on how much I hate the telephone—I’d say eat that, luddite naysayers.

News comes this afternoon that ogged’s taking down the shingle.  Things in the blogosphere feel different to me already.

I’ve been in New York for the last couple of days, and though I’ve had the computer with me, and have been having a fabulous time, I haven’t felt the least bit compelled to post.  I’m here for some meetings which are beginning tomorrow, about which more later, but have taken advantage—literally—of the opportunity to see my sister and some grad school pals whom I haven’t gotten to see in years.  Or what feels like years, in any case.

More thoughts forthcoming soon, if the stars align.  In the meantime, I’m just soaking up being back in the city.

Letters of recommendation.

*sigh*

I spent much of yesterday in the East Baton Rouge Parish Public Library, reading through the microfilm archive of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, the predecessor of today’s Advocate, the sole remaining daily outlet here.  I’m doing this at the East Baton Rouge Parish Public Library, wherein I have not set foot since high school, because they have the only complete set of the paper’s microfilms.  The LSU Library has weirdly spotty holdings, and is completely missing the first year that I need to read.  Which is just bizarre.  That said, it’s been cool, if time-consuming and mildly nausea-inducing, going back through these papers and watching history unfold.  But I’m really wishing there were a better way to get the stuff I’m looking for.  And so I’ve got this running dialogue in my head:

– Do I really need to read the entire paper, for the whole year? 

No.  There’s a particular set of stories that I’m trying to track. 

– Couldn’t I do that electronically, by, like, figuring out what days the stories I’m tracking appeared, and then just hop on the microfilm to get the stories themselves? 

No.  The Advocate’s own electronic archive only dates from 1995.  And Lexis-Nexis, which happily does index the Advocate, dates all the way back to 1994. 

– What year does the story you’re trying to track start?

1953.

– So, you’re, like, loading up the machine with the film of Jan. 1- Jan. 20, 1953, and paging through the entire thing, looking for relevant headlines?

Yep.

– How long is that taking?

About an hour per month.

– How many years do you want to cover?

Twenty.

– Twenty?

Not wall-to-wall.  But the stories I’m looking at extend at least over that period of time.

– Isn’t there a better way of doing this?

…

That’s where I pretty much stall out, every time through this little dialogue.  And I stop, and I search around for another index that might help me, and I grind my teeth and go back to the microfilm.

The good news is that there’s a dissertation out there that covers much of what I’m interested in, and that will probably help me narrow down the post-1953 work I need to do.  The bad news is that the dissertation has been checked out, and isn’t due back for another three days, assuming it comes in on time.

Of course, it’s also available on microfilm.

– OmniOutliner Pro, whose praises I’ve sung in the past, and which continues to rock.  In conjunction with Joel Schoonmaker’s KGTD scripts, OOPro becomes a fearsome task organizer; on its own, it can help organize even the wonkiest thinking.  I drafted a paper in OOPro during the fall, and am currently laying out the outline for a Big Project in it, a project that I’m not at all sure I could visualize without it.

– TextWrangler, a richly featured text editor from the folks at BareBones Software.  This is the free version of the hallowed BBEdit, and I’ve been using it up a storm, in no small part out of a desire to move as much of my writing as possible out of .doc formats and into .txt, until fancy formatting is actually called for.  I’m liking this so much that I’m considering upgrading to BBEdit just to pay for the value I’ve gotten from TextWrangler.  All I’d need is one desirable little feature to push me over the upgrade edge.

– NeoOffice.  Because like vemos, I’d love 2006 to be the year in which I get to escape the clutches of Microsoft entirely.  This is one of the primary reasons I’m moving a lot of my writing over to text files (the other being that text editors are generally so much lighter, and given that the point of the writing is usually supposed to be the text rather than the formatting, lighter is better). Yes, there’s an irony in attempting to get off the MS boat in the year in which Apple is going over to Intel processors, but I’m good with irony.  Anyhow, NeoOffice is an OS X native port of the OpenOffice project.  It doesn’t quite do everything that the MS programs do, and there are apparently some issues with spreadsheet compatibility, but 95% fabulous is pretty darned fabulous.

– Adium.  An app that I first heard about from AKMA.  One client to IM them all; tabbed chat windows; cool interface.  Awful alert sounds, but they’re easily changed.  And again—one IM client for all your chatting needs. 

The overall story is simplication:  single clients, lightweight formats, cleaner text.  This is thus far the sabbatical of streamlining, and thus far, it’s going well.

I finally get it—why researchers develop archive fever.  I spent part of yesterday afternoon in the special collections of the LSU Libraries, and am completely entranced.  Not only was the staff immediately and overwhelmingly helpful (making phone calls on my behalf when part of what I wanted to see wasn’t, in fact, available, and granting me immediate access to their collections without the personal background check required in order to obtain borrowing privileges at the main university library), but I was able to sit down and start paging through some absolutely fascinating manuscript material.  And I’ve already stumbled upon something I wasn’t really looking for, or that I didn’t know that I was looking for, but that’s absolutely perfect for what I need.

Yes, cryptic.  The new project, incorporating some of this archival material, will with any luck be coming to a screen near you early in March.  Assuming the rest of the research goes as swimmingly, and that I don’t get totally lost in the archive.

Is the plural of “roof” roofs or rooves?  Is one U.S. usage and the other a Britishism?  Which is which?

In the last few days, I’ve gotten hundreds of hits from various Canadian browsers, nearly all of whom have come from some variant on a Google search for obsolescence, planned or otherwise.  Is there something going on up there I ought to know about?