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Best Friends Forever….

July 16, 2009 in Me-me | 6 comments

Have you ever found an old friend after years of separation and discovered that you still had a connection so strong that it had never broken? That you still share the same thoughts and have the same ideals, that you still laugh at the same things, cry over the same things, enjoy the same things, even though very different from days of yore? That even though you had grown up apart, you have somehow grown together? Today I have found that friend.

These re-connections would have been nearly impossible or at most wildly coincidental in the years before the instant connectivity of computers, social networking sites and search engines like Google.

There is nothing like having shared experiences from childhood. These cannot be recreated ever again – my childhood is long over and I can never build that same type of relationship with anyone else. I will never get into situations that silly, do some of those moronic things that only children do and survive without a thought. I believe that these experiences and the shared memories of them forge bonds that cannot be duplicated ever again.

If one is lucky enough to have had such a very best friend as a child, and has been even luckier still to find them again, that person really is a BFF – Best Friend Forever. This is the friend who is so low maintenance that over 20 years of no contact doesn’t wipe you from their memory or them from yours.

I have been so lucky to have had a friend like that in the first place. The kind of friend who had my back even when they were mad at me. The kind of friend that bled when I was cut . Finding this friend again is a gift I’m not ever likely to take for granted.

Someone I can go walk on the train tracks with, go hitchhiking with, break rules with and tell my deepest secrets to. A friend I can share all my sorrows and joys with. And who will share those things back with me. Together we can be children again, only this time as adults. And we can do all these things from our armchairs, laptops on our laps, from a distance of almost 3000 miles away.

Ain’t it grand?

A little help here….I think my tongue is stuck to the frozen flagpole……!

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Oggi Sciopero….

July 14, 2009 in Current Events, Uncategorized, WTF? | No comments

English translation copied from http://dirittoallarete.ning.com/. Click link for original text.

It will be the first strike of bloggers ever.

On July 14, 2009, Italian bloggers will muzzle themselves in the Web as well as in Piazza Navona in Rome, at 7PM where they will meet to protest against an Italian government bill (the Alfano decree) introducing a number of new rules which will limit the freedom of expression in Italian internet.

The so-called “obligation to rectify” imposed to the manager of an information site (blogs, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter etc) clearly appears to be a pretext. In fact such imposition, in terms of bureaucratization of the network and of very heavy penalties for users, will make of the new decree an internet-killer.

The practical effects shall be to cause the independent sites and blogs to cease or materially reduce their publications. The apparent intent of introducing criteria of responsibility hides the attempt to make life difficult or impossible for bloggers and users of shared sites (for example: You Tube…).

The fact is that bloggers are already entirely liable, from a penal standpoint, in the event of crimes such as insults, defamation etc: there is no need to introduce unbearable penalties for “citizen-journalists” who do not intend to submit themselves to the bureaucracy and the burdens contemplated in the Alfano decree.

The plurality of information, regardless of the media, internet, newspapers, radio and tv networks etc, is a fundamental right of men and citizens, on which democracy and freedom are based. The Alfano decree is an attack to the freedom of all media, from the major newspapers to the smallest blog.

For this reason we invite all Italian blogs and sites to a day of silence, in the day in which newspapers and tv networks will also remain silent. It is a message of all operators in the media world, who jointly shout to the political world: “we do not want to be gagged”.

We therefore invite all citizens with a blog or a site to publish this logo and maintain it for the entire day of July 14 next. Defending the press, the tv and radio networks, the journalists and the Web, we firmly defend the basic freedom of information and the future of our democracy.

Signed:
Alessandro Gilioli
Guido Scorza
Enzo Di Frenna

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Lining up for the free tour….

March 13, 2009 in About the Blog | 2 comments

OK, I know I promised you a guided tour but I’m barely able to find the “new post” button here, much less show you guys around without fear that you’ll trip over a moving box, or that I’ll lead you out the back door instead of the kitchen or something. Stretching the metaphor too far? OK, I’ll give. No more moving metaphor. But you have to admit the photo was cute (courtesy of my own iGeek  - thank you iGeek!).

What’s new here at annimaine.com?

For starters, you’ll see it is snowing. This is my silly homage to my new homestate, and I’m leaving it up there until the last bit of snow melts. So you can feel for me shivering up here in the frozen north (wind chill today? 10º).

You will also see at the bottom of each post a cute little icon that looks like this: Bookmark and Share. Clicking on it will allow you to share my post on Twitter, Facebook, and countless other social networking sites. Please share me, often, and with many.

The coolest thing so far, and I say this as a blog reader and commenter myself, is the ability to edit your comments after you have pressed “submit” and suddenly realized you wrote “I pick my nose in the car” when you meant to write “I enjoy opera.” This new feature will allow you to go back and correct that. I added this just for you. You can thank me later, by commenting. And then by sharing this post with all your friends (see previous paragraph)!

Other features include the new and definitely improved calendar, to your left (and my right)*. It is now much easier to see which days I posted and which days I did not. And easier to click on the larger buttons. Larger buttons are good. Needing them may be the first sign of age. Uh-oh.

Additional changes, like the tags being shown at the bottom of each post instead of at the top don’t really effect you at all, and are barely even a visual change it is so insignificant. The stuff at the left should look pretty much the same, except at the bottom, instead of listing a bunch of recent posts, there is a search box. So you can search stuff. You like?

That’s about as far as I go without a seeing eye dog. As I become more familiar with new features I will point them out to you. Some of them you’ll never see (and have to do only with administrative stuff and therefore only affect me). Some, you may have to discover on your own (your own fault for reading a not so tech-savvy blogger). Some of them, if I don’t get back to work here, may never become active……

 

*Actually, just kidding. Also my left. It’s not like this is a mirror or anything.

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Cryptic Missives……

February 20, 2009 in Me-me | 6 comments

Today I got to looking through a bunch of old correspondence from my school days. Yes, those oh so many many years ago. Not just back when people the world over used to correspond via handwritten letters, I mean back when we used to write notes to each other – even when we were going to see each other within the hour or we were actually sitting across from each other while writing.

I’m sure that today those notes have been completely supplanted by text messages. And I’m equally sure that today the word “notes” probably only refers to something you attach to your Facebook page, not to those short dispatches written on a piece of scrap or notebook paper carefully folded to conceal the writings inside from the prying eyes of potential unintended recipients, or sometimes even on note cards in their own little envelopes.

First of all you have to marvel at the sheer prolific nature of all these writings. There is a ton of it. An entire banker’s box. All written in longhand. No keyboards of any kind were used here. And full English words are used (no text abbreviations). OK, so it wasn’t all dictionary perfect, after all, we were kids. But we were trying to be so grown-up and we even over-formalized some of these writings with salutations and flourishes. As if they were precious scripts to be kept through history. And, indeed they were, because all these years later I still have them. 

These were extremely important communiques, messages like:

“I love Joan and tell her please” 

I have no recollection of any person named Joan!

How about cryptic ones like this:

“Please read the other note”

What other note? What did the other note say? We’ll never know – the facts being relegated to history and this cryptic missive the only residue of whatever critical information was contained in the so-called “other note.”

And then there are those silly notes that only adolescents can possibly take seriously – and we did:

“Guess who likes me now?”

The idea then being to circle one out of the four names written underneath, one of which was Yogi Bear. Who probably also had kooties.

Or the notes upon which all your future happiness rested:

“Job doesn’t know if he likes you or not. But most likely he hates you. Well isn’t class boring.”

Nice segue, huh? Very smooth. Job, if you are reading this, I didn’t mean to drag you into my blog madness, but, hey, there you were. You didn’t write this one, so no need to feel outed in any way.

Folks, Job was my very first boyfriend, and also my very first kiss and now possibly my oldest friend. It was a relationship fraught with verbal sparring and what we thought was witty repartee, as in this note from him (sorry Job but your father should have taught you never to commit anything to paper…..):

I  will not talk to you again. 

When you talk to me then I might talk back.

Love,

Job

That he signed with love is the true measure of the boy. So no matter how angry he was at me, apparently he still “loved” me.

People, we were 12 and 13. This was serious stuff!

So do any of you still have a cache of precious notes from those early years? Do they make you laugh, do they make you cry, do they just make you cringe or do they fill you with the warm and fuzzies?

More importantly, do any of you know who Joan is or what was in that other note?

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