SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #235 New Moon of January 30, 2014 Contents copyright 2014 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See the Creative Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* Groundhog Day is nigh as I start this, but will be past by the time you see it. The holiday that will be big in the media will probably be Valentine's Day, perhaps mixed with Presidents' Day. When I think of Presidents' Day I get a mental image of something dull and gray and boring, not much of a festive holiday at all. This probably comes from my long-ago school days. Back then there were two official February holidays, Lincoln's birthday on February 12 and Washington's birthday on February 22. They had not yet been consolidated into Presidents' Day and moved to always be on Monday. These holidays may have been good for a day off from school preceded by an assembly with some speeches and such to break the normal classroom routine, but they were not something I looked forward to like the year-end holidays of a couple of months earlier. Neither were they a reminder that the school year would eventually be ending. That happy day was still far in the future. They were little more than just another history lesson. So even though days in February were often as not bright and sunny, my memories of those February holidays feel kind of dull and gray. ********************* There was also Valentine's Day. It had the advantage of being kind of festive and playful, even though we didn't get the day off. In elementary school we did a Valentine box every year. This was a big cardboard box with a slot in the top, all decorated with hearts and such. We were supposed to take valentines (probably mostly store-bought by our parents), address them to various other kids of the opposite sex, put them in envelopes, and drop them in the box. I don't recall whether we signed them or sent them anonymously. There may have been some of each. Then on Valentine's Day the teacher would open the box and hand the valentines out to whoever they were addressed to. We would count up how many we had gotten, and show around any that we found especially interesting. It was all a game, and I doubt that any of us really knew what it meant to adults. We all knew that eventually boys and girls were supposed to pair up and fall in love and get married, and that all this may have had something to do with where babies came from, but few if any of us knew how it worked. And even if we did, it wasn't the kind of thing you were supposed to talk about. There are lots of subjects that are discussed pretty openly now that just weren't talked about back then. As I recall, grades in which most of the kids were old enough to know how to make babies didn't do Valentine boxes. Does anybody still do Valentine boxes nowadays? ********************* While we're reminiscing, I should mention that I did walk to school through snow once. According to the Wikipedia article on "Snow in Florida" the day I walked to school through snow was probably February 14, 1958. But I didn't get to walk back home through snow because it had all melted by the time school let out. No, I wasn't barefoot. I had shoes. And there were no hills to speak of along the way. So I definitely had it easier than my parents and grandparents. ********************* Talking about how we walked to school through snow leads to thoughts of people grumping about how the younger generation is doing all kinds of things wrong. But then I'm reminded that all present-day natural languages (as opposed to constructed ones like Esperanto and Klingon) are the result of generations of people speaking and writing older languages badly. So getting stuff wrong may not be all bad. ********************* This rainy season has been rather dry, as have the previous two or three, so they're talking about ways to conserve water. We've been through this before, and one bit of advice that always seems to come up is not to flush toilets as often. So I'm wondering if anyone has looked at those automated toilet-flushing gizmos found in many public restrooms. In my experience it's not unusual for an automatic toilet to flush several times in a single session, often before I've done anything worthy of even one flush. On the other hand one person I mentioned this to said that she'd never noticed this happening. So are the things more sensitive to some people than to others, perhaps due to differences in skin temperature or clothing or tendency to move around? What has your experience been? And assuming they really do flush more often than is really necessary, can they be set to be less sensitive? (I did a writeup on this in a previous issue of Silicon Soapware. See http://www.well.com/~bubbles/SS0175.txt and scroll down to the second topic, not counting the header stuff.) ********************* Back on anniversaries, we're coming up on fifty years since the Beatles appeared live on US prime-time TV, on the Ed Sullivan show. I looked the performances up on YouTube. I'd forgotten how much things had changed since 1964. For one thing, their hair wasn't all that long by today's standards, although their style of combing it down over the forehead may have made it seem longer. Also, they were wearing suits and ties. That's still the norm in some musical genres, but not in rock. Those weren't the only things that have changed since then, but they were the most obvious ones I noticed while watching the videos. ********************* Early February (records differ as to the exact date) also marks 21 years since I got my first "real" Internet email address: bubbles@well.sf.ca.us, since changed to bubbles@well.com. Although I'd had a sort of an email address on Prodigy before that, it didn't feel like a "real" Internet address the way the WELL address did. Even if we could exchange messages with people on other services, the emphasis was on communicating with other Prodigy users. And although I don't recall details, I sort of have a feeling that it was kind of "dumbed down" for non-tech folks. Whatever the actual details, it feels like the Prodigy email somehow didn't count. So I count the WELL address as my first "real" email address. ********************* Valentine's Day reminds me of this: Together Together -- Feeling each other's warmth with only skin for separation. Little tricks with fingers and tongue in strategic spots and private places Or just lying there In each other's arms, Legs entangled -- Intertwining of bodies. Together -- Enjoying sharing whatever thoughts arise -- Intertwining of minds. Together -- Face to face Nose to nose Lips to lips Eye to eye Gazing into each other's depths -- Intertwining of souls. Thomas G. Digby written 0330 hr 11/03/76 typed 0030 hr 11/06/76 entered 1655 hr 4/11/92 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware you can tell which list you are on by looking at the email headers. 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