Hours after the engagement

As some of you may already know, I got engaged last week. I proposed to the smart, funny, gorgeous Elizabeth Harding last Saturday morning after a walk along the lake. I was delighted when she responded: “Yes, I will marry you.”

There is no date yet for the wedding, and we are not in any particular rush to set one.

Elizabeth is a Unitarian Universalist minister. Right now, she is consulting minister at Prairie Circle Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Grayslake, Ill. You can read some of her sermons here.

Interestingly, Elizabeth and I have known each other — after a fashion — since we were 4 years old. We attended the Inter-American Magnet School from preschool through the eighth grade. I can safely say that we were not close back then. If we ever exchanged more than a few sentences of conversation during those 10 years, I’ve entirely forgotten them.

But you seemingly cannot maintain any presence on Facebook for long without your past creeping up on you. In this case, it was a benevolent creeping. Once the number of Inter-American grads who had connected on Facebook reached a tipping point, it was clearly time to reunite, albeit unofficially. Elizabeth did not attend the first get-together, but she did make it out for a second reunion last June. Lucky me!

As we milled around Navy Pier before heading to the Reagle Beagle (which I recommend for kitsch value alone), I explained to Elizabeth that I had taken to using Twitter to explore important topics such as my need for a system to tell apart my black dress socks from my navy blue ones. She laughed.

You know, when a pretty girl laughs at your jokes, she has a way of getting your hopes up. I am constantly on my guard against false hope. As a Cubs fan, I’ve developed a kind of self-protective hope allergy, especially after 1984 and 2003. But in this case, I let my hopes get the better of me. I let myself get carried away. I chose wisely.

So now are we engaged. We are, most assuredly, carried away. Where shall we go? I look forward to the adventure of finding out.

In Slate magazine, Farhad Manjoo writes that “it’s hard to make an honest claim that [Web ad-blocking] programs are ethical,” though he doesn’t bother to rebut head-on the perfectly valid arguments he mentions (“it’s my browser and my computer, so I can choose what I want to download”).

Steven D. Schroeder at Sturgeon’s Law does an excellent job of taking apart Manjoo’s claim. I also tackled the argument back in 2005, here. By the way, if Manjoo thinks ad-blocking plug-ins are problematic, he’ll probably compare the folks behind Readability to Charles Manson.

In all fairness, I should follow up my March post offering helpful tips for pedestrians by noting one critically important tip for drivers: Do not — I repeat, not — paint your fingernails while driving.

I’d say the same also probably goes for painting your toenails.

Things that no longer aggravate me:

• Lousy weather
• The Cubs’ losing ways
• Heavy traffic
• People who think they’re the coolest, man
• Travel delays

Things that still aggravate me:

• Politics and politicians
• People who just know how others should live
• Technology mishaps
• People who do not pick up after their dogs
• Alarm clocks
• Deadlines

And, of course, there are plenty of things that I find disturbing, deeply saddening or incomprehensible — murder-suicide, child abuse, racism, homophobia, etc. — but that don’t aggravate me, per se, in the sense that I don’t get worked up about them.

So I’ve been playing around with a couple of new Web 2.0 services and they seem to fall prey to a problem I’ve seen elsewhere — a total lack of consistency about how or whether to capitalize Web site or service names.

You can check out my new profiles at the online music-sharing site Blip.fm and the social media aggregator FriendFeed. Or wait — is that how I should capitalize their names?

Note the logos. Blip.fm uses mixed capitalization and FriendFeed lowercases the whole thing, despite how the name appears in their Web site copy. I know that for Web companies there’s a special complication in that the name always appears lowercase in the address bar no matter what the company’s official style is. For that reason I’ve chosen, for example, to call this site kboreilly.com, instead of KBOReilly.com.

Web firms are far from being alone in engaging in this regrettable practice, though they seem to be especially prone to it. Lots of companies do it; why, even think tanks do it. A long-time offender:

I guess the blame really lies with the folks who design the logos, who apparently cannot find a way to make mixed-case look good or at least deceive themselves into believing it does in order to appease style Nazis such as myself.

Photo by misternils (CC 2.0)

The red hand means don’t walk. I know, I know. If you squint hard enough it kind of looks like it’s waving you forward, but do not let your eyes deceive you. Wait for the little walking figure. I know it looks like he’s frozen in place and not really walking. You probably think it applies only to those sick people from the movie “Awakenings.”

Or, you think, “Well, the hand is not really red, it’s kind of orangeish and, gee, who knows what the heck that means? I’ll just dart into traffic.”

No. No. No. Just think of that old dance routine the Supremes did when singing “Stop! In the Name of Love.” You remember it, don’t you? When they said, “Stop!” they put their hands up. No, their hands weren’t orangey-red, I’ll give you that much. But still, it was the same basic gesture as what’s displayed on the sign and I feel safe in saying that it was not meant to secretly indicate, “Please walk toward me, putting yourself and drivers in serious danger.”

And another thing: You know those white lines that are usually at each intersection? They are there for a reason. They are called “crosswalks” and you are supposed to use them to “walk across” the street. I know, I know. It sounds complicated. But just as we figured out the red hand thing we can do this too. Now, you might think, “But, the place I want to go is in the middle of the street — so I’ll just cross right here.” But here’s the thing. Despite all your mentalist efforts, there are no temporary magical crosswalks painted around you as you jaywalk.

In fact, drivers do not expect you to be there. And they may hit you. And when they do, you will be seriously hurt or killed and some poor schlub of a driver will have to live with the guilt for the rest of his life. “Aha!” you say. “But I’m a Very Important Person who will use the 30 seconds I save by crossing against the light or jaywalking to cure cancer.” Uh-huh. And yet you haven’t. And the odds are you’ll get hit by a car before you do. Jackass.

Information overload — news overload, to be more precise — can be a problem, though it is a wonderful problem to have.

The main reason people read “the news” — is to satisfy a general sense of obligation to “know what’s going on.” It is to avoid that terrible sense of embarrassment you might feel if you had no idea what a co-worker was talking about when she asked, “Can you believe what those monsters did in Mumbai?”

This need, as well as the desire to follow news of deep personal interest such as how your favorite stock or sports team is doing, used to be easily satisfied by reading the daily newspaper. Now that you could probably spend hours a day researching your stock or your sports team, the question of when enough is enough is highly pertinent. Each new link seems to ask, “Do you want more information?” How do you think about answering that question? How can news organizations help you decide the answer to that question?

Daniel Luzer attempts to take on the issue in a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review called “Linked Out.” The gist:

In mid-October, I decided to spend a day following the news through hyperlinks only. I followed every link I could find. I stuffed myself full of news to understand the potential and problems of the hyperlink. How much does the hyperlink matter? Is it an incidental addition to news, or does it actually change the way people consume information?

To describe this approach as conceptually stillborn would be polite. To describe it as idiotic and moronic would be impolite, but perhaps more apt. The methodology is akin to studying urban sprawl by randomly taking every highway off ramp for a day or consumerism by walking into every store on a street. It is a pointless gimmick that does not in any way resemble how real people behave, or tell us anything useful about the subject at hand.

So, I’ve come to your Web site. Looks interesting. No, I’m not going to bookmark it, because then I’d have to remember (1) where I bookmarked it and (2) to click on the bookmark. What I’d love to do is add your RSS feed to my news aggregator of choice. But why do so many news sites make that a daunting prospect?

For example, I’ve heard good things about the pro-am/citizen journalism Web site, Chi-Town Daily News. But check out the RSS page.  There are more than 20 feed options, and not a one of them is a general site feed or “top news” or “top headlines” or “front page” or whatever. And worse, many of the feeds carry vague titles such as “Thesis 11″ and “Reality of my surroundings.” So, which feed do I subscribe to?

Gapers Block is another Chicago news site guilty of the same sin. No general or “top news” or “main” feed. And would you have guessed the “Mechanics” feed covers politics, not auto repair? Yeah, me neither. (That should not be confused, of course, with “Transmission,” which covers music.) Site editor Andrew Huff says there is some sort of technical hurdle to providing a general site feed. I take him at his word, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the fact that I can subscribe to the Boston Globe’s Celtics and Red Sox coverage without getting the rest of its news content. But check out how logical the Globe’s RSS feeds page is. There are ways of doing this well.

Sites should make syndication quick, easy and intuitive. Is that too much to ask?

By the way, Russ Smith’s new Web site, Splice Today, does something I find odd for this Web day and age. It prominently asks users to “make Splice your home page.” Isn’t that awfully presumptuous for a brand new Web site? Most users are already attached to a page that’s been their starting site for a while, often years. It’s sort of like someone proposing marriage on the first date.

Update: Chi-Town Daily News head honcho Geoff Dougherty tells me the all-news feed shows up in the “subscribe to this page” option now available in many Web browsers’ URL bars (not mine, however). Nevertheless, the RSS feeds page still could use some clarity given that many users are interested in drilling down to more specific syndication options.

As some of you may already know, Karen and I got divorced last month after two and a half years of separation and more than six years of marriage. I’m not sure what explication I’m willing — or able, really — to provide on the matter.

I can say that we are still on very good terms. Indeed, we carpool together to work on those mornings I manage to get myself out of bed on time.

It was 10 years ago this fall that Karen and I met online, back when that was an oddity. Despite the turn of our tale, I think it’s appropriate to note — on this Thanksgiving Day — how grateful I am, and how grateful I always will be, that Karen came into my life.