Archive for December, 2007

Here it is, the 2008 new year card.  I hope you got one in the mail.  If you didn’t, I apologize for the oversight.  Be sure to send your postal address, there are a couple of blanks still left from the edition.

Colophonically, I should state that the fountain is in the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, and the water is the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic, churned up by the ferryboat.  See other Alhambra-related posts.

I’ve written, sealed and stamped 53 of my new year cards. I have 43 to go, plus 17 more for which I have no postal address. I’ve cut the no address crowd in half using Google and superpages. I’ve been using Apple’s Address Book – oddly not called “iAddress” – for want of a better database and I’m running into a problem that can’t be all that new or unique.

Many of my friends are married or otherwise coupled, and some of them have children. I like to address the card to the whole family, as in “Adam, Betty, Carl and Diane Example” so I’m forced to fill in the “first name” field with “Adam, Betty, Carl and Diane.” That’s hardly a giant hassle, but some of my friends have a modern mixture of last names in their family. Leaving the kids out for the moment, that would be “Adam Example and Betty Sample” which leaves me making the couple’s first name “Adam Example and Betty” and their last name “Sample” – hardly fair to either.

I suppose the address book software is designed from a business point of view – it has a field for “assistant” and the ability to handle multiple “work” and “home” addresses and phone numbers – where your contact is a single individual who might have a family you know socially, but it’s not designed to capture that in a useful way.

My friends are typically professional couples, (yes, I scrambled the names, do not adjust your set or your dosage) each individual worthy of a card in my virtual rolodex (does anybody have those anymore?) but I sure don’t want to print up two labels or send two new year cards to such couples. Is that too much to ask of an address book application?

I have faith in software. Software pays my bills. Can’t software solve this problem? Am I just doing this wrong?

It’s been a while since I posted a word for word’s sake. This one is dedicated to, well, you know who you are. I’ll keep the tone positive and leave it at that.  And besides, mendacious people hardly ever read this blog.

Google Maps’ Street View feature – wherein they send car-mounted cameras tooling around the streets of an area and use whiz-bang technology to stitch the photos together into an eye-level view of everything along the streets – has come to Boston. So, naturally I poked around, looking at my home, my friends’ homes, places of personal note, and so forth. The images are obviously not live, but I still got a strange feeling when I was able to spot my own car parked across the street from my home.

I can see by the shadows that the picture was taken mid-day and by the foliage that it was in a more temperate season. The fact that I’m parked near my home not at work suggests a weekend or holiday.  The whole thing summons up creepy echoes of Rear Window or Blow Up or some other paranoid story in which a crime is revealed through some form of semi-illicit surveillance – or is it?

As a follow-on to recent discussion about the paper accoutrements of pre-digital life, I sent my mother to the post office in the freezing cold to buy me 100 self-adhesive stamps today for my new year cards.  OK, she was going anyway and I did give her money and it really wasn’t that cold, but you get the idea.  One hundred stamps might well be the last I ever buy, however.  I’ve been reviewing my list of those nice or naughty enough to merit a new year card, and I have postal addresses for a scant 40% of them.  I’ve received a few holiday cards already and mined those for return addresses.  There are the people at work – or who have left that place of work – for whom I never acquired postal details.  There are the people whose “we’ve moved” notices I foolishly discarded.  I blame myself for poor database maintenance, but I also blame digital life.  Asking for a postal address seems almost awkwardly intrusive and suggestive, like asking for a clothing size in order to buy an unwelcome gift.

What now?  I’ve had some success using internet phonebook type sites to suss out postal addresses, I’ve asked a few people outright, I’m sending a couple of cards to business addresses when I don’t have homes.  Should I create an electronic version of my traditional paper card and simply email the placeless digerati in my life?  Seems like throwing in the towel, much like I feel about the flimsy drugstore produced photo-cards with the holiday borders wrapped around the cute kids, pets and families. 

I guess time will tell.  I really want paper to win this one, but I think I see the writing on the virtual walls.