Not enough ears

Contemporary technology poses an anatomical challenge.

I've been thinking about the interplay between my ears and my eyes lately. Sometimes I wear contact lenses, sometimes I don't. If I'm wearing contacts, I still need to wear sunglasses or reading glasses or reading glasses that morph into sunglasses. That's one set of temples atop my ears. No problem.

If I'm wearing glasses, it gets a little more complex. I am both astigmatic and far-sighted. (So far, laser surgery can't fix that, so it's not an option.) The lenses for my glasses are hideously expensive, so I didn't want to invest in prescription sunglasses too. I figured I could turn them into sunglasses with those little clip-on things. It didn't take me long to figure out that if I happen to be driving around, or have long fingernails or arthritic fingers (all of which I've done or had, at various times), it's almost impossible to get the clips fixed in the right position. Of course there are the cheap plastic ones that flip up and down, but when they're in the up position, they look ridiculous. Consequently, I decided on a pair of sunglasses that go right over your regular glasses. They're actually decent looking, if you like Hollywood style. But now I have two sets of temples squished between my ears and my skull. It's already an ouch.

I have pierced ears, and it's unusual for me to leave the house without earrings, even though I often forget to put on a watch and end up using my cell phone to find out what time it is. But the cell also adds to the equipment I'm supposed to schlepp around on my ears. Most of the time that I'm using my cell, I'm driving or shopping - activities for which I really need my hands. So I use my Bluetooth headset, which stays in place because it has a silicone attachment that fits in the same uncomfortable place as the temples of my glasses and/or sunglasses. Also, if I'm wearing big dangly earrings (the fashion conscious refer to them as chandeliers), there is a theoretical risk that they will get tangled in the functional parts of the Bluetooth. So far that hasn't happened, since I seldom wear chandeliers if I'm not going someplace special.

Still any of these combinations are at least possible, if uncomfortable. The problem is that I now have an iPod, and I love it. So at the same times that I'm likely to be using the Bluetooth, I want to listen to music. How I might do this totally escapes me, so I have to make a choice.

It's a good thing I'm not deaf.

I'm a Technorata

Now that I have a bit more time to blog, I might as well attract some readers. So I've just signed onto Technorati, which gives blog freaks tools for tracking their favorites. You do this by putting a little bit of code into a post, which produces a link like this:

Technorati Profile

When I see this sort of thing, it seems like a million years ago (actually it was 1994) when I built my first site and proudly displayed a graphic proclaiming me a bona fide member of the HTML Writers Guild. Sounds a bit quaint now, doesn't it?

Encountering my internet past

Nothing can better illustrate the passage of time than the knowledge that you're now on your third domain. But even if your hard disk has crashed, taking with it the remnants of sites past, all is not lost! There's still the WayBack Machine, the amazing internet archive. Sure enough, most of my first site, Me and My Bright Ideas, was captured and is still readable, if you don't mind missing images. (A good reason to use the alt tag!) I built this site when I was learning HTML and, unaware that there was such a thing as an editor, I coded it by hand, character by character. Tedious, but a good learning experience. You can see what's left of it here.

At the same time that I was learning HTML, I was teaching myself Photoshop by illustrating amusing material that I innocently filched from other sites. Courtesy of the WayBack machine, here's my all-time favorite, sans images. It's a collection of answers to Sunday school tests. If your sense of humor is anything like mine, you'll find it hysterically funny.

1. The first book of the Bible is Guinness's in which Adam and Eve were created from an apple.

2. Noah's wife was Joan of Ark.

3. Lot's wife was a pillar of salt by day and a ball of fire by night.

4. Samson slayed the Philistines with the axe of the apostles.

5. Unleavened bread is bread made with no ingredients.

6. Moses went to the top of Mt. Cyanide to get the 10 Commandments.

7. The seventh commandment is, "thou shalt not admit adultery."

8. Joshua led the Hebrews in the battle of Geritol.

9. Solomon had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.

10. Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption.

11. The people who followed Jesus were called the 12 decibels.

12. The epistles were the wives of the apostles.

13. One of the opossums was St. Matthew.

14. Salome danced in seven veils in front of King Harrod.

15. Paul preached acrimony, which is another name for marriage.

16. David fought the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in Biblical times.
17. The Jews had trouble throughout their history with unsympathetic Genitals.

18. A Christian should have only one wife. This is called monotony.

(Maybe I'll redo the graphics for this page; and actually put it up on besidemyself. It's too hysterically funny to consign to bottom of a blog, which is where this post will be some day.)

My next site was built for a little business I started when I was in Westchester (NY) before I went off to manage the Martindale-Hubbell Web site from its lovely suburban New Jersey location. (I didn't much like New Jersey.) The best part of it was a little arrow that flew around the page, but the DHTML seems to have been lost in the archiving, and it now just sits over on the left side of the page, doing nothing at all. But it does occur to me that my fondness for a certain coral color has persisted for some time; it's what I use on the front page of besidemyself.com. Most of the links in the archive still work, and you can take a look at the teeny teeny type I used for this short-lived presence on the Web.