A few people have asked me to post links to products and people mentioned in the book.
Most of these are not safe for work but then you knew that, right?
Shopping
Gadgets & Games
Chat and Blog Spots
Adult Chat & WebCam Communites
Dating
Revolutionaries
Fetish, Adult & Alternative Adult
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The Also link has been fixed! The entire Sex Drive archive is once again available on Wired News when you click the Also by this reporter link next to the byline.
It’s been broken for months and I’ve had a lot of emails complaining about it so many thanks to Justin at Lycos who was finally given a moment to fix it. (It was my priority but not necessarily Lycos’s, y’know?)
Unfortunately this means my duds are once again available, too. Oh well. Can’t knock your socks off every week. LOL
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New column up today:
The Myth of Cybersexual Losers
I estimate that I’ve been online at least 40,150 hours since 1996. That’s a conservative estimate but I don’t want to over-share. Ahem.
I’ve known a lot of people who spend more time online than they expected to. I’ve met people who have fallen into robust online lives at the expense of their (former) offline relationships.
But among the thousands I’ve interacted with online, in professional venues and in sexual communities, I have yet to meet more than a handful who have lost interest in offline romance, love or sex. And even they admit that their disinterest probably won’t last forever.
The podcast is about the recent “hot monogamy” survey at MSNBC and Elle magazine.
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Well look at that, a book review. I didn’t even know it was happening.
And it’s a thumbs-up, too. 
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Usually when I’ve been to Las Vegas, it’s been for multiple conventions: Adult Entertainment Expo, Internext, and CES all happen simultaneously (although I hear rumors that next year that will change). And the first time I came here, it was for about 24 hours, for a friend’s wedding — after which I sneaked in Cirque de Soleil’s first horse-themed show, Cheval. Mmmm Cheval.
But this time I’m here for the Society for Technical Communicators conference, and boy, is it different. Instead of playing “engineer, engineer, engineer, porn star, engineer, porn star,” in the halls, it’s “tech writer, newlywed, tech writer, tech writer, newlywed.” And for the first time in so long I can’t remember ever doing so, I’m attending a conference merely as a student and a networker, not as press. Seriously, I can’t think of a time I’ve been to a conference just as an attendee — oh! yes! From 1994 - 1996, I attended the San Diego Comi-Con for a day or two, sometimes helping a friend at his indie booth and other times just as the friend of fans. And in 1990 I went to the first (only?) Star Trek convention in which Shatner and Nimoy appeared on stage together.
That was cool.
But here I am, dazed from my drive across the Mojave on a May afternoon (I’ve always done this drive in Dec. or Jan.) and listening to Earworm’s Rapid French language lessons. Fitting, as I’m staying in the Paris.
I enjoy the drive. This is the first time I’ve not listened to music at all — I replayed the language MP3 several times, and also took in about half an hour of Steve Martin reading his new book, The Pleasure of My Company. I now should be able to order in a French restaurant the following items: water (by glass or carafe), wine (red or white), beer, coffee (with or without milk), tea, mixed salad, bread, olives and cheese. And dessert. I can ask for and understand rudimentary directions, find my way to city center or to the airport or the bank or the post office, ask someone if they have a table for two or a table for three available and understand the answer. I skipped the numbers and clock times as too difficult to learn while driving.
Had to concentrate to hear some of the consonants above the road noise, and usually the vocabulary doesn’t “stick” with me until I find an English or Spanish equivalent. That’s easier to do while reading, but it was intereresting to have to learn aurally first, and follow up with text later. I could not get “I would like to” (”Je voudrais à”) until I stopped in Baker and ordered French fries (to help with the lesson, of course).
I’ve never taken French before but listening to Ute Lemper on Friday night made me want to.
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Hear the Noise or Block It Out. It’s Your Choice, Instantly. - New York Times
…Shure is packaging a push-to-hear switch with its E500 earphones, which cut ambient noise by 30 to 37 decibels — the equivalent of bringing airliner cabin noise down to about the level of a quiet conversation. Press it, and the music in the headphone mutes, while an external microphone picks up ambient sounds.
The E500’s will be priced at $499 with the switch when they arrive in stores this month. (The switch, which will work with all standard earphones, will also be available separately at $59.) The high price is partly because three miniature speakers are used in each earphone, a tweeter and two woofers, for better reproduction of high and low tones. …
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Seems like everyone I know is getting calls from “collection agencies” lately asking us to have so-and-so call back. I’ve been getting a recorded message from Walthrop & Abramson at least twice a day for weeks now. I might even have called to say “Hey, Maria doesn’t live here,” except that I’ve heard from several other people that they’ve been getting calls like this too. Makes me think they really just want us to call back and validate the number.
They have different numbers on the caller ID, too, but this time I noted it and called it back on Skype. The recording answered and said “If you’re calling us about our special offer, please hang up, as we will likely call you again soon. If you don’t want us to call again, enter your 10-digit phone number and press pound and we will put your number on our do-not-call list.” I waited for a while on the zero percent chance a human might pick up, clicked O, that sort of thing, but after telling me I was making wrong choices, it said Goodbye and hung up.
So I either call back as Maria, or I enter my phone number into the database, or I live with the calls. Blocking the number might help if I can block each number they use, but I think PacSBC&T charges for every number you block.
It’s like a mosquito bite (sans malaria or avian flu). Repetitive, annoying, can’t quite ignore it, but ultimately harmless invasion.
Bloodsuckers.
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Tim Berners-Lee speaks out about net neutrality, a very serious concern for all of us (not just techies), and some commenter has to nit-pick about whether Tim is “father of the internet” or not? Sheesh. That’s like dismissing the entire Gettysburg Address because Lincoln didn’t mention the foremothers. Or like not being able to tell me if the content I’ve just written for an online help system is technically correct if I send it to you in Notepad instead of producing a nicely formatted help in our standard template.
Anyway. The NY Times editorialized yesterday in support of net neutrality and even managed to describe it in layperson’s terms (mostly). This morning, Tim-Berners Lee added his voice to the growing coalition of people working to avoid turning internet control over to telecos (and how would that affect the international internet, I wonder?).
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Jedi (duh)
My yoga pants from Title 9
The roasted beet and goat cheese salad from Coffee Table (Eagle Rock)
Pilates (thanks Jesske!)
My two-year-old nephew learning to count and announcing to everyone “We have two bathrooms. We have two toilets. We have four baseballs in the garage. We have one couch. We have two dogs. We have six …”
Talking with interesting people and bringing their interesting stories to the online world
Candles
Reading
Listening to music written and performed by master musicians
My siblings’ successes in pursuing their dreams
Guppies
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I got through more of Friday’s list than I expect to, but still, how is it already Monday? Afternoon?
A reader wrote me about my pin-up girl. We bought the art but I didn’t credit the original artist; now I have, way down there in the footer. Enoch Bolles is one of the first — perhaps the first — American pin-up artist, and I thank him heartily for being so far ahead of his time in creating the sex-techy image for this site.
Obviously I rode JW all over the place this weekend. Also watched the first episode of Firefly. I have all the episodes on DVD plus the movie Serenity, but I’ve never seen ‘em. Great show. I see why the fury at its cancellation. I think Joss Whedon and I grew up reading the same books.
I’m feeling tired though. Not physically tired, but tired of fear-based stories, tired of extremes, tired of feeling whipped by whatever the latest scandalous news story is, rather than whipped up as the publishers intend. And I don’t even watch TV news!
Tired mostly of having to declare oneself as part of this camp or that camp or the other camp. Am I for porn or against it, for strong federal presence or against it, for immigration or against it, blah blah blah blah blah. Everything is so much more complex and so much more interrelated than people seem to realize. Or at least, those people who realize it aren’t the ones out there doing the whipping up.
I think I’ll go toss the ball around with the dog for a while and regain my perspective.
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