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A little family of birds made a home in the little space between our roof and the gutter. The chicks twit happily when their mother comes back with lunch, and it can be quite a noisy but happy affair.
Some may consider such a nest as an inconvenience, but I’m just happy to have a little bit of nature near me. It is the upside of living in the middle of nowhere, and it is one of the things that make my life here bearable.
Snow?! In April?! Mad weather!
Before I moved to the US I considered some of the difficulties I experienced during the early days of my previous relocations. I remember communication as being the major problem I had when I first moved from Israel to the UK. Back in 1996, international phone calls were still expensive and not everyone had constant access to the Internet and related applications. I remember that during the first year my mum used to call me every Friday at the same time, and I had to make sure I was in my room to accept her call. At that time, few of my friends made their first steps into Instant Messaging, and with many of the others connection was lost forever.
My next move was easier. Email and IM were everywhere, and after moving back to Israel, I could still keep in touch with many of my friends in the UK. Eventually, most of those connections also faded away, but this was more due to changing personal directions than technological difficulties.
My contemplations before moving to the US, and my consultation with friends who were in similar positions, brought up the conclusion that these days technology helps solving the issue. There’s email, IM, VoIP and so many other communication technologies that can help me keep in touch. Yet, after my move, I realized that this abundance of technologies only creates a new problem. There are so many channels, that it is impossible to find the one that enables to keep in touch. Every friend has a different preferred channel, and it is difficult to follow. Some prefer Facebook and other Twitter. Although I am registered to both, I find it difficult to use any of them as a personal communication tool.
I currently have accounts on most of the popular IM applications (including MSN, Yahoo!, GTalk, Skype and ICQ), I’m listed on multiple social networking sites (Facebook, Linkedin, last.fm, Flickr and Twitter) and I have multiple email addresses. I try to follow all of them through Digsby (which I highly recommend), but I can’t see the wood for the trees. How can I find my friends and keep in touch? Which one should I follow to maintain personal communications with my friends? This even becomes more difficult as flavours change and my friends move from one channel to another quite frequently.
I am guessing that my friends may experience a similar problem when trying to keep in touch with me. Allow me to suggest technical solution for that: a “Universal Communication Preference Profile” or UCPP. This new protocol will list the types of communications, possibly with values that enable all my friends to know what the best way to contact me would be. Here’s mine:
Please help me develop my new standard, and let me know what other preferences should be listed. I would really be happy to see other people’s UCPP pages too – it would make keeping in touch so much easier!
