It all started with my original blog at LiveJournal, which was to be the mis-adventures of a mid-40’s divorced woman. Since I met DH almost immediately, that went by the wayside, and the blog eventually moved here when I set up Art of the Firebird and became a general-purpose blog.

Then I discovered Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon as places to keep track of interesting web sites, and of course I was going to share what I found. Of course I had to claim my blog on Technorati, and then more and more interesting sites came along to check out. When I found about Tumblr, I thought, “Perfect! A place for all the little snippets and tidbits I wanted to save and share.” So I set up not one, but two Tumblr sites, one for personal stuff and one for techie-related stuff.

I resisted Twitter and its imitators for a very long time. But once I started seeing more and more information about claiming your “social identity,” it was time to claim mine everywhere it could be claimed. After all, I can’t let anyone else out there be known as “Art of the Firebird” if I’m going to use that as my artistic identity!

All that has created a monster!  When I finally put together a lifestream aggregator and put every site where I have an account (at least every one I could remember) on there, it was, OMG, 42 different places and counting!  Eeek!!!

So how the hell do I keep up with ALL of them?  I think I don’t. I use tools like Ping.FM (which is a godsend!) for the status updates; the lifestream aggregators like Profilactic and FriendFeed and Lifestream.FM work pretty much on their own; some of them just barely exist and don’t get any attention. The ones that do are the ones I really care about, or the ones that are may eventually be good for marketing. I figure as time goes on, I will keep trying things out and the ones that work for me will be ones that get some attention; the ones that don’t work will at least not be claimable by someone else using my identity.

Who would have thought five years ago that social media would be so, well, pervasive?

Not too long ago, Twiggy, one of my fellow lampworking-forum members, said to me:

I don’t know how you keep all your online stuff up to date, run a forum and actually get to melt any glass.

As I told her:

Ha ha ha. The secret is I DON’T do it all as well as I look like I do. I don’t keep my online stuff up to date very well. About once a month or so I will go over to each site and play with it a bit so that it LOOKS like I’m keeping it up. I’m really bad about consistently listing stuff on Etsy because I’m finding it to be a PITA. If I had a bit bigger name I’d just set up a shopping cart on my website and list most stuff there, just a few things elsewhere to make myself visible.

Luckily I don’t depend on this for my living!

Also, since I have a full-time job as a computer science professor, I can call a lot of the computer stuff, including running the forum, “professional development” and kill two birds with one stone that way. Sneaky, eh?

I learned how to fake “having it together” long ago.  Of course, there are times when the facade crumbles — if you want to come visit me, you better be coming to see ME, not a clean house!  Yep, one of my tricks is that housework is a low priority.

It’s also still true that there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything I’d like to do.  So I give little bits of my attention to this, and that, and the other, here and there.  Every thing gets its little bit of my life; nothing gets all it wants.  It’s all compromise, and it works because it has to — because it’s how I work.

With the Russian invasion of Georgia (the one on the Eurasian continent, not the one on the North American continent), and Google Maps’ colossal blunder in locating the correct Georgia, we once again are going to be subjected to comments such as these.

• From Mark O’Neill, contributing writer at Geeks Are Sexy:

you’ve probably still got the crazies in Georgia, USA hiding in the bushes with their shotguns waiting for the Russian tanks to come rumbling past muttering to themselves “that Google map thingie said they were coming!  Gotta stay vigilant!

• From freebsdgirl, commenter at Valleywag:

I *do* know what it’s like in the south, and the post that was made on Yahoo! Answers was completely typical.

Do you honestly think that people in the South aren’t racist? Think again. What does MARTA stand for again? Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta, or so I’ve been told *many* times. Just because whites are a minority in Georgia (ed. note: not according to current Census Bureau figures) doesn’t mean that they aren’t making all the comments their grandparents made when they think no one is listening. Also, when is the last time you saw a Mexican in Georgia in a suit?

Sigh.  Here we go again with the stereotypes.  Apparently they think it’s okay, though, because this is a Politically Correct stereotype, the Ignorant Redneck Southerner.  Sorry, folks, your high-mindedness is badly misplaced.  It’s NOT okay.  Bigotry is bigotry, just as ugly when it’s PC as when it’s not.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going into the studio to do a little cleaning while Gretchen Wilson’s cranked up on my stereo…

Once again DH comes through with an idiosyncratically perfect romantic gift for Valentine’s Day:

Seriously — it is!   Over Christmas break the techno-idiots in our IT department at school managed to totally mung up my computer, meaning it took most of two days to fix it back to where it needed to be.  This will go on the wall right beside my monitor, yes indeed!

Not only are my tunes working, but I spent a couple of hours tonight and got my new Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet working.  Now THAT was a non-trivial task.  All the necessary steps of downloading modules, building them, getting files into the right directories, editing system files to recognize the hardware, and so on were documented out there on the Web, but there was no one place where it was spelled out completely and step by step.  So I put all the pieces together with much trial and error and a bit of gnashing of teeth, but in the end worked out the puzzle and got it working.

Next comes the REAL challenge — learning to use it, along with The Gimp!!