Sober (and in the light of day), she realized that…

Sober (and in the light of day), she realized that….

With thanks to Miss Whistle for leading me to the site.

Mary

My brilliant, brave and beautiful friend Mary Herczog lost a rare battle today, and to an especially unworthy opponent: breast cancer. She fought it heroically, and with great humor and style, for a dozen years. It finally got the better of her this morning.

I met Mary through an AOL message board, not long after I first joined the online world (way back in the dark internet ages of the early 90s). She was one of those people who went from online friend to 3D friend in a heartbeat. We traveled together, dined together, worked together (she dubbed me “designated drinker” for the Las Vegas Frommer’s books she wrote). We shared an affinity for Hello! Magazine and A.S. Byatt. She and her equally lovely husband Steve were fixtures at our dinner parties, and we always felt like lottery winners to be invited to their Labor Day barbecues and Oscar parties.

It’s unbelievable to me that she’s gone. I can’t quite accept that she won’t be sending another one of the characteristically wry emails with which she kept her “best beloveds” apprised not only of her health but of her travels, discoveries (especially food-related discoveries!), and not infrequently, of her pride at the accomplishments of her friends and family. She had the foresight to archive these emails online; you can read them and learn more about her at her website if you’d like.

I grieve for Steve; for Mary’s best friend Rick; for the many friends to whom Mary introduced us in real life and online; for everyone whose lives she touched who will feel her loss so keenly, and for me. As prepared as I was for her death, it’s been a gut-wrenching day. I miss her already.

Wishing you endless supplies of chocolate, jazz, and fluffy pillows, Mary. I love you.

Update February 17: Mary’s dear friend Lisa Derrick has written a wonderful obituary with more details o Mary’s richly-lived life. You can read it here.

Update February 19: Mary’s LA. Times obituary is here.

Managing Your Tweet Stream: Three Tips

A few friends on Twitter found some recent suggestions of mine about managing their Tweet streams helpful, so I thought Id present them in blog form.

You didnt catch my tips on Twitter? Not surprising. One paradox of Twitter is that the more people you follow, the less likely you are to see any given tweet. And if the people (or feeds) you follow are prolific, trying to make sense of the stream is akin to trying to sip from a fire hose.

Sure, you can use a third-party app like TweetDeck and segregate people into columns, but you can end up with so many columns, or so many people IN a column, that it doesnt really fix the problem.

One way to solve the problem is by following fewer people, but then you might miss out on information you want or need. Here are some other ways to approach it:
h21. Stop Following, Start Listing/h2
If there are groups of Twitter feeds you want to keep track of (e.g. news feeds, other students at your school, people attending a given conference, local food trucks), but you dont want or need to see everything they say in your live stream, create a list of them and then span style=text-decoration: underline;unfollow those accounts/span. For example, you can see my list of News Feeds a href=http://twitter.com/#/list/Wzzy/news-feeds target=_blankhere/a.

Get started by clicking New List on your Twitter sidebar, and then adding the accounts you want to follow in that List.

a style=text-decoration: none; href=http://sw14group.com/wzzy/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Screen-shot-2010-02-13-at-10.17.57-AM.pngimg class=aligncenter size-full wp-image-611 title=Twitter Add New List dialog src=http://sw14group.com/wzzy/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Screen-shot-2010-02-13-at-10.17.57-AM.png alt= width=401 height=314 //a

As you can see in the dialog box shown above, your list can be Public (anyone can follow your list and see whos on it), or Private (only you can see it). So if you dont want to cop to being interested in what a celebrity or pundit has to say, your secrets safe.

You dont need to reinvent the wheel, either. Check to see what lists other people have created. The public lists theyve made are shown on their Profile page, and you dont need to be following someone to follow their list. Feel free to follow someone elses list if it works for you, or to check out accounts on their lists if they look like theyd make an interesting addition to your own.

You can check your list(s) whenever you want to see what theyve tweeted recently, but you dont have to see it all in your Tweet stream. Most (if not all) 3rd party Twitter clients support Lists, so you can follow them using Tweetie as well, for example.
h22. Save a Search/h2
If youre following some accounts because of a particular interest, save that interest as a search term. Enter the search term in the box on your Twitter home page; when the results appear, click on Save this search just above the results.
a href=http://sw14group.com/wzzy/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/SavedSearch.png/a

a href=http://sw14group.com/wzzy/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/SavedSearch.pngimg class=aligncenter size-full wp-image-612 title=Saved Search src=http://sw14group.com/wzzy/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/SavedSearch.png alt= width=540 height=373 //a

That will create a saved search listing for the term, which you can click on from Twitter and most (if not all) 3rd party Twitter clients anytime you want.
h23. Check out NutshellMail/h2
At last months Twiistup conference, I learned about a new product, a href=http://nutshellmail.com/NutshellMail/a, that Ive been using ever since. NutshellMail aggregates the activity you specify – and emonly/em the activity you specify – from your social network accounts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace), and emails a digest to you at the schedule of your choosing. In other words: your social media activity, in a nutshell.
p style=text-align: center;a href=http://sw14group.com/wzzy/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Screen-shot-2010-02-13-at-10.48.49-AM.pngimg class=aligncenter size-full wp-image-626 title=NutshellMail src=http://sw14group.com/wzzy/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Screen-shot-2010-02-13-at-10.48.49-AM.png alt= width=398 height=104 //a/p
With specific regard to Twitter, you can use it to keep up with your Twitter lists, saved searches, and much more. For example, it will also give you a list of new follows and people who have unfollowed you. Click a href=http://nutshellmail.com/twitter/twitter-update.htm?iframe target=_blankhere/a for an example of what a NutshellMail looks like. You can have it sent to you once an hour or once a day; its up to you.

NutShell Mail is currently free, and it does require you to provide your username(s) and password(s) to access the account info for you, so proceed at your own risk. (emNote/em: I have no business or other relationship with NutshellMail. Im just a fan.) But its brilliant, particularly for times when you cant get to the services directly (e.g. youre behind a firewall that blocks access), and it will even let you take actions (e.g. following someone back, responding to a Facebook post) from within the email.
h2Et Voilà/h2
Using any or all of these tips should let you cull your Tweet stream a bit (or perhaps significantly). I hope you find them helpful – please leave your own Twitter management tips in the comments.

3-D glasses dress by Nicole Lindner

A clever idea (even if, as one commenter points out, the red and blue panes should be reversed for accuracy).

3-D glasses dress by Nicole Lindner – Swell 3D (with thanks to Ben for finding it).

Six Months On

For those following along at home: I had my six-month post-op visit with Dr. Friedman (my oncologist) yesterday. “You look perfectly normal,” be pronounced upon examining me for any signs of recurrence. Pause. “Well, actually, I can only speak for your vagina. Whether YOU are normal or not I’m unable to vouch for.”

Gotta love an oncologist with a sense of humor.

Just released: Curt Smith’s new single “All Is Love (featuring Zoë Keating)”

In case you don’t follow me on Twitter (and why on earth not???), here’s a tip: The new single from Tears for Fears co-founder Curt Smith, “All Is Love (featuring Zoë Keating),” is available for the next few days as a free MP3 download from AmazonMP3 (U.S. only – it’s an Amazon U.S. thing). It’s awfully good. Click below to grab it.

Shagadelic, baby

My favorite new iPhone app is PhotoTropedelic by Larry Weinberg ($1.99). I’ll say upfront that v1.0 auto-adds a credit to your photos – BOO for a paid app –  but the developer  heard the cries of his public and has submitted a 1.1 revision which he promises will eiminate this annoyance.

Here are a few originals and the PhotoTropedelic versions I created of them. Click  each one for a larger image. For a one-button photo modifying app, it’s pretty sweet, don’t you think?

How the International Medical Alliance is Assisting the Haiti Relief Effort

… and how you can, too.

I received this email late on Saturday from Lee Kagan, our personal physician and longtime friend:

Dear Friends:

The photo below was taken today (Saturday, Jan. 16) at the hospital in Jimani, Dominican Republic, where a medical team from the International Medical Alliance (www.imaonline.org) is now working. The town sits an hour east of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, right on the frontier. Refugees fleeing the chaos in the Haitian capital are streaming over the border into Jimani. Doctors with the IMA who are there describe Haitians with crush injuries arriving at the hospital in the backs of dump trucks. The hospital and medical personnel are overwhelmed. This poor rural community where IMA has operated clinics for the past twelve years is now at the epicenter of an emerging refugee crisis. The situation is becoming desperate.

Patty and I have worked with the IMA in Jimani annually for the past two years. The people who run the IMA are the same folks we worked with in NOLA after Katrina. They have operated ongoing clinics for years in Kenya, the Dominican Republic, New Orleans, and elsewhere. There dedication is inspiring. Every dime donated to IMA goes straight to patient care. There is essentially no overhead, no paid staff.

You all look at the news. I don’t have to tell you how desperate the situation in Haiti is. Please consider making a donation to the International Medical Alliance to support the work they do. If you’re looking for an organization that will put your charitable dollars directly to work helping those in need we can tell you that this one does just that. You can donate right on line at their website. (www.imaonline.org) or send a check to the address posted at the site. The website also has some moving photos and written accounts of what they are up against in Jimani.

We are going back to the DR/Haiti frontier next month with an IMA team including students and faculty from the Mayo Clinic Medical School. We are also strongly considering making an additional, earlier trip (in about a week) to join our friends and colleagues who are already there hard at work. We’ll let you know our plans.

Thank you for your support. Our best to you all.

Lee and Patty

Heartbreak

A dear friend, who’s three years my junior, learned yesterday that the breast cancer she’s fought fearlessly for a dozen years will soon have the last laugh. She sent a typically wry email around to announce this news to her “Best Beloveds.”

In it, she muses about how best to use her remaining time. “Does one keep moisturizing,” she wonders, “even if future wrinkles may no longer be an issue? Which books should I read: old favorites or nifty sounding new ones?”

I’m devastated.

The Known Universe, Scientifically Rendered For All to See | American Museum of Natural History News

A welcome, perhaps even necessary, bit of perspective as we ring in the New Year, this short film vividly depicts the Universe as scientists best know it. Produced by Michael Hofman and directed by Carter Emmart, it’s well worth six minutes of your time. Click left or below to view.

The Known Universe Scientifically Rendered For All to See | American Museum of Natural History News.