Sunday, April 10, 2011

Getting through the past two weeks


I'll begin by getting right to the point; our dog Logan died very unexpectedly in her sleep almost two weeks ago. While she was around 13 1/2 years young, it's hard to imagine that it was "her time". She was just too active, too alert, too happy and had just received a clean bill of health from the vet the night before.

I wrote an article loosely about dogs and beer, and more specifically (and therapeutically for me), that I thought you might like to read over at The Washington Times.

It became more clear to me this weekend that our ability to be social and use "social web tools" is ever-more imperfect partly due to the numerous ways in which we can be social without seeing each other face-to-face.

Make sense? Maybe not. Allow me to explain.

I've been writing here at The Brew Lounge (more informally) since 2005 and The Washington Times (more formally) since 2010. During the past 6 years, email has become much less reliable as texting, facebooking, and tweeting have become much more prevalent.

I've actually begun to learn how to best find someone based on their preferences. Some people are still exclusively phone people, eschewing most Internet-based communication tools. There aren't a bunch of them, but yet still some where that is the only way I can find them.

There are others who still cling to email, but a growing many others who look to Facebook first (status changes, messaging, etc). Twitter has its own loyal following, though I confess that I "get" this vehicle much less than any other.

I've seen, and been part of, text messages that turn into text conversations that nearly turn into textbooks.

So when our Logan died two weeks ago, I knew that my writing would take a back seat for a while.

But, how to communicate it? I wasn't going to issue a press release. And I wasn't going to waste a lot of time on it. Yet I know a lot of people who are interested in knowing about such things, particularly those that have been a part of our - and Logan's - life for a long time.

I figured that the most personal approach would be via my personal page on Facebook. In this era, trying to figure how to get to the most people most easily is not all that easy.


Then, at The Drafting Room yesterday, I learned that by not covering off Twitter and The Brew Lounge (here), there were plenty that felt badly that they weren't aware of what had happened. I also learned of Facebook's recent default news feed presentation that likely obscured my status update from many people's views.

Anyway, enough kvetching about all this techie stuff. It's a learning process how best to communicate in these changing times.

This note today was my last effort to bring everyone up-to-speed with what I've been up to and to provide a link to the article at The Washington Times Communities section that I published yesterday.

Also, posted more pictures in my public Picasa gallery if you care to see more.

And...to give your dog (or cat, or whatever) a little extra treat today in honor of Logan's good life.

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