Tumblr, facebook, Twitter, and reams of other organizations provide canvases for us to share, share, and share. To top all of that off, I have gotten myself involved in activities and hobbies that no longer leave me time to blog as I frequently as I once did — and I don’t really need to.

The people that matter most to me are on facebook and see snippets of my life, as I see theirs. My brother and I have a photography business on the side with its own blog and we both spend lots of time on flickr.

I just don’t have the time to write down my thoughts about movies, theatre, and books with the same obsessiveness I once had. I’d like to, but I like too many things.

So what the heck am I going on about?

I’m saying that this blog is still a part of my life, but it’s a much smaller part than it once was because I share my thoughts in lots of other places. This is probably a good thing too because as I become more famous and sought-after for my opinions on movies, theatre, and books, it becomes more dangerous to have my life laid out in a single public forum on the internet.

At this point, I’m thinking that I’ll focus this blog more towards my experiences in dentistry. I’ll probably throw some interesting personal-life stuff in every now and then, but those of you that truly are interested in my personal life (god knows why you’d be) are already my friends on other sites where I expose more of myself anyway.

Refocusing has involved pausing my twitterfeed aggregation and limiting my use of Twitter. Facebook’s changes over the last year, along with a really useful RSS app, allows my brother and me to do things that we could only do in convoluted ways via Twitter in the past.

Times change and technology follows suit. Although the infrequent posts to this blog leave me appearing stifled, I am in fact the complete opposite because of these continuous innovations in the social media landscape.

© Periapex for The Periapex, 2010. | Permalink | 6 comments |

© Periapex for The Periapex, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments |

Here’s a song that sums things up. I’ve reworked the lyrics to an Olivia Newton John song. The very first CD that I ever owned was one by her. Click the play button to listen to the song as you sing the lyrics below:

[See post to listen to audio]

Maybe I hang around here
A little more than I should
The Girl says I’ve got somewhere else to go
But I got something to tell you
That I never thought I would
But I believe you really ought to know

I love you
I honestly love you

You don’t have to Comment
I see it in your Tweets
Maybe it was better left unsaid
This is pure and simple
And you should realize
That it’s coming from my heart and not my Wall

I love you
I need to Twitter you

I’m not trying to make you feel uncomfortable
I’m not trying to Chain Drop at all
But something like Entrecard doesn’t come along everyday
And you shouldn’t blow the chance
When you’ve got the chance to say

I love you
I have to email you

If we both were born
In another place and time
This moment might be ending on a BBS
But there you are with yours
And here I am with mine
So I guess we’ll just be leaving it at this

I love you
I really must blog you
I have to facebook you

© Periapex for The Periapex, 2008. | Permalink | 20 comments |

Twitter doesn’t have to be about broadcasting your daily activities to the universe pointlessly. It doesn’t have to be about meeting strangers in a corner of the internet for mindless chatter. Instead it can be used for a greater good.

I am actively using Twitter to try to form an online community of people in the dental field who will be able to interact in real-time. Possibilities formed by this sort of interaction are endless, geeky, and a subject of future posts.

Here‘s one Twitter experience that will give you a hint of the usefulness of real-time online social media and the relevance it might have to our daily practise of dentistry. The players are I and some buddies that I made on Twitter. These buddies are dentists and a non-dentist — a patient. The director of the production is Twitter itself. The Washington Post blogged about our shenanigans here.

Microblogging on Twitter will never replace continuing education courses or blogs themselves as a vehicle for detailed dental information. The art of Twitter, though, is perspective.

Twitter will give patients a view into a dentist’s day and it will give dentists a view into one another’s practice. Questions will be asked, opinions will be given, and through all of this new perspectives of dentistry will be developed by patients and people within the dental field together.

Join me on Twitter if you’re interested. Check out my follow list for other dental professionals and add them too. Let’s get talking:

© Periapex for The Periapex, 2008. | Permalink | 13 comments |

We presented a Foxtrot routine last night at the studio and although it went decently, we had our usual timing issues with the music. The Girl was pissed off enough about her performance afterwards that she had more than a couple of glasses of wine at the studio after our routine. This was before she remembered that we had driven separately and would have to leave in separate cars.

I’ve currently got a Yaris that is a courtesy rental while my car is yet again in for some repair work. The Yaris is an odd little car and I can’t get used to the fact that the speedometer sits in the middle of the dashboard to the right of the driver. This is a perfect location for backseat drivers to see how fast you’re going, but not all that great for the driver themselves. I thought that maybe a GPS pops out of the dash in front of the driver. Alas, that’s not the case.

Anyway, I ended up leaving the rental at the studio and drove The Girl‘s car home with both of us in it. We drove back to the studio this morning to pick the rental up and then I headed home while she headed off to do some temping work. She was ahead of me on the road. And this is what transpired on facebook:

I’ll get the apology about being critical about the car out of the way before I go on. I was just getting really frustrated having to keep turning my head to check my speed. The Girl, on the other hand, well she’s making fun of the fact that I had to lock each door manually when I first got out of the car. We’ve both been spoiled with remote door locks on each of our cars. For her the more lights and buttons something has, the more expensive it should be. I also want to state to all of the young people that read my blog that text messaging while driving is a very bad thing to do. Especially when driving past a speed trap.

What we like about facebook mobile messaging is that our status updates get sent to our phones, so we know what each other is doing during the day. The most important aspect though, is that we can send threaded messages to each other. This allows us to bypass the limitation of SMS message length on our phones. If I’m at a computer and she’s not, I can still send her a long message that facebook will break into SMS-manageable chunks for her phone. Much of our discussion about day-to-day issues with the landscaping was done this way.

Why not just talk on the phones? Because as usual, our patients get in the way. Text messaging between patients works much better for short conversations than having to dial and leave voice mail for each other. It’s also cheaper on our phone plan. It also works better at home in Cowland where cell service is spotty because of inadequate coverage. SMS gets through eventually, voice service is fairly unreliable. Because we only have dial-up internet access at home, the landline is often tied up. I’ve gotten around this by having the landline’s voice mail fire a page off to me when there’s a message waiting.

So everything has been pretty nice over the last year or so. Fast forward to today. Both my brother and I have had serious issues with facebook that have left a bad taste in our mouths. So I’m not on it as much. I’ve also met some really neat folks online through blogging communities like Entrecard and others. This has kept me busy enough to not be logged into facebook as much as the past.

Most importantly, I’m really grooving Twitter. There’s been lots of stuff written about Twitter all over the blogosphere these days because as Rudy says, “it’s micro-blogging at its finest“. Twitter is best described as a hybrid status updater (like in facebook) and an instant messenger (which facebook now has also). facebook can now do what Twitter does, but Twitter can preserve your anonymity much better.

The only reason that I initially signed up with Twitter was so that I could update my status on my blog without having to use my actual name. The facebook rss feed for status updates carries your real name on it. It was easier for me to update my status on Twitter, have my blog pick it up, and also have a facebook app called TwitterSync update my facebook status automagically. Twittersync can filter @ replies out of your updates and keep your facebook status looking “normal”.

However, as more and more people that I interacted online with used Twitter, I thought I’d check it out a bit more. It’s very, very simple to use. But it’s cool. The list of people that I interact with on Twitter consists of a number of people in the dentogeek field. One of them, @kamala is a dentist out in Texas who is intent on having a contest with me to see which of us can eat the most sugarfree gum before diarrhea sets in. @dentalinsider just became more active on his Twitter account after a bunch of people started following his “tweets”. Of course, there’s @fragileheart who is everywhere as I’ve said before, and lin, who has commented on my blog a number of times. There’s also the corset model/writer, @Haley, who was nice enough to play along with that last meme we did.

One thing that will annoy the hell out of you on Twitter though are people that update their status incessantly and to the point where everyone else’s status is never visible because it’s been scrolled off your screen by theirs. When this happens, I leave a friendly note that I’m unfollowing that person for a while because of too much, too soon. I’ll check their page every so often to see if they’ve stopped and then maybe re-add them to my follow list. Maybe.

Here is some sage advice by @prokofy:

Subscribing to signal, person by person. Of course, what a lot of people mean by “signal” will vary, and many people think their little noises to their little friends are of fascinating and gripping interest to others — they aren’t. Here’s what I find irrelevant on Twitter from other people: status of baby’s diaper; status of surgical wound; status of your landing in an airport or sitting on a runway. Hold that thought, and if you are compelled to externalize your lifelogging because you can’t listen to your still inner voice and focus and connect in real life, at least tweet something to go along with your lifeshell (I call these things lifeshellcasting instead of lifecasting because they are only casting the shell of life, not its inner content).In other words, if you feel compelled to um, lifelog shit like that, you have to do it like this to get me subscribed: “The toddler’s diaper is loaded again but I’m completing the latest chapter to my book”. “My open surgical wound is hurting me but I continue to translate Dostoyevsky”. And “I’m landing at SFO to meet with @robertscoble to talk to him about what he actually does at Fast Company”. In other words, your landings and your takeoffs, your toddler, your wounds — none of these matter unless you supply some other relevant life data that lets us know you are not content-free. People who are content-free are a waste of time.

And finally one last point: Lots of bloggable topics come up through Twitter. If you want to see what I might be pondering for a future blog post. Check my favorites and see what I’ve got stuck in there.

Hope to tweet with you soon…

© Periapex for The Periapex, 2008. | Permalink | 12 comments |

The Rules:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’ve been tagged, and to read your blog.

My 8 Random facts/habits:

1. The book currently at my bedside is a textbook on endodontic microsurgery by Kim. The bookmark in it is a whole article on emergency management of restricted jaw opening. There’s nothing like having to choose whether to read the book you’re trying to read, or to read the bookmark instead.
2. Interacting with people drains my energy. Interacting with nature rejuvenates me: I touched each of the new White Birches on our property, they were planted last Autumn, and welcomed them to their new home. They felt good.
3. Edgar will be upset to hear that although everything I do at work is based on the scientific method, I live my life less strictly. The Silva Method (when it was less religious-based) provided me the tools to achieve what I have in life. I dabbled in NLP for a while back in dental school.
4. I believe that extra-terrestrials exist and have been a member of SETI@Home for uncountable years.
5. I believe in Karma.
6. Our friend, Mark, recently said something that I will remember for the rest of my life — and that too many dentists have forgotten: The largest influence towards a positive treatment outcome is that the treater (healer) cares about his patient. Those that have followed my blog for a while know how I feel about dentists that care more about the money than the patient.
7. I have been fingerprinted by the U.S. government.
8. I tried to fail 80% of the students in the last endodontics course that I taught. I haven’t taught since.

I’ve tagged:

Haley, Debbie, Tam, Edgar, Laney, Kamala, Rudy, and Ginny. Sorry guys, but rules are rules.

© Periapex for The Periapex, 2008. | Permalink | 33 comments |

We saw the last part of Nicholas Nickleby on the weekend and were awed not only by its magnitude but by the way it exploded Dickens’ themes into life. Bravo to the cast, crew, and musicians who brought the show our way.

Now on to the meat of this post:

Shortly after I posted that I accepted drug money as payment, my blog became erratically glitchy. Not only did I notice this, but my readers did as well. Well actually only fragileheart mentioned to me that she did. That’s probably because she’s on the internet 24/7 commenting on everyone’s blog. Basically if you have a blog, she’s probably commented on it. And if she hasn’t don’t worry, she’ll get to it eventually. Not that there’s anything wrong with that or anything. I think it’s really cool and she does liven up my blog with her comments.

Anyway, my theory about the whole thing is that Canada’s internal security service (our version of the FBI and MI5), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, probably got interested in the post because of the drug angle title. They don’t mount people too much these days but they do have a budget for surveillance.

Their packet sniffer is probably an old Intel 486 that they attached downstream from me. Instead of passively checking my readers out, it slowed everything down like crazy. The whole situation got me thinking though: What if my readers had something to hide from the RCMP? I’ve been trying to encourage people to comment on the blog, but what if some of those commenters on that post have things to hide?

So I did some bloggound checking on those commenters and sure enough, suspicions abound. Who actually might be the real drug users around here?

Let’s start with Erin. She (he?) seems to be hungover a lot. One hangover remedy they recommend involves vitamins that help to reduce pain: http://paintmorgantownred.com/…/sunday-hangover-cure-11/. Uh huh. Vitamins that reduce pain. Yup.

Then we have Monique who I didn’t know was a woman of colour. I thought all of the pictures on her website were underexposed. She seems angry about various things quite often. Her doctors have told her that she has tortured her body too much in the past (http://moniquerenae.com/…/im-going-to-diet/). Really…?

We have BT Cassidy who walks through dark alleys meeting people: http://theanatomy…/and-now-little-more-about-inspiration.html.

There’s Melo whose goal seems to be to make money one way or another on the internet. You know how it’s been said that money corrupts: http://www.i-tong.com/2008/03/05/money4banners/

Fonzie’s Ghost is my cockroach friend. If you’ve read my posts about him you’ll know what a good people-user he is. He’s smart but doesn’t have many morals…

Person Who Is Hormonal And Keeps Changing Their Name: They admitted that they’re almost addicted to pot.

Of course, there’s fragileheart who must have been on drugs to post this: http://www.fragileheart.com/…/its-like-a-trainwreck…/

Laney is a good friend of ours…a really good friend who now lives in Switzerland. We know her well enough to know that she’s not all that sweet and innocent as she appears in her blog. Stay away, far away — which isn’t a problem considering that she lives atop a mountain over there. Although I’ve had horse meat and found it very good, I’m still not sure how I feel about eating horses: http://whatsuphighup.blogspot.com/…/not-for-veggetarians.html

Finally, there’s Rudy whom I’ve known for a long time also. However, one of his recent posts lists a person who is most definitely a regular pot smoker. Guilt by association I say: http://www.amid.com/werd/good-people-day-2008/

So out of all of this I know that the RCMP will need to upgrade to a more powerful computer in order to track all of these other suspects. Hopefully that’ll take some of the heat and glitchiness off my site.

© Periapex for The Periapex, 2008. | Permalink | 26 comments |

metaphor

noun.

1. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in “a sea of troubles” or “All the world’s a stage” (Shakespeare).

Recently, I briefly posted about the benefits of EntreCard for a blogger attempting to promote their blog and who also might be looking for other interesting blogs to follow. Blogs that have registered with EntreCard are regularly updated and well-maintained. Owners of these blogs generally understand how interaction with commenters can drive visitation rates up. Whether they are interested in making money from their blog or just finding an interactive audience, EntreCard has proven to be a useful tool towards either end.{FEED ID endodontics dot ca FF88FF}

But there seems to be a Freudian undercurrent to the creation of EntreCard. Let’s consider the following:

1. It is more satisfying when my drop is reciprocated.
2. If I’m tired or don’t have time to do much dropping, it’s still nice to be dropped on.
3. I’ll drop on people for a while, but if there is no eventual reciprocation, I stop dropping on them.
4. I usually drop on people first and only afterwards read their blog to find out more about them.
5. If you drop on someone and they then drop on you but you are not interested in dropping on them anymore, is it rude to ignore them?
6. It’s really cool when I drop on someone and they drop on me at the same time.
7. I’ll drop on ugly or cute widgets, but I prefer to drop on cute ones.
8. I think twice before going back to drop on a blog that takes a long time to load or is too complicated for me.
9. It’s nice that there are no strings attached to dropping.
10. After dropping on people, they sometimes become your friends.
11. Some people talk to you more after you drop on them, others do not.
12. Sometimes EntreCard is up, sometimes it is down. It is mostly up.
13. The more EntreCard credits you have, the richer you are, and the more people that want to be your “friend”.

So there you have it–some food for thought. Gotta go. The Girl is waiting for me to drop on by.

Update (April 8, 2008): EntreCard has modified their economy and, in my opinion, reciprocation is not as big of a deal as it used to be. I’ll still try to reciprocate as much as I can though because I’m just that kind of a guy.

Update (January 1, 2010): I no longer have Entrecard attached to this blog for various reasons. At the top of the list: Change in ownership of the organization, unfilled promises, no time for dropping anymore.

© Periapex for The Periapex, 2008. | Permalink | 19 comments |

Before EntreCard, I had about 6 regular readers and only a few blogs that I felt personally interested in. Don’t get me wrong–I read quite a few blogs, but there were only a handful that I felt compelled to comment on. This was after almost a couple of years of blogging. I’ve never read anyone’s blog in its entirety.

After reading her last post I felt the urge to go backwards through her blog, or even start at the beginning and travel…but then I pictured myself doing that and felt like a stalker. So I didn’t.

Isn’t that strange?

© Periapex for The Periapex, 2008. | Permalink | 9 comments |

As you know, I started my blog on blogger.com and then moved it over to a WordPress system. When I was blogging on Blogger I sometimes used to click on their top toolbar to jump to a random blog to find something interesting to read. Through this method I never really found anything interesting enough to add to my RSS aggregator (at that time Bloglines, now Google Reader). In fact, I found many splogs that wasted my time.

I ended up mostly reading blogs that I fell into via Google’s Blogsearch or via comments to my blog. The novelty of facebook led to a decline in the quantity of posts to my blog for some time. However, as the facebook help page (shown above) says, I am a Blogger…

Through facebook, I found a university friend of mine and discovered his blog. Through his blog I found EntreCard. Through EntreCard I have found a repository of quality, well-maintained blogs.

EntreCard’s website has more information for you if you’re interested. You should be interested in EntreCard if you’re a blogger who is on the lookout for other interesting blogs to read and you want to increase your blog’s exposure to others that are also looking for interesting blogs to read. It’s really that simple.

Most people using the EntreCard system use it to try to increase visitors to their blog in order to expose their in-blog advertisements to a larger audience. This is definitely a legitimate use of EntreCard but has been the source of debate about its effectiveness for monetization.

I see EntreCard as the most effective blogging social network system out there right now. Thanks for the recommentation Rudy!

With all of the blogs that I was now subscribed to, keeping track of conversational threads in posts’ comments started becoming problematic for me. If the blog had no option to email me future comments related to the post, I would have to subscribe to the comment feed of the blog. All of this required a few steps that ended up being time consuming. Maintaining these comment feed subscriptions started to become unwieldly in my reader because there were so many of them and they wouldn’t be relevant after a certain amount of time.

Thanks to Lin, another EntreCard user, I found a more elegant solution. Although still in testing, CoComment is a comment aggregator that itself has a feed that my feed aggregator can read. Now I can keep up with comment threads easily.

Because all of this blog hopping has drawn my blog into more of a social blog network than it used to be, I’m tending to spend more time these days in the blogosphere than in facebook. I wanted to find a way to put facebook’s status update system on my blog so that I could still keep track of my fb friends. In order to try to maintain some level of protection of my super-secret identity on my blog, I had to use Feedburner to massage my facebook friends’ RSS status update feed before it could be posted on the blog (so that the feed doesn’t show my real name). Really, really, industrious and motivated individuals will likely still be able to discover my real identity, but you deserve to know it if you go to all that trouble.

Because my blogroll is now so long, it made more sense for me to find a way to show recent posts from the blogroll rather than links to the blogs themselves. So now recent blogroll posts are shown on my blog via a script courtesy of Google Reader. Blogs that show on here are just a handful of the total number of blogs that I’m subscribed to. I choose which ones get to show up based on a number of factors: Frequency of posting (blogs that post tons of material a day don’t go on here because I want to try to have a fair distribution of posts from other blogs), if you comment on my blog there’s a good chance your blog will get added to the list, and most importantly, blogs that represent topics I find most interesting show up on here. Oh, and obviously your blog needs to have a valid syndication feed.

Finally, there’s the “Current Context” headline at the top of the blog. This is from a WordPress plugin that reads the status from Twitter. My Twitter updates get picked up on the blog and also by a facebook app that then updates my facebook status and keeps the two in sync. As far as I know, there are 2 facebook apps related to Twitter. Rudy uses the “official” one and I use the second which I like better because it doesn’t automatically prepend stuff to my update.

Now if anyone finds a plugin that will vacuum the house, wash the dishes, cook dinner, and shovel the driveway please let me know. The Girl is on a continuing education course all weekend and is just home at night so I have a good-sized TODO list to work on.

Blogging isn’t on the list.

© Periapex for The Periapex, 2008. | Permalink | 20 comments |