irl no longer applies. irl used to be the way for some of us to discern between “in real life” and “online” friendships and relationships. at this point in time an overwhelming percentage of my relationships (friendly, business, or otherwise) are what i would have termed virtual ten years ago. i have had face time with my immediate family on average three times a year for the last few years. almost all of my close friends live in a city other than mine, and some live on another continent.

for me irl is no longer valid because all of these long distance relationships are now part of my real life. we may keep in touch via chat or email or texting or rss feeds or comments on photos and blog posts. with some people i even have some sort of voice communication, made cheaper by the fact that i was an early adopter for voip with standalone sip hardware. some of these people i have yet to see in meat space and others are people i gather with at the same gps coordinates perhaps once a year or once every two years. i have meaningful personal and business relationships with people from all of those categories.

it’s interesting that the term irl is no longer valid to describe my interpersonal relations, and i have a shrinking suspicion that perhaps it doesn’t apply to you either.

there is a meme going around, about first name google lust. check it. well it helps a little i’m sure that my first name IS the name of my site. on the other hand, i was a tad worried last year when i hadn’t hit the first page of fabienne on google.de nor google.fr. now i’ve hit page one on both and i’m aiming for the number one spot in all three. if you think about it, it’s harder for me to get number one on .fr and .de because my first name is actually semi-common out there. that, and i don’t really blog in french or german at this point. the really hilarious part of all this is that i haven’t done a darn thing except blog. seo’s eat your heart out. being [in]famous in the interwebs is deceptively simple: just keep creating content.

comments are finally enabled. yes they are a bit crude (everyone is labeled anonymous so leave your name if you do want me to actually know who you might be).

oh and if you already knew about this before i posted, either i told you or you are more in the know than most. *cough* twitterers *cough*.

just a quick note to say that if you wrote to me in the last two days and i haven’t replied, please write again. a bunch of email was lost after the server went back up again (after two days of down time) and it seems that it hasn’t made it through to me. i have just gone through and replied to all the email i did receive, so if you haven’t heard back, i’m not ignoring you, just please write again.

my email is back up and running on a new server so no outages will occur when the net cuts out of the old apartment in a few days. also, if you haven’t already, please update my gpg key in your mail program as it was changed on the 3rd of october. if you don’t use encryption yet, don’t be intimidated, start to read about gpg here.

even though tux isn’t actually running around inside most of the machines at home, he is still a cuddly mascot (i haven’t counted lately but i think over half have a beastie inside). moving, ah yes the sweetly glorious grass-is-greener-3-floors-up routine. my personal email is also being migrated so if you get some stuff that bounces in the next week or so, that’s why. ok back to painting and email server configs.