Want to build some more brain synapses between your hemispheres, possibly reducing the damaging effects of Alzheimer’s and strokes? Try using your opposite hand!

You can actually teach yourself to write just as well with the opposite hand, believe it or not. It’s all a matter of forging new pathways in the brain, which is possible to do in a healthy brain of any age. (It could take months to perfect it, but it can be done.) I’m heavily right-handed, but have decided that for today– or as long as I can stand it– I’m moving my wacom pad over to the left side of my computer. It’s a very strange feeling trying to move the cursor. It makes me feel like i’m five years old, just learning to "draw" my alphabet. I can’t make a good circle, and can’t manage a straight line, because my left hand has no muscle memory for those kinds of fine movements.

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A couple of days ago, Google released a new open-source browser called Google Chrome. (The name "chrome" comes from the developer’s term for the graphics that go around the window of a browser). Their goal was to totally rethink the way people interact with the web, stripping the browser down to its barest essence with a minimum of tools and options. I am particularly fond of the "omnibar" as they call it: rather than having a separate address bar and search tool, it’s all combined into one. This will make my mother happy, who often types URLs in a search box and then wonders why it doesn’t take her to the website. (This will hopefully keep me from reverting to my annoyed adolescent voice: "Because you have to use the ADDRESS BAR, Mom! Duh!")

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I recently ran across a hilarious list of instructions from a 1950s telephone directory from Drumright, Oklahoma. It explains how to get the most out of your telephone service, with tips like "Answer calls promptly. It’s courteous to do so and often keeps the caller from hanging up– thinking you’re not at home." They also recommend in the book to "Use a natural, pleasant voice. Don’t whisper. Don’t shout." (See the whole list.)

This made me recall my friend Madeleine’s classic story of a person who, in the early 90s, once phoned in frustration to her association’s headquarters after being unable to fax a conference form. Turns out she wasn’t actually using a fax machine: she was holding the page up to the computer monitor and slowly "scanning" it my moving it upwards.

It cracks us up to think that people once found routine technology so confounding. And yet, all technology is bewildering to start off with. That’s precisely the way I felt a few weeks ago when I started using Twitter and Facebook. I really had no idea what it was for, how to use it, or why I, never mind any of my clients, needed it. I only started blogging a few months ago, after years of summarily dismissing the whole medium as a self-indulgent exercise in time wastage.

Oh, how quickly things change. Now I’ve set up several clients with blogs, I’ve started Facebooking and Twittering, and I’m becoming a convert of all this new social media stuff. I’m realizing that it was starting to make me look like an old foagie to keep shouting "Get a horse!" 

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I am writing this on my blackberry at 3am from a dark hospital room where our poor daughter has been since Friday, sick with severe abdominal pain. Between taking care of her, a big catalog project, and a various other websites, blogs, flash pieces and identity projects, there has been little time for any diversions lately.

Fortunately, this hospital (like nearly all nowadays) offers its patients and guests free wifi so we can get some work done and stay in touch with the living.

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Today I found this free downloadable ebook by Geekpreneur which outlines in simple language why they think Twitter is a great promotional tool for your business. This whole "microblogging" idea is sounding more and more convincing to me the more I read about it. Here’s a synposis:

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I discovered Chris Brogan from my recent Twitter experiment. His blog is an excellent resource of ideas, and this is one post that I particularly liked, as I have been trying to figure out how social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook can be beneficial to businesses– both my own, and my clients’.

Check out Chris Brogan’s 50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing. Some ideas I particularly like:

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Ever wonder what it would be like to see Jack Handy in a Leave-it-to-Beaver episode directed by David Lynch?

A month ago when I started this blog, I encouraged my dad, who is retired and has too much time on his hands, to start writing one too. Dad loves to read and write (he has a Ph.D. in English literature) but most of all, he loves to tell funny stories, and to force other people to parrot back things he finds funny, ad nauseam. I have often retold my Dad’s humorisms to other people, and thought it would be a really cool idea to get him to write everything down in his own words. So I set him up a free wordpress.com account, showed him how to use Windows Live Writer, and let him go. Bigdaddytype2 is the remarkable result. 

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I’ve read so much about Twitter lately that I decided it’s time to give it another shot. Today I logged onto Twitter, had it search for people in my Outlook address book who are members, and fellow HOWie Von Glitschka (illustrator extraordinaire) turned out to be a Twitterer. So I clicked "follow" and he wrote me back and became a follower of mine– kind of exciting!

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David read this article in the Dallas Morning News yesterday about another novel use for Twitter: as a play-by-play of what’s happening in Congress with the Republican uprising against Democratic leaders:

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I ran across this post by Rick Butts about why he thinks Twitter is better than Google for finding information. The gist of it is that:

• It’s easier to write a plain-English question in Twitter than it is to formulate the perfect search query in Google. (True)
• Twitter is composed of humans answering queries to the best of their abilities, whereas Google is nothing more than an inhuman giant database spitting back search results. (True)
• Twitter can’t be spammed or manipulated through fancy technological tricks (True)

“Just join Twitter and attract a group of followers and you’ll soon you’ll have created your own collection of living brain cells, capable of solving problems, reasoning, understanding fuzzy logic, and developing solutions, and pointing you directly to the answers you seek!”

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