THEY still live in Martins Creek, Pa., where they were married in May 2000. Their small farm is surrounded by 250 acres of protected forest and farmland. Yet Larry Fink, 69, a prominent photographer, and Martha Posner, 54, a sculptor, have traveled great distances in their appreciation and understanding of each other and their relationship.

... Reflecting on 10 years of marriage, Ms. Posner said she was surprised at the impact “that little piece of paper” has had. “It’s made the relationship stronger.”

During the eight years that they lived together before they were married, she always felt there was an “escape hatch.”

At the end of the day, she continued, “My litmus test has always been, ‘Are we better as a couple or independent of each other?’ ”

This strikes me as a brilliant way to look at marriage. So much of the time when you hear people talk about their marriage (or their break-up), it's from a very subjective perspective: "I'm so happy with her", or "He wasn't there for me". I love the idea of stepping back and thinking about the marriage as a unit: are you better as a team or separately?

Graham Hatch's blog post about privacy issues at Google and Facebook includes some interesting musings on the dotcom world:

I’ve long had a sense that there is an assumption in the dotcom world which deems that because they are inventing the future they don’t really need to be concerned by the conventions of the past.

[T]he problem with dotcom culture [is that m]any of its practitioners lack any real sense of seriousness or objectivity about the enormous role they now play in the daily social behaviour of their users—and the fact, that in playing such a role, they serve to reinforce, amplify and exaggerate human failings as much as attributes.

Valerie Casey made the same point at SXSW, though in a more positive light. The designers, architects and programmers of the social web are building the infrastructure for the next era of our civilization. They (we!) need to take that responsibility seriously.

Given the potentially asymmetrical nature of Twitter relationships, and the centrality of relationships to finding value in the use and experience of the social networking site, fan and star studies offer rich models for theorizing Twitter. For, on Twitter, we may all be fans, following celebrities, politicians, local bigwigs, academic superstars, friends or simply people we do not yet know but wish to interact with. Scholars of star studies frequently highlight the desire for intimacy as a central part of the fan-star relationship. Intimacy is inferred from access to what seems to be “authentic,” private, backstage star behavior, which is precisely what social media seems to facilitate.⁷ After the sharing of such information, fans may make bids for further intimacy by responding through the same social media, and if the star acknowledges them, the sense of intimacy is further heightened.⁸

If social media turns us all into mini-celebrities (with all the neuroses and joys that implies) then perhaps celebrity studies (who knew that field existed?) is the best point of entry into research on the dynamics of social networks.

Or consider Leuwynda, whose photograph of a broken stretch of sidewalk triggered an epiphany in Deifell. Reviewing a roll with Leuwynda one afternoon, Deifell nearly discarded the image, pegging it as another missed shot. Quick to catch his mistake, Leuwynda explained that the cracks, a daily impediment to her, were exactly what she had intended to capture. She had taken the photo as proof of the hazard, and included it in a letter to the school superintendent. “Since you are sighted,” she wrote, “you may not notice these cracks. They are a big problem since my white cane gets stuck.” The sidewalks were repaired soon after, and Deifell was left with an unexpectedly powerful lesson.

“I believe we live in a world that has suffering in it, and that suffering comes from cracks such as racism and sexism,” explains Deifell. “A lot of times we don’t see those cracks at all, and then sometimes we see the cracks but we don’t see the cracks. That’s exactly what happened for me in a very simple and clear way with the sidewalk cracks. I had walked on those cracks over and over again to class, but I didn’t see them from Leuwynda’s point-of-view. It took her to tell that story before I could see them in a different way.”

Working in an art and design university has made me conscious of the power of speaking visually -- and made me more aware than ever of how it eludes me. If I'm a better writer than artist/photographer, I should just stick to my own strengths, right?

Or maybe not so right. If a blind teenager can master visual communication for her purposes, the rest of us can let go of our self-reinforcing myths about how we should or shouldn't communicate, online and off.

Follow the following method as described by ravens.prophesy on the following link  http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid=0ece6b37ff80c552&hl=en

Problem FIXED. SOLOUTION FOUND. Read the fix that Kegan from apple support and myself found:

Step 1. Use finder to locate the //Library/mail/mailboxes folder. Look for a folder called "recovered messages (your mailbox name).mbox. If you see it filled with emails, kindly drag it to the desktop. If you don't see it filled with emails, kindly drag it to the desktop anyways.

Step 2. Open Apple Mail and go to preferences/accounts. Highlight the offending IMAP Gmail account and DELETE your IMAP gmail with the "-" icon. Close Apple Mail.

Step 3. Go to System Preferences and create a new dummy user. Log onto that dummy user.

Step 4. Open Apple Mail and go through the initial dialogue to set up your long lost IMAP gmail account. Give it a few minutes to set itself up and start downloading all your emails. You don't have to wait for the whole thing if you don't want...just a few minutes so you can see the labels listed and can click one of them to see the emails in there.

Step 5. Close Apple Mail and log out of that account and go back into your normal account. Open Apple Mail and set up your old account again.

Step 6. Grab that beer you so richly deserve. You ARE the man (or woman)!

THIS FIXES THE IPHONE "WRONG USERNAME AND PASSWORD" PROBLEM AT THE SAME TIME. I changed nothing on my Iphone, went and looked, and it worked suddenly.

Happy Mackin'! (Yeah, I know it's another name for making out)

2. Mac users should update your  Mac OS X v10.6.2 Update.

3. Unlock your captcha 

For gmail.com/googlemail.com users goto:

https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha 

For google apps users goto:

https://www.google.com/a/[domain.com]/UnlockCaptcha

When Robert Rauschenberg and a buttoned-down Bell Labs engineer named Billy Kluver began thinking, in the mid-1960s, about ways that people from the world of technology could help artists make art, Mr. Kluver surveyed the mighty gulf between the two groups and almost thought better of the idea. “I was scared,” he said once in an interview. “The amazing thing was that it’s possible for artists and scientists to talk together at all.”

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David Karp, left, and Ryan Trecartin discuss their project at the Seven on Seven presentation at the New Museum on Saturday.

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Nearly half a century after that influential experiment, one in the same spirit, though crazily compressed into a single day, was taking place on Friday in a chilly loft office on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. An artist and a technical whiz sat together at a long table, their faces made silvery by the glow from their laptops — the only tools they had brought, besides their digital cameras. Anyone unfamiliar with the pair — Evan Roth, a kind of Web-centric graffiti artist, and Matt Mullenweg, a creator of the popular blogging platform WordPress — would have had to listen a long time to figure out which one came from which world. They free-associated at Web speed, their conversation sprinkled with things like hex values, detection algorithms and executable code.

“Let’s try to stay away from the Web-nerdy stuff,” Mr. Mullenweg, 26, warned, as Mr. Roth, 32, trolling for help on Twitter, was compiling video clips for the work of art they had conceived that morning.

The two were part of Seven on Seven, a project conceived by Rhizome, the new-media art organization in New York, to match seven artists with seven “technologists,” a Google engineer and an early Facebook developer among them. The pairs were given a reality-show-era deadline of 24 hours in which to sit together in rooms across Manhattan and come up with creations to present on Saturday to an audience at the New Museum, where Rhizome is based.

Whether the brainchildren of these collaborations ended up feeling more like apps or like art was up to the teams, and the distinction didn’t seem to matter to artists nearly as much as it might have even 14 years ago, when Rhizome was founded to explore the emerging field of Web-based art, said Lauren Cornell, the organization’s executive director.

But Ms. Cornell, who created the team-up project along with some of her tech-world board members and supporters, added that even now, after decades of increasing overlap between art and technology, the idea remained daunting to many of the artists and Web people she approached. “This was something we went into with the knowledge that it was an experiment and that it could end up being a failure,” she said. “A lot of people I called to see if they were interested, people I know — friends of mine — didn’t even get back to me.”

More than 150 people turned out for the New Museum presentation, some paying as much as $350 for tickets. With a couple of exceptions what they saw were not objects but ideas — some funny and entertaining, some deadly serious — situated at the fertile nexus where social networking and the Web’s data-gathering power is providing artists and scientists with immense piles of raw material about society and psychology.

Joshua Schachter, a software engineer at Google, and Monica Narula, an artist from New Delhi, came up with a rough plan to convert private guilt into charitable giving, allowing Internet users collectively to assign dollar values to various misdeeds so that guilt might be assuaged through donations. (On Friday the team paid Web users small amounts to help come up with categories of misbehavior and attendant fines. They arrived at $47 for forgetting one’s mother’s birthday, for example, and $20 for “being mad at my spouse because of a dream.”)

The artist Ryan Trecartin and David Karp, a creator of the short-form blogging platform Tumblr, came up with a streaming video site that feels like plugging YouTube directly into the cerebral cortex. The artist Kristin Lucas and Andrew Kortina, who builds social Web applications, proposed a way for people to exchange identities — in essence, to take a break from themselves — via Twitter. Ayah Bdeir, an engineer and designer, and Tauba Auerbach, her artist collaborator, made a randomly moving moiré-pattern sculpture designed to freeze when a viewer enters the room, leaving its actions when unwatched a mystery.

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More Articles in Arts » A version of this article appeared in print on April 19, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.

Here's a great vision of how artists and technologists can work together.

Here's a handy solution to a common problem. Just find a binder clip as big as the edge of your desk.