I want a social experiment. Are you ready?

For a while, I've wanted to do something like that of the vlogbrothers and go without textual conversation for a period of time. They went for a year. I'm hoping to go for a month. I don't think it will affect me¹ that much. After all there's a big gap between my last post and this one (almost a month).

So how am I going to give up textual communication? And what will I do instead? Well I'm going to tell you. Just let me get my notebook out.

• No textual communication on the web for one month.
• Instead images, video, or sound will be posted at least once a day and no more than three times. An exception to this will be for Saturday/Sunday where the days will be combined into one day for posting material. In other words, the weekend will be considered one day.
• The files will be posted with no explanation at all.
• An RSS² feed will be added sometime.
• Stuff other people have written, such as mail, signs, T-Shirts, CD or book covers, are allowed.

So why am I doing this? Well for starters, I just want to see if I can do it. Another reason is that I wanna test the "social" part of social networking. And the last reason: why not?

The one exception to the no text is Identi.ca dents. And that will only be used to alert followers of new content. Hopefully this will become automated using other online services and I won't even have to that.

If you need to contact me, you can send me a link to a video with your question or you can call me. There's a little Google Voice gizmo on the About me" page. Until August 1st, I'll talk to you later!

Oh and I guess you'll need the link to the site, huh? http://mylife.jacroe.com

¹ Or you for that matter.

² RSS = Really Simple Syndication though it will probably be an Atom feed actually.

A while back, when we were still in New Orleans, I wanted to try some authentic, spicy, Cajun food. And I got my wish. First off were some spicy fries. They were regular French Fries with black pepper¹ all over them. Then we bought a hamburger, and it had sweet onions cooked with the meat. Needless to say, it was different. And it was good.

But I wanted to try a meal of Cajun goodness, so at Joe's Crab Shack, I got it. It was some kind of fish, with etouffee all over it. With it came BBQd shrimp and regular shrimp. It. Was. Delicious.

So what's the point of that story? Recently I've became more willing and wanting to try new foods. And today I tried an "eggy in the basket" which is basically a piece of toast with a fried egg in the middle of it. Very good. I've had three today. But I want to know more. So I've got a question for you. Do you have any "homemade" or little-known dishes? I would love to hear about it so I can try it out. I'm trying to build me up a little arsenal of foods that I can prepare when I'm alone at the house.²

¹ Or some kind of pepper. It was spicy I know.

² And this wasn't the long post I was talking about earlier.

A while back, I had signed up for LibraryThing which is "an online service to help people catalog their books easily". So one day, I sat down and added my books. It was a fairly simple process, but soon I grew apart from it and my library is helplessly unupdated.

So when a friend suggested¹ I sign up for Shelfari, I was wary to sign up for just another social networking library thing². But once I got going and started adding books, I grew to love it. It's like Facebook, but geared to readers and lovers of books. What you do is add your books to your "Shelf". From their, you can mark it "Planning to read", "Reading it now", or "Read it". Besides those, you can also mark it as a "Favorite", put it on a Wish List, or tell your friends that you own it, in case they want to borrow it and read it.

Using Shelfari, I've realized how many books I have that I want to read. I thought it was just maybe two or three. Looking at my shelf, I can see that there are 10 books.

So sign up for Shelfari. And add me as a friend

¹ It wasn't really a suggestion. It was more like a command.

² Yes, that's a technical term.

A while back, I wrote a post detailing a mind puzzle that I had read. An "Anonomous" person (btw, it's spelled "anonymous") said that they had figured out the puzzle and wishes for more like it.

Well unfortunately I don't have any more (yet) and will, instead, post the "solution" to this puzzle. But I would rather have something more creative than just a paragraph saying which one is right. So I made a slideshow presentation. You can view it here on my website. To go through the slides, just click.

I welcome any discussion and comments below. What do you think?