It’s been a strange week for Silicon Valley companies – I hope it’s not something in the water.

Facebook

There was a time when I felt compelled to keep up with my friends’ postings on Facebook. If I was too busy to check the site during the day, I’d make a point of scrolling back as far as it would let me so I’d miss as little as possible.

I remember feeling that way as clearly as I remember yesterday.

But yesterday seems far away; today, Facebook gifted me with their latest design change, and suddenly, I have no desire to catch up. In fact, I have very little desire to go to Facebook at all – the new design is complicated, what with a scrolling ticker in the upper right, an arbitrary division in the main text area between the “Top News” and the “Recent Updates”, and, in general, a lot of visual sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Google+ looks more attractive every day; I just wish they’d let me use it from my primary email address (hosted on Google Apps for Your Domain) instead of forcing me to use my depreciated GMail address.

Netflix

Perhaps Facebook’s new complication was inspired by the Sunday night Netflix announcement. If so, they have more work to do – after all, you can still interact with everything that Facebook offers on one website, while Netflix is going to force their remaining users to deal with Netflix and Quickster.

I didn’t mind the price increase much, but doubling my workload because Reed Hastings has a vision of the future…what do they think they are, an airline?

On Sunday, I asked for help in identifying a story I’d read many years ago. I pointed to the posting from Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

This morning, a friend from shul (who happens to be a Googler) answered my Google+ post, asking if this review might be of the story I was looking for. It was, and a quick search found the first few pages on Google Books.

I wanted to read the whole story, and I thought I’d probably be able to find Matheson’s book in a local library, but I was still curious where I’d originally read the story. I was pretty sure that I’d read it in an anthology, not a single-author collection, so I went to the Contento Index and looked for “The Creeping Terror”. I discovered two interesting things there:

• The story was also called “A Touch of Grapefruit”
• It had been anthologized under that name in Star Science Fiction 5

Both of those facts seemed awfully familiar. I got up from the computer, went to the bookshelves, and found my copy of Star Science Fiction 5. And “A Touch of Grapefruit” was right there on page 35.

Yes. I’d been searching for years for a story which was sitting on my own bookshelves.

At least I got to read the end of the story today!