Everyone who grew up in Boston has a marathon story. This one is mine.

I grew up in Melrose, a few miles north of Boston. Between 1975 and 1980 – when I was just about old enough to understand just how long 26.2 miles is – a guy named Bill Rodgers from our town won the Boston Marathon four times. Later, as a high school kids, we’d use the day – a holiday in Boston that always fell in the Massachusetts school vacation week – to go into the city and catch a glimpse at the sight of tens of thousands of runners crowded into the streets of Boston.

In 2006 a friend and I went to the Patriot’s Day Red Sox game, a Boston tradition and the only game on the Major League Baseball schedule that starts in the morning. The 11 a.m. start time is a throwback to the days when the marathon started at noon, meaning in most years – barring rain delays and extra innings — fans could leave Fenway Park and be in Kenmore Square, about a mile from the marathon finish line, as the lead runners passed.

410 Norfolk Street in Cambridge, where the accused bombers lived.

In recent years, however, the Boston Athletic Association had moved up the start times, so now the game ended around the time “normal” people were nearing the finish of the race. But whether they were the Kenyans, Ethiopians and occasional American who flirted with times close to two hours, or the people who had day jobs and still found time to log hours of training and finish in four, five or six hours – the people running the marathon never seemed normal to me. I was no longer a seven-year-old kid in awe of my hometown hero, but a 33-year-old who drank and ate too much and exercised too little. The idea that anyone could run 26.2 miles seemed just as unbelievable to me then as it had when I coveted Bill Rodgers’s autograph as much as a Carl Yastrzemski rookie card.

“These people?” I said to my friend as runners trudged by us. “It’s amazing. I could never do what they do.”

Six months later I proved myself wrong, and finished the Dublin Marathon in just over six hours. Two years later I finished the 2008 Boston Marathon and two years after that, I finished the 2010 New York City Marathon. At this writing, I am done with distance running with three marathon finishes to my credit.

But the only one that really matters, the only one that really counts, is Boston.

You don’t have to have run Boston to call the marathon your own. We liked that our marathon was one of the oldest, one of the toughest and – without argument – the most prestigious in the world. We liked that in running circles you simply had to say “Boston,” not “the Boston Marathon” for people to know what you were talking about. It was the one place in sports where we always topped New York City, and it made us a world-class city that could be mentioned in the same breath as Chicago and London and Berlin.

Unlike many other major, metro-area marathons, the Boston Marathon doesn’t confine itself to just the city proper. It starts 26.2 miles west of the city, in sleepy Hopkinton, and winds through five additional towns before runners cross over the Boston city line for the last mile and a half. More than a million people live within walking distance of the course, and those people have parties, set-up unofficial water stops and have as much right as the runners to call Boston their own.

The former Red Sox utility player and talk radio show host Lou Merloni never ran Boston. But he grew up in Framingham and remembers lugging a bucket of oranges to the end of his street every Patriots Day morning to pass out to runners as they sped past. Long before I met her, my fiancée was one of the Wellesley College students who lined the course in front of the school and offered kisses to passing runners (as a runner, one of the most incredible aspects of the race is being able to hear the cheering of the Wellesley students several minutes before and after you see and kiss them). In 2013 I was working with students in my Social Media & Journalism class at Bridgewater State University to live-tweet the race from various points on the course and share with them the excitement of an event that had become so important in my life.

Patriot’s Day – which is interchangeably known as Marathon Monday in Boston – is our holiday. It commemorates the start of spring as much as the start of the Revolutionary War. It was a reason to celebrate Boston and Massachusetts as much as a reason to celebrate the start of a nation.

And that is why the bombings felt so personal to so many people, and why they made us feel so helpless. It wasn’t just that the bombers had taken away lives. They had taken away a way of life for all of us.

And, it being 2013, we took to social media to vent our rage, express our disbelief and, most of all, share our sorrow.

“Ain’t no love in the heart of the city,” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev posted to Twitter a few hours after the bombs went off. “Stay safe people.”

Please email me at dave@davecopeland.com with what you know and a phone number where I can reach you today/tomorrow.

Please share this post.

You’d be lacking all sorts of native reason if you accepted a friend request from your boss on Facebook, but what happens when you like your company’s Facebook page?

Turns out some companies are encouraging employees to support the firm by liking the company Facebook page – a move that exposes even the most privacy-conscious worker to potentially uncomfortable questions from the boss.

While some companies are making it clear that they will check in on employees who like the page, others may be using it as a ploy to get workers to consent to the scrutiny.

There are loads of ways employers check up on employee social media posting, and all of them raise our ick factor. Among the worst offenders:

• Requiring employees to sign a form promising they won’t say anything inflammatory or disparaging about the company on their personal social media accounts (employees who refuse to sogn the form “forfeit” their right to employment with the company).

• Requiring job applicants to let a hiring manager log into their Facebook accounts during an interview (although there’s loads of evidence that this doesn’t happen nearly as often as the mainstream media would have had us believe in a flurry of stories last year).

There is some evidence that such requests may be illegal, but sometimes people need a job more than they need to take a stand by breaking rules they view as unfair and intrusive.

Best bet? Don’t say anything you’d regret on social media, no matter how secure you think your privacy settings are. And while you’re at it, you may want to check your timeline with the Facebook “view as” feature to see how it looks to people you aren’t friends with.

This is a sample post for ColdBomb, a tech news and digital culture site I plan to launch this summer. ColdBomb is a tech news site for people who would rather USE social media, smartphone apps and gadgets instead of talking about/geeking out over them. Like ColdBomb on Facebook for updates and news about the official launch (I promise not to creep on you).

Continental Drift (P.S.), By Russell Banks

Date Started: December 24

Date Finished: January 8

Year: 2011

Pages: Kindle Edition

Publisher: Harper Collins

Synopsis: Typical Banks about down-on-his luck working class loser.

Quotes of Note:

• “and nothing seems improved over yesterday”
• “pretending he wasn’t who he was”
• “like most people, Bob finds it difficult to know right from wrong”

Other Notes and Thoughts: Lots of good descriptive writing. Tough to read in parts and the parts about Bob seemed to be better, filled with more depth than parts about the Haitians. Lots of sex – almost to the point of being unnecessary, overdone. Liked how the stories collided.

Overall Review: 3 out of 5 stars.

The Roundhouse, By Louise Eldrich

Date Started: January 8

Date Finished: January 19

Year: 2012

Pages: Kindle Edition

Publisher: Harper Collins

Synopsis: National Book Award winner; Native American family living on a reservation comes to grips with brutal attack on the mother.

Quotes of Note: Just a sampling – so many good descriptions and theme-supporting quotes in this book.

• “like punching a bruise”
• “His face registered the humming rage of a man who could not think fast enough.”
• “There was the added weight of being a surprise….and the surging hopes that implied. It was all on me – the bad and the good.”
• Quoted Marcus Aurellius: “Very little is needed to make a happy life.”
• “Lots of men cry after they do something nasty to a woman.”

Other Notes and Thoughts: Really loved this book despite it being predictable in some parts (Cappy’s death, for example, and I say that without giving too much away), but thrilling in most parts. Wish I could write like this. Gave me some good guidance for narration on a fiction project I have been struggling with, as the narrator is retelling a story from his youth.

Overall Review: 5 out of 5 stars.

With The Animals, By Noelle Revaz

Date Started: January 18

Date Finished: February 13

Year: 2012

Pages: Kindle Edition

Publisher: Dalkay Archive Press

Synopsis: Translated story about a misogynistic, semi-illiterate French farmer who relates better to animals than his family, including his cancer-stricken wife and his children.

Quotes of Note:

• “to know the son you have too look at the father too.”
• “Life’s like that, a wheel that turns faster and more frequent all the time, so the seasons seem to pass quicker than they used”

Other Notes and Thoughts: Tough read, and didn;t strike me as being as great as the review I read about it had lead me to believe. Semi-simplistic themes.

Overall Review: 2 out of 5 stars.

The Year We Left Home, By Jean Thompson

Date Started: March 1

Date Finished: March 13

Year: 2011

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Synopsis: Tracks on family through four decades. Interesting structure and, again, something I could possibly experiment with if I were to write a novel based on my experience at summer camp.

Quotes of Note:

• “what really mattered was the life you made for yourself, and the person you decided to be”
• “You never can tell, looking at it from the outside. How miserable people can be in marriage.”
• “You decided that your life would go in a certain direction, and maybe it did. Or maybe you were kidding yourself and the world was mostly a matter of being in the right or wrong place in the right or wrong time.”
• “They didn’t think in terms of happy.”

Other Notes and Thoughts: Very sad when this book ended – picked from the dioscount table at Brookline Booksmith and it ended a streak of starting and not finishing a few books that let me down (Eat the City being one of the titles I really wanted to like a couldn’t like, or finish for that matter, in February). Structure definitely worked, as it showed complexity and growth of characters. Wondering if a similar structure could work in literary nonfiction.

Overall Review: 4 out of 5 stars.

The Lost Weekend, By Charles Jackson

Date Started: March 9

Date Finished: March 31

Year: 1944

Pages: 248

Publisher: Vintage

Synopsis: Semi-autobiographical tale of a five-day binges on the East Side of Manhattan.

Quotes of Note:

• “What was happening to him was, in a sense, not happening at all because nobody knew about it.”
• “Never dreamed it because these things just didn’t happen. Not to the kind of person he was, the kind of people he knew…”
• “How nice and neighborly of them to straighten up for him. The dear, sweet, considerate bitches.”
• “They wake up on mornings such as this, all but out of their minds with remorse, enduring what others call and can call a hangover – that funny word Americans will joke about forever, even when the morning after is their own.”

Other Notes and Thoughts: Picked it up after reading a Vanity Fair article about the film version (which is supposed to be quite good). Fairly timeless and has held up well; will resonate with anyone who has ever struggled with functioning alcoholism.

Overall Review: 3 out of 5 stars.

Questions I have after the reports that Facebook is going to start incorporating the hashtag into its service in what amounts to a direct shot across the bow of Twitter:

• As Facebook tries to look more and more like Twitter and Twitter tries to look more and more like Facebook, what the fuck’s the point of being on both?
• Is Zuckerberg et al capable of an original idea? More and more, and from its inception on down the line, Facebook seems more about stealing good ideas and (sometimes) making them better. I don’t think this is one they can make better or worse, for that matter.
• Isn’t the whole point of a hashtag to make content easier to search? Doesn’t this say something about the quality and usability of Facebook’s long-promised search engine? Hashtags are so simple they’re brilliant, but something tells me you’re not going to topple Google or Bing if you’re resorting to the rather low-tech hash tag.

NetVibes

Pros:

Quick signup and the free version of NetVibes seems to offer most of the features that Google Reader had. The paid version offers some fairly impressive analytics, as best I can tell (not going to pay for a RSS reader if I don’t have to, and if I do pay, it will only be after one of these services wins me over with their free offering). Some cool looking skins and layouts to choose from, and lots of widgets.

Cons:

The interface is radically different from what I’m used to, but that may not be a bad thing. You can switch between a widget view and a reader view (shown above). Took longer than the other services I tested to Still haven’t figured out how to import my Google Reader subscriptions (like all of these services, they’re dealing with an overload of new users today).

If I had to choose a replacement for Google Reader today, NetVibes would get my vote.

More RSS Reader reviews after the break.

Feedly

Pros:

Feedly was ready to go the second Google announced it was retiring Reader, and its Normandy project made converting seamless. Love that it works as a Chrome App and I’m looking forward to trying out the iOS version.

Cons:

The interface is VERY different from what I’m used to with Google Reader. It’s almost too minimalist for my liking. It’s free, but I find the adds take up a lot of valuable screen real estate.

The Old Reader

Pros:

The Old Reader is designed to look like Google Reader pre-redesign. You can quickly sign up with your Google or Facebook account and, once operational, you should have a fairly familiar RSS experience.

Cons:

The Old Reader is designed to look like Google Reader pre-redesign, meaning it has all of the limitations of the old Google Reader, including piss-poor mobile offerings. But worst of all, the site wasn’ ready for the overload so while you can sign up, you may not be able to start using The Old Reader until things die down a bit.

NewsBlur

Pros:

Not much I like about it. Perhaps because there were so many people looking for replacements, but Newsblur was overloaded for most of the day, and I never was able to get my Google Reader subscriptions to auto import. Seems to want to offer more social components than most other RSS readers, but that is exactly what I am not looking for in a Google Reader replacement.

Cons:

The biggest con, and the only one worth mentioning, is the cost. Newsblur only lets you follow 12 sites for free (I had followed 252 on Google Reader). After that, you have to pay for a subscription starting at $24 per year. I’m all for people making money, but I needed to see how it worked with more than 12 subscriptions before I could commit to paying for it.

Google Reader has been my daily goto since at least 2006. I have used no other Web product – including gmail – longer. While I realize not everyone is like me and (still) relies on RSS feeds to keep up with news, blogs, job postings and all sorts of other things I’m interested in, this has the potential to force me to fundamentally change the way I work and consume information.

Anyone else dreading the impending information Apocalypse? Anyone with suggestions on how to cope? Also interested in knowing what impact, if any, this will have on blogs that rely on Google Reader for at least some of their traffic.

Update: Lifehacker has some recommendations on what to do. In the short term, I think I’m going to try NewsBlur. Updates/reviews to fall, but so far I’m encouraged, as it looks like their mobile apps are a hell of a lot better than Google Reader’s were.

• Nowadays more [students] attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing.
• During a [teacher's strike] I remember walking through the temporary campground in search of a teacher reading a book. Among tens of thousands, I found not one. I did find people listening to disco-decibel music, watching television, playing cards or dominoes, vegetating. I saw some gossip magazines, too.
• So I shouldn’t have been surprised by the response when I spoke at a recent event for promoting reading…“Who likes to read?” I asked. Only one hand went up in the auditorium. I picked out five of the ignorant majority and asked them to tell me why they didn’t like reading. The result was predictable: they stuttered, grumbled, grew impatient. None was able to articulate a sentence, express an idea.
  
• We have turned schools into factories that churn out employees. With no intellectual challenges, students can advance from one level to the next as long as they attend class and surrender to their teachers. In this light it is natural that…we are training chauffeurs, waiters and dishwashers.

It’s an op-ed in today’s New York Times about public elementary and secondary education in Mexico. But – and perhaps this is me simply being bitter in a long semester, three days before spring break – I am often left feeling statements like the ones above could just as well apply to public higher education in the United States.