Everything, once understood, is trivial

You've got to be kidding me

2008-08-12T20:43:00.000-07:00

Somebody mentioned Krispy Kreme donuts the other day, which reminded me of an experience I feel compelled to share.

There is a KK not far from my office, and on a whim a few weeks back I stopped in to pick up some yummy donutty goodness. I got a dozen (for the office, not just for me, you crazy people), two of this, two of that, two of the other. I noticed they have a Special of the Day advertised.

"What's the Special of the Day?" I ask the clerk.

"It's a white-frosted mango filled."

"Sounds good. I'll have two of those, too."

He hesitated. "It's really sweet."

I looked at him. "Yeah, I would sort of expect that."

"No, it's really sweet."

When the clerk at Krispy Kreme cautions you that a donut is sweet... you should consider yourself warned.

It was really sweet.

I mean, really, really sweet.

I love donuts. I love sweets of all sorts.

I couldn't finish it.

My seven year old son! couldn't finish it.

Any donut that is too sweet for seven-year-olds to eat really should come with warning labels.

Don't get me wrong, it was very tasty. In fact, when I went back I got another one. This time, though, I split it with three friends.

Krispy Kreme does do the donuts up right.

We all have a face, that we hide away forever...

2008-08-08T23:54:00.000-07:00

Got 'friended' on Facebook by my very very oldest friend, from first grade, the other day. We've stayed vaguely in touch - well, not really, but her mother and my mother live around the corner from each other so they've kept us up to date on what goes on in each other's lives. But we've not seen each other regularly.

And browsing her profile I noticed she was chatting with someone else... someone who was my very bestest ever friend in ninth grade, whom I haven't seen since... um... ninth grade? So we friended each other too. Odd how small the world is getting. And on Facebook, at least, my worlds are merging. Family, friends from school, friends from work, friends from all the different places I've lived ... all coming together.

Assuming this is happening to other people, not just me, it's an interesting convergence that this is bringing about. Normally, we all maintain separate personas for different situations. A persona for work, a persona for school, for socializing. Different personas that we have held at different phases in our lives. It's not intentional dissembling - well, not normally- it's simply a natural human phenomenon of acting and reacting differently in different situations and different relationships.

Now I have personas from over thirty years, four states, a half dozen employers, all in one place at one time. I'm ego-centric enough to wonder what they think - how have I changed? How am I different than they remember or expect? And the question none of us can answer, of course - are those differences due to time, or environment?

Ye canna change the laws of physics, Cap'n!

2008-08-08T22:30:00.000-07:00

So. I had a delightful experience yesterday, a woman at a networking meeting asked me if I was a runner. I said no, running hurts my knees. She observed that I look very trim and fit and that's why she'd thought that. I thanked her and went on about my business. But it was quite validating to know that all the exercising and dieting has actually paid off.

I had a long post here earlier about that, but it's probably going to annoy people. So I've taken that post down. I may put it back up, depending on how many of my readers I feel like I want to have flame me. Musing...

A blog by any other name is...

2008-08-08T19:00:00.000-07:00

Heard a somewhat interesting talk about blogging tonight. One of her key messages was that in order to get and retain readers, a blog must not remain always _on topic_ but should reveal something interesting about the author, personally, even if it's not related to the official subject of the blog.

I thought about that for awhile, because my initial reaction was to reject that. I read subject-specific blogs because I want to know about the subject, not about the author. But eventually I realized that's not actually true. I do read silat blogs to learn about silat, but also to learn about silat players, and the people. The posts that are most interesting to me are when the author talks about his/her personal experiences, especially as related to the subject matter. I read tech blogs to learn about the technology, but also to learn about the company, as represented by the author. And so on. This is something I shall have to consider in picking topics for my corporate blog.

As for my personal blog, (that would be this one) I've no idea if anyone reads it at all, and I don't really care. I'm not seeking validation, I've decided that instead of making this a professional blog, it's going to be about whatever I feel like writing about. It may be technology, it may not.
It may be martial arts, it may not. Stay tuned for further news. Or don't. Doesn't matter to me, actually.

2008-08-06T17:51:00.000-07:00

Posting this press release from Emerging Media, pass it on!

THE BAGDAD THEATER & PUB

Portland's marvelous relic of Hollywood's Golden Age

Presents the World Premier of HEMPSTERS - Plant The Seed

A documentary featuring Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Ralph Nader and Woody Harrelson.

If you've felt indifferent to the industrial hemp movement so far, this lively documentary will jump-start your thinking. After witnessing the arrest of Woody Harrelson for planting four feral hemp seeds in Kentucky and his subsequent trial and acquittal, you will likely be spittin' mad. You might be nearly as mad as traveling hemp activist Craig Lee and a number of featured old-school Kentucky tobacco farmers who want to grow the multipurpose crop as a way to save their farms.

You may become disillusioned as Alex White Plume, leader of the Lakota "Tiospaye" (family clan), and the first family to plant industrial hemp on American soil since the 1950s, makes a startling case that his right to grow the crop is a sovereignty issue. Julia Butterfly Hill goes to extreme lengths to protest the pulping of old-growth forests by living for over two years at the top of a thousand-year-old redwood tree in Northern California. Gatewood Galbraith, the fiery orator of the U.S. Reform Party, attempts to bring the public at large to its senses in his own inimitable style.

This motion picture puts hemp at the heart of just about every grassroots issue in America today. Featured players include Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Ralph Nader and Woody Harrelson.

HEMPSTERS is not a political study of cannabis, the history of twine or a trendy conversation on ecology. HEMPSTERS was conceived more than a decade ago, shot and edited over the last eleven years and is now test screening with our regional audience. It is a telling tale about standing at the cross-roads of human evolution and wondering which way we should go. And now the whole world is watching.

Many people came together from across America to help get the movie made. Sixteen Oregonians are proud to have played a role in the film's message which will now be heard around the world. Oregon filmmakers hope to reach out to the audience and let people everywhere see what a great message we as Americans had back then - and that it's very, if not more .... relevant now. Come and kick back in the theater and enjoy a slice of pizza and a handcrafted ale during the show.

Portland Premiere Screening, McMenamins Bagdad Theater Thursday August 14th 2008, Screenings at 7 & 10, must be 21 and over, Tickets $3 Doors open at 6 p.m. 3702 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd. Portland, OR 97214. (503) 236-9234. upcoming: http://tinyurl.com/54szd2 http://www.hempstersthemovie.com

--
Rod Pitman
Executive Producer Emerging Media
Virtuscape.com
AlphaGeektv.com
323.304.7858
The best way to predict the future is to create it. Imagination is your doorway to reality.

--
Rod Pitman
Executive Producer Emerging Media
Virtuscape.com
AlphaGeektv.com
323.304.7858
The best way to predict the future is to create it. Imagination is your doorway to reality.

School's out

2008-06-22T21:11:00.000-07:00

No more pencils, no more books! No more teachers’ dirty looks!

And, to the chagrin of parents everywhere, no more guaranteed child-supervision for at least a few hours a day. This week I, like many others, faced that annual question: what to do with my seven-year-old for the next ten weeks? He’s not ready to be home alone all day, so, we’ve started looking at day care options. The state of the economy means that we’re pinching every penny we can. At the same time, we want to make sure the child is safe, secure, and enjoys his summer holiday before he dives into the rigors of second grade.

Educational day camps? There are some very nice ones, at the zoo and the museum. The price? Not so nice: ranging from $250 to over $500. Plus the day camps only run 9 – 4, whereas we have to be at work 9 – 5. (That’s actually a conservative estimate: when you count in commuting time, we’re actually often out of the house from 8 - 6 or so. But maybe we can shuffle our schedules so we overlap or something.) The museum camps are actual camping so hours aren’t a problem. But do we really want the kid to spend the whole summer sleeping in a tent?

Neighborhood community center day camp? Much more affordable: about $100/ week. These are much less structured than the museum or school camps, though, and the counselors don’t seem to be as experienced or qualified. Will my kid be safe, educated, and will he have fun?

Hire a sitter? Even the neighborhood teenagers run at least $8/hour. And do I really want to turn one of the neighborhood teenagers loose in my house all day? I’d feel a little safer hiring a bonded and insured professional sitter from a service, but they start at $12/hour. And that would be not a teenager, but a complete stranger in my home all day every day.

We considered collaborating with some of the neighbors and hiring one sitter to supervise our three kids. That brings the rate up to $18/hour, but split three ways that’s only $160 each for the week. Much more reasonable. But it still has the issue of a stranger being in my house, along with two other kids, neither of whom is nearly as mature and responsible as mine. (My son is, of course, a model child, perfect in every way.) Can I trust the sitter to take care of my house the way I’d like to? Am I going to be responsible if the sitter or one of those kids slips on my stairs and breaks a leg while I’m not home? Uh oh.

Well, we thought, maybe we can flex our schedules? How about a four-day workweek, so we each are home one day with the kid? Well, that means we only have to pay 3/5 as much for a sitter. But on the other hand, now we’ll need ten, not eight, hours a day, so it’s still $360/week.

Option	Cost/week	Cost/summer	Hours	Pros	Cons
Zoo camp	$240	$2400	9 – 4	Educational	Expensive and still need supplemental coverage
Museum camp	Average $450	$4500	M - F	Educational, exercise	Outdoors and out of town all week
Neighborhood teenager	$320	$3200	9 – 5, or more as needed	In-home, flexible hours	Trusting a teenager in my home
Professional babysitter	$480	$4800	9 – 5, or more as needed	In-home, flexible hours	Trusting a stranger in my home
Shared professional sitter	$160	$1600	9 – 5, or more as needed	In-home, flexible hours	Trusting a stranger AND other children in my home
Flexing schedule, 3-days of daycare	$360	$3600	8 – 6	In home, cheaper	Working long days, and still trusting a stranger in my home
Community center camps	$100	$1000	8-6	Cheaper, local	Less structured, less experienced counselors

It’s times like this I wonder if life would be easier if we didn’t both work. But we both love our jobs, and more than that, we both need our jobs in order to make ends meet. So quitting work to stay home for the summer isn’t really a workable option.

About those neighbors… Could we all flex our schedules, so we each take one day off and supervise the three kids? Maybe we’ll have them over for a cookout this weekend and discuss it.

What do other people do?

Pack Animals

2008-06-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

DiSo: Distributed Social.

Scott Kveton of Vidoop (who is a very interesting and exciting person) is driving this. It's really, I think, the inevitable intersection of technology and society. As far as I can tell, all of your websites, all of your online activity, will become inextricably entwined with your social network(s).

I believe that the explosion of social networking tools synchronizes with the desperate isolationism that modern technology has created. Thousands of people work from home. Even in office settings, many people are isolated, spending all day secluded with a computer. Off the clock, we spend hours a day commuting or running errands, alone in our cars. We check our own groceries out of the store, deal with finances online or via an ATM, at night we watch TV or play computer games, fundamentally solo events. How often do you see people sitting on their porch, chatting with neighbors passing by? How much of your daily life involves having face-to-face conversations, forming social connections and relations with other people? I think less now than ever in history.

But we are an intrinsically social species. We need to interact with other people. And so when technology tools develop that allow us to have social interactions through the virtual media, we flock to them. Facebook, BeBo, MySpace, Twitter, instant messaging... all ways to electronically recreate that sense of presence, of immediate feedback and response, of being with another person.

I don't know if it works, of course. That's a question social anthropologists can write theses about. I don't even know if it helps. But I'd guess it probably does. It might increase productivity. I think it WILL increase job/lifestyle/personal happiness. And after all, which would you rather, be productive or be happy? In fifty years when you look back at your life, which way will you wish you had gone?

On exercise

2008-06-07T14:50:00.000-07:00

We got to talking about exercise. One (perhaps the most common) reason given for not exercising is, "I don't have time." And it's a good excuse. Busy people, busy worlds. Jobs, family, commutes, recreation, household... the hours get carved away. Back when your job or your commute included activity, it was easier to get and stay fit. Now it's something you have to add to your life. It becomes, like anything else, a question of priority.

Going to the gym? I hate it. An hour working out at the gym becomes two hours out of my day, when you include driving there, parking, changing, showering, changing back, driving back. Lose two hours for an hour of exercise? No thanks. (There are other reasons I hate gyms, but I'm talking about time right now).

So I need something I can do at home, that doesn't require expensive equipment, and that gives me maximum return for minimum time. I've found several DVDs that seem to be doing really good things for me, both in increasing fitness, weight loss, and general health and well being.

My routine:

Morning: about 15 minutes of breathing and stretching rites, that do great things for the abs. Steven Barnes put out a DVD on these.
Mid-day: the Five Minute Miracle, five one-minute breathing exercises spread out through the day. I usually do these while I'm driving, or steeping my tea, or walking to meetings.
Evening: walking, anywhere from half an hour to an hour. Ends up being a couple of miles. I don't pay close attention, just go exploring the neighborhood. Light aerobic exercise, warming up the muscles, mostly walking out the day's stresses.
Evening: three times a week, Scott Sonnon's FlowFit. This fifteen minute routine is some phenomenally well designed overall strength and resistance training. It starts out simple and light, you can go as deep, as hard, as slow or fast as you want. Anybody, at any level of fitness, can start it and can get gradually more intense. The exercises are graduated to give you more challenge as you get more fit.
Bedtime, every day: Scott Sonnon's IntuFlow. This is about 20 - 30 minutes of stretching, flexibility and balance exercises that seem to me to be extremely good for overall wellness and health. Like FlowFit, you can do them no matter how fit you are or aren't, and they are graduated so you can progress through them and remain challenged.

I usually add some martial arts practice to it. Still, it totals less than two hour-long TV shows.

As always, your mileage may vary.

Exercise in creative thinking

2008-06-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

Looking at the variety of topics in the blogs and news streams I read, I'm setting myself a challenge. Pick three entries at random, find the connections, and write about that. Stay tuned...

Too Much Information

2008-06-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

We do live in the information age, don't we? And the wonderful thing about this age is that everywhere you turn there is information that's pertinent, relevant, useful to you, no matter what your interests are.

Today, that's my problem. I like to keep on the news, the blogs, the latest-and-greatest ideas, in my areas of interest. In no particular order, that includes:

mobile technology
advertising and marketing
ubiquitous computing
next-gen interface design
martial arts
information security
science fiction
space exploration
blogging
website design
CMS
personal privacy
data mining
elementary education
civil rights and liberties
US, European, Asian technology trends
Web 2.0/3.0

Add to that a couple of dozen specific companies and industries, several dozen personal friends and family members, and several dozen more professional colleagues and compatriots, and I don't know how I get anything done.

Time has a way of moving on.

2008-06-05T14:29:00.000-07:00

"It's not my fault," complained one of my childhood friends recently. "As I've gotten older, my metabolism has slowed down, so I've put on a little weight."

This is undoubtedly true. When your metabolism slows down, you burn fewer calories. On the other hand, you also NEED fewer calories. If you take in more than you need... the difference has to go somewhere. Now he's got eighty pounds more than when we were in college. He has back problems, hip problems, ankle and knee aches. And no wonder. He's carrying the equivalent of an eight-year -old child around with him, all the time.

And yet... he doesn't walk anywhere, he still doesn't eat vegetables, he goes through a box of cookies at a sitting, he drinks soda and beer incessantly...

When you're twenty, you can abuse your body shamelessly and pay no price for it. At forty... it starts to add up.

It's the economy, stupid

2008-06-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

So according to this morning's Oregonian, we are now tipping into a recession. Well, duh. Prices rising, salaries dropping, unemployment rising, consumer confidence dropping. I'm going to start taking the MAX to work, even though it takes over an hour whereas driving is only 25 minutes, just because it costs me over a gallon of gas to drive to the office and back. At $4.41/gallon, that adds up.

But on the bright side, it seems like my job is in the correct sector. Although people are cutting back on purchases, particularly consumer electronics, they are apparently cutting back less on mobile phone purchases than on anything else. (Thanks grigs for the cite) "More will cut back on buying gas than their cell phone 51% versus 31%" And since my company makes its money from mobile advertising, it looks like we're in the right place to do well,if we do it right.

The statistics in the Harris report are interesting to me, because they seem so obvious. The mobile lifestyle is all about making mobile devices, mobile applications, and mobile advertisements, useful, relevant, integrated and pertinent. If I'm walking through downtown on my lunch break, using applications on my mobile phone, I don't want to see advertisements for the newest version of Adobe Acrobat. I don't care about Adobe Acrobat when I'm going to lunch.

On the other hand, I will be much more receptive to advertisements for coffee shops, burger joints, or pizzerias. I will be enthusiastic about receiving coupons for coffees, 2-for-1 sandwiches, even happy hour specials for after work or discount movie tickets that I can use tonight. Well, duh. That's where the future of mobile advertising is, in supporting the mobile lifestyle.

Social networking - technology catching up to human nature

2008-06-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

I think that social networking technologies are simply implementations of the human desire for connectiveness and relationships. People have a fundamental, intrinsic need to share with and be close to other people. Or society has become so mobile, so distributed, and so isolate that often we can't be physically close to the people we trust, can't interact with them in the ways we have evolved. So, we share ourselves virtually, electronically.
The difference now is that we have no physical reference, no way to verify that we are placing our trust in the people we think we are. The person who online seems to be my best friend from high school could actually be a total stranger, a confidence artist who has successfully impersonated my friend, who will abuse my trust for his own gain. How do I know?
One friend of mine pointed out that, "there is something to be said for the transparent society - if obscurity is the only privacy, then the need for privacy goes away." I'm not sure I agree. Do I need to protect myself (my information)? And (and this is where regulation enters it) is anyone else (the government, my employer, my doctor, my lawyer) responsible for doing so?

Privacy is what you make of it

2008-03-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

I think it's interesting, that at the same time we have unprecedented levels of fraud, intrusions, and identity theft, we have a phenomenal increase in peoples' ability and willingness to make contacts and share information, with large and unknown audiences. Social networking sites are taking off like wildfires. Blogs pervade the net with a huge variety of personal information. "Virtual friendships" are becoming more common than "real" friendships...often, without the basic elements of knowing names, ages, locations, even gender. People put out huge amounts of information about themselves, and mobile technology is moving ever faster to interlace the virtual and real worlds. Online communities are giving people a sense of connection, of belonging, of being a part of their world in a way that hasn't been widespread since the Industrial Revolution. And yet...

I read the blog of someone I have never met. Based on what he posts, and what I learned by Googling him on the open Internet, I know his name, address, employer, son's name and school, his dog's breed and name, the address of his vet, his wife's name and employer, his approximate net worth, his hobbies, his favorite books, what movie he went to see last weekend and what time (so I know what time he was out of the house) and where his parents live. I have more than enough information that, were I a malicious sort, I could utterly take over his identity, empty his bank account, steal his dog, burglarize his house, kidnap his son...

but in one of his recent posts he ranted at length about the "government's" responsibility to protect personal information and prevent identity theft. Sometimes I wonder if people just want to have it both ways.