iPad, Flash, HTML5, and F2F Social

May 11, 2010 | Life | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

Although I'm big into tech I'm not really much of an early adopter. I tend towards buying 2nd- or 3rd gen products right as they're released. My theory is that this is the sweet spot for cost/benefit.

The iPad is different. After watching the introduction video (twice) I couldn't get it out of my head. Not because of how Cool it was, or – as an iPhone owner – because of how a bigger screen would "fix" some of the issues I have with heavy iPhone surfing. The brainworm that the iPad became was very subtle, and had to do with human interaction. Not so much human-and-computer, though there's that, but human-to-human.

You might have a sense of how the iPad changes the game if you live in a house where more than one person has a smartphone with a web browser and you've surfed together after supper at the dining table. Or if you've had a dedicated computer in the kitchen or family room, where people can look something up on a moment's notice and not break the conversation. Having an always-on Internet integrated with daily life (vs. the "computer" as something over there in the office) is just different.

So I pre-ordered the first-gen $499 iPad. And indeed, I still think it's a big deal. It's totally full of 1.0, but none of it matters. It's been available barely a month, all that will get sorted out. And yeah, when they do add a camera it will be better, etc. But the social component is here now. And the way it's changing websites is here now. The Apple/Adobe HTML5/Flash saga is all part of it.

John Gruber's Daring Fireball has had a number of interesting links, as have others. Reading them in in bulk will give you a sense of what I'm talking about.

What iPads Did To My Family

Fred Wilson: I've changed my mind about the iPad.

The iPad, and the Staggering Work of Obviousness

The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash

Non-Apple’s Mistake

The Progress of the Platform

The Adobe - Apple Flame War

Scribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5″

Introducing Scribd in HTML5 (Web geeks, try selecting some fonts....)

HTML5 and the Web

Understand The Web

Try reading all that and not getting a sense that always-on, always-with-you Internet will change your life.

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Morning Smoothie

April 23, 2010 | Life

The other day I mentioned my blender breakfast lifestyle and someone asked what exactly I've been putting in the BlendTec. Here's the current recipe with a few options.

Notes: When I say, "Tbs" I usually mean "heaping Tbs" – dump the stuff in there! If I use the "~" symbol it means I don't measure but am guessing the amount (just dump it in there!). I add the ingredients in this order because some of them start to expand and thicken in water.

• 8 - 12 oz water
• Big handful of leafy greens: spinach, lettuce, kale; mix it up.
• 1 Tbs raw cacao powder
• 1 Tbs hemp powder
• 1 Tbs hemp seeds
• ~ 1/2 Tbs cinnamon
• 1 Tbs rice protein, vanilla or chocolate (whatever's around)
• 1-2 Tbs ClearVite (horrible website!)
• 1 Tbs Vitamineral Green
• 3 drops liquid SteviaClear (that stuff is strong!)
• 1 Tbs psyllium husks
• ~1/4 cup Goji berries, maybe 20-30
• ~1/4 cup Mulberry berries, maybe 10-20
• 1/4 cup frozen blueberries
• 6-8 ice cubes

Sometimes:

• 1/2 Tbs chia seeds
• 1 Tbs macca powder

(Both of these give me funny reactions, and I haven't decided if it's a lightweight allergy or a psychoactive buzz that's distracting during the workday. More experiments required.)

For years I ate a bagel with peanut butter for breakfast. Then for a few years I ate a 6 oz turkey burger for breakfast. Then for a few years I ate a peanut butter sandwich with Ezekiel sesame bread. This smoothie has far more nutrition, and keeps me full longer. I haven't priced out the per-serving cost, though it's got to be higher than a PB bagel. But it's so much healthier, and tasty. Much morning yum!

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Cherry Table

October 9, 2009 | Life

Dear Friend,

I have enclosed a photo of what I believe to be a cherry coffee table. It measures 2' x 4' x 17"H and is in very good - really quite close to excellent - condition.

The table - it does not yet have a name - was given to us last year by M.G., former board president of the B. Food Co-op. He had purchased it direct from the source while on a two-day spree in the Rt. 2 corridor of furniture manufacturers in Massachusetts. He offered it up because, after several years of trying, he could not really fit it into his furniture scheme. 2' x 4' - just too big. And, just bought too much furniture that day. He's been giving things away ever since.

We haven't found a purrrfect spot for it either, even after a year of considering the nearly-infinite range of possibilities. But now we've started to make some halting initial conceptualizations - to say nothing of the future potential actual *physical* manifestations, - of a move toward a more zen minimalist approach than our current post-integration maximal mashup would allow.

And so today we find ourselves in the same predicament. It's a nice table. Sturdy. Good condition. Holds a LOT of book piles. You can sit on it. Nearly perfect size for a couple of cat beds. You can see it here, in the enclosed grainy low-light iPhone spy photo, eBay style, stepping out in one of our objet arrangements which some have called, "The Annex Appendix Bric-A-Brac Congregation Diversity Evincement Fez" series.

Imagine the possibilities....

Picture yourself owning this fine table, set properly amongst your cherished belongings. Imagine your books, your tea, your cats, your very selves, enjoying the large, welcoming platform for your every purpose. Feel the smooth polished surface with your fingers. Listen to the solid "thump" you hear as you place it firmly onto the floor in the precise location you feel is best. Change the location at any time.

Experts say that nothing can occur that you can't also imagine, so in that sense you now already possess this table, in your minds. A simple matter of manifesting that reality - for yourself and your family - is all it takes to immediately create a stronger, smarter, sexier, AND wealthier version of your best self.

The most amazing part of this offer? You can have this very table - not a very similar table as seen elsewhere or in stores, but the very same table itself that I have described herein - for the exact same price which we ourselves paid: FREE!!! You sure don't hear that everyday! Let's spell it out: F-R-E-E-!-!-!. You heard correctly. Free as in beer, and also free as in speech. Gratis and libre, indeed. Absolutely, positively, 100% free. Senza soldi. Pas d'argent. Nolo denario.

There is only one of these fine tables. It won't last forever. Like all assemblages of atoms and matter, it will eventually cease to exist. Unlike most carbon-based bipedal life-forms, it doesn't really care. But you care. You care because you're you, and you care. And now, you have the opportunity to care about this table, and fondly remember the many years of pleasure you've received from caring for it.

When would you like to take free home delivery of this fine quality heirloom?

M & K, Co-Founders
Zen Minimalist Potentialist Industries
Shadow Ministry of Information and Architecture
Annex Appendix Bric-A-Brac Congregation Evincement
Comcast Sector, The Internet, Earth, Milky Way.
10:53PM GMT-5, Julian 281, 02009

[Update: This item has been claimed.]

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Introduction to Grateful Dead

January 8, 2009 | Arts & Culture | Life

So, you have a new friend, and one day she says, "You should burn me a Grateful Dead CD because I'm really not familiar with anything they've done." You say, "Sure," and a few minutes later your head explodes as you reel from the possibilities. It takes a week of full-time leisure-thought to sort it all out and find an entry point....

The catalog is vast. 30 years of concert performances. Over 3,000 shows, most of them available as recordings! Hundreds of songs in the repertoire. Dozens officially released concert CDs. Thousands upon thousands of authorized private non-commercial concert tapes and discs. The Internet Archive has 2,854 multi-hour downloads online, and it's certainly incomplete.

You start by wondering how your friends might answer this question. So you ask a few, and their first response is to laugh. "Wow, not sure. I don't know...." is the typical response before their voice trails off.

Do we start with the old experimental shows? (No.) Or the most modern powerhouse shows? (Maybe.) The middle years, at the peak of their creativity? (Possible.) Pigpen-era? Keith-ear? Brent-era? We certainly know enough not to start with the Vince era.

Do I burn something I like? Or something I think she will like? Do I pick something with clean sound, or something gritty, real, and otherworldly? Do I choose an official release so it's nicely edited, or a tape I recorded myself in the '80s?

When people asked this during the college years I'd just give them a copy of whatever I was listening to at the time. It was always changing, there was always more. If they liked it, or even if they didn't, we'd just bring 'em along the next time the Dead were playing nearby and see if they caught the live magic lightening. Or maybe they liked it a lot, and wanted to drink from the fire hose – they'd bring over a tape deck and spend the weekend copying cassettes. Tape flip every 45 minutes. Oh, the slow lazy days of real-time dubbing. Roll another one.

Today, virtually none of this is possible. We have only the recorded legacy, and a lot of it. Today, we burn 70-minute CDs in 14 minutes.

For starters, let's eliminate the studio albums. Although there are some worthy of listening, there's no sense in starting there. The Dead experience revolved around live performance. Maybe a Dick's Pick concert release? But then what to say? That 1971 show that turned Donni into a raving Deadhead? The 1983 one with a chunky Scarlet Fire? The '77 Fox Theater shows? That weird '74 Alexandra Palace show that makes you feel like you're tripping just listening to it? Maybe that '73 Oklahoma show because it has such a hot summer beer-drunk lazy vibe?

Dick's Picks narrows it down but doesn't really help the selection process. Maybe we should just have an all-Dead weekend and see how that goes....

How about if I just burn the five-disc chronological set, So Many Roads? This was put together by scholarly Deadheads, with carefully selected songs and thorough liner notes. It flows well, and you can start in the middle and work out toward the early and late years. But you don't want to overload. She just asked for a sample, a taste, you don't need to deliver a box-load of discs to paw through.

Maybe Dozin' at the Knick, that's a pretty safe bet. The playing is quite tight; the polish meets anyone's standards, and it's from a good era. But somehow, no. Can't tell you why. Probably a good second round offering.

What about an audience recording, like Lewiston 1980? Well, that was a short-lived thought. It is a rockin' fantastic show, and it seems like every Deadhead I know was there, except for me. And the audience recording on archive.org is a fantastic representation. But, man, that show is dead to the core. I think it's best left to round three or four.

What about a multi-track release like Go to Nassau? This was a contender, and I listened to it on my commute for two days. Strong contender. But, like Dozin', not quite right. A little too rock 'n roll, not enough representation of the thoughtful, mellow side. Yes, I know that High Time is rarely played and it's well-played on this release, but still.

It came down to eras. Late '70s, early '80s, or late '80s/early '90s. Each has their charms—and there are other options but these seem best for introductory material—and it depends a lot on what the prospect likes and listens to already.

In the end, I decided on the remastered versions of Reckoning and Dead Set. Two live recordings from 1980, when Brent was new but settled in, and highly polished in production. Reckoning is all acoustic, so you get the Folkie Country Dead, and Dead Set is electric, with the more typical sound. The innovative recording technique pioneered new ground, and the band, rarely allowed to play sophisticated and intimate venues like the Warfield Theater in SF and Radio City Music Hall in NYC, rose to the occasion with fresh, tight ensemble playing. The remastered versions are two discs each, with a lot of bonus material. It's still four discs – what can a deadhead say? – but split in half by the acoustic/electric difference.

I figured if that floats then round two will be a single show (complete experience), from the west coast (home field advantage), in a small venue (raise the stakes), from the Dan Healy era (psychoacoustic sound effects). So we're talkin' probably the Greek or the Frost, maybe Ventura, from the 1980's.

On a plane to Detroit I listened to a soundboard from 6/19/1989 (Greek Theater). It's a serious contender. The headphone experience was something else. The harmonic vocal processing, the stereo exchanger effects, the setlist, Garcia's heartfelt Candyman, Crazy Fingers, and Knockin' – really brought me back, I tell 'ya, even on a plane.

I think a full survey of the late-eighties Greek and Frost shows is in order, but if you had to choose today you could do a lot worse than the 6-19-89 at the Greek.

[I wrote this in August, 2006, but never posted it. I think I had intended to link up a lot of the text and never got to it. Decided to post it today without the link farming.]

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Stop Counting Calories!

January 8, 2009 | Life | Nature & Environment

It's amazing!! Did you know salad has almost no calories!?! But a bacon cheeseburger with fries and a coke is nearly a whole day's calorie budget! You can eat as many carrots as you want! - they're like free food calorie-wise. But ice creme, whoa! - smaller portions, please. And then, exercise: If I did almost ANYTHING in movement I could eat more junk food! That hour of snow shoveling this morning was worth a muffin or something, maybe even a chocolate croissant. Mowing the lawn for 90 minutes burns 900 calories - a guy could have a couple three beers on a sunny day and yet his beer-gut expansion would be neutralized. They say God works in mysterious ways....

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Labor Day Weekend (Four-Day Edition)

September 2, 2008 | Life

• A beautiful and easy hike in the White Mountains with a friend.
• Sunburn.
• Great dinner out with said friend and our partners.
• Finally, a day to sleep in.
• One electrical outlet added.
• One closet light and switch removed.
• The lawn mowed.
• The dining room layout redesigned.
• Wow, Sara Palin.
• Another closet light and switch removed.
• Took advantage of big Home Depot paint sale and stocked in 15 gallons of paint and primer, in five colors and 2 tints.
• One visit to the emergency room due to a nail embedded in a 2x4 bashing and bouncing off the top of my head. Hey, head injuries bleed a lot!
• Lunch with mom and family.
• Supper with dad and family.
• Experimented with fruit fly trap. Incinerate or drown, that is the question.

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Up and Out (1:40)

June 10, 2008 | Life | Technology

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Approximately one in four odds, depending on your bias

May 19, 2008 | Life

Days can be characterized in one of four ways: Outstanding, Fine, Difficult, and Off.

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FYI

March 28, 2008 | Life | Software | Technology

WinXP (hello, ActiveX) & IE7 (welcome, Acrobat Reader 8.1.2) running Online Quickbooks, via Parallels and Mac OS X running on a MacBook Pro, prints checks no problem on the HP color laser connected via JetDirect and Ethernet. Astounding.

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iPod Makes the NordicTrack Just Barely Tolerable

February 25, 2008 | Life

Headline says it all.

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Thanks Bro

February 4, 2008 | Life | People & Society

Got a helpful Twitter tweet from my brother last night:

@notio: Super Bowl is starting. Just wanted to make sure you know what the rest of the country is doing right now.

Thanks bro – I had a head's up from Fake Steve on Friday...

I noticed that many of the proles seemed to be talking about some big sporting competition that will happen in the next few days. Football, apparently. I don't much care for the game -- I'm more into European sports like cycling and cross-country skiing, and I still think it's outrageous that we don't have tai chi on television in this country the way they do in every country in Asia.

Since I don't have TV reception, I couldn't verify the lack of Tai Chi, or watch the Super Bowl. (But go Pats!)

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Running Out of Ideas?

January 17, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Software

Amusing one-line review of Handmeon, pointing to the Boston Globe article:

Handmeon.com is a cool idea, perhaps showing that Web 2.0 entrepreneurs may be running out of ideas.

Well, I laughed out loud. He goes on to say, "Actually, I do think it's a pretty interesting social experiment." Thanks Pito, for taking a look.

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Handmeon Update

January 2, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Life

Here's a status (promotional) update (flogging) on (of) my project (startup) to change the world, Handmeon.

We got great press during the holiday season, including the Boston Globe, Vermont Public Radio, Seven Days, and the Valley News (broken link; left here for posterity).

Jeff had an epiphanette while in dialogue at GiftHub.org which we're discussing internally, and this might lead to some ground-breaking organizational structures.

We received some good traffic from the media, and a good round of registrations. People who like it seem to really like it. We're looking for more members, so stop by, explore a little, and see if it's something that resonates with you.

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See Change, Part 1

December 11, 2007 | Life | Technology

I remember when I started wearing glasses, in third grade (1970). These days I think they test kids a lot younger, but back in the day that was the first test I took and I needed glasses pretty badly. I used to always sit in the last row of class, and on that first day with glasses I went to my normal seat and was amazed when the teacher started on her material.

I couldn't believe it – she was writing stuff on the wall up there!! All this time I thought she was just telling us stuff, I had no idea she was writing things on a "blackboard" and pulling maps down from rollers. Wow.

I told her this at morning break, and she looked at me funny, in a way I ow recognize as disbelief, and moved my seat to the second row, permanently. I forget if it was her or my Dad who said, "No wonder your handwriting is so bad." [And people ask, "How did you decide to study psychoacoustics in college?"]

Today, 37 years later, my prescription was nearly -10 in the right eye and nearly-11 in the left, including some astigmatism in the left eye. If 20/20 is normal" vision, this corresponds to approximately 20/2,000. What other people could see at 2,000 feet, I could only see at 20 feet. The problem with lenses this strong is that the light is distorted by the lens except at the very center. With a strong lens, that center area is very small. So as my eyes scanned across a page of text, the eye would see distorted, then focused, then distorted text. The brain can process it, but it takes more cycles, and it's fatiguing. I used to be the fastest reader I know, these days, not so much.

Of course, there's all the usual reasons why wearing glasses sucks: Raindrops in the rain, fogging up when you walk inside during the winter (six months, here in New Hampshire), and getting smudged with every kiss, etcetera.

So, after five years of occasional research and consideration, last Thursday I had Lasik surgery at Laservue in Montreal. Technically, in their marketing-speak, thin-flap, high-definition, custom-wavefront Lasik. Here's the story.

It's a very modern clinic, on the second floor of a medical office building. The area I saw was about half the floor. It appears they have most of the whole floor, but we weren't in the other half.

I checked in at 1 PM. I gave them the patient consent form, checked my basic information, and gave them my hotel information. After a short wait, a technician took me to what would be the first of six testing and treatment rooms. She started with the CRS-Master wavefront measurement and a standard refractive test. This created a computer map of the topology of each eye, and programs the laser how to do its work. We moved to a second room and she measured the thickness of my cornea (and the curvature too, I think). Then we went to a third room, much like a standard optometrist office, where, in fact, an optometrist conducted the standard subjective eye exam.

After confirming that indeed I was a candidate for surgery (verifying the pre-testing dne by my local eye doctor), and confirming that indeed I would like to have the surgery done, they sent me to billing where I signed the billing release and ran the Visa card. $2,400 Canadian, currently with a ~10% discount rate to the US dollar.

She directed me to a second waiting room, and soon the two doctors came out to have a discussion about my supposed allergy to Proparicaine HCL, a common eye numbing solution. Long story short, they were pretty darn sure I wasn't allergic, but had a vasovagal syncope, common among young men, which is when I was originally diagnosed. They asked a few other questions, nodding and looking at each other knowingly, until one finally said, "Classic." They would put a single drop into each eye and look for a reaction, but didn't expect one.

They took me to another room where a paramedic asked me to lay on the table. I said, "This is it, right? This is probably the last chance to use the bathroom before surgery?" It was happening kind of fast at this point, and it suddenly occurred to me that, you know, there was a certain amount of fear, and, well, peeing my pants would be unfortunate. So I ran off to the restroom, whilst Kathryn, the nurse, and the doctors had a brief laugh. "That's certainly a nervous pee," he said. As it turned out, I'm glad I went.

So then I'm back in pre-op, laying on the table, being told, "Okay, look straight up (drop into each eye), look up toward me [she was standing behind me, at the head of the table] (another drop), look down at your shoes (drop, drop)." This went on for several rounds, and if you go read anything about the Lasik surgery procedure, you will know why they want the eyes good and numb. At one point I was unable to look down at my shoes. I tried, but couldn't seem to do it, and I think at that point they know they've got enough in there.

Next, stand up, a little weirded out by the heavy eye numbing, and the next thing you know I'm laying on the table of the Zeiss MEL-80, an excimer laser.

At this point you can see my sleeve rolled up – they had given me a shot of Atropine, to control that vasovagal syncope, and on the television screen you can just barely make out a close up of one of my eyes under the laser. And how does the laser work, exactly?

Rather than burning or cutting material, the excimer laser adds enough energy to disrupt the molecular bonds of the surface tissue, which effectively disintegrates into the air in a tightly controlled manner through ablation rather than burning. Thus excimer lasers have the useful property that they can remove exceptionally fine layers of surface material with almost no heating or change to the remainder of the material which is left intact.

Here is what I remember of the surgery itself. All of this happened in less than ten minutes, maybe five or six. I lay on the table, and they put the bolster under my knees. The table is motorized and it rotates me under the laser. I get the shot. I am positioned to work on the right eye first. They put a clamp on my eyelid to hold it open. They tell me to look at the green spot – which is actually a wide green pattern, kind of like a snowy TV screen, or a 2D barcode. The nurse says, "Now we will let you hear the sounds of the surgery, so they will be familiar. First, the [name I forgot] will position your eye, then the microkeratome will make a sound [buzzing sound], then, finally, the laser will make a high-pitched sound." The doctor held my head. The second doctor took my pulse. The microkeratome was lowered toward my eye. The nurse called out two numbers, something like, "436, 528." The doctor said, "Lower," which I took to be a confirmation, or a "Go" statement, rather than a directive.The buzzing started. My sight went very blurry. "Keep staring at the center of the green dot." I thought, "No turning back now." Funny time to think that, but whatever. The buzzing stopped. Through blurry vision I saw a clear sheet with a hole in it placed over my eye, probably a sort of bib to protect the eye from debris. The high-pitched sound began.

I did a lot of reading about all this, over five years, but no one, nowhere, told me there would be a smell, like burning hair. So I stopped breathing through my nose.

A few seconds later, at most a minute or two of ablation, the doctor said, "Perfect." The laser stopped, he removed the protective sheet, the flap went back onto my cornea, and he started putting drops in my eye while it sealed in place, which took maybe 10 - 30 seconds. The table repositioned me for left eye treatment, and we began again. The left eye took a bit longer because it was a stronger correction. I was twitchier, and tried to focus on my breathing.

And then, the table moved me out from under the laser, and the doctor said, "Aren't you glad you don't have four eyes?" which is a very funny double entendre, if you think about it. Even at this moment, through blurry, wet eyes, I could tell the light was entering my eyes totally differently.

They walked me across the hall to a typical optometrist setup, and did a close inspection of each eye. My left eye had a 'piece of mucus' he carefully brushed away – this could have been a euphemism for making sure the edge of the flap was not curling up. In any case, he did that, said, "Perfect," and they taped plastic shields over my eyes, which I wore until the next morning. I got some basic instructions, and we walked down the hall, got our coats, and some water, and drove out of the parking lot at about 2 PM, one hour after checking in.

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Quote for the Day

November 18, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Life

"It is by deferring mediocre actions and by being utterly intent on foreseeing the unforeseeable that we prepare ourselves for being thoroughly contradicted by happiness." —Gaston Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration, pg 63.

The Unbroken Chain blogging fiesta didn't materialize (deferring mediocre actions), but it was a rilly rilly great weekend. I met some fine people who are sure to be long-term friends, and got some positive reaction to the ideas and potentials I put forth. The level of discourse, the warmth of the folk, the awesome power of the music, the fun times – one of the best social weekends in many years. There will be followup.

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Handmeon RSS

October 26, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Life

Handmeon now has an RSS feed. It's a pretty interesting view into the site. Have a look and check out the diverse topics our early users are engaging.

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Beauty parlor's filled with sailors...

September 27, 2007 | Life | People & Society

...the circus is in town.

We had The Big Debate here in the hood last night. Good video summary at TPM.

Complete with our own freedom pens and everything!

It was also the first day of classes, which combined with the media tents, temporary air conditioning, security presence, and pedestrian jostling to wake the whole town up from its summer slumber like some sort of cheery post-hangover alarm clock.

My favorite quote though, came from the private air services firm at the local airport:

As of 5 p.m., Barack Obama had the biggest jet on the tarmac, a Gulfstream II. John Edwards had a Hawker jet on hand. And U.S. Sens. Joe Biden and Chris Dodd flew together from Washington, D.C., in a King Air twin engine plane. Hillary Clinton's plane was due to arrive closer to the 9 p.m. debate.

Ray Reed, a veteran customer service representative for Signal Aviation at the West Lebanon airport, said the lineup of incoming planes were “comparable to any big weekend” at Dartmouth, such as parents weekend.

Gotta love that. These big-shot politicos are no match for Dartmouth parents' airplanes!

Bonus link: Singles will check out eligible candidates at Obama rally

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Introducing Handmeon

August 31, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Life | Products & Opportunites

Okay, enough with the hints. In January I started a new company with two co-founders, and today we released the second major revision to our first product, Handmeon. To quote some draft marketing material:

Handmeon turns giving into a shared creative experience. Inspired by ancient circles of exchange, Handmeon lets people create renewable resources of expression through gifts endowed with history and trajectory, humor and thought. Rejecting material consumption and accumulation, Handmeon seeks a return to giving as a vehicle for human connection.

The basic idea is to take an objet, perhaps something small, perhaps something beautiful, perhaps something with an interesting background, and create an online presence for it. You upload a photo, write an inscription, and make blog posts regarding the object. Eventually you give it away, and the new keeper can write posts and enjoy the objet's sojourn with them. As the object moves between people, you can see the travels with integrated Google maps. After 4 hops, or 20, or 40, the object develops a rich history, accumulating stories online.

In other words, we're playing with the integration and separation of the real-world and the Internet. These objects are passed from one friend to another – when you hold an object you received it from a friend, and you'll give it to a friend, perhaps in person, perhaps by mail. And they'll give it to a friend, perhaps one you haven't yet met. The object becomes a connecting thread between a line of people, all connected one friend to another. I'm hopeful that it will expose the connections and therefore the interdependencies between people who haven't ever met.

You can take a tour, or explore the site to get a sense of what the early adopters are doing. For instance, Kathryn wants to learn more about meditation. Trippy the Frog wants to travel. The Roller just completed a sojourn with Jer. John wrote a post about a brush with celebrity. Jeff went meta, right out of the gate. And so on. You can create public, private, and secret objects.

To make money, we'll sell the permanent tags that turn objects into Handmeons and give them a URL. So the creator buys a tag, and everyone else can claim, post, and release the object for free. Speaking of free, right now the tags are free – so go register and order some! Make some Handmeons! See what it feels like to imbue something with meaning online, and then give it away. Experience the gratitude that this act of generosity engenders. You can create the online Handmeon before your tags arrive, so you can get started right away.

Eventually we'll charge money for the tags. Pricing is not set, but we want it to be affordable, maybe three tags for $12.95 or something. We have to model the object's long-term pageview cost and whatnot, and we haven't finished that yet. Three tags for $19.95 is probably the highest price we can imagine right now.

Of course, there's a blog, newly minted. We're going to try for one solid software release each week for a few weeks. Comments are on over there, and we are actively looking for feedback and enthusiastic participants. Come over and play in this new interaction space!

Oh, and, as a self-funded startup, we're looking for links! Tell your friends. ;) Thanks.

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Yo! This is not cool. WTF.

August 24, 2007 | Life | Nature & Environment

I woke up about 40 minutes after falling asleep, hearing what I thought was a big moth banging against the window screen trying to get in. It went on long enough that I grabbed my flashlight to see what it was. When I turned it on, something whizzed by my head, and I realized the moth was already in the bedroom, and it was trying to get out.

So I got up and put my glasses on and hit the flashlight again to go find the lightswitch, when, lo and behold, the thing flew by me and I realized, it's a bat!!. Uh, okay. I bolted out the door to the hallway, and turned on the hall light.

So now I'm standing there, naked, dazed and confused, in the middle of some decent REM sleep, trying to figure out what to do. Do I have to deal with this now? I'm tired, can I deal with this in the morning? Well, first, let's verify it's a bat, and not just a really big moth.

So I open the door just a bit, and flip the lightswitch on, and a big grey bat comes dive-bombing at the door, which I slam shut. Yo! This is not cool. WTF.

So, I'm thinking, where's my sleeping bag? I don't think it's in the bedroom. It's not in the spare bedroom, but hey, there's the futon Kathryn moved over here when Rob and Sarah lived here last fall. I can sleep there. Kinda cold, nice to have a blanket or something. So I head downstairs to find the sleeping bag. Not in the closets. Basement maybe? I'm down there rooting around and can't find it. Ugg.

Well, maybe I can catch the bat and get it out of here and just go back to bed. And then I realize I'll be chasing after this thing barefoot in my birthday suit, and that just seems crazy. Too many bad things could happen. I just want it to go away, a particular instance of my pacifist "tuck into a fetal position, roll out of the way, and hope for the best" approach to physical conflict.

So I go back upstairs to the bedroom hallway. I listen closely. Maybe it has left? Then, schnit, squeal, bang into the screen. Nope, it's still flailing. I'm going to sleep in the spare bedroom. In some sort of weird bat-mind theorizing, I leave the bedroom and hallway lights on, figuring he wants to get out, and he'll be less likely to head for the bottom of the door if it's light on the other side.

I find the winter comforter, and pull it onto the futon, and bunch some of it up at the head for a pillow, and crash sometime after midnight.

I wake up and don't want to get up. Eventually I get up and listen at the door. Nothing. I peek inside. No apparent danger. I quickly put on sweats and a t-shirt, and get out of there. I spend an hour wondering about my approach to the search. I eat a banana. I check email. I check my morning blogs. I call Kathryn. Finally, I get my Tilly hat, my leather garden gloves, and my capture implements: a 3 gallon paint bucket, and an 11 x 17 sheet of photo-mount backing board.

I carefully head into the bedroom, searching on the floor, walls, and ceiling. Nothing. Corners? Under the bed? On the slats up under the bottom of the bed? Behind the curtains? Behind the pillows on the floor? In the closet? I can't find him. Maybe he really did find his way out under the air conditioner, the likely way he got in. I tape up the A/C slot, and hope he really got out, leaving my bucket and backing board handy in case I need them tonight.

It all feels like a weird dream, kind of like the fiction I wrote in 2002. But amplified, since it was, in fact, real. Six or eight hours from now we'll be headed to bed. I wonder what will happen....

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Shipped

August 8, 2007 | Life | Products & Opportunites

Our project went live an hour ago.

I'll tell you all about it in a couple of weeks, after vacations. For now, just marking the date.

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Delete and Design

August 1, 2007 | Life | People & Society

So today Jeff came in for a meeting and after we settled in I asked him, "Should we try to do anything about the Explore page, or just wait until after launch?"

Jeff said (I paraphrase), "That tour page has got to go." We then launched into an hour-long discussion, starting with the presumption of this one particular page that we're going to rip out, and moved on to making bumper stickers with a two-word tag line on them, as an expression of the opposite of what the egregious Tour page expresses. Compared bumper stickers to domed labels in social field impact. This tangented into some lengthy discussion on the desirability of choosing a focused market segment and not trying to please everyone, concluding the best approach is that sometimes less is more. We considered the differing impact of an elite right-wing education or an elite left-wing education on one's stance toward economics and activism. Eventually we agreed that I would delete the offending Tour page and also design a bumper sticker for the tag line.

Then I said, making a few to-do notes, "Okay, cool. Do you think we should try to do anything about the Explore page, or just wait until after launch?"

And Jeff replied, "Oh, wow; you asked that an hour ago, and I heard the wrong word, and I went off on that Tour page, and everything else, and you were so nice, you didn't even say anything...."

Well, it all had to be discussed, and we had fun along the way.

 

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Sticker Bumpkins

July 12, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

About three months ago, I saw that Don had an Obama bumper sticker on his car, and I said, "I want one of those." So I went to the website, and much to my surprise, there was no way to buy a bumper sticker. No swag at all. Crazy.

I decided to send them a comment, but to do so I had to register on the site. Sigh. So I registered, and sent a message to the effect of, "I want to buy a bumper sticker; what the heck, eh??" Then I went back to work.

About a month later, I got a phone call at home. "Hi this is Dave from the NH Obama '08 campaign. I just wanted to check in and see how you thought the campaign was going so far." I said, "Seems great to me, except I want a bumper sticker, and I can't figure out how to buy one online. You should sell them for $20 or something." Dave said, "Yeah, they're really hard to get. You know, we're going to be opening an office in downtown Hanover, I'm sure we'll have them there once we open." "Cool," I replied, "just let me know." "Okay, thanks," he said. And that was that.

Then about a month after that, I was walking down Main Street and saw Tom, who, as it turns out, is doing some volunteering for the Obama campaign. He was with Graham, who is with the political desk of the campaign, visiting from Manchester NH and talking to people. Tom introduced me as an entrepreneur (simply because I can spell it quickly) and Graham said they were going to be starting a business for Obama group, and he'd love to have me attend some of those events. "Cool," I said. "Will I be able to buy a bumper sticker there?" Told him about the website, and the phone call, and said, would love to advertise for you guys; what's with the sticker shortage? He said, "Yeah, they're really hard to get." We exchanged cards, and I went to the post office.

The next day I got an email from Graham that began, "I was lucky to meet you yesterday..." And I thought, what a great way to get someone's attention. "Lucky to meet me," – maybe I'll get a bumper sticker!

About a week ago I got an email from the Obama campaign, saying, hey, we heard your pleas and cries and wailing in the night, and finally got around to opening an online store so you can buy all that swag you've been asking for. Cool, I thought, I'll check that out someday. It's about time.

Then today I was finishing a sandwich at the office and someone knocked on the door. "Yo," I said. In walks this tall lanky young friendly kinda-goofy guy, who says, "Are you Michael J.?" "Yup," I said.

"I heard you wanted an Obama bumper sticker," he said, as he handed me the goods. I nearly fell over. "Wow! This is like a precious commodity!," I exclaimed. "Yeah, they're really hard to get," he said. I said, "I went on the website, and I couldn't believe they weren't selling them." Then Dave said, "Yeah, I was talking with Graham, and he said you wanted one." I laughed out loud. "You were talking with Graham?!?!?" Like, this is the modern political campaign. Including intrastate backchannel discussion about getting Michael J. his Obama bumper sticker? My mind reeled. "Yeah," he said, "I came a couple of times last week, but you weren't here." Three words: O. M. G. I'm thinking, here's this guy, walking the streets of Hanover, searching for Michael J., with a single Obama bumpersticker in his hand! It's like they invented some weird, inefficient, but personal, and effective, distribution mechanism.

I guess you can just order them online now, but this one is more special than that, because they made me beg for the bumper sticker – they're so hard to get no one has ever hardly seen one – and then in the end they send a guy dedicated with a singular focus to this one task, not even carrying a backpack with literature or other swag, or anything, and it makes me feel like they'd do anything to deliver this to me. How odd is that?

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Making Happy

June 22, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Life

via Chris Glass:

From Stefan Sagmeister's presentation at TED:

Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.
Thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. I have to live now.
Being not truthful works against me.
Helping other people helps me.
Organizing a charity group is surprisingly easy.
Everything I do always comes back to me.
Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.
Over time I get used to everything and start taking if for granted.
Money does not make me happy.
Traveling alone is helpful for a new perspective on life.
Assuming is stifling.
Keeping a diary supports my personal development.
Trying to look good limits my life.
Worrying solves nothing.
Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses.
Having guts always works out for me.

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Firewalk'd

April 3, 2007 | Life | People & Society | Travel

On Friday night, I, along with nearly 4,000 other people, walked barefoot over 12 feet of hot burning coals. At least 1,200 degrees. About eight or ten steps. Barefoot. It's quite an experience.

You can imagine the legal disclaimer (edited for brevity):

In consideration of my participation in the seminar I agree to release and hold harmless RRI for any liability whatsoever for any damage or injury, personal or mental, which might incur as a result of my voluntary decision to walk barefoot on a bed of hot burning coals. I am fully aware and understand that, at a seminar sponsored by RRI and its promoters, I will be given the opportunity to walk barefoot on burning wood coals, which will range in temperature between 1,200 - 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. If I do choose to walk on the coals, I affirm that I have not been coerced or persuaded in any way to do so, and I acknowledge that I make this decision voluntarily and without reservation. I am fully aware and acknowledge that there is no guarantee regarding my safe passage. I am fully aware that I may suffer serious injury, including severe burns or other physical or mental damage.

Thirty lanes of firewalkers, in the first floor of a Meadowlands NJ parking garage, at midnight, in the dark, with loud drums pounding, people chanting, and dancers with glow sticks twirling about. Kool-aid; drank.

Update: Hannah posts (with good links); I comment.

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Keith's Song

March 11, 2007 | Life | People & Society

When I first arrived at Top of The Hop for book group he was playing the piano, and I paused at the top of the stairs. He continued playing, but asked, "Too loud?" And I said, "No, beautiful."

There was another guy standing near him, and I thought maybe they were playing together, or studying together, or waiting for other people -- there was a box of doughnut holes and a NY Times on the nearby table.

After I took off my coat and sat a ways away, he asked what kind of music I liked. "Everything, pretty much," I said. "Well, name a song, maybe I know it." At a loss for words I eventually said, "How about something from the bebop era?" "Yeah!," he said. And then proceeded to knock out a perfect rendition of a complicated Thelonious Monk song. Not only was it perfect, but it had soul, and swing, and he was really into playing it.

Then, again, "Name a song! What bands do you like?" I finally admitted to a Grateful Dead habit in college, which moved toward jazz, and now exploring the edges of "classical" 20th century art music. He said, "Do you like Led Zeppelin?" "Sure," I said, thinking, how funny -- just this past weekend Bowfire played a Celtic strings arrangement of a take on Kashmir (!!) at the Lebanon Opera House, and before that I hadn't thought about The Zep since I bought that archive DVD and played it while Lynne and I were getting ready for a party a couple of years ago. "Really takes you back to high school, huh?," she said. Sure does.

So anyway, he starts into Fool In The Rain (don't worry, I had to look it up). And then as I'm sitting on the couch with my tea, waiting for friends, he takes Fool In The Rain to places Page and Plant never dreamed of. Probably a dozen, or even two dozen, bright and blinding references to other composers and entire genres of music. Each time, returning somehow, some way -- sometimes quickly, sometimes briefly, sometimes with great harmonic dexterity -- returning to the Zep theme. He was moving in the seat, moving in and out of the theme, swaying, humming, and really knocking himself out.

Meanwhile, the other guy has moved to a table behind him and is working on marking up a paper or something.

I asked about a Chopin concerto I heard on the radio Monday, and he launched into it: "Is this the #7? Or was it this one?" I had no idea, but he probably had one of them right.

So then Maureen arrives, and Suzanne, and we start talking a bit, and suddenly Keith stops and comes over to a couch near us. And then we experienced a very interesting and unpredictable 45 minutes. It's not everyday that you get to meet someone who was at turns brilliant, scary, thought-provoking, deep, and duplicitous. Absolute genius, and possibly dangerous. I'd never give him any trackable or identifyible details of my life.

He was a quick conversationalist, though monologuist might better describe it. One of us would ask a question, and he would go off on a lucid, raving, coherent explication of the topic. Common touchpoints included: the relation of the self to others; understanding your self, and coming to know it; how society is constructed to keep people down; the beauty and love of children; how the grace and beauty of children are squeezed out of them by parents, teachers, bosses, friends, and assorted others; how love is the only thing that can heal you; how he feared his dad, and how long it took to get that voice out of his head; how one of the ways he's defying convention is to marry a 41-year old wife, though he is only 27; how doctors need power over others to maintain their ego; how rich people are so boring; and on and on and on.

Meanwhile, the other guy has now moved across the room, far, far away. And I'm wondering, has this guy Keith been up all night tripping, or is he a crazy genius, or what?

Along the way, I started to wonder about his truthiness. It began early, when I said I liked the Grateful Dead: "Oh, I love the Dead. The Dead are great." But he didn't know any of the songs.

When Maureen mentioned that she was playing at the hospital rotunda later that day: "At Dartmouth?! Do they have a piano there?" Then, a few minutes later: "Yes, I played there yesterday."

In the end, I wondered if he was 27, if he was married, if anything he said were true. But I did know, first hand, what a brilliant piano player he was, with a memory and soulful skill that was rarely heard in a casual setting.

By and by that other guy left the Hop without saying goodbye. Did they even know each other?

As we wrapped up, Keith took the doughnuts and left, remembering our names, and who knows what else. Later, when I looked up the Zeppelin song, I was astounded at the lyrics I read:

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/ledzeppelin/foolintherain.html

"Fool In The Rain"

Well there's a light in your eye that keeps shining Like a star that can't wait for the night I hate to think I've been blinded baby Why can't I see you tonight?

And the warmth of your smile starts a-burnin' And the thrill of your touch gives me fright And I'm shaking so much, really yearning Why don't you show up, make it all right? Yeah, it's all right.

And if you promised you'd love so completely and you said you would always be true You swore that you would never leave me, baby: What ever happened to you?

And you thought it was only in movies As you wish all your dreams would come true It ain't the first time believe me, baby I'm standin here feeling blue Yeah I'm blue

Now I will stand in the rain on the corner I'll watch the people go shuffling downtown Another ten minutes no longer And then I'm turning around

The clock on the wall's moving slower My heart it sinks to the ground And the storm that I thought would blow over Clouds the light of the love that I found

Now my body is starting to quiver And the palms of my hands getting wet I've got no reason to doubt you baby, It's all a terrible mess

I'll run in the rain till I'm breathless When I'm breathless I'll run till I drop, hey The thoughts of a fool's kind of careless I'm just a fool waiting on the wrong block, oh yeah Light of the love that I found...

Listen

This lyric seems to perfectly sum up Keith's story, as told in fragments to people he doesn't know, on a Friday morning when I thought I'd be thinking about 3rd and 4th order consciousness and how we relate to other people. In fact, I was, but never did I expect such a wildly radical approach to the topic.

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Not Yet Within Range

February 28, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Life | Technology

For some reason, I am now craving a Leica M8 digital rangefinder camera, with the 16-18-21mm, the 28-35-50mm, and the 90mm lenses.

This is absurd, since that would be about $15,000 in camera equipment, well outside not only my budget, but also my socio-economic caste.

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Happy New Year

January 2, 2007 | Life

2006 was a forest fire. 2007 is the re-seeding. Welcome to the future.

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Strong Medicine

December 25, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

Between the rampant consumerism, the killing carried out in the name of God, and your everyday garden-variety family dynamics, it takes a heckofalotof positive, weird, and funky energy to keep the cultural balance this time of year. In an attempt to stay sane, the past three days I've deep-listened to:

* Frank Zappa's, We're Only In It For The Money, Lumpy Gravy, and Civilization Phase Three. (That right there should tell you something, when those three albums are the description of sanity.) [Those are all really good Wikipedia links for learning about Zappa's music, which is worth doing, hint.]
* Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks and Modern Times.
* Grateful Dead, Truckin' Up To Buffalo, July 4, 1989.
* Phil Lesh and Friends, Live at the Warfield DVD, May 19, 2006 (twice!). This is some hot jamband-inspired jazz improvisation, showing off John Scofield tearing it up with Larry Cambell. Joan Osborne on vocals.
* Radiohead's Kid A. ("...one of the most challenging pop records ever to achieve such commercial success.")

I've also browsed Love In America, an article on interpersonal triangles by Thomas Fogarty, an MSW thesis written by a friend (regarding the effects death-anxiety has on end-of-life caregivers), and the New Yorker Complete Cartons.

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Coop Holiday Shopping

December 22, 2006 | Life | People & Society

I went to the Coop at 1:30 PM today, three shopping days before Christmas, and the first day off of work for most people. I knew it would be a scene, but it was such a scene I got a photo pass from the store manager and took a few shots. When you arrive and there aren't any carts, you know you're in for it:

After you make it through the deli (whew!!) you have the dairy gauntlet:

The intersection of wine, meat, and produce was something of a bottleneck:

I don't eat caviar, but if I did I'd be glad to know you can get it in a range of qualities this year, from $4.25/oz to $130/oz:

Checkout moved quickly, but there were a lot of people, and everyone had full carriages:

My meager basket was $143.62:

Eat, drink, and make a toast to peace in our lifetime.

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Monday Blues

December 11, 2006 | Life

Observe the following:

1. It's 40 degrees F outside.
2. I'm wearing a t-shirt, a flannel shirt, a wool sweater, and a ski jacket.
3. I'm freezing, my sore throat is a lot worse today than yesterday, and I can't tell if my muscles ache or if it's tension because I'm cold.

Ugg, I hope this doesn't last too long. Is it too late for a flu shot this year?

Update: Okay, I've worked 90 minutes today, time to go home.

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What's Up

November 16, 2006 | Life

The reason for so little blogging lately.

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The World Standard in Studless Winter Tyres

November 7, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment

Glen said, "The ultimate winter weapon is still the Hakk 2's with studs, but if you don't want to run the studs with the noise and the rolling resistance and everything, then the RSi is what people are talking about." Better than the Hakk 2's? "Without the studs; With the studs, Hakk 2's are what you want." Got it. "This is a good tyre, it's quiet—people say it's really quiet—and it replaces the Nokia Q, which was around for ten years, and people liked that tyre quite a lot." How much? "Let me go work it out." [3 minutes of tyre store being] "$109 mounted and balanced." Okay, sold.

Now I just have to get there at 7:15 some morning to be in the first batch of customers. Otherwise it's an all-day affair.

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Dear Boloco

November 7, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

Quality control in Hanover has GOT to improve. Today: Regular teriaki with chicken. $6.25 They forgot the chicken. Then realized that this is normally $5.25 if memory serves. Last visit: Ordered extra chicken. Got normal amount of chicken.

This is the sort of thing where it's way too much of a hassle to go back and complain for a dollar or two. Plus, with a small staff you can get a rep for complaining and then who knows what happens to the ingredients in your next order.

Recommendation: Give every customer a receipt. Put a sign up saying, "If we don't give you a receipt your next order is free." Print messages on the receipt like, "Was your order perfect? How can we improve? www.boloco.com" etc. Monthly drawing for best feedback, etc.

I realize it's a tough staff to manage (high turnover, low pay, tedious work, food service, lunchtime slams, etc) but at this point three of my last four visits were incorrect meals, and one of them seems like it included an overcharge (two, if you count the missing extra chicken).

So I'll give it another shot in December, but it's been kind of a downer in Sept and Oct.

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Have You Made Any Meaning Today

November 2, 2006 | Life

Reported at check-in: "I tried to make some meaning from yesterday's meeting...."

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Autumn Beauty

October 17, 2006 | Life | Nature & Environment

Saturday was a stunning late-fall New Hampshire day. We went for another 14-mile bike ride on the rail trail.

Bridge Over the Water

The ride includes several bridges over the Mascoma River, vehicle gates, dark forest, traveling past open green fields, under an Interstate highway, next to the Mascoma Lake for quite a while, through steep rock walls, and past rambling ramshackle mill buildings. It's a real gem of a community resource. Two more photos over at Flickr.

Kathryn On the Trail

When naming, always include the most important element no matter its prominence in the photograph.

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The Present

October 15, 2006 | Life

From Saturday's yoga class: "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift we call the present."

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My Life at Work

October 12, 2006 | Life | Software

Excerpt:

• Would it be possible to have the h3 pick up the correct "subhead" style from the div id="centerwrap" directly? That is, it would be nice if the user didn't have to enter the class in the edit block. We use the Markdown processor, so typically the user would start an h3 line with "###" and it would generate the h3 tags for them. But we can't specify css classes that way. If the h3's inside the centerwrap div got the class styling automatically (via a css selector) it would be mondo cool.
• Likewise with the h2 class=movedot. Can this get picked up from the expTeaseWrap div? Generally speaking, we try to minimize class specs so editors don't have to worry about them. However, the "followme" class and the "last" class and the ones in the nav and such are fine because editors don't edit those ones.

From Open Space and World Café to Perl and CSS. No wonder I have a headache.

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ISFP

October 12, 2006 | Life

How the ISFP sees Self

• Very affirming.
• Sympathetic and trusting.
• Good communicator especially where values and ideals are involved.
• Hard working and practical.

How Others see the ISFP

• Difficult to negotiate with.
• Won't follow divorce laws or is naive about what actual law is.
• Not serious enough about negotiations.
• Flaky and irresponsible.

And, of course, both Truth and Beauty lie in the eyes of the beholder. So don't take anything too seriously, because moods change like the Sun and Moon.

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Rosanne Cash

October 10, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

Saw Rosanne Cash Saturday night at Dartmouth. Fourth row center. Amazing performer. Amazing band. Much more transformative than Amiee Mann a week earlier. Rosanne is Johnny Cash's daughter by his first wife (Vivian Liberto, not June Carter Cash). Cash's husband, John Leventhal, was the guitarist, and my comment after the show was, "Watching him made me realize how average most guitar players are."

The most poignant moment was her arrangement of Ode to Billy Joe, originally by Bobbie Gentry. I haven't heard this song, nor thought about it, in 35 years, but I could have sung the lyrics word for word. Somewhere along the line it was burned into my memory. Cash's performance was slow, moving, deliberate, and chilling. Afterward she commented, "That song is like a Walker Evans painting." Right on.

There was a Q&A after the show with her, the video director, and the producer. Maybe a hundred of the 900 audience members stayed. Eventually I asked a variation of my stock artist forum question, "How do you sync up with the audience, and how does the audience influence your performance, and what do you do if it's not gelling?"

Cash talked about how she has a bag of tricks to regain her center, and commented that sometimes you don't want to sync up with the audience because, you know, you don't want to sync up with some audiences."

I jumped in, "How can we be a good audience?" People giggled. She said, "Oh my God I love you, I want to come down there and kiss you." And continued on to say, more or less, "just listen." The producer elaborated, as I recall these three days later, on listening with intent, and feeling the music in you, and engaging with the performance in a heartfelt way. And then they moved on to another question.

I myself know how to be a good audient. My intent with the question is to give the performer a platform to educate the audience about engaging with music and performance at a level deeper than passive entertainment consumption. Especially the stoic New England elites. It's a softball question, but sounds serious because few people think about music or listening with any depth.

Walking out my date said, "Only you, Notio, could ask a question that made the star say she wanted to kiss you, and then have the producer get all touchy feely about listening." Yup, could be true.

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Addled

October 5, 2006 | Life

I just asked my office-mate: "Addled; is that a word? I just wrote 'my addled brain,' is that the right usage?" He replied, "Yes."

F12 to the dictionary:

addle |ˈadl|
verb [ trans. ] chiefly humorous

make unable to think clearly; confuse : being in love must have addled your brain. adjective archaic
(of an egg) rotten.

ORIGIN Middle English : from Old English adela [liquid filth,] of Germanic origin; related to Dutch aal and German Adel ‘mire, puddle.’

Oh, how God smiles.

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The Harder They Come

September 29, 2006 | Governance | Life | People & Society

But I'll keep on fighting for the things I want
Though I know that when you're dead you can't
But I'd rather be a free man in my grave
Then living as a puppet or a slave

Garcia has a great version from 1978 in commercial release.

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It Will Become Impossible Not to Speak the Truth

September 29, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Scheherazade on blogging (reposted in full):

I got an email from someone today who started blogging because of stumbling across this blog. I wrote back to her, and said this:

I do think that if you blog, honestly, for six months, it will change your life. I'm not sure why, exactly, but it will. I think if you get in the habit of first noticing, then describing, the truth about your life and your reactions to it, it will become impossible not to speak the truth. And when you've made telling the truth and being tuned into your world a habit, you will make changes to things that don't work for you. And so you'll make room for wonder, and you'll become more fully yourself.

Enjoy. I don't think we know what we have to say until we start saying it. And I definitely don't think we know our power until we start being honest and brave in front of other people. I'm still learning how to do that, but this blog is teaching me how, daily.

Thanks Sherry.

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Autumn

September 25, 2006 | Life | Nature & Environment

Yesterday I stood on the deck and watched the wind blow the leaves off the weak trees. Some of the remaining leaves are turning color, and the nights are crisp and cool. In two weekends my nephew will visit for annual apple picking. The driveway is covered with pine needles. My neighbor mowed the field last week. I need to stake the driveway for snow plowing.

The last time I looked it was July and I was at a concert. Then I blinked and I was at another one with a new friend. Then I blinked again and now it's the end of the summer, autumn is really here, and winter's around the corner. Wow.

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En Route

September 25, 2006 | Life

Email banter plus blogging, a deadly blow to productivity. Let's go to lunch.

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The Power of Mental Models

September 25, 2006 | Life

My friend Peter Pruyn sent this recently:

The best advice I ever got was from an elephant trainer in the jungle outside Bangalore. I was doing a hike through the jungle as a tourist. I saw these large elephants tethered to a small stake. I asked him, 'How can you keep such a large elephant tied to such a small stake?' He said, 'When the elephants are small, they try to pull out the stake, and they fail. When they grow large, they never try to pull out the stake again.' That parable reminds me that we have to go for what we think we're fully capable of, not limit ourselves by what we've been in the past.

— Paul Vivek, quoted in "The Best Advice I Ever Got," Fortune, March 21, 2005, p. 100.

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Best Seminar Chair, 2006

September 23, 2006 | Life | Products & Opportunites | SoL | Travel

I sat in these chairs 32 hours last week. I would not want to work full-time in this chair, but it is, by far, the best seminar or workshop chair I have ever experienced. Very comfortable. They deserve an award for designing a chair that fits the body, and Ford deserves an award for purchasing decent chairs for large group meetings.

The Notio award for Best Seminar Chair, 2006, goes to the arper Pamplona, designed by G.Terin & G.Topan, made in Italy.

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Social Capital

September 19, 2006 | Life | SoL | Travel

I'm at a SoL meeting with about 60 people. About 20 of them are in my consulting convergence group, and we're meeting as a sub-group frequently throughout the four days. The schedule is fairly grueling for white-collar types, mostly 8 AM to 8 or 9 PM every day.

Tonight was the 'open' night, where we can have unscheduled dinner with friends and colleagues. I was exhausted, and was the first one on the 5:45 bus to the hotel. Next to me sat Joanne and Karen, and on the way to the hotel in talking about dinner options I said, "I'm exhausted. I want to walk to the Olive Garden, eat with one or two people, or alone, and do it soon so I can get some sleep." They thought that was a decent idea, and after a 15 minute wash-up we walked over there and broke bread.

We had a lot of good conversation, and when I said George Bush was a war criminal we found out that Karen strongly disagreed—he is a man of faith who believes in democracy and freedom; gag me—but we were able to gracefully move on without too much politics or hard feelings. They were intrigued with my online dating story, and essentially outed the whole marriage story, the public parts anyway, and we had a very open and honest conversation about intimacy and relationships.

On our way out we ran into a table with 12 of our colleagues, and we stopped over to say hello. M.S. briefly surveyed the situation, called me over, pushed his chair out, and pulled me close. He whispered: "Notio, can you tell me how it is that you ended up with the two best-looking women in the entire conference, alone, for dinner?" I said, "I have no idea; it just happened." He replied, "More power to you."

Then I.W. called me over to the end of the table. She and I have had a kind of rocky relationship, because she's been around since the early days of SoL, and her 68 years of Croatian wisdom sometimes annoy my modern sensibilities. But she leaned over to me and said, "Notio, you are very lucky to have your supper with those two women. That is really quite something. Do you that that [x] used to be an actress?" No, I didn't know that. She looked me in the eye, "Well—you enjoy yourself." That whole end of the table was grinning and staring and generally letting their imaginations run wild to my great benefit. We three soon said our goodbyes, and walked back to the hotel, and each went to our respective rooms.

But the unintended social capital of that five minutes saying hello to colleagues will last the rest of the conference, without doubt. Tomorrow night is the party at the Model T museum, and I can already hear it now....

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Detroit, Motor City

September 18, 2006 | Life | Nature & Environment | Travel

Arrived at Detroit airport yesterday and called the hotel. "How do I get to you?"

"Okay, you take the south exit of the airport, get onto route blah, go 8.8 miles and take exit blahblah,...." I interrupted: "I'm not renting a car. Is there any public transportation?"

"Oh. Well, I think there are cabs somewhere near the Ground Transportation area." All-righty then. This is the first airport I've ever been to that didn't have a $15 bus that stopped at all the major hotels. Into the cab I got. Half an hour and $36 later I arrived at the hotel.

At the front desk after checking in I asked, "Is there an Appleby's or Chilli's or something around here to eat?" This was Sunday at 8:00 PM, I wasn't looking for a fancy wine list.

"Sure," he says. "Go out of the driveway, take a right. Go to the end of the street, take a left. Go 3 miles and there's a bunch like that right there." I said, "I didn't rent a car—is there anything within walking distance?"

"Oh. Hmm. Well; not sure. Just past that Best Buy I think there's something."

Cue Laurie Anderson: Hey Pal! How do I get to town from here? And he said: Well just take a right where they're going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway, take a left at what's going to be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they're thinking of building that drive-in bank. You can't miss it.

Anyway, here's a guy who knows the restaurants three miles away but doesn't know what's next door?

And then I realized, hello, Notio, you are in Dearborn, MI, on Mercury Drive, just off of Ford Road, about 0.2 miles from the Ford world headquarters. No wonder there's no public transport. And hey, didya notice? There aren't any sidewalks either!

Welcome to Motor City.

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Help On The Way

September 16, 2006 | Life

Tell me the cost,
I can pay,
Let me go,
Tell me love is not lost,
Sell everything,
Without love, day to day,
insanity is king

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Word of the Day

September 11, 2006 | Life

Petoskey Stone:

A Petoskey stone is a rock, often pebble-shaped, that is composed of a fossilized coral, Hexagonaria percarinata. The stones were formed as a result of glaciation, in which sheets of ice plucked stones from the bedrock, grinding off their rough edges and depositing them in the northwestern portion of Michigan's lower peninsula.

The state stone of Michigan!

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On Waking Up Fearful

September 11, 2006 | Life

There are, at least, two primary kinds of fear. The first is internal. Say, I'm late on some client work. Generally I can use internal fear as a motivator – I get up wicked early and crank on the to-do list. Sometimes I'm overwhelmed and waste some time mentally spinning with no results, but usually I can get traction at some point and move through it, make progress, and meet the deadline.

The other kind of fear is external. Generally I can recognize and then ignore external fear and just move on.

But sometimes external fear is a lot harder to shake. Say, you're trying to have a graceful mediated divorce, and your wife chooses a lawyer who has a local rep which freaks you out. You hear all the voices, the dozen people now who have sighed, rolled their eyes, and said things about him you don't want to type. Then you find out that the accountants made an error on the 2004 taxes and in addition to the $12,363 you owe for 2005, you owe another $3,000 for 2004. Technically, it's joint debt, with each party having full responsibility for the whole debt, no matter who earned the income. But practically, it's extremely painful, and the last thing you need is an opposing lawyer who is known to play games. Hopefully that lawyer is not also stupid, and sees there's no money here, and wraps this up post haste.

I didn't even want lawyers, I wanted a mediator. The compromise was we'd mediate but Lynne wanted a lawyer to advise her, and at that point I felt exposed and thought I should have one too. So I found a lawyer who has Tibetan prayer flags behind her desk, and she's smart and witty and has a great rep, and I'm getting great advice, especially in the context of trying to have a non-confrontational ending to an introspective and non-angry separation and decision process.

I managed to avoid, in toto, the five-year 9/11 anniversary fear campaign manufactured by the Bush/Cheney Consolidated-Corporate-Media department industry last week (screw you, ABC). But it's hard to tell how much of that propaganda is thriving below the surface in the collective unconscious, and if it's alive and well, whether it would be easy to infiltrate a non-participant like me. In this case I would like to think that my feelings are tied to a global external fear rather than a local external fear, but you just never know.

In any event, the NH law statutes are an interesting read.

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Engrossment's That Are Not Even Their Own

September 7, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

Excerpt from On the Shortness of Life:

You really must leave the ground and turn your mind's eye upon these things! Now while the blood is hot, we must enter with brisk step upon the better course. In this kind of life there awaits much that is good to know—the love and practice of the virtues, forgetfulness of the passions, knowledge of living and dying, and a life of deep repose.

The condition of all who are engrossed is wretched, but most wretched is the condition of those who labour at engrossments that are not even their own, who regulate their sleep by that of another, their walk by the pace of another, who are under orders in case of the freest things in the world—loving and hating. If these wish to know how short their life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own.

—Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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Symbolic Interaction

September 7, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Last night a friend called via cell phone from Michigan between sets at a concert.

Cell phones suck. The microphones pick up a lot of background noise, there are frequently echos on one side or the other, there are subtle time delays that make it hard to tell when someone has stopped speaking, and the mics are so low quality that it's hard to hear the specific words. I end up interpolating and guessing a lot of the time.

Add to this the fact that household wireless phones also suck, for most of the same reasons, and the end result is that you're not getting much human connection via electrons. Immediately I better understood Debord's idea that " the spectacle made relations among people seem like relations among images."

We had a nice symbolic interaction, but not much human connection that wasn't manufactured in my own mind. Gawd, give me some eye contact, some body language, some tone of voice and inflection, some sixth-sensory telepathy—otherwise let's just keep it short and symbolic and not attempt any meaning.

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Zero!

August 30, 2006 | Life

My email inbox count is now zero. That's right, zero email messages in my inbox. Once more, with feeling: ZEEEEEEROOOOOO!!! Praise the lord and pass the chocolate. It has been years, possibly ten years, since the inbox was completely empty. Typically on a major cleanup I can get it down to 15 or so. This week I decided to go for the gold. If you keep up with the incoming, and process the old ones at five or ten a day, you can make some real progress.

Now, let's keep it that way.

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IRS Installment Plans

August 29, 2006 | Life

In case you ever find yourself owing the IRS $12,363, here is what you need to know about payment plans and interest rates.

IRS-PUB, 2005, IRS Publication No. 910, An Installment Plan to Pay Your Taxes

If you are not able to pay all your federal taxes by the due date, a monthly payment plan may be the answer. The process isn't automatic and there may be alternatives, but if you are eligible, this could be the solution that makes paying taxes easier.

Apply for a payment plan by completing Form 9465, Installment Agreement Request. This form also has details about eligibility requirements.

Generally, you may have up to 60 months to pay, but paying the full amount as soon as possible will save you money in penalties and interest. The late payment penalty is usually 0.5 percent a month, every month, up to 25 percent of the tax owed. Interest rates vary because they are set quarterly. You can check the current interest rate by going to www.irs.gov, keyword interest rate. Interest and penalties are figured on the declining monthly balance throughout the life of the payment plan. There is also a $43 set-up fee for an installment agreement, which is taken from your first payment under the plan. Do not send the $43 with Form 9465.

The current interest rate is 8%.

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Rail Trail to Twigs

August 27, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

Most readers of this blog will be shocked to hear that I rode my bicycle 14 miles yesterday. I have owned this bike for ten years, and on yesterday's one ride I probably doubled it's total lifetime miles.

One of the draws was the Rail Trail, a reclaimed railroad bed turned into a flat, well-maintained activity trail, with beautiful "behind-the-scenes" views of neighborhoods, covered bridges, lakes, rivers, and streams. Compared to riding around near my country house, with its steep hills, both short and long, the rail trail was a breeze, and that made it more fun. Lots of people had been telling me to get out there, for at least a year now, and I'm glad I did.

But the big news is the absolutely amazing Twigs cafe in Enfield, NH.

It's at the ~7 mile mark riding from Lebanon, and I expected yummy carbo treats, but in addition to all that they have fantastic sandwiches. I had a turkey wrap with sprouts, tomato, mustard, and, get this, real roasted turkey, like from Thanksgiving dinner. It was one of the best sandwiches I've ever had, no kidding.

Cool decorative atmosphere, river views, free wi-fi, what more could you want? It's really worth the ride.

Just opened next door is Stecco, an upscale Italian restaurant with a menu that looks great. Downtown Enfield is coming into its own. There was talk of training this winter and next spring to ride the full length of the rail trail (45 miles) to the Thai restaurant in Concord, NH. Some of you have just spit out your coffee; I apologize.

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TMI: Kundalini

August 24, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

Sanatan Society:

Kundalini Yoga: The roused Kundalini energy moves upwards in the central nadi, the Sushumna, passing through each of the lower chakras to reach the seventh, the Sahasrara Chakra. This process is known in Kundalini Yoga as the piercing of the chakras and represents the merging of the female with the male.

Kundalaini Teacher:

Headaches: Most Kundalini headaches are caused by too much energy in the head. Many people are accustomed to releasing energy downward, into the Earth. This works if they are spiritually awakened, but not Kundalini awakened, or only using prana.

Lust/Lack: While some Kundalini teachers advocate abstinence, I am not one. I believe in the Wiccan ideal, "All acts of love and pleasure serve the Goddess." Sexual tantra has been used to facilitate the awakening process, for millennia. Sex with an awakened person can cause awakening. (Something to beware of, once one reaches the stage of being Shakt-contagious... awakening can be horrific for the unprepared, so be discerning in your choice of lovers.)

Jargon alert.

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Now In Clogs

August 24, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites

On May 10 I cracked a sole on my Birkenstock Chicago shoes. No biggie, they were six years old, and it was my second pair. The first pair failed the same way at about the same time. Not so bad: Spend $200 on shoes and wear them almost every day and they last six years. They were also super-comfortable—I could go to a trade show in NYC and walk on concrete for 16 hours and my feet were fine.

So on May 11 I went to the local store to buy another pair, and I found they had discontinued the Chicago model. Okay, what's the replacement? I ended up in the Wexford, which looked a little more business-like, but had a thinner sole and the Footprints low-arch footbed. I like the high-arch footbed, but this model didn't allow the swap. Oh well. $195 later I'm out the door.

The following week it rained. Not hard pouring rain, but a steady drizzle. And walking down Main Street, my feet got soaked. Not because I stepped in a puddle or anything, just from the rain. Bad sign; the Chicago's never did this.

The week after that I noticed that my feet were killing me, and I was mostly just walking to work and sitting all day at the computer. Another bad sign: the Chicago's never did this either.

So I stopped in the store to see if anyone had had similar problems. Of course the store hadn't heard anything.... so I went on my merry way thinking, "No way am I wearing these for six years. I'll last the summer, switch to winter boots when it snows, and then buy some Rockports in the spring, and put Birkenstock insoles in them for the high-arch comfort."

Then this morning I went to put my shoes on and the right one was completely blown out on the side. I hadn't noticed yesterday or last night, but there was a six-inch tear in the seam between the leather and the sole. When did I buy these again? It appears to me that they've either cost-cut this thing to the point of worthlessness, or I got a real bad apple.

I stopped in the store on my way to work, and the owner, who sold me the shoes, was there. He was genuinely surprised. His brother has worn these for the past two years without a problem. We talked about the history as related above. Long story short, not wanting another pair of Wexford's, I'm now in some stylish Alton clogs. Comfy, easy on and off, a firmer sole, and a high-arch footbed.

We haven't actually sorted out the money yet. He wanted to talk to Birkenstock, but if they didn't "do something" he would. I said that weighing 160 lbs, with only three months of use, I didn't really want to eat it, but I'd trust him to sort it out in the next couple of weeks. I'm a 15-year Birkenstock customer, so I'm assuming that they'll do the right thing here.

Meanwhile, for business shoes, I'm headed for the waterproof Rockport with Birk insole option.

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Getting Things Organized

August 24, 2006 | Life

A great Flickr tour of an office organization system based on Getting Things Done. Really advanced implementation. See also: Martin Ternouth's highly-regarded workflow system.

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Is Fear Always a Negative?

August 23, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Kat asked, in a comment, "Is fear always a negative thing?" I briefly reflected, and here's where I am now:

I think of fear as a continuum between "an alert edge" and "paralyzed with fear." What we generalize as "fear" starts at alertness, because at that point you can no longer be fully "open"—you are looking for something, even if you don't know what. By the time you increase your fear to paralyzation, you're toast. In the middle range are an infinite number of emotional and psyiological states which have a fearful component. A less fearful, more fear-less life would seem to have a number of important benefits. It might be worth reflecting on those in depth.

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Bats in the Belfry

August 23, 2006 | Life

On June 18, 2002, I awoke from a dream and wrote this:

Recently, a problem has surfaced where huge numbers of bats suddenly infest a house, church or other public place. Sometimes the bats can reproduce so quickly that they overtake the people present, driving them out. Oddly, it doesn't seem to happen at coffee shops, restaurants or music stores. But city council meetings, Board meetings, homes, churches of all denominations, and courts of law have all experienced situations where bats suddenly and without much warning have reproduced rapidly, in geometric proportions, and driven people to the streets. In one case, a family of five were driven from their house during dinner. By the time the police and fire departments arrived the bats were so thick you couldn't move through the rooms of the house. One estimate on site put the bat population in that house at over a million, in only 1,500 square feet of living space. People are scared.

A public hearing has been called, and a prominent scientist has been asked to testify about the problem. He is at a witness stand, facing the audience. A governing body of some sort (city council, or panel of judges perhaps) is also at the front of the room, and they are asking questions trying to understand the problem and determine what to do.

The scientist is explaining that it is primarily a psychological problem. "You see," he said, "bats do not exist without fear. In fact, I would go so far as to say that bats are created by fear – without fear there would be no bats. The way to eliminate the bats is for each of us to eliminate our fears."

A panelist asks, "But the bats are a physical entity. You're telling us about a psychological state. How can the two be related?"

The scientist explained, "It's an interesting phenomenon. There are many examples of the mind influencing or even controlling physical conditions. The most famous of course is the so-called mind/body connection. Psychosomatic illnesses, cancer patients becoming cured, allergies, asthma, etc. We've known for years that the mind can have an influence over our well-being. Now, in this case, we have an example of our minds manifesting a physical presence due to our insecurity. It's quite an interesting situation, and may be important for all of mankind to understand and learn from."

There was much murmering from audience members when another panelist pressed for a description of how the mechanism worked. "How, exactly," he asked, "does this work? I need to see evidence that your theory is correct."

"It's fairly technical," said the scientist, "but I think it's important to walk through the details. I should warn you, though, that during my description it is critical for every audience member to stay focused on the technical aspects of my theory, and not yet consider the ramifications. There are solutions to the problem at hand, but first let's understand the problem."

"When the first bats appear, each one represents a different fear. These fears come from people's thoughts and interactions. It's very rare for a single person to have enough fear to manifest a bat, but as people congregate their fears form a sort of energy field, and this field can sometimes be strong enough to create bats. In order for a bat to be manifest, the fear factor must exceed a threshold defined by the ratio of the product of collective fears to the sum of individual fears. That is, a strong-willed person without much fear can compensate for another person that carries much fear. However, in groups, the effect of the fear-less people is typically less than that of the fear-full people, and then the dominant effect multiplies, whereas the individual effects only add. The net result is that things can be fine for a long time but as each person's fearful threshold is approached it contributes to the dominant group threshold. At some point the threshold is crossed and then there's little that can be done for that configuration of people."

The first panelist asked, "You said that each bat represents a different fear. Say more about that."

"Sure. As the fearful threshold boundary is approached, dominant fears emerge. When the threshold is crossed, the first bat manifested represents the most dominant fear. At that point the particular fear is 'consumed' so to speak, and pushed down below the threshold – it's a form of redirection. There was fear, it was manifested, now it's not as fearful – since it is now present we can 'rationally' deal with it. As each new fear crosses the threshold, a new bat is manifest. So, if there are a lot of fears, there will be a lot of bats. The real problem however, is that sometimes a fear begins to spin through a group of people such that they continue to think about it, perhaps stuck in a loop of fearful thoughts, each amplifying the others, magnifying the worst potentials of each fear. When this happens and the fear crosses the threshold _again_ a new bat is not created, but rather the existing bats associated with that fear duplicate, similar to cell division."

"For instance, one bat can turn into two, then the two into four, then the four into eight, etc. This can proceed quite rapidly, and once started tends into feedback onto the fear factor, creating new fears and new bats. But, since there are a number of fears possible, eventually there are enough bats that the bats themselves become the fear source. Then it becomes obvious that there is no rational way to deal with over a million bats in one house, the fears continue to multiply there's very little you can do and you don't have much time. It takes a lot of love to counterbalance that much fear, and sometimes the best thing to do is burn the building down and start over."

A panelist asked, "Once the bats appear, is there anything to do to minimize their impact?" Suddenly, a single bat appeared on the back wall of the room. The scientist saw it immediately. The panelists noticed it as he spoke.

"Because the fear factors multiply in groups of people, the best thing to do is to break up the group so that each person can regain their personal center. Smaller groups of two or three, focused on deep desires rather than hypothetical fears, can begin to leverage their love to overcome the fears. This is much more difficult in groups due to psychological entrainment, but basically the largest group that can sustain the least fear will have the most impact over a population. However there is a danger in that if a group suddenly loses their focus and fears coalesce it can be almost impossible to reset the whole group. In that case the groups need to refactor again and focus more narrowly on positive futures."

Now there were about a dozen bats on the back wall, and before the scientist could continue the panelists watched in horror as the bats each morphed into two, halving themselves and doubling at the same time. Like a sophisticated special effect from a science fiction movie, the bats existed outside of normal time – they could appear instantly, grow exponentially, and consume all space. A panelist called the meeting to adjourn. A bat squeaked and flew across the room. Someone screamed. People ran panicked for the doors. Within seconds the bats consumed virtually the entire ceiling volume and were doubling quickly downward toward the audience. The scientist shook his head sadly. Someone called 911. The fire department arrived. When they couldn't see anything but bats through the windows, they set the building on fire.

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Is Psychoanalysis Elitist?

August 22, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

Was digging around the unblogged writing archives, and found this half-formed thought from July 22, 2003.

A comment has been raised that psychoanalysis is the most narcissistic and elitist of pursuits. I'm beginning to wonder if "elitist" is like "affirmative action" – defined on the fly to suit and argument or perspective.

Sure, rich people do analysis. And so do poor people. And smart people and undereducated people. I'm not sure what the label adds to the discussion.

Is self-discovery and self-knowledge ONLY narcissistic? Is self-awareness ONLY elitist? Should poor people not have access to the advantages of self-knowledge? Should we, as a species, abandon psychoanalysis and by extension formal inquiry and introspection because only some people can afford it?

No, much better that in many places analysis is on the rise. An increase in therapists will drive prices down, just as in Berkeley massage is so cheap as to have created a barter economy. Most therapists are not rich – some are, but plenty are doing it for the love of soul and as a way to increase the evolution of consciousness. This process takes eons, and simplistic labels simply enforce the status quo.

As regards narcism – it may be culture, it may be our place in our collective evolutionary path, but we are a narcissistic people. (cf fashion, makeup, designer eyeglasses, rolex watches, and blogs). What analysands find, however, is that by having an outlet for narcissism they bring LESS of that into their other relationships. You can't will narcissism away – you have to pay attention to it, listen to it, and nurture its healing.

It is likely that a root cause of narcissism is a lack of parental attention in childhood (unproven generalization alert). If this is so, we might want to consider if the two-income, high-materialist lifestyle is the best approach to parenting. It might be better to ditch one income, live a little less large, and spend more time with family and community. Or, perhaps, take a deep look at why one might want to raise children in the first place. Is it because you want a dependent, someone you can control, someone to grow in your image, someone to listen to every word you say as if it comes from God herself? If so, try analysis – it's much cheaper than children.

So. Everyone can afford children but cannot afford a few hundred dollars a month (full boat, no insurance, no reduced rates) for analysis? There's something here other than elitism.

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Where the winds hit heavy

August 22, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

Fred Wilson posts an mp3 of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash singing Girl of the North Country. Stunning.

Well, if you're travelin' in the north country fair, Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline, Remember me to one who lives there. She once was a true love of mine.

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Grids and Graphs

August 21, 2006 | Life

Free Online Graph Paper / Grid Paper PDFs

Amazing collection of graph and grid paper downloads. Each is generated on the fly from your parameters: Doc size, border, grid size, grid color, etc. Way highly useful.

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Attics of My Life

August 12, 2006 | Life

Well, after that last bout of capitalism, I've been relatively introspective, and also relatively productive.

In the attics of my life
Full of cloudy dreams unreal
Full of tastes no tongue can know
And lights no eye can see

Playing guitar. Writing emails. Reflecting. Working this weekend so I can have fun next weekend. Knocking out the work backlog, and dealing with a lot of financial planning and catch-up. Beautiful weather. What more can I say? Life happens.

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That's Odd

August 9, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

Sticker found on bananas: "Eat five a day for good health." Five bananas a day?? Wow.

How do you know it's early August? You receive the Eddie Bauer Holiday Preview catalog in the mail. That is so, like, in sync! I have been thinking about Christmas gifts and winter clothing recently, haven't you?

The world is a very odd place.

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The Collision of Two Tendencies

August 7, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

Hannah, bless her heart, happened to quote something from The Little Prince that spoke to me, and created an hour of research unrelated to any of my pressing commitments.

The dominant idea in the story of The Little Prince is to be found, of course, in chapter XXI, in which the little prince meets, tames, and says goodbye to the fox.

—Adieu, dit le renard. Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

You can only see well with your heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye. The fox adds a corollary to this:

—Les hommes ont oublié cette vérité, dit le renard. Mais tu ne dois pas l'oublier. Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé. Tu es responsable de ta rose...

People forget this truth, but you shouldn't forget it. You become forever responsible for what you tame.

Marie-Louise von Franz, in her amazing Jungian interpretation of the story, writes (pg. 94ff):

It can be said that the fox teaches the little prince the important value of the here-and-now, and with it, of feeling. Feeling gives value to the present, for without it one has no relationship to the here-and-now situation, and with it comes responsibility, and, through that, a formed individual. [...] The fox is here on earth and that friendship must last, for otherwise it is meaningless. [...]

For instance, if a man has an obligation to his anima and also to the woman with whom he made friends or married, then he gets into the typical duality situation of life where one always has a real conflict and a double pull, and is always torn between obligations to this side of life and to the inner or other side. That would be the realization, or the crucifixion, the basic truth of life, that life is double and is a double obligation. Life itself is a conflict because it always means the collision of two tendencies. That is what makes up life, but that realization escapes the little prince completely or he escapes the realization.

Thanks Hannah. Thanks Marie-Louise. I hope I can recover from this reeling mind-bomb and deliver on my obligations today, the ones on the outside, not the inner ones, and at the same time not escape this realization.

N.B.: Do not literalize Saint-Exupery's story, von Franz's interpretation, or my reference. For metaphorical use only.

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What a Weekend is For

August 7, 2006 | Life

Leaving work early on Friday and stocking in enough food to avoid going back into town. Going for a walk and checking out the waterfall down the road for the first time this year. Champaign aperitifs. Cooking easy suppers. Red wine. Listening to music. Enjoying wonderful company. Waking up early and cooking good breakfasts. Chocolate. More music. Cleaning the grill. Long showers. Taking naps. Cooking yummy dinners. A good Merlot. Going to bed early. Waking up late. Having leftovers for breakfast. Visiting the neighbors and their barn, seeing the pigs, the goats, the horses, and the barn swallows just hours before fledgling. Walking through dew-dropped fields. Daytime skinny-dipping in the pond. Smiling through water droplets in the yellow sun of the blue sky. Late lunches. More chocolate. More naps. Discovering that both good restaurants in Claremont are closed Sunday and Monday. More red wine. Sitting on the deck with a bug-protecting light wind, watching the sunset. Late suppers. Good conversations. Self-reflection. Sharing. Exploring. Waking up to a quiet Monday rain and beginning the transition back to the work week.

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Cancer Sucks

August 2, 2006 | Life

Got into town at 7:15 AM, ready for my super-productive day. Energized, upbeat, focused. Saw a friend drinking coffee on a bench on Main Street and stopped to talk. "How are you?," I asked. "I never know how to answer," he said. "Yeah, I know, me too," I said. He asked, "Do you want the straight shot or the friendly response?" "The straight shot," I said.

Cancer, bad. Got the news Monday night. I knew he had been something of a walking miracle having beaten it back a few years ago. But it's back and the prognosis is not good. So we talked for an hour, a really good talk, a valuable hour of connection, and now here I am in the hot office, thinking about life and living, death and dying, and trying to work back around to the clients.

I wouldn't have given that hour up for anything, but man, the best-laid plans.... And, to reiterate, cancer really, really, sucks.

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Hot

August 2, 2006 | Life | Nature & Environment

At 5:10 AM it's 79 degrees. Wha? Forecast is for 97 degrees and thunderstorms, read: air as thick and close and humid as you can imagine. Welcome to August.

This morning's wake-up fun was to attempt killing a bee's nest under a deck chair. They say to do this at night or early morning, "when the bees are at rest." I think what they mean is, "when it's cool outside and the bees are too sluggish to move." I slowly turned the deck chair on its side and bees immediately started crawling out, blowing my carefully choreographed plan. I started wildly spraying them and the nest before one escaped and circled around the mist and came after me. I think I got him in the face while I was running for the door. Unharmed, today. Requires another attempt tomorrow.

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The Difference a ".." Makes

August 1, 2006 | Life | Software | Technology

Unbelievably crazy-busy day. At one point in the morning, Adrian was working on a website redesign, Marty was starting the v4.1 SFTP programming, Anne was catching me up on her sales work and the plan for August, and I'm thinking, "It used to be that I came to this office and it was mine alone and it was quiet and I could work for hours without interruption." Then Chris walked in to pick up his CDs and we talked about Radial for a few minutes. I looked around and there were five of us, three working on my projects and me wanting to escape and go talk music for a few hours. Insane.

So let's skip over the middle of the day, including the improvisational client meeting, the friendly walk back afterwards, the guilty pleasure of a massage mid-day, the haircut, and the work-dodging visit to Strings. I went to the post office and back to work. Oh, wow, now it's 5:30—is that still "mid-day??"

So I walk in and Marty is coding Perl, Adrian is coding CSS, and Anne is rearranging the office, having taken all the boxes to the basement, set up another desk in the corner, swapped locations of the round table and the printer, consolidated the office supplies, reset my filing space, measured for window shades, and generally cleaned up virtually everything. She's a little aggressive that way—I mean, I had done a thorough cleaning when I moved into the place in 1999, does it really need it again already?? Anyway, now four people can work there, maybe five, and while it might not be exactly private or spacious it certainly looks like a startup scene.

So by 6 PM all the slackers cleared out of there and we could get some work done. After just barely finishing the brain-meltingly complicated testing for version 4.0 (and, truth be told, it's not quite exactly totally done until I finish some UI changes and write the release notes and perform one last round of basic testing on the staging site) we launched into version 4.1, which has the SFTP support.

SFTP stands for secure FTP, and basically it tunnels insecure FTP over a secure encrypted SSH connection. Crypto is like the hardest thing in computing, and luckily Scott could get all the special pre-built binaries installed on Sunday so we could get right at it this week.

The first thing we needed was a server account where we could publish files via SFTP. We got that going, but it stopped working. We tried from another machine but couldn't get connected to the net. I wondered about the firewall, and messed around with some settings there. Didn't help. (Red herring: if it worked once, it wasn't the firewall.) Marty took the laptop outdoors to get some free Ivy League wi-fi, and it worked out on the porch even at 100 degrees and high humidity. So we messed around with the Ethernet routing and got the laptop connected and verified that it could SFTP in, but our development box couldn't. I had a flash that they were filtering our IP address because of our bad login attempts, and convinced Marty that it was worth emailing them to check. Ten minutes later, yes indeed. Notio shoots; scores. Okay, so now we can log in from both machines.

You probably can't believe you're still reading this.

So then I configured our software to publish to this now-working server. The target working directory path was "../www/workspace/pivot" We verified that when we logged in manually this path worked. We tested a publish run, and it failed. Well, off to look at logs, etc. Iterate on verifying where the code is failing. Etc.

Long story short, after, who knows? an hour? half an hour? we realized that logging in via SFTP put you in a different location than logging in via FTP. Really? Test. Yes, it's true. Logging in via SFTP you need to use "../www/workspace/pivot" but logging in via FTP you need "www/workspace/pivot" And that's the difference a ".." makes. It's sensible, one you realize that FTP typically sandboxes you into a location amenable to a webserver, whereas SFTP is actually using SSH, which is typically dropping you into your home directory, only a subdirectory of which is wired to the webserver. Oy vey.

So we need to have two config variables, one for FTP and one for SFTP. Now we know. Then we spent half an hour talking local search dev models, engineering talent availability, funding options, various complications, etc.

At 8 PM I went to the Coop to get dinner, technically supper, and came home to have a beer and eat and write this and try to chill enough to go to sleep. So much got done today, but exactly zero on my list. The next two days have to be super-productive, or the clients will have my head. Wish me luck.

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The Difference An Hour Makes

August 1, 2006 | Life

The problem with 1:00 PM meetings is that if you spill something while eating lunch there's no time to recover. If the meeting is at 2:00 you can run to the men's store and buy new clothes. At 1:00 you just have to live with it. Really puts a lot of pressure on food selection and careful eating.

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And Good Ones Too

July 31, 2006 | Life | Site Maintenance

Doug is back from vacation and has commented on many posts. Always appreciated.

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Too Cool to Bluff

July 31, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

On today's errand walk, another sudden lyric occurrence, in isolation, apart from the song, leaving me wondering.

She was too pat to open and too cool to bluff

If you follow that link, you'll find I got a lot more than I bargained for. After some preliminaries, there's a lengthy excerpt from my old haunt The Well, where (notimetohate), writes:

My take on "She was too pat to open and too cool to bluff" is that he could tell she was satisfied with where she was at and she wasn't going to initiate a conversation/friendship with him. And he could tell if he started it, that he couldn't match what she had and would have to bluff, but knew that wouldn't work with her.

Then (mellobelle), whom I met when I visited Lexington, KY in 2004, and who is totally cool, said:

Scarlet Begonias has my favorite woman in it of all the women in the Dead oeuvre. She's cool, she's together, she's so confident and not afraid of drawing attention to herself, she wears scarlet begonias in her hair and bells on her shoes. She has no need of the singer, has that exactly right. Altho', I think she enjoys his company for the evening, but when the evening ends, she's done with him. And she doesn't fake her interest. (Too cool to bluff)

There's more, lots more. Craig Dudley starts with a poker game explanation, goes on to write 1,300 words full of interpretive wisdom, and wraps up with:

That’s what I see in the song: A description of a relationship gone bad, but also the singer’s realization that it’s okay for relationships to go bad--it doesn’t mean that one (or both) of the people had to be a bad person. Innocence isn’t lost just because we make choices and choose to be ourselves, even when it might lead to conflict or loss of love.

More perspectives than you could shake a stick at. If I try to do a gender inversion on the characters in the song my brain locks up and goes blank, pointing toward a huge opportunity for learning.

....in the strangest of places if you look at it right....

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Morning Earwigs

July 30, 2006 | Life | Nature & Environment

Earwigs are disgusting in many ways, but they're especially disgusting when, on a Sunday morning, up a bit earlier than you might prefer, and slightly hung-over, you find a pack of them nibbling away happily inside the wrapper of your virtually untouched Scharffen Berger chocolate bar. Besides the waste of fine chocolate, the shock and sudden reaction made my head hurt. Might be time for an early-morning nap.

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RMA Please

July 28, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites

Dear Andrew,

I'd like an RMA to return the microphone stand purchased on order #L23298760, invoice #6098612.

The reason for the return is that the metal boom of the stand, when delivered, had two stickers on it, put there by the manufacturer. One was a white paper UPC bar code sticker. The other was a long silver foil sticker with a purple stripe that said, "On-Stage Stands." As it turns out, these two stickers make a difference.

The paper one tore off in tiny pieces that took nearly five minutes to remove—though, granted, using only my fingernails and sailor slang—leaving a sticky glue residue. The second one peeled off easily leaving only a lightly tacky film of glue.

I attempted to remove the glue using the spray cleaner called Fantastic and a paper towel. Much to my surprise, the UPC glue came off easily, but the foil glue became stickier. I then used Windex, which helped loosen the glue, but did not remove it. Additional elbow grease was applied and had some minor effect. Bringing out the heavy artillery, I used Clorox spray cleaner with bleach. Nor did this powerful agent have any impact on the glue.

I guess what it comes down to is that when I buy something I don't want to spend ten minutes taking stickers off the thing, and I especially don't want to own something on which the sticker glue cannot be removed using only everyday cleaners commonly available in the average kitchen.

Does anybody at On-Stage Stands ever purchase their own products and try to use them as a customer would?

It is unacceptable to me to use the stand with the glue residue as it is. It seems like my only other alternative would be to re-order the stand and use it with the stickers attached. But I don't want to use the stand on-stage (har har) with the stickers—especially the purple stripe one; the UPC one is kind of ironic and cool—hence, best to return it.

This is the sort of thing I can buy at the local guitar store and not pay for shipping. It's too bad I had to spend $15 shipping (plus return) to figure that out.

Thanks,
Michael J.

PS: If you have a staff contest for best return requests, I hope that this letter at least merits an entry. If not, please forward some examples for my study and self-improvement.

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A Version of Me

July 26, 2006 | Life

The strangest thing about selling my car was the feeling I had today when the buyer drove it away down the driveway. Suddenly, exhausted. About to fall asleep right now exhausted. So at 3:30 in the afternoon I walked into the living room, lay down on the couch, and fell asleep. I woke up at 7:15, feeling remarkably similar to when I experienced that self-induced hypnosis. It felt as if a version of me had driven away, and I needed time to integrate the change. Or something. It's an extra-ordinary sense, that's for sure.

An hour and a half later, and I'm ready to crash for the night. What a weird day.

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Song of the Day

July 25, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

Orchestra Nodding.mp3 (3:46)

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Cogitating Is Doing

July 25, 2006 | Life | Software

In software engineering it's common to spend much more time understanding and characterizing something than actually implementing a feature or fix. For example, we just spent almost two hours pair programming to figure out 1) if the observed behavior is correct by design (yes); 2) why the error message is wrong (null set); 3) finding where in the code the message is being reported (line 1769); 4) typing "if !=NULL" in exactly the correct place, without disturbing any surrounding code; 5) testing the change to verify operation; 6) undoing the change to verify failure; 7) making the change again; 8) verifying the final change.

In other words, 120 minutes to type nine characters. Not quite as bad as fiction writers, I suppose.... But the real idea here is that doing requires thinking, and really, there's very little difference between the two in knowledge work. Sure, if you're hunting a grizzly bear, or plowing a field with your Fjord horses, or bolting the body to the frame on the assembly line, well in these examples there's a big difference between thinking about it and doing it. But for symbolic analysis work, thinking is far harder and more time-consuming than doing and the two are so intertwined as to be one and the same.

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What Matters

July 24, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

Falling asleep last night it occurred to me that in the past few days I have

• Really gotten motivated playing guitar, reminding me how much I loved playing when I was young. It's hard to remember that in the mid-1970s I was the best guitar player in my school district, and I just walked away from it. WTF.
• Made a simple music video, reminding me that I have at least two screenplays I'm hoping to write. A couple of years ago I had good traction on the first outline. Now, a distant memory.
• Printed some of my photographs, reminding me that my grandfather taught me how to work in the darkroom and I've always loved playing with images. My photography work is on a four- to five-year binge cycle, and I'm ready for another one.
• Continued writing, currently focused on the blog, reminding me that in addition to the two or three screenplays I have at least one novel and and one or two non-fiction projects I'd like to accomplish. This is in addition to any business writing, which probably includes one or two short works.

I have a passion for many parts of my work, but really, it sure seems like the list above is what deeply matters to me. So if you see me online or in person, maybe you can ask me about that stuff as encouragement. Life goes on, plenty to do, work is busy, etc., but the four areas above are where I'm really trying to work. It's easy to forget, and life is short.

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Weekend Snapshot

July 23, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

After seven hours of financial straightening (I'm probably one-third through the project) I offer 15 minutes of guitar snapshots.

Detective Mystery.mp3 (2:01)

Swimming.mp3 (4:19)

Dee Vee.mp3 (1:48)

Simple Chords.mp3 (2:01)

Big Noise.mp3 (3:58)

Are You Fire.mp3 (2:36)

Now it's all about dexterity and stamina (ain't that always the way) until I start to work out specific song themes. And maybe learn what the heck I'm doing. I'm going on feel here, and have little understanding of how guitar tuning works, intellectually. That's an unusual space for me, normally I think it first and feel it later. This is the opposite. There's sure to be some learning.

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Rainy Ghost of the Golden Age

July 22, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | Nature & Environment

An impromptu music video I shot this afternoon....

Rainy Ghost of the Golden Age (YouTube, 4:35)

A mood hit and I grabbed the camera and restarted the song. The video compression makes it hard to tell how hard it was raining, and hard to see the ghost. But watch carefully and pay attention, and you might catch a glimpse.

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Guitaring

July 22, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | Products & Opportunites

On Thursday I picked up the guitar for the first time since at least January. The last time I had callouses on my fingertips was at least a year ago. Around that time I had wanted to build a positive feedback loop with my playing, and rented a gadget that connected to the computer to record my guitar doodles. But it was too much setup hoo-ha—get the computer out, fire up software, close down other apps, plug the box in, set the levels—I just wanted something physical where I could press a button when I was hacking around and immediately capture the moment. So I didn't buy the gadget and didn't get a feedback loop in place.

But Thursday I had a lot of fun playing, and I removed some disincentives by setting up the guitar processor on top of the stereo and keeping the guitar plugged in. And then I remembered a new gadget I saw a few weeks ago. The Edirol R-09 is about the size of a deck of cards, and records high-quality sound on SD memory cards. I was able to borrow one for the weekend (thanks Chas!), and last night played around.

Here are some of my experiments, about 20 minutes total. Most of these songs don't go anywhere, they're more like chord explorations and emotional states. I'm pretty happy with them, especially given a first effort. I've sequenced them into something of a flow, for those that dare listen to the whole set.

Sweeping Birds.mp3 (1:22)

Interior Waves.mp3 (3:20)

Minor Grunge.mp3 (4:46)

Tangerine Mining Company.mp3 (4:17)

Eee Space.mp3 (4:03)

Swoop.mp3 (1:08)

The Edirol recorder is pretty sweet, and the built-in mics are better than decent. It's a complete splurge, but I think I'm going to buy this on Monday instead of returning it to the store. Add in some stealth mics, and there might be some undercover recording returning to my future.

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cmd-tab

July 20, 2006 | Life | Software

Trivial Mac tip: I just figured out cmd-tab for application switching. It's great. The default selection is the last app you used, so it's easy to switch back and forth between two apps. You can arrow between any open apps, but the UI design to order them based on recency is brilliant.

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Modern Business Realities

July 19, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

Lunchtime banter:

You can buy better but you can't pay more.

This [$300] pen works as well as the cheap ones.

We're not happy until you're not happy.

The food was bad and the portions were much too small.

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Hope and Joy

July 19, 2006 | Life

I'm in Boston again, ninth or tenth time this year. This morning's check-in question was, "How are we experiencing hope and joy in our lives?" It took 14 people an hour and fifteen minutes to go around the circle. Two interesting thoughts came up:

1) Love is the only emotion that contributes to intelligence. (Fear, anger, et al don't.)

2) Joy is a place you come from not one you go to. (It's internal, not external.)

Nice to be here again.

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Three Hours Later

July 17, 2006 | Life

Three hours after posting the bit below on Korzybski and E-Prime, I suddenly found it amusing that given everything going on in my life I should now have an interest in General Semantics. As if I don't have enough other intellectual hobbies.... I think this is one I can let go, but I'm still going to try to avoid using is, am, are, was, were, be, being, and been, just for the heck of it.

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The Adventures of Anybody

July 16, 2006 | Life

Lately I have a renewed interest in Neuro-Lingustic Programming (NLP), about which I'm sure there will be future blog posts. I read most of the core material available in the early '80s, and paid a bit of attention in the '90s but I didn't pursue it much. As I looked through the books I own I was surprised at how much the language mirrored my world-view. I think NLP was even more influential in my approach to being than I recognized. I recently ordered a few of the newer books, which appear excellent, and I'm excited to dive into them.

I started with an odd little book, The Adventures of Anybody, by Richard Bandler. It's not so much about NLP as it tries to tell the story of NLP in action. It's about 100 pages long, and set in a script italic typeface that changes the reading style, making it both casual and difficult. In essence, this book is a fable about our internal representation of "reality," written by a master hypnotist.

Yesterday morning, instead of my "morning papers" blog scan, I started reading. A few things happened along the way—the Verizon guy came and fixed the static on the phone line, I ran down to the post office, WBZ-TV called with an automated poll about the November elections, I ate breakfast—but by around 11 AM I had finished the first half, "How Anybody Got His Name," and decided I could finish this off in less than an hour, so I started on the second half, "Anybody and Time." Because of the way the light was coming into the room I decided to lie down on the couch to read. And I read about eight pages. And then, I fell asleep.

And not just any kind of sleep, but over three hours of rock solid, don't move, wake up stiff with all limbs tingling asleep. I was zonked. And when I woke my mind was reeling in slow motion—it seemed like I had travelled the universe and was suddenly surprised to find myself back on the couch, with my cat ultimately happy and curled up at my feet, in the middle of the afternoon, shortly after I had gotten out of bed at 7 AM that morning. Hours of "real time" had gone by in a flash, yet even more infinite time had elapsed in my experience. I don't even really remember the rest of the day, except that I did get my car listed for sale on eBay (please spread the word!).

Now, at the time, I didn't quite connect the idea of reading a fable about representing reality written by a hypnotist to my falling into a deep sleep for several hours, but when I picked up the book this morning I found my bookmark where I had left off and—I kid you not—the last thing I read was:

Presently Anybody fell asleep, and though he could not quite remember his dreams, he saw a tremendous fountain that sprayed the most wondrous water. He felt himself lifted into the air and floating through space. He saw the sorcerer in the purple robes and heard him whisper in his ear, but he could not understand.

Can you believe that? The guy hypnotized me through a book, and despite my highly tuned ability to go meta and abstract up and read between the lines, I was a goner. I'd like to read this again, but I can't spend today sleeping.

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More Philling Photos

July 13, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | Travel

Executive summary: Wednesday July 12 at the Champlain Valley Expo near Burlington, VT. Live music mid-week and the guilty irresponsible feeling that comes with. Pouring rain all day and night. Dancing in the mud. Crowded covered grandstand. Happy happy people.

The Benevento/Russo Duo opened the show at 4:00. This was the scene during the middle of their set. We got there early enough to take third row seats in the grandstand. Most of the dirt you see will soon turn to mud and then be filled up with people.

Phil Lesh & Friends, first set. Songs: Good Lovin', They Love Each Other, Rubin and Cherise, Desire, Suraree.

Kathryn has seen a lot of live music, but none of the Dead- and Phish-related jamband variety. She is however a sociology grrl, and in addition to enjoying the music, high-quality people-watching ensued. The character in the foreground wearing the orange hat was dancing in the aisle, him bad, and as he noticed the usher coming he danced up three rows and into his section as she walked by. As she walked past he danced back down into the aisle. He was invisible as far as she was concerned.

Phil's second set. Songs: You've Got to Hide Your Love Away, Scarlet Begonias, Viola Lee Blues, Phil & Mike Gordon Bass Duo, Help On the Way, Slipknot, Franklin's Tower, Not Fade Away. Midnight Hour.

Full house. Not sold out, but comfortably full. You can see in the foreground the grandstand has become much more crowded in the aisles. Trey played onstage for the whole set. During Help I remembered walking across Main Street last week, crossing between the Post Office and Molly's, and suddenly, in the middle of the crosswalk, the startled opening of Help On the Way popped into my consciousness. I remember thinking, "That's probably the one song I'd like to hear Wednesday." So, I got my wish, even though I forgot I had one.

Remember that "dirt" we saw earlier? A fond memory. Dancing, walking, running, and standing in the mud. I think you get the idea.

Trey and Mike, with the Duo. Songs: Drifting, Trouble, Tuesday, Hap-nappy, Goodbye Head, Something for Rockets, Shine, Mud City, Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, Dragonfly. Who Are You (with Page).

Two things seem to happen at rainy outdoor shows: 1) The band plays really well, being sympathetic with the audience outdoors in the rain; and 2) They play it loud. I don't know why this is, but it was damn loud during this set. The music was driving, rock electronica, with many minor chords and dissonant sounds. Some of the light show was beautiful, rainbow fingers playing over the audience for instance, but some was a blinking brutish barrage of colors and intensities. The music was assaultingly loud, and when I found myself wincing and twitching every time this one particular drum was hit (every few seconds), I dug around the backpack for hearing protectors. We smiled. We could listen now. Even wearing hearing protectors it was plenty loud enough. And this was 200 feet from the stage. I can only imagine up front. People seemed to like it, but my left ear was ringing a bit even 12 hours later when I woke up. Ugg.

When we left after the "first" Trey and Mike set, we thought there might be a big jamed-out second set with the hometown boys – Page McConnell had already joined Trey and Mike onstage with Phil's band for Midnight Hour and there might be more. But we decided to beat the traffic and it's good we left early because it rained hard for much of the drive home, slowing us down. And it turned out they only played the one encore, so we missed almost nothing and saved an easy hour, maybe more, getting out of there. The audience had a great time. The rain was an annoyance but didn't affect the mood. People were happy, smiling, dancing. Top-notch live music in northern New England doesn't happen every day, so let's enjoy ourselves.

The one downside: "I tell 'ya sonny, back in the day, I could stay up until 2 or even 3 AM and still go to work the next day. Now, I go to bed at 1 AM and I'm a-wiped out the whole next day. I am not getting any younger for these things."

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That Sinking Feeling

July 11, 2006 | Life

The seashells are next to the soap.

Yes, that's true.

Don't you want the seashells on the other side of the sink? Or move the soap to the other side?

No, not that I'm aware of.

When you use the soap you have wet hands. So water splashes around the soap. The seashells might get wet.

That's okay. They're seashells.

 

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Examples of Categories

July 11, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Science | Software | Technology

Art: Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins on live TV. (Thanks Jon.)

Commerce: Do Patents Encourage or Stifle Innovation?

Culture: On media elitism and the "derivative" myth

Technology: On playing with my Holux GPS unit...

Cool: Velcro Being Pulled Apart

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Wishing for Skirts

July 10, 2006 | Life

After wearing shorts for nine full days, wearing slacks to work today feels so constraining. Oh, if only men could wear skirts in the summer.

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Activity Recommendation: Vacation

July 9, 2006 | Life

A couple of weeks ago, when I was laid low with the flu, under deadline stress, and finally hitting my limit of multi-tasking, I decided I better take a week off before I burned out. I looked at my calendar for the week of the 3rd, already a short week with the holiday, and with no appointments booked I blocked it out completely.

Well, by Wednesday, after a weekend of naps, a live music show at my favorite venue, and another day of naps, I decided that I already was burned out. Holy cow do I feel better now! Of course, after six months of rain, it's nice that it was sunny and warm and with a cool breeze every day. Pat myself on the back for getting the weather right. Also pat myself on the back for minimizing expectations about getting things done. Yes, I managed to get some major housecleaning in, and wow was the lawn ever long and mangy after all the rain and my travel schedule, but mostly I sat around enjoying the birds and trees, and hardly even reading.

For me "relaxing" means a lack of obligations – making the holiday season far from enjoyable – and this week I managed to reset my body, my mind, and my spirit by minimizing the "shoulds." I wish I could extend this another week, but there are a few things I have to do this week. I think I will make it to a mid-week concert though, and then there's another weekend coming up soon.

Recommendation: Take some time off and do nothing. I promise: You'll love it.

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Paul Simon's Live Surprise

July 8, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

Vacation, Friday night. There must be some live music around here. Oh, Paul Simon in Burlington. That sounds good. Bought a single ticket the night before the show and got dead center last row before the soundboard. A perfect seat for this event. Although most of the audience was sitting down the whole night, I could stand and dance without bothering anybody.

I'd never been to the Champlain Valley Exposition, in Essex Junction, VT (one exit north of Burlington). It's a farm fair summer venue, and as these things go, it's not too shabby.

It doesn't have the luxe that SPAC offers, but it's a big step up from a hockey rink. Outdoors in the cool night air of Vermont, high-quality lights and sound, with birds flying above and a light breeze, world-class musicians, a fine performance in a beautiful setting.

It's good to go to a non-Jamband concert every once in a while to see how the other half dances. Before the gates opened I asked a ticket taker, "What are the rules?" She said, "Rules??" I replied, "You know, can we bring in water bottles, cameras, food, or backpacks? What about beach balls, glow sticks, and laser pointers?" She said, "No one has told me about any rules, normally you just walk in." This got an eyebrow raise out of me—maybe she hasn't been told, but usually there are rules.

But it turns out she was right: No apparent rules! No pack search! No body search! There wasn't even anyone there to check my backpack or pat me down. They tore my ticket and I walked in.

Of course, there were rules, they just didn't announce any of them in advance. For instance, right after I took this picture:

An usher walked over and said, "The artist has requested no photos of any kind." Oh, okay. I know what they're really trying to prevent are flashes, and people with cameras acting like killjoys to people just trying to enjoy the show. It's unfortunate that the only way to avoid those two bad behaviors is to ban all forms of the behavior. I know how to set my flash to 'off' and I only take a few pictures a set. But, as we know, rules are rules, (unless you're the President).

Here's my annotated setlist:

• Gumshoes
• Boy In The Bubble
• Slip Sliding Away—Very dark and slow and smokey.
• You're The One—Nature gives us shapeless shapes, Clouds and waves and flame. But human expectation, Is that love remains the same. And when it doesn't, We point our fingers, And blame blame blame.
• Me & Julio
• How Can You Live In The Northeast—Weak as the winter sun, we enter life on earth. Names and religion comes just after date of birth. Then everybody gets a tongue to speak, And everyone hears an inner voice. A day at the end of the week to wonder and rejoice.
• Mrs. Robinson
• Love Me Like A Rock—[I note here that this show is very song-oriented, which is a departure from the Jamband scene, where they, well, jam more.]
• That Was Your Mother—Along come a young girl, She's pretty as a prayerbook. Sweet as an apple on christmas day. I said good gracious can this be my luck? If that's my prayerbook, Lord let us pray.
• Duncan
• Graceland—And she said losing love, Is like a window in your heart. Everybody sees you're blown apart. Everybody sees the wind blow.
• Father & Daughter
• Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes
• Still Crazy After All These Years
• Cecilia

At this point we were headed for the encores, and I decided to take another photo.

First encores:

• You Can Call Me Al—A man walks down the street, He says why am i soft in the middle now, Why am I soft in the middle, The rest of my life is so hard. I need a photo-opportunity. I want a shot at redemption. Don't want to end up a cartoon, In a cartoon graveyard.
• The Only Boy Living in New York
• The Boxer

Second encores:

• Wartime Prayer—I'm trying to tap into some wisdom, Even a little drop will do. I want to rid my heart of envy, And cleanse my soul of rage, Before I'm through.
• Bridge Over Troubled Water—Sail on silver girl, sail on by. Your time has come to shine, and all your dreams will run their way. See how they shine, oh, if you need a friend, I'm sailing right behind

At the end of the show a solid 10 minute firework display.

The promoter of this show is a friend of mine. I saw him and his wife backstage before and after the show, and unfortunately only 4,000 attended. The capacity was something like 13,000, so they took a bath; very unfortunate. The promoter puts up the financial guarantee for the artist, rents the facility, hires the stage and security, etc. They earn out based on ticket sales. In this case, it's possible they wrote a very big check so that Paul Simon could play for the first time in Vermont. Since the show was a Friday night, I'm assuming the $80/$50 ticket prices were the deciding factor.

And he told me that, yes, there would be entrance searches for the upcoming Phil show Wednesday. So there you have it, audience profiling and discrimination even right here in Vermont.

The big surprise for me was that Simon only played three songs from the new album, Surprise. I love Surprise, so I was surprised to read in a review from an earlier show in Montreal:

If there were lulls in last night's set list, they came with three songs from Simon's recent disc, the disappointing Surprise. In future years, it's hard to imagine any of that album's songs staying on the set list.

We'll see about that. Certainly there aren't the dance numbers that Rhythm of the Saints had (a career peak work of his). But both You're The One and Surprise were critically panned when I think they're very thoughtful and contemplative albums.

The local show review was favorable, save for the fact that the author has no friggin' clue about how sound reinforcement works:

Why do some touring acts (including Simon) postion the key sound-mix decision-makers onstage, where they don’t have a prayer of hearing what the crowd is hearing?

Uh, dude, check it out: There's this big white tent in the middle of the floor in the audience? It's called the "soundboard." And the guy there, in the middle of the audience, is mixing the "house sound." He controls what you hear. What you see on stage is the "monitor mixer," who provides an individual stereo mix for each of the on-stage musicians. He's on the side of the stage so they can yell over, or point, to make something louder or softer. He's got nothing to do with the sound in the hall.

Sheesh, editors, please fact-check. Or use Google. Are you trying to emulate bloggers or something?

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Dishonest Could Still = Nice?

July 8, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Heard last night: "Joe's a nice guy, but he's not honest."

Hearing this I noted my current understanding of nice already included honest. But apparently that's not true for everyone....

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Letting Go of Outcomes

July 7, 2006 | Governance | Life | People & Society

Over the past ten years I've become much more "process-oriented." Part of this learning comes from my work—as a consultant I'm often in situations where I don't know very much about the specific content, but contribute to change based on looking at the larger system. I used to say that a focus on process leads to a better outcome.

In the past year I dove even more deeply into process and facilitation, especially through participating in and leading Open Space and World Cafe sessions (and couples counseling, a longer story). Now I'd go further about the value of process: When I participate in the design and iteration of a process, I am comfortable with whatever outcome arises. Focusing on how something is decided allows me to let go of what is decided.

One way to think about this is using my favorite phrase from the past year, abstract up. Take a specific situation, then generalize it a bit and work at that level. Then generalize that, and go up one more level. Continue, until you can't make a general case that still contains the specific situation you're dealing with. At that point apply the rules you've learned from the general case, and see how the specific case plays out.

Simple example: Say you're going to buy a house from a friend. It's not listed on the market, and it's a private sale without real estate agents. How do you set the price? One way is to pick a number that feels good and fight for it trying not to compromise too much. Doesn't usually work out too well. Another way is to let the buyer get an appraisal, and use that number. If that doesn't seem quite right to either party, have the seller get another appraisal, and split the difference. At this point you will have two opinions by professionals, and you can choose to use them, or walk away from the deal, but it's not going to make much sense shooting for a number a lot higher or lower than the bounds of the two appraisals.

It's worth noting that letting go of outcomes is non-trivial, as they say in engineering. I would not yet say I am expert at this, only that when I am able to abstract up it works out, usually better than when I'm obsessed with "what's going to happen."

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Great Bass, Lesh Philling

July 4, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | Technology

Right up until Sunday, the day of the show, I wasn't sure if I'd go to see Phil Lesh & Friends at SPAC. I'd been sick for two weeks, the first week full-blown, with all symptoms known to (wo)man, and a second full week with the phlegmish hacking cough. Symptoms had died down by Saturday, but I didn't want to travel unless I was going to have a great time – I could have a good time at home.

When I woke up I felt good, and balancing continued R&R vs. dancing until midnight, I decided to let the hotel decide. If I could easily get a reasonable room the morning of the show, I was good to go. Let's have fun. First call, at the Super-8 over by the big Wal-Mart – across from the Home Depot and Target, right off the exit, before you get to the Best Buy, Bed Bath & Beyond, and EMS – the Super-8 had a room for the in-season typical $125. Therefore, it's a deal, we're on the road, pack it up. Figured on a 3-hour drive in holiday weekend mid-day traffic. It was 11 AM, and the show started at 5.

I arrived at about 4:15, after stopping at the hotel to change. Surprisingly, I got a great parking spot in the VIP area just off the back entrance by the reflecting pool. One reason might be that as I drove down Avenue of the Pines and hit the traffic directors, there was a sign that said, "Main parking lot [arrow right]; VIP parking [arrow left]." Everyone was going to the main lot, but I just turned left, no one seemed to care, and drove into a shaded parking spot. Got out of the car, stretched, looked around. No one was walking after me or hollering, and people of the tribe were grilling and chilling so I decided: Parked.

The reason to see concerts at SPAC is that if you get there early you have a very nice State Park scene for hanging out.

I've been coming to concerts here since 1983, when those trees were a lot shorter. There's a lot more crowd control now. Back in the day they'd put 34,000 people here, with multiple delay towers for sound, and it was crazy spinning sweating hippies even at the way-back of the lawn. Now they top out more like 25,000, and there's never any delay towers beyond the house system hung on the back of the balcony. And instead of a couple dozen ushers and a virtual autonomous zone, there are hundreds of ushers and you can hardly go visit a friend across the aisle without answering for it. But it's still SPAC, a New York State Park, manicured for our dionysian pleasure, with its marble stall dividers, lush green lawn, old pine trees, brick outbuildings, waterfall, bridge, and ravine. It just doesn't get much better than this for rock 'n roll, so stop complaining already. We're lucky they let fools like us in the place with the terror alert at Code Yellow (soon rising again as we approach November).

June 30, 2006 – The United States remains at an elevated risk, Code Yellow, for terrorist attack. The Department of Homeland Security continues to analyze intelligence and closely monitor events as they unfold overseas. At this time, there is no credible intelligence to suggest a specific or imminent threat to the homeland.

Back in the real world, sans propaganda, people were enjoying themselves at a cultural event. First up was the Benevento-Russo Duo, who I'd never heard, or heard of. They seem pretty young, so I think this is a big gig for them:

Keyboard player and drummer. I would call the music I heard intense, pattern-oriented electronica. Driving, tight, cranked. Very well-played. Enjoyable, and a pretty danceable 45 minute set. Worth exploring.

Next up were Trey Anastasio and Mike Gordon, former Phishmates. What I didn't realize is that they're playing with the Duo. They set up as a foursome and played a little over an hour:

Those guys totally rocked out. After the second tune, which contained more than one killer jam and a spectacular close, the guy next to me (who I didn't know) looked over and said, "Dude! That was totally like the old days!!" Indeed it was. When those guys hit the groove they nearly got the gold ring. Surprisingly good, and not just a nostalgia act. The Duo adds a modern element that takes Trey and Mike into the 21st century. Recommended.

Here's a wider shot to get a sense of the indoor scene:

Toward the middle of the set a guy named Blake showed up in the aisle in front of me. A little while later he turned and asked, "Did Mike play the acoustic [guitar] yet?" No, not that I remember. A few minutes later they jumped into "Who Are You?" by The Who, a classic-rock surprise prize, and along the way Mike did then pick up the acoustic for that little ditty in the middle of the song and the guy Blake turned around and high-fived me. "Psychic!," he said. Of course, he had been on the road and this was his third of four shows, so he might have had some sub-conscious low-frequency pattern-recognition going on there.

Above, in the left of the frame, you see Leigha, who's currently working as a bartender in New Paltz, NY. She was with a couple who drove up for the day. We had talked a bit during the set, I don't remember how it started, I think maybe I asked her something, since one of the things I'm doing these days is learning how to talk to random people. I'm more of a closer, not much of an opener, so I'm practicing. At the break her friends went to get water, so she and Blake and I talked for a while.

Blake was having a good time, as they say, and Leigha and I were pretty much drinking water and hanging out. We talked some facts like wherefrom, schools, tour plans. Blake had been to Bonnaroo last month, and Leigha had been for the past three years but not this year. I asked them what they liked about it. He said, "Good bands." Leigha? "I think the community, the feeling you get when you're there." Like how? "Well, like when you're walking by a campground and some people are cooking eggs and you say, 'Oh, that smells good!' and they say, 'We have extra, do you want some?' Stuff like that happened all the time." [Well, this is a lot better than talking about college.]

So I asked, "What do you think creates that sense of community? The world needs more of that, what can we do to create that, to bring that out in people?" She thought for a minute and said, "I think it has to do with being open, and being nice to people, and helping people along the way." I said, "So, if we can be open and vulnerable in more situations, just engage without preconceptions, then maybe it rubs off on other people or something?" She replied, "Well, at the least it's a couple more open and engaged people in the world, and that can't be all bad." At this point Blake suddenly blurted, "Man, you guys are deep! I am in no shape to talk about stuff like this." [No wonder guys get a bad rep.]

Leigha smiled. I winked at her, and thought, "Is this the state of competition for dates these days? Blake, dude, have something to talk about!" We chit-chatted to include him. Turns out Leigha has a master's in literature and the environment, a program she heard about when she was teaching English in China. I asked her if I could take her picture. She wasn't comfortable with that. She asked me where I lived, and why I liked it there. She asked Blake what he did for work. Turns out he's a mortgage broker in the sub-prime sector – "We help people save their homes, even if they have bad credit; We loan them the money ourselves for 7% a year for two years, then it converts into a regular loan; I mean, yeah, at that point it's 13%, so I guess that's why they call us the predatory mortgage market, but I can sleep at night, at least these people have their houses, they wouldn't otherwise."

Okay. Time to go get some water. Handshakes all around. Good eye contact.

Placed a bet with myself: When I return either Leigha is with her friends and Blake is gone, or Blake is there and she's gone. Zero probability of anything else happening. I walked up through the lawn, and it had filled in quite a bit:

Bought four waters, two liters to drink and two 16 oz to give away. Went to the men's room. Wandered around the vending and food options. Considered the beer tent and skipped it. Took some crowd pictures, but that seemed to generate slightly bad vibes. Makes sense. Headed back inside. Blake was there alone, natch. I won the bet. Gave him a water. "Wow, thanks!" "Just building community. Leigha split?" "She said she'll be back."

When Phil came out, I was surprised to see Joan Osbourne with them. She had played with The Dead, but never with Phil & Friends. I didn't know she was on the tour. When Chris and I saw this band in December, I remember thinking it was early in the tour, and they would get a lot better. Now it's three tours later, and it's the lineup we saw in Boston, plus Joan on vocals, and Greg Osby on sax. They were a lot more together, and Joan adds an important vocal component for this band.

The show had something of a slow entrainment for me. Good Times, okay soundcheck opener. Sittin' on Top of the World did get a nice groove going with some jazzy fiddle and horn jams. I usually dig Direwolf, but this was kind of poppy. It didn't have any kind of deep or thick or fur-lined groove happening. Then Joan sang Peaceful Valley, a Ryan Adams tune. Slow and sweet, southern bluegrass country. Maybe too slow that early in the set.

Then I'm not sure what happened, maybe a bus came by and I got on, that's when it all began. Suddenly we were in Fennario, and everyone—band, audients, Audience—was locked in. Bang, in a heartbeat. Best Peggy-O ever, no doubt about it. So beautiful. Then a slow solid stomping Althea. Can't talk to you without talking to me, We're guilty of the same old thing. Thinking a lot about less and less, And forgetting the love we bring.Very deliberate and smokey. Magic is possible when you take the time to rehearse. Some of the sax solos and improvisation sounded more like a baroque ensemble than a rock band.

I heard a lot of interesting tempo changes, perhaps micro-tempo changes, in Peggy-O and Althea. Subtle shifts in the pacing, slight changes in the exact placement of the one, stretching and compressing the elasticity of time. Very skilled and polished, I thought. But there's a guy on the Internet who seems to think they didn't have it together:

Everything was well performed, but the band had a tough time getting on the same page during Peggy-O, which was to bad condisering how well I heard them play it in February. Althea was pretty smoking to close the set and featured some great playing from all, even Osby. This was my first time seeing and hearing this band with Osby and I really have to say that he did not add to much. He sounded like he was struggling at times and like he is trying to figured what key the songs are in for the entire performance of the tune. I really wasn't impressed with him at all. But in his defense he is still getting to know the material and he hasn't spent much time with the band, and I'm sure it will get better as it goes along.

Huh? Greg Osby is a master player. What he was playing during those two songs probably went over the heads of most of the audience. It's more likely our critic was listening to his expectations and not open to the brand-new, fresh, never-before-heard music in the room. Greg Osby trying to figure out the key? Get a grip.

Thus ended the hour-long first set. Seemed super-short, since I only connected deeply with the last two songs. I stayed in place for the break. I wore my new favorite t-shirt and stood up and showed it off whenever I could.

When I first saw someone wearing this shirt at Dairy Day I laughed out loud. The day before I'd seen a "got democracy?" t-shirt on a friend and this was even better. More direct. Cutting. But then I realized the back of the shirt shows the seven cooperative principles and it's a co-op movement t-shirt! Happy happy joy joy!

A 60-something usher glanced at the shirt and as he checked my ticket said quietly, to himself, "Ok, got principles, that's a good one." Smiled and pointed down the aisle and handed me my ticket. Mostly the hippies laugh and the crew-cuts look away. Meme injection project continues apace.

One thing I don't like about the new and improved well-managed SPAC are video ads played during intermission. Granted, they're silent, so it's not too intrusive, but you can't really escape the video screens. The variety was amazing. Here's a sampling, so you can avoid these merchants that leech off the good vibes of counter-culture rock 'n roll: Jeep, Hinekin, GE, State Farm, Marriott ("be treated like a star"), fye, Fetzer wine, Appleby's, Verizon, livenation.com, Rockstar Energy Drink, Best Buy, Dunkin' Doughnuts ("iced coffee in nine flavors"). Etc. You'll notice they get no link love from Notio.

Okay, second set opened with New Speedway Boogie. It's unlikely I will ever forget Joan's inflection delivering One step done and another begun, in I wonder how many miles? Spent a little time on the mountain, Spent a little time on the hill, Things went down we don't understand, but I think in time we will.

Three rows in front of me there's a woman in her late-20s or early-30s. She's wearing an erotic asian art t-shirt. Not exactly like the art linked (I didn't yet find a copy online) but similar. A guy could never wear this shirt. And, doesn't she get hit on constantly wearing that? Maybe it's a way to separate the men from the boys, so to speak. It's certainly a conversation starter, and possibly an immediate ender too, all rolled into one. Maybe it intimidates people so they don't approach her?

Nice lengthy and considered jam going into He's Gone. Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile.

Into Uncle John's Band. It's a Buck Dancer's Choice, my friend, better take my advice. You know all the rules by now, and the fire from the ice.

They're teasing Truckin' during every jam between songs, so I wonder if it will be the set-closer payoff. The show is error-free at the level of the song. They're remembering the lyrics or using the monitors—and not a decade too soon. There may be a musical faux pax here and there, but I don't hear anything obvious and it's probably at a level that most won't notice. I don't think anyone missed a lyric all night, nearly unheard-of in the land of the Dead.

Joan leaves the stage, and Phil and Greg lead a free jam which issues a transfer to Unbroken Chain. I love this song, and they seem to play it a lot when I'm in attendance, and I like that. November and more as I wait for the score, They're telling me forgiveness is the key to every door. A slow winter day, a night like forever, Sink like a stone, float like a feather.

We forgive Phil for singing because he wrote the song and it's so good. His voice has been shot for years, and he's kind enough to hire other singers for most of the tours, but there are a few songs he still sings. Tonight was very strong, with some sort of Eleven-ish jam in the middle. Totally sick, as my college buddy Bug would say. Then back into Chain. Amazing.

Long pause. Band resets. Joan returns. We wait quietly. Count off, click click click pause. Morning Dew. Please god let Joan sing it. Yes. Thank you. Beautiful. Calm. Strong. Respect.

Short pause. Trey walks out and plugs in. Quiet free jam to start. Trey in the lead. The band is trancing, hypnotic, looking nowhere, listening everywhere. Trey might already be drooling. Thought it was going to be Tomorrow Never Knows because of Joan's throaty vocalizations during the intro. She sounded like a sax, then Greg came in to carry it on. Suddenly:

Into The Wheel. You can't go back, and you can't stand still. If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will. Unlike any previous Wheel ever. Trey and Phil are in the lead; the band is supporting Trey. Harmonic, soaring, waves crashing, round and round, then back to the song. Exit jam sounds like TNK again. Smokin'.

Into Not Fade Away. Rock out closer. During the jams Trey is playing hard and Joan is standing in front of him dancing with him, smiling. I'm laughing; they're having a great time. She's got her back to most of the audience, he's an audience of one. She spins around to sing her verse and then turns back to him. Joan and Trey trade places, Joan dances with Greg while Trey jams across Phil with Larry. Rock 'n roll, baby. At the peak Joan is vocalizing at the top of her game, totally putting out for that song. While the band brings it home to land she steps back and looks left, looks right, and smiles with satisfaction. Her boys done good.

Rap for organ donors, then Casey Jones. House lights. I sit for a while and listen to the crowd. Happiness. I stand near the aisle for a while and show off the t-shirt. One nice thing about staying inside for a bit is the interior view glowing gently like a spaceship.

Leigha never came back. Next time I'll invite her to come with for water, not leave her with the sub-prime mortgage broker.

Rather than sit in traffic I walk around the park for a while. Men's room. Wash up in the cold water. Some trash pickup. Drink some more water. Take in the post-show view. Walk on the grass under the tress to the car. Drive to the hotel. Eat some peanuts. Look at the photos. Twelve hours earlier I was packing, now it's over.

_{Thanks to Rob Clarke, who recorded, mastered, and uploaded the show before I even got home to download it. You can also buy an official soundboard recording.}

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Stadium Arcadium

July 3, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

The new double-album by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stadium Arcadium, really rocks. People were raving about it, and I liked the single I heard on the radio (Dani California) , so I splurged and bought an actual physical CD – made of atoms no less. None of them ephemeral DRM encrypted bits for the Peppers!

This is a great summer rock and roll album filled with screaming guitar, power chords, great harmonies, narrative lyrics, and danceable dance rhythms. It's outrageous how much fun you can hear in the music. They are just rockin' out the whole hour and twenty-two minutes.

After four listens I notice there are half a dozen styles on the work. Rock, disco, rap, hip-hop, funk, ballad. Maybe more. Very diverse, held together by the drive. A brief review of the lyrics indicates that at least some of the songs are related to a major breakdown of some sort. I've never listened to the Chili Peppers before, so I don't know the history. Very well-composed music though. Great piece of work.

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Concert Etiquette

July 3, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | Travel

Overheard at SPAC:

Why do you carry a lighter to rock concerts? You don't smoke.

—Sometimes people ask for a light.

But smokey rooms suck. Why would you help smokers by offering them a light?

—Because if, at a rock concert, someone asks for a lighter, the chances are good that you'll have the option of getting a toke on a joint, should you so desire one at that particular moment in time.

But don't people smoke cigarettes at concerts? You don't want a toke on a Winston. Don't the chimneys ask for a light more often?

—Well, that happens sometimes, but not that much.

That doesn't make any sense. A lot more people smoke cigarettes than smoke pot.

—Yeah, but, cigarette smokers are addicts. They usually have their kit prepared to keep the juices flowing. Pot smokers are, by definition, stoners. And stoners usually forget stuff like lighters back in the van.

That's kind of funny you're gaming them like that.

—No gaming here. It's all about catalyzing the win-win.

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Where's the....

June 30, 2006 | Life

Went to iron a shirt for tonight's event. It turns out I don't own an iron and ironing board anymore. Put it on the list. I bet there's a bunch of stuff like that.

Update: Drove over there and the parking lot was surprisingly empty. Hadn't really considered the situation where I'd be one of three attendees, I was expecting more of a crowd. Parked in back and walked around to the front. Front door was locked. Looked up at the sign to make sure I was at the right building. Then David walked over, talking on the phone, and said, "Hold on—Hi!" And I said, "Cultus Arborum thing tonight?" And he replied, "That was a couple of nights ago. Wednesday. Do you want to sign our guestbook?" Sure, that's good, at least the trip wasn't totally wasted. Earth to Notio: Check out the date, dude. Don't guess. Notio spaceshot to promoters: Put the day as well as the date ("Wednesday, June 28, 2006") to assist calendar-challenged people like me.

Turns out I didn't need an iron after all.

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Narrative Selection Bias™

June 29, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society | Site Maintenance

Doug and I had an interesting exchange in the comments that's worth bringing to the front page.

I pulled a quote from a blog post and out of context the quote had a different meaning. A reader could get the wrong idea. So this is a formal disclosure statement that Notio is extremely biased. I am citing material that is interesting to me, possibly for reasons unknown, possibly unknown even to me. It's an interpretation, not an "objective" perspective. Essentially, you can't trust anything you read here.

Just thought I'd mention it.

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Choices Have Consequences

June 21, 2006 | Life

The title says it all. Was just thinking that every choice we make means some things are more likely to happen, and some things are less likely to happen. Yes, I have embedded a probabilistic worldview into that statement, but the important point is that we have choices to make and those choices have consequences both good and bad. And sometimes you don't know which way it will go, or even, which is which.

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[Local] Dairy Day

June 16, 2006 | Cooperatives | Life

Saturday is Dairy Day at the Co-op. Free food samples, hayrides, music, and big news this year: sunshine! I'll be there around lunch for an hour or two with my board member badge on. It's a great community event.

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From the Mouths of Babes

June 16, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

What do 1st and 2nd grade students wish for? Mostly the same things you and I do. Excerpt:

• I wish thar was mor peas in the world
• I wish pepol wloud be treted farly
• I wish evey body could go to scool
• I wish to have more fun
• I wish everybody had food

Will make you laugh and possibly cry for the honesty.

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Love, Taste, and Sublime Dignity

June 11, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

Grateful Dead keyboard player Vince Welnick died June 2.

John Perry Barlow:

When Jerry Garcia died, Vince was alone among us in his wretched sense of utter loss. He attempted suicide about six months later, thereby 86ing himself from any further creative interaction with what was left of the Grateful Dead. As a culture, we were never big on emotional vulnerability. Like a caribou herd, we had learned, over a long period of time, to leave our cripples behind on the tundra rather than risk the entire local genome. That's life, Dude. Devil take the hindmost.

It's likely that Vince, while not exactly disliked, was the fans' least-favorite of all the GD keyboard players. In his defense, he was stepping up just as Jerry was stepping down, and it's a rare show from those years that's worth listening to aside from archival investigation. But those few are hot. I suppose all this is just inside baseball, or the family's dirty laundry. But maybe it's important to know that for all the joy and light in the front of the hall, backstage was complicated and dark. Many in the audience thought they wanted to get backstage, but having been there once or twice, trust me, it's not what you want. What you want are the results, the output, the benefits, the feelings, the buzz, the tribe, the cosmos—but no one need visit the sausage factory. Maybe backstage was once expansive and puckish, but after the shady characters arrived around '77 or '78, you'd best keep your distance. Garcia told the assembly of concerned family and friends "I see you got your list out, say your piece and get out," and it was then a long slow decline, all the sadder since we watched it unfold before us, in slow motion over 15 years. [c.f. Boreal.]

Robert Hunter:

In the aftershock of the tragic death of Vince, an amiable man and a fine musician, the Grateful Dead is once more a target of public disdain, fueled by passion and indignation. Its ethics and humanity are being publicly questioned on a deeply troubling level. Sic transit gloria mundi. Do I know the score? To a degree. But I'm not concerned here with either justifying or condemning the attitudes which make a group of musicians, who must seal themselves together in that intimate time capsule called a tour, make the decisions they do concerning who they want to travel with and why. It's not necessarily democratic and it's not always pretty. They choose what they choose for reasons as much personal as professional.

But what if what you read is only half true? What if events tally but the interpretation placed on them is wrong? What if events have justifying precedents and antecedents of which you are entirely unaware? Or, if aware, interpret by a code of valuation foreign to the situation of participants? Are you willing to throw over something you truly prize on the basis of hearsay? Listen - I know these people. They're bastards. Yet I find myself here trying to interject a little perspective into their public scorching because they're my bastards. They played the songs I helped write with love, taste and sublime dignity. You know what I'm saying because you heard it too.

A shelf of books could be written and still only lightly perturb the surface of who the Grateful Dead were, are, and why. A book must have a point of view and I submit there is none extant sufficiently wide and informed to do more than tease curiosity. That possibility probably passed with Ramrod. Think of something approaching your own life's complexity of nuance and multiply it by the number of characters in our scene, past and present, and put the spotlight of the world on it - see what I mean? There is an official Grateful Dead story, chronological highlights which are largely, and rightly, Garcia oriented, but no possibility of a comprehensive estimation. It wasn't a story, it was life.

I may personally believe the only answer is to continue creating one's art while being careful not to live beyond one's means, physically or psychically. Sure. But that's not what people want to know. What they want to know is: who's to blame? Not the music. If the music were to blame they wouldn't be asking the question in the first place. Play the recordings. I put as many clues there as I could. In a way, they are one long letter to the Grateful Dead. The tensions involved created art. I think that art lives. Go there for answers.

The rest of our lives will offer a parade of heros passing. Dylan, Phil, Bobby, Billy, Mick, Keith, Carlos, et al. God rest ye merry gentlemen. Please don't be sad, if it was a straight mind you had, we wouldn't have known you all these years.

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Fire Dance With Me

June 11, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Cooperatives | Life | Travel

The CCMA party was held at The Compound in Atlanta. Weird place. Had fun. The tent had fans, but acted like a greenhouse, so it was pretty hot in there. The indoor area had A/C, but they left the doors open so it wasn't that cool. Really loud; hard to talk. Kind of a weird smell in there. Good dance band. There are apparently secret rooms that some people saw before the lockdown that had large beds and huge monster showers with five showerheads and stuff.

Reminds me of the Caravan of Dreams in Fort Worth, TX which had some odd rumors and secrets surrounding it for years—there were tales of rites and rituals and various Magik. Marla and I saw a memorable Horace Silver performance there in 1987. After the waiter stopped by a few times and we hadn't ordered anything, I called him over, put a $20 bill on the tray, and said, "We're not drinking anything but water tonight, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get a tip." He was very happy at this, and offered to move us to a more private table in a darker spot with a better view. We took it, and he was able to put a higher-profile couple in the prime real estate we had been holding down.

Anyway, back here in 2006, the highlight at the CCMA party was a fire dance.

There were two performers, and they had several sequences. It was pretty fun, and they got a big response. I uploaded eight photos. Four of the photos are at standard shutter speed, and the other four are at eight-second exposures. And here is a low-res five-minute movie of one of their sequences.

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The Difference Between Heaven and Hell

June 9, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Cooperatives | Life | People & Society

I'm at the Consumer Cooperative Management Association conference in Atlanta. This morning Peter Couchman from the Midcounties Co-operative in England (near Oxford) presented a (probably well-known) parable during his keynote address. I paraphrase:

There once was a highly developed Buddhist guru who had the ability to transport himself to any place in the universe. He decided to investigate Hell. Upon arrival he found a lush green valley with perfect moderate temperatures, beautiful flowers, clear sparkling water, and snow-covered mountains. In the middle of the valley there was a large table with every known delicious food available. But the people at the table were moaning and screaming in agony. All they had to eat with were six-foot chopsticks, and no matter how hard they tried, no matter what technique they used, they couldn't get the food into their mouths and it was driving them insane.

The guru decided to visit Heaven. When he arrived he found a scene much like the first. A beautiful valley, green and lush, with flowers, trees, and plants of all varieties. In addition, there was a similar table piled high with fantastic food from all over the world. The people gathered at the table were happy and joyful, laughing and talking. They had the same six-foot chopsticks to eat with, but instead of trying to feed themselves, they used the chopsticks to feed each other.

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Never a Still Moment

June 8, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society | Travel

To give you a flavor of the multi-media nature of modern baseball, here is a short video clip of the national anthem from the game last night.

Notice the thin horizontal video screens over the third-base line (and presumably over the first-base line where we were sitting). The effect of these was to have motion in your peripheral vision at all times. This is where the hatchet icons marched, like the hammers in Pink Floyd's The Wall and where all manner of on-going stimulation appeared.

The video was shot with my still camera, and compressed by YouTube, so the quality is not up to reference standards, but I think you get the idea.

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Home of the Braves

June 8, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society | Travel

Thanks to my friends at CDS, I was able to enjoy The National Pastime tonight: The Atlanta Braves vs. the Washington Nationals at Turner Stadium in Atlanta. I uploaded 15 photos to Flickr.

There's so much to say, and it's so late to say it. Even though we were outdoors, watching a live event, it was unbelievably multi-media. The screen was huge and bright. In the photos, you can see the sun shining on the field, and it's brighter than the screen in my living room.There are cheerleaders now in baseball—someone said, "You gotta stick with the National League, they're more misogynist." Every moment of the game is branded—the Holiday Inn Instant Replay, the NAPA Cap Shuffle, fireworks coming out of a Coke bottle. I can't even begin to name them all. There were all sorts of behavioral conditioning—short snippets of songs that had specific audience responses, an electronic repeating tomohawk logo that ran around the horizontal screens in a chopping motion that cued the audience to make a chopping motion with their arms, etc.

It was a fun time, especially going with a dozen people, some of who were big baseball fans, and some of whom hadn't been in 10 or 20 or 40 years. The game itself was fairly pedestrian, with hardly any hits, but it had its moments of excitement and tension. It was faster-moving than I remember it, and I missed a couple of big plays just because I was exploring camera settings for a moment. The irony level was set to max pretty much as soon as we walked in the place (see the photo of the booth selling "The future of Ice Creme" for instance) and it was so American you couldn't believe it. I'd go again, especially with a better camera and an attitude to drink Budweiser in plastic bottles washing down a big honking hotdog and a $6 bag of peanuts. Who knows, I might even go for some cotton candy and a Sno Cone for desert.

[Update: Kottke & Megnut and friends attended the Yankees/Red Sox game at the same time.]

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Walking in Atlanta

June 7, 2006 | Life | Travel

Flight from Boston landed early. Forgot to make reservations for the hotel shuttle, so rather than take a taxi I headed for the Marta subway. Helpful employee guided me to the stop I wanted, even calling a secret cell phone number to verify my destination and best stop.

Arrived at the stop and asked another employee which direction to head. "Left; three blocks...." Okay, 10:00 PM, downtown – Midtown N3 stop, for you locals – dragging my roller suitcase and oversized computer bag. Past the construction zone, past a monster gas station convenience store, over 8 lanes of highway, down a long hill, past student apartments, into a neighborhood, past the football stadium. Have I walked three blocks yet? At least I'm near Georgia Tech, which is supposedly my destination.

At around 10:25 I decided that I had walked way more than three blocks, and I hadn't seen anything close to a hotel and conference center. I took a left and headed into the campus. Eventually I decided I had no idea where I was, it was only getting later, and I was only looking more like a target. So I called the hotel. "Uh, I walked down Tenth Street for a while, and now I'm on Atlantic. How do I get to you?" First words: "Oh, wow."

Well, it turned out to be back on the other side of the highway. It was about "three blocks" from the Marta stop, but I wanted to take a left after two of them. Oh, okay. So he gave me directions from where I am to where I'm going, and I hike it over there. Remember that long downhill? It's just as long two blocks west. And it feels a little steeper going up, though maybe that's just my suitcase arm talking. Past the baseball stadium, over the highway again. Down a very nice side street and bingo, hotel appears. Relief. I walked about 45 minutes dragging about 75 pounds behind me. Bonus adrenaline boost from being lost in the city. Considered going to the bar and getting a strong drink, but decided to blog this and head for bed instead.

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The Most Thankless Job in Tech Support

June 5, 2006 | Life | Technology | Travel

Tried to use the web without paying the $10 extortion tonight. No go; way slow. So I went to the upgrade screen and authorized the billing. But nothing changed—still super-super-slow, as billg would say.

So I called the tech support line, cringing all the way. Can you imagine a worse job in tech support than fielding calls from semi- to fully-clueless people paying $250+ per night at random hotels, trying to get their hopeless Windows laptops onto the web? People in airports and hotel lobbies regularly ask me, "Can you help me get the wireless working?" And I say, "Windows? Sorry, I use Mac, no idea. Would help if I could." The support guy was not totally clueless, but he was basically working from screenshots, and I'm running down ping speeds (1,500 ms!) and packet loss (35%) and MAC addresses, and sub-netted IP addresses, and he's not sure what to do with it all. The symptom presented as if the hotel network had cached my MAC address and was routing it through the old connection and slow equipment. The ideal "hit it with a hammer" fix would be to clear the router cache located somewhere in the bowels of the hotel. Good luck with that, Notio!

What worked was to plug in an ethernet cable, fooling the laptop into thinking the network port had changed, then switching back to wireless, which for whatever reason got things working again. At least it's not as bad as Minneapolis in 2004, when Internet service was provided by housekeeping. OMFG, that was scary, but worked out okay in the end.

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Royal Sonesta Boston

June 4, 2006 | Life | Travel

Unlike the Hotel Marlowe across the street, the Royal Sonesta is not a particularly engaging hotel. It's essentially generic, if upscale. Yes, I'm sitting in an Aeron chair, but it's one of the cheap models that is only somewhat adjustable. And, as usual, working at a desk that is too high for typing. Confidential to hotel decorators: The age of lovingly writing postcards by hand is over. Give me something that is typing height for email and blogging, especially if you're going to put a $1,000 chair in front of it.

Anyway, all I really want to do in this post is make two complaints:

1. $25 a day for parking. Why? "Real estate is too expensive to offer free parking." Really? The Hampton Inn, four blocks away, at half the price, offers free parking. The Sonesta should just say, "Because we can," or "Because most people staying here are on expense accounts and it doesn't matter to them."
2. $10 a day for high-speed Internet. They have free wi-fi, but it's slow as hell ("good for email and surfing") , and so they upsell the premium service. How's that for price discrimination—offer a free crappy product to make me feel better about buying the overpriced product you've always offered. BTW, the Hampton Inn also has free high-speed Internet.

So why am I here and not at the Hampton? My friend Stephen told me about the Sonesta's "individual traveller" rooms, which are small, and next to the elevator, and about half-price. In-season that puts it at $139 (+$25 +$10 +tax). I wanted to check it out, because in the off-season it's only $99. These mini-rooms, which are plenty big enough for a few nights at a time, are more comfortable for about the same price as the Hampton. But with the $35/day additional fees, it's more expensive. The Hampton is a low-budget generic hotel, but somehow they get points for not being pretentious about it. The Sonesta is pricing-high and delivering-middle. I guess I prefer the price-low / deliver-low model better. Or better, the price-high / deliver-high model of the Marlowe, but I can't regularly afford that option....

Bonus link: If you're going to write a post card, make one for PostSecret. [via tip from Ashley]

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Dashes Are Not Just for Running and Salt

May 31, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

My punctuation questions provoked good comments, including a grammar correction from Meg (which created the opportunity for a [third {level of} parenthetical] comment) and two professional citations from Hannah:

Per Strunk and White, third edition, Elementary Rules of Usage #8: Use a dash to set off an abrupt break or interruption, and to announce a long appositive or summary.

A dash is a mark of separation stronger than a comma, less formal than a colon, and more relaxed than parentheses. . . . Use a dash only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate.

I complained that the S&W doesn't seem to distinguish between varieties of dashes, and Hannah had to invoke authority:

You're just begging for me to drag out Chicago, aren't you? Seriously, man, dashes, en-, em-, or otherwise, have specific uses. En-dashes mostly replace the word "to" in a span of numbers or hyphen "in a compund adjective when one of its elements is an open compound . . ." (see CMS 15, 6.83-6.86). Em-dashes are used as S&W describe (see also CMS 15 6.87-94). Of course, when communicating with typesetters, proofreaders specify the type of dash required.

My only quibble now is wondering if "typesetter" is still the correct term, or should it be "typographer?" In either case, I guess rules are rules, which drives improvisers like me crazy. But if George Bush can be The Decider, then I guess the Chicago Manual of Style can be The Reference. And I can be Back To Work! Or at least, Back To Work.

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Nature Abhors a Vacuum

May 31, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | People & Society

Fast Company on changing your behavior:

If you want to change something in your life, it's common to try to stop the behaviors you don't like. While this certainly seems logical, it seldom works. The reason is simple - it unintentionally creates a vacuum where the old behaviors used to be. And since nature hates a vacuum it will fill it with anything it can find - usually the very behaviors you're trying to stop since they're so familiar. Instead of stopping certain behaviors, try focusing on what you want to create - and the new behaviors you need to get there. Eventually, with practice, new behaviors will develop enough muscle to naturally replace the old ones.

Good advice.

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What Up That?—Yo.

May 29, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

My brother-in-law said this yesterday at the Circle-Y barbecue. It made me laugh. The phrase has just enough words to convey something, yet not enough of them to resolve the ambiguity. Add the street slang (he's a law officer) coming from a white boy (though, from New Jersey) and somehow it just stuck with me.

What up that?—Yo.

The punctuation is important and I'm not sure I've got it exactly right. The first three words (What up that?) need to convey disbelief, the observational shock of the instigating incident. The italics emphasize the implausibility of the situation — its un-heard-of nature or characteristics. It is posed as a question, indicating an attempt to grasp the surprising or unfamiliar.

But the final word (Yo.) quietly expresses a slow, sad, shake of the head; a smirking "I knew it would turn out this way," and a superior arch in the eyebrows. This might be followed by a short sigh, with a second shake of the head, perhaps closing the eyes briefly, as if to mourn the dumb-ass under observation. The closing period carries the finality of judgement. Appeals are heard at the discretion of the speaker.

Connecting the two utterances with an em-dash (as above) attempts to unify contradictory – if not schizophrenic – ideas into a single sentence. The two phrases are connected, in that one prevents the other, and vise versa; but also, simultaneously, one requires the other to exist. In this view, the connecting punctuation (which probably has a technical name from grammar class [Notio: "Are there rules for this kind of stuff?" Meg: "No, you had to have been paying attention in elementary school." {grammar updated based on a comment; which also gave me the chance to use a third level of parentheses}]) – the connecting punctuation carries the flow of the whole expression.

Bringhurst says, "Use spaced en dashes – rather than em dashes or hyphens – to set off phrases." [Aside: the definition brilliantly models the correct behavior.] "What up that?—Yo." has two phrases, but that doesn't quite describe the phenomenology upon hearing them. Bringhurst provides a second clue: "Use the em dash to introduce speakers in narrative dialogue." Ah, perfect! There are two phrases, so we should separate them with an en dash surrounded by a normal word space. But the phrases are contradictory – as if they were spoken by two different people – therefore we should use a closed em dash—like this.

Ideally we'd follow the em dash with a thin space (M/5) but we're writing with web fonts; we don't get M/5 thin spaces this decade.

So that's one take on it. How else might you punctuate this construction?

Update: The jury of our commenters has specified the correct punctuation as: "What up that? Yo." It's settled. If you ever need to write that phrase, that's how you do it.

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[ANN] [AD] Notio Guestroom

May 29, 2006 | Life

The Notio Guestroom is now open for reservations. Located in north-central New England, two hours north of Boston, five hours north of NYC, three hours south of Montreal. Private setting on a dirt road. 30 minutes from Hanover and the quaint home of Dartmouth College, known as the heart of liberalism in NH.

On-site or nearby: Biking, hiking, walking, water sports, skiing, theater, dance, live music, movies, art. Additional attractions: Solitude, trees, clean air, clear water, birds, insects, stars at night, diverse forest wildlife.

Accommodations: Private room with door and east-facing windows. Share single bath with owner. You are welcome to use the Guestroom as a home base for regional travel. My summer is filled with work, so I'd enjoy living vicariously by hearing your travel stories every few days.

Network: Grounds bathed in wifi connected to Adelphia cable Internet. About 450KB/sec down from iTunes. Also: Lunches, drinks, suppers, etc with cool artists, massage therapists, energy workers, pagans, Ivy Leaguer's, environmentalists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and change agents.

Cost: First three nights free. After that you have to spend an hour a day helping chip away at house projects like clearing small brush, deck repair, stone wall rebuilding, basement reorg, or interior remodeling. If you dislike the "three-free, then one-hour per day" pricing model, you may elect to pay $2,500 per day for our concierge-class service. Includes door-to-door airport shuttle, private, small-group, or "on-your-own" activities and tours, and all meals served on-site. _{(You will be invoiced for off-site meals and event fees.)} Providing the absolute highest level of service, the hospitality of our concierge-class offering is unmatched by any traditional host in New England.

Arrangements: Leave a comment to kick off an email conversation!

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Pragmatic Technology Strategy

May 23, 2006 | Cooperatives | Life | Software | Technology

Yesterday Mark and I drove down to Andover MA to meet with Walden. We three are running a (pro-bono) session for a Coop consulting group next month on technology strategy. Because Kate wasn't feeling well, we went to Panera for three hours. The place was hoppin' with businesspeople!

Above you see Walden coaching Mark on the use of an important strategic technology tool – the pen and paper. They're really amazing! You can write in any light, without any battery power, on both sides of the device. You're not restricted to "documents" or linear formatting. You can create an unlimited number of pages no matter how little memory you have. There are a whole raft of accessories to collect, sort, organize, and store your notes – and they're all cheap! File folders cost a nickel or something, nothing like the cost of a hard drive upgrade. And you can use pen and paper on any surface, even including a computer tablet!

If you look closely, you can see that Walden is carrying this toolset in his front pocket! Just try doing that with your fancy new MacBook.

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The Principles Underlying Our System Are Actually Better

May 20, 2006 | Governance | Life | People & Society

This post at TPM sums up my feelings on the US national security situation exactly:

[...] is just this dogmatic post-9/11 insistence on acting as if human history began suddenly in 1997 or something. The United States was able to face down such threats as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany without indefinite detentions, widespread use of torture as an interrogative technique, or all-pervasive surveillance. But a smallish group of terrorists who can't even surface publicly abroad for fear they'll be swiftly killed by the mightiest military on earth? Time to break out the document shredder and do away with that pesky constitution.

Last, there's the unargued assumption that civil rights and the rule of law are some kind of near-intolerable impediment to national security. But if you look around the world over the past hundred years or so, I think you'll see that the record of democracy is pretty strong. You don't see authoritarian regimes using their superior ability to operate in secret and conduct surveillance to run roughshod over more fastidious countries. You see liberalism prospering -- both in the sense that the core liberal countries have grown richer-and-richer and in the sense that liberal democracy has consistently spread out from its original homeland since people like it better. You see governments that can operate in total secrecy falling prey to crippling corruption. You see powers of surveillance used not to defend countries from external threats, but to defend rulers from domestic political opponents.

The U.S.S.R., after all, lost the Cold War, not because we beat them in a race to the bottom to improve national security by gutting the principles of our system, but because the principles underlying our system were actually better than the alternative. If you don't have some faith the American way of life is capable of coping with actual challenges, then what's the point in defending it?

I hope enough people are awake at the polls in November, and the flawed voting machines aren't actually rigged.

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One Possible Explanation for Obesity

May 18, 2006 | Life | Nature & Environment | People & Society

I woke up this morning wondering why human muscle mass is such an attractive feature in our culture today. That is, why are fit people with defined muscles "more attractive" than couch potatoes.

My mind leaped to the idea that this taps into a primitive part of our brain that says, "If times get tough, and we have to resort to cannibalism, you want to have the right friends." Uh, okay mind, that's interesting. Then via inversion I speculated that perhaps the rise of obesity in America can be attributed to a deep-rooted fear of cannibalism. After all, who would want to eat the lumpy gristle that constitutes the body of most Americans? If it turns out that someday we're roaming the streets looking for a nice gluteus maximus to tuck into for supper a lot of people are going to be pretty safely off limits. Similarly, perhaps the popularity of garlic in blue-state cuisine is an attempt to minimize the off-chance danger of vampires.

I wonder if all this very interesting morning thought has to do with the proposals I have to write today, and the lawyer's cliché that "you eat what you kill." In any case, Good Morning!

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I Feel Safer Now

May 17, 2006 | Life | People & Society

A couple of monster military jets just flew over the house. Those puppies are loud and fast. By the time you get to the window they're already cruising down the valley disappearing out of sight. Boys with toys. Practicing for the Big Day. Probably fun to do, in that all-powerful dominant I Am God way.

Also, it's cool that China is financing all this fun. Interesting to watch Eastern countries with multi-hundred-year strategic plans toy with Western "super-powers" that can't see past the next Wal-Mart sale.

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Gratuitous Name-Dropping

May 16, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | Software | Technology

[Attention conservation notice: This post contains little of actual value.]

I spoke with Jeffrey Zeldman today. (I just have to say it again—I spoke with Jeffrey Zeldman today!)

A client is evaluating technical vendors. One of the prospects wrote a strong proposal, really kind of in-your-face for this small northern New England college, but she was from New York New York so I just took it as par for the course. I got to the last page and her first reference was Zeldman.

Well, that got my attention. Zeldman is One Of The Most Famous Web Designers In The World. He wrote a great book that introduced a lot of us to the very real possibility of standards-based web design. He operates Happy Cog Studios, a web design consultancy, and also runs a well-trafficed weekly newsletter for web developers called A List Apart.

Long story short, we're calling references. I emailed Zeldman and asked for ten minutes on the phone Tuesday morning or anytime Thursday. He wrote back and said sure. I called at the appointed time, and we chatted for about 15 minutes. He worked with The Potential Vendor (The Subject Under Discussion) on a project for the New York Public Library. He likes her. Thinks she's a good designer. Delivered the goods on the project. All that stuff she said was probably genuine, not bull.

So that was pretty much that. I thanked him and we hung up. I sent a thank you email and promised not to blog his phone number. Then I went to a six-hour project meeting and came home exhausted.

Mañana. Namaste, y'all.

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Lynne's 45th

May 14, 2006 | Life

Pictures from the party.

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I [Heart] My Clients

May 11, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

I have the best clients in the world. I just agreed to a large project for the summer that I had initially turned down (wherein I would participate but not lead) because the client wanted me to lead it so much they moved their deadline to fit my existing commitments. There are a lot of players involved, including other vendors in the collaboration, so this is a significant vote of confidence. Thank you.

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Body Echos

May 10, 2006 | Life

Saw the chiropractor this morning. I've been visiting about every two weeks for about 18 months. We've been working on some structural issues, from sacrum to mid-back to neck. Some were related to my broken ribs a few years ago (pre-blog, but worth posting) for which I never did any rehabilitation other than take the drugs and lay around for a couple of weeks zoning. But some other issues were tenacious, and were unresponsive to adjustment.

But today, even in the first body scan, she said, "Wow, all this seems to have cleared up," running her hand from my shoulders to my lower back. "A little bit still in the sacrum, and a little in the neck, but this is the best I've ever seen you." Furthering this was the ease with which my sacrum adjusted – it's never happened so easily. At the end she said the soft tissue had more elasticity, I was holding my alignment, and the patterns she had been seeing are essentially gone.

The body echos and reflects our reality in its own way.

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We Put On Gloves and Dug In

May 7, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life

Lynne and I went for a walk down the road today. Ran into neighbor S., who, like Lynne, is a massage therapist.

S: I went to a two-day cadaver workshop last month!

L: Oh, excellent!

S: There were about a dozen of us. There were four cadavers, two up, two down, cut wide open. We put on gloves and dug in. It took a few minutes to get used to it, and then it was okay.

L: That sounds awesome.

S: This one was on the sacrum and hips. The same guy is doing one next month on the neck.

L: Oh, that would be really cool.

I didn't faint, even though I have in the past hit the floor from far less explicit conversations than this.

[Note to CIA/NSA/DIA/DHS/TSA: A really good immobilization strategy for me is to describe details of the gore, or perhaps the neural sequences the pain of a specific injury would cause.] [Updated the post for clarity.]

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Opening Space for Ourselves and Each Other

May 5, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | People & Society

Chris Corrigan posts some (great) current thinking on the Four Practices of Open Space. I hope he and Michael actually do get a book written about their experiences. Spending three days with them was life-changing, in many subtle but persistent ways. One example: staying in touch with Ashley, and thus seeing posts like this.

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Glory Be

May 5, 2006 | Life | Nature & Environment

It is really springtime here in New England. Last night the bard owls, the peepers, the moon, the stars. Slept with the windows open. This morning, streaming sunshine, activity in the woods, birds galore, happy cat. I sat on the deck for over an hour entraining. It would be a fantastico day to take off for mental health, but unfortunately I already did that once this week – on an oppressive gray pouring rainy day no less – so my boss doesn't think it's a good idea today. Too bad though, it's glorious outdoors.

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Birdsong

May 4, 2006 | Life

All I know is something like a bird, within her sang

It was cloudy this morning, and that bummed me out because yesterday was so difficult (probably due to precognition). I had a prospect meeting, so I dressed in costume. After the dentist I got a bagel and went to the office. Lots of calls to return. More summer project prospects. A speed bump on the road to another. I went out for lunch and there was some blue poking through the gray. Two hours later I left for the meeting and the sun was shining bright and it was hot! Or at least hot for early May. Felt like summer. Should have worn a lighter costume.

Last year around this time Lynne came home from a couple of weeks at Kripalu, and a couple of days later Black Bear died. That was the end, really, if you want to carbon-date the situation. At least the end of the middle, and the beginning of the end. Not that we knew it at the time. Only in the rearview mirror do we reflect on where we've been. Doesn't help with where we're going though. For that you need something else, and it's hard to know what.

If you hear that same sweet song again, will you know why?

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A Downside of Email Marketing [#000001 in a series]

May 2, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

I just got an email from Netflix that began:

Netflix is proud to announce the opening of its new and improved Previously Viewed DVD store!

Good idea, I thought. Sell off the low-traffic movies. So I clicked over to check out the new section. Looks just like Netflix, you browse, you search, you rate. Nice.

Then I remembered I had wanted to downgrade my account because I don't watch as many movies in the summer. So I clicked over to my account, and went from the 2-at-a time plan to the 1-at-a-time plan, reducing my monthly expense by $2. Then I realized that the action I took – decreasing their revenue – was the direct result of their marketing spam email. Ha! Thanks for the reminder guys!

$2! Two!! Dollars!!! Two Dollars!!!! Twooooooooooo Dollllllllllaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrssss!!!! Puttin' one over The Man!!!!!!

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Listening To Yourself

May 2, 2006 | Life

Almost exactly a year ago, on April 21, 2005, a friend interviewed me for her oral history course. Yesterday I read the (nearly) complete transcript.

Oh, the agaony of reading and hearing your actual words transcribed. No, no, I meant....

Plus: Wow – who knew I could be so self-absorbed? Well, some people know, but they're kind enough to clue me in. But also, who knew how much of an under-current was present in my life. Almost like a river that flows under the foundation of your house, and you never know it's there until you excavate for some other reason and discover a whole new world, that's been there all along. Here's an excerpt:

Q: Do you remember visiting the Dimetrodon?

A: [For the listening audience, he’s smiling and dreaming in reverie!] Well, that was really interesting because it wasn’t architectural, really, it was just an amalgamation of buildings that had been built up because a bunch of hippies moved in and it started expanding as more people showed up, and had kids and stuff. There were ladders up to the bedrooms, and it was just a labyrinth of – it was unbelievable. On the other hand, the sort of, workmanship and its unity was really high on the inside. If you looked at pictures of that building, you’d say, “That’s totally fucked up.” But if you thought about it, or experienced walking through there, and probably even more-so living there, and you thought about the Pattern Language, and thought about, what it takes for architecture to support human interactions, human life, that building scored damn high. Far higher than any office building that’s ever been built, for instance. You know, far higher than the bulk of the houses that have ever been built. It was more like a hand-crafted interior that fit human life perfectly, because it sprang from human life, and it was built by people who were thinking about the impact of architecture on human life. You could tell they would have a lot of interesting conversations in those rooms, because there were a lot of places to have interesting conversations. And you could tell that – you know, you could just tell a lot. You could tell that it would be a fun place to have a kid’s birthday party. You could tell that wild sex had happened in that building in many different corners of that building. You know, you could just feel it. And it felt great. It felt like this building supports people. As opposed to the typical “buy a house” [scenario] where the people support the house. Another thousand bucks every time you turn around. Right? That’s the sort of homeownership drain where you’re now working to own the house in the guise of a retirement plan. Which is a very American idea, retirement, and even a modern idea. Why isn’t it somebody’s retirement plan to jump off the Quechee Gorge Bridge, frankly? Why is that viewed as non-rational? It sounds perfectly rational from my perspective.

Don't worry, this isn't a suicide note. Just an example of what I sound like in full riff mode. If I had any real guts I'd paste the whole 8,600 words into a blog post, but I don't think that's the right idea.

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Linkfest

May 1, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

Minor procrastination battle raging. Productive but difficult. Hence:

• Ever wonder what it's like to become an expert in the press? Ph.D. student Danah Boyd helps you out. "I talk to press every time i'm in my car, in the airport and walking around. I spend a good 15 hours a week addressing press right now. It's exhausting. I can only get back to a fraction of those who contact me and i've missed most TV and radio opportunities because i can't just jump when people ask me to jump."
• Kathy Sierra reports her experience with the Shangri-La Diet. "It claims to do just one thing--cause your body to want/need less food. Period. In other words, you know that feeling you have after you've eaten a huge dinner and you think, "I'll never eat another bite ever again" -- this so-called "diet" makes that feeling happen much earlier, after a much smaller meal."
• You should really check out the Stephen Colbert video. The one I pointed to yesterday was incomplete. Here's a full version. Salon comments: "Then he turned to the president of the United States, who sat tight-lipped just a few feet away. 'I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.'"

Okay, back to work!

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My Brother Esau

April 29, 2006 | Life

The more my brother looks like me, the less I understand

Spring: Transitions and decisions. Buds bursting and cool nights. Grass growing slowly now. New kinds of chores. Winter's over, summer's not here yet.

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Idea No. 22

April 28, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

Some of my loyal readers are already subscribed to the Signals vs. Noise feed; to you I apologize for the repetition. Just skip ahead to the last three paragraphs now. For everyone else:

Could you live like this?

A slide show (NY Times) of commisioned pieces from the collection of Ohio art collector Andy Stillpass, “one of America’s most radical and eclectic contemporary-art collectors.” This is what happens if you decide to spend your fortune by having artists run around your place rearranging books, filling drawers, painting the house, etc.

Rob Pruitt’s “Idea No. 22 ‘Fill a desk drawer with gravel and make a secret Zen garden’” (1999). [with photos]

Related: There is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World (photos/description) was a 2004 public installation at Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco. The store allowed its 20,000 books to be reclassified by color. McSweeney’s interviewed Chris Cobb, the idea man behind the event. [with links]

Sure, okay, rearrange the known world - bookstore or kitchen or bedroom.

Art.

That's a thought.

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The Shangri-La Diet

April 28, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Most interesting diet (fad?) in a long time. I first read about it at Aaron Swartz's weblog, and he posted a followup today.

This is where Roberts's big insight comes -- he argues that we use a Pavlovian sort of flavor-conditioning system to see whether food is scarce. If we eat foods frequently, we grow to like their taste, and thus our brain realizes we're eating them out of choice and raises the set point. On the other hand, if we eat new foods or foods with little taste, our brain assumes we're eating them because there's nothing else around and the set point is lowered.

And thus, the way to lower your set point: eat foods with no taste. Of course, they have to have calories as well, so Roberts's preferred suggestion is extra-light olive oil (ELOO), which is basically just oil with absolutely no taste. Your body gets the calories but it doesn't get the taste, so the set point goes lower every time you eat it.

Possibly just another diet fad, but easy to try, and unlike Atkins (for example) would appear to have no (potentially) dangerous side-effects. Most interesting to me, whether it's this diet or some other future "eliminate fat" method/technology, are the societal implications.

Among those results: lots of people you know getting thin. It's difficult to imagine what this is going to be like. The fat guy at the office won't be fat anymore. That cute-but-slightly-overweight girl you've had your eye on won't be slightly overweight anymore. Social dynamics will be seriously disrupted in a way that, to my knowledge, has no analog. People have gotten taller, and thinner, and prettier over time, to be sure, but never quite this fast.

Imagine if your weight were a choice, and everyone chose to be thin. Imagine if, in the span of two or three years, everyone were the exact weight they wanted to be. Eating whatever you want, no complaints about your weight, clothes fit more or less forever. It's nearly unfathomable. Some magazines would die. Whole companies profiting on diets would go bust. Exercise would be focused on mobility and endurance rather than weight loss.

If this happened, people might actually have the attention span to focus on government corruption and nuclear war in the Middle East and electronic voting machine rigging and possibly slow the decline of our republic and the destruction of our planet.

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From The Mailbag

April 25, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

The life of a consultant....

Notio: Were you out of town this weekend?

A: Well.... that's a pretty good story, actually. After waiting for a half hour to be picked up at the Asheville, NC airport for a Fri-Sun retreat I started to have anxiety about standing outside the wrong airport. Nope, that wasn't the problem. I was at the right place at the wrong time! Their retreat is NEXT weekend. Yikes. I was able to get home (call it a mutli-hundred, 13 hour, 6 airport lesson in attending to details). The sad part is that I'm booked next weekend and will now be helping [these] folks from a distance rather than in person. So, I was home this weekend, by surprise. Then was hit by allergies and overall exhaustion from a full day of nonstop travel.

Notio: That's highly bloggable.

Name withheld to protect the detail-challenged. Let this be a lesson to us all.

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Sometimes It's Better Not To Know

April 23, 2006 | Cooperatives | Life | People & Society

We had our Co-op annual meeting tonight. As board president, it means I'm more or less running the show. The face of the meeting at least. Luckily we have a great staff and I can pretty much show up half-an hour before and everything is all set up. But I have to have an agenda and something to say.

So I was preparing my remarks this afternoon, working from the list I made earlier in the week. I left the list on the dining room table during the week so I could think about it in passing while I went about my days. This works well for less complicated topics – if there's real work to do then I need to sit down for hours on end and actually focus and draft and revise and edit and re-structure and grind it out. But brief remarks I can write from the heart after some background processing and everything tends to work out okay.

The most important section of the meeting tonight, from my perspective, was presenting my friend Bruce Pacht with the Allan and Nan King Award for Community Service. Bruce is a family friend; I nominated him for the award, and as president I would present it. That writing went well, primarily because Bruce has a 30-year resume of community contributions and I could work quickly from his accomplishments.

Then I worked up some notes about the Board's decision earlier in the week to pay itself a stipend for service. This idea failed a board vote a few years ago, but this week we agreed on $200 per meeting attended for board members, and $300 per for the president. During the spirited discussion about voting ourselves a salary, the moral and ethical dilemmas therein, and the potential reaction of our member-owners, someone asked, "How will the members find out?" I said, "I'm going to stand up in front of them Sunday night and tell them, and ask for feedback. Then I'm going to write an article for the Co-op News." Someone suggested we ask the members first, perhaps at the meeting. This is reasonable from many possible angles, but I came down on the side of leadership – we should consider a broad range of material and as leaders decide what's best, then explain ourselves to whom we are accountable, and then just listen. Make adjustments as required. An important component of leadership is making decisions – constant polling and triangulation generates train wreaks like the Democratic party.

So anyway I wrote up those notes, and checked the clock. It was 2:45 PM. I had to leave at 4:30. I was done, save for another round of edits, so I took a break for lunch. When I came back upstairs to check the agenda, I realized I hadn't printed an agenda yet, because I was working from Tuesday's 3x5 notecard. So I printed one out. An then it jumped out at me: The first agenda item was President's Remarks – uh oh, I haven't written that yet!

Um, maybe we could start the meeting by skipping the first agenda item?

Maybe not. So on two sheets of yellow pad paper I wrote everything that came into my head in sound bite format. Not the exact words to say but the main idea and any connect-the-dots language necessary to the other ideas. Then I got in the car and drove to the church basement where we hold the meeting.

Once things got rolling there were perhaps 60 or 70 people there. We had a very nice meal for the $5 fee, and then saw a slide show of a fair-trade coffee trip to Mexico, where an employee and the manager of another nearby co-op had travelled to pick coffee beans as ambassadors of American co-ops. A fascinating personal report. As you might expect, the village is extremely poor. The exceptional houses are constructed of cinder block and are slightly larger than New England tool sheds. They hike two hours, on a steep slope to the top of the mountain, barefoot, to harvest the beans. I saw the photos. Men, women, children; all hands on deck. When they pick the beans they put them in sacks which, when full, weigh about 100 lbs. The sacks have a strap at the top that goes across your forehead, to leverage the weight of the bag slung onto your back – you need your arms free to balance and hold onto trees going down the trail. Barefoot. My chiropractor would be horrified. Not to mention my pedicurist. When the beans make it down the hill, they have to remove the outer skin with a hand-cranked machine, and then they dry the beans out on a cement pad, like a garage bay. The moisture content has to test correctly for the beans to be valuable for export. If it starts to rain, they have to scoop them all up and put them inside then spread them out again later. In the old days, they'd walk them to market, a couple of hours away, and then be forced to take whatever the gringo buyer paid that day. The world market price is set by the commodities markets in New York and Chicago, but the farmers didn't know this number. Sometimes they had to accept ten or twenty cents a pound for their product. And, guess what, the gringo brought his own scales....

I am a tea drinker, no coffee for me, but I wonder what the grim reality is for harvesting the green tea crops.

So now that they have a co-op of their own, they have a laptop in the office that can get the current world market pricing – they have the information. They also have their own scales. And because they're dealing with Equal Exchange, the pioneer of fair-trade, they get $1.25 a lb for their coffee beans, or $1.45 for organic. Score one for co-op's, and score one for fair trade.

My remarks went over fine. The Celebration of Bruce was nice, though it sounded a bit wooden to my ear as I spoke it. Some other things were reported. I opened the "Q&A" section with the board pay bits, and we got some feedback on both sides of it. Some other questions were asked and answered. We even almost came close to approaching the beginning edge of audience dialogue there for a brief moment.

Then it was a wrap, I thought. But Don, the board VP, snatched the mic and launched into a very nice tribute to me. Because I will not accept a nomination for next year's presidency, this was the last meeting at which I'll preside. I'll stay on the board, but as a past-president. Don waxed eloquent about abstracting up, my leadership and vision, and my thoughtful concern for all things co-op. It was very nice. Then he gave me a whoopee pie as a departure gift, about which I'll have to consider the hidden meanings. Then it was a wrap.

I talked with some members who approached me. I gathered my things. I finished my water bottle. I picked up my coat. Then the GM came up to me and said, "Did you see that crazy guy in the back?"

I had, actually. He had a weird look. The winter parka, the fidgeting, the unkempt hair, the look in the eye. Down from the woods. I had smiled to him on my way to the restroom and I got a sort of vacant return. The GM said, "Did you know he had a pistol?"

What??? No, I did not know he had a pistol. Speaking as the guy in front of the microphone most of the time, I was not excited to learn that the weird fidgety guy with the vacant stare at the back of the room near the exit had a pistol. I was not LOL.

It turns out that employees Tony and Aaron had noticed this situation and had debated what to do. They didn't want to cause a scene. I appreciate this. They work in a public market, and there are discreet ways to handle disturbing situations. I once had lunch at the cafe, where, behind me down the hall an employee was having a seizure, and it was absolutely amazing how the staff handled it. Very calm, loving, professional. So I dig that they didn't want to accost the guy and create a scene.

Tony called the police to see if it was legal. They told him that if they guy had a concealed weapon permit it was legal. How would you know if he had a permit? Ask him to show it to you, they are required to carry it. Okay, Tony tells us now, he didn't really want to ask the guy because that's heading toward making a scene. So Tony and Aaron position themselves on either side of him, in case Something Needed To Be Done. Apparently when I was talking about store expansions, and a couple of other topics, the guy got really fidgety, rubbing his hands and twisting his thumbs and breathing heavily. Eventually he'd had enough and left early. Nothing happened.

I was totally freaked out. I am a very accepting person, but this was over my line. I just don't think weird fidgety guys with vacant stares are being very cooperative when they bring pistols to member meetings.

So next year, when you walk into the Lebanon Cafe and see the sign on the door announcing the annual meeting, you will see at the bottom, "Firearms not allowed." I'm not sure if we'll hire security and do actual searches, but I am just not sitting on stage at the front of the room when weird fidgety guys with vacant stares have pistols under their coats. Not even for $200 a meeting, no way.

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Alex Meets The New Neighbor

April 20, 2006 | Life

Database uber-nerd Philip Greenspun checks in with 34 photos of a 13-week old Golden Retriever meeting his much-loved Samoyed Alex. As a commenter noted, this probably violates a maximum cuteness regulation.

Also, unrelated except by the author, he's looking for a personal assistant, and the job description is a paragon of the modern age.

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Update on Police Solicitations

April 19, 2006 | Life

Re: the solicitations and implications. Got a call from the Chief of Police. Turns out this was an International Brotherhood of Police Officers union project, which was not cleared through the town administration. The complaints started coming in, and finally today they went down to the telephone "boiler room" and read them the riot act on using the Town's name. Two union guys were fired (for not clearing the project). Mine wasn't the first complaint, and the Chief is spending quite a bit of time on it this week. Quote: [Sigh] "Having one employee is one too many." The Town did something like this ten years ago and decided never to do it again – little of the money stays locally. It's not the way the Town or the Police department operates, he apologized for the trouble, and if it happens again call him directly.

Can't really ask for more than that.

Looking backward, who would have thought 25 years ago that the Chief of Police and I would be on the same side of any issue? Maturity, I tell you. Hopefully this buys me some slack the next time I'm out raising hell and have a run-in with the local law.

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Choosing Your Empty Calories

April 19, 2006 | Life

If you read the last post you might get the idea that I'm a model of healthful eating. Well, I eat a lot better than the average bear, but I still want variety and tasty goodness every once in a while.

I've started to pay attention to the calorie counts on various junk foods and this has influenced my eating. For instance, I am a big fan of the Stoned Wheat Thins crackers. Then I noticed that each cracker is 20 calories. So if I had six of them, that's 120 calories. Well, compare to the extra-dark chocolate Le Petite Ecolier butter cookies. Two of these is 130 calories. So, if I'm going to eat ~120 calories, do I want crackers, or chocolate butter cookies? Hmm, not sure. Salty crackers or sweet dark-chocolate butter cookies? I'm still not sure, let's think about it some more: Bland, salty, refined white-flour crackers, or divine, rich, heavenly mix of 70% chocolate mixed with crisp, snappy, butter cookies? Um, let's take the cookies.

[As an aside, who knew you could get this stuff at Amazon!]

This has been a helpful way to consider the choices and compare against my taste preferences (which is all that matters with junk food, right?).

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Stomach vs. Bloodstream

April 19, 2006 | Life

Now that I'm exercising more I've started to notice a difference in how I think about hunger, and this could be a helpful distinction for children learning about eating, or adults trying to change their habits.

In the past, when I was hungry, it was mostly about satisfying my stomach with something tasty. It was about filling up, not being empty, and doing so in a pleasurable manner.

Now when I'm hungry I'm thinking about my bloodstream – what nutrients do I want to add to my blood? It's about providing energy, nutrition, and balance with what I've eaten (or not eaten) in recent hours.

This sounds simple, but it's been a game-changer for me. For instance, let's say it's 4 PM, and I'm hungry. Not an unusual case if you have a salad for lunch. I am planning to exercise, but I don't like going between 5 and 6 because it's so busy then. So I'm going to work until 6. That means I'll need to eat before I exercise. It's a little early for dinner, so I want a snack. In the past this would have been any number of empty-calorie foods, like ice creme, chips, etc. Let's own up to it: Even Oreos were on the list, conveniently sold in six-packs these days. Or, even, a two-pack of Pop Tarts, though that pushed the limits of my upper-middle-class self-identity and didn't happen too often (thank goodness).

Now, I think, "What nutrients haven't I had recently? What does my blood want?" The answer tends to be more along the lines of carrots! an orange! a banana! some grapes! turkey rollups! I have to think a little bit more, and it's more like a discovery game to figure out the right answer, but it's much more satisfying mentally because I know I'm being good to myself, and physically because I don't feel like crap after I have a snack.

By changing my mental model of hunger from "stomach" to "bloodstream" I have completely changed how I think about food, snacks, and eating. This feels like a long-term change.

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More on Police Solicitations

April 19, 2006 | Governance | Life | People & Society

Good morning Julia and Nicholas,

When I woke up today I had more questions about the police solicitations.

-- Is Jim Reid an employee of the Hanover Police Department? The voicemail said "with" the Hanover PD, so I assume he is, because if he isn't he should have said "for" the Hanover PD.

-- If he's NOT an employee, then I'm annoyed that I was lied to by someone representing the town. There should be much more careful monitoring of outside contractors. For instance, perhaps he should say his firm's name, along with "representing the Hanover PD." I'm sure you can understand why someone misrepresenting themselves to be a Hanover police department employee would be problematic, in both the present situation and in the long-term consequences.

-- If he IS an employee, is he being paid for this time soliciting businesses? That is, are taxpayers paying to have town employees call citizens and ask for money? I'm not sure what to think about that, but it's not an obvious win from my point of view.

-- If he IS an employee, and is NOT being paid, i.e. this is a volunteer effort, then I have concerns about the "wink wink, nudge nudge" aspect of "volunteering" for your employer. This is common in white-collar businesses, where salaried employees are regularly expected to work more than the specified 40 hours per week, violating all sorts of Federal labor act provisions and State labor laws. For some reason this is never enforced, presumably due to the power of Capital over Labor, but I would dislike the idea that a town government, especially one the size and quality of Hanover, would engage in this behavior.

Perhaps you can shed some light on the operation of this program and address my concerns, which I'm sure are shared by many others in our community. Thanks for your consideration.

Michael J.

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Police Solicitations

April 18, 2006 | Governance | Life | People & Society

Hello Julia and Nicholas,

I received a voicemail today from Jim Reid. The message was (exact transcription), "Mike this is Jim Reid calling with the Hanover Police. Please give me a call at 448-1108. No emergency, just gotta talk to you. Thank you."

So, I'm sure you know where this is going: This was a solicitation for an ad for the crime prevention booklet. Okay, that's fine, I like to support community organizations. Jim's a nice guy, and he handled this well, and I registered no complaint with him. This is a policy issue.

My opinion is that the voicemail message should say, "I need to talk to you about our first-ever crime prevention booklet and how you can help," or somesuch thing. Because if it doesn't, you're diluting the value of the police department authority.

Which is to say, like you two, I lead a busy life. I don't have time to call back solicitors, but I would always call back the police or fire department. However, if I ever get another voicemail like that and I call back to find it's another solicitation, I will never ever return another police or fire department call that is not emergency-related. Period.

Using the goodwill and authority of the police department should be very carefully considered. I hope this experience helpfully informs your policy decisions going forward.

Thank you for having a functional website that allowed me to quickly find the appropriate contact information and make my opinion known at the time of the incident.

Best regards,
Michael J.

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Stuff You Don't Have Time To Read Either

April 17, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | People & Society

• The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (book, wiki, free pdf).
• Collaborative Thesaurus Tagging the Wikipedia Way (abstract, pdf, author's blog).
• Integral Communication (review, master's thesis pdf).

They all look great. Wish I had time to read them. Maybe next year.

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Once in a while you get shown the light...

April 17, 2006 | Life | Nature & Environment

...in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

The earth is not handed down to you from your parents, it is on loan to you from your children.

—Message printed on Ruth's check.

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Regulating Sliced Bread

April 14, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites

I am tired of buying pre-sliced loaves of bread that have an odd number of slices. WTF? What do you do with one slice of bread? Is this some sort of industry handout for the songbirds or something? There oughta be a law.

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A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

April 12, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways,
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin',
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin',
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin',
Heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin',
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin',
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter,
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony,
I met a white man who walked a black dog,
I met a young woman whose body was burning,
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow,
I met one man who was wounded in love,
I met another man who was wounded with hatred,
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

—Bob Dylan

Copyright © 1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

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Primary Sources

April 12, 2006 | Life

From a phone conversation:

"I got email from MoveOn.org and Working Assets – something about Iran. I thought, 'I should go over to Notio and see what's up.'"

Scary, isn't it?

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New Service Offering

April 12, 2006 | Life

Do you need to procrastinate more? We can help. Notio is now offering a new service: Procrastination Coaching. We have dozens, hundreds even, if not thousands, of ways to avoid the critical to-do items on your list. Our program includes advanced techniques such as using non-profit volunteer work to avoid the paying gigs, using life changes to avoid the non-profit obligations, and using the overdue obligations of paying gigs to create so much internal stress you can't deal with any more introspection. It's a win-win-win trifecta of passive aggressive success-avoidnance meltdown. Don't settle for simple procrastinative blogging! Order your advanced procrastination starter kit today!

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Touch Base

April 12, 2006 | Life

Yesterday I got three emails with the subject "Touch Base" or "Touching Base." One from a current colleague, one from a contractor about to start a project, and one from a former co-worker I hadn't caught up with in a while.

I can't remember the last time I got an email with that subject, so getting three in a one day was memorable. Let us declare April 11 Touch Base Day, in honor of baseball, and our kinesthetic being.

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Quote Of The Day

April 8, 2006 | Life

"Keep in mind that four psyches will be vying for control: two innocent children who are confused and hurt, and two adults trying to make strong heroic statements. Take care of the children." —David Kantor, My Lover, Myself

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This Week's Mail

April 7, 2006 | Life

Jeff: Might be a question of 'adequation'. Adequation is one of the seven paradigmata. (The third, I believe.) The one that has to do with issues like "What sort of answer would you find satisfying for that question?" In other words: It's particularly difficult to find something if you both aren't looking for the same thing.

Notio: Did you make that up, or do you have a pointer for more?

Jeff: Sorry, I made it up. Any ideas for the other six?

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Focus Over Planning

April 7, 2006 | Life

It's amazing, really. If you actually get up early, get your butt in the chair at work, focus, don't surf the web, avoid blogging, have enough caffeine, ignore unrelated phone calls, turn off email, don't clean your office, don't run errands, don't call anyone for lunch, don't buy office supplies, and do only things that you owe other people – well, you can actually get a lot of work done! My in-box has gone from 47 to 7, and it might be zero by the end of the day.

Of course, I'm stressed-out and brittle, talking too fast, inattentive, and darting, but I guess that's what it takes to succeed in high-productivity symbolic analysis work these days. Or maybe it's just me. In any case, there will be more completion soon. Progress is our only product!

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N-Dimensional Web 2.0

April 5, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Science | Site Maintenance | Software | Technology | Travel

Many people are trying to define "Web 2.0" – what it is, what it means, how to build Web 2.0 apps, what makes a company a Web 2.0 company, etc. All of those efforts fall short, because Web 2.0 is n-dimensional. Web 2.0 is "reflecting more complex multivariable situations.¹"

Today I learned of a new dimension to Web 2.0. Chris² invited me to join a beta of CollectiveX, a new Web 2.0-ish social widget. To invite someone you have to set a temporary password, and when they log in they change it to whatever they want. Chris set my password to "ratdoggy." Ha! Now that's a good one. This made me laugh out loud, and when I told Meg³ she lost it too. What's so funny?

Well, it creates a strong but secret connection between the title of a recent post I wrote – wherein "maybe too much information" was offered⁴ – and an unrelated client task. Chris' password was an acknowledgment that he read the post. Maybe even he liked it. And he certainly knew it would make me think of that post in the middle of the workday. But in any case "ratdoggy" is not in frequent usage (Google: "Did you mean: ratdog?") and his reference expanded its sphere of influence.

Which is like a link, just not a web hyperlink. It was a link from one mind to another, from one blog post to a work moment, from a concert review to a social software login, from my original post written on a couch in the lobby of a cinderblock hotel in Charlestown to my colleague's laughter at the password in an office building in Hanover, from all that to this post which you are reading now. Links, links, links, everywhere you look. Which makes me smile.

And that seems to be the common element of a Web 2.0 app – that it makes you smile, somehow, in some way that maybe you never have before.

---

1) An Introduction to Chemometrics. A report given as Session F of Educational Symposium No. 17, The Use of Statistical Methods in Formulating and Testing of Rubber at the 130th Meeting of the ACS Rubber Division by Brian A. Rock, Ph.D. in October, 1985.

2) Blog updated according to a complex precision timing schedule involving the highway, the moon, the clouds, and the stars.

3) I did not invoice for this minute of laughter, nor did the client utilize any official company time or resources in reaction to the laughter event.

4) Plausible Story, personal communication.

---

Now, how many new links can you find in the above footnotes?

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April Snow

April 5, 2006 | Life | Nature & Environment

Looking northeast out the kitchen door this morning. A beautiful tangle. Wet snow on shadowy branches. Blue sky, but cloudy. Moving shards of sunlight dart around the view. Looking into the woods, but can't see that far. Trees at odd angles, falling over but not yet dead. They'll never stand straight again – should we leave them to grow sideways, or cut them down and clear the space? There's a wounded beauty in scenes like this. Very nice for a view, but challenging if pervasive.

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Ratdoggy Style

April 2, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

I'm in Boston for a SoL consulting gathering. Conveniently, Ratdog played across town at the Orpheum Theater last night. Technically, I'm staying in Charlestown at the Constitution Inn, which is in the Navy Shipyard, which is sort of a planned community built in the 1700's.

I left the hotel and walked to find a restaurant. Stopped at the generically named "Bistro" and sat at the z-shaped bar. After I ordered I got out the bus schedule and the local map to figure out my options. There was an escort across the corner of the bar waiting for her first call, and she asked where I was going. Turns out you can walk to North Station from here, and I took her instructions and headed out after supper. I stopped at the guard station to checkpoint my wayfinding, and then again at the final navy yard guard station.

You end up walking through a wild backstreets neighborhood parallel to the radical new bridge, behind the Bank North Garden, nee Fleet Center, nee Boston Garden. I stopped several times to verify my orientation, and every time they pointed me straight ahead, just that each time it was a different direction. So after about half an hour, without too much zigzagging, I found my way to the Boston Common, and heard the drums.

The tribe was gathering, but it turns out the drums were played by a homeboy on five gallon buckets. Patchouli and related scents were in abundance. One of the first things I saw was a woman beating up a blind guy near a subway exit. His cane was flailing, and he was on his back covering his face, as she twisted his nose and beat the side of his head with her hands and pulled his ears and kicked him in the chest and screamed at him. I was struck dumb by the sight – it's not every day you see a chick beating the hell out of a blind guy, but eventually a few of the Deadheads broke them up and she stormed off cursing while the guy got up and got his bearings and poked along. It all happened in less than a minute.

The next thing I saw was a couple of 40-something parents walking with their teenage girls, stuck in the sidewalk traffic jam of miracle seekers and paraphernalia vendors. The girls were wide-eyed and smiling, and the parents were tight-jawed and worried, and pulled them quickly through the crowds. Hehehe – curiosity was sparked; they will return.

I walked toward the theater, and remembered the last time I was here, six or eight years ago, for Blues Traveller. We had backstage passes, but no tickets. So Tenz walked us to some pretty darn fine seats up front, and when the rightful owners came he talked them out of getting security by waving his laminated tour pass telling them we could all fit. Which we could, sort of. It was miserable. I can tolerate a lot of ambiguity, and put up with a lot of crap at rock concerts, but this was pushing it. Plus, the show sucked. Bad sound, drunk audience, amateur playing. The only worse times I remember were the show where a guy in the row behind me vomited on my back (that was pretty bad) and the time the teenage jerks were throwing cigarettes into Cheryl's hair from the balcony above. I think that was probably Cheryl's last rock show – she had a run of bad luck in her first few concerts, and it wasn't very encouraging. The Orpheum Blues Traveller show wasn't that bad, but I wasn't planning to see them again, or rushing back to the Orpheum.

Anyway, as I walked down the little side street that fronts the theater, the tour buses were parked right there by the entrance. This made me laugh, because it meant the band was hanging out right in front with the audience – I've been on those tour buses, and everything you've read or heard is true. Much better to park them behind the theater, because what happens backstage is best left backstage, but I guess you can't park back there at the Orpheum, or maybe they didn't get there early enough to get a parking space?

Once inside I bought a 20-oz beer ($8) and hung out. I met seven year old Cora Blue, who was at her second show with Mom and Dad. She went to Danbury last week, on a school night, and she like it a lot, but Mom got yelled at by the teacher the next day, saying she shouldn't take her daughter to concerts on school nights. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, I suppose. Cora likes Playing In The Band, and Ramble On Rose. She said she liked dancing to Playin' and I explained that it's fun to dance to because it's written in 4/10 time, which means if you're normally counting in fours, like 99% of the songs written, then you get a never-ending cycle effect, since the count is 4-4-2 and when you're in the 2 you're halfway through the third 4, so to speak. She nodded and said, "Cool."

The show opened with Jack Straw, jamming between every verse, and halfway through I knew it was going to be a way better show than the one Lynne and I saw in Northampton last week. Emphasis on way. It turned out to be an awesome performance, fantastic and flawless with an enthusiastic and energized audience. Jack Straw flowed into Cassidy which flowed into Birdsong. That triplet was probably 40 minutes and they hadn't stopped yet, moving right into Odessa.

[An imaginary version of this blog post would link to each song in the set, extract a personally meaningful lyric to highlight, and relate my comments to support the metaphor. This isn't that post. Instead, here are someone's photos, and a setlist, as a nod to formality.]

During Odessa a Beautiful Usher came into our aisle, to check tickets of the aisle in front of us. The Beautiful Usher stopped in front of me, and apologized, but she had to clean up this aisle, pointing in front (where there were a couple of people for every seat). The Beautiful Usher pulled out her flashlight and leaned over the seats to start checking tickets. This had the effect of grinding her (also beautiful) butt into my crotch. I was simply unwilling to stop dancing during this minor inconvenience, and the Beautiful Usher kept doing her job, pressed into me. This combination turned out to be not unpleasurable. Eventually she was done hassling the people in front of me and the Beautiful Usher stood up and turned around. She said, "Sorry!" And I said, "You're not going to stay and dance??" She laughed, "Ha! I wish!" and the Beautiful Usher moved along. But at that point I knew what the blog post would be titled.

Then the band (you remember there was a band playing, right? I was a bit distracted) went into Lazy River Road, a very thick Deep Elem Blues, finally landing on Greatest Story Ever Told. I thought this would be the last song of the set, but they jumped right into a crankin' Help On The Way – we were now completely out of control – and then a really, really kick-butt Slipknot to end the set. Wow.

During intermission I scoped out my neighborhood. The guy next to me was too wasted to speak, but he was quiet, so that was neutral. The 50-something Harley babe on the other side apparently only talked to people with long gray hair, so I didn't qualify. The two guys in front of me were from Strafford VT, just up the road. This was a mail-order ticket faux-syncronicity. If the people filling tickets have time they try to put people near other geographically-related orders. You sure don't get this kind of service from Ticketmaster.

The second set opened with an acoustic Black-Throated Wind, and moved into Dylan's Hard Rain's Gonna Fall. During Hard Rain I was dancing so hard that my fingernail caught the pen in my front pocket and I accidentally flung it somewhere in front of me. Oh well. The band headed into a fast-moving Good Morning Little Schoolgirl, and we still danced. They played a smoking Althea, and we danced some more. They moved into Ashes & Glass, and a lot of people sat down. I didn't – it's one of the better recent-vintage Weir tunes, which I like for it's harmonic structure and the interesting jam before the last verse. In this case they jammed not after every verse, but after every line of every verse, bringing a whole new concept of "jam-band" to the song. After another semi-lame drums and keyboard segment – which seems to exist solely so Bobby can leave the stage and take care of business – they dropped into Sugaree, a long slow romp which could possibly pass for the ballad near the end of the show, save for the fact that you can dance to it in almost any style or speed. They headed for a jazzy jam, which I thought might be the Wheel but turned out the be the end of Birdsong, which I forgot they hadn't finished, and then the jam out of Birdsong landed on the ending segment of Cassidy which I also forgot they hadn't finished – blowing me away. I figured dollars to doughnuts that Franklin's Tower would close the set to complete the normal Help > Slip > Franklin's triple-play, but they played an over the top One More Saturday Night which brought down the house. A stunning end of the set, from Sugaree onward.

The encore started with Mark playing bass instead of guitar, Robin on guitar instead of bass, a roadie on drums, the drummer on piano, the horn player on keyboards, and Bobby on trombone. The song sounded a little familiar, but I couldn't place it. [Turned out to be Get On The Bus.] In any case I realized it was April 1st, and that explained it. One by one the switched to their regular instruments while the song played on, and then on a single downbeat they arrived at Franklin's Tower. They didn't seem rushed, even though it was 11:40, and played a longish driving version. Even the laggards danced at this, knowing the show was about to end, and when the house lights came on everyone was exhausted and satisfied. (You can order an official recording of the show here.)

Left the building close to midnight. The understated picky Deadhead would say, "Good show." It was better than good, and I needed it. Got to bed at 1:30 old time, 2:30 new time.

Then, four hours later I was waking up. Two hours after that I was sitting in a circle for check-in, and then we played with Legos in a group aspirations exercise until lunch. My play date continues. Cora Blue would be happy at this.

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Take Me For Longing

April 1, 2006 | Life

Whatever the answer, it's yes that's the question

[insert meta-post here. abstract up. relate it to something unexpected. close with an astute observation. check for comments.]

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Stella High Blue Time

March 31, 2006 | Life

It could always go wrong

Two steps forward, ten steps back.

There's nothing left to see

Watch out for dropping shoes.

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Believe It Or Not

March 30, 2006 | Life

But I'll roll up my shirtsleeves

How do we know for sure? Who goes first? Can I do it? How long will it take? Could it last? Will it be "work?" Is there alignment? Can we overcome fear?

These questions and more fill my head and heart today.

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Welcome to Notio

March 27, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

Welcome, Big Picture readers. Barry pointed you to the Kid's Today post. Thanks for visiting. You might also want to check out some of the greatest hits:

• I've written a lot of personal posts this year, including Expressing Anger, Jung's Typology vs. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Gaston Bachelard: Subversive Humanist, Your Song, Broken in Two Yet Still Functioning and I Love You.
• Every once in a while I am greatly annoyed by technology. Microsoft ftpd Madness is representative.
• My post on the Chris Bliss juggling video, and the followup on Jason Garfield's subsequent mean-spirited parody continue to generate comments.
• Posts on consumerism include a recommendation of Champion Chip Cookies, a Hot Tip For Online Electronics Buying, and A New Kind of Showerhead.
• I am very interested in good governance, especially open, transparent governance based on honesty and integrity. I think hybrid cooperative business structures are a good way to generate entrepreneurial participation. See Minnesota 308B Cooperative Act for some additional info.
• A while back there was an epic post on Frank Zappa's serious classical compositions. Notable for it's length – pushing the limits of a blog reader's attention – as well a rare anecdote about meeting Frank.
• Occasionally I post some of my photographs, and snapshots even, on Flickr.

Here's a link to the RSS subscription feed, if you're interested in following along. Thanks for stopping by.

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Mercury In Retrograde

March 23, 2006 | Life

This could explain the last few weeks.

In general, Mercury rules thinking and perception, processing and disseminating information and all means of communication, commerce and transportation. By extension, Mercury rules people who work in these areas, especially people who work with their minds or their wits: writers and orators, commentators and critics, gossips and spin doctors, tricksters and thieves.

Mercury retrograde gives rise to personal misunderstandings; flawed, disrupted, or delayed communications, negotiations and trade; glitches and breakdowns with phones, computers, cars, buses, and trains. And all of these problems usually arise because some crucial piece of information, or component, has gone astray, or awry.

It is therefore not wise to make important decisions while Mercury is retrograde, since it is very likely that these decisions will be clouded by misinformation, poor communication and careless thinking. Mercury is all about mental clarity and the power of the mind, so when Mercury is retrograde, these intellectual characteristics tend to be less acute than usual, as the critical faculties are dimmed.

Believe as you wish. Or wish as you believe. Or get back to work. Or take a break. It's your call.

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All The Rage

March 23, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

Finally, I may be in step with a style trend, just this once.

Whenever a countercultural trend becomes a mainstream one, there is a natural tendency to look for deeper meaning. Do beards that call to mind Charles Manson suggest dissatisfaction with "the system"? Are broody beards, like the dark and somber mood of the fall fashion collections, physical manifestations of a melancholia in the air?

Not that I knew anything, or did anything that put me in step. Style has just caught up with me. Of course, styles will change soon enough, and I'll appear out of step again. But if I wait long enough, it will come back around. Doing nothing has its advantages.

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Kids Today

March 22, 2006 | Life

My nephew, Matthew, is nine years old. He's been taking violin and piano lessons for a couple of years. His dad, Alan, my brother, is a technology manager at a big company and has been livin' the digital lifestyle for a couple of decades now. Matthew's mom, Susan, Alan's wife, my sister-in-law, is a graphic designer working half-time at home and taking care of Matthew.

It should be no surprise that Matthew has his own iMac, next to Susan's desk, and plays the keyboard I bought for him into GarageBand. I guess what's surprising is this song he sent, which is amazing! These kids today, I tell 'ya.

"Climbing Mt. Everest #2" (2:22) [work-safe]
[Update: Converted to an mp3 file, from an m4a, and nested the embed tag inside an object tag.]

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In Case You Were Wondering

March 21, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Technology

Do you happen to know if there's wifi available in the Lebanon Coop?

There is not. I have asked for it a few times over the years. Being board president doesn't pull any weight on this, believe it or not (due to a personality-minimizing governance structure which is long-term good and specific-issue annoying).

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Top 'O The Morning

March 21, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | People & Society

I like the brand-new Google Finance for its page layout and information density. Lots of Ajaxy goodness throughout – check out that slider under the long-term graph!

Billmon exposes the hypocrisy that is John Snow, Bush's Treasury Secretary, standing in for arrogant overpaid CEOs the world over. Not that every CEO is arrogant and overpaid, but certainly some are, don't you agree?

Danah Boyd on the differences between MySpace's success and Friendster's failure. Required reading for online community builders. Also has some notes about the impact high-profile social software failures might generate in the legal or regulatory space.

Michael Crichton on a federal circuit court's decision that thinking can violate a patent. Patently absurd.

A 20-year study determines that whiny, insecure kids usually grow up to be conservatives, while confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals. Admit it: You thought to yourself, "No surprise."

Katrina went to a Television Preview Screening. She found it sickening; let this be a lesson to you.

The Economist on open source collaboration. Makes a point I have mentioned in the past: Open source is very good at optimizing existing technology, but not necessarily good at innovation – might require a few more years to play out, but that's the current thinking. Linux is a very good replacement for a plethora of Unix; Wikipedia is optimizes human knowledge editing. Open source is an excellent process innovation but that is not the whole game.

Adaptation offers two excellent articles on the personal economics of a post-hydrocarbon century (1, 2). These are important and valuable contributions to the planning for "powerdown." Summary: You should worry less about losing electricity and growing food than losing your job and home.

Finally, from email: I am blessed with wonderful, generous, and appreciative clients, as well as thoughtful, helpful, and supportive friends. Plus, the sun is shining and I have a clear, open day with no appointments. My time is my own. If I can't have an upbeat productive day today then I don't know what it will take.

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Modern Baby Names

March 20, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Off the top of my head:

• Pixel
• Bitmap
• Ui
• Mouseover
• Hover
• Feed
• Titlebar
• Favicon
• Clickwheel
• Earbud
• Doctype
• Serverside
• Api
• Voip
• Hosted

I threw away about half of what I thought of, but there are dozens more. I gotta get back to work. Update: Can also be used for cat names!

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Create Your Own Reality

March 20, 2006 | Life

Now that my personal training sessions have ended, it's time for me to stay in the exercise game without scheduled (and expensive!) moral and educational support. As part of that program, I'm going to do some minor dieting, to really nail down the fat loss in the waist line. This morning I went through the kitchen to see what food I had to finish up or throw out that wouldn't be on the diet. I was surprised. It's probably a good sign when all you need to finish up is three bananas, two oranges, half a loaf of wheat-free, gluten-free bread made from sprouted grains, and two servings of gluten-free pasta with pesto, chicken, and broccoli.

Oh. And the chocolate. I suppose that counts. Even dark chocolate? Yes, it appears so. That's probably the biggest loss. I was surprised to notice that dark chocolate is kept in the candy aisle of the supermarket. I never thought of it as candy before. More like an anti-oxidant caffeine-boosted pleasure melt. Candy? I suppose, if you insist....

Which reminds me of a conversation from last week. Meg and I are both on a local email listserv, and people were posting their blog URLs. She asked me why I hadn't. My response surprised both of us: "I want Notio to grow by word of mouth on the Internet." At which point we both laughed as I realized out loud that I'm not sure exactly what else a listserve would be if not a word-of-mouth Internet thing. But it's different, somehow, even if I don't know why.

Which just goes to show that we define things however we want, and rationalize them later for other people.

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On Being A Bad Internet Citizen

March 18, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

I'm sorry, I just can't help myself:

• Cute Overload Kittens
• Kitten War
• Rate My Kitten
• The Daily Kitten
• Cute Little Kittens

Father, please forgive me.

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Not So Much To Release The Sorrow As To Embrace It

March 17, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment | People & Society

Dave Pollard posts a letter from organizational development consultant Roger Harrison, "A Time For Letting Go" – parting thoughts on the occasion of his retirement. Via Jon Husband.

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Lunch Menu

March 14, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Went to the Co-op to have lunch with some friends. While foraging, I ran into someone I hadn't seen for a year or more. "How are you?," I asked. "Eh. [Someone]'s father died, so I'm getting lunch for him and going over there." I had heard the week before that a key person had quit his company, and that his fiancé had left him because he drinks too much. I didn't pursue those topics, but they were in my mind. I am awkward in situations like this, never sure exactly what to say. "Ciao!," doesn't quite cut it. I told him about my dad, who has had six stents put in his heart, which is like science fiction, but also means that his heart is fragile, and of course he won't live forever. Friendship score: C.

Eventually I sat down and the first person arrived. "How are you?," I asked. "Well. Not that great. I had been on anti-depressants, and tried to get off them for a while, but then I had a lot of problems, so I'm on them again, but it takes time for them to take effect. At work everything seems so complex. I can't really focus, and even when I can I don't really seem to get it." I noticed my fear - here is an engineer who can't understand his tasks; that would be scary. I was a better friend with him, offering some perhaps meager moral support for life's twists and turns. Score: B.

Needless to say, as the other four people arrived I did not ask how they were.

But then during lunch Sarah walked by and gave me a big smile and a wave, and I felt brightened. Then later Alison walked by and gave me a big big smile and a friendly wink as she waved, and it's pretty hard to be bummed out about that. Then Doug and I had a good talk about his art show and how people relate to art, and who buys art, and how you have to fail fast enough that you can afford to succeed. Talking with Doug is always good. Then the clerk at the post office knew my box number without me telling her, so I felt recognized in the world.

I guess for lunch I had "soup of the day," in a social sense.

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Hot Tip For Online Electronics Buying

March 13, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

I ordered a new CD/DVD player this weekend. I'll spare you the ridiculously obsessive materialist consumerist research process, even though it might make for a good blog entry. The bottom line was, once I knew what I wanted, and the eBay bidders outbid the value of a used one, and the authorized B-stock eBay sellers ruled themselves out due to their spotty feedback rating, I was left with the authorized e-tailers, who offer real factory warranties, and sell at full price.

But two years ago when I purchased my preamp from OneCall, I used the real-time chat system to ask for a discount. That worked really well - in ten minutes the rep and I had negotiated a price reduction and free shipping, simply because I asked.

So this weekend when I saw the Crutchfield site had this feature, I took another shot. Here's a slightly edited transcript (which they kindly emailed me when we finished) of the entire 3-minute chat:

Agent: "Welcome to the Crutchfield Sales Chat. How may I help you?"
Customer: "Are there any deals right now on the Denon DVD-2910B? Can I get this thing for less than $700?"
Agent: "I'll be glad to help you."
Customer: "Cool"
Agent: "I do have one in outlet stock for $629.99."
Customer: "That sounds good - Is that refurbished or new."
Agent: "The box has been opened since it left the manufacturer. Same warranty, guarantee and 30 day return just like the new one. It has not been refurbished."
Customer: "Okay, I have one in my online cart now. Do I need a code or anything?"
Agent: "Does it show the discounted price?"
Customer: "No, it shows $699.99"
Agent: "Let me send you a link to it."
Agent: "This should show the discounted price." [URL removed]
Customer: "Okay, that seems to work. Thanks!"
Agent: "You're welcome. Have a nice day."

As I recall, that's exactly the situation I had with the preamp. They had "an open box" of a new unit, with full warranty, full return policy, and free shipping. I wonder if "open box" is code for "we're not allowed to discount, except for outlet stock, so we'll happily open the box for you in order to give you a discount." I like these chat systems for expensive online purchases.

And, note, it's worth asking for what you want.

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Tour Tickets

March 13, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

According to the folks at GDTS-TOO, I will have an extra ticket for each of the following Ratdog shows:

• Thursday March 23, Northampton, MA.
• Friday March 31, Hampton Beach, NH.
• Saturday April 1, Boston, MA.

If you live in the Northeast, or want to fly in for the shows, and you'd like to join me at a great jazzy blues dance show, send an email. If you don't know my email leave a comment here with your email.

Update: Northampton, claimed! Hampton Beach claimed! Boston claimed!

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First Things First

March 13, 2006 | Life

Consider: 1) If your shoelaces come untied at an inopportune moment, that could spell trouble. 2) People like choice. Hence: Ian's Shoelace Site. A critical resource for people who want choices and also wear shoes.

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Secret World

March 10, 2006 | Life

Seeing things that were not there
On a wing, on a prayer

Rediscovered Peter Gabriel's Us recording. Beautiful, powerful. Especially the last song, quoted above. It reminded me of this (unretouched) photograph I took in Austria, at the Vienna State Opera House, in September, 2005:

When I took this photo, I was seeing things that were not there. I cringe every time I look at this picture. I cringe because although I took 1,200 photos over three weeks in Europe, this is the only one in this location from this perspective. And don't you wish there were just slightly more at the top edge, so you could see the full circle of the architecture? And at the bottom - wasted pixels, with those lights. If I had tilted the camera up just a bit, this photo would be perfect. But I didn't. It kills me.

I thought this photo was perfect when I took it. I thought I saw, in the instant before I opened the shutter, that it was composed well, that I had paid attention to the four edges of the frame, and the middle, and the thirds, and that I had a good shot. In this situation, with so much symmetry and filigree, the difference between a perfect shot and a wasted shot is binary. You either pulled it off or you didn't.

Yes, of course, I could crop it so the viewer doesn't know there was an architectural detail at the top. And I can clean up or trim the bottom. But I don't want to, because I will always know that if I had been more present in the exact moment I was capturing this photo it would far better reflect the essence of the place. But I wasn't and it doesn't.

And because of that, I have no interest in working with this photo. None at all. Zero. Zed-ed-red-oprah. Binary - I don't want to touch it. I am content to leave it there in my photo library, annoying me each time as I scroll by, on my way to find some other photo where I was present, where I was fully attentive yet grounded in the flow of the place.

It's worth reflecting on the point that this seems like a bad attitude. There could, maybe possibly, be some gray area there in between. Somewhere. (Possibly, I think.) Or even, heaven forfend, the opposite could be true.

In this house of make believe
Divided in two, like Adam and Eve

Maybe it's easier to work on a photo like this one (unretouched), taken two minutes and 59 seconds later:

You'd think in the three minutes between these photos I could have taken a few at various focal lengths, or bracketed the exposure, or verified the composition, or tried some off-center angles. But apparently not.

Perhaps I was in the moment, enjoying the ephemeral experience more than capturing it in a two-dimentional color-quantized pixelated bitstream. Perhaps that first photo captures the fact that I was present in the experience at the moment of capture. Maybe it reflects the essence of my experience of the experience. That would be, good, I think.

Anyway, here is a photo I can work with. Symmetry is strong, and the person appearing in the left foreground provides an asymmetrical break. There is large-scale repetition in the architecture, and small-scale detail to discover. From this we can get a nice print.

But maybe it's a cop out to start with the well-composed photo, and simply see how far it can be optimized. That idea puts all of the creation, all of the making, at the moment of capture, and reduces or removes any re-creation during processing. Certainly there is creativity in color-balancing, cropping, and sharpening a photo. But that's optimization, a lower form of creativity than creating.

Using a photo with flaws as a starting point invites creativity to re-create the scene, or create a new perspective of the scene which was not in attention at the moment of making. It's a second opportunity to make the picture. Or a first opportunity to make a different picture. Once you get in there and start pixel farming, you never know what you might make.

Okay, well, fine. But this is a hobby, not another full-time job. So maybe right now I don't want to spend any time (effort) re-making (fixing) this photograph (crappy snapshot). Maybe instead I just want to change (play with) the color balance (feeling-tone) and set the white point (brightness). Boys just wanna have fun.

I stood in this unsheltered place
'Til I could see the face behind the face

I came across this personal mission statement earlier today. (Most of the thread is worth reading.) I have not nearly integrated my values and ambition to the degree Tim has. As you can see, I can't even take a decent snapshot during a once-in-a-lifetime photo opportunity.

But for starters, I'm aspiring to live in the moment, expanding my experience of the length of each moment, entraining with nature, feeling my body, feeling my being, without regard for clocked time. That is a secret world that collides with capitalism, and privileges the moment of experience over the moment of capture – and over the moments of creation, to the detriment of deadlines.

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A New Kind Of Showerhead

March 8, 2006 | Life | Products & Opportunites

I'd like to make a new kind of showerhead, one that has more impact. As a simple example, who decided that showerheads are useful only for cleansing the body? There are many other things a showerhead could do for you. For instance:

• If you never wanted to shave your legs again, or somewhere else (get your mind out of the gutter), then you could set it to "RH" (remove hair) and run the water over the part of your body you want shaved. That's all there is to it!
• Let's say you wanted more hair on your chest, or maybe fill in the slight balding on the top of your head. No problem, set the showerhead to "GH" (grow hair) and run the water where you want more hair.
• A very popular feature would be the "LW" setting (lose weight). Want a little off the belly or bum? Choose the correct setting and run the water where you want the slimming.
• There's also "AW" for adding weight. This is good for when you're going to holiday dinner and you're tired of hearing, "You look too thin dear. And you eat like a bird! Have some more pie." Take a quick AW rinse around your mid-section to add some weight in the morning, and just take it off the next day.
• The "TD" setting (tanning darken) saves you from going to the tanning booth. So you can stay home and read books on winter break, but still get that Bermuda tan.
• The "TL" setting (tanning lighten) offers the pale white goth look. Perfect for trips to city art museums.
• The "FS" setting (firm skin) is less invasive than a lift or tuck, and you can use it on your whole body as your aging skin starts to sag all over. You'd be surprised how useful this turns out to be for the AARP'ers.
• Advanced models could reshape your nose, add "length and girth," change your chest, or remove the tattoos you got during your mid-life crisis.

If we could make this showerhead for the same price as today's showerheads, would you buy one or what? Don't tell me: You would put one in every shower in the house, wouldn't you? You'd insist that your health club install them in every shower stall. You'd tell everyone you knew. Mark my words: This is a killer app for the shower! And, I don't need to tell you: Nearly everyone showers nearly everyday! This product could touch every single person alive. That's what the MBAs call a market!

Of course, there are a few details to work out. You'd have to have a "velocity" setting, so that if you had a lot of weight to lose, you could set it high, but if you just wanted a trim you could slow the process. Otherwise you might over-do and have to constantly switch between the AW and LW settings until you got what you wanted. You could turn out lumpy.

You'd also want child-proof locks or some other parental control system. Your 14-year old daughter is probably not the best judge of whether she's thin enough or not.

And, I suppose, you'd want all this to work while you're cleansing. Most people are way too busy to take a shower and then take another one just to lose 10 lbs! Get real.

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A Good Example Of A Dilettante's Progress

March 7, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

I Googled "dilettante" to find the correct spelling (used in the phrase above) and in the right column I found a sponsored ad that eBay purchased for that word!! They don't think their customers are dilettantes, do they?

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Ultimate Insight Is The Booby Prize Of Life

March 6, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

A variation of the above phrase wandered past me in email today, and I wondered if the writer had made it up, or if it was one of those long-lived Internet-revived quatable-quotes kinda deals.

A review of Stephen Yenser's "The Consuming Myth, The Work of James Merrill," provides the title quote:

The est people used to say "Ultimate insight is the booby prize of life." We would guess that the booby prize for an American poet is to have some scholarly University Press put out a 350 page, closely printed, totally cryptic, highly footnoted, turgid, dogmatic investigation of one's works.

I wonder if they liked the poetry, even if they didn't like the book. Richard Stayton's interview with "writer's therapist" Dennis Palumbo is interesting:

Now, the thing about writers is that they're so therapized. They've been in therapy for years, and they'll lay out a lot of their family dynamics for me. But as I always say, "Insight's the booby-prize of therapy." That means change doesn't come from insight. You need insight and awareness to understand what's going on. But change comes from courage, the risk of challenging those meanings everyday. If you're someone who believes, for example, that if you get angry you're a bad person, then you could have all the insight in the world as to where that comes from when you were a child. But every day you're going to have to risk showing a little anger and seeing that people around you don't fall over dead. And until you challenge that as an adult and go, "Wow, I got angry, and my loved ones still love me. Nobody thinks I'm a killer, and it doesn't mean I'm a terrible person." Until you challenge that in the here and now, you're not gonna change.

Working on it, dude. Tracy A. Turner has an interesting (and detailed) page on distinctions :

The ability to create and draw distinctions is one of the most powerful and empowering abilities that human beings have. To be able to distinguish does not mean that we separate what we distinguish, it means that we perceive clearly, we differentiate, we discriminate, or discern. The distinctions of transformation are unique and demand rigor. If you've ever participated in an arena that creates and supports transformation, from religion to some corporate cultures, you'll recognize some of these distinctions. Many of these will be familiar to any transformational graduates, including the Forum at Landmark Education.

Insight vs. Breakthrough - 1. The booby prize. 2. A breakthrough is what occurs when you take committed action on an insight.

Abundance - 1. When you experience your experience, there is no lack.

Acceptance - 1. It's where we start to make a difference. 2. No good or bad, no right or wrong. 3. Being with. 4. Accepting that there is nothing we can do about the past. 5. Beyond acceptance is responsibility.

I can relate to that! Have you heard of The Association of Happiness for All Mankind (AHAM)? I hadn't, but that's a great mission statement, encoded right there in the name of the organization. Their page on experience begins:

“Intellectual understanding is not enough, it is only knowing ‘about’ a thing. It is the booby prize. You must experience whatever it is you think you know. Only by thoroughly and completely experiencing your experience will genuine Completion actually occur.” - Arunachala Ramana

There's a ton of hard-to-pronounce words on their site. Must be serious. Finally, speaker and consultant Richard Thieme says:

Understanding how the system works is the booby prize. Using that understanding to make a difference is the prize - and that requires timing and the ability to enter the system, build trust, and use that window of opportunity to intervene in appropriate ways to shift behaviors in desired directions. So energy and information will flow in a way that’s aligned with the leader’s objectives.

Rock on, he said.

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I Love You

March 6, 2006 | Life

A man carried metal, carried gold

Something happened between Thursday lunch and Saturday breakfast. I'm not sure what, though a couple of in-depth conversations undoubtedly assisted. To recap: The week before last was a real bummer, emotionally. February, and all that. Then last week I spent three days immersed in SoL work, a one-day workshop on systems thinking and then two days as recording secretary for the council of trustees. A deep and heartfelt set of meetings, with little time for other thoughts.

By Thursday I knew that I had months of personal work to do; personal mastery would be the Fifth Discipline term, expanded considerably by Robert Fritz in The Path of Least Resistance. I have the Jon Kabat-Zin book to finish and integrate. I have Grady McGonagill's "practice model" inquiry questions to delve into. And I have a lot of other personal inquiry in mind.

Somehow, this quantity of depth work sits well with me right now, unconcerned about "outcomes," or the "future," or the "past." And so by Saturday morning, apparently I was prepared to learn something interesting: If you want to completely clean the living room, the best approach is to rearrange all the furniture.

In my case, I turned the room 90 degrees, with the focal point moving from the west wall to the south window. Move some stuff, vacuum, put the new stuff there. Vacuum the old spot, move some other stuff, vacuum there. Rough out the locations, vacuum the rug, and the back of the rug. Get the tunes running again. Have lunch. Do some minor rearranging. Place some objets d'art. And then vacuum the whole room again as if you haven't done it yet. I tell you, the place looks pretty damn clean after this regimen.

Lynne and I had supper, and fun t'boot. Later that night I did precision loudspeaker alignment, and listened to a few selections. For the first time since I've owned this high-resolution laboratory-quality stereo, I've aimed the speakers inward, toward the center listening spot. In the past I've focused on the width of the stereo image, and have aimed the speakers either straight ahead or slightly outward. This new arrangement is the most intense setup yet. Pointing them inward puts the sound inside your head, and the speakers disappear into the background. The soundstage is narrower, but more focused. Even at very low amplitude (that'd be volume, for you non-technical folks) there is a quality of precision, of the air being liquid, with subtle acoustic vibrations enveloping the listener.

The new furniture arrangement is a little tighter, and forms more of a circle than a rectangle. So when you come into the room to sit down you are effectively "entering a circle." Combined with the new psychoacoustic interiority of the sound system, it's a unique feeling. Very powerful, but light and airy, not heavy.

I spent Sunday sitting in the soundfield, looking out into the blue sky and yellow sun and green trees (instead of the old view, into a mirror showing the staircase behind me). I did Yoga for nearly an hour, and felt great. Laundry, dishwashing. Hung a whiteboard. Made a list of upcoming household errands. Made a meal plan, and a shopping list. Matted a couple of photos. An actual day off - glorious.

Today I started a new morning routine, including taking my tea on the couch, then Yoga, shower, and breakfast, all before computing. When I was shaving I looked up and caught myself with a little smile. "Weird," I thought. Then, a pause, and, "Weird that me smiling is weird."

When we say, "I love you," do we include ourselves?

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Paying Off Debt? You Might Be a Terrorist

March 3, 2006 | Life | People & Society

This is quite something:

The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges' behavior was found questionable....

After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn't changed....

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.

I just did the same thing last week, at about twice the amount. I wonder if I've now hit The List.

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What Is Fun?

March 3, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Dave Pollard: If our job is work, and marriage is work, and recreation is work, when do we have fun?

In nature, children play, breeding adults work, and non-breeding adults do a bit of both. In raven communities, for example, each flock has a breeding pair and a bunch of singles who help protect the breeding pair's young, search for food, connect with other flocks, and otherwise spend their time doing barrel-rolls on roofs, mid-air cartwheels with their talons entwined with each other, mimicking sounds (brilliantly), and, when they're alone, singing to themselves.....

The essence of fun and play is imagination -- and that is not the same thing as creativity. I think we live in a world of enormous imaginative poverty, not because we're incapable of imagination, but because we're badly out of practice....

If we want to relearn how to play, to have real fun -- the kind that is delightful and not merely exhilarating -- we first need to relearn how to imagine, and practice it. The children and animals can show us how.

Good work with which to engage. (Heh.)

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Non-Rolling Stones

March 3, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

Plausible Story kindly contributes to the Interweb with this rock-solid excerpt:

There was a wall in him that no one reached. Not even Clara, though she assumed it had deformed him. A tiny stone swallowed years back that had grown with him and which he carried around because he could not shed it. His motive for hiding it had probably extinguished itself years earlier. . . . Patrick and his small unimportant stone. It had entered him at the wrong time in his life. Then it had been a flint of terror. He could have easily turned aside at the age of seven or twenty, and just spat it out and kept on walking, and forgotten it by the next street corner.

So we are built.

—from Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion

It seems to me that we can take on these stones at any time in life, and they calcify at different rates, and then they are like psychological or spiritual kidney stones, which cause a lot of anguish to eliminate, depending on how long we've held them and how deeply they've calcified. What we need is a selective, fast-acting, stone-melting technology product! ;)

This is probably all too much thought applied to some beautiful poetic prose, but such is the intricate New England stone wall I have built, with the help of many others.

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Hotel Marlowe, Cambridge, MA

March 2, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites | SoL

While I was in Boston (Cambridge), I stayed at the Hotel Marlowe; first time. The Marlowe is part of the Kimpton Group boutique chain - "Every hotel tells a story" - found in all the upscale cities you'd expect. It is very close to the SoL offices, and attached to the Cambridgeside Galleria mall. I had heard from SoL staff that people either love it or hate it, and I can see why, and I love it. The reason I love it is that they are going after an aesthetic. Success or failure, you judge, but they have attempted Hotel As Art.

Things to like:

Leopard-style carpet. How cool is that? Probably done to cope with their pet-friendly policy, but it's a lively change from boring brown.

Cool Leopard-style robes. Use in the room, and optionally purchase upon departure for $120. Wore mine every night and morning. Warm, weird, different.

Free wi-fi throughout the entire building, plus Ethernet in the rooms. This was great, and easy to set up. My only criticism here is that throughput was a paltry 20-30K/sec. Things were kinda pokey; they need a speed upgrade.

Four sampler CDs on the in-room stereo. The labels said, Please enjoy during your stay and leave in the room for the next guest. Hey, no problem, I got iTunes right here. 20 minutes later I have four promotional samplers of music including "Frequent Flyer: Buenos Aires," (2 discs), "Suite Life volume 1," and "Rosa (zipper)." All have multiple bands, and they were all found at Gracenote, so I know that the songs are!

"Om Away From Home" - an 8-panel 4"x4" full-color guide to hotel yoga, produced with Yoga Journal. There's an in-room tee-vee channel with all-day Yoga instruction. They provide a free Yoga Basket for in-room use that includes a mat, strap, block, and free issue of Yoga Journal. You can buy the basket, or have it shipped to your next destination. The guide shows five simple postures that can be done with typical hotel props like a blanket, a side chair, an empty wall, and a carpeted floor. They encourage you to take this with you, so I dropped it in my suitcase and will find it the next time I'm away. Sometimes all you need to get started is a starting point. I found this and the CDs a brilliant way to provide me some real value and remember this chain in the future.

Free wine bar in the lobby from 5-6 PM every day. A red and a white featured wine. Gathering spot, learning moment, socialization opportunity.

"Wines of the World" - a 16-page 3"x6" guide to wines presented by the Kimpton Wine Club. Wine expert Leslie Sbrocco provides comments on two wines per month, which are featured at the free evening wine bar. So now I have this kicking around on the kitchen table, and if any of them catch my interest I can try to track them down. The guide provides URLs for each vinyard, and Kimpton has their own monthly by-mail wine club with three price levels ($29/month to $125/month for two bottles.)

"Kimpton Style" - a style guide cum catalog, where you can buy accessories that style each of their hotels. The catalog is organized by hotel, showing a room and then keying the products to what's in the room. Candles, robes, linens, lamps, pillows, beds(!), plates, glassware, etc. 24 pages, full color.

So I'm walking out of there with four new mix CDs, a hotel yoga guide, wine notes on 24 interesting wines, and a catalog of stuff to buy to reinforce the lifestyle. That is some modern marketing think applied to business-class hotels. These guys have done their homework, and are thinking about the experience beyond the basics.

Anything I didn't like? Well, paying $22.80 for a bowl of oatmeal, three bacon slices, a glass of orange juice, and a cup of green tea is a bit much, don't you think? The $18 hamburger and coke was a stretch too. Their 'net connection was too slow, as noted above. $20 a day for parking is the going rate, but it's annoying.

I was there three nights. Two of those were paid by my hosts. My one night expense, with incidentals for three nights - parking, two meals, taxes - came to $291.07, which can take your breath away. Maybe I'll feel better about the price if I buy some stuff out of their catalog. I'm certainly digging the new music.

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With Heavy Heart

February 26, 2006 | Life | People & Society

I'm with Jon. Sad times. Not clear how to fix it either. What can we each do? Miracles are possible, but not typical. But we don't need typical, we need a transformation. How do we feed the transformation?

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Two Thoughtful and Emotional Blogs

February 24, 2006 | Life

These are making the link rounds, for good reason.

Dear Elana: Parents journal about the sudden death of their six-year old daughter. "Elena was surrounded by her four grandparents in the hospital. Grandparents are not supposed to bury a beautiful six year old. Neither are parents."

Five Reasons to Get Cancer: A Zen practitioner is diagnosed with prostrate cancer. "That moment was the last moment when I hadn’t quite absorbed the news, when I didn’t quite have cancer yet. Afterwards the thing that struck me was the feeling of nakedness with people, of falling into their eyes and swimming in the spaces there. In the end, this intimacy seemed to be more significant than the news about cancer"

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Results of Exercise

February 23, 2006 | Life

I had a physical today, first one in a little over two years. I've been exercising pretty regularly, one to four times a week, for about three months. I'm up to about an hour of cardio per session, and maybe 30-45 minutes of weights, mostly free weights or functional trainers (only occasionally using fixed-position machines). While I feel noticeably better, my objective metrics are eye-opening:

• Blood pressure: 106/62. About a year ago it was 138/86, the highest ever since 2002. The lowest it's ever been since 2002 was 108/80. And I have some stress right now so this is especially good.

• Resting heart rate: 60, vs 84 about a year ago, and 80 two years before that.

• Weight: I've gained about seven pounds, virtually all muscle. I'm not so concerned about my weight, so this doesn't bother me.

This is highly motivating for a non-natural exerciser like me. I need to continue the cardio to burn some more fat, and watch my diet - I think I'm eating more empty calories since I'm so much hungrier - and keep this going until bicycle season gets here. Which, given this so-called winter, may be soon!

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33-Pound Cat with 31-Inch Waist

February 21, 2006 | Life | People & Society

"A 33-pound cat in Qingdao, China, is being described as a "feline monster" because of its 31-inch waist and large size, according to a report. The 9-year-old cat from the Shandong Province is so heavy it needs the help of its owner to get onto a bed. However, the cat is in surprisingly good health despite its weight. The cat's owner said it has no interest in eating fish but prefers to eat six pounds of chicken and pork each day. This fat cat is not alone in his weight problem, according to the report. Obesity has become a serious problem for the modern cat, primarily due to a lack of exercise and a richer diet."

Emphasis added. Reality is looking more and more like The Onion.

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The Least We Can Do

February 21, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Wealth Bondage: "I do wish that liberals were above the fray, presiding over institutions characterized by moderation, fairness, good will, reason and parliamentary procedure. But that is not so. That is what we have lost, or is rapidly slipping away, under pressure from those who have no intentions of compromising with liberals, who indeed bait them, as ineffectual and diffident as they are, and call them traitors. How will we get democracy back, by fighting with one another, left and middle, or by acting like nothing much has happened, just going on working our daily procedures, as Wealth Bondage sets in? For some of us business as usual sets in like death or paralysis, not just in the body politic, but in our most personal inner selves. We become the knave we play as we go along to get along with the intolerable. To dramatize that knavery, our own, the acts in which we are complicit, is the least we can do out of human decency."

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Half-Step

February 21, 2006 | Life

If all you got to live for, is what you left behind

Meanwhile, all this video from the '70s has me wondering about the future. How can I, as Otto Scharmer teaches, learn from the future, instead of the past? There's nothing wrong with the past, but it's not happening in the future. What is?

While pondering that, don't confuse learning from the future with predicting the future. That, as Hunter says, would be pointless:

What's the point to callin shots?
This cue ain't straight in line
Cueball's made of styrofoam
and no one's got the time

"Events in my life suggested to me that maybe it was going to be my responsibility to keep upping the ante. I was in an automobile accident in 1960 with four other guys...ninety plus miles an hour on a back road. We hit these dividers and went flying, I guess. All I know is that I was sitting in the car and there was this...disturbance...and the next thing I was in a field, far enough away from the car that I couldn't see it.

I lost my boots in transit babe, A pile of smoking leather

The car was crumpled like a cigarette pack...and inside it were my shoes. I'd been thrown completely out of my shoes and through the windshield. One guy did die in the group. It was like loosing the golden boy, the one who had the most to offer. For me it was crushing, but I had the feeling that my life had been spared to do something...not to take any bullshit, to either go whole hog or not at all...That was when my life began. Before that I had been living at less than capacity. That event was the slingshot for the rest of my life. It was my second chance, and I got serious."

- Jerry Garcia, quoted in Playing In The Band

Every once in a while, something happens that shakes us into awareness.

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Passion of The Boss

February 21, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

Ever wonder why Bruce Springsteen became so popular? Watch this piece of rock theater and wonder no more. August 15, 1978 at the Capital Center in Landover, MD. An 11-minute impassioned performance of Backstreets. Watch him define the early days of the soft piano intro. Watch as the power ballad takes form.

Listen to a young Bruce sing a story, of younger love, memories of growing up, exploration, yearning. Then betrayal, abandonment, loss. Listen to his voice, soft and then thunderous. Contrast the clear high piano with the distorted grunge guitar. Consider the depth embodied in the song. Wise beyond his years.

Watch the performance take on a dark edge as Bruce improvises around a memory. Watch the close-up, dark eyes doubled with the long-shot bright guitar. Think about Springsteen's quote in the recent Bob Dylan documentary where he says that hearing Dylan sing, such as it was, gave him voice - if Dylan can succeed with his voice, anyone can.

Listen to the compositional structure of Backstreets, how the song changes as they approach the beginning, middle, and end. Listen to the crowd, who know all the lyrics, singing along, powering The Boss and the band in a frantic sweaty dance of mutual elevation. Bruce's shows were longer than the Grateful Dead, even into the '80s. He put out this energy for three or four hours a show, non-stop, for years.

Take a gander at his background: Son of a bus driver and a legal secretary, raised in a tough New Jersey borough, Bruce is an unlikely singer-songwriter, an unlikely star. Not particularly photogenic, a little rough around the edges, but with a guitar and a song all that disappears. Realize when this performance took place in his career: He started performing in late 1969, but didn't form the E Street Band, or record his first album until 1973. This performance is five years after that. Imagine playing a 15,000 or 20,000 seat arena five years after starting out. The drama and passion in this performance shows you why he caught fire. When you have that passion, and a determination, your gift can really shine, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

Hat tip to Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures in NYC, for the link that prompted this brief reverie. You never know where your links are going to come from....

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Unbroken Chain

February 20, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

November and more, as I wait for the score

"Petersen contrasts the unbroken chain of authority, of the preacher and his hounds, of the hypocrisy of religion epitomized by "They say love your brother, but you will catch it when you try," with the unbroken chain of natural existence, of individuals in the world whose conscience is the true authority: 'unbroken chain of you and me.'" (link)

Here's a nice 14 minute version from a Phil Lesh & Friends show I saw in Boston, on December 1, 2005. (Link goes to a 64K mp3 file; there are also higher quality versions available.) There's a pretty hot St. Stephen that follows immediately thereafter, if you want the rock 'n roll closer.

Listening for the secret, searching for the sound. Inquiry and introspection. Asking questions and listening for answers. Secret searching sounds. Sink like a stone, float like a feather. Contradictions. Ambiguity. Holding both at once. Sinking and floating. Feathers, stones.

Unbroken chain of sorrow and pearls
Unbroken chain of sky and sea
Unbroken chain of the western wind
Unbroken chain of you and me

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Nobody Cans Peaches Any More

February 19, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Joe Bageant: Welcome to Middle-Class Lockdown. Wonderful, fantastic, valuable rant:

Joe Bageant's little inner voice is like everyone else's. Whenever I shudder at the condition of the republic, whenever I feel its utter absence of community, it scolds me and tells me I am crazy: Nothing is wrong. This is merely the way things are. It has always been this way. You cannot change that. You expect too much. Look at your wife. She's not upset. She wonders why you cannot just go ahead and be happy. What you see around you is normalcy. Take care of your own family. Relax. Buy something. And I do too. Which is why I own nine guitars, though I can only play one at a time, and even then not very well. The voice made me do it. I was bored.

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Something Happens That Shakes Us Into Awareness

February 19, 2006 | Life | People & Society

via Ashley Cooper at easily amazed: Losing Our Way of Life

One of the books I'm playing in right now is Calling the Circle by Christina Baldwin. This passage brought to mind several conversations I've had with people recently... so I offer it here:

"As we grapple with the awareness that our personal lives cannot be separated from the life of our times, we are forced to reconsider the assumptions, expectations, and values that have guided our lives thus far. One by one by one by one, something happens that shakes us into awareness.

When one vision falls, another vision rises. This is not usually a sudden switch, but a long process of the old paradigm fading away--struggling with itself to let go, subverting new forces, becoming reactionary and rigid exactly because the inevitable is obvious. We are losing our way of life, and we need to lose it, in order not to lose life itself.

... And so the fading of what-is-established gives rise to what-is-possible. The new vision starts to come into focus--struggling with itself to shift from dream to reality, tangential, experiential, a vulnerable and determined seed. We are claiming a more aware way of life, we need our awareness in order to save life itself.

...As our vision of what constitutes successful living shifts from acquisition to accountability, we seek social and spiritual forms that help us address these questions. It is the premise--and the promise--of this book that gathering in peer-led, spirit-centered circles provides such a community forum."

What assumptions, expectations, and values have guided your life thus far?

Which ones might be worth reconsidering?

What are your reflections?

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From The Comments

February 18, 2006 | Life

Chris Corrigan: "I spent the better part of a day cruising through your Zappa post...."

Dude - I'm so sorry! Oh, man, I didn't intend for anyone to actually click all those links - hell, you could get sucked down the rabbit hole spending the better part of A DAY in the Zappa matrix. Be careful out there.

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Baby Snakes

February 18, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

While writing that epic Zappa post a while back, I noticed that I had never watched Baby Snakes. That seemed like an unfortunate oversight, so I ordered up the DVD and watched it this week.

This, gentle reader, is a masterpiece of weird. Officially billed as "A Movie About People Who Do Stuff That Is Not Normal," Baby Snakes celebrates Not Normal and deploys live concert footage, fantastical clay animation, and backstage sophomoric humor to confound the senses and defy categorization. There are long sequences of audience participation on stage, dramatic cinematic interpretations of complex compositions and driving rock beats, an interview with an artist a few peas short of a pod - producing amazing, surreal animations - and rock guitar god tributes. I think Monty Python might have copied the Zappa formula, leaving out the music parts.

In an effort to promote this amazing cinematic accomplishment, I have extracted and posted the 2-minute theatrical trailer (4.8MB .mov file). I encourage you right-click the link (Mac users: Ctrl-click) and download it to your computer in case you want to watch it more than once. Is it worksafe? That's hard to say. It's not obviously un-worksafe, but it's not typical family entertainment. Best to get your own copy to watch in the privacy of your home.

I highly recommend the film; a more unique cultural artifact from 1979 will not be found. I myself hope to watch it several more times with friends, but it's not immediately clear who, exactly, is willing to sit through two hours and forty-five minutes of Intercontinental Absurdities. It's worth it though; it's likely you've never seen anything like this.

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Product Recommendation: 3x5 Blank Index Cards

February 18, 2006 | Life | Products & Opportunites

Somehow, I ran out of index cards at both my house and my office. Life nearly shut down there for a day. The index card has got to be one of the best organizational inventions ever made. I keep a stack next to the phone and another next to my desk. I keep some in my outdoor jacket pockets. I keep a some in my suit coat pockets. I have a nifty leather holder for swank events so that if I take a quick note it looks formal and official.

A 3x5 card is perfect for an errand list. It's great for taking a phone message or leaving a note to someone else. They work pretty well for quickie screen designs, or mini-outlines of project issues. You can hand them out at group events to capture ideas, unless you need stickies for posting. Torn in half it is a great bookmark, and you can use the other half to bookmark the endnotes at the back of the book. Folded in half it fits perfectly in your front shirt pocket or in with your folded paper money in your front pocket. They fit nicely in your passport holder for important notes and numbers you don't want to lose.

If you buy them in bulk they cost about a tenth of a cent apiece. Even at Staples in a pack of 500 they're still less than a penny apiece. I probably use about a thousand a year, so the cost is cheap and the waste is minimal. I prefer the blank ones, freeform on both sides. They look better out in public, and in any case the lines go the wrong way - if lined I would want them horizontal in portrait orientation, not landscape.

If you want to feel truly organized, you can download the free D*I*Y Hipster PDA, which is a series of templates that print calendars, to-do lists, etc on index cards. Hot tip: If you like the 5.5" x 8.5" format, he's got a fantastic set of free templates for that size too. Both of these incorporate ideas from Steven Covey's Seven Habits, and David Allen's Getting Things Done.

Let us celebrate the humble index card! Understated, practical, polyphonically useful multitasking assistant extraordinaire.

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Notio on Technorati

February 17, 2006 | Life | Site Maintenance

I haven't visited the blog search engine Technorati in a dog's age. They had some serious scaling issues a year or two ago, and it was just useless. I don't know why I went to visit yesterday, but the results surprised me.

First of all, they hired a designer, thank god. Second, it was essentially fast enough. I had a couple of searches time out, but it was basically an okay experience. What really got me though, was finding out who is linking to Notio. I was quite surprised. The links are listed by recency, so they may change by the time you visit there, but here's a sampling.

• No surprise on Wealth Bondage. The Tutor and I had a really fun blogging weekend a couple years back, and I have been reading his site since 2003. And he was the genesis for the Giving Conference. So, blog buddy, here's to ya!

• Up A Creek Without A Patl was a surprise, because I didn't know Pat had a blog. And a great name for a blog it is! She's a local tech buddy, who I don't know well, but I hear through the grapevine that she's really good at what she does. I sort of expect to work together on a project at some point, but I don't know why I think that, nor is there any evidence that this is a possibility. But, another subscription for the newsreader!

• Kn@ppster was a total surprise. I've never heard of this site, but he picked up my This Is What's Wrong With The Democrats post on the same day I wrote it. He comments: "Yeah, there's a blogosphere "A-List" (see above), but what the "C-List" is saying may be more important: Notio - 'This is what's wrong with the Democrats,'" and goes on to list a few more sites. Hey, I'll take a C-List blogger ranking any day - thanks!

• There are a bunch of posts on various sites regarding Rails training by Rails core member Marcel Molina, Jr., linking to my post on the Big Nerd Ranch class I attended. Here's an example.

• R Perl's weblog links to my post on Alain de Vulpian and the Process of Civilization. I'm glad that got picked up somewhere - it deserves a wide reading, and I may tackle a longer post on it sometime. InfoDesign and Nicholas Paredes also picked up this post; both are interesting sites.

• Then there are a bunch of spam blogs, that have meaningless sentences strung together, linking to other sites on the 'net. These guys suck, and I'm not linking to them. What a waste of energy. Dudes, go friggin' make something instead of sucking wind out of every one else.

• Of course, I knew that Plausible Story linked here, because Hannah is a local friend and I helped set up her blog. Her site is worth subscribing to, IMHO, for an ambitious attempt at integrating life, fiction, and literary imagination. I wonder if she would agree with this description....

• Chris Corrigan is a friend from the Giving Conference. He was excited that I blogged the Society for Organizational Learning conference in Vienna, Austria. Chris is an excellent role model for how to be in the world, and I hope to visit him on Bowen Island at some point.

• abstractplain I hadn't heard of, but there's some Rails stuff there, as well as other interesting material. (S)he picked up on my science and technology category, which I haven't actually updated in a while.

• Ted Ernst is another Giving Conference buddy. He's a frequent commenter here at Notio, which is amazing since there's a bug in my comment form making people enter their info every time, and blocking even the most frequent contributors until I approve each comment, time after time.

• Michael Herman coordinated the Giving Conference with The Happy Tutor, and works frequently with Chris Corrigan. Another good role model, and it's amazing how influential that conference was in my future.

• That epic Zappa post I wrote a while back got picked up on Kill Ugly Radio, so that's cool. For some reason, duh, I had no idea that there was a whole network of Zappa fan sites.

All in all, it's pretty interesting who's linking here. Thanks for your support!

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Broken In Two, Yet Still Functioning

February 15, 2006 | Life

This is a telephone pole on Route 120 near East Plainfield, NH. I noticed it Monday on my drive to work - it hasn't changed all week. You'd think that a sight like this would generate some attention from repairpeople. But apparently it's okay; just put up a couple of warning cones and I guess everything will work itself out eventually.

If you drive by this a couple of times a day for a week, you start to think about things. There are plenty of products, or companies for that matter, that are broken, yet somehow still function. Or relationships - you can imagine a relationship that is broken in two yet still survives. It could stay this way for a long time. People might look at it funny every once in a while, but eventually it too fades into the background and looks normal. But sooner or later the ground will erode, or the supports will rot, or the weight of the ice on the lines will be too much to bear, or another truck will smash into it, and then you notice it's broken for real - usually observed with a loss of electricity, or a loss of communication lines.

Based on this photo, I'd say it's hard to tell when something is broken yet functioning vs. broken for real. You put up your warning cones, you call the repairpeople, and you wait to see what happens.

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Opening, Awakening, Listening, Offering

February 15, 2006 | Life

My friend Ashley posted a nice poem today, inspired by a post (and comments) titled "Free speech, responsible listening" over at my other friend Chris Corrigan's blog. I met them both at the Giving Conference a couple of years ago, and I'm glad I did.

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Crashing in Bolivia

February 15, 2006 | Life | Nature & Environment | People & Society

My college buddy Allan Karl has a hair-raising tale of his motorcycle accident in Bolivia, and getting his sorry butt back to the States.

In a state somewhere between awake and sleep three hours had passed. The rain, thunder and lightning added dramatic effect to my sprawled body with my left leg in a cardboard box splint as I laid in the Tica Tica medical clinic. Still no ambulance. In a town with one telephone, one restaurant and no motel I wondered if I'd ever get out of Tica Tica.

Many amazing photos - if nothing else you should scan the site for the photos. And if you have time to read about medical treatment in the middle of nowhere, you are in for some good reading.

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Your Song

February 14, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

I sat on the roof and kicked off the moss

As we were finishing dinner at Molly's tonight Elton John's Your Song came over the Musak. It's one of the sappiest songs ever written. On the other hand, it's one of the best love songs ever. I've thought about it both ways many times over the years.

But hearing it tonight got me thinking about junior high, when I played it on acoustic guitar supporting the chorus at the Opera House. I think John Nichols, my instructor, might have been playing piano. It was a big deal, no doubt about it, and I must have rehearsed that song dozens of times in the weeks leading up to the performance. I knew every note, every vocal inflection, every nuance - I probably could have played the song backwards.

The performance went well, as I recall. I was nervous, being a shy introvert. But I was also the best guitar player in the school system at the time. So I just did what I could do, which happened to be better than anyone expected, which turns out to be a winning formula.

I remember at one of the dress rehearsals I was standing there in the front with my guitar strapped on, and Mr. Nichols was talking to the chorus. Chris D. was horsing around, and knocked the piano, where Mr. Nichols' vintage Martin guitar was leaning. The guitar started to slide to the floor, and you could hear the whole chorus take a breath, and I reached over and grabbed the neck, saving the guitar. Mr. Nichols calmly thanked me, put the guitar in its case, expressed his fury by telling Chris to cut the shit (a major word to use in front of 60 junior high schoolers) and reminded Chris that I had saved his life. I think people were pretty focused the rest of the rehearsal.

At some point later that year, or early the next, Mr. Nichols told me he had taught me everything he knew about the guitar, and now it was up to me to practice, learn songs, and go to the next level. That was pretty much the end of my playing guitar. Though I still own two, and hack on them now and again, I wish I had continued to play and hadn't given it up for synthesizers, tape decks, and mixing consoles. I didn't play as well as Jimi Hendrix was all I knew, so why bother trying. Had I only heard Joni Mitchell, Crosy, Stills, Nash & Young, American Beauty, Workingman's Dead, or any of a hundred other folk rock tunes I would have realized that I could play in that style as well as any 13-year old kid alive, and I might have continued.

This would be an easy place to blame my parents for not encouraging or insisting that I continue, but what can you do with a teenager?

During my freshman year at college, I had come home to visit and heard Mr. Nichols was ill - some sort of cancer is what I remember, but I could be wrong. He was teaching sixth grade music, and I went over to visit in the middle of the school day. Just walked into the classroom, and said Hi. He had the class practice some exercises, and we talked for five or ten minutes. He was pleased to see me, and I thanked him for being such a big influence in my life - I still loved music, and I wished I played more, but his four years of lessons were an important part of my life. He didn't mention that he was ill, but I think we both knew why I was there. He smiled when we were wrapping up, and I remember he gave me a hug when I was leaving. I left thinking that I should really pick up the guitar again, a thought that still runs through my mind every few years.

I've only thought about Mr. Nichols, his Back 40 String Band, and the accomplishment of playing Your Song perfectly in front of a few hundred parents and peers a few times since then. Funny that an "okay" dinner with lots of sappy early '70s songs would be the trigger to bring it all back, but that's the magic of music.

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No Comments Yet?

February 9, 2006 | Life | Site Maintenance

Whenever I post at Notio, (using MarsEdit, natch) I visit the website to verify that it's on the air. For some reason, every time, I say to myself, "No comments yet?"

Is that crazy or what? Talk about narcissism. The post has been alive for less than ten seconds and I'm wondering where the comments are? Last week, four people said to me, "Well, it's okay to be self-absorbed sometimes." I took this free ride on the cluetrain as a suggestion, ever so subtle, that I was being self-absorbed. Thank goodness for friends, who can both helpfully point out and willingly accept your flaws, at least for a time.

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Jack of All Trades, Master of None

February 8, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites | SoL

A business colleague whom I met at a SoL gathering emailed asking if I or anyone I knew would be qualified and interested in presenting his seminar for 5-7 days in May and June. I sent a bio, CV, and selected projects list. The response (in part):

Wow! Talk about diversity! Clearly you are virtually undefinable.

Taking it as a compliment, I asked if I could use his quote in my media kit. What the heck - if people can't figure out what you do, you can at least have good marketing.

Question: Correct use of 'whom' in the first sentence? Answer: Yes. Details in the comments.

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Visions of Johanna

February 7, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life

We see this empty cage now corrode

The students are building a snow sculpture for winter carnival. I wish I had my camera with me. Takes dedication, since they have to truck the snow in from who knows where - the mountains, I guess. So they have scaffolding, ladders, plywood frames, etc., all holding this big hunk of fragile snow in place so they can carve it into some sort of character. It sits in the middle of the brown grassy quad - the so-called "green" - a monument to white, to what might have been, to winter carnival's past, to what could be, if we only work hard enough, build it up from scratch, carve off what we don't need, and turn it into something beautiful, or at least sustainable.

"Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial"

I wonder if it's fun. Could be, I suppose. Certainly a challenge. It might create a feeling of accomplishment, if they can make it work. Unless the temperature goes to 45 degrees again and it all melts into the mud. Odds are probably 50/50, given the recent history.

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Fire On The Mountain

February 6, 2006 | Life

Almost aflame still you don't feel the heat

Back from Boston. 28 degrees; road frozen with deep ruts. Cat annoyed that I was away for 30 hours. Won't be the last time.

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Simple Twist of Fate

February 5, 2006 | Life

He woke up, the room was bare

I consoled myself about the weather by getting a car wash. No danger of the doors and windows freezing. Turboglacier: "New England, weather-wise, is currently an unacceptable, unholy mess."

Lynne's been in Chicago. She called yesterday while I was out. Got the message at midnight. Called back after I woke up, and the power had come back on, but she was at the workshop. Went about my day. Stopped at the gas station to check the tire pressure (good thing, too). While I was out of the car for five minutes I missed her call on the cell. Called back, wasn't there, left a message. Started driving to Boston. Stopped in Manchester. Was out of the car for five minutes in the restroom and vending area, and again missed her call. Called back but she had left for dinner. 'Twasn't meant to be, apparently. Blame it on a simple twist of fate.

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Crass Rant vs Eloquent Reflection

February 5, 2006 | Life

Unbeknownst to me, another local blogger and friend was writing a much more eloquent post about the weather, the same day I was. Whereas I was crass, frustrated, and blunt, Hannah was nuanced, reflective, and subtle. She even cites actual data! Yes, ten to twelve degrees F warmer than normal seems about right. I think we both agree it's a bummer, even if we don't speak the same language.

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Mission In The Rain

February 4, 2006 | Life

Everything you gather is just more that you can lose

Made it home through the mud. It's 38 degrees and pouring rain outside. I approached the muddy section of the road on the left side, knowing that near midnight - or nearly any other time of day - the chances of another car on my road were slim. The first thing that happened was I slid sideways toward Marilyn's mailbox and as I steered to the right, I hit a huge puddle full of mud and it covered my windshield with thick brown mud. I couldn't see until I hit the wipers and they took a swipe or two. By then I had been pulled into a rut near the middle of the road and had to gun it pretty hard not to sink in. Plowed through that stretch and everything was okay. This stuff is rough on passenger cars. I'm the only one for for a mile in any direction without a four-wheel drive truck, and mostly you only really need them a week or two a year. But this would be one of those weeks. I can park at the neighbors, but who wants to walk home half a mile through eight inches of mud and the pouring howling windy rain at midnight?

"Tomorrow will be Sunday, born of rainy Saturday."

Met four new people tonight, and got better acquainted with three others I already knew. Lots of jokes and banter - I haven't laughed that much in months. And I forgot how amazingly yummy a multi-ingrediant fresh vegetable soup can be! Friends in a New England winter: keeps the place habitable, I tell 'ya.

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Let's Talk About the Weather

February 4, 2006 | Life | Travel

Or, better, let's bitch about it. We owe it to ourselves – it's February, and it's 45 degrees again. If it had been below freezing yesterday we would have two feet of new snow. Instead, inches of rain. My dirt road is a real mess, and when I go out to see friends tonight I'm wondering if I'll get back without a long walk and a tow truck. More rain scheduled for tonight, and tomorrow. Sigh.

Growing up, two hours south of here in Connecticut, I remember building snow forts that I could stand up in, during Thanksgiving weekend! I don't think you could have built a fort at all for the past several years. I was so looking forward to skiing this winter, but it's hard to get excited about skiing for the first time in 26 years when it looks like April in January and February. [Plus, I can't believe I'm so old that I can write about something I did 26 years ago. That has its own grim reality.]

I can't be the only one around here thinking about this. Nobody I know has been complaining about it much, maybe because it's so obviously crazy – why bother? But I for one am ready for a few cold, crisp, blue-sky and yellow-sun days, after a couple of big monster dumpings of snow, where I can snowshoe, take a ski lesson, and revel in the beauty of frozen ice crystals. Until then, we're just slogging though the mud up here, and I'm browsing places that have 1) more urban culture, and 2) better weather.

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Gaston Bachelard: Subversive Humanist

February 4, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

Well, it's been over 16 hours, and no one has taken up the "Dreams vs. Hope" challenge. Granted, the first eight of those hours would have been "Friday night after work" and in my heart of hearts I know that not all of my readers are rushing home to check in on the Notio Inquiry. And then the next eight hours were after midnight, or early Saturday morning, and most people were sleeping, at least euphemistically.

So I guess it's up to me to rise to the occasion and consider this question.

As we've seen, Thich Nhat Hanh believes hope is an obstacle. I resonated with this when I read it ten years ago, and I resonate with it today. Which is not to say I'm not a hopeful person - but perhaps "hopeful" is best thought of as "optimistic." At least most of the time, modulo the human condition.

Gaston Bachelard was a postal clerk who eventually rose to teach at the Sorbonne. I understand Bachelard primarily through the vectors of phenomenology, the rehabilitation of imagination, poetics, and especially reverie, even though his oeuvre is grounded in epistemology and the history of scientific thought. Mary McAllester Jones writes:

Bachelard was always a polemical thinker, believing, as he declared in La Philosophie du non (1940), that "two people must first contradict each other if they really wish to understand each other. Truth is the child of argument, not of fond affinity."

Bachelard likes to describe himself very simply as a reader, not out of intellectual laziness or false modesty, but because of what happens when he reads: "is not the reader's imagination...revealed to be purely and simply the movement of quickly changing images?" and more strikingly, "it would seem that the reader is called upon to continue the writer's images; he is aware of being in a state of open imagination." Reading poetic images brings us "the experience of openness, of newness," new images, new language, new possibilities in the world and in ourselves. What [Bachelard] brings to it is an attitude of mind, a willingness to accept and not reduce complexity, to take reading a poem seriously, as an aspect of our relationship with something other than ourselves.

What Bachelard reads is images, not ideas. In his first books, these are images of fire, water, air, and earth; later they are images of space - cellars and attics, shells, corners, the cosmos; and then in his last book, images of a candle flame. He reads material and dynamic images, neither perceptual nor rational, nor expressive of lived experience, images which are written, which are in and through language. He modifies and subverts Freud, and eventually, in his second series of books on poetry (1957-61), he rejects psychoanalysis, preferring phenomenology. He does so because psychoanalysis is reductive; it reduces images to the unconscious, the unconscious to lived experience, to infantile social experience in particular. Bachelard modifies Freud by making the source of poetic images not the unconscious ... but rather what he calls an "intermediate zone" on the threshold of consciousness and thought. Bachelard's material images, in which man and matter are conjoined, spring from "the zone of material reverie that precedes contemplation."

In 1957 Bachelard turns from psychoanalysis to phenomenology precisely because this offers a better account of reading. However, he modifies Husserl as he did in his work on science, insisting on the dynamic relationship between subject and object, so that the reader's consciousness is changed by what he reads.

- Gaston Bachelard, Subversive Humanist, Texts and Readings (1991)

So when Bachelard says

We can accomplish nothing good against our will, that is to say, against our dreams. The oneirism of work is the very condition of the worker's mental integrity.

he is trying to infuse all of our activities, all of our lives, with an endless joy in making images as we make the world. It is not just what the reader reads, but what the person does - every moment is an opportunity to infuse our living with dynamic images, allowing our imagination to lead us, as it reacts with where we are, what we are doing, and recursively, what we are imagining.

This is much different that the idle longing of hope. When I think of "one who is hopeful," I think of passive daydreams, infused not so much with possibility, probability, or even plausibility, as with an idealized and disconnected image of perfection. In this perfect hopeful world, things work out according to the script in our heads, driven by our previous experiences and infantile impressions created in our family of origin. In this way, hope is aligned with psychoanalysis in Bachelard's view - reductionist, limiting, and of the past, not the future.

Instead, by living in the moment, by paying attention to the images we create as we work, as we read, as we dream, as we meditate - as we live - we draw our consciousness every moment toward the larger sphere of the infinite. We are not reducing the possibilities to fit our notio, we are alive in the openness of all possibilities. We then react and respond to these images both imaginatively and materially. We are changed by what we read, and also by what we imagine. We observe phenomenologically, and we then observe how our observation changes. Even as we "cram the oven with shovels-full of coal," and "challenge the oven to a duel of energy." The result: "To participate no longer in heat as a state but in heat as growth, to assist enthusiastically the becoming of its growth."

In this, Bachelard gestures toward David Bohm's work on the dynamic aspects of soma-significant and signa-somatic implicate and explicate orders of meaning-making in quantum physics. But that's a reading for another day.

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The Reciprocity of Dream and Work

February 3, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

What would a week of philosophical and psychological inquiry be without a bit of Bachelard? This excerpt is originally from La Terre et les reveries de la volonte, translated by Colette Gaudin in a volume titled On Poetic Imagination and Reverie:

If, passively, as an idle visitor, you find yourself in the stifling atmosphere surrounding a china kiln, then the anguish of heat takes hold of you. You retreat. You do not want to look any longer. You are afraid of the sparks. You think it is hell.

Nevertheless, move closer. Take on in your imagination the work of the artisan. Imagine yourself putting the wood into the oven: cram the oven with shovels-full of coal, challenge the oven to a duel of energy. In short, be ardent and the ardor of the hearth will shoot its arrows in vain against your chest; you will be invigorated by the struggle. The fire can only return your blows. The psychology of opposition invigorates the worker. [...]

To participate no longer in heat as a state but in heat as growth, to assist enthusiastically the becoming of its growth – its active, qualifying quality – grants immunity against the very excesses of fire. The worker is no longer the servant of fire, he is its master. [...]

Take away dreams and you stultify the worker. Leave out the oneiric forces of work and you diminish, you annihilate the artisan. Each labor has its oneirism, each material worked on contributes to inner reveries. Respect for deep psychological forces must lead us to keep the oneirism of work safe from any harm. We can accomplish nothing good against our will, that is to say, against our dreams. The oneirism of work is the very condition of the worker's mental integrity.

Exercise for the reader: Reconcile Bachelard's requirement for dreams with Thich Nhat Hanh's recommendation to avoid hope.

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Big Life Lesson #1

February 3, 2006 | Life

This diagram seems pretty pertinent.

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Update on Blog Comments

February 3, 2006 | Life | Site Maintenance

My aggressive approach to comment spam is having some short-term side effects. There have been a few comments this week that have been snagged by the filter, and I had to tell it to "trust this commenter" and to mark it as "not junk." Then the comments get posted. Hopefully if this happens to you it will only happen once. If I am not careful in scanning my junk folder (about 500 junk comments a day, thank you comment-spam scum) then it's possible I might delete a comment. If this happens to you, my apologies. We don't censor here at Notio, but we do make mistakes. Ask anyone we know!

Catching up on responses:

Chris: I do little food shopping outside the Coop, so virtually all cookie recommendations will be found on their shelves.

Hilllady: I almost took a swipe at the Enneagram, but it was late and I couldn't find my copy of the book. Plus, I didn't want to muddy the waters after working so hard to clarify the situation.

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Fallible Signs

February 3, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Jim Holt:

Turing did [see] a Jungian analyst and developed a taste for Tolstoy, but neither is an infallible sign of madness.

– Code Breaker, The life and death of Alan Turing, The New Yorker, February 6, 2006

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Learning to Love Again

February 2, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Wendy Brown, via Long Sunday:

We have to learn to love again. We also have to recognize that the ‘we’, the ‘I’, who will be doing that loving, if it is still committed, if there is some continuity in the cares that it has for a humanity that is in some way governing itself, as opposed to being run by a power larger than itself, the ‘we’ that loves again will be a different ‘we’ than the one we are.

She's talking about the "prospect of replacing capitalism with another social and economic form." But you knew that.

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Marriage (As A Dada Concept)

February 2, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society

I wondered what Frank Zappa had to say about marriage. After all, he and Gail were notoriously devoted to each other, and they were married from 1966 though Frank's death in 1993. They raised four interesting children with unique names (Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet Rodan, and Diva), and they ran a business together, with Frank writing, recording, editing, and mastering music, and Gail manufacturing, promoting, and distributing it. They seemed to have it all worked out.

So I pulled down his autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book, and there's a whole chapter on the subject! Here are a few choice nuggets:

This division of labor works best when we see each other the least. Don't get the wrong idea from that - Gail is also my best friend. If you can't be friendly with your spouse, it's not going to be much fun to live together. Friendship (let's get maudlin now) is a very important dimension. I think that a marriage without friendship has to be pretty dreadful.

Gail has said in interviews before that one of the things that makes our relationship work is the fact that we hardly ever get to talk to each other.

We talk about business when we have to, but the rest of the time we don't talk at all. The other factor that has kept things interesting is that when I'm touring - which has been almost every year since we got married except 1984-1987 - I am gone from the house six months out of the year.

Even when I'm not touring, our work keeps us on different schedules. The Cottage Industry - getting out records, tapes, CDs, and videos, the mail order business and everything that entails - is sufficiently complicated that, in order to handle all the chores, I have to work the night shift and she has to work the day shift. We see each other on the edges when the shifts change.

If I worked the same hours she does, nothing could get done. Gail has to be awake during the day because the kids have to go to school and she has to handle the telephone. My schedule sort of twirls around the clock. I can't stay on nights all the time because every night I work an extra hour or so, editing, or recording, or on the Synclavier, or, presently, on this fucking book - pushing it a little later each night - but then, once I go to sleep, I want to grab eight or ten hours, and so my "day" keeps changing around. Every three of four weeks I'm back on daylight - and I dread it, because I can't get anything done. The phone rings all the time. All those questions Gail was dealing with when I was sleeping on the day shift, now I have to answer - live, in person. I can't edit - I can't write - I can't do anything because of the constant interruptions.

So there you have it. One perspective on a successful marriage. I wondered what Gail had to say about it, and found this interview from 1997:

SECONDS: When you saw him, you knew he was the one.

GZ: I heard a chorus of voices and they said, "This is it."

SECONDS: He was a sex symbol in those days, if I'm not mistaken.

GZ: I think you're into some fantasy. I never thought of him as a sex symbol. Frank promoted himself and the band as a bunch of ugly guys who played fantastic music. [...]

SECONDS: When Moon was born, did Frank become more of a homebody?

GZ: He was extremely prolific and he always enjoyed working on his craft. He became more financially able to explore different ways of recording and different musical ideas. It's expensive to be a composer and Rock & Roll is what paid for his habit. It was a by-product of his real interest -- writing music. Both Frank and I are straight-ahead and conservative in terms of what we consider the appropriate way to raise a family and conduct a stable environment. [...]

SECONDS: Hmmm ... in conclusion, what was the funniest thing that ever happened between you and Frank?

GZ: We got married and managed to stay together for twenty-eight-and-a-half years. That's the joke.

We'll take that as confirmation of a happy partner!

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Feeback to Notio

February 2, 2006 | Life | Site Maintenance

Email from Chris:

Subject: Your post
Chris: Wow. You topped yourself. ;)

Notio: Uh, which one? I've been a little over the top in general....

Chris: The one that wasn't english. With all the abbreviations. That you edited today, perhaps for clarity, though I couldn't tell... ;)

Notio: Blame it on the cookies!

Chris: Seriously, you're going off the deep end. It's fantastic.

(I love my readers.)

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Jung's Typology vs. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

February 1, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Yesterday's Singer quote on intuition and feeling generated some confusion because she (interpreting Jung) says feeling is a judging process. But, but - but, if the MBTI is based on Jung's typology, why does it consider feelings as a separate function from judging? Wha'sup wit dat? Here are the differences between Jung's types and the MBTI:

In Jung's types, intuition and sensation are considered perceiving functions. Thinking and feeling are are functions that process information, and to do so certain judgments must be made. So Jung has the two attitudes - introversion and extroversion (which are also commonly misunderstood), and the four functions - intuition, sensation, thinking, and feeling. This gives eight cognitive modes: IT, ET, IF, EF, II, EI, IS, and ES. No one abbreviates them in Jung's world, I do so for brevity.

In the MBTI, they attempt to identify the dominant function and a secondary function by adding the dimension of perception vs. judging. So the MBTI has four polar dimensions - introversion vs. extroversion, intuitive vs. sensing, feeling vs. thinking, and perception vs. judging. This gives 16 modes: ISTJ, ISTP, ISFP, ISFJ, INTJ, INTP, INFP, INFJ, ESTJ, ESTP, ESFP, ESFJ, ENTJ, ENTP, ENFP, ENFJ. Everyone abbreviates these in the MBTI world, I do so for consistency.

Note that the Keirsey Temperament Sorter uses the same terminology as MBTI, but is based on different conclusions as to what factors go towards what outcomes. I don't know what to say about that, except consultants typically need unique selling propositions.

Jung is the primary source material here. It's not clear to me what benefit is derived from breaking out another dimension in the MBTI, especially when experience demonstrates that people who are grounded (or drowning, as the case may be) in their feelings do have the judgmental characteristics that Singer relates. [Did you know INFP's could make such judgmental statements?] I find it more useful to study Jung, which has the depth, if not the concision. Many people are critical of the MBTI because it is not a highly repeatable test - people can change results just by taking the test again. In fact, I typically test as an INTJ, but today I tested as an INFP. Is this a situational change, a long-term change, or a fluke? Hard to tell.

There is another take on personality types in the workplace which I have sometimes found useful: Social Style/Management Style - Developing Productive Work Relationships, by Robert Bolton and Dorothy Grover Bolton. Their book outlines four styles which they call Amiables, Analyticals, Expressives, and Drivers. The helpful teaching here is learning how to "flex" your own style to adapt to the other person. The advantage of this model is that with only four types you can build a 2x2 matrix, a favorite of consultants the world over. This means it's a bit simpler, and you can quickly explain it to someone unfamiliar with the material in a coaching situation. It doesn't have the depth of Jung or the breadth of the MBTI, but it's a reasonable if simplistic model.

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Hope as an Obstacle

February 1, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Thich Nhat Hanh:

Hope is important, because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. But that is the most that hope can do for us - to make some hardship lighter. When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic. Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future, that we will arrive at peace, or the Kingdom of God. Hope becomes a kind of obstacle. If you can refrain from hoping, you can bring yourself entirely into the present moment and discover the joy that is already here.

Enlightenment, peace, and joy will not be granted by someone else. The well is within us, and if we dig deeply in the present moment, the water will spring forth. We must go back to the present moment in order to be really alive. When we practice conscious breathing, we practice going back to the present moment where everything is happening.

Western civilization places so much emphasis on the idea of hope that we sacrifice the present moment. Hope is for the future. It cannot help us discover joy, peace, or enlightenment in the present moment. Many religions are based on the notion of hope, and this teaching about refraining from hope may create a strong reaction. But the shock can bring about something important. I do not mean that you should not have hope, but that hope is not enough. Hope can create an obstacle for you, and if you dwell in the energy of hope, you will not bring yourself back entirely into the present moment. If you re-channel those energies into being aware of what is going on in the present moment, you will be able to make a breakthrough and discover joy and peace right in the present moment, inside of yourself and all around you.

- Peace Is Every Step (1991)

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Product Recommendation: Champion Chip Cookies

February 1, 2006 | Life | Products & Opportunites

Possibly the best mass-market cookie ever: Newman's Own Organics Champion Chip Cookies. Specifically, the Double Chocolate Mint Chip. (Mint Flavored Chocolate Chip Cookies with Chocolate Morsels.) At just two inches diameter - they're so cute! - you can eat dozens and not realize it. Great for all-night blogging!

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Intuition vs. Feeling

January 31, 2006 | Life | People & Society

From Boundaries of the Soul:

Intuition is the perceiving function that sees things whole, or in the broad context. It grasps the big picture and also sees the implications. When it looks at something, it imagines where it came from and how it arrived at this place. It looks for antecedents, for history, for broad general trends. It also speculates about the future, asking, where is this going? And perhaps, what is most important, intuition asks, what are the possibilities of what I am seeing?

Feeling is a judging process, but it operates quite differently from thinking to achieve its ends. Feeling depends upon a personal or subjective value system - there is something conscious or unconscious, against which objective reality is measured. Feeling operates with spontaneity, responding directly to a situation before analyzing its many aspects to determine its worth or usefulness. Feeling says, I like that, or, that will never do. [...] People with strong feeling functions base their responses to a situation on their sense of what is right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, urgent or not urgent, or any other criteria by which something may be judged.

- June Singer (1972, 1994)

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Tear Up Notio!

January 31, 2006 | Life | Software

Grab the chainsaw, express your inner anger, and tear up Notio!

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Love Requires Depth

January 31, 2006 | Life | People & Society

From The Love Problem of the Student:

Love requires depth and loyalty of feeling; without them it is not love but mere caprice. [...] Every true and deep love is a sacrifice. The lover sacrifices all possibilities, or rather, the illusion that such possibilities exist. If this sacrifice is not made, his illusions prevent the growth of any deep and responsible feeling, so that the very possibility of experiencing real love is denied. Love has more than one thing in common with religious faith. It demands unconditional trust and expects absolute surrender. Just as nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to God can partake of divine grace, so love reveals its highest mysteries and its wonder only to those who are capable of unqualified devotion and loyalty of feeling. And because this is so difficult, few mortals can boast of such an achievement. But, precisely because the truest and most devoted love is also the most beautiful, let no man seek to make it easy. He is a sorry knight who shrinks from the difficulty of loving his lady. Love is like God: both give themselves only to their bravest knights.

Love is not cheap - let us therefore beware of cheapening it! All our bad qualities, our egotism, our cowardice, our worldly wisdom, our cupidity - all these would persuade us not to take love seriously. But love will reward us only when we do. I must even regard it as a misfortune that nowadays the sexual question is spoken of as something distinct from love. The two questions should not be separated, for when there is a sexual problem it can be solved only by love. Any other solution would be a harmful substitute. Sexuality dished out as sexuality is brutish; but sexuality as an expression of love is hallowed. Therefore, never ask what a man does, but how he does it. If he does it from love or in the spirit of love, then he serves a god; and whatever he may do is not ours to judge, for it is ennobled.

- C. G. Jung (1928)

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Expressing Anger

January 31, 2006 | Life

Three of my women friends think I'm not expressing my anger. As a self-identified pacifist, this is somewhat amusing. It first came up a few years ago too, in a series of conversations that went something like this:

"You should express your anger more."

"Uh, could you re-phrase that as an 'I statement?'"

"I think you should express your anger more."

"I'm not angry."

"Everyone is angry."

"Well, learning to process anger without acting out and affecting others might be considered a positive step in human evolution."

"But you must be angry."

"Sometimes, but I try to avoid it."

"You shouldn't avoid feelings."

"I have lots of feelings, I just don't necessarily feel a need to amplify all of them."

"I think it would be good for our relationship if you were more able to express your anger."

"Um, I'm not sure I want a relationship where anger is a required amplification. I don't want to be walking around looking for ways to be angry all the time, especially as a way to validate that we have a 'good relationship.'"

"Well, you don't have to look for it, it's always there."

"Um, this is sounding like projection to me. Feel free to express your anger. But don't rely on me to express it for you."

"I'm not talking about me."

"I see that as the problem with this discussion."

"Why don't you want to express your anger."

"I'm not feeling angry, for starters."

"But you must have feelings."

"Yes, plenty, thanks. But I've been working for years to highlight positive reinforcement feelings - like love, for instance - and minimize negative reinforcement ones. The fact that I might express anger only occasionally, and do it without yelling, throwing things, or punching people is something I see as a benefit to both myself and humanity, thank you very much. Actually, this conversation is making me angry. Are we starting to meet your goals yet?"

"I don't see why you're angry at me. Anyway, it's not my goal, I just think it would be healthy."

"This is a really good song; do you mind if I crank this up?"

Clearly this is a deep topic, and I don't mean to trivialize it with the fictionalized dialogue above. But as a male raised in the '70s and in college during the '80s, you might forgive me if the culture at the time did not exactly take kindly to angry men. We were brought up to be sensitive, to be nice to people, to look for the good in others (despite my capital-J judgmental nature), and most of all - once we got to therapy in the '90s - to not "act out."

The result? Here are some ways I express anger: Tone of voice; modulating loudness of voice; tree cutting and brush clearing; playing loud music; shoveling snow; cleaning; intellectualizing; sulking; writing; meditating; yoga; exercising. There are probably some other ways that escape me in my insomnia.

I probably have more work to do in this area. But I find it ironic after all the cultural conditioning I've experienced that not being angry enough is viewed as a problem. One might think, given the state of the world - with road rage, bankrupting wars of choice, suicide bombers, heroin in the high schools, etc. - that a little quiet indignation would be appreciated as appropriate behavior.

Maybe what I need are a couple of tattoos and a roaring Harley-Davidson, to prove that I'm pissed.

Update: I'm looking for book citations on this topic, if you have any recommendations.

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Rapport vs. Communication

January 30, 2006 | Life | People & Society

Good Marshall McLuhan quote from Richard Cavell's McLuhan In Space.

Communication, in the conventional sense, is difficult under any conditions. People prefer rapport through smoking or drinking together. There is more communication there