Recently in memes Category

Levi Asher tagged me with a meme, according to which I am to list the first sentence of the first post of each month for the past year. I’m game:

• January: “The talented Lisa Williams has launched Placeblogger” (Local blogging gets a site)
• February: “Grab your preferred username at Useless Account before someone else does!” (Signing up for the sake of signing up)
• March: “This story (Open Call From the Patent Office) suggest that a breath of fresh air may be entering the patent-review process” (Open sourcing the patent process)
• April: “What knowledge would be lost to the company if I were to leave tomorrow? What do I know that I have done a thousand times that I think everyone already knows?” (Pattern Mining)
• May: “Hmm, those options have an excluded middle.” (Answering danah’s twitter questions)
• June: “Over on the Well, in the public Inkwell topic, I’m interviewing my pal Nick Meriwether about his new book, All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead, a scholarly work looking at the Dead phenomenon from a variety of perspectives.” (I’m interviewing Nicholas Meriwether)
• July: “If you missed Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Privacy, and Reputation last March at South By here’s your chance to hear me, Ted Nadeau, Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Hodder, and George Kelly take on these topics, very early one Sunday morning after an untimely daylight savings change and, for many people, a night of carousing and drinking free drinks sponsored by startups and web behemoths.” (Podcast of my sxsw panel is now live)
• August: “Three jobs I have held: vendor at Yankee stadium, freelance legal summarizer, assistant sexton” (Three things about me you may not have known)
• September: “23. Write lots of numbered lists.” (35 ways to draw more readers to your blog - a series)
• October: “Since I started at Yahoo my workaday routine involves riding a shuttle from Oakland to Sunnyvale with a big laptop computer crammed on my lap so I can work, browse the net, or as I’ve been doing lately, blog.” (Can I blog from my iPhone?)
• November: “I’m feeling a bit under the weather, fighting off some kind of bug.” (Stumbling out of the gate)
• December: “Get salad greens and heirloom tomatoes at the farmer’s market at Splash Pad park” (Things to done)

I’ll pass this meme contagion along by infecting So-called Bill, Cecil, Leisa, Woody, and Christina.

The big version of the human calendar is amazing!

The portable version is kind of cool too.

From Craig Griffen, who also brought you the human clock.

Michael Wesch, who created the virally popular internet video called Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us (its success drew on a sort of meta-application of the very concepts it discussed), was the keynote speaker at IDEA 2007 last week. As part of his keynote, he previewed two videos he has now released to the web.

The first, Information R/evolution, examines the challenges we all face in this age of information glut and shortening attention spans:

The second, made collaboratively by one of his classes (Wesch is a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, where he is launching a Digital Ethnography working group to “examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction”), looks carefully at how we are teaching today and how out of sync it has become with the lives of contemporary students:

In some ways, for me, the highlight of the conference was Wesch’s story about how he frightened himself one night in the communal sleeping quarters in New Guineau when he thought his own arm, which had fallen asleep, was a snake lying across his body. This story became the kernel of Wesch’s reputation with the people he was studying and living among, and helped him realize that telling stories is a big part of how we gain identities and fit ourselves (and others) into society.

This is a quandary for me. I try to keep my LinkedIn network literally to people I know and have worked with or with whose work I am familiar. From what I can see, you seem like an excellent person to know, I’m flattered that you enjoy my posts on that list, and I appreciate your providing that context since so many invitations I get have robogreetings on them.

I couldn’t bring myself to click the “I don’t know Jack…” button, but since I take LinkedIn literally (I want to be able to recommend people from my own direct experience) I also don’t feel right accepting your invitation.

I hope you understand.

Friends and cow-orkers alike have heard me make the now clichéd quip about being disappointed not to have a jetpack yet, living as we do in the year 2000. Jetpack has in fact become a sort of shorthand for some awesome feature that probably won’t get included in a final design.

I still remember some of the sci-fi and futurist inspired visions of where we’d be in the year 2000. Remember George Jetson’s complaint? (“These three-day work weeks are killing me!”). So this article projecting life in the year 2,000 AD from a July 22, 1961 issue of Weekend Magazine mixes the sublime with the absurd, and a handful of things that aren’t entirely off the mark.

Some excerpts:

looks as if everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom.

You will be whisked around in monorail vehicles at 200 miles an hour and you will think nothing of taking a fortnight’s holiday in outer space.

Monorail!

You’ll have a home control room - an electronics centre, where messages will be recorded when you’re away from home. This will play back when you return, and also give you up-to-the minute world news, and transcribe your latest mail.

You’ll have wall-to-wall global TV, an indoor swimming pool, TV-telephones and room-to-room TV. Press a button and you can change the décor of a room.

The status symbol of the year 2000 will be the home computer help, which will help mother tend the children, cook the meals and issue reminders of appointments.

(But apparently gender relations will revert to the postwar norm.)

At work, Dad will operate on a 24 hour week. The office will be air-conditioned with stimulating scents and extra oxygen - to give a physical and psychological lift.

Mail and newspapers will be reproduced instantly anywhere in the world by facsimile.

There will be machines doing the work of clerks, shorthand writers and translators. Machines will “talk” to each other.

(Using XML, no doubt.)

It will be the age of press-button transportation. Rocket belts will increase a man’s stride to 30 feet, and bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways. There will be moving plastic-covered pavements, individual hoppicopters, and 200 m.p.h. monorail trains operating in all large cities.

Rocketbelts? Where’s my jetpack?

Our children will learn from TV, recorders and teaching machines. They will get pills to make them learn faster.

…and to palliate their ADD. (via Reddit)

23. Write lots of numbered lists.

Two years after the first BarCamp (an ad hoc unconference formed initially in response to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, I’m finally planning to make it to one, this weekend’s BarCampBlock, headquartered at SocialText’s offices in Palo Alto.

According to what I just jotted on the Sessions page on the wiki, I’ve just volunteered to lead or participate in discussions about portable social networks, identity, design patterns, particularly social-media related design patterns, and the gift economy.

I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk about all of those things but when has that ever stopped me before?

Since the moment that Liz Henry and Tara Hunt tipped me off to this event, I’ve had the feeling that this was an important one not to miss. So soon after my wedding and honeymoon and with a rapidly filling-up fall conference schedule, I could have been tempted to let this one slide by, but I have a strong intuition that many of the people I consider friends, heroes, and inspirations will be there and that I’d be kicking myself if I let another Bay Area BarCamp go by without joining in on the fun.

I’ll blog from there if I can find the time between no-spectatorin’ and schmoozin’ and gettin’ things done.

via B (who did hers in email):

Three jobs I have held: vendor at Yankee stadium, freelance legal summarizer, assistant sexton

Three Places that I have lived: Lawrenceville, NJ; Glen Canyon, SF, CA; Washington, DC

Three TV shows I like to watch: Flight of the Conchords, Ugly Betty, The Wire

Three places where I’ve been on holidays: Volcano (HI), NOLA, Big Sur

Three of my favorite foods: pasghetti, grilled salmon, french toast

Three places where I would rather be right now: a beach on the gulf stream, Tuscany, at home with my sweetie

Three people I think will respond: cecil, so-called bill, jac

Three things I want to do before I die: publish a novel, write and record a song, make a movie

Your turn.

In reply to apophenia: Twitter questions (curiosity is killing me…):

First, the practical question. Can i quote you?
[ ] Yes, and you must use my real name.
[ ] Yes, but please use a pseudonym and don’t use any identifying information.
[ ] No, please just use this for your own weird thoughts.

Hmm, those options have an excluded middle. I’d say “Yes, feel free, and you may use my real name, my online handle(s), or whatever other descriptor you find useful.” If I have to pick one I guess I’d pick the first one.

1. Why do you use Twitter? What do you like/dislike about it?

I use it to jot down my thoughts and narrate my day and to keep up with what some of my (online) friends are doing and thinking about. I like the ambient intimacy, to quote Leisa Reichelt.

2. Who do you think is reading your Tweets? Is this the audience you want? Why/why not? Tell me anything you think of relating to the audience for your Tweets.

I think my followers are reading them. Is that a trick question? It’s a perfectly OK audience for me, since it’s opt in. There are people, like close friend and family whom I’d like to also read them (if they were willing of course), but there is no invite feature.

3. How do you read others’ Tweets? Do you read all of them? Who do you read/not read and why? Do you know them all?

I read them sometimes via twitterific, sometimes from the Twitter website, sometimes receiving them as text messages. I don’t always read all of them but I do tend to read down till I reach familiar territory, much like the way I catch up on a blog I haven’t read in a while. (Having said that, I scan - I don’t read everything carefully.)

I read people whom I’ve met and a few whom I find interesting or appealing. So I don’t know them all but I think I know (meaning have met in person) 90% of them. I don’t expect any of them to reciprocate necessarily. That is, it doesn’t bother me if they are not interested in following my thoughts.

4. What content do you think is appropriate for a Tweet? What is inappropriate? Have you ever found yourself wanting to Tweet and then deciding against it? Why?

I haven’t thought about it too much. I go by instinct. I guess some descriptions of graphic bodily functions might not necessarily feel appropriate to me, at times. Beyond that I think it’s fair game and the character limit kind of helps.

I have thought about tweeting something and then decided not to, usually because I think it’s too random or trivial, because I’ve ceased to find it amusing in the first few seconds since thinking of it, or because I’ve posted a bunch of tweets lately and don’t want to be spamming people.

5. Are your Tweets public? Why/why not? How do you feel about people you don’t know coming across them? What about people you do know?

My tweets are public. I like doing things in public and don’t mind people paying attention. Therefore (back to the appropriateness thing) I probably won’t be tweeting about things that are illegal or offensive or humiliating (unless I can’t resist because it’s so entertaining or revealing). I don’t mind people coming across what I write. I expect it’s all out there and people will see it and even form opinions about me based on it. It’s all good.

6. What do i need to know about why Twitter is/is not working for you or your friends?

I can’t get the IM interface working and I would find it useful during the workday. There are many people I’d enjoy sharing with on Twitter who are not on the system but I can’t be sure they’d like it (so many people don’t) so I don’t feel comfortable evangelizing.

Unsurprisingly, Ze Frank is going all Hollywood in the near future.

Last year at SXSW (at least I think it was last year, and not 2005), I ended up going out to dinner with my Austin guru, some folks from WorldChanging, and I think David Pescovitz or maybe I just chatted with him at some party later on, and a very tall witty guy who I felt like I should know but didn’t, who was talking about the work he was doing mainly giving talks on creativity.

It was much later (that night) that I realized this was Ze Frank, the Ze Frank. Probably because he is so much taller than I, the angle on his face was different from his usual bug-eyed unblinking full frontal in his videos and more recently on The Show.

I’m kind of glad I didn’t recognize him and go all fanboy. Instead I probably acted aloof, and that’s cool, right? After all, did he really want another person saying, “Hey, I got your How to Dance animated gif forwarded to me back in the day. I’ve been a big fan for yea long!”

Meanwhile, he is a creative force of nature who should make me feel envious and insecure but who instead inspires me not to get hooked on brain crack and I’m not surprised he is about to cross over to the mainstream and I’m sure he’ll knock him dead in Hollywood town.

Oh, man. I can't wait to see Snakes on a Plan, starring Samuel L. Jackson. When Mike Stillman posted a link about this movie to the merry punster list, I couldn't tell if it was for real or just a high-concept joke.

Then MichaelZ posted a follow up link from a screenwriter who's turning "snakes on a plane" into a mantra, and it looks like it is for real.

Here's another guy's idea of how the script might look:

SAMUEL L JACKSON: You've got to listen to me. There are SNAKES... on the PLANE!

CUT TO: Samuel L Jackson punching a snake. The snake is wearing a pair of jeans.

Jackson finally knocks the snake out. He rummages through the snake's pockets and is shocked by what he finds.

SAMUEL L JACKSON: Oh my God. This snake has a PILOT'S LICENCE!

CUT TO: Samuel L. Jackson is talking on one of those phones they have in the seatbacks of planes. Tears are streaming down his face.

SAMUEL L JACKSON: Listen, sweetie, I know I haven't been the best father. I'm so sorry. I don't think I'm going to get through this, and I wanted you to know something: I love you very, very much. Oh, and by the way, there are motherfucking SNAKES! On the goddamn PLANE!

VOICEOVER: Coming soon: SNAKES ON A PLANE. Because on a plane... nobody can hear the snakes.

I was catching up with ALLABOUTGEORGE and I was intrigued by his Johari window. (I’m not sure I’m brave enough to try the negative-orientd Nohari window.)

It seems like a cool way to find out how you are perceived. If you’re interested in helping me with this, please stop by and pick a few adjectives to describe me (xian was already taken, so I used the domain of my personal blog as a handle).

This was once my favorite game:

(via TED)

I’ve got a deadline, so I’m going to stop playing this fastr game and get back to work.