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Question 168 of 365: When are we ready to fulfill our promises?

Published on June 18, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Una webcam
Image via Wikipedia

Making promises is one of the easiest things that I have ever done. They just roll off my tongue after a while. In fact, so long as I am talking to someone that is interesting enough, I will continue to make promises just to keep the conversation going. So long as I can believe in the moment that whatever I am selling is in some way connected to reality, I can justify my promises.

I have promised that Open Spokes would be a platform for answering questions and collaboration. I have promised that we will be able to record webcam video on the fly. I have promised an engaging display and ratings system for the question pages.

I have promised all of these things in the hopes that if I said them enough, theree would be some hope of them becoming true. It is as if I wanted to wish them into being. And as it turns out, I mostly have.

Somehow, thorough all of my high hopes, the system started to work. It started to perform the way that I always knew it could. And yet, I still held it back. I have a working product, one that I think has a huge amount of potential, and I am holding it back for fear that it will be judged too harshly. I have not written about it because I have been worried about people finding out that I am a fraud, that my promises weren’t everything that they were cracked up to be.

I delayed the launch and the testing phase because I wanted things to be perfect. I wanted to avoid the appearance that we are just toting with the idea of what is possible. I have been keeping things under tight wraps, holding on the simple piece of information that Open Spokes is open as of today.

While I am still maintaining that this is a soft open, you can go in and register for an account here. You can then go in and ask your questions and record your reflections. You can share your questions on any social media platform you wish and seek to get responses from others who sign up for an account.

While that may sound nice and technical, it is nothing short of terrifying for me to say those words. The idea I am encouraging people to start actively trying to play in the playground that I have created (co-created with my partner, actually) is so freeing and damning at the same time.

I think my biggest fear isn’t that people won’t like it, but that supporting and developing it will become all consuming. My fear is that it will become something that people actually rely upon.

It is so much easier to believe that you can shut down your project or company at any point and not have any further ramifications outside of yourself. After you have actual users, though, it isn’t yours any more. It is theirs.

That may be the one thing that we miss most in developing new spaces. We miss the fact that simply launching them and having others make them a part of their lives is hugely vulnerable. So, we may try to secretly sabotage our work so that we can go and slink away from it if necessary. With one foot always out the door, it is safer.

Safer, but not as spectacular. Standing beside your creation proudly and proclaiming that it is good is the only way to insure that it actually is good. I guess that is what I am doing. I’m stating for the record that some of the biggest promises I have made in the last 9 months are actually coming true.

Please, go and see for yourself.

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Question 167 of 365: When does the game change?

Published on June 17, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Image representing Flowr as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

I wrestled for 2 years when I was in elementary school. I was never all that good at it, but I did manage to win a few matches. Mostly, I only remember trying to sit against a wall in an invisible chair.

We were supposed to put our backs up against the wall and bend our legs into the sitting position and hold it for as long as we could. We would line up by age along the wall, with the youngest by the water fountains in the cafeteria. We could only hold out for a minute or so, and we would complain the whole time. Our muscles just weren’t ready for that kind of stress. The middle schoolers, though, could take it for upwards of five minutes and they didn’t make a sound. Somehow, the invisible chairs that they were sitting on held them up much better than ours did.

That was the game, though. Sitting in an invisible chair with our matching wrestling uniforms on. The chairs were pretend, as were most of the grunts and grimaces because we knew that we were going to give up at the first sign of real pain. We knew that there wasn’t any real point to powering through because there was no winning. The chairs would always be fake and we would always lose the game. It would always be more work than it was worth.

That is kind of the way that I feel about social networking within an organization. I can see the huge benefits to sharing information around an institution, allowing everyone to feed off of the smartest ideas and the most efficient workflow. The value of communication and collaboration is clear whenever an important document is created or a new feature is floated. And yet, it just feels like sitting in an invisible chair to try and get people to share information or collaborate with one another. It feels as though it is more trouble than it is worth, like I am exercising a muscle that I am never going to actually get to use.

At least it did, until today. Today, I saw a glimpse of what institutional social networking really could be if it was done right. This afternoon, I realized that lowering the barrier to entry was possible. I could be talking about Google Buzz or Wave coming to Google Apps or I could be talking about Facebook or LinkedIn really branching out into the business space. I could also be referencing Yammer or Ning or some other well known piece of social software. Instead, I am talking about a product that hasn’t been out more than a month and has none of the press of these much larger players.

I am talking about Flowr.

More accurately, though, I am talking about the fact that Flowr just created Google Apps integration with its social networking package. The software on its own, allows users to share status updates, ideas, polls, files, and events. Couple with the system that many institutions are already using for e-mail and collaboration equals WIN. It is mind-boggling that I will be able to login to a single space and share information with everyone in the institution via a social stream and then share different information specifically with groups that can then connect that information to Google Docs or Google Calendar Events. It is as if someone pushed a really comfy chair underneath me while I was trying yet again to lean against the wall with my knees bent.

I’m not saying its the holy grail, nor could any web application deserve that moniker. What I do mean to say is that by making such a vital part of connection in modern life that much easier, I believe that institutions may actually start to focus on what will actually cause them to succeed: valuing their humanity. By this I mean that companies will finally see that it is people sharing information and that the people are the ones that will add to the understanding and institutional knowledge and culture. While their is great lip service paid to this idea, it really is only when faced directly with the possibility of searching through (via a great search bar in Flowr) or filtering out (via tags) all of the contributions of an organization that people come to their senses about what is truly worthy of pursuit.

So, the game changes when the things that we thought were impossible become possible. When things that were once invisible become things you can depend upon. It is when you now need things that formerly didn’t exist. This will happen with enterprise social networking, but I think that it probably isn’t the biggest invisible thing that we will come to rely upon in the next few years.

More likely, our invisible chairs and muscle strains will become clearer with age. Just as the middle schoolers could hold it longer than we could in early elementary, we will start to realize just how valuable those chairs are going to be just as we need them to support the weight of our work.

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Question 166 of 365: How can we scrape better?

Published on June 16, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
A social network diagram
Image via Wikipedia

I guess I might as well go on the record for stating that the future of networks is in scraping. I know that some people are calling it the social graph and the power of the connections and links and liking and all of that, but I think that it is much better to just call it scraping. Turn on the full twitter or facebook firehose if you have access, but it doesn’t mean anything unless one person sees significance in the data that is being scraped and served up to them.

Just so I am clear, scraping is something that is done with the links part of sharing. It is done with the location part of publishing, the metadata about all of the things that we are passing around. It is in the description of the thing rather than the thing itself.

The benefit of such a thing was made real to me by a single product called DejaPlay. This video pretty much sums up its features:

Suffice it to say, though, this iPad app makes my network real again. I can sit back and watch the things that all of my friends and colleagues have been talking about and I can finally engage in the process of catching up on the inspiration that everyone around me has been calling upon. This app simply scrapes all of the youtube and other video links from your facebook friends and twitter followers and then creates a video playlist for you to enjoy. It does this one thing incredibly well. So well, in fact, that it makes me never want to click on a link again without it being served up to me in a better format.

Twitter Times does this as well with text-based links (as does Google Reader and Delicious to a lesser extent). It creates a fully functioning newsletter for all of the links that have come through your twitter feed, but I am afraid that this just isn’t enough after watching DejaPlay work its magic. I don’t want a list anymore. I want a tactile exploration through what is going on within my network. I want to explore and have it autopopulate as new information becomes available. I want to dig deeper into what people are reading and watching and see the context for everything that they are sharing. I want to know who the people are that are creating the work I am consuming, and more than that, I want an elegant interface that shows me the path that I have taken down the rabbit hole. While DejaPlay doesn’t currently let me retweet the videos I am watching, I have received direct correspondence from them that it is coming in the next major release. In doing so, the experience would be complete: Network, Scrape, Consume, Contribute.

That is what the process should always be, not to put to fine a point on it. We network to create a space worthy of inhabiting. We find people who are a part of the conversations that we wish to be involved in. We connect to them and start thinking through the problems that we want to solve with their help. We scrape (or should start scraping, anyway) because we know that the value of their contributions is not simply in having them close at hand, but rather in knowing that they are carefully curating our library of knowledge. We have selected them in the networking phase and they are providing us with dividends simply by choosing them. Then we must consume, ravenously, everything that we can from our network. We know that it is good and so we must read and watch and absorb all of the good things that others have to offer us. This type of consumption, unlike our daily bodily intake, never leaves us feeling full. The more that we consume, the more we want to take more in. We make the connections that were always there waiting for us to make them real. Our final step is to contribute back to the network. We curate and add to other people’s libraries. But, now we need to make sure that we are remixing and recontextualizing. Here is where the future is going to come in handy.

Our stuff must get more scrape-able. When we share things, we must share them knowing full well that their contexts must be shifted a hundred times for our network. We must realize that the lists and posts that we have conjured up are meaningless without the ability to dissect them.

Here is what I want:

I would like the ability to see all of the people that I have carefully chosen as a part of my network and I would like to be able to choose what kind of media I would like to scrape from their various shared places. I would then like to be able to flick from their profiles (using my hands, of course) their videos into one corner of my screen. I would like to be able to choose certain people in my network and flick their blog posts into another corner. Then I want to flick the podcasts of those who I know to be quite eloquent with the spoken word (or have an ear for it anyway) into a third corner. The fourth corner I will save for images of those who seem to have an uncanny knack for finding the best arguments through pictures.

I want to be able to play a podcast while looking at the images and then comment on each one directly as I go through. I want to be able to watch a video and then step into the twitter conversation that it sparked. I want to be able to see the blog posts highlighted with everyone’s annotations and then copy and paste my favorite parts with a few of the images that I found and link it together with the videos that are going around in the network as well.

This is what scraping will do for us in the not so distant future. We will be able to remix any type of content into a new one with as few steps in between as possible.

We will know we have reached the point of truly enlightened scraping when we no longer have to care where things are posted (facebook, twitter, buzz, flickr, etc.). We will simply see the people in our network and we will be able to literally grab ahold of what they have shared and put it to our own uses. This will be the future, and this will be now, too.

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Question 160 of 365: When is something both good and true?

Published on June 10, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
OTTUMWA, IA - AUGUST 13: Matthew Murray of Ott...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

We have been warned all of our lives that things that seem too good to be true, probably are. This healthy sense of skepticism is bred into us at very young age. This is done so that we don’t go home with strangers and so that we don’t believe everything that we hear or read or experience. It makes sense to not get your hopes up every single time something good happens, but it is also not as much fun or as exciting as if we did.

On a regular basis I receive tweets and phone calls that could change my life if I let them. It isn’t so much that I don’t want them to, it is just this skepticism that keeps getting in the way. I can’t possibly make myself as vulnerable as I would need to in order to explore each of the opportunities that have arisen. And yet, if I do nothing, nothing exciting will ever happen.

The truth is that sometimes true things are good and sometimes they are even spectacular. He chain of events isn’t always so easy to follow, but after a while, the events really start to take shape.

I once owned a Nerf basketball hoop that I would play with in my bedroom. It was the kind that even my brother could dunk on. We used to all get on our knees and play a half-court press game for hours on end. At was until it broke at the hands of my older brother.

He paid me back for the present even though I hwd received it as a gift , and for that I am eternally grateful. With that 20 dollars plus some other birthday money I bought my first ever gaming system (a sew genesis). After a few years of Sonic the Hedgehog and friends, I decided to trade in the Sega and purchase my first brand new computer game (Full Throttle, an adventure game). This commuter game hoped to usher in an era of exploration and experimentation with computers that has not stopped to this day.

And while that path may have been assured by many other factors, it was this single Nerf game that was directly responsible for the events unfolding as they did. In this case, the facts were both good and true.

So whenever I see an opportunity, even now, I look at it as if it might be the next Nerf basketball hoop. I know that there was no way for me to make that judgement upon sinking the first basket, but I try to see it anyway.

I try to see all of the possible ramifications of my choices and figure if they have any truth to them, or goodness for that matter. I start talking to the tweets and other opportunities as if they we ere simply plot devices, and as if I am the director of some cosmic play. Some objects are just props, but even those have meaning. All I have to do is figure out what.

I’ll let you kniw what I figure out.

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Question 154 of 365: What are fences good for?

Published on June 4, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

Nearly all of the houses in my neighborhood have fences, many of which are in severe need of repair. They are coming down because they were all built in the early 80′s. So, every few days I see new fenceposts being dug and placed. Pretty soon, all of the fences will be new again and we the peer pressure will mount on any house that doesn’t pony up.

But, whenever I see a new fence I am reminded of the Robert Frost poem about good fences making good neighbors (or not, if you read the poem according to the author’s intent). The fences that are around our houses are serving to separate us and to ensure our isolation, and for the most part, we are all in agreement that they are a good idea. We know that we are demarking the land that is ours versus the land that is yours. It isn’t egalitarian; it is ownership.

We know that we will never be as good of friends or find the kind of close community that places without fences seem to be able to achieve, but we are good with that. Until we learned that the people who live behind us are the most loving and amazing family. The husband and wife are genuinely attracted to one another and the three children play together and with their parents in a real and wholesome way. There are fits and there is yelling, but they love each other just the same. And my family and their family anticipate living in these two houses for years to come. We are looking forward to that, too.

So, what else would we do, but start planning to put a gate or a enormous slide between our two houses, circumventing the fence in the hopes of bringing our two families even more together. We have decided that it is more important to have the ability to roam freely and rely on one another for things than it is to preserve all of the privacy that was originally envisioned.

And that is the way that I feel closed platforms like the iPad are moving. In the beginning, all of the apps worked on their own and could only speak to their own data. This was great for focusing your attention on a single thing (this goes for many facebook applications and even Google web apps as well), but it was terrible for portability and ease of use. Now, though we are starting to see a sort of convergence where apps can open up files within another app. For example, the mail app now allows you to open productivity documents in any program that allows for editing of those documents. Apps like Documents to Go allow you to edit Google Docs and then sync them back up or upload them to another service like Dropbox. We are moving away from the default of emailing yourself objects and moving much more toward the requirement of syncing objects with all of the things that need access.

All closed systems need to be able to do both. I get the benefit of a neighborhood of applications or houses, with walls seoarating them. This allows each one to be the best house or app it can be. But the value of a neighborhood is when people come together. Be it through slides or garage sales, we all need to find those others that can add value to our existence. The fences are good for preserving privacy, but they are terrible at creating new spaces or relationships.

I want both. I want to be able to have an unique identity and also find a way to see how that idenity fits in to the greater picture. Without the grater picture, there really isn’t much left but being a shut-in without the capacity for collaboration or knowledge sharing of any kind. As enticing as that sounds sometimes, I don’t think it is in anyone’s long term interest,

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Question 152 of 365: What do we do with uninvited guests (or, the CC effect)?

Published on June 2, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

There is a disturbing trend in sharing.

We share with others (as we should), giving them the ability to edit and observe. This allows them to contribute and for everyone in the collaborative process to move forward. However, this is where the trend emerges. Once this becomes a norm within our institutions, there becomes an expectation of sharing. Ordinarily I would say that this is a good thing. I have spoken many times about the “collaborative instinct” thqt I believe to be essential. But it isn’t the people that we intend to share with that are causing the trend. It is the expectation that everyone needs access to all collaborative processes. It is the CC effect. Because so many people are being given the rights to edit and add to the conversation, everyone believes these rights are inalienable now.

We share documents now because we think we have to. We let the collaborative space be the way in which we communicate changes in direction, and we let the single act of contribution become the end all and be all. We are cc’ing the collaborative process by keeping our bosses in the loop. We are shortchanging the power of the brainstorm because we need to be setting up protocols for future times to come together. Drafting areas are becoming final solutions.

The unending email thread is no longer the worst thing to happen in office politics. Now, the wiki with an agenda that doesn’t take into account all those with editing rights, is dead in the water, as are its originators.

But, what do you do with a list of people who have access to a google doc, all of which matter but one? What do you do with a Wave that can’t get the work done that it was designed for, simply because of who it was shared with? How do we get rid of our unwanted collaborators?

We used to be able to hold meetings at awkward times to try and smoke out those with a hidden agenda. We used to be able to write one another notes and leave them on the desk of certain people. We used to not have to worry that the edit button was just a single click away from the very people who seek to derail our change or cross out our best ideas.

When the unwanteds speak up, there isn’t anything to be done other than to sit and take it. Much of the time they occupy very disarming positions of power. And they are the folks who recognize when they have been removed from the access list.

Much like my wife’s high school boyfriend noticed when she unfriended him on Facebook. She gave the logical reason that she didn’t want to be friends with him on facebook if they couldn’t be friends in real life. I can respect that, of course. But this former flame noticed his sudden unfriendly status with Kara and called her on it. She refriended, but that wasn’t fair. Clearly she could (and still can) take a harder stance with him, but she shouldn’t have to. It should be okay to set boundaries on everything that is shared.

While I am no expert in privacy settings, here is what I propose:

  • Along with the ability to share a document or piece of information with specific people, there should also be the ability to bleep it out for certain users. No matter if they were shared with directly or received a link, I would like to see a way to specifically and preemptively ban the people who are willing and capable of creating havoc in our collaborations.
  • I want to see the staggered share. I want he ability to edit the live document and then publish a more sanitized version of the document whenever it is appropriate to do so for a second tier of users. Right now, everyone either has view or edit rights. I think it should be edit, view, see. As in, you see what we show you.
  • I want the ability to kick people out and not have them know it. I want to keep letting them see the same version of the document or site that they originally accessed, but nothing more recent. Perhaps this is too underhanded for most communications, but I think that addressing the security of information is all about taking snapshots of what that information is and providing them as evidence of the collaborative process. Kicking uncollaborative people out of the environment is the only way that they will see just where the value comes from. An alternative to this solution would be to simply be able to tag every element of a collaboration with users who can edit, view, or see them. This may be more cumbersome, but it may allow for more transparency. Essentially, we are telling people that the web isn’t the same for everyone, and there is no one source of truth, unless you create it. I think that most folks are going to have to get used to that soon enough anyway.

    • So what do we do with uninvited guests? Nothing… Yet.

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    Question 151 of 365: How do we predict the future?

    Published on June 1, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
    Souris Microsoft | Tapis Google !
    Image by louisvolant via Flickr

    Everyone is trying to devine the next big thing. Reading the tea leaves on Twitter or letting the alerts drift in to the inbox of your choice. We are all looking to get in on the ground floor of the next version of the web (3.0, 3d, etc.). We are looking for what could be, in every cute logo or interesting color scheme.

    I keep thinking that I will know it when I see it, too. I look back on what was the next big thing, and I knew it then, right? I saw Google way before they were Google. I was searching with them back in high school. I should have just invested in them when they went public. I didn’t, though, and so many other people are in the same boat. And that is why we keep looking for the next Google.

    That’s not the only reason, though. We keep looking because we want to know the future. We are looking for reasons enough to invest our time or effort, if not our money. But we keep looking in the same places. We are looking toward app stores and startups with vowels missing.

    Predicting the future requires a little bit of crazy. It isn’t going to be the same companies, although they will be major players. It will be someone that sees something completely different from the same set of rules and situations.

    While I know this isn’t going to be it exactly, here is something that the future might be:

    There are a special glasses for making things appear to be in 3d, but I believe that there are new glasses coming. I believe that there are glasses that block out every other frame of a movie. The reason they do this is because there are two movies playing, interlaced so that the glasses will display only one and block out the other. The sound will match for the one you are watching. You will be able to sit in the same theatre or in front of the same screen and watch two separate films.

    This is crazy talk. It doesn’t exist, nor will it. There are two many unanswered questions. There are too many things that don’t make sense about something like this, but this is the future. The future of ridiculous technology that seemingly is more intrusive and convenient at the same time. These glasses are impractical. They are the unfortunate offspring of wanting to be completely immersed by the media you are consuming and wanting to be with others who are interested in being with you but not in consuming the same media that you are.

    The future is in sharing the same space but not the same experience. The future is in finding connections without having to know all of the same people or the same facts. Differentiation is the future, whether that is with glasses or with a single online profile that knows more than it lets on.

    The next Google is going to be the first company to let people be who they are with one another. They will present technologies to get people together. People have been trying this for years, but it is the one thing that is still severely lacking. The physical devices have presented screens to separate our learning and understanding. The ones that are coming are ones that bring it all together.

    The ones that have already had their shot at this rather elusive prize probably won’t get it quite right. Google, Apple and Microsoft pay lip service to the future, but they really are trying to shore up the markets that have made them profitable. They won’t see someone coming up on the outside with a crazy gadget such as those glasses. They will see it as something that can’t possibly catch on, and then once it does, they will try and copy it or buy them out. But it won’t work this time. This time, the future will be too interested in creating itself anew. And it will.

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    Question 150 of 365: What can we say in the moment?

    Published on May 31, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
    Chicken soup
    Image via Wikipedia

    I spoke at my high school graduation. Along with our valedictorian and a few other people who applied for the job, I gave a speech that was mostly a rehash of my application to get into college. I reprint it here to make sure that the absolute obtuseness of it is not lost on this audience:

    To borrow from the classic movie The Breakfast Club, I say to those who believe they understand: “You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions.” But what I found out was that we learned more than just Algebra and Physics and English and all the other things they bullied into our heads. We learned about responsibility, change, thought, enjoyment, love, friendship, differences and ourselves. I can’t define high school but I can tell you what I know.
     
    What happened in the past couple of years? Our bodies were in so many positions. There was standing, sitting, laying, hunched over, fetally rocking, uncomfortably leaning, doubled up, reaching down and stretched out, with both feet, one foot, and no feet on the ground. Our thoughts though, were far more numerous. We used our bodies and minds wisely as well as recklessly.  We had to force ourselves to go on green and stop on red. I only got in a few accidents. Repair was a habitual thing. It always came out better than new. Except for those tiny scratches on the bumper and the keying on the window. But I know what those are from. I remember those days.
     
    ?The people that knew us before we knew anything took a back seat to other learning methods. They sat at home while we mistook nightlife for something new and untried. Sometimes in a clear shove. Sometimes in a hug. They always had their hands near the jugular but usually just fixed our clothes instead.
     
    We were asked to climb a mountain with people in front and behind.  Our goal was to reach the height with the best view. Any falter would cause us all to have scraped knees. It was a burden to be depended upon. But there is no burden greater that that of being undependable.
     
    School locked our hours tightly with a chain of double-edged paper. It was easy to break free but the cuts still hurt from every time I did. We were told at point blank range our worth. Built up with perfect marble and torn down with precision wrecking balls. A river of questions raged towards us, capsizing us or prolonging our ride. In the end our bodies ache from overuse but heavy objects aren’t so heavy anymore.
     
    The never ceasing need to win drowned out many a day. Pride in a future unknown. Loving people for ability natural and learned. We were told to be the best according to every banner, announcement, and flyer. There was no celebrating of mere trying or thinking of things that saw further than Friday night. I too followed the blesséd ones. Why? Because I need to see someone do the things I can’t. We are people of action. Sometimes we just choose the action of inaction. But life would be pretty boring without the other exercises. My primary objective though, was within. Finding vocabulary enough to purge deep demons and strength enough to be completely fragile. I called myself names to satisfy the recognizable. But beyond tangibility lays just my name. No cleverly labeled packages, no boxes with ingredients, I’m filled to the brim with undiscovered theories without perforated lines. My ode to the four years past is “While most people were given their fishes of truth, I taught myself how to cast out the nets.” I’m not ashamed of what I caught. I know that many of my peers can say the same. In the end I am satisfied. That is the greatest thing about an end, the satisfaction of completion. We are now at point B and point A seems so very far behind us but as I see it we have about 24 more letters to go. And I’m prepared this time. My clothing is warm. I brought chicken noodle soup. My shoes are new but broken in. My watch is set perfectly. I have taken a comfortable sleeping bag and pillow. My deodorant, soap and comb are tucked away. I know how to make a fire. I know when to rest. I don’t know, however, what will become of these things on my journey, but I’m prepared. So let’s go.

    While I still can look back fondly at some of those words, I mostly have no idea why I would just tell people what I was thinking. I mostly am completely embarrassed that they let me get away with speaking to thousand or so people who were there to see us off. I had that opportunity to say something real and I turned it into an academic exercise. I tried to write the kind of poetry that is heavy on inside jokes that I didn’t let anyone in on.

    Cleverness is not flattering when you are the one doing the setup and the punchline.

    We squander ooportunities like this all of the time. We resort to being cute or speaking around what we actually mean instead of coming right out and saying that we don’t have the first clue about what the future holds. Instead of giving a status report with a few engaging anecdotes, we try and make everything universal. And in trying to appeal to every experience, we can’t even relate to our own.

    I hope I don’t do that this time. I hope that when the time comes for me to speak to my wife about her mother, I don’t try to be anything other than her friend. I hope that when it comes time for me to speak with my boss about the ways things should be heading, I don’t try and defend bad decisions in metaphors. I hope that when I am given the opportunity to present in front of others, I don’t try and drive home a message that is only valuable in my head.

    I hope I have enough common sense and courage to state for the record that I don’t know anything but what my stories have told me. I want to be the one to not try wnd resort to movie quotations and other quick words of wisdom to score cheep relevance points with the audience. I want to stand there in all of these situations and respect the moment enough to know that it will never occur again. If I can see others for who they are and not as additional data for my version of the monologue, I will have done more to achieve the respect that my original graduation speech was supposed to.

    Selfishly, I just wanted the audience to need more from me. I think that is pretty backwards considering how much I needed them, for approval, for their collective power to make me feel important. Now, I want to let the moment dictate what is important. If it isn’t me, so be it. I think that is why I have given so few speeches since. It is much harder to share a moment with others if all you are doing is talking at them.

    In such a shared moment, we share a part of who we are. We can ask for someone to do the same, but that is up to them. It is the giving of your self to someone else that makes the contract between people so important. I nope to negotiate many more such contracts as I look out into the future.

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    Question 149 of 365: What happens when it shatters?

    Published on May 30, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

    The wind must have grabbed it while we were out. It must have taken hold of the oversized umbrella and flipped the entire table, shattering the glass top directly on the deck. It must have done this because when we came home we found the thousands of pieces and the heavily bent umbrella.

    It was the hottest few days of the summer so far and the only relief was that umbrella. The cool air at night was so beautiful when sitting around that table. Grilling out or simply bringing the leftovers to the deck for one more experience with them, made the day just fine.

    Nothing is fine now. The table is broken. My wife is leaving for one of the last times to see her dying mother, and all she can do is study for her final exams. She spent almost 12 hours today at Starbucks, trying not to feel everything that she has ever right to feel. And I tried to think of something that I could possibly do or say. I was unsuccessful in that regard. Everything feels utterly shattered.

    But my kids aren’t. They survive, as they jumped through water fountains in the park today. They saw the shattered table and just wanted to watch it get cleaned up. I wish I could say that with that single act of cleaning up, that the rest of it would be okay too. It isn’t likely, at least not for a while.

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    Question 148 of 365: Who gets notified?

    Published on May 29, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
    SAN FRANCISCO - JANUARY 26: Workers apply th...
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    The shipment of iPads came in. The ones that my father was looking forward to. The one that meant a message from Apple was was sent out to his email address. I was notified because he was notified. And I went and picked it up. I will mail it off tomorrow, but for today I will spend some time thinking through the idea of being notified when good things are coming your way.

    I wish I could be notified for the following things:

  • When my children say they love me when I am out of earshot.
  • When I could get away with eating a bunch of junk food because of my low calorie count for the rest of the day
  • When my wife works on our budget or bills and I don’t know it. (This is to make sure I never take it for granted).
  • When someone adds something substantial to an idea I enjoy thinking about
  • When remember something worth writing down. (Ideally, this wiuld alert me to the idea I’ve just had and not the fact that I have just had an idea.)
  • Whenever something new is going to completely change my direction and interest drastically. (This may require being able to know the future, though.)

    • So, while I don’t get alerts for those things yet, I can be fairly confident that at least I get alerts for the new gadget du jour. That is nice and convenient, but not nearly as transformative,

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