Question 240 of 365: Why are lists important?

Question 239 of 365: Who are the happiest employees?

Question 233 of 365: What is a morale dilemma?

My morale is conflicted. In tending the communities I created, I have constructed an almost impossible conundrum for myself. It goes something like this:

I am most happy when I talk to those who need my help and I am most engaged when talking to those who have things to offer me.

Usually there is a certain back and forth that I gain, but lately, it seems to be one or the other. Those that need nohing from me are the ones I am drawn toward. Their ability to create things without my help is incredible and awe inspiring. They don’t require my guidance, although they do seem to at least tolerate it. They start projects that subsist. They are amazing and all I want to do is watch.

And yet, I am most happy when those people are coming to me and directly soliciting my help. When they can’t figure something out or they need a tool to figure out their next move, I couldn’t be more fulfilled. I am conducting the work of teaching and it feels satisfying in a way that is primal and instinctual. Getting a problem resolved in the on thing feels productive, the one thing that makes me feel useful.

So, it isn’t a moral dilemma that I am speaking of, but a morale dilemma. I am conflicted about what I should be spending my time doing.

In the long run, is it better to be engaged or happy? While they may be related to one another, they are not the same thing. Both are temporary and both sustain me. The former consumes time, whereas the latter consumes energy.

Obviosly this is a false dichotomy because I don’t have to spend my time doing only one. I can use both to my advantage. But, as I look out into the future, the choices I make are not concrete and the positions I take are not all mine. When I advocate for what to work with most often, should I derive my morale through those I consider my equals and betters or should I be pursuing opportunities to work with those who I can really work with and help to understand what is really possible?

Question 232 of 365: Where is aspen, colorado?

Question 231 of 365: What are the technologies that never die?

The 8 track tape is dead. No one has produced new music on one for a number of decades now. The UHF radio station is dead. Everything over the airwaves is digital. The bbs is dead. The web made sure of that.

And yet…

The record is alive and well. I can go into a dozen stores all around Denver and find new music being released on vinyl. It may be a niche market, but it is a large niche that has a lot of mainstream followers.

The walkie talkie is alive and well. As far as we get into using cell phones and texts, I still see walkie talkies being used by police offices, schools, and any place where two way communication just has to work. This technology has been around for half a century or more, and it remains the backbone of a lot of systems of communication, even as other things have come along with are supposedly better.

IRC chat is alive and well. Nearly every chat system that I see being labeled as web 2.0 is based upon or has it’s roots in a irc chat server somewhere. IRC clients haven’t changed and protocols haven’t been altered for years, but it is still a force to be reckoned with.

And these are the kinds of technologies that will never die. These are the technologies that linger because they don’t fulfill a single fad of our culture, but an ongoing purpose. They are the things that show us what it means to be human.

Records are flawed and easily broken. Not like cd’s or mp3 files that can be copied and last almost forever. They have a shelf life and they are focused only in one time and space. We can share them only when someone else is in the room and that is their magic. They require us to be gentle with them and with one another because if we do things too roughly, they skip and scratch and are no longer of any use. Records are mirrors. They have a story of exactly where they have been and who has played them. Anyone who has ever held the oversized liner notes knows exactly what it means to see lyrics as a book, I soul behind the music.

We continue to play and buy records because they are worth more than the money we pay for them with. They are the sum total of all of our experiences with them. So, get out an overly large set of headphones and line up the needle. There isn’t anything else like it.

Walkie talkies fulfill a different need. They are the chain around us to required communication. They are the untransformed facet of our jobs that requires rapid transfer of information. They are human in another way by replicating shouting across a room or a field. We know that we need to stay in constant and instant contact and we don’t want to think about that process while we make that contact. It is as if we all decided long ago that the best way for people to come together is by stringing up two tin cans and talking into them. We have never moved beyond this even though we got rid of the string. We haven’t moved on because anything more complicated than that and we become something different. We become approximations of people, machines that are capable of taking phone messages or queueing up email. Nope. All we need are some tin cans and some string.

And since the very early days of the Internet we have needed chat. We have needed a single room to come into and speak to one another and log the whole thing for as long as we can stomach it. The chat is universal. We are who we say we are, and that is an incredibly human characteristic. We can pretend so long as we can keep up the charade, just as we would at a party. It isn’t Twitter where we are cultivating followers and some peoples opinions are more important than others. Everyone is equal in an IRC chat room, even if there are ops and others present. So long as you aren’t banned, you are capable of seeing the whole conversation. We want it that way, so that vanity doesn’t get in the way of conversation. Ew get to know one another in chat because those words are being typed out as reactions to ideas that we form and then submit. We are more who we want to be in chat than we could ever be in real life and that is beautiful. It is also why it is still around even after video conversations have become ever more common and social media has become the standard protocol for sharing. Chat will be the backdrop for all of it because there is no way to forgo revealing yourself to just a few other people in a set of conversations which you can keep on coming back to for more learning experiences.

What are the technologies that are recent that are equally universal and long lasting? What are those things that we will be talking about 50 years from now as continually reminding us of our humanity?

Question 229 of 365: Who started it?

Sometimes the best ideas are not our own. Definitely not mine, anyway.

Sometimes when we check into our communities, we realize that they have gone on without us. They have brilliant ideas about what should come next and they don’t require us for much of anything. The ideas abound. Ones that we would have never considered, or at least considered useful. Others can and do create what we would have thought too difficult to manage or attempt.

And yet, we can and do jump in. We take one look at the big plans that others have started in motion and we take part. We tend to our communities and it becomes something that is a part of us as well. I’m okay with the plans that others people have for me, or the ones that we co-author over time.

Today, I checked in on one of my communities and they were working on creating a broadcast, of the community itself. How is it that they came up with that idea before me? How is it that they started developing it, sharing phone numbers and emails? How could they have figured out how to advance the community beyond the current set of messages going back and forth?

And yet, I injected myself into the conversation. I created a collaborative document for them to help plan. I encouraged them to fill out their roles and their ideas for the project. I gave them ideas about how to broadcast and which tools would help them to make it valuable to the rest of the community. I made myself useful, sure. But, it wasn’t my idea in the beginning. I didn’t start it.

And that is a pretty wonderful feeling, all around.

Question 225 of 365: Are you pumped?

I have heard this phrase a number of times in the last day. I’m pumped about that.

I think we are in hopeful moments when the thing we feel is pumped. We are balloons, flying. We are satiated and full. We are bolstered and unhinged in a wonderful way.

New school years, even if you aren’t in school, have this effect. It is not the only thing you can feel. But if you feel anything else, you are doing it wrong.

Question 224 of 365: Why do we go and go and go?

Question 223 of 365: What forces your hand?

My wife got into nursing school today.

She took prerequisites, applied, interviewed and was offered a spot in nursing school. She didn’t know that was what she wanted until quite recently, but here we are, staring directly at changes to our life’s as we know them. The single fact of knowing that she is going makes me afraid for the status quo.

First off, she can’t work and do nursing school. It just isn’t humanly possible (even for her). This means that everything that we have known in the relative comfort of sharing the breadwinning burden will fall to me. I have never had that unique experience. It seems unreal to me. I don’t want to talk about money as mine or what I earned. It has always been ours and neither of us have particularly cared who spent what (so long as we stayed in budget). I don’t want that to change. I don’t want the feeling of being cash strapped for the year or two that it will take for my wife to complete her program to unearth this patriarchal feeling of entitlement. I want us to know that this is temporary and that we are not the roles that we currently fill.

The reality of the decisions that we have already made is forcing my hand at a lot of things now. It is as if we set up our own predestined path and now we are watching ourselves walk along it. Every time that we think about hopping off it, the weight of our decisions compel us to keep moving forward. We don’t have anything to be afraid of because we chose this, but we also don’t know what lies ahead so we are terrified. We are being forced by our former selves to be the people that we promised to be.

Even though we made those promises, there was a large part of me that didn’t think I would ever have to be this person. I didn’t think that I would have to own up to the changes we now both face: quitting job(s), getting a different job (or finding something to supplement the current one), figuring out ways to finance a course of study, figuring out how to take care of two young children while being financially responsible and/or going to school.

This is not to say that I am defeated by having to step into these shoes. Quite the opposite. I am exhilarated by being forced to change so much, so quickly. I know that it will be difficult to have conversations about raises, about financial aid, and about family support systems. I know that I things will not be normal (read: stable) for quite some time. I know that we will never be the same family after this. But, I also know that it is what we both want.

I want my wife to be happy. I want her to know that I will work solo for as long as she needs me to. I want her to be able to take the late shift at the hospital and not worry that the kids are going to get fed and bathed and put to bed on time. The fact that we are being forced by decisions we have made is all the better. Even though we may not feel in control right now, we are. We have set things in motion that give us the ability to take control of our own destinies.

Our hands are forced because that is how you sculpt something into being. We have forced our hands to move around this raw clay of a future. We force our hands to apply pressure in just the right spots, opening up possibilities for what it may hold. The whole thing keeps on spinning, sometimes almost out of control and sometimes in the rhythm that we feel within ourselves. Our future is crafted and thrown and fired and cured. We are only done with it once it satisfies us.

Right now, I am looking at a huge hunk of clay and I wonder just how I am going to make it into something beautiful. My wife got into nursing school, and we are just getting started.

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Questions 222 of 365: How gullible are we?

Gullibility is an ironic joke to those who are young. We tell each other that the word isn’t in the dictionary or that it is written on the ceiling. We prove ourselves gullible nearly every chance we get because we get so excited about the things that we know can’t possibly be true but that we wish were anyway. We believe in what our older siblings and parents tell us about bunnies who give away chocolate and monsters in closets. We continue to believe out of fear or pride.

As adults, though, we shun gullibility as a vice. We proclaim our abilities to rise above gullibility and rely upon the logic that we have honed over the years. And yet, we get sucked in anyway.

No fewer than four times today I received direct messages employing me to come and sign up for my chance to beta test iPads. These direct messages were from real people I know and follow. Each one of them were sucked into a slick looking webpage enough to give away their Twitter credentials and have their accounts hacked. They were drawn in by the promise of a free iPad. They were lulled into a false sense of security by a beautiful website theme. In short, they were gullible.

I don’t blame them, though. A few weeks ago, I was duped into entering my credentials to visit a mobile movie site. I realized my mistake, but it was awfully hard to tell on my phone that I wasn’t someplace like Netflix. But I think the broader point was that I wanted it to be that easy. I wanted to be able to watch full length movies on my phone so badly that I was willing to take the risk and pass out my account to anyone with enough gumption to promise it to me. I wanted to be gullible, and they knew that. They took what I held as the next logical step in the hope of technology and they ran with it. Because it wasn’t a giant leap, I was okay to be duped. I think that is exactly what happened to others today.

Because the iPad is something that likely each one of those people who out in their information were looking purchasing in the future, they saw this as the means to take that next step into iPad ownership. It wasn’t something that would just be nice to have down the road. These people had put enough time and thought into it to know that if there was some way of attaining one, they were going to do it. And rather than money, they were willing to shell out privacy in order to take that next step.

And, it is that next step that is going to kill us.

Well, maybe not kill, but surely get us into some pretty serious trouble. Because we are so eager for quick fixes and easy ways out, there is no limit to what others can propose to us. So long as it is not too outlandish or too far off what we can see directly in front of us, we are willing to accept some sacrifice to see where this path leads. We are willing to take the next steps with those that we are unfamiliar, but we would never do the same thing if they promised an entire journey.

This is the reason that most people don’t accept the “free cruise” flyer as legitimate, but they do accept the penny auction sites or sketchy Facebook targeted facebook ads (the ones that know your age and the fact that you are a father… just creepy). We accept what we can theorize into being. Whatever bit of magic there is in the offer (free, unlimited, etc.), there is always a basis in something real. There is always a reason that something is so cheap, and if we can see that reason as legitimate then the offer itself has been legitimized.

We are so gullible that we are willing to give away our universal passwords (most people use the same password for everything) for just the hope of attaining what we don’t have right now. It makes me worry about just how much we are being sold that is one step removed from reality. Was the promise of Google Wave’s revolutionary collaboration tool just a bit too magical? Is the promise of 3d video one step beyond what it is that we actually need? Are the ultra low prices at the local discount store or online retailer simply too much? Are we just being gullible?

The answer, probably, is yes.

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