Learning is Change

Question 272 of 365: What are we not paying for?

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In thinking about budgets in tight times, it may be easiest to think about all of the things that we are paying for and then see exactly what it is that we can cut back on. It makes sense that we wouldn’t spend much time at all agonizing over what we do not pay for, but I am finding myself feeling entitled to everything that I am not paying for. I am finding myself reliant on the free things that are simply the fabric of my everyday existence. And it makes me think about just how many systems I have surrounding me that support my way of life. Even with all of my overpowering responsibilities, I know that the things that really open up possibilities are the ones that I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for. And as I consider what to cut out, I must also think about what is essential.

Things that are free that I could never live without:

  1. WordPress blogging software- This has become a part of my habit of thought and reflection. Everything that is a seed of an idea is run through this piece of free and rapidly expanding software. It sometimes makes me wonder what I used to call publishing and what I used to call brainstorming. How was it that I was able to focus my attention on a single document that sat on my hard drive?
  2. Google Documents- Sure, this may not always be free and there are other services that are like it, I am finding that there is no reason to go anywhere else for my collaborative needs. I share links to edit documents on a daily basis (having almost completely forgone inviting individuals via e-mail address at this point). When I am connected to Docs, I literally have a record of nearly every collaborative project I have undertaken in the last 4 years. It says something about what I value to be able to literally replay the revision history of my life.
  3. Libox – I have listened to more music in the last few months than I have for the past 3 years combined. The simple sharing of music with my friends is a beautiful thing. The fact that it is a better looking (and much lighter) player than iTunes makes it so much more essential. I need to hear what other people are listening to and not just the radio stations that they frequent. I want to hear the actual music that is shaping their lives because if I let it, it will shape mine too.
  4. Free Wifi – The internet is in the air and I expect the air to be free. I understand that bandwidth costs something for someone, but I can’t at this point imagine going into a public place like a library, coffee shop or school and expect to pay for access to my communication system. Just as we have free access to the public radio frequencies and tv frequencies, I am starting to believe in free access to the wifi frequencies too.
  5. The Jabber Protocol and Adium – I started using AIM in 1997, but I fell out of love with Instant Messaging until quite recently. I now feel much more connected to everyone I care about because there is a single protocol and program that allows me to stay in touch. While I like twitter and facebook for staying connected and I enjoyed Skype for a time for video calls, I am finding that much of the meaningful conversations of my daily life are happening as a series of rapid messages. Adium connects me to my gmail contacts and their Jabber server as well as the Facebook chat that seems to be a favorite of many folks who spend a lot of their networking time in there. The fact that this is all open protocols and open sourced means that I will never have to give it up, even if my network moves on like they did from AIM.
  6. Search – I don’t really care that it is Google that is running my search now. I must say that I have all but stopped categorizing or folding things away in any of the services I use. Search is so good now that it almost seems unnecessary. As long as it has taken for me to figure this out, it has taken me almost no time at all to drop services that don’t enable absolute search ease. I can’t handle milling about in a repository (or even in iTunes) trying to find what I am looking for. If it isn’t right there, I no longer see the value in looking further (with a few notable exceptions like important benefits information in legacy systems). Search algorithms I am dependent on and they are freely available to all, and hopefully always will be.
  7. Zemanta – Along with search, I have come to rely on  the power of suggestion. Zemanta recommends images, links and ideas based upon whatever I am writing in an e-mail or in a blog post. This is the killer addition to my brain which is looking constantly to connect to other things that are out there. Making these connections is now a great part of my life and whenever I have something to help me in the process, I feel the support of a network even if it is just a semantic analysis of the things I am already writing.

Things I pay for that I could live without:

  1. DirecTV service – I have really enjoyed my time using their DVR, but I really only record shows on about a dozen networks. Much of this content is now on Netflix and local stations which provide HD content free of charge.
  2. Home Phone Service – I know that many people have forgone this luxury, but the bundling of services has really kept this one in the mix for me. It makes other things cheaper and it is always nice to call someone back on a “landlane” when all else fails. Cell phones and VOIP have all but killed this one off.
  3. All of my hardware – I could give up my cell phone, my ipad, my ipod touch, my laptop, and my netbook. While none of these things have a subscription cost associated with them, none of those individual pieces of technology hold my most important information or workflows. I now have a copy of my entire workflow syncing between browsers, cloud-based folders, and housed on a series of easily copied usb sticks. I don’t have to worry about anything getting lost. So long as I have a single device that connects to the internet, I can respond to e-mail, edit documents, and generally be productive.

If I ever had to pay for the things on the first list, I would. I wouldn’t be too happy about it, but they are too important to let go fallow in my life.

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Question 271 of 365: Who will we let change us?

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Day Nineteen
Image by rshannonsmith via Flickr

My son has never liked being changed, not even when he was very small. He is absurdly strong and his hips seem to have the superhuman element to them that allows for him to swivel out of all but the tightest grips. He screams and he asks for whomever is not changing him at that moment. He doesn’t care if he hasn’t been wiped yet and he doesn’t mind struggling for ten minutes at a time. This is who he is.

Now that he has shown an incredible interest in potty training, I am finding myself extremely relieved. I cannot wait until I never have to hold him down as I struggle to keep the biodegradable insert in place for his earth friendly diaper of choice. I will not miss the dance that we have to play to get him to just lay down and start the work of changing him. I will not miss the chase or the defiance in his voice when we ask him the status of his diaper.

This process also makes me think about why he never let us change him. It makes me think about his insistence that he be in control of everything that is happening to him. While he has always wanted our help with things that he can’t do, he has always made it known that he is the one in charge, that he is the one orchestrating the whole thing. Seeing as how we have changed hundreds (perhaps thousands) of diapers in his two years of life, he has let us do it. It may have been a struggle, but he has never let himself go unchanged for very long.

Even though the metaphor may be a little gross, I wonder who we are really willing to let change us. With all of the excrement that we come up with in our formative stages of work and collaboration, who are the people that we actually will let wipe it away and give us a fresh start each day? Who are the ones that we struggle with, but inevitably allow to see us at our most vulnerable? And as we are training to be better at what we do, who are those people who will encourage us and give us incentives to keep on doing it the right way?

Those people are the ones that I want to be surrounded by: those mentors that don’t care if we fail? occasionally, those ones that stay with us even though we may struggle against them. They are the ones that see our successes as their successes. They are the ones that cannot wait for us to stop needing them so much and go our own way.

I want my son to outgrow me and our current struggle, just as I would like to outgrow all of those that keep on pushing me to be better at collaborating, communicating and creating the future. I’m sorry for pushing back so much and for all of the crap you have had to put up with. Soon, I will be better. I promise.

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Question 270 of 365: How do we define success?

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Amway
Image via Wikipedia

I believe in serendipity. It is one of my strongest held beliefs, actually. It is the way in which I find much of the passion that I have for technology, education, and business. I make contacts on Twitter and at Coffee Shops that have very little chance to pay off with real relationships, but on occasion have yielded some of the most enduring friendships of my life. I take serendipity as a given. I proclaim that given enough time and enough creative output, I will meet the people that I am supposed to and traffic in enough new relationships to be fulfilled.

One recent encounter has shaken that hard-fought foundation.

A few weeks ago, I was meeting with a colleague and we decided to grab some coffee. After our meeting was over and I was finishing up some e-mail, a woman (who was clearly stood up by her business contact because of the awkward phone conversation I overheard which contained quite a few apologies on both sides from the sound of it) introduced herself to me. She asked what I did for a living and she wondered about the type of meeting I was having in the middle of the day. As I often do when in interesting conversation introduces itself, I gave her my card. I didn’t think anything of it. It seemed serendipitous, but probably not all that useful in the long-term.

And yet, that weekend I received a phone call from this woman. I returned her call on the following Monday and we had a short conversation about her new business and potential dovetailing of interest. She told me that she had a e-commerce website like Amazon.com and was looking for other people to help with it. I am always interested in seeing what else is out there (although I struggle to find any reason for someone to start up an e-commerce website that is “like Amazon.com” having a close relationship with that retailer already). So, we set up a day and time to meet to talk over what continued to seem like the logical extension of serendipity.

Then we met and she brought out her computer. We talked a bit about things that were going on as she connected to the free Wifi. I told her about doing some professional development with online school teachers and she reacted with an overly complementary response, which I thought nothing of because she seemed very interested in each one of our short conversations so far. Then she pulled up a rather obscure URL and turned the laptop toward me.I immediately recognized the site for what it was: a specifically designed presentation for a “business opportunity.”

Not wanting to get too judgmental (the meeting was serendipitous and all), I let her talk about her business as if we had always known that this was where we were headed. She went into details about her “e-commerce” site that she purchases all of her household items from. She showed me logos of every major player in online household and consumable products. We talked about my goals for the future and what I wanted to see happen in the next three years economically. I did my best to play along as much as I could.

Then we came to the org charts and one very small detail that was intentionally missing from the previous 20 slides.

At the bottom of the org chart, almost obscured by the arrows in the chart pointing to “me” was the Amway-Global brand. As she begins to reassure me about this company’s presence in the presentation she says this: “I’m sure you have heard of this company.” She pointed to it. She didn’t say the name. She just pointed and allowed me to process. She explained her progression of coming to terms with working for Amway. It was a real soul searchers story.

She said that she had wanted to run straight out the door when the person sitting in her seat now had introduced it to her. She said that her uninformed opinion was, well, uninformed at that time. She received some sage advice from her uncle to give it a chance. She is so glad that she did because she is doing quite well for herself now. I, on the other hand, just wanted to see how long she was going to go on about how it wasn’t a Pyramid scheme. I wanted to see how many different ways she was going to obfuscate the referral process. I wanted to know how she was ever going to get around to how she convinced other people to purchase all of their household items in bulk from a website that seemingly provided no benefit to anyone except for the person who owned the website (other than perhaps having a lot of off-brand discount products).

By the time she got to the point of asking for feedback after this revelation about what we were really talking about, she was pointing to a $117,000 annual salary. This was supposed to elicit a reaction of rabid interest from me, but I just felt dirty. I was being asked to consider “owning my own business” as nothing more than growing someone else’s model. I was being asked to believe that money was the measure of success that mattered most.

The problem with her pitch wasn’t that this seemed too good to be true. I am fairly confident that many people who get into Amway and work hard at it make a good amount of money. I am also pretty sure that given the right situation, this type of work would seem awfully attractive. The problem with her pitch was that I already consider myself a success. I don’t require that kind of salary to validate it. Furthermore, the purpose and passion I feel for everything I do has always provided me with enough money to feed my family and purchase all of my needs and many of my wants.

I believe in education and good ideas. I believe in creating a life for ones’ self. I do not believe in manufacturing it out of consumable goods. While you may be able to sell a lot of them, they will never last. That is the metaphor for why I felt so betrayed by serendipity. I create things based upon the reciprocal nature of shared ownership. She took that ownership of our communication and bent it toward her will. She tried to reengineer it until I became the perfect client, the next in a long line of “business owners” that she had converted. Well, that is not serendipity. That is manipulation. That is false advertising and bait and switch networking.

No thank you.

So while I still believe in serendipity, I will be on the look out for those who try to trade on it and are unwilling to give creativity back. I will still give out my card, but I will ask for their’s next time as well.

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Question 269 of 365: Are we looking hard enough?

I have stopped telling people that things can’t be done.

I used to say it all of the time, but I haven’t for quite some time.

I used to make up time limits and proclaim things impossible without fully investigating. I used to portray things as hard than they actually were so that I wouldn’t have to attempt them. I used to explain things in complex language so that others wouldn’t see just how easy it is for me to figure things out.

Tonight, when I was asked to find a live stream of Dexter a mere two hours after the premier, I didn’t act naive. I didn’t act as though it was unfeasible for me to find. I balked at the questionable legality, but without the ability to DVR or buy it via iTunes, the choices were less than stellar.

A man in Michigan was streaming his TV out into the wide world. I was just one of the 500 or so people that were sharing his couch.

It is time to stop lying about the things we can and are doing with our technology. It is time that we stop refusing to let content flow the ways in which it wants to. I am interested in paying people for their work, but this is what is possible. In fact, this is what is easy.

I don’t tell people that I can’t anymore. I often don’t stop to question if I should, either. There is enough reason to try. There is enough reason to believe that simply by pushing the right buttons or asking the right questions, we will find the ways in which everything becomes easy. And, none of us will have to say can’t again.

Question 268 of 365: Can we take everything with us?

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Micro SD
Image by bigcityal via Flickr

We have preferences and we have workflows. We know where things are in our offices and on our devices. We don’t have to relearn every keystroke on a daily basis. We establish comfort zones all around us so that we can rise above the minutiae and pursue the big productive work at hand. We even lug around large laptops or set up elaborate work environments just so that we don’t have to change too much from day to day.

Even as I argue for a device independence and syncing every service to one another, I notice that I am leaving a lot of the customization that I treasure behind. I am starting to begrudge putting in my wifi credentials on each new device I decide to use. Even though I have access to all of my files in Google Docs and Dropbox, access still differs a bit depending on the browsers and versions I have to work with. I have decided that I hate upgrading software almost as much as I hate having to bring a certain laptop with me in order to access all of my individual preferences. It just seems so antiquated and uncivilized to feel like a foreigner even as I access the same gmail account on different computers.

There may be hope, however. Yesterday, I decided to give load up Ubuntu Linux on a micro-SD card. This tiny little card holds an entire operating system, all of the programs I will need to run on it, and every preference I could possibly have. Currently, I am running it on a Netbook that I was given for a test drive. But, I popped the card into a USB stick and loaded it up on my Mac, my wife’s Dell and any other machine (save my iPad, I suppose) that I could throw it’s way.

It is nothing short of a revelation.

I am looking at the same desktop on this machine that I look at on any machine that I turn to. The desktop is the same. The programs are the same. Even the saved credentials are the same. I am literally packing my entire computer into a square centimeter of silicon. How did I not recognize this as the logical extension of syncing everything together? How was it that I missed the idea of bringing my consistency of experience to everything I use?

The word that Ubuntu uses for a USB stick based install that can save preferences is persistence. I think that describes what I am doing pretty well. I am using a persistent system. It persists as a part of me, even as I add to it and change my workflows to meet the operating system that is so tight and compact that it can fit into a single Gigabyte. I can now take everything with me that I need to get down to business. Everything.

(For those who would like to know more about this setup. Here is what I have done:

  1. I made the Ubuntu instance out of the Universal USB Installer. (I used the Netbook Remix of Ubuntu because I knew it would work on pretty much any machine)
  2. I installed Google Chrome with the Browser sync (for any computer I use that isn’t running this Ubuntu instance).
  3. I’m using Google Documents to edit all documents.
  4. I installed Dropbox to sync all files to every computer (I do not sync directly to the USB stick, but rather to the hard drive of whatever computer I am running).

While this really isn’t a long list of things that I had to do, I think that each one adds a bit to being able to take everything with me.)

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Question 267 of 365: How much are we willing to share?

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Image representing AOL as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

My first email address that wasn’t tied to a major online provider like AOL was pacer@cyberdrive.net. It came from this local ISP in my home town. It was this cute all you could download on a 14.4 modem affair for about $25.00 a month. The reason that this ISP was surviving was that they were one of the first to offer the unlimited model, rather than the hourly rate for logging in. I thought that this was the best of all possibilities because I had been mowing the lawn for years just for the chance to log in a few more hours. This plan, however, came with one major drawback: the email address had to be shared. Everyone in the family had access. They might not have checked the address all that often, but they had access to it. Most importantly, my father had access to it.

Upon the occasion of my posting to a newsgroup with less than desirable users, I received an absolute torrent of email. Per our arrangement with Cyberdrive, my father received those emails too. After quite a long discussion about cyber safety (which didn’t really have a term at the time, so I’m pretty sure we just called it safety), he decided to shut down the account and I decided that sharing an e-mail address with my father was just about the worst idea ever.

I didn’t want him to know everything that I was up to, and I’m sure he didn’t really want to know either. We both realized that there was a level of trust and privacy that had to be built into our relationship. We had to figure out a way for the model of not sharing an account to work. I’m not sure we ever talked it through, but a few weeks after that incident (I had been grounded for a bit during that time), we both stopped checking that account and we moved on to our separate ones. It made sense to do so, but we knew that something had been lost. We used to be able to view the state of things from our family email account. I would get my updates from my newsletters and my father would get his. Sharing the email account made it easier to appreciate the things that we were both a part of. Now we didn’t have that.

I know other families that still do this. Everyone logs into one gmail account. It is something that prevents anyone going too far off the deep end of perversion or illegal activity. It focuses our attention on the family itself rather than the individual conversations. The privacy loss, though, is hard to swallow. When anyone makes a mistake or signs up for a ridiculous list-serve, we all pay the price.  We want to send out a united message from a single source, but we don’t want to be pigeonholed into a single identity or be unable to develop our own interests.

I wonder if there is a compromise that exists. I wonder if Facebook and other social networks might help us to maintain that level of inclusion without the headache of solely a family identity. They have shifted our expectation of what should be our own. They have let us connect to family members but not be swallowed by this association. Already, these services are stating the default sharing to be public rather than private. This allows me to group my family’s responses on walls and in twitter lists. I can see the communication and I can watch it grow. Somehow, this simple act of making more things public has allowed my family to share the things that they might not think to do, but keep hidden the things that are none of my business.

Social networks are just better at communicating what is yours, mine, and ours. Email just dumps everything into one pot and forces us to sort it out. This may be inciting in order to completely control what we are all getting into, but it spells disaster for the relationships we are trying to build. We need autonomy. We need trust and respect. In short, we may need Facebook.

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Question 266 of 365: When is hyperbole needed?

Honesty is sexy. Truth provides a potent attraction. Seeing the world
clearly and being able to communicate that clarity is stunning.

But sometimes being overwrought is just easier. Sometimes the
exagerated story is better to tell. And sometimes hyperbole is all
that is available.

This is where I place the most emphasis:

1. Letter writing.
2. Blog posts.
3. Emails.
4. Tweets.
5. Planning documents.

Most of modern writing is exaggerated, I suppose. And mostly, I’m okay
with that.

Posted via email from The Throughput

Question 265 of 365: How many pieces am I playing with?

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Combined with images taken from Wikipedia ches...
Image via Wikipedia

Chess has a certain amount of pieces, as does every other game that I can think of. If you put too many pieces on the board it doesn’t look right and you can’t play. Having too many pawns makes moving around the board more difficult and having two queens on one side would be a most cruel advantage. Games are set up so that each person has an equal chance to win, so long as they have the skills. We don’t put more pieces on the board just because we want to. We don’t take them off just because it makes the space look prettier. We have to earn each piece that we take. The winning moves are precise and exacting. The right amount of pieces is required to pull off any kind of upset or comeback. These are just givens.

And yet, I can never seem to keep track of all of them. I sacrifice valuable pieces just so I can see the board better. I trade them because it makes sense at the time and I think it is moving me ahead, but later I regret it. I can’t do 15 possible moves in my head because I don’t know what the other person is going to do with their pieces. I can’t keep track of the relationships and the distance between the pieces. They all seem to jumble together into these fits of excitement that lead to their own destruction, without strategy of coherence. I am not orchestrating a win so much as I am hoping that my positioning and outward confidence is somehow hiding my complete lack of experience or research.

I am lining my pieces up for the game that will ultimately decide what my future looks like. They all look good right now, and I’m hoping it holds. I am reading the instructions for the hundredth time, but with each conversation I have about the way this game is supposed to be played, I notice that I need specific techniques and to think through every move before I make it. Others can see the board too, and I am looking to them for advice. It is my responsibility to set it up, but I feel like each move is being crowd sourced.

That is how I am going to keep track of all these pieces. That is how I am going to make sure that I am playing the right ones at the right time. I won’t bring my queen out too early, because she is one piece that I will never sacrifice. I have to send out my pawns as scouts to see just what is out there. I will castle at the right time, moving myself away from danger. I will strike and set up gambits that are too enticing not to take advantage of. And my faceless opponent will have little choice but to confront all of the pieces that I have set up. They will have to engage my contributions and they will have to give something up in order to get access to anything else I have to offer.

In short: I will win.

I will win because I have all of my pieces in place. I will win because of everyone giving me resources and knowledge and knowhow. And, I will win because there is no alternative for me. It can’t shirk away and I can’t come back later. The game is happening now, and the game clock has started.

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Question 263 of 365: Where can we live?

I have lived at 7 different addresses that I can remember and in only two cities. The total lack of variety is somewhat startling. I didn’t so much choose these locations as they were a part of what was next for me. The starter home that my parents bought, the great move out to the suburbs, college dorms and then houses, my starter home and my suburban relocation. The journey is unremarkable. I could mark it in a map or plot it on a graph and the change over time would be slow and steady. The line traveled would be the distance from Cleveland to Denver, the separation from my parent’s family and the joining of my own.

This common journey was nonetheless enjoyable. Because it was so ordinary and felt by so many, it ties me to everyone who makes these kinds of maps or lives these kinds of timelines. We choose to live where we are most comfortable. And it is the little things that make us stay.

At first it was baseball cards. I couldn’t collect enough of them. I would go to specialty shops and shows and purchase packs guaranteed to have the players and types I could hold up as legendary. I would look at the books of cards for hours or fondle an individual card as I contemplated the statistics on the back. This is what made me stay as a child more than most thing. Home was where my baseball cards were.

My computer came next. My father and grandfather had built it from scratch. A pentium 120 MHz. It was the ugliest gray box you can imagine and it took up most of my desk. But, I learned how to write on that box. I learned how to upload and download. I learned how to game. How to manage files and ideas. How to hide things and clear out history records. I learned how to communicate. My computer was the thing that kept me sane in Cleveland until the rest of my life caught up to what my head had known for years: it was time to leave.

My guitar floated me for the few transitional years. It helped me to pluck out what was really important. As I started to write songs for my future wife, I knew that objects could no longer be the touchstones and tokens of where I chose to live. At the time I was comfortable any time I knew the guitar was in arm’s reach. So long as I could run my fingers over those strings I was safe, but my own family changed that.

Now, the totems I keep to know that my reality is right side up are my wife and two children. Anywhere they live, I will live too. They are not objects that I can take with me. They are beings that have to make the choice to follow. We may move cities someday. Certainly San Francisco could be more than accommodating, but I will never leave them. They will always be what makes a place livable. They are what makes my path assured.