A Letter of Love

23. December 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: cycling, daily life, storytelling, twitter

You and I had an amazing day yesterday. I couldn’t have asked for a getter time than we had. When we left the house, and the boy, I wasn’t sure how things would go. I hadn’t gone for so long in quite some time.  As we settled into the rhythm and a steady pace, I began to relax.

The weather was just about perfect, with almost no wind, strangely warm temperatures, and some low December sunshine. I tweeted before we left that I was going to make some vitamin D. I’d forgotten just how low in the sky the sun is at this time of year. We’ve just entered the beginning of the lengthening of daylight for the year. We’re over the hump, rounding the bend.

As we crested the Naval Academy Bridge, you dropped the chain. I struggled with your derailleurs to right it without getting off, but that chain was stubborn. We had to stop for a mechanical. I worried that this might be a problem for the rest of the ride, but it turned out alright.

As we cruised into Annapolis, there was a fair amount of traffic which I hadn’t planned on. I debated the route. I’d thought we’d ride around the river through Crownsville when we left, but was second guessing that now. There would be more traffic than we wanted to deal with on MD450. So we took a short break at the City Dock.

Decisions made, we peddled off with the intention of heading back up the trail. Your gears gave us no trouble on the bridge, thankfully, and getting over the few short hills coming up to the trail was not a problem.

Riding up the trail, I found that I was suddenly smiling for no reason at all, and I knew it was because I was out in the open air with you. As we approached the usual turn off from the trail, I knew we weren’t ready to go home, and so we continued, with no planned route.

Something lead me to turn us toward Kinder Farm Park when we were on East West Boulevard. We’d never ridden through the park, but I knew that there was a nice paved bike trail. It was a little more crowded than I’d hoped, but we managed, and I’m sure we’ll ride there again some day.

By now, the sun was sinking low and I felt the need to get us home before long. We headed back down the B&A tail and took the right at Cedar lane. When we got home, I put you back in the shed without washing you. That was wrong, and I’m sorry.

Today, you’ll get a proper bath and some pampering.  You deserve it.

Personal Brand | On Message

19. October 2011 · 4 comments · Categories: frustration, internet, irritants, rants, struggles, technology, twitter

So many people who I follow on twitter seem to be constantly on message.  What I mean by that is that they constantly post about a singular subject.  It may be IP Networking.  It may be cycling.  It may be the environment.  They are on message.  They have a lot of followers. 

If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time (which only a very few have) you’ll know that I kind of wander from topic to topic.  I’m almost never on message.  I don’t have a lot to say about the industry that I work in.  I don’t have a lot to say about the apocalyptic nature of our relationship to the climate.  I don’t have a lot to say about cycling.

I’ve got a little to say about each of these topics, and many more.

Recently, I noticed a number of my “followers” on twitter abandoned me.  I’m sure it’s because I wasn’t tweeting enough about what they originally followed me for.  Perhaps I pissed someone off with a few to many tweets about politics, the climate, or occupy wall street.

I don’t know.

But I do know this, I’m way more than one-dimensional.  And so are most of the people out there in the Internets.  I wish more people would take the risk of being “off message” once in a while.  They’d been more interesting.

What is “Social Networking” anyway?

10. February 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: community, computing, culture, daily life, entertainment, facebook, information, internet, lunacy, noise, slowing down, smiles, social networking, thoughts, twitter

What is social about social networking? That is a question I’ve been asking myself for a while. There is a lot of interaction with the computer and by extension other people who are using their computers but it is far from truly a “social” experience, right?

I don’t really know where I stand on these questions. I have used electronic communications as part of my everyday existence for so long that I really cannot imagine a life unplugged. Much of that communication has been for business but a substantial portion has been with friends and family. That sounds like the very definition of social to me. And yet there is something distinctly unsocial (perhaps even antisocial) about relationships that are purely based on electronic communications — the complete lack of physical face to face human interaction.

When TWTTR first emerged it was an SMS service with the simple idea of enabling friends to let each other know what they were up to. But that was geeky and boring and unprofitable and so now a significant number of tweets have nothing in them about what a person is doing. Most of them have a url and a lot of them are intended to sell something. That is Twitter in 2010. (And yes this blog uses twitter to get traffic too.)

Facebook was fun at first — catching up with people who I’d not talked to in nearly 20 years was cool. Finding some people who I was sure I would never hear from again was awesome. Even the games were fun at first. But then it settled down and the games and apps began to get old. There was a growing sense that the lil green patch couldn’t possibly be doing anything to help the environment. And gradually there was a realization that maybe the reason I’d lost touch with some of those “old friends” was because we really didn’t have all that much to say to each other anymore.

Suddenly I find that most of my facebook time is with people that I do have real relationships with. But that we are no longer calling each other or even emailing each other. Suddenly online social activity is replacing REAL social activities! And that doesn’t seem so social.

And one more thing…I was not a fan of my high school when I was 17 why on earth would I become a fan on Facebook?

Snow Days: Another Legacy Concept

03. February 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: america, Baltimore, daily life, facebook, incongruities, information, internet, lunacy, media, noise, nostalgia, snow, technology, twitter, weather

Most days, I’m firmly in the camp of people who believe that technology makes our lives better.  We have access to information in unprecedented ways in human history.  And make now doubt about it, information is powerful.  It can enrich our lives.  In some cases it saves lives.  Sometimes, I wonder though, whether we are living richer lives in this age of technology.

I really do count myself lucky to live in the age of information, partly because I can remember when information did not flow as freely as it does today.  When I was young, we lived in a small town in the country.  It was easily 12 miles to the nearest town and 15 to a town with a movie theater.  Our town was so small that we didn’t have a local newspaper, there was one that was geared toward the whole county, but not a local paper.  We got most of our news from Baltimore, either in The Evening Sun or on WJZ 13 news.  We had two black and white television sets.  One had a 13 inch screen and one had a 19 inch screen.

If I wanted to learn about something, I went to the library and scoured an archaic set of drawers called a card catalog.  Then I would locate the book on a shelf by the reading a set of codes on the spines of the book which helped me to find that single book in a room full of shelves.  Then I would take the book to a counter, and the librarian would stamp a due date in a card that was kept in a pocket pasted to the inside back cover of the book.

If this sounds like something out of the 1950s, well, it is, but this was also my experience in the early 1980s.  We got a color TV when they laid cable in our neighborhood, in 1986.  When I was in college I did not have an email address.  I graduated in 1994. More »

Nineteen Eighty-Four

19. October 2009 · 3 comments · Categories: advertising, america, business lunacy, cultural failure, culture, daily life, entertainment, food, irritants, media, noise, twitter

mots-twitter

Last night at 8:09 PM Eastern, I tweeted:

making applesauce from old apples, mentally transitioning into a week at the office

This morning at 2:44 AM Eastern, Motts began following me on twitter.  I’m fairly certain that nobody at Motts is actually reading my tweets.  I’m also fairly certain that no person at Motts is actually paying enough attention to tweets about apples or applesauce to have made a conscious decision to start following me because of my tweet.

What I suspect is that Motts has some BI type application that is reading one of the many rss feeds that exist for twitter and then following people via the twitter API.

Now, I’ve got no misconceptions about my privacy or lack thereof as a result of my choosing to use twitter or any other service or site, but no matter how you slice it, this is disturbing.  It makes you wonder what other company, government, or organized crime group is reading tweets.

And to think, Motts just thought that maybe I’d follow them so that they could sell me applesauce instead of me making it from scratch.