NaBloPoMo 2010

I don’t get out much socially any more. In fact, most of my actual friends don’t even live in the same time zone I do, and a couple of them don’t even live in the same country. While this lack of socializing can be a drag sometimes, and does lead to friendships that are more distant that I would either like and that psychologists would say is good for a person, the one advantage is that I tend to stay healthy during the winter. But right now I’m fighting a cold and it’s all thanks to my cousin’s 6 year-old.

How do we know this? Those of us who spent the least amount of time with her are the least sick. the child’s grandmother, my aunt, is sick as a dog. My mother recovered from “having a nose” in under a day. My Sunday was blown and I spent Monday jacked up on decongestants, worked half a day, and spent the other half lying on the couch unable to sleep. Yesterday I worked and, so, I figured, if I’m well enough to work, I’m well enough to curl in the usual Tuesday league I play in.

And this morning I have more snot and a scratchy throat, so it’s back to the decongestants and being well enough, with luck, to play in the Saturday Breakfast Extravaganza this week.

As such, I’m not feeling quite up to a sterling analysis of journalism and politics, nor am I up to discussing why the flat tax is a bad idea, though both of those things are on the block for the next 20 days. But I did commit to 30 days and 30 blog entries so, until I get my brain back, check out the iRock I built as part of my effort to finally actually learn JavaScript. The iRock is an exercise from Headfirst JavaScript which is the only book in the more than a decade I’ve been working as a web professional that has managed to make JavaScript even vaguely learnable.

The great folks over at The Story of Stuff project released a new film today, The Story of Electronics, which looks at the environmental damage our addiction to new gadgets causes both at home and in developing countries.

The videos do require Flash/access to YouTube which is a bit of a barrier to communications but otherwise, these videos hit all the points a good campaign should:

• They’re short: each of the four spin-offs from the original Story of Stuff film is less than 10 minutes long and the original movie was broken down into three, approximately 10 minute segments with a clear message.
• They’re engaging without being preachy: one of the biggest problems the environmental movement has in this country is that that it patronizes the very people it needs to convince to change their behavior to achieve the goal.
• They’re simple but not simplistic: the visual style of these movies promotes easy to understand explanations of complex concepts.

Check them out if you want to spend your YouTube time on something more interesting than a cat eating spaghetti.

A glorious thing is happening in the eastern sky as I type this: the sun is rising. I know that doesn’t seem like anything special. After all, the sun rises in the East every single day and were it to do something different humanity would probably drop it’s collective brain right on the ground.

No, this is amazing because it’s the first time we’ve seen the sun here at approximately 40°N before 7am in nearly a month. Ever since Congress, in its infinite wisdom, decided to extend daylight saving time, those of us to get up early have had to scurry around in the dark until we can find a lamp to turn on so we can find our shoes and our clothes and see what we’re having for breakfast.

Of course, the downside to falling back to standard time is that it was dark, I mean midnight pitch black, by 7pm yesterday. For me, that means it’s time to break out the blinky bike light to make me more visible as I walk to and from the subway (because yes, it’s important that winter coats only come in dark colors ’cause everyone lives where there’s enough snow that a dark colored coat makes you more easily visible to search and rescue teams).

Personally, I wonder what it would take to get national leadership to just abandon the whole idea of daylight saving time. It’s not as if we’re a nation of yeoman farmers any more who need that extra light in the evenings to tend to our crops. Though, the way things have been going economically, that extra light to work in the garden might just be helpful.

And yes, this is short. I picked up an icky little cold at my cousin’s wedding (yeah for socializing with big groups of people you don’t know!) and do not claim to be vaguely coherent at this point.

On other notes: Google is celebrating the 115th anniversary of the discovery of x-rays. Kinda cute as Google doodles go.

If you want to take a look at the Internet Archives Wayback Machine you can even find the day when Google celebrated curling during last year’s Winter Olympics.

I went to my cousin’s wedding yesterday. It was probably the most fun I’ll ever have at a wedding which is due in large part to the fact that my cousin and his wife are really fun people. And while their friends were nice enough they were a little to focused hockey, but when a large number of the friends at a wedding have a particular context for connecting with the bride and the groom lots of emphasis on that context is to be expected.

It was a short ceremony; from the bride’s entrance to “I now pronounce you man and wife” took all of 12 minutes and they’d only actually slotted 15 so scheduling was good on that. What was also good was how they structured the pre-wedding and after wedding events. Five words to make your pre-wedding time less painful for your guests: cocktail hour and open bar. [Read more…] about Tip like you mean it

I had a conversation with my friend MW the other day about online networking and social media during which she remarked that she saw absolutely no use for Twitter. It was kind of an odd remark given that she’s Finance Director for a U.S. Representative who was just re-elected. Despite that, I allowed as how if you didn’t have a use for Twitter it really was just a lot of blateration.

When she asked me to elaborate I explained that I had two Twitter accounts, one for my personal blog (you can see my hugely engrossing tweets over there in the right hand column) and one for my professional life. The one for my professional life, I told her, I use like a private news feed.

I follow other people who do the same day job that I do, designers who are doing cool and interesting stuff, a couple of web design and development magazines, some outfits that specialize in WordPress, and a few other interesting people. Doing this ensures that the links and updates that come through my Twitter stream generally have intrinsic value. I, in turn, put out updates that have the same sort of content value and many of the people I’m following are also following me. But just because I’m using Twitter and getting that level of information out of it doesn’t mean that everyone is either getting that value or putting that value back into it. [Read more…] about Technology doesn’t equal content