Posted in thoughts, twitter on 06/25/2009 11:12 pm by Goldie
Or…when 140 characters are not enough. (This is in part the more than 140 character response to a friend’s tweet.)
I have been watching the reactions of people to today’s news of Michael Jackson’s and Farrah Fawcett’s deaths. Many people were touched by these deaths and posted about memories, and many posted about their feeling of loss. I know that today certainly had a somber feel to me. Significant icons of my youth were now gone from the world.
Sometimes the loss of a celebrity, especially a mega star seems so significant because they are so much ‘bigger than life”. Whatever they have done in their lives - because of their visibility - they have touched and impacted billions of people. It can make our actions seem much smaller.
However, with death the message comes that that person’s time to create and do in this world is over for this lifetime. What they have done stands as a record and all that can go forward from now is what we do in response to their life, and their death. To borrow a phrase, life is left to the living.
It may seem like our actions are small compared to the loss - but our actions are larger than we think. Even if we never become mega-celebrities our actions transform the lives around us, and in turn those lives we’ve touched touch others. Ultimately we touch billions of people.
With each loss we feel pain but we can, and should, use the loss to remind us of how we have been inspired by those who have died and act on that inspiration to inspire those around you.
Posted in Uncategorized on 03/19/2009 09:44 am by Goldie
I got back from SXSW last night. What an amazing experience. It was awesome meeting so many people. I wish I had had more time to spend with everyone and that I had caught up with a few more people but I am so thankful for the conversations I was able to have. The sessions were great too. It is good to hear other people’s thoughts on topics and I learned some new things and new ideas as well. Not every session was a home run, but there was something to get from each session (and more than a few I want to catch on podcast.)
Hopefully some of the thoughts and ideas that were triggered by SXSW will come out as posts in the next few days, we’ll see how that works, but one thing that struck me the first night I was wandering around was the grackles.
We left our hotel Saturday night to head to the parties and I was struck by this sound - it was so loud and almost mechanical I was wondering who had some mechanical bird sounds playing on the street. No, it wasn’t mechanical it was 100’s of birds in the trees all clicking and whirring and chirping at each other.
When we went back to the hotel we asked and they told us - those are grackles.
My sound recording options were pretty limited, so below is a very poor quality recording (from my blackberry phone voice recorder) but it gives you a little feel for the sound.
Posted in social media on 03/10/2009 09:46 pm by Goldie
Purim has come and gone and the remaining exciting event for the week is the start of SXSW. Last year I was very bummed to miss SXSW and started planning towards making it this year. Reservations are made, plans for the pets are made, and a general (and flexible) plan has been made. I’m not sure of my exact plans but I will be tweeting as I go. I also will be planning a Friday night kiddush/nosh/hang out get together so if you are are going to be at SXSW feel free to stop by. I’ll update with the actual details as to where specifically once I’ve arrived.
Posted in Uncategorized on 03/08/2009 09:06 pm by Goldie
I pretty regularly watch the TED videos. Today I watched a talk given by Mike Rowe who does the Dirty Jobs tv show. In it he gives some interesting insight on dirty jobs and questioning if “Pursing your passion” is the right answer. In a sense his talk was the counter-point to the Four Hour Workweek. His thoughts on the balance of the lives of these people with what we might think of as “less than ideal” were quite in line with what I saw when I went to my training class a few weeks ago and shared a class with “Working class” men. I’m not sure what the full lesson is, and I think Mike Rowe is still asking some questions there as well, but his talk is definitely one I recommend, and so I’ve embedded it below.
Are we at war with work? How does tangibility play into the balance of ones life. I think the technical and virtual and passionate parts are relevant, but it is very easy to “over virtualize”. How do you keep your balance in life?
Posted in administrivia on 03/01/2009 10:05 am by Goldie
Well I was quite pleased to find out that I could easily import all of my blogposts from blogspot with the comments. There is a little import tab in the administrative interface and it just works.
One of the reasons I was considering the switch over to a self hosted wordpress blog was so that I could actually respond to comments by some means other than just commenting (which as far as I could tell could not be subscribed to so you’d have to check back to see if I replied.)
Another reason was to try and come up with a way to sort my content a bit more by topic/category and allow users to just follow one thread or another if they prefer. I tend to dabble in a broad range of things and while it’s fine if you want to peek in on all of them I’d love to give people an easy way to follow just stories, just social media, just virtual worlds etc. We’ll see if my wordpress theme configuring skills are up to the task.
Now to fix up categories & tags and get various useful widgets like blogrolls and the like back where they belong.
Posted in administrivia on 02/21/2009 06:47 pm by Goldie
Apparently when moving my domain name “preserve dns settings” didn’t mean what I thought. Since things neede to be reset anyways, I figured now was a good time to move over to wordpress. The previous content (and new content and theme) will be up over the next few days. I appologize for the disappearance and dust that is still settling.
Posted in thoughts on 02/11/2009 01:42 pm by Goldie
Just ended a three day training session for work. Not for my usual sort of job but a more “get your hands dirty” kind of job. It was a really fun, class. Most of the students were desk workers like me, but there were two guys who were the supervisors for the type of job we were training for and had real life experience, as did the instructor.
It was fascinating, they had these stories of real life situations where being careful about safety meant the difference between life and death, or stories about things they built with their hands, or stories about hard work on the job and the connections with their co-workers who stood by their side through the hard work.
On the last day of the class in another “just talking about stuff” session one of the other desk workers students said, what I had been thinking in the back of my mind, “I’m trying to think of any good cubicle stories and I can’t think of any.” It isn’t that there aren’t any, but so much of what we do is solitary, or so very intangible that it is hard without the context and a like understanding to see the passion or realness of the struggle.
There are some that come up, but there is no working hard in the rain (unless there is a leaky roof) and lots of jobs don’t directly touch people’s lives or essential services. Sure we have our struggles and challenges, and they seem as real…but when you try to share them in the telling it is hard to find the bridge.
Now I’m not hanging up my desk job apron and going out to look for something more physical to do for work. Society and day to day life just as essentially relies on these software systems and applications as they rely on the physical layers. However, how much do we see the impact of what we do, of the code we write. How does it impact other people’s lives. And how does the virtual become graspable beyond those with the specialized knowledge. Is that possible or has it become too complex.
In a sense the stories that they told were modern day moral stories. How easy can we make modern day moral stories of our lives and our actions and our projects? And then, how long does it take before we can look back and see that what we did today was a great story. So maybe today is making a good moral story for tomorrow, but its worth looking and seeing if your cubicle or coffee shop story will be something to share down the road, and if not why?
Posted in thoughts on 01/12/2009 11:27 am by Goldie
Ed: What follows are some personal thoughts, but I thought that perhaps my lessons learned would help someone else
Today I woke up angry, and that’s good. I was angry at me for forgetting who I am and what my strengths are. Sometimes something is hard because you are making a big difference and changing something that needs changing. And sometimes things are hard because your doing it wrong.
For me, it was the latter. The problem with a decent amount of competency and stubborn headedness is that most things that you put your head to you can do reasonably well, even if its not your thing to do. The only problem is that it takes all your time and energy and you aren’t doing what you are good at and can make a difference doing.
Somewhere along the way I got back to my younger self and was trying to hang out with the cool kids. I’m not one of the cool kids, and I probably never will be, and trying to be there is just saying cool is the only way to be.
Instead teaching classes that people clamor for (I have 2 emails in my inbox and one person who pesters me once a month to see if I’ll teach again) I’ve been busy organizing things and running events, and at the same time being behind scenes too much to be very visible, unless you were paying attention.
Sometimes its your smallness that gets you to realize that you’re on the wrong path. And I guess that’s what it was for me. I need my projects to give me a sense of overall benefit, and yes, I like continued recognition (as long as people are still talking about what I did.) Teaching and virtual worlds, and blogging all give me that feedback. So does participating in things like Seesmic and the other social parts of Web 2.0 - for the fun of it.
So it’s time for me to stop trying to be all that I can be, and instead be me. Sometimes you have to stretch beyond what you can do, but sometimes you have to come home and focus on who you are and what benefits you.
This week we read the story that is in the epilogue of the book Truths Revealed: Modern Stories of Miracles & Faith which is written by a friend of mine. It is a story about darkness and light.
by Tzvi Jacobs