I was lucky enough to have made the acquaintance of Mary Robinette Kowal at Orycon 2006, when we were on several panels together. I’ve followed her ever since and noted with interest the project she began talking about a few weeks ago, The Month of Letters Challenge. It’s not unlike NaNoWriMo but the idea is to write and send a letter each mail day in the month of February. There are 24 mail days in the month, so 24 letters.

As it happens, for years I have had the idea of creating little collage postcards and mailing them to my friends. My idea was to do one each weekend and mail to a friend with whom I had fallen out of contact. The person I always thought should have been the first recipient was my friend Thomas Peake, who is now sadly the late great Thomas Peake. Thomas was always a guy for creating things, especially interesting physical artifacts. He taught me how to screen print t-shirts (some of which I still have and wear), he used to print up his own zines and the like. This idea appealed to me precisely because it was physical. Much of what I have done in the last decade is digital, electronic and ephemeral. I liked the idea of getting glue on my fingers and dropping in the post a little physical thing that will show up at someone’s house in their mailbox. It is old fashioned and nostalgic and the opposite of how we do things nowadays.

I had this idea maybe five years ago, but it wasn’t until Mary began posting her challenge to social networking sites that I began action. It was just enough of a shove to get me out of my inertial rut and moving. This is now underway. I mailed the first one today, to Mary herself. That seemed like a reasonable enough place to start. The next is going out tomorrow. I am tending to prepare them a day ahead, mainly because I want to keep a scan of them for myself. Part of the challenge is that you don’t write them ahead of time. You write one per day. I am, however, making the collages several days ahead of time and leaving them blank until time for the letter.

A wrinkle I decided to add is a QR code on each of them that points back to this post. If you were the recipient of one of these cards and reading this post, please leave me a quick comment below. It seems like a weird and interesting way to bridge the loop between the online and off, the slow deliberate postal system and the immediate global internet. I’m all for weird hybrids of interesting projects, especially the kind that helps keep me in touch with my friends.

Even if you don’t start on February 1st, if you want to join in either because you received a letter from someone (maybe me) or it just seems fun, please do. Start whenever you like, count off 24 mail days and get to it. Life is short, friends are too scarce and now is the only time we ever have. Off we go into the future, you and me and everyone. Let’s make it what we want of it.

Tags: lett, mary robinette kowal, orycon

I upgraded to a smartphone (Android, not iPhone) kicking and screaming. However I will admit that being able to blog from my phone in a dark room with a sleeping baby on top of me is pretty sweet.

Tags: android, htc status

I’m still catching up on the unblogged items from throughout 2011, aka “The Year Lost to A Tiny Human.” Here is one from last August that I’ve been thinking about for months.

According to this article in the New York Times, there is a phenomenon called “Decision Fatigue.” I can’t attest directly to the science or the reportage of the science, but I do know in my life I feel like this is a big issue. In our modern first world lives, every single day I am asked to make dozens of decisions over and over that I don’t really care about. According to the article, each one of those whether profound or trivial is using up a bit of your store of “decision making mojo” (term coined by me, TM.)

A trivial example of this from the average lunchtime is this – compare going to Subway to Jimmy Johns. In either case, you walk out with a fairly similar sandwich. All told, you get more food for cheaper at Subway, but I prefer the experience of going to Jimmy Johns. Why? Because I walk in to Jimmy Johns and tell them I want a #6. I even make a substitution, deli mustard for mayonaiise but when I place that order, that is the end of it. I hand them money and shortly get a sandwich handed back to me. I can order three or seven, and the experience is the same. Contrast that to the Subway experience. Going to the head of the line at Subway is like being interrogated at the station house.
“What sandwich do you want?”
“What bread?”
“What size?”
“What cheese?”
“Do you want this toasted?”
“Which toppings?”
Even if you say ‘the works’, you still get asked “Do you want the jalapenos? How about the banana peppers?”
“What sauces?”
“Chips and a drink?”
“How about a cookie?”

By the time this experience is over, I’m exhausted from having to answer all of these frigging questions when truth be told, I don’t give much of a shit about any of it. You could hand me my sandwich on any bread, with any cheese, and with any permutation of toppings and I’d feel about the same about it. Scale this up to across your whole life all day, and it begins to get abrasive.

Recently we went to get photos of the baby taken at the mall, and we had not even thought about Santa being there. We’d already had a photo session when we saw the Santa stand and decided to do that one too. I didn’t even think hard about the options, I went straight for the top package with the most stuff. The reason was that the few dollars in savings mattered less to me than making an arbitrary decision I didn’t care about and trying to decide right there on the spot whether it was better to have 3 5X7 vs 4 5X7 and whether it was better to make a tradeoff on wallet sized. Further, the purchasing experience at JC Penney’s Photo Studio is such that they take photos and then 2 minutes later you have to make all decisions about which and how many to purchase, and if you don’t decide right that second the price skyrockets from $4 to $10 a sheet. It’s kind of a gross and unpleasant user experience but not at all atypical in modern American consumer driven society.

One of the things I do on a small scale is the invariant ordering at certain places. When I go to Starbucks, I get an Americano 99.5% of the time. I get the same sandwich at Jimmy Johns every time, and at most restaurants I frequent I have a small set of go-to options. For me personally, I’m happy to trade off variety for simplified decisions. In those places where I am a regular customer with invariant ordering, after a while they learn my choices. I’ve had my Jimmy Johns sandwich (with correct condiment substitution) waiting for me on the counter because they saw me parking my car and started making it. My regular Starbucks will often bring my drink to my table without us ever exchanging a word, which is fun because the beach tourists always look confused over how a guy who never ordered at all got a drink ahead of them.

I’m not telling anyone how to live their life, but if you are in the business of trying to shake money out of American consumers, you might want to consider the best ways to streamline decisions out of the process. Every one of them is a roadblock that might abort the transaction entirely. Think of the ways to reduce the whole transaction to “Yes, I want it” and then boom it is done. Amazon is particularly good at this. What is “one click ordering” if nothing but “decision free checkout process?” Brilliant.

Our baby was born last January. It’s amazing how much came to a grinding halt then and has never come back. I have seen no television since then except for maybe 4 hours total of college football and a few hours of NASCAR races. I just looked at my Google Reader under my tag “Blog fodder.” I had been using that to tag entries I might later want to blog about here. The last entry in there was dated December 2010. I don’t know how far behind I am in reading my GR items but I’d guess three or four months.

None of this is a complaint. If anything it is the opposite. One of the many gifts the baby gave me is showing me that parts of my life that were major time sinks can completely disappear and I will barely miss them. I had already had the goal to jettison some of the fast twitch parts of my online life (Twitter being a prime one) before she was born, but after she was born it was no longer a choice or intention. Having a baby – especially at our ages – is the equivalent of on Star Trek when the captain says “Life support only!” It doesn’t matter what you want, you do what is physically possible for you.

I’m calmer and happier now, even with the exhaustion and stress of keeping this small being alive whose primary goal is to do dangerous activities. Life is good, even as far less of it occurs on the internet. It’s quite possible it is because far less of it is happening on the internet.

So I had this idea of life with a baby that went like this: Baby is born and things are really tough. The first few weeks are insane, no one sleeps and life is completely hard. Then after this, things get easier and easier and we go on into our future.

Our reality went more like this: The first few weeks were hard. Then the second month was actually harder than the first because I started going back to work and we had to deal with that. Then the third month was harder still because the baby is still challenging but now we have a long term exhaustion setting in. I’m not sure how long this trend will continue but at this point we are wearing down pretty hard. It’s amazing the small things of life that just don’t happen. I have a stack of unread comic books growing slowly because I’m lucky if I can read one per week. I can’t even remember the last TV show I watched on our DVR. I imagine things are getting recorded and then deleted as it runs out of memory but I haven’t looked in weeks.

The other thing that happens is that for people like us in a town with no family, there is a lot more support in the early days. People recognize the emergency nature of the situation and bring food and run errands, etc. However you can’t run like that forever and draw on friend karma forever.

I would have thought life would be different but there you have it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything but the arc of how it is playing out is a big surprise to me.

I’ve occasionally had blogging slowdowns here but never for as good a reason as the current one. Last month our daughter Lila was born. For the time being, what blogging does occur will be sporadically timed and probably disjointed and written as if composed by an exhausted and loopy individual.

We had a tremendous outpouring of support and congratulations before and after her birth. Our friends and family were generous to the point of embarrassment at the baby showers and in life in general. We are grateful to tears and deeply appreciate everything.

The last few weeks have thrummed to a rhythm not our making. We’re trying to get used to it and figure out how to get life accomplished while dealing with her needs. As time goes on we’ll meet in the middle.

We discussed our internet policy as regards our daughter, and in this instance it is actually a score for the walled gardens. We decided for the time being we don’t want pictures with her face posted to the open internet. We have posted those to Facebook where we can limit the scope to only friends. This is a work in progress, but for now that’s where we stand. If you see in the photo to the right, that is the “lil’ genius” onesie sent by Garrick Van Buren. He made it by snipping out the bomb from the EGC logo, which I find fantastic.

More blogging in the future, when we are able to be both parents and human at the same time. I know it is coming, I just don’t know when.

I’ve drifted away from the Merlin Mann hero worship, but today I saw a really good post from him about changing habits and making resolutions. This is one of the reasons I stopped making resolutions years ago. Creating a change you want to see in yourself and then tying it to a resolution is a kiss of death for it. It’s an admission that you will perform the puppet show of pretending you care and then forgetting all about it. Independently the other day I started assembling the list of projects large and small in my life that I want to make progress on. It was a shockingly long list which also explains why I don’t make progress. It occurred to me days after I started that I was leaving off projects for which I have web sites up and running. I registered domains for these things, set them up on my Hostgator account and even so it took a few days to remember I even had them. This signifies that I have too many projects in my life.

The sad thing is that I’d love to move on all of these projects. It’s true about me as about most people that I love starting projects and concluding them but I’m far less interested in executing on them. Although New Years and resolutions is not a triggering event for me to re-evaluate, the imminent birth of my daughter is. I can pretty much guarantee for the early part of 2011 we will barely be holding it together. We will be old parents dealing with a newborn at first, then trying to integrate working my day job with being the dad of a young baby. I know I will barely have any time, so I have to jealously guard whatever little bits of time come my way. This requires thinking through that list and making the hard decisions.

I want to work on all these projects. That’s why they are on the list. I just physically can’t work on them all so now it becomes the Sophie’s Choice model. If I could take one and only one project and work it all the way to successful completion this year, which one would it be? I think I know (although I’m keeping it to myself.) Now the question is how in the next week or three to do all the groundwork necessary so that I can decompose this into something I can achieve in bursts of 15 minutes of time stolen away from my life. It will be hard to put most of these things I care about into cryonic suspension as if they were going on an interstellar voyage. However, they will all still be there later if and when I ever get back to them.

I am already in the process of divesting myself of AmigoFish. Originally I was planning to shut it down but a white knight has emerged to keep it alive. The transition is under way and around the time my daughter arrives I should have only the minor role we specificied contractually in providing emergency system administration help. That’s painful because I’d loved to have made this more of a success but making the hard choice to no longer pursue it feels good. I can’t adequately time slice between 20 different things, so I’m keeping active the one or two that I care most about and everything else goes on hiatus. With luck 2012 will be a great time of refreshed enthusiasm and reinvigorated process. Possibly, it could also be a time of purging my metaphorical project pantry of the cans of beets I know I’ll never eat. Either way, I feel good about it.

May all of you have a successful year of making the hard choices and moving your individual ball down the field of your lives.

Tags: amigofish, merlin mann

It’s true that my output on all internet fronts has slowed waaaay down. I’m blogging less, podcasting less, tweeting not at all. For a long stretch of time that bothered me greatly because it seemed like I was letting down the team in some way, or failing to correctly promote my “personal brand” or all sorts of other vague dreads of underplaying my hand. In truth, I feel better about life in general lately. I don’t know if this correlation is causation, but worrying less about doing things at the bogus pace of “internet time” means that I don’t have the constant heartbeat of the next refresh interval driving my attention. It’s peaceful. In a very real way, turning off a lot of those inputs and worrying less about my output feels like a long term vacation.

I never intend to close doors with any of these pronouncements because reality on the ground may change, but I sense this may become more like the long-term sustainable way I approach online life. I may blog every day for a week and then not for a day or week or month. I may do a few podcasts in a row and then drift off for a while. I may return to being a tweet machine, or I might never do it again. If the question is “Did you see that thing on Facebook”, regardless of the thing the answer has a greater than 99% chance of being “No.”

Of course, in less than a month you mix a newborn baby into this and life gets even shakier. I know plenty of people have kids and a digital life and the two mesh happily. I’m predicting that in our lives since we are older new parents that it will take a lot out of us. I might blip out for most of the late winter and early spring. If so, you can safely assume I’m happy as a clam and probably covered in some form of bodily fluid.

One of the upsides of pulling back from digital life is that it allows me to double down on corporeal life. In the last few months I’ve done more fun stuff in person than many years, and it keeps on going. You can trust that if I’m in the room with you, I’m not checking a smart phone. When I’m present, I’m trying to be actually present rather than this vaguely distracted weird attention that everyone pays nowadays.

So, that’s where I’m at this time, right before XMas 2010. I remain a ghost in the machine on the internet but I’m around. Give me a call, write me a letter, invite me to lunch, set up a play date. I’m 17 years into this internet thing and still working out how to do it correctly, but I feel like I’m getting there.

Happy holidays to all. May you find exactly the level of peace that you need.

As the posting frequency gets slower and slower, it gets harder to tell when this blog is on vacation. But it is. For the next week we’ll be in a house on a lake without internet. At first that seemed like a problem but as we pack to leave, it feels more like an amenity. I’m taking a few paper books, a Kindle stocked to the gills, swimsuits and games and a few DVDs we never seem to find time to watch.

I’ll come back in a week, tanned and relaxed (just like Nixon) and ready to tackle a busy fall into a busy holiday season followed by an extremely busy 2011 for us. This might be the last good sleep I get in some time. Hold down the internet without me.

I didn’t actually intend to take a summer hiatus from online stuff but de facto I did. Decision by decision for the last few months, I’ve opted away from creating and publishing things online and more towards relaxing. The exception is at Ebooks From TV where I’ve blogged more or less every day since early June. However, since that’s not personal and is done for a very specific single purpose, for some reason that has felt much easier.

Tomorrow I’m recording an episode of the EGC podcast and at some point I have to prepare episode 6 of the Peakecast. I still have work to do on the movie footage in the can, episodes of Reality Break that really need to be put together, an office that desperately needs cleaned, an air hockey table that needs to be sold on Craigslist. I’ll have to upshift my lazy ass from summer gear to productive gear, but I think it can be done. I’m just trying not to grind the gears too badly.

I am currently on a quick tour through Colorado and northwestern Kansas. This weekend I’l be attending my 25th high school reunion. This really seems like the one to go to. We ain’t getting any younger, we’re all at the point in our lives where we’re starting to get sentimental about the past. I haven’t been to any previous ones but I was really motivated for this reunion. Realistically, this is probably the last chance I have in this life to see a number of these folks. I need to take it.

I’m not even sure if the Kansas hotel we’re going to has internet, so my appearance on the intarwebs might be spotty. The way I’ve been blogging/podcasting lately, that’s getting harder to notice.

I don’t want this blog to fall into cobwebby disarray, but for a variety of reasons I haven’t been around here much. Part of that is normal summer stuff with some fun travel and work travel, part of that is other projects, and part is the ever diminishing urge to blog. I do like the thought some days of just shutting down Twitter for good and going back to this blog as my primary interface with the internet. I don’t trust Twitter as either a business entity or as a competent deliverer of service so it never feels sensible to allow them to be my stewards between me and the rest of the world. The same goes 10X for Facebook as an untrustworthy steward, even if they are better on a technical level.

I’ll post here when I have something to show for it, but  just for pure giggles I’m pursing an old school paper zine. So much of what I have done for creativity in the last decade is electronic, intangible and ephemeral. I like the idea of putting out something that is an artifact, that you can hold and keep and get in the mail. That’s my new slogan: Putting the ‘somatic’ back in ‘psychosomatic’!

Sometimes a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. That goes double for dogs.

My struggles with the online world continue. I am blogging ever less, podcasting ever less. However I remember the introduction to Ted Sturgeon’s short story collection Sturgeon Is Alive and Well . . .. In it he posited that there is no such thing as “writer’s block” only changes in writing styles that require entering a chrysalis-like state for a while before emerging as a different thing. He thought that what seemed like an inability to write was the conscious writer requiring a quiet time to catch up with the subconscious one.

I hope that is what is happening to me and social media. The positive side about my online life doldrums is that is being matched with a ramping up of activity in my offline life. Just this morning, I rode my bike down to the Conway riverfront and around downtown for the first time in a long time. I plan after next weekend’s CREATE South to take one month off from social media – for sure Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and other presence type services and possibly the blog and everything. I know Larry Lessig does one month a year entirely away from the internet and that might turn out to be a long term healthy way to live.

For now, I remain trying to adjust the needle to the sweet spot of the online/offline balance mix. Time to shut down the computer and go play some beach volleyball with friends. It seems like a better thing to do on a beautiful April day in Myrtle Beach than blogging. I’m just saying …

Tags: create south, create south 2010

Twenty years ago today, my child bride and I were married. We made the decision two weeks before we did it and got married the Saturday of our spring break from Georgia Tech. The ceremony was performed by a judge at the Cobb County courthouse with about 40 of our friends in attendance. The reception was at my in-law’s house in Mableton GA. All told, including rings and everything, the wedding cost about $300. We financed part of that by selling back used textbooks a former house mate left behind when he moved away. The whole affair was low rent and high emotion. I thought the ceremony was beautiful, my wife was and is beautiful and marrying her made me incredibly happy.

The road from that point to now was difficult and a few decisions were made incredibly badly. We managed to power through the hard times and recover from the missteps and we are still together. We decided last night that the only thing we envy about the kids in these pictures is how skinny they are. They are smug and oblivious and shortly to get smacked in the head by life in a big way. Let them have their moment here, things will get tough for them soon enough.

Happy anniversary to us!

This holiday season my last day at work was December 22, and I’m going back on Monday January 4th, which is tomorrow. This is my 12th day off in a row and it doesn’t seem like I’ve hardly started.  I’d love to say the batteries are recharged and I’m raring to go but truthfully, I could easily do another 12 days if I had the opportunity. Thinking it through, I realized this is the longest stretch of vacation I’ve had since grad school where I had a job to go back to. I was out of work from layoffs for three months or so in 2001 at the bottom of the dot-bomb period but that wasn’t a vacation. It was more stressful than having a job, really.

While I’ve been on vacation, I’ve also kind of been on vacation from the computer somewhat. There were multiple days in that stretch where I didn’t touch a computer, and I’ve been mostly off of Twitter, Facebook, et al. I did read a lot of comic books, do a good bit of reading on my Kindle and we’ve been working our way through The Wire: The Complete Series, which we’ve been loving. We watched movies, leaning towards the stupid comedies but also including Slumdog Millionaire. I’ll be contrarian and say that while Slumdog isn’t a bad movie, it was completely nothing special to me. I’m not sure why it got the hype and buzz that it did. It was competent enough but I didn’t find it anything more than an average quality diversion of a film. I was much more enthused about The Hangover, which was like Memento with a raunchy sense of humor. After I watched it, I realized that it has basically the same plot as Dude, Where’s My Car? and that’s OK.

During the vacation I had vague plans of productivity in new media that never happened. In retrospect, that is probably for the best. I don’t feel bad about not blogging or podcasting and I only wish I had made that as a deliberate choice up front so I didn’t have free-floating guilt about my lack of productivity. I feel recharged and happy and ready to prosecute 2010 to my fullest. I’ve already recorded a podcast this morning, have another blog post lined up behind this one.

Hello new year, let’s light this candle.

I know some people like Lawrence Lessig explicitly take time out periods from being online. It seems like a growing thing to do as all of us struggle to find ongoing sustainable ways to live our digital lifestyles for periods that get longer and longer and may well be the rest of our lives. I am no exception to that, I might be one of the worse ones. I wasn’t trying to take time away but it is working out like that. For the rest of the month of December I may or may not be away from my blog, Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter et al for days or weeks, with or without warning.

It’s reached the point where I shock myself sometimes when I look at this blog and see that it’s been 2 or 4 or 6 days since the last time I posted. It never feels like it has been that long. This is further evidence that the hamster cage we are all running in might be wearing us out. I’d love to be posting longer, insightful pieces like I tried to do in the past but when it comes down to time to do it, I’m tired and make other decisions.

Added to all this is the ongoing sorting out process as people shift energies amongst their blogs, Twitter, Facebook and all the other ways you can do something online. This will never be settled, the best we can do is to find semi-stable equilibria now and then as the landscape shifts under us again. Off I go, trying to balance my way across the shaking ground.

Today might well be the last day that weather permits my standard “sit on the beach and eat mediocre grocery store sushi” type lunch. So I did it. I love fall in Myrtle Beach so much, it’s really the absolute best time of the year here. Instead of being 93 degrees on the beach, it is 78. Instead of being packed with tourists, it’s pretty wide open. Plus now you can park on the street on Ocean Boulevard. It’s clearly a win all the way around. Here’s hoping there are a few more wins this year but if not, I did it today. Carpe diem, y’all!

Tags: myrtle beach

I watched the TV show “Hoarders” at the recommendation of people who thought I, ahem, shared some characteristics with these people and their pathological accumulation of useless crap. Ahem. I guess it all comes down to degrees.

Some time back I have identified the root cause of practically every problem I have as procrastination. This is why I found GTD such a compelling philosophy because it addressed the real problem I have. I have a huge buildup of emails in my inbox. This is mostly because of the ones that will take some time to address – not a huge amount of time , but some. I don’t do them now, and procrastinate. I have clutter because I am failing to make a choice in what to do with this thing. There is some future point at which value will be realized, but I’m not making the choices that will realized the value and instead just hold onto the crap by default.

There was a point in “Hoarders” where a clutter addict was confronted about a broken vacuum cleaner. “It only needs this one thing to be fixed up and sold at a yard sale.” The organizer pushed back with “What is your history in actually doing that?” The response, a reluctant “… well, I’ve never actually held a yard sale.” Check and mate. I have the same problem. I really want to address it and make the choice now. This might be a fall of purging. I hope so. I don’t want the city condemning my office.

Tags: gtd, hoarders, you make really bad life choices

I enjoy fall and after the sometime oppressive heat of a coastal South Carolina summer, it can be quite refreshing. However I always find it a melancholy point in the year when we hit the last day where one can reasonably wear shorts and sandals. I believe today might be that day. It’s downright chilly here and even though I’m wearing closed shoes, long pants and a long sleeved shirt, I’m wishing I had also brought a jacket.

Let’s raise a toast to one more lovely summer and wish it well. I’ll deal with my melancholia by drinking lots of coffee on this cold and dreary October day. I wish I could take a nap, but that’s generally frowned on in the workplace.