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- July 22, 2008
On Hiatus
July 22, 2008Read moreAlthough at this moment I am filled with excitement at again redefining and reframing myself, I have a big project I need to close out, and I’m going to have to refrain from blogging for at least a month. This is a good time to haul out my Pickle Jar, which I think is in the laundry room collecting coins that I find in the washing machine. The Pickle Jar is used for holding ideas that I don’t want to lose, a sort of promise to myself to come back to the idea later.
Before I disappear, here’s some updates on various initiatives:
- I’m still working on that interactive museum project, and we’re at the point where development should be hitting “full steam ahead” mode. I’m falling a bit behind on the technology side of things (I’m learning how to program 3D graphics systems) because I’m becoming familiar with the underlying development system. I’m also looking for programmers experienced with XNA on Windows, particularly on the model/shader development/animation side of things, to help out on a module-by-module basis.
One of the people I met at Starbucks teaches piano lessons, so I signed up for one to see if that will help with the Gospel Music experiment I started a while ago.
I’ve gotten several submissions for the freelance referral building, but I have not yet processed any of this. If there’s anything I post about, it will be this.
I have Printable CEO-related updates that I’d like to make, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to get to them. This also includes several user submissions that I haven’t had the time to virus-check, zip, and upload. The challenge with user submitted updates is that I end up having to provide the technical support for the uploads; links to blog posts are much easier to deal with.
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p>Although the writing and blogging are activities that fill me with energy, they take a lot of time and I have to shift that to my paying work for a good chunk of time. At least afterwards, I’ll have a whole new body of expertise to write about.
- July 21, 2008
Personal Insights from Social Media
July 21, 2008Read more
Yesterday was the final day of PodCamp Boston 3, and I had a really great time. I wasn’t sure if I would fit into a social media event, but apparently what I’ve been trying to do for the past two years IS social media. It all started with insights from my first SXSW, and more recently I’ve been going through this progression of insights over the past month that have led up to this insight:
- For the past year or two, I’ve been trying to figure out my “angle” so I can accurately describe what I do. I’ve played with ideas like storytelling by design (which I’ve noted interestingly that some other designers online have since adopted) and investigative design to describe my design approach. The major insight I’ve had, up to now, was that I should put my skills (programming, interactive, design) second, and my nature first. Figuring out what my nature is has been what’s on my mind.
Following up on that insight, I’d noted in Groundhogs, The Future, and Tanabata Too that my “armor” or “persona” was in opposition to some mysterious bird-like core that wanted to “just be”. In other words, I was denying myself my nature, and this reminded me very much of how recognizing such conflict can help inspire great character performances in film. Perhaps I am in my third act.
I’ve recently realized that I would rather be writing than anything else. At PodCamp, I dipped my toe in the water by labeling my name tag “designer / writer” instead of the usual “personal productivity enthusiast” or “investigative designer”. I was pretty pleased with myself until the all-seeing Chris Brogan happened to catch it as he was sweeping by, and commented, “designer first, Dave?” before vanishing in a puff of rhetoric. Realizing I was lacking guts, I went back to the registration table and put writer before designer.
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p>So what is social media? You can read the definition on Wikipedia, but I would flip it around and say that it’s reaching people and making a genuine personal connection steeped in shared passion. It’s not about technology. It’s not about increasing the size of your network. It’s not about monetizing the eyeballs that advertisers are desperate to reach. For me, it is about making a real one-on-one connection, to create enthusiastic conversation. What social media does, from an action-oriented methodology perspective, is create the context where such conversations can take place. That’s the way I’m thinking about it, anyway.
One of my favorite presentations at Podcamp Boston 3 was C.C. Chapman’s Building Your Brand Through Passion & Community, because C.C. is a living example of the kind of transparency I applaud. I didn’t keep good notes, other than the link to the awesome Where The Hell Is Matt dancing around the world video, but I remember feeling that for the first time, I had some external confirmation that it was OK to equate brand and personal identity. I do not need to compartmentalize my interests for the convenience of marketing myself as a package to different special interest groups. However, I do need to be cognizant of the need to make those aspects of myself easily approached; that also means that they need to be clearly presented. That isn’t the case at all right now on this website, and the scattered nature of my topical writing isn’t helping either. On top of that, there are several threads that I haven’t reported on in a while: the gospel music project and the freelance network wiki are foremost on my mind at the moment. I’m feeling bad about this because continuity is important when you’re trying to do anything of lasting coolness; you can see the tie-in to productivity here.
I met a ton of cool people, and feel plugged into the possibility of having found another community that’s close to my heart. And this time, it’s right here in the Boston area. Awesome.
- July 20, 2008
Podcamp Boston 3 Day 1
July 20, 2008Read moreYesterday I made the trek to Boston for PodCamp Boston 3 for a first day of gettin’ social with people and the media that they’re creating.
Socializing
Unlike past conferences where I learned to be comfortable by myself, this time around I was comfortable approaching people and saying “hi”. PodCamp Boston 3 is the first real-world test of my insight about personas vs core identity and allowing myself to be. At conferences like SXSWi, I’d tried to figure out where I fit into the social picture, and tried to come up with a way to describe myself accordingly: “I’m a designer that specializes in personal productivity and information graphic design.” This time, I have the benefit of knowing what I fundamentally am driven to do–my passion, in other words. Which is, as anyone who has struggled to get through my lengthy articles will tell you, is writing stuff down. For the past year I’ve been chasing myself down a different path, trying to figure out how to describe the sum of my skills and interests in some snappy way that could be readily dropped casually into a creative business conversation and explode into intrigue followed by deep understanding. This week, I realized that it was not the sum, but the core that was important. And that is writing about what catches my eye. In the process of writing, I relate what I see with what I find interesting, and along the way I synthesize a few nuggets of insight that people find useful. It’s very tempting to call that something snazzy, for the purposes of monetization, but at PodCamp I’m just telling people that I’m a writer/designer that writes about whatever catches my eye, and that I am best known for designing tools for personal productivity. And then things go from there.
One nice thing about PodCamp is that everyone is friendly, and generally willing to sit and talk. The pace is much less hurried than SXSW, with plenty of time and space to collide with someone and have a 15 minute conversation. Yesterday we rustled up a posse of random people to have sushi at Uni down the street, and it was a fine time despite getting back to the conference later than expected. Some people don’t feel like chatting, and so you can smile and just move on. One of the other insights I had this week is that I am indeed innately curious about people, and that this curiosity had been blocked by a sense of wanting to know how I “fit in” before I spoke. Now that I’ve identified this mental barrier and rerouted my expectations, it’s a lot easier to just sit and listen, and interject as curiosity raises its fluffy tail and starts to wag. Personally, I’m finding it rather remarkable a change in myself. Day 2, which is about to start for me in an hour when I get ready to drive into Boston, will provide a second day of data. I’m such a nerd.
The Panels
I wandered in and out of the various panels. The one that I started with was NeoVictorian, Nobitic, and Narrative by the rather fascinating Mark Bernstein, the chief scientist for a company called Eastgate with a hypertext note product called Tinderbox. The presentation, established Bernstein in his opening remarks, was to be a kind of “sermon” that took a tour through topics of…actually, I don’t remember specifically what it was about without my notes—and I didn’t take any other than a few pictures of interesting slides. What I remembered was that there was a lot of audience participation, and that the word “Nobitic” was very very important to what I’m trying to do. Since it is a made-up word, I’ll have to find my notes on this later.
I caught a bit of the Using a live podcast to allow your readers to “become part of the conversation” by Nikki Starr, who works for Blog Talk Radio. This is apparently a service that allows bloggers to create live podcasts, take calls from readers, and archive the material online. It’s a co-ownership arrangement with regards to the recorded performance, and it sounds pretty cool. Nikki mentioned that The Fly Lady, one of the giants of the domestic productivity scene on the net, uses the service to reach out to her 500,000 loyal followers.
I missed the next panel block due to the late-running lunch, and afterwards popped into Solo Podcasting by Greg Demetrick. My real agenda was to take a nap, and I successfully dozed off for a few minutes, but I kept waking up because Greg kept talking about interesting things. It was an excellent presentation on both the gear and philosophy that drives a successful podcast. I’ll have to check out what else this guy has written.
I only caught a little bit of Down and Dirty (and free!) ways to put your Mac to Work by Jeff Berg, a highly-knowledgable Mac consultant that I liked immediately for his personable yet direct demeanor. At that point it as time to head home, but Sunday will be a full day for me and I’m looking forward to several sessions. This time I’m leaving all the fancy camera stuff at home and packing much lighter. My ideal note-taking setup for a conference like this would be a digital audio recorder that could take periodic stills: a slideshow recorder as opposed to a video recorder :-) I wonder if such a thing exists? It would be more memory-efficient, certainly.
Ok, time to shower. See youse at Podcamp Boston!
- July 18, 2008
Little Birds
July 18, 2008Read moreEvery once in a while I like to check out a store online called See Jane Work. I have an irrational love of paper and office supplies, and I enjoy the cheerful upbeat nature of the site. Everything is so cute! If this website were a gal, I’d marry her :-)
Today I ordered my first product, a magnetic chirping bird for holding paper clips. This is probably the least necessary thing I need in my office, but its role is more symbolic than functional. There are these little birds that I see every day at Starbucks in the morning; I believe they are some kind of common swallow. I usually sit outside if it’s not raining, taking in the morning air, and observe these birds almost every day. There’s something about the way these birds approach us that I find fascinating. They’re tiny, fluffy, and pretty cute. They’re also diligent, bold, and industrious. I realized a couple weeks ago that they do a very good job of “just being themselves”, and that I could learn a thing or two from them. I sometimes get wrapped up in thinking I should be “more professional” or “building my career”, and though I’ve definitely chosen a more non-traditional path to life-work I still get caught up in thinking about “success” and how people perceive me. Those little birds have no such pretensions, and every day they remind me that my OWN little bird inside of me needs to come out and “just be”. That realization has become one of my moral compass points.
That my moral compass point is now available in shiny magnetic bird form is just a bonus. Woot!
- July 17, 2008
Seeing What’s Inside
July 17, 2008Read moreI’ve got a friend, J, who is studying to become a doctor in the Washington D.C. area. Since she works almost all the time and we haven’t talked much recently, we started trading snippets of everyday stories for fun. So yesterday, J is working at a senior living facility, where she is volunteering while school is out, and she had a personal epiphany that moved me to tears while I was sitting here at Starbucks. She’s graciously allowed me to share her words here:
So, I have a story to tell you. Yesterday I went to volunteer in this senior living facility. I do a free blood pressure check-up for the residents there once a week there. Because the facility is an apartment for the seniors with the amenities geared towards senior living rather than a nursing home, the residents are pretty in good shape. However, one of the patients obviously did not look normal but rather disabled. He had a disproportionately large head compared to his torso, even more so when compared to his legs. His torso was so hunched over forward, he reminded me of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. On top of that, he couldn’t walk well even with the walker. His lips were open constantly and he drooled. His hands were permanently deformed due to the neurological damage which caused contractures. Hope you get the picture. I glimpsed him walking (rather, dragging himself) into the room and felt a little bit of repulsion in my gut because he just didn’t look like a human to be honest. He walked in and sat down on a chair next to me while I was checking other residents’ BP which took a good 10 minutes. When it was his turn to take BP, he mumbled something and showed me his note book. He couldn’t even speak right so I had a hard time understanding him. He kept saying the same thing repeatedly, and finally I figured it out. It was that he drew a profile of me in his note book while he was waiting and he wanted to give it to me when he was finished. It was so touching that I almost had teary eyes. In the drawing, there were crude outlines of me which occupied half of the page. The lines were so zig-zag that it was hard to tell what it was at first glance. Yet, when I looked more closely, there was the eye, the nose, the lips and even the glasses I was wearing. The face was colored with red and yellow crayon which were the only color in the drawing. It might be just my own imagination but I could tell this person in the drawing surely is an Asian. When I looked at the drawing I could feel my heart wringing in my chest and ache. Here was this person, who didn’t even look like a human to me, who had the talent and the kind heart to draw me and give it to me! It turned out that he used to be a painter and he still enjoys it. I asked him whether he could show me some more drawings in the notebook. When he flipped through his notebook, there were pages after pages full of peoples faces all with the familiar zig-zag lines, yet with well-captured features. A chubby-faced boy with lots of freckles, a middle aged African-American lady, the security guard of the apartment, and so on. And he told me who these people were in his notebook. Some he saw in the emergency room a couple weeks ago, some were fellow residents, some were visitors, etc… He made me realize how shallow, calculating, judgmental I was. I failed to see past the person’s outside. I forgot that there is a soul in every human being no matter what kind of physical state he is in. It was amazing how one little drawing could change me so much and so deeply. It was amazing.
I reflected on this story for many long minutes, sniffling quietly, and was newly amazed at how every small interaction with another person can lead to…well, I don’t know what to call it. A connection? A change? Maybe it’s a reminder that so long we have the capacity to recognize a genuine gesture from someone’s heart, or to have the ability to express in that same way, we create the opportunity for something amazing? I have myself been going through an identity crisis of late, and have been hyper-aware of my barriers and preconceptions. I’ve been more self-conscious than usual—or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I’ve reverted to an old self-consciousness—as I’ve tried to work out what it is that’s been bothering me and define a course of action to correct it. J’s story reminds me that this is all in my head, and that if I can be open to what is out there, I’ll find amazing people and experiences just like this, hidden behind doors I wouldn’t ordinarily open. It could be that simple.
But there I go, introspecting again about myself. Thank you, J, for sharing that special moment with those of us who needed to hear it and didn’t even know it.
