turning a new leaf

We hired my replacement at V-Day. It’s official. I’m officially leaving. Wow.

My replacement is a wonderful woman full of spunk (a.k.a. young and optimistic like me) and i’m excited that she’ll be taking the baton. In our group discussion over who to hire, my colleagues told me that they loved this woman because she has that same youthful (a.k.a. insane, intense, spastic) energy that i have. It was a little weird to think that someone valued my craziness and wanted to see it replicated in the organization. Hmmm…

dead cell phone

Btw: if you’ve been trying to get in touch with me via cell phone, you should know that my cell died. 🙁 I’m trying to solve this problem in the next couple of days, but if you need to get in touch with me, email me and i’ll tell you what phone number i’m at at a given point. Oh, and if you have a Sprint phone that i can borrow for a bit, please let me know!

an ode to a dear friend

At Brown, we were required to submit a proposal of what we would do as part of our concentration. My roommate and dear friend wanted to submit his proposal in Postscript, a coded representation of what he planned to study… explanation through example.

This comic is for him:

upcoming.org

Upcoming.org lets you list all of the events you are planning to attend, see what your friends are up to, and see what is generally going on.

voting day

Tomorrow is voting day in California. It will be a circus; it already has been a circus. And i’m so sensitive to election issues. I’m an adament believer that you can’t bitch unless you vote. And i’m a strong believer that you have to be a responsible voter. This means that, more often than note, you have to cast an anti-vote instead of a pro-vote. I’ve never found an electable candidate that represents me, but i’m not going to vote the closest approximation when an election is so tight and when my poor choice could help elect a clown. While i will never be a religious missionary, i’m certainly an evangelist when it comes to my political views.

Thus, to proselytize for a moment:
– No on the recall
– No on 54
– Anti-Schwarzenegger vote = Bustamante

Will You Buy a Car From This Man?

Will You Buy a Car From This Man? is a new Wired article about Tribe.

amos musings

My friend Amos just posted a great entry on his blog, examining issues the usage of the term ‘they’ and the rules of institutions, ‘high’ class and ‘objective’ science (complete with links to interesting articles on synesthesia and vocabulary). I love when my friends weave stories through utterly fascinating ideas.

the collapse of email

I wonder if there’s a corrolation between Clay’s gut and the values of teenagers. I knew Usenet was dead when teens stopped knowing what it was. Same with IRC. Don’t get me wrong: all of us geeky social software folks still use both. (And Marc Smith still believes that we can make Usenet work.)

Teens are focused less and less on email. It no longer provides an identity marker in the way it used to. Even at universities, students are more likely to use their easily accessible hotmail account than the university account. This also means that they are forced to constantly fight the annoyances of spam.

The value of email is no longer there. Instead, youth rely heavily on IM (and SMS where available). Parents don’t get to read the records of these conversations and if spam is a problem, you can just block everyone but your friends. Plus, now that you can send IMs without having to be logged in (it’ll just get queued), why worry about synchronicity?

I’ve always been a big believer in paying attention to teens in order to understand the longterm viability of older technologies. But maybe Clay’s gut will be just as effective…

metacrap

In one of my classes, we are working on a phone project. Basically, we are given photo phones and required to come up with an application that will rely on structuring good reusable metadata. I can’t help but get cranky at this, although i can’t tell if it’s because i actually don’t believe in metadata structures or if it’s just a good target to critique. All the same, Cory’s Metacrap rant makes me smile all too much.

fragmenting myself

Because blogging is inherently social and a good way to chew on ideas with friends and colleagues, i’m going to be participating in Many-to-Many as a guest blogger.

(Do be warned: at times, i will repost things from there here, as relevant)

danah boyd | apophenia

making connections where none previously existed