April 2012

2011: The year in review, in photos

Back in 2007 I had a crazy idea to skim my flickr stream and pick a few photos from each month to try and illustrate how I spent the year. I found it to be pretty cathartic and gave me a whole different impression of the year I’d just experienced. I liked it. So I did it again in 2008. And then in 2009 it was kind of “a thing” so I did it again. And then again in 2010. I really like doing this. It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s awesome to reference.

I’ve been slow getting to it this year for no good reason, I can’t believe it’s April already. Gah. I’m sorry. So here it is. The first photo I posted in 2011 was this one of Ripley and Lucky cat just waking up. I guess that’s a good way to get this moving

Waking up, sort of

Which I think must have been followed by a hike up to Runyon Canyon with the family based on my pics. I had a beard.

Bite your tongue!

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On leaving Facebook

For better or worse, I consider myself a fairly principled person. That is, I’ve chosen to live my life in a way that reflects my convictions. From what I eat to how I vote to what I spend money on, I consider how those choices impact me, those around me, and the world as a whole. I consider what my actions and choices say about me as a person, and take great care to ensure I like who that person is. Ethics are important. Convictions mean something.

If you know me in person you know this to be true. It’s not about changing the world, or even changing anyone else’s mind, it’s about being comfortable with my own choices. It doesn’t make life particularly easy, but I sleep really well at night.

When it comes to the internet, I’ve always tried to have my online presence reflect my offline presence. I frequently speak out in favor of things I support, and against those I don’t. But I hadn’t considered that where that online presence was also said something about me.

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The Network I Want

Over on the NYT Blogs Jenna Wortham has written a piece about Instagram and the internet’s “secret” places. It’s a great piece and she discusses a number of things really interesting to me, especially given the recent acquisition of Instagram. I’ve written before about how the personal nature of Instagram was very appealing and I think that their focus was on just one thing (they didn’t even have a web UI) really worked well for them. It felt private, even if it wasn’t, and that was attractive. But with Facebook, arguably the least private place on the web, taking over the controls there, it’s no longer even a pretend safe haven. Jenna writes:

“…privacy is an illusion. There is no fail-safe way to publish privately online. Top-secret tweets and conversations can always be captured by screen shot and texted or e-mailed.”

Which is true, and something people need to realize more often. I had high hopes that Path would be a private place but it’s hard to feel private when updates are published to Facebook, and it’s hard to see the value in limiting connections, when in a click of a button you can share with everyone. I desperately want a place that doesn’t share with everyone. I recalled a few notes I made last year, kind of a wish list…

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Very initial thoughts on Together Alone

I’ve been a Sherry Turkle fan for quite sometime, so I was pretty excited to see her talk at TED earlier this year. The video of that talk has just been posted, but if you were following me on Twitter during TED you may recall me tweeting out countless quotes from her at the time. Here’s the talk in case you want to watch it, it’s 20 minutes, but it’s damn worth it. Trust me.

The talk covers some of the issues in her recently released book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other which I preordered while she was giving this talk live, but only recently started reading. I have to admit that I’ve really only cracked the cover (though, I’m reading it on my kindle, so does that even work?) and so these initial thoughts could be completely off base once I get further into the book, or maybe she even covers these ideas. I’ll keep reading and let you know what an idiot I sound like after the fact.

So anyway, I started reading and as I was reading I found myself verbalizing thoughts or comments about the text, so I started to write them down and next thing I knew I had several paragraphs, so I’m flushing them out just the slightest bit and posting them here for feedback, as well as later reference once I get further into the book.

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Year Of Less Update #6

My last Year of Less update was on Feb 1st, and since we’re firmly into April at this point I feel like I owe everyone an update. People keep asking, hows the year of less going? I’ve been answering with “it’s going!” which is dodging the question a little bit without getting too specific. As this is an official update I don’t really get to dodge anything, and as much as I’d like to say that everything has been working perfectly, that’s not the case. 3 months down and I can very honestly say I was overzealous on what I thought I could pull off. That isn’t to say it’s a failure or that I’ve stopped – far from it, but my regime of daily requirements turned out to be not very realistic. But that’s still fairly general, so let’s look at each of the 3 pillars of this damn thing.

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