oraculi

I don’t know anything about Doug Fine, and I’m not criticizing him in this post.  However, reading about him on BoingBoing called to mind all the stories I’ve read, recently and less recently, about people who give up city living, abandon modern technology, and experience life as it used to be.  I will acknowledge the edu-tainment value of such an endeavor.  But I will also say, perhaps as a “city” boy who mostly grew up in a region that thrived in large part because of area farmers, loggers, and ranchers, that I know the hardness of that life, and that the mystique of returning to the land in such an idyllic fashion carries with it very little luster.

Still, I am amazed at how far removed the average John Q  can be from the how and where of food source origins, and I applaud Doug’s efforts and his honesty; because really, who wants to give up mobile phones, computers, or the internet?

While in New York last December, in the midst of the writer’s strike, I went to see a comedy show headlined by John Oliver, arguably most notorious for his role on The Daily Show. I only occasionally watch The Daily Show, so going into the show I didn’t recognize the name, but having seen him live, sitting less than 10 feet from the stage, I can say that he really is this funny in person.

I spent the last three weeks of January in Thailand, dividing my time between Bangkok, the mountainous northwest, and the southern coast. Thailand is a very photogenic country.

My last trip to New York was a New Years Eve affair. A friend, a party at a swanky hotel, a quintessential New York experience. And my return flight home, departing from LaGuardia airport, was via an available seat on an earlier flight. After de-icing and a hasty departure through a blanket of snow, I arrived at home right on time; my luggage, departing according to my original accommodations, spent the night somewhere in the Detroit airport and then joined me the next day.

Earlier this month, I returned to New York, this time for business instead of pleasure. Again my return flight was from LaGuardia, and again the weather turned threatening. I rebooked my evening flight to early afternoon, finished my meetings, and left the office, on my way to retrieve my luggage from the hotel. Out on the street, I was instantly soaked, victim of the same slush-and-freezing-rain threatening my flight. Pedestrianism the victim of inclement weather (my umbrella safely packed away in my suitcase), I caught a cab, grabbed my luggage, and was efficiently deposited out the airport terminal a short while later.

Every time I travel via airplane, I reflect on the the inevitable need to hurry-up-and-rush-then-wait. Rush to arrive at the airport on time. Rush to join the security line. Rush to get to the gate. Then wait in the queue for boarding pass and ID verification, then wait to walk through the x-ray machine, then wait for the gate agent to announce boarding. On this trip, I also endured additional opportunities to wait; wait for trucks to de-ice the plane, wait for the tower to clear the plane for departure, wait for the forecast to become one of mere light freezing rain. Three hours of waiting on the tarmac later, mine was the first flight to depart (with the bribe of bottled water and a light snack in exchange thanks from the pilot for passenger patience). It brought the debate over a passenger bill of rights, for me, to life.

Anyway, New York does the season up, with lights and decorations at the airport, throughout the streets, and adorning building exteriors across Manhattan (sorry other boroughs, but no time this visit). Atlanta, to a lesser extend, does the same, though lacking the cold and the bluster of northern states, fails to give it the same kind of breath of life.

Jingle bell rock, y’all.

Off to San Francisco; hello Pacific coast.

Don’t worry, I’ll get the postcards in the mail.

I have always been the type to hear a story one time and not want to hear it again.  If I’ve seen the movie, I don’t read with the book.  If I’ve read the book, I won’t bother with the movie (The Lord of the Rings being a notable exception).  And I almost never read anything a second time.  New books are published, new movies are produced, and the quantity of printed words and motion pictures stretches back decades and centuries before my lifetime.  Why return to people and places, events and distant times, I have already experienced?

Neil Gaiman’s essay on fairytale in The Guardian makes me rethink whether, for me, this should be.

“…but I enjoyed the screenplay and I really like the film they made - which takes liberties with the plot all over the place.  …A star still falls, a boy still promises to bring it to his true love, there are still wicked witches and ghosts and lords…”

The retelling of the thing is, perhaps, a whole new experience to know.

While my decision to move to the South was a good one, a week of thermometer readings like this have left me wondering just how wise a decision it was to move here.

There was rain, briefly, on the airplane window in Chicago. Which is to say that I am currently in Denver, before heading back to Chicago on Thursday and Atlanta on Saturday. Today I spent some time in Leadville, CO.

The The Freelancer’s Toolset is a great list of online web tools and applications for completing a project from start to finish and everything in between. Calendars, project management, writing, and collaboration are all covered in a very comprehensive list.

I love online tools; anything that allows me to save data in a single place with internet-driven universal accessibility is great. But there is a difference between web applications I install on my server and tools I use compliments of the generosity of others. Specifically, what about privacy, and what about data availability?

Take Google as an example. Google has become nearly synonymous with searching the Web, and the people behind it have steadily expanded their offerings with email, collaborative documents, and customizable maps. Google is huge, and the world would share a collective gasp were the Google domain to suddenly go dark. So, email, documents, and other data housed in the massive Googleweb are safe in terms of long term storage and continuous availability. But privacy? Well, Google’s Privacy Policy specifically allows the use of personal information to display targeted advertising. This is no secret, and they go the extra step of providing a human readable Privacy Policy Highlights page for all of us who do not speak the legal dialect of the English language (though the full length Privacy Policy is also fairly readable). And really, who cares if, when reading an email about your nephew’s diapers, Google accompanies it with an advertisement for Fuzzi Bunz somewhere on the screen?

But say you and some friends are working on the next big thing, the website that will turn Web 2.0 into a brief footnote in Web history? You collaborate online, using the tools that fit your project’s needs. The various companies hosting your data are not necessarily your competitors today, but with a press release and an acquisition, suddenly Yahoo also has a mega-tool for photo sharing. And corporate espionage is not just something you read about in the news.

Or say your deadline is fast approaching, and the specifications you need to finish your project are hosted at an ever-useful online website. You go to log in to that familiar web page, only to find that it is not there. Remember the Milk seems like a solid little app, but I have never heard of Emily Boyd or Omar Kilani. Their mini-bios make them sound legit, and the endorsement of both PC World and Popular Science help cement their credibility, but what of the numerous other web tools out there? If a server suffers a sudden meltdown, and the dutiful developer decides to walk away, where does that leave you and your project? Or when an interface upgrade to a web application in perpetual beta cancels your planned 72 hour coding bonanza, will you still make your deadline?

When I discovered SlimTimer, I finally found the perfect tool to track my small handful of personal projects. Has it ever let me down? No. But a spreadsheet saved on my hard drive provides a more solid guarantee that my time accounting will be there when I need it — as only I can accidentally delete it. Of course, in the process I loose the universal accessibility that drew me to SlimTimer in the first place.

With the convenience and accesibility brought by the last few years of AJAX-iliciousness, the vultures have started to gather around the weakest of desktop software applications. We are a society perpetually on the go, using three of four or possibly more different computers in a given work week, and we want all our data ready to go on any and all of them. But in our embrace of convenience and accessibility, I wonder if we have considered everything that we are trading away.

All last week, asked about my plans for the weekend, I had the rare opportunity to respond, “oh, what? I’m getting married.”

Which is to say that I was and am, and thanks for asking.