Category: General

On this beautiful Saturday, I missed PublicRadioCamp. Unfortunate for many reasons, including – many of my favorite people in town were there. Hell, some of my favorite people in town organized it.

Instead, I had one of the best days ever with my family.

Our Day

1. Sleep until after 7am
2. Pick up a few things from the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market
3. Grab a Coffee
4. Take a Leisurely Stroll through the Sculpture Garden
5. Home in time for lunch
6. “Nap” – I finished my book club book during nap time, while the kids didn’t sleep soundly in their beds 😉
7. A walk to Audobon Park for a dip, some swings, and an afternoon coffee.
8. An amazing Pea-Mint-Leek soup dinner
9. Mixing up bread dough with the boy before bedtime.
10. A quiet Netflix and wine with Jen after bedtime.

After all that, I’m catching up what I missed with Bob Collins Off to Camp post. Good stuff.

“…we are going smaller, we are going less.” – Bodo von Hodenberg, bookseller – Bildschöne Bücher, Berlin Germany

BTW – I found this link on my economics reading list in Cullect which proves (at least to me) that good curation is about both depth and discovery.

Looks like Leif Utne bought a 1-way ticket on the high-speed underground tunnel between Minneapolis and the Pacific Northwest.

“Pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested in a beautifully-remodeled, energy-efficient home close to bus lines on a safe, quiet street in an artsy neighborhood. It has a brand-new kitchen and furnace (95% efficient), and in 2002 we did a complete attic remodel, including bamboo flooring, new windows and skylights, super-efficient Icynene insulation, and a 50-year metal roof. The remodeled attic master suite (from architects Otogawa-Anschel) has won numerous design awards and was featured in two Parade of Homes tours, as well as the StarTribune home section, HomeTime TV, and an architecture book about attic remodels” – Leif Utne

2518 Cleveland St. NE Minneapolis, MN, $250k, 3bd/2ba.
Full details at Edina Reailty

Tim Brunelle passed me the baton

4 jobs I’ve had (and would be even less good at today):
1. graphic design
2. laser printer repair
3. baling hay
4. hand-milking sick cows

4 places I’ve been (and anxiously await returning):
1. Brussels
2. Hamburg
3. All those waterfalls in the Columbia River Gorge
4. That hill I used to spend winter afternoons hiking up and snowboarding down.

4 bands or artists I am listening to:
1. Lucero
2. Centro-matic
3. Two Cow Garage
4. Gentle Reader

4 of my favorite foods (that I either don’t or can’t eat anymore):
1. Anything from Krispie Kreme
2. Cake frosting on graham crackers
3. Unpasteurized cheeses
4. Sandwiches from the Acoustic Cafe in Menomonie, WI

Big thanks to Tom Elko over at the Minnesota Independent for bringing me the best transit news I’ve heard all year.

“The House of Representatives easily approved the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act….legislation authorizes $14 billion in appropriations to modernize and expand passenger rail…includes $850 million in grant money to fund high-speed rail initiatives.”

The promise of cutting 2.5hrs off a trip to Chicago, while not driving myself and not being stuck in the Illinois Tollway Parking Lot is pretty attractive.

Some interesting graphs from intrade.

Chances the US Economy will go into Recession during 2008

Down to 32 from a high of 79.

Chances Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Presidential Nominee in 2008

Down to 3.0 from a high of 75

I’m fortunate to be regularly exposed to a number of crazy project ideas. Each of the ideas I vet through a number assumptions:

1. We all will be regularly, publicly, independently, publishing via the internet¹. This is consistent with Fred Wilson’s views².
2. Publishing via the internet complies with both Moore’s and Sturgeon’s Law.
3. Our peers are the most relevant news source.
4. Information is presentation independent.
5. Proper nouns are indistinguishable from advertisements.
6. The smaller the scope, the more quickly sustainable success is reached.
7. There are no users.

1. Regularly = at any frequency, Publicly = any definition you like.

2.

“Honestly I am not envisioning anything other than this; every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet..Many people will say that’s a ridiculous notion…To which I say bullshit. I believe that we are headed to a world which everyone will share their lives with the rest of the world via the Internet. That is social media.”- Fred Wilson, A VC

No, despite my activity on Twitter, I don’t blame it for my barely bi-monthly postings here. And given Twitter’s uptime (ba-dum-bum) you shouldn’t either.

There’s a far more guilty party; Cullect.com.

Writing posts on Twitter is easy – have a passing thought, write it down. Done.

Writing more than 140 characters is more time consuming. An hour, if I actually collect my thoughts. An hour Cullect whisks away far more easily. Just ask the 10 drafts at this blog, a few more elsewhere, and the 2 coffee review podcasts in the queue.

The few bits of weblog writing I eek out between posts here are probably at Cullect’s blog (though it has a number of unpub’d drafts as well).

3 Other things Cullect has all but eradicated:

• The First Crack Podcast.
• My regular 5k running work out.
• My Netflix queue.

Like my newborn daughter, Cullect is only a few weeks old. We’re all still adjusting.

Big thanks to Dan Grigsby for asking.

Update 29 May 2008
Though I’ve picked up the pace since publishing this, I wanted to chime in to Chris Heuer’s question of why I don’t write more often by seconding a few of his excuses:

• Don’t think I have anything valuable to say
• Not in the mood

“Viewing Garrick’s Twitter opened my eyes to how social media enthusiasts were using it to connect with others in the industry, to share interesting news and resources, and to help out friends and business acquaintances by sharing their accomplishments and cross-linking. This might make Twitter sound way too business-like, but it’s not.” – Reed Smidebush

“…for the first time, society forced on an enormous number of people the requirement to manage something they’ve never had to manage before…which was free time. And what did we do with that free time? Mostly we panicked and spent it watching TV.” – Clay Shirky

A nice reminder on what is actually active and social:

“People still spend a huge amount of time consuming passive media like television. If even a small fraction of that mental energy was diverted to more active pursuits, it could lead to the production of dozens of socially-beneficial efforts like Wikipedia. The problem isn’t finding people with time on their hands; we’ve got tens of millions of those. The challenge is finding socially-beneficial projects that they’ll enjoy participating in more than re-runs of Seinfeld.” – Timothy Lee