So I stumbled onto a youtube video posted by a young girl, in which she dives into a lengthy, circuitous, somewhat nonsensical diatribe about politics, the world, global warming, lots of big issues. There was a lot of sighing in this video — a lot of “how can liberals be such idiots!?!”

Then, of course, a flurry of comments and video responses ensue. The polarization builds and the viral rage spreads. The internet has become a sponge for our country’s anger and frustration. Maybe the release of these feelings is healthy in a way, but productive conversation has not occurred. People are not working out their anger with each other, because the culture discourages it. It is sufficient to continue being angry.

But I do believe people want to understand each other. These issues are not clear cut, the answers are not obvious, and no single group comprising half the population are all idiots—at least I hope not. But I think people lack tools for acknowledging and discussing nuances civilly. We can all be “experts” on a topic, but we must take the time to research and build supporting evidence. Before launching into a rant, most people are not making the effort.

So maybe what’s really missing is an understanding or respect for rational debate? I know I’m pretty terrible at it, but I do respect it as a process that has worked well. Do you think we can somehow introduce a form of interest-based mediation into the youtube dialog, or educate people about how to self-mediate?

I’d like to better understand how Wikipedia covers this, because I think commons-based peer production can be employed to aggregate and interpret evidence for different sides of a particular issue. In a way this might already happen on Wikipedia, but I’m not sure whether Wikipedia’s format (or culture?) is exactly the right thing for this. Wikipedia has one big page for the Armenian Genocide, and even the title of that page is contentious. The big issues that tug on people’s core values may demand a separate space for each facet of the issue, where that particular piece can be fleshed out: history, claims, supporting evidence, etc.

A professor of mine worked with different groups on these really divisive issues, and he found 5th and 6th graders to be among the most thoughtful debaters, because they were willing to listen to the merits of both sides, to recognize difficult grey areas, and to be more flexible with their own core beliefs. So if we want to move the conversation forward, maybe the real goal is to teach adults to be more like 5th graders, or to teach 5th graders to somehow leave open a window in their minds…

I love to play Scrabble. One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten better at it is that many new Scrabble players start out with a broken model about how to win. People start out wanting to make long words, because naturally long words are good. It is assumed that if you’re a grammarian or amanuensis, you’ll naturally be good at Scrabble. But Scrabble is not about making long words, it’s about strategically placed, usually mundane words. In Scrabble, a well-placed two-letter word can score points in the upper 30s, while a beautiful looking 6- or 7-letter word may only score 10 or 15 points. Furthermore, Scrabble draws from a very specific grammar that Scrabble players memorize and that’s really pretty useless in everyday life. Unless you’re a civil engineer in the Middle East, you probably don’t talk about qanats very often. But if you’re a Scrabble player, this is a word you should know, because it may provide a brilliant play one day when you have a Q and no U. Who cares what it means.

Similarly, in Pac-Man, many people start out with the idea that success means gobbling up all those dots so you can reach another level in the game. It is so natural to want to do this. It doesn’t matter where you live or what language you speak—the first time you sit down at Pac-Man, you’ll probably be unable to suppress your desire to eat all the dots. But Pac-Mac is not about dots or levels, it’s about points! The levels are a trick. The real goal of Pac-Mac is to creatively lure the ghosts into one of the corners where you can eat them all up quickly after using a power pellet and score lots of points. If your focus is on this goal, the dots will take care of themselves. And if you can eat all sixteen ghosts on each level, then you’re on your way to a high score.

Not that Pac-Man and Scrabble are the only examples. Every skill has its broken initial models that lay waiting for the unsuspecting beginner. As people gain experience, they continually build, test, and rebuild mental models. I think this is why people who are very good at something will know it, because they have insight into their past incompetence.

Renting an apartment in New York is an emotionally and financially draining experience that we’re in the midst of. Before Thanksgiving, we spent a week in New York and came out without a lease—though we have a place to stay in January. But we have learned so much, and as part of my personal reflection on the week, I wanted to write up some tips for securing an apartment in New York, even though we haven’t succeeded yet.

I remember, midway through the week, getting a call from an agent who was showing a 1BR in Park Slope, Brooklyn. At the time, we were looking at another place nearby, and when we called him back later he said it was already gone. “A woman walked in earlier,” he said, “she saw the place and paid the whole year’s rent up front in cash.” Lesson one: In the heat of battle, always answer the phone, even if you think it’s rude to talk to one agent while being shown a place by another. Feel free to walk away in the middle of a showing if you think something better has come up and won’t last. And if you’re using brokers, go to as many agencies as you can, meet some brokers you like, get their card, and call them every morning to see what’s happening.

Of course, someone with a year’s rent up front in cash is hard to compete with. But since so many apartments are constantly turning over, a patient, dedicated person who can commit full-time hours to the task will eventually get what they want.

And at some point along the way, you will most definitely encounter many agents. In New York, there are three kinds of rental agents, each obligated by law to act on someone’s behalf: the landlord, the tenant, or both (the Judge Judy of agents). The vast majority of agents are landlord’s agents—gatekeepers between potential tenants and the landlord. Here’s the kicker. If you are renting through a landlord’s agent, you will pay them upwards of 15% of your annual rent so that they can represent the landlord’s best interests. This is like going to court and paying for the other side’s lawyer when you win the case. We’re not talking about small change here, either — on a $1,500 one bedroom, 15% of the rent is $2,700. They may be great people—we met some wonderful landlord’s agents in Brooklyn—but when it comes to the real business of drawing up and signing a lease, their undivided loyalty is to the landlord. You can pay a tenant’s agent to find a place for you and be loyal to you, though, and I’m still not sure whether that means you could pay a fee twice, or whether the two agents would then agree to split a fee. (Does anyone know?)

Here’s my reconstruction of a conversation with a dual agent after seeing a place we liked.

Us: “We really like the place — what’s the rent again?”
Manager: “$1,600/month”
Us: “And what do we have to do to hold it?”
Manager: “Well, you can fill out an application. Here’s one.”
Us: “Oh, who owns the building? Your office owns it, right?”
Manager: “Yeah, but the landlord is out on vacation for the next two weeks.”
Us: “Oh, one more thing. We saw one of the tenants outside the building, and we talked to them for a second. They told us they pay $1,500 a month for their 1BR, so why is this place listed at $1,600?”
Manager: “Because $1,600 is the price of this unit.”
Us: “But why?”
Manager: *scowls* “Because the landlord wants $1,600 per month.”
Us: “Why does the landlord want $1,600 per month when others are paying $1,500?”
Manager: “OK listen, first of all, you’re not getting the apartment. Second, let me show you something.”
Manager hacks away at his computer for a second.
Manager: “Here’s someone in that building who is paying $1,825 a month for their 1 bedroom. For the unit you’re looking at, the landlord requires me to collect six applications from qualified people for this apartment, and then they will choose someone from those. You are the first two people to see it. But I can tell you right now that you’re not getting the place.”
Us: “Why not?!?”
Manager: “Because you’re being difficult with me.”
Us: “We’re not being difficult. Look, our interest is in fairness, that’s why we’re asking these questions.”
Manager: “You’re going out and talking to other tenants about what they pay. Look, why don’t you guys just move along, OK?”
Us: “Really? But we are great tenants, we have great credit, we have references, and we love the place. Can’t we just fill out an application?”
Manager: “OK, listen, I’m a dual agent, OK? Do you know what a dual agent is? It means I am bound by law to act in the best interest of both the landlord and the tenant. So I have to be impartial. I’ll let you fill out an application. We require first and last month’s rent, a security deposit, and 10% of the annual rent as a realtor fee up front (this totals $6720). There’s also a $50 credit check fee for each of you, if we decide to do credit checks.”
Us: “But we have our own credit reports that we’ve printed out.”
Manager: “Well, I’ll look at what you have…”
We fill out the rest of the application in silence.
Us: “We have to go pick up all our documentation. We’ll bring it back later.”
Manager: “OK, well, if you have to…”

We leave, knowing we’re not getting the place, but having learned a lot. It was a great conversation, because it reinforced a few more apartment-hunting lessons:

• Talk to the owner or property manager, go into their office. Is this a good person? This is the person we’ll be asking to fix our hot water heater later. Will they use the “you’re being difficult” line then? One management office had, for reasons I still don’t understand, a huge road sign just inside their front door that said, “GO AWAY.” You don’t have to ask me twice.
• Know the market well, so you can walk in and know that a place is overpriced. “What? $1,600 for this utility closet?”
• Be careful about when you bring up the price. In the future, we might be better off talking price after we’ve submitted an application but before we sign a lease. However, my guess is that since he’s taking six applications, his plan is to play them off each other and get as much as possible for the place. For every tenant who is diligent about getting fair market value, there will be one who’s willing to pay something way beyond the listed price. Thus the $1,850 tenant. That’s their perfect tenant. So while you’re at it,
• Forget about the places that need to take six applications. You want a place where they’re ready to move as soon as someone good comes through the door and hands them a few hundred bucks.
• Don’t fall in love with it until the deal is done. I guess this is true of any deal, but this is really hard for apartments, because when you see a place you like, you start picturing where your fern will go and thinking about how you will get coffee at that cute cafe around the corner on Sunday mornings.
• $100 for credit checks?! I can check my credit for free, so I’d rather give them a copy of my credit report. Cursory googling found credit check websites for landlords that cost around $10 per person, probably more like $5 if you subscribe to a regular credit check service.
• Bring all your documentation with you, all the time, everywhere. You must be ready to make a deal. You will want to bring identification, a copy of a recent credit report, a reference letter from a past landlord, a copy of pay stubs and W-2s and anything else that shows you make a stable income, $500 or so in cash for a deposit, your checkbook, a pen, a knife, and a fifty rock of cocaine. If you’re a freelancer, musician, poet, dancer, or barista, you really have to go the distance here: resume, past invoices, work references, etc. If you’re in school or have poor credit, you’ll probably need a guarantor—have them ready to sign at the blink of a FAX. If you have an unmarried partner, a copy of a past lease showing that you’ve lived together for a while could be helpful.
• My ideal is to rent directly from an owner, preferably someone who lives right on the premises. This can work well if you’re an owner, too, because you get to meet potential tenants, establish rapport, and show them that you’re around and that you care about the place—making them less likely to install their 3-story beer funnel next to the downspout.

An ad phrase that caught me ear the other day on the New York Times was, “Since when is an airline’s schedule more important than yours?” It was for “The New Delta” and I had to laugh, because it’s a really odd way of saying, “Things have been screwed up lately, but we’re trying to fix them.” They have a lot more to coordinate than I do—with their airplanes, luggage, pilots, crew, fuel, and little pillows and bags of nuts all having to arrive at the same place in the middle of a long day. If they are to continue functioning at all, their schedule must be more important than mine. But something about that notion is way too socialist. People really don’t want to hear it.

The funny thing is, even if their point is simply that the two schedules, mine and the airline’s, are ideally of equal importance, they still leave room for the hyper-individualistic interpretation that my schedule is way more important than theirs. I’m sure there are many who see it that way, and that’s why we are going to hell in millions of individual handbaskets, with little pillows provided through a partnership with Delta.

(see also: Maine lake time series 1)

If Eskimos have 20,000 words for snow, then surely I must have at least a dozen words for why I returned to Nashville after six years in Boston. “Boston, we have a problem,” I said to myself one day. “You had me at ‘come work at an amazing tech company, make great friends and learn how to pronounce Waltham.’” But dude, where’s my free time? And will someone please think of the bank balance? I need the expense of a Boston apartment like I need a can of baked beans thrown at my head.

So I thought, “What Would Ralph Stanley Do?” WWRSD? Are you there, Ralph? It’s me, Carl. The sky opened up, and Ralph said, “N is for Nashville, and Nashville is the best thing since sliced lolcats.” Yes, Virginia, there is a state south of you. And lets face it: Nashville is the new Knoxville. It is there that I’ll practice Zen and the Art of Figuring Out What The Hell To Do Next or Something. In the meantime, Nashville is the most laid back city I can think of to end all most laid back cities I can think of.

So I pointed to the horizon and declared, “Nashville or Bust,” and before long Karl and I were on I-81 with all our belongings, and I said, “I have a feeling we’re not in Massachusetts anymore.”

OK, I know what you’re thinking at this point. You’re thinking: Boston 1, Carl 0. And if by “Boston 1, Carl 0” you mean “Carl 1, Boston 0,” then yes, you’re right. Because this is not the decline and fall of Carl’s career.

Or maybe you’re thinking, “Carl, if you don’t at least consider moving to Silicon Valley, then the terrorists have won.” But in a world where every geek flocks to California, one man thinks that is bullshit. Silicon Valley? I don’t need no stinking Silicon Valleys. I’ll just say it once and for all: the Internet killed the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. In Nashville, you create the world you desire. In Silicon Valley, the world you desire creates YOU!! After all, any sufficiently advanced urban sprawl is indistinguishable from San Jose. I don’t heart that borg.

“Friends don’t let friends move to that cesspool of mulish intolerance and religious fundamentalism,” you say? But dammit, Jim! I’m a relaxed southerner, not a stress monger from the commonwealth! And after six years, Boston was turning me a whiter shade of freezing my ass off. Worst. Winters. Ever. Holy snowstorms, Batman! Especially when the Batmobile is a bicycle.

So when the going gets cold and expensive, feeble folk like me move south. I am Carl, hear me tweet! The way I see it, happiness is glass of fruit tea in the mid-summer swelter. And I, for one, welcome our new Southern Baptist overlords. Yes, it is the city formerly known as the buckle of the bible belt, but today’s Nashville is not your father’s Nashville.

Anyway, here’s my plan for world domination while I’m in town:

1. im in ur state, drinkin’ ur whiskey!!!
2. ???
3. Profit!

No VC money please; we’re southern. Today Nashville, tomorrow the world! I call it Dubious Life Plan 2: Electric Bugaboo.

Oh, and then there’s the Pork. Pulled Pork. Nashville is about Better Living through Pulled Pork. We’ve secretly replaced Carl’s friends with extremely obese people in the line at Hog Heaven. Let’s see if he notices!

(I’m not a writer, but I play one my web site.)

Wanting to make one last cup of coffee, this morning I pulled the coffee grinder and porcelain drip filter out of a small cardboard box that was sealed up just yesterday. We’ve sold so much of what we own: the bed, the dresser, the chairs, an old globe, a cello. Each sale is to me as intimate as a kiss. Not a drunken kiss with a stranger in the dark, but a sober kiss with a stranger in broad daylight. I size up the prospective kissee and picture them owning my chair: Who will sit in it? What will they be talking about? Will the chair be in the sunny alcove, next to a table with a bowl of fruit, or will it languish in the den, developing a long-term smoke stain patina, soaking up spilled alcohol and bad television? Or maybe they’re saving up for a breast implant, and they’re just buying to flip.

But once the exchange has occurred, there’s no use in getting sentimental. I will never see this stuff again. And because this week we are blessed with the highest gas prices in the history of the United States, Karl and I will pay $450 in fuel to get to Nashville. That’s about how much we made on all of this stuff. That is, we are burning all the furniture.

Picturing the burning pyre of our old stuff, I start to sense the deep catharsis of a big move. It’s a catharsis that begins to makes up for the distance I’m putting between myself and all the friends I’ve made here. Of course, the degree of freedom that I feel may be inversely proportional to the size of the moving vehicle, and because we’ve rented a 16 foot truck, maybe I haven’t milked it for all it’s worth. What else would I throw on the fire, if I really had to?

But then I remember we are two, so it’s really like two 8 foot trucks: one for Karl’s stuff, one for mine. And an 8 foot truck seems like a reasonable size, if a little big, for one person’s belongings.

It went like this. I waded through everything I own and made two piles: I want to keep that, I don’t want to keep this. “Why don’t I do this every year?” I thought. “There’s not enough room for what I don’t want.” And I had no idea how much stuff I’d accumulated. I didn’t know going into it what would make the cut and what, maybe to my own surprise, would be tossed into the Goodwill pile at the decisive moment.

The Goodwill pile swelled with books and magazines I never read and probably never intended to read. T-shirts I would never wear. Lots of knickknacks. So many things that aren’t durable, don’t fit, aren’t practical, or just aren’t relevant anymore.

Last night we had friends over to help us pack. We invited them into all of our personal belongings, to consider the things we own in a way more closely than we ever do. Dee carefully coiled and taped all of the cables for our electronics, matching them with their counterpart gadgets. Jon filled a box with Wall Street Journal-wrapped mugs and bowls. Lauren packed up books on the environment. And we gave so many things away, even now, after two yard sales. Clothes to the Goodwill. A dozen liquor bottles with an inch or so of liquid left in each. A wooden model sailboat. I thought about how we’ll feel driving away—that moment when we merge onto the interstate and realize that we have everything we own in tow. There will be no home to return to, not right now, not this week. We are plunging into limbo.

Missed my flight to Austin this morning; will leave at 11:45am instead. In response to this blog post, I’ve just started reading Cities by John Reader. With earplugs and a cup of coffee, Terminal C is not a bad place to read. The light is very good along the windows, and there’s no lack of activity out on the tarmac.

I’m rarely up so early. I saw the sun rise out the bus window, and it was really pretty along the Fort Point Channel docks, looking back toward downtown. Sunrise has a beautiful quality of light, nicer than sunset I think. It’s serene and is more of a silvery blue than sunset. Sunrise feels different emotionally, too — the slow reveal of a landscape that’s been hidden for 12 hours. It uncovers the the potential of a new day, but it’s not an innocent potential. It’s an omnicient potential, and if you’re observant, you might see things at sunrise that you’re not supposed to, perhaps the last moments of some illicit transaction or a crime in progress. Sunset is all glamour, warm and fake, a cloyingly comfy Kodak moment. Sunrise is cold, subterranean, even surly. But it’s genuine, a real astronomical event, clearly stated, evidenced by the dew. And when I see it, I feel part of a small community of dissidents: early risers, alley cats, drug runners and club heads. Where sunset is sold out and overrated, sunrise is an exclusive event, perpetually underbooked, missed for months at a time by most of us who’d rather not face its raw power, preferring vacuous dreams and tight schedules instead. We’re rightly scared that the dawn might quietly reveal more to us than we’d care to know.

More than two years after I turned off public commenting, I’ve finally turned it back on, thanks to Akismet for MT. Here’s to community (without spam)!

Did someone finally listen to my pleas for better visualization of photo albums on the web? Tabblo is a local web startup that lets you create little tableaus (or Treemaps, if you wish) from photos on your computer. Tabblo lets you move photos around, resize, add captions, zoom in and out, and all that good stuff. Importing is easy with iPhoto plugins, Flickr integration, and so on. Once your photos are in Tabblo, it’s painfully hard to use! I created my first Tabblo, worked on it for 20 minutes in vain, trying to make it look the way I wanted it, and then reset it back to their default. I tried adding captions, but all the photos shifted beneath my feet and nothing ever lined up as desired. This site has too much clever magic behind it and not enough basic user testing.

Anyway, here’s my Tabblo of photos from our recent trip to London and Paris:

See my Tabblo>

Listen, I think your service is great and all, but I’m finished with it. I found a better alternative. I found some other phone company, some other bank, some other to-do list management service. They are cheaper and better, and their web site looks nice. So, I guess if I’m all done, I will just sign on to your web site and close my account.

Now, if I can just find the button that says “close my account.” Let see—“add a fax line” — “add calendaring” — “upgrade rate plan”— “open a brokerage account” — hmmmm. I know it’s here somewhere. Right? No?

Why not? I’ve never understood this frustrating barrier. It’s not just a cost for me, the customer. It’s a cost for the company, who is paying upwards of $3 to answer my call and demand that I explain in person why I’m leaving. Don’t you hate these calls? They hem and haw, they make you wait, they ask lots of questions. Suddenly all of our information age advances fade away. You could apply for a Turkmenistani passport in less time than it takes to quit some of these services. But as services inevitably become more “self-service”, this has to change. The quality of the service has to be the thing that keeps people around, not an exit barrier.

It’s funny though. Part of the logic for companies is, “Maybe they’ll stick around longer if they have to call.” Has anyone measured this? How many people actually stay with a service for a longer time just because they couldn’t find the “close my account” button?

And if they do, does it outweigh the cost of the phone call? There’s also the cost of the bad will. That is, by not providing a feature they should clearly have, the company is sending a message they might not even be aware they’re sending: “If the customer doesn’t value the relationship anymore, neither will we.” But the fact is, people quit services for a lot of reasons and often return later. Maybe they are moving away for a year. Maybe they’ll tell their friends about it. In other words, it ain’t over ‘till the customer is dead. And even then it might not be over.

Why is this sign needed? Were people going to try some third option? Yet it was obviously written by hand and attached to both sides the door for a reason, presumably to prevent some common problem. I am puzzled.

We just got back from Quebec yesterday, had a great time up there. We camped in the mountains near the town of Sutton, just north of the border, on top of a hill with a beautiful view, in a clearing where they keep a few dozen cows in rotational grazing. It was absolutely picturesque.

K and I are always seeking out good food when we travel, and we didn’t have to work hard to find it here. Quebecers love their food, and there is a major food culture here. We went to one of two big farmer’s markets in Montreal, called Jean-Talon. Much of the food is local to Quebec: tons of fruits & veggies, smoked meats and salmon, a stunning variety of raw milk cheeses, breads and spreads and syrups and on and on. It’s not just a Montreal thing: Sutton has an old “general store”, La Rumeur Affamee, that specializes in local food, so we got most of our meals there. With no camp stove fuel, our dinner was very simple: local pâté (including caribou!), smoked ham, cheese, cornichons, and tomato on an amazing kamut wheat baguette.

I think some of the Quebec food culture has boosted Vermont’s own local food loyalty. On the way up to Canada, we stopped for breakfast at the Farmer’s Diner in Qechee, VT. They make simple, traditional diner food, but 95% of their ingredients are from local farms. It was delicious: local ham, eggs, pancakes with local flour (King Arthur is in Vermont) and butter. Local maple syrup, coffee with local cream. Wow.

Went to Western Mass last weekend. Geoff showed us around his hometown of North Brookfield. It is bucolic for sure. Not much in the way of commerce, but there is this:

Had some home-made ice cream sandwiches and ridiculous Sundays.

So, I’m now in the ranks of the self-employed, and I need health insurance. When I left my job a few weeks ago, I signed up for COBRA and it’s around $350 a month, which is totally unreasonable. So I’m switching to something else as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, the landscape is bleak when you’re not covered by a cushy employee plan. There are actually only a handful of companies that even bother to sell insurance here, because the state laws are so strongly in favor of the patient. Massachusetts and Maine are the only two states with guaranteed health insurance, for example. This means that you cannot be denied coverage by an insurance company if you already have coverage. If you are on a rinky-dink health plan, and you develop some major illness, you can switch over to a better plan and the insurance companies can’t say no. Of course, there are exclusions here—for example, there might be a 1 year waiting period before you can get prescription drugs on the newer plan.

Anyway, a little background. I am 28, a Massachusetts resident, a non-smoker, and self-employed, so I want to pay as little as possible. I don’t want dental or vision coverage—I just want major catastrophes to be covered, and I don’t mind paying for my office visits out of pocket. I rarely go to the doctor.

So, I looked around. Some other self-employed folks I know pointed me to “catastrophic” plans, which are the cheapest non-Medicare health plans that I could find. There are a few companies that provide these in MA: Mega Insurance/NASE, Mid-West, etc. The plans are around $150 a month and are either “accident-only” (no illness coverage) or high-deductible. You pay the first $5,000 of health costs per year, and after that is supposed to be covered. But there’s a lot of bad news about these companies, and the biggest problem for me is, there’s a maximum that they’ll cover! So if you get into a catastrophic accident with one of these “catastrophic” plans, and the bill is $75,000, you may end up paying $20,000, not $5,000. The coverage caps are what get you. Unfortunately, they don’t tell you this in the sales pitch. What you have to ask about is the “maximum out of pocket” for a given plan, which isn’t necessarily the deductible.

Anyway, now that I know way too much about this, I’ve decided that the only plan worth getting is a low-end Tufts HMO plan called “Advantage 2000” that costs around $250 a month, and is available to business owners through SBSB. I’m having to register my business with city hall ($50) and join SBSB ($85/year) in order to get this plan. But it looks good: it has a $20 co-pay, a $2,000 deductible, and $100 for an ER visit. No prescription coverage. My understanding is that because it is a “100% coverage” plan, the maximum out of pocket is the same as the deductible ($2,000). HMOs only work inside their network of doctors, so you can’t really pick and choose your doctor, surgeon, etc. So, for outpatient services, most HMOs require you to be inside Massachusetts, because that’s where the network is. Worldwide outside of MA, you are only covered for ER visits.

While on the topic of health insurance, here’s some other stuff you should be aware of:

• Many of these “high-deductible” plans can be combined with a health savings account (HSA), a Federal program introduced in 2003, which lets you save pre-tax money for health care in an investment account. It is very similar to an IRA. Not bad for the entrepreneurs and self-employeds of this country. Check hsainsider.com to see if a plan you’re evaluating supports an HSA.
• Insurance Partnership can cover some of your premium, up to 50% in fact, if you make less than $20k per year.
• But whatever you do, avoid healthplans.com!

We are nearing the peak of the season! The food is amazing right now! Massachusetts blueberries are here, corn, green beans, and…

albino eggplant!

and two early tomatoes, of heirloom geometry

I made some “100 mile bruschetta” with tomatoes, basil, and garlic from the farm share. Haven’t decided what to do with that eggplant…

May 18, 2006

July 13, 2006

A few weeks ago, Jon and I went to the BALLE conference to find out why our world is so unsustainable, and to see if there’s any hope. Bill McKibben gave a fantastic, extremely distressing, inspiring, and generally excellent talk on the opening night of the conference. He covered a lot of ground, but I think I caught the central thesis: Peak oil demands a continuous solution that must change where and how we live and work, the policy and culture of local farming, local businesses, and local green initiatives. All of these demand a refocus on our local community and on the things that make us happy (hint: it’s not big profit$$$). We have the power to create businesses and policies that can substantially push these changes ahead. Here are some tidbits from his talk:

• Ten times more conversations take place at farmer’s markets than at grocery stores. At the farmer’s market, people are actually talking to each other and directly to the farmers! They are trying to figure out what’s ripe, what they are looking at, and why they don’t buy local food more often. They’re connecting with their neighbors. They being a community together. At the grocery store, the typical conversation is very short and usually ends the same way: “plastic.”
• Speaking of neighbors, 75% of people in this country do not know theirs.
• Speaking of local food, here’s how the local food movement is doing: The average bite of food on the American plate travels 2,000 miles. As McKibben put it, “We are ordering take out from across the world, three times a day.”
• Meanwhile, the most productive farms in the country, in terms of food per acre, are between 8 and 15 acres, according to the USDA.

(I can track down sources for any of these stats, in case you are wondering.)

This stuff is staggering. We have a lot of work to do! As late Jane Jacobs said, “Find your place in the world, dig in, and take responsibility.”

Are you ready?

Now that I’ve officially quit my job, I have to find something to do with my life. Clearly I need a piece of software to tell me what the next hot Web 2.0 idea is, so I can code it up, flip it, and retire.

That’s where lokobot comes in. Lokobot currently offers about 900,000 Web 2.0 business names and mission statements. Sorry, there’s no RSS feed or Ajaxified crossfading.

I’m terribly unresponsive to e-mail. It’s not on purpose, of course. I just let days go by sometimes, and then I look down at the bottom of my inbox and there’s something I should have replied to that is now two weeks old. I’ve improved the situation recently by storing only items that need my attention in my inbox, and moving everything else to the trash or some archive folder. This is the Getting Things Done approach, sort of.

At work we’ve been doing a lot of recent work with the Kaizen method of process improvement—redesigning our processes to be more efficient, where efficiency is measured very closely on a few different axes. The Kaizen method makes the outliers of any process very very clear, and everything else just flows through. Some of our processes are managed with simple translucent bins posted on the wall. Every bin represents a different state in the process, and all of the bins have a time limit. Time is money after all. If a piece of paper (representing a task) sits for too long in one bin, it gets moved into an “urgent” bin where it must be dealt with that day. For example, if the bin represents an external part of the process, handled by someone outside of the company, with a four day time limit, this might simply mean that after four days of inaction, we have to send a ping: “How’s it going?” The followup is important to keep people from getting upset, and to keep things moving along, so it represents an action and when it’s done, the paper can move back into the regular bin to wait another four days.

I’d like to see this with my e-mail. If I haven’t replied to something in four days, I want it to come back to show up in an urgent folder and turn red. I need to at least say “Look, I’m not ignoring you, but this is taking me a little longer.”

You would think this possible with Apple Mail, but it’s not. You can’t set up a smart mailbox to do it, either. “Unreplied to” and “Unforwarded” are not filtering options. And I don’t want to flag messages in need of reply, because that takes too much time and I have to unflag them later.

So for now I’m keeping unreplied messages in my inbox. It’s simple and sometimes it works. When is e-mail going to get a much-needed overhaul?

I met Matt Kirkland at SXSW, and admired the notebook he carried, which he’d made himself from a discarded library book.

We exchanged cards, and a couple weeks later I checked his site and found that he’d opened an online store for library book journals: the novel novel. These blank books all have a story to tell—just check out the covers! You might recognize some of these from elementary school. Matt rebinds them by hand, and they’re super durable, which is good because I still drop things just as often as I did in second grade.

Matt also had a great quote on his site from the SXSW keynote we’d both seen:

“Tomorrow’s frontier is the wreckage of the unsustainable past.” — Bruce Sterling, 2006.

To Harvard Square today for a weekend walk. Harvard is the closest square from Inman, where we live, so the winter route to Harvard is followed by many squeaky Inman cyclists.

Went to the bookstore and found a used copy of The Square Foot Garden. I’m trying to grow an urban garden in our very shady New England back yard (18’ x 17’ — about 300 sq ft). I’m thinking potatoes. What else likes the dark?

On my way, I picked up a bottle of Kombucha tea, which tasted like my grandmother’s stewed rhubarb from her garden—delicious. I’m endeavoring to brew some myself, if I can find a baby bucha starter.

On my way back, I stopped at Savenor’s Market, which was Julia Child’s grocer and is about 3 blocks away. I’m paralyzed when I walk in there—I look a lot and buy little. Today I saw a hundred esoteric meats I’ve never cooked with or eaten: rattlesnake, duck eggs, quail eggs, black and white blood sausage, emu steak, deer, ground buffalo, duck bacon, kobe beef, rabbits, squab, yak steak. The people are extremely knowledgeable, but I feel like they should have recipes on hand.

They also have chicken breast cutlets, but you kind of have to look around for a while to find them.

I think it’s time to get past the shock of Savenor’s and dig in.

I’d like to see a new kind of product labeling that shows what the item will look like in 100, 200, and 500 years.

I redesigned this site. It’s a long story as to why I would take the time to do this. I started out doing one thing and before I knew it I’d triggered the project avalanche, and it could not be stopped.

It turns out there were 3 or 4 different previous versions of the site, depending on which page you looked at, and I’m glad things are now more consistent. That’s what I like. I’m obsessed with consistency.

The site is also a lot simpler. I removed much of the irrelevant computer administrative debris in default templates. I don’t like a lot of useless icons and blogrolls getting in the way, visually. Not that the content of this site is relevant either, but hey—you’ve got to start somewhere.

But don’t mistake simplicity for lack of innovation. There’s a major technological improvement in this site: For the first time in a long time, I’ve provided a way to contact me from my web site (on the about page).

Here’s a look back in time:
- My home page, 2000-2003
- My home page, 1999-2000
- My home page, 1997-1999
- My home page, 1995-1997
- The first web page ever, by Tim Berners-Lee

Reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done, along with everyone else in the computer world. He says “If it takes less than 2 minutes, do it now.” But I’m realizing that most things take 10 minutes, and these are the things that really drive you crazy.

Need to find ways to make 10 minute tasks take 2 minutes without sacrificing quality.

Possible approaches:
- don’t edit and re-write e-mails, write them right the first time.
- limit quality, for tasks that don’t deserve it
- limit quantity.
- stop obsessing
- kill the anal attitude.
- delegate
- consolidate
- start from a place of organization
- skim
- just say no

others? (I’m delegating.)

Thinking of questions for strangers in the elevator of our four-story building. I get in on the fourth floor, heading out for a lunch break. Elevator descends to third floor. Door opens. Person walks in. As door closes, I say:
‘Excuse me, what do you think the meaning of life is?’
‘Nice weather, huh. What was the most traumatic experience of your life so far?’
‘Uh, will you tell me how an internal combustion engine works?’

Others?

What is the difference between cooking and making a sand mandala?

I’ve always liked sand mandalas as a concept, but could the monks’ time be better spent preparing food for the community? Cooking is also meditative creative process. It emphasizes impermanence, both of humans and of the food which will ultimately return to the earth. It aids in the lesson of detachment from personal ownership. And it the result is a thing of beauty.

A mandala feeds the community in a spiritual way, you might say, but food literally feeds it. So what am I missing here? Any monks in the audience with first-hand understanding?

Probably it’s just a tradition, but I say it’s time to learn a real lesson of impermanence by dropping dusty traditions in favor of modern pragmatism. Or perhaps it’s a matter of optics. Mandalas do have a simplicity to them that cooking lacks. Cooking requires a lot of resources. A group of traveling monks hauling a pile of All-Clad around might not be seen as masters of detachment from personal ownership.

Sunset, Lake Lorraine (taken by Karl)

Hamilton Farmer’s Market

yum.

yum.

yum!

Emily et al.

So the three-speed is finished! This is the quintessential Cambridge bicycle. I rode it around Central Sq this evening and it feels great. So upright and proper! I’m going to start commuting on it this week and see how that goes. Here’s a photograph:

I tracked the costs, just to see how much I’d end up spending on it:

total expenses: $449.51!

the cost of basically the same bike, built by someone else: $485.00

So I didn’t save any money doing it this way—but, as Stephen says, at least I know every part of the bicycle now. Oh… I still have to buy fenders and a front basket…

niether pup nor fogey.

I’ve been learning basic bike mechanics at the Broadway Bicycle School, but this is going to be a real challenge. It’s a 1948 Raleigh three-speed. Straight out of Nottingham! I picked it up at the huge vintage bike emporium / junk shop across the street that only two weeks ago I was scared to visit because it’s creepy. Now all I have to do is strip the entire thing down, replace everything but the frame and maybe the rear hub, and I’ll be rolling to work on beautiful vintage commuter bike. Good thing I’ve got some friends who can help with this endeavor…

the Care and Feeding of English Three-speeds (via Greg)

The first wheelchair rider

The snacks.

Women’s first place: Catherine Ndereba of Kenya

The law.

The camera club.

Men’s first place: Hailu Negussie of Ethiopia

1/1000th of everyone else.

Dyson US, the vacuum people, are releasing their new Ball vacuum on April 21st. It looks like a combination of their upright vacuum and the Ballbarrow (pictured here).

I don’t have enough living space to need a vacuum, but I’m still psyched.

David Byrne now has an Internet radio station of what he’s currently listening to.

It’s my kind of stuff—and he has mixed in a bunch of world music that I hadn’t heard (from his label, presumably). His journal is also good—he’s a good writer.

Speaking of which, I just read half of “This Must Be The Place” — a
poorly written biography of Talking Heads by David Bowman. Don’t go near it. It’s a potboiler for sure, “unauthorized” because I can’t imagine that DB and the gang would waste trees on the silly old rumors and downright solipsism. It seems like he’s writing to an audience of obsessed rock-n-roll fanatics. I was looking for more insight into process, and group dynamics. Knowing what a process-head David is, I thought I’d get it. But this book doesn’t deliver on that.

The book that IS delivering for me right now, however, is Against The Odds by James Dyson, the excellent British inventor who made that lovely cyclone vacuum cleaner. It’s beautifully written and very inspiring. A real review is forthcoming.

Speaking of Dyson— they have come out with a new vacuum: “the ball.”
Very smart looking.

(found in a Denver library book by Karl’s grandfather)

I just got my Annual Appeal letter from the Boston Athenaeum, the private library that Karl and Freddie gave me a membership to on my last birthday. The Annual Appeal is the library’s drive to make $525,000 in additional funding beyond the standard $100 (if you’re under 40) or $250 yearly membership fee revenue. I don’t doubt the library will need the extra money: they occupy some of the best real estate in Boston, right next to the State House; they buy books, they buy paintings, they host all sorts of programs and research; they are constantly working to restore and preserve their aging building and its collection of half a million books.

The Athenaeum is nearly 200 years old. It holds a place as a unique American literary resource, a national historic building, and a cultural-intellectual institution. Yet the Athenaeum always feels underutilized to me—I never see anyone under 75 in the place, and the 75-year-olds are few and far between. I often spend an afternoon in the library and see only a couple staff members. An enormous reading room with a pristinely restored vaulted ceiling lies empty most of the day. Dozens of early American bronze sculptures lounge around feeling underappreciated. Beautiful antique study carrels and leather chairs remain unoccupied. Stepping into the library from the busy downtown street, I feel like I’ve entered a cathedral on off-hours. There’s a deafening quietude; it’s a social anti-node, and I’m compelled to tiptoe even though no one is around.

I think the Athenaeum is kept clean, quiet, and unoccupied on purpose. I think its life as an institution parallels the lives of its geriatric membership. They are birds of a feather, both nurturing an obsessive desire to freeze time that I’ll only fully understand half a century from now, if I’m still around.

Maybe it’s just the timing of my visits. I go during the day on Thursdays and Fridays, when most people under 75 are at work, and anyone not working is also not wandering private libraries. I’ll have to visit on the weekend sometime.

Anyway, I received a donation letter from them yesterday. It was a normal appeal for money, like all the rest that come in weekly from non-profits. But toward the end there was a bit that brought up the now-familiar penurious feeling I get in my stomach when I walk into the library:

“I am happy to report that, as of today, we have received $400,000. … I hope that you will join the more than 600 donors who have already made a commitment …”

Six hundred people donated $400,000, so the average donation for these 600 people was $667. Compare this with the NPR crowd, another group with an above-average income, where the average donation is around $60.

Given this bit of information, and the feeling I already get from the place, I can see why more people in my tax bracket aren’t members. There are cultural pressures at work here. The upper-class intellectuals of Boston have this place swen up tight. The library is an excellent resource for me, at $8 a month, but the membership presents a personal challenge: am I prepared to be at the short end of intergenerational chatter with upper-class socialites looking for a place to hang out and quirky bookworms doing literary research?

Yes! Ultimately, this is too good of a resource to not be involved with. The people are friendly. The funding is plentiful. So I think it’s time I got more involved before my membership runs out. Karl and I are going to the annual April Fools reception for the members under 40. If there are more than a dozen people, I’ll have to revise my perspective.

I’m fascinated by the working style of successful teams and individuals, specifically in the creative realm. I think that’s what’s been drawing me to diaries and biographies lately. I’m not expecting to find some key to unlocking creativity, but I have been collecting guidelines that I can cling to in the limitless expanse. One of the guidelines is the Buddhist principle about learning to let go, so I should probably throw my whole list into the river right now. But let me indulge myself for a moment instead. The problem is, I’m sick of feeling both overbooked and underlimited, so I’m looking for ways to either accomplish more with less, or more with the same, or simply less. Less means stabbing my ambition and letting it bleed a little, and I’m not ready to stick the knife in yet.

So I’m stuck hunting for design principles and working styles that can help me make sense of my work. I’m attracted to them because they’re about understanding the medium—any medium. They are solely about process, but they are not Life’s Little Instruction Book entries about having a solid handshake. So in a way they are constrained: they contain no subject and no emotion, no social etiquette. They’re not supposed to make you happy in life; they’re simply there to boost creatively productivity. They aren’t too general; they’re just general enough to be useful. We all find inspiration but apply it differently.

The Winslow Green Growth Fund stood out to me in a New York Times mutual fund round-up from early this year. This fund was among the best performing mutual funds of 2004 and it invests only in environmentally friendly companies.

The minimum initial investment is $5,000, and you can set up monthly or bimonthly automatic investments of >= $100 after that. I’d like to set this kind of thing up while I’m young and am not locked into long-term investments in environmentally unfriendly corporations.

Now, where did I put that $5,000?

PS. On the subject of evironmentally friendly companies, I noticed that Nike considered improving their corporate image this year. What I love is how this is a special product with a special website targeted toward a special audience, not a wider business practice for Nike.

my latest web distraction: a series of dramatic videos of chemical reactions, from “Chemistry Comes Alive!”

Highlights:
Nitrogen Triiodide Detonation
Reaction of Magnesium with Carbon Dioxide
Ferrofluid (Part 3)

I found the end of the earth today.

We went outside for a bit today, but promptly returned and are now making a second breakfast…

the view through the skylights:

I was just reading more about the tsunami and I can’t believe it. The photographs are devastating. The New York Times has ariel photographs of idyllic island towns that were completely wiped away.

Support UNICEF, Oxfam America, The American Red Cross, or any of these other relief organizations.

Nashville’s a bigger city these days, but it still has a lot of very stark spots. Here’s one of them near the local high school, which I took a day after a pretty sizable ice storm hit the area.

My cousin Ethan, an industrial designer in San Francisco, just opened the doors of his new sexy accessories shop called jimmyjane. Their flagship product is a compact, waterproof metal vibrator available in steel, gold, and platinum, all with optional personalized engraving. I don’t know if he’d describe Jimmyjane “sex toy company” exactly; they also sell fragrances, jewelery, clothing, etc. His is the first US company doing high-end accessories like this, though UK-based Myla has been successful at Selfridges and Liberty in London, and they’re now selling their wares through some of the bolder Nieman Marcus stores here.

Karl and I gave a little talk for the Harvard Sq UU church group around this topic. We split the group into pairs and had each person interview the other for 15 minutes. Here are the interview questions we used:

Interview Questions on connection experiences…

What doesn’t work: What specific social environments or spaces do you encounter that are apparently designed to bring people together but don’t? What causes them to fail?

Themes: What is your conception of connection? What is necessary? What is its function/value for you?

These are simple questions, but there’s definitely enough here to talk about for at least a half hour. If you spend a lot of time in group settings, you should understand what works for you.

Anyway, after the interviews, we got back together and discussed our answers. My answers reflected a desire for the following group dynamic:

• small groups to get “real work” done, large groups for more “fun” or reflective things (usually with one leader.. like carolling!).
  
• a mixture of group time and personal time— I need time to mull over stuff.
  
• a group must have a reason to be together, or I get disinterested.
  
• an atmosphere of mutural respect is important to me.
  
• alcohol doesn’t help
  
• nature is a great place to gather: no distractions.
  
• if I’m meeting a large group for the first time (eg. a conference), I’d prefer to spend at least a few days with them.
  

Questions for reflection…

Have you identified areas where you’d like to grow? Are there any new patterns you’d like to start but haven’t, or ones that clearly don’t work for you? Reflect on how you might encourage more meaningful connection experiences for yourself and others in the future.

Barriers: What barriers do you face in making connections in your daily life (social, fiscal, emotional, etc.)? Day to day, would you make any changes in how you seek out social connections?

After all this, I really wished I’d taken a group dynamics class in college. But instead I’ll start looking for books on the subject. Any suggestions?