Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words.
Keep your words positive because your words become your behavior.
Keep your behavior positive because your behavior becomes your habits.
Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values.
Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.
– Gandhi
Went to the clinic, signed a form saying I’d hold them harmless for whatever, discussed nerve damage and drooling and droopy eyelids and such, opened old wound, checked for centipedes and all that kind of shit, nothing found, closed it up, went home and ate Ibuprofen grateful not to have been found dead like Leslie – no relation to Dave – Winer on a floaty in a pool in Coconut Grove.
How do we purple-ize when there is one side that insists on zero sum solutions? Given that for some it’s a win-lose competition and victory supercedes any compromise or consensus building, that some segments of our culture are so “values driven” that their values don’t permit entree to new ideas or facilitated consensus… given all that, why sit in the same room with them?
Jennifer Harris from the Center for Digital Democracy is presenting right now and the message she brings is that the ad revenue migrating to the web is HUGE. She’s talking about diversity of ownership, online privacy protection, local oversight, assurance of access to broadband… big media companies are working their way from the top down…
I’ve been more interested in reading the IRC backchannel than listening to the panel…
John Palfrey had a great piece of presentation software this morning that he used during his introductory remarks. A young man named S.J. told me it was maybe Mind Map, but there are lots of such packages. David Isenberg suggested maybe Mind Jet or Free Mind. Now that I finally got my wifi hookup here I’ve done a little googlery and discovered the Wikipedia article on mind mapping and the cool software that is linked there-from. Look out power-point…
I got into into Boston yesterday and started burning money on cab rides and meals at the Kendall Square Legal Seafood… lobstah roll for lunch and fried clams for dinner. Last night in my room I ordered a dessert and a decaf espresso. I don’t know if it was the clams, the ganache or the fact that I ran into DW at the Copley Marriott a few hours earlier, but I found myself humbled and worshipping at the porcelain god that I call Ralph. The discomfort passed away as quickly as it arrived and I had a good night’s sleep, untroubled by bossy kitties or face licking dogs.
Despite that dyspeptic moment with Winer, who felt a need to confront me for expressing my own opinions, I enjoyed the IMA Public Media 2024 closing speeches by Tim Karr and Doc Searls. I’ve heard Doc’s current schtick in a variety of venues over the last year or so.. I think he packaged the cognitive linguistics piece for last year’s Freedom to Connect (F2C) conference in Silver Spring. But if I’m fortunate enough to be exposed to Doc’s developing thought so some of it seems less than fresh and spontaneous, still I always go away feeling better informed. He’s a trouper and an original thinker, a real presence on stage who can turn complex ideas into pop cultural memes at the turn of a phrase. Here’s a picture of Doc with Larry Josephson, one of his early and continuing influences…
2/22 is the day we usually hear the Sandhills arrive on the marsh. Didn’t happen this year, but the tom turkeys are starting to strut their stuff. The hens are just turning away at this point though.
A few weeks ago it was observed in the Harvard Gazette that when it comes to social networks, gender seems to matter. (To my shame if not embarrassment) I am a lurker on a mailing list of femme-geeks that came together following last summer’s BlogHer. It’s more of a support group than a geek fest, and more about geekular entrepreneurship, strategies for recognition, that sort of thing. It doesn’t offer much to a traveler on the technoid way.
The gazette article said, Male entrepreneurs have larger emotional support networks, and have an apparently greater facility for using emotional ties for utilitarian ends — in this case, making more money.
Then I received in the mail a tired gender-biased joke offering several words defined from a male and a female perspective. Here3 are three:
VULNERABLE (vul-ne-ra-bel) adj.
Female…. Fully opening up one’s self emotionally to another.
Male…….. Playing football without a cup.
COMMUNICATION (ko-myoo-ni-kay-shon) n.
Female….The open sharing of thoughts and feelings with one’s partner.
Male……. Leaving a note before taking off on a fishing trip with the boys.
FLATULENCE (flach-u-lens) n.
Female… An embarrassing byproduct of indigestion.
Male…… A source of entertainment, self-expression, male bonding.
I’m not sure that the author speaks for all of us, and I suspect that the Cosmo versus Argosy (do they still publish Argosy I wonder?) polarization is more interesting as an example of cliched role modeling than as a statement about how men develop those deep emotional bonds in their mutual support groups.
Like most of the things I’ve thought to write about over the last few months, lack of time, talent and insight force me to leave the subject here. I’d like to list some groups of nice, earnest, mutually supportive business men, and contrast them with the sparkling individual women who find perhaps less success on average than the some of the less gifted men in those supportive networks alluded to in the Gazette. Some of that stuff seems unfair, but is it a man’s world, really?
