@johnmierau is where you'll find me and it would be great to hear what's going up with some of you.... miss blogging but just don't have the time to say anything I think is great meaning, and I'm forcing cogent thoughts into longer form the few times I can.

Oh, and I'd like to give those fleeting moments when the kids are sleeping and the house is clean to my fickshun.

I gave up my embargo on twitter after buying a used iPhone (cue the heavenly choir) and discovering just how wrong I'd been to blast the thing since inception.  If you have one you understand: if you're a poweruser and will not even try (as I was) you can feel free to laugh at me.  TO each their own...

So, TWEET my way if you're still alive, if you've got something funny to say, and I'll follow you back.  Yes you, in the back!

Cheers,
J

A few years back camera phones showed us the London Tube bombings on sites like Flickr, later to be used by more traditional media outlets.  Later, bloggers covered the Myanmar martial law outbreak, when foreign reporters weren't permitted access.  Days ago, the Mumbai, India terrorist attacks - on anyone with a brit or american passport- were livetweeted via twitter.org and on photoblogging sites.

I'm excited by this.  This is how I want to get my news.  Unless my little ones are around and then I'll look for those hallowed traditional-media information sources: Stewart and Colbert.  But for up-to-the-minute, what-matters-now coverage?  If you're reading this blog, you've already got at least one source for unfiltered, unverified information - which news always is, even the stuff you read later in history books.   And that puts us in the best, most informed position thus far in history to decide truth for ourselves

This was meant to be a rant about the amazement I feel at having recently plugged myself into an iPhone.  About how content is personal again, now tech has made the world smaller after years of requiring intermediaries.  I'll write that post, here or elsewhere, but watching the Mumbai events unfold on Twitter made one fact more real for me than ever: 

We don't need people deciding what to fit into our news cycles ever again.  We have the power to choose what knowledge is critical to absorb FOR OURSELVES.  That's a freedom and a power I still don't think I -nor the folks crafting messages or hiding facts from us- have fully adapted to yet.  

Now go out and experience the world, with nobody's x-colored glasses on but your own. 

Courtesy future perfect comes a fiting followup to my cellphone fossil post, Jan Chipchase talks of Nokia's "remade' branded effort to create recycled phone products attractive to the buying produc, thus reclaiming parts from (conservatively) maybe millions of phones, and thus generating a new cash model while reducing environmental bruising.

"Is it possible to make an upcycled mobile phone entirely from recycled materials? One that consumers want to buy? At a price that puts it within reach of the mass market? The discussion is well underway."

Though the corporate giants are now actively discussing ways to sell 'greener' phones and generating prestige for them in order to charge a profit, Chipchase's post is accompanied with images of the owner of a smallscale regional cell repair shop... because the biz of reclaiming tech is already a proven model on streets if not in boardrooms.

We decided to pull Nathaniel from daycare two days a week, since Nik's not too busy what with not working and just sitting around the house raising two other kids (joke, nobody kneecap me!).

It's fun to hear thumping upstairs while I work in the basement (at least a few precious months remain in my working at home dreams).

It's also busy-making: this weekend the girls get their christening - given the time of year we're holding it out back to squirt them with magic water under the blue sky. Prior to that, I'll have to find time to stain the deck furniture and slash the grass (read: clover) to a bearable level.

In addition to the work stuff, o'course. And teensy bits of writing, which is firing my brain thanks to new levels of cameraderie from a couple of wordluvvin' compatriots.

That leaves the typical near-zero time for blogging, or evaluating how friends are using the internets (I am continually amazed by its usefulness, and also the volume of spam otherwise intelligent people generate - pollution worth considering on its own).

However I did manage time to do something I'd never seen value in: I oined FaceBook. Oh, how I can hear the disbelief in you reading this, if you know me at all. My reason for joining is not to make use of another social platform but to make use of another protest platform.

In Canada, the Copyright reforms our Conservative government is trying to make into law has received its biggest rebuke from the much-publicized popularity of the FaceBook protest group 'Fair Copyright for Canada', which now has 80,000 members.

80. Thousand.

I joined exclusively to pitch my voice to this protest, when there were 60 K. I will bet more than a few have joined for exactly that reason. I still, however, despise the idea of proprietary, 'gated' communities like FaceBook -- despite any allure that my friends and the much-vaunted FaceBook apps may wear against me.

But, I'm on, so I might as well poke around. I can hate myself later .

J

I keep coming back to this haiku-style approach to commentary in a world where anything in volume seems tantamount to correctness.

Are you usung it? Do you detest it? Opines requested.

A short ps by way of the theme of this post:

Few things can be as cathartic as portioning out wtermelon for desert after a long, stressful day by pulling a butcher's blade from the block and burying that rectangle of steel inside the unsuspection melon. Such a nice, soft, wet thunk is made (grin).

You remember Henry David?  The gent who went to the woods so he could live deliberately?  Being conscious about your choices is even harder in the ADD, digital world we've been wired into.  So, what do you do to stay on top of it?

The latest good news from my neck of the woods: my 'work-from-home' contract looks to have been extended until at least September.  That's VERY good news because I have no idea how family men and women get anything done when they mix in commute and office time to the mix.  I'm busy as hades as it is.

One thing about being busy, is you try your damndest to prioritize, organize, not panic as you see things you meant to do race by in the rearview.  Now combine this with impressionable young 'uns imitating your every move adoringly, and you find there's a new weight to your desire to juggle all those things in your life more efficiently.  This is a hard thing.  For me.  I'm making a 'weighty pronouncement' when I say that, and I'm sure there are some folks out there who drop nothing, never break a sweat, and look good doing all the things that come easily to them. 

I very much hope these people spontaneously combust.

While I struggle to bury my jealousy of the uber-organized, and join their ranks, I find myself trying two things: tossing away guilty pleasures I can no longer afford.... and taking more breaks.  Yes, breaks: stretch breaks, twenty-pushup-breaks and thinking breaks.  Short ones, to shuffle piles and identify where I'm heading in the next hour, next day, before the next deadline at work or for pickin' up chillin's from daycare.

And the other thing I'm doing to keep as many tasks in motion as possible is organization.  That doesn't mean a new system for tasks, or a shinier calendar: it's the hard choice to STICK to what you say.  That's the only secret to every great human accomplishment, but it's a hard one to master, and to keep mastering on down the road.

So I have one list with what needs doing, and one alarm reminding me to switch it up, stretch or clear my head every 45.  And the minimalist approach seems to be working.

I'm listening to cbc radio's spark podcast interview with Jonathan Zittrain, author of 'The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop It!'

This is a great discussion of 'tethered' appliances - endpoint appliances like iphone, apps like facebook and other access routes to the internet and our data that lock us in and kill innovation.

I have brisk discussions on the greatness of the iphone and how it's in Jobs' best interest to provide innovative software, but Zittrain verbalizes my concerns clearly: in any 'walled garden' the proprietor or the regulator can drop the hammer on our expectations.

To me, his strongest argument is a call for data portability, the same way years of lawsuits have led to privacy agreements and licensing agreements... and a more aware user who fights for those rights, the same way consumer advocacy groups fought for real-world regulation of products.

Zittrain's book is free online in PDF form here

I love hearing people assert that 'hub and spoke' society is an expired mode and that distributed code/social components and crowd sourcing/cloud computing is bringing a new aspect to the way people think about interaction.

Great examples: like how Canadian Broadcasting Corporation -a monolithic, government-sponsored mainstream media entity- is embracing bittorrent, podcasting and small-scale, widespread communication.

Love it!

Mesh Conference