Handwritten Mother's Day Card from 5 year old Lily Clare to my mom
I think Lily Clare, age 5, wins the Mother's Day Best Effort award for this handwritten note to her Nana, with accompanying artwork. Jeez, it's gonna be hard to match this by just ringing something up at Pottery Barn.
In this grim era of serious electoral machinations, we need more purple stretch pants and gold go-go boots.
I'm gonna vote Obama way/what your mama say?
via Popwatch
True story: my path to last week's SMB event was as follows. A few weeks ago, as I struggled over another update to my job search materials, I cried out in frustration: "I hate my resume!" So at that moment, I Googled for "social media+resume", which in turn led me to this and this and this.
Aha, I cried (okay, thought), here are some people who are on this. The essential problems with the traditional resume are manifold, but two big ones are:
a) it's flat, a dead-end. Better tool for weeding people out (not this one) than it is for zooming in (ok, I'm interested in this one,let me find out more).
b) even though hand-offs of resumes today are overwhelmingly electronic, the resume's print-world origins make it really badly suited for that purpose. The heartbreak of mangled Word docs leading to frustration for all involved.
So I'm pretty ready to hear what these guys are saying about creating a new professional practice of self-presentation in the Web 2.0 world, one that's more closely tied to examples of your recent work and thought and valuable, ongoing conversations within your profession--more "showing" and less "telling" as they urge in the creative world.
Before I get entirely carried away on the happy of social media as a replacement though, it is useful to look at some limits and caveats.
I
had an interesting conversation at my table with two recruiters, Grace
and Debbie, that grew out of the agenda: as people in the business of
hiring, but not in the business of running a Web 2.0 business, how did
they view and use social media?
Continue reading "Wisdom of Tables (Final Social Media Breakfast 7 post)" »
Faces of the past: this pic includes my grandfather Paul, granduncle George and their father, my great-grandfather Peter. Among the back row are my father, Peter, and his brothers Paul and Leo, with additional cousins.
www.hinesfamilyreunion2008.com
My cousin David is on a quest to host the first-ever family reunion on my father's side, the Hines family. His is the Herculean effort of hosting and sort of leading the "recruiting," my way of helping is to do the site.
Once upon a time, the idea of a reunion would have never occurred to us, because most of the vast tangle of aunts, uncles, grands, 1st, 2nd and third cousins, lived in the same small world. I joke that my family's been here a hundred years in the US and only made it three miles inland.
Continue reading "Roots and Remembrance (Hines Family Reunion)" »
You're Missing - Sidewalk 9/11 memorial near Saint Vincent's, NYC
True story.
Three families meet in the Mass General head trauma ICU. Over days of vigil, stories get exchanged.
One. My uncle, the peaceable mailman from Malden, age 60, who survived a war to live a life based on quiet affection. He lived with my Grammy and his young single sister my Aunt Jean till Grammy died, then took care of Jean till she got married. Moved in with Uncle Doug and Aunt Bev 25 years ago, helped raise their daughters and now his grandnephews and nieces. Every day when he gets home, cooks his beloved Boston Terrier Bart II (a framed portrait of Bart I is on his wall) his own burger on the George Forman grill.
Finishing his mail route on Charles Street a week ago, on a lovely sunny spring Friday, got knocked down by a speeding bicyclist and hit his head against the curb. Rushed to MGH with massive head injury. A mix of his eight siblings, their spouses, and eighteen nieces and nephews has been there ever since. He hasn't woken up. Things don't look good. At the house, his dog looks nervously up at each human, waiting, not understanding.
Two. A young African-American woman, age 27, has been in Africa helping AIDS patients, giving of herself in a way that most of us in our comfortable lives would find unimaginable. On her way home, she suffers the sudden bursting of a cerebral aneurysm. The jet diverts to Boston. She's rushed to Mass General.
Her family gathers from Atlanta and other far-flung cities, carrying Bibles, home-made posters, food. On Sunday, we see them in the hallway, weeping, furling their signs. The father comes in to hug and shake hands with my aunts and uncles. Their daughter and sister has died.
Three. A young Irish-American guy, aged 20 or so, is a drug-addict. Lost, on the streets, his mother desperate to even hear word of him.
Last weekend he gets himself beat up, serious head injury. The doctors go in to fix it, and find he, too, has a big undetected aneurysm. They fix that as well, and tell his mom that had this not happened, the flaws in his brain, there since birth, would undoubtedly have later burst and killed him.
Today, he walked out of MGH with his mom, on his own two feet, Sox cap on over his shaven head.
He has another chance.
Social Media Breakfast 7 Boston
The top sign that a professional event was worth it to the audience occurs when each participant gets home. If you find yourself sorting through your notes, checking out new sites, updating your feeds, and adding people to your contacts, you know you've found a good one.
The golden snitch is our old friend, relevance. I could walk into a Meetup of astrophysicists, gain an accurate sense of how cool and impressive the folks are, and understand almost none of their discussion. I could walk into a meeting of Flash developers, understands some of what they are saying, be impressed by the esoteric parts of the conversation that are 10 game levels above my grasp, file a few useful tidbits away for the next time I work with Flash developers, but that would be the end of that.
The Social Media Breakfast, organized by the excellent Bryan Person, provided that great sense of an exact match: the speakers were all dealing with the questions that I'm *already* thinking about. There was a lot of "new" (names, insights, links, etc.) but it was new information that fit into and extended the set of things I work on or am curious about right now. In a trifecta, the talks were valuable, the hanging out with people was valuable, and later that day I was busily making a list of people, ideas, and links to follow up on. Bing bing bing (sound of imaginary pinball machine).
So much so that not only am I indulging in my old skool long-form blogging about SMB (ironic, given the Twitter-worship going on that morning) but will divide it into two posts on stuff from the speakers, and stuff from my table-mates.
Speaker Value from the Breakfast
Stever Robbins, "Get It Done Guy"
I am a junkie for Lifehacker, GTD, and The Spirit of Getting Organized, a Backpack subscriber and 37Signals fan. I consider the self-management of time and individual action the number one skill that my traditional liberal arts schools not only did not teach, but had no words to express. So this site went into my Netvibes.
Stever began what turned out to be a morning-long love fest with Twitter, a techno-crush in which all the speakers are still in the throes. Stever has a gift for aphorisms: one was that in social media "frequency trumps duration."
Continue reading " Tweet Your Way to a Job (Social Media Breakfast 7)" »
Sign of spring, Zeigler Street
Huh, it just hit me more forcefully then ever in this bit from Barack--Obama's background is more similar to my own then either Hillary or McCain's.
A chuckle and then some serious comments on the crazy, distorted fun house mirror in which two millionaires and two of the most powerful people in the country can get the media to declare Obama the "elitist."
Bluebells and Tripping on forsythia, Arnold Arboretum, April 23
In the midst of a worrisome week, my mind runs on spring and all things garden.
Seriously, I'm driving along, worried about illness in the family, jobsearch, the Presidential race and the fate of the nation, and meanwhile, my mind is having a running conversation with the dirt.
Silouette. From "Take your time: Olafur Eliasson" at MoMA NYC
Last weekend in New York was about seeing Mary, my dear indestructible aunt, sister of my late father; she has in the last year survived cancer, and then this winter, had a bad heart episode that ended in the insertion of a pacemaker.
Today my uncle Paul, my mom's younger brother, was in a serious accident. Walking his rounds as a postman, and he got mowed down by a speeding bike courier and hit his head. He's at the hospital having surgery this evening, and my aunts have been calling with regular updates. There's cautious optimism that he'll be ok.
I'd be hard put to pick two more dissimilar people out of my world, or two people in my enormous family with whom I have a more different relationship.
From "Take your time: Olafur Eliasson" at MoMA NYC
Melding of today's results from the PA elections and Battlestar Galactica S4.
Ahem. Say it with me.
"We're going the wrong waaaaaaaaaay."
Spring glimpse, New York City
If I were New York City, I'd work on having it be April all the time.
Went to see a show of photographs in Chelsea, NYC by Gregory Crewdson.
He makes images of these huge, lush, saturated scenes of desolate figures on desolate streets of small New England towns, which ironically enough, are staged with crews of dozens of people. Results are sort of Edward Hopper meets David Lynch meets Cindy Sherman. Elaborate artifices they may be, but they will suck you right back to every hour you ever spent waiting at a bus station, walking the streets of your parents' neighborhood at night, or sitting in a parking garage after a failed meeting. They map the Geography of Nowhere, they represent our terror with being alone with ourselves, our particularly American fears becoming aware of the present moment, of experiencing a loss of forward momentum. It's why we move away from our hometowns. They are why we don't turn the TV off. It's what's out there, in the back yard, with teeth.
BPM member seosmh and the Dudley mural
The Boston Photo Mob is a Flickr group that also exists in the spatial world.
It's a photopool whose members continually contribute digital photos of Boston, and many members participate only virtually, enriching a growing archive of thousands of images of this city and its people, beautiful and mundane, dramatic and sweeping or minute and well-observed.
But several volunteers also use the Flickr discussion threads and Google Groups to organize BostonPhotoMob meetups where a whole bunch of photographers show up at a time and place and just photograph the heck out of the same thing, clicking away and creating a hundred different views and takes.
It's a version of the flash mob concept, only with cameras and a way to share the results. Mob sites include the South Boston Saint Patrick's day parade, the recent Anime Convention, the enormous Pillow Fight downtown organized by local pranksters Banditos Mysteriosos.
Faces of Dudley mural, by BYCC mural crew: Dedicated To The People of Roxbury
Little taste from my outing with the Boston Photo Mob walking tour of Roxbury.
Group Flickr photopool here.
At the Portland Museum of Art: filtered window
From MIT prof Ed Boyden: "how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure."
Via Mike Lee by Twitter.
Read more at the MIT Technology Review.
