I’ll admit right at the outset that my attention span could use a gym membership, some spin classes and even some cross training. The cross-training comment was a joke, as my attention span flits from one item to the next without minimal urging or outside intervention.
Even as I compose this column, I’m frantically looking around the room at various objects that might easily take me away from the keyboard and into magical lands. Lands of television watching, Italian Ice snacking, scooter riding, magazine reading, and even furniture construction.
It’s not that I like all of those activities more than connecting with you readers, but I find my mind struggling to slow its pace and stroll along with my fingers. It’s not ADD (as I’ve ranted numerous times about how that’s a fantasy diagnosis created by antsy parents and accommodating physicians), but it is very real. And I’m not alone.
Just today, while cruising the Internet at 82MPH and jumping from Facebook to Twitter to CNN to the Sarah Palin Quotes page, I stopped to read a person’s profile. This guy regularly posts to Twitter as @technosailor and has his regular site here… TECHNOSAILOR.
His name is Aaron Brazell and he’s a self-proclaimed social media expert and backs up this bravado with some impressive writing on the subject and a long line of followers on Twitter. I poked around this follower list and added some of the smart ones to my Twitter feed, but then realized that maybe Twitter is starting to supplant longer forms of writing in the social-media space.
Brazell still keeps a blog going – and has a handful of contributors who blog nearly every day. People like Steve Garfield put videos up and are everpresent in the electronic space. And guys like Adam Gaffin are putting up news and other media by the barrelful.
But what has happened – or is happening – with the general audience in this space? I fear that it’s slowing and growing at the same time.
Last night my aunt asked me about blogging and ‘doing’ a Website. I told her I could get her up and running in 15 minutes, but I stopped short of asking her why she now wants to enter the digital age. I imagine that in the worlds of people 50 and up, digital is new and fresh and email is the wave of the future.
Look at the younger set, though, and you’ll see a move away from long-form blogs to quick-hit Tweets and Facebook status messages and FriendFeed aggregation of a person’s activity. In fact, I took a look at three people on Brazell’s following list and none of them had a blog post fresher than last June. While each had a Twitter post no older than two hours.
Have they run into the problem of having so much short stuff to share that there’s nothing left to build a bigger discussion around?
Are we facing the ultimate in OMG, L8TR conversations? And where does journalism and column writing fit into this new world?
Thankfully, the proportion of people currently mired in the new-media space is tiny. People are still wondering what a blog does. News organizations are just finding out that a shared Twitter post is called a Tweet. And our legislators don’t even use email yet.
So is the wave of the future ahead of us or crashing down upon us? It’s really up to the consumers to decide.
Ultimately, the delivery system isn’t the major factor to writers and other content producers. A good story, article, feature or column is the ultimate goal. I don’t care if you eat off a paper plate or the finest china, the meal of information should still be top-notch, accurate and compelling.
Let me know what you think and where you are in relation to the wave(s).
I guess I should at least explain. The other night, David Letterman did a Top Ten List of Sarah Palin facts. Here’s that video. *The reason this appears here is because Palin has proven herself a less-than-intelligent interviewee and possibly a less-than-able VP candidate. As a professional journalist and columnist, I like to share snippets from all corners of the media so people can make up their own minds.
I’ve also put the Katie Couric interview below the Letterman Top Ten. Enjoy that too. Palin seems to think that Alaska has been critical to the United States’ ability to stave off another coming of the cold war.
After watching these two clips, let me know what you think of Palin as a serious candidate.
It’s 8:15AM in Boston. Barbara drops her bag and strides to the thermostat. She reaches into the locked box with a nail file and flicks the plastic tab up. Barbara returns to her desk, hoping nobody saw her.
Sound familiar?
Of all the issues at the office, nothing is so divisive and secretive as control of the office thermostat.
A woman who works near Boston’s Financial District refused to share her industry and was uncertain if she should even reveal her office location.
This woman said she enjoys the large window near her desk because it keeps her warm. But when it comes to overcast days or bitterly cold periods in the winter, she finds herself in a battle between coworkers who bump the heat up and others who cry for cooler temps. The thermostat seems to do nothing.
This results in frequent calls to the HVAC crew who run around the office all year long adjusting thermostats. Ultimately, this woman has found other ways to stay warm.
“I find it easier, more conducive to my working relationships,” she said. “To keep sweaters and scarves within easy reach.”
She’s not alone. At one company in southern New Hampshire, the thermostats appear to be only decorative. Recently the thermometers on the wall read 81° while the thermostats were set at 68°.
Said one employee, “I don’t know enough about the heating system to know if the thermostats are inadequate, or if the heat doesn’t work properly, or if the thermostat and heat are ill-suited to one another, or ill-suited to this office. But it gets headache-inducing hot every afternoon, then mysteriously near-comfy at 3PM.”
What’s the big deal with controlling the office climate? We can agree that some people have their own internal furnace and others run reptilian and need to carry a space heater around with them to meetings. But in an age where robotic vacuums clean up our homes, shouldn’t it be easier to keep employees comfortable?
Apparently, it’s more difficult than you’d think. Raymond Falite is vice president Falite Brothers , an HVAC company that has served businesses, homes and schools in the Boston area for 32 years. He said that the real difficulty in maintaining comfort comes down to zones.
Most buildings have zones that vary between 500 and 2000 feet and depending on the size of the zone, you’re going to have people who are either too hot or too cold.
Ideally, he said, you would want to design a building so that the zones are only 500 feet. The smaller the zone, the more completely and accurately you can control the heat and cooling. When spaces get larger, that’s when you get thermostat wars.
“Over the years, we’ve put a lot of locking thermostats on,” said Falite.
But heat zones are where every builder wants to cheat. It saves you money if you put a 2000-foot zone in instead of a 500-foot zone. Less equipment. But that means less control.
“In a 2000-foot zone you’re going to have four to eight people,” he said. “And they all have a different temperature threshold.”
He explained that women are typically colder than men, but everyone’s body temperatures run differently.
“You’re always going to have people who feel uncomfortable,” said Falite.
“During the summer, everyone on my side of the building got so cold, they literally needed space heaters to keep from becoming popsicles,” said Strout. “Some days, you could literally go from 90 degrees outside to 58 degrees in the office—in spite of regular complaining to our building manager.”
Is there a solution? Maybe if construction companies stop cutting corners and put more zones in new buildings we won’t have this problem in the future. But for now, a sweater, a fan and maybe a space heater are the best ways to survive at the office.
I’m already rolling on a major rant about individuals who can’t write or understand the value of good writing. I was tempted to just let all my mistakes lie unfixed in this column so readers would see the abhorrent disaster bad writing inflicts on the senses. But I won’t do that.
Instead, I’m going to remind you that today is National Punctuation Day and there are three fun writing and punctuation sites you should visit.
Spend some time with these sites on regular basis and you’ll be amazed that some people can even open a can of peanut butter to feed themselves.
[EDIT] One reader contacted me after reading this post to ask me why I was so down on people who can’t write. I told him that it’s not solely that people can’t write…it’s that these very same people see themselves as fantastic writers. That’s akin to me saying I can paint masterpieces because I can open a can of paint or wield a brush. It’s like anyone saying the Indy 500 should be an easy race to drive in because it’s all left-hand turns.
I could tell you until I’m blue in the face that the New England Patriots franchise has created a class of fans that are dark in both deed and spirit. But I don’t want to color your opinion without some perspective, so I’ll paint a picture for you.
Since 1972, I’ve gone to nearly every Miami Dolphins game played in Foxborough, MA. I’ve been a Dolphins fan since before people called them the fish. Since before Dan Marino. Since before Ricky Williams. And since before any Patriots Super Bowl wins.
This year I chose not to attend the game in Foxborough for two reasons. First, I was able to donate the seats I would have used to charity and raise money for Crohn’s Disease and cancer research. Second, the fans here in New England have become far more arrogant and annoying than any fans I’ve met in my 40+ years of attending professional sporting events.
Pats fans are now the Yankees fans of the NFL, but it wasn’t always this way.
I remember going to Foxborough dressed in my leather-sleeved, wool Dolphins jacket. I would wear my Bob Griese shirt and other Dolphins gear, too. And the reception I received – regardless of the game’s outcome – was respectful and polite.
In recent years I’ve been threatened by ignorant, short-bus candidates from Patriots’ nation. They seemingly attend the games only to get drunk and berate anyone within shouting distance. This frequently includes the referees and the players on the opposing team. But it often degenerates into belittling and insulting any fans around them who have come to Foxborough to see the Patriots lose.
There is certainly a degree of competitiveness that comes out when you’re rooting for your team, and I can see that in many cases the enthusiasm for the Patriots is harmless. But it only takes one idiot to put the blood-red stain of evil on the entire fan base.
Take for instance the hit and run killing in New Hampshire earlier this year. In that incident, the victim was allegedly run down because a Yankees/Red Sox discussion turned ugly. How long until a Patriots fan does the same thing to someone from out of town?
I’m not saying I’ve ever feared for my life, and the Patriots’ management has instituted far harsher rules for fan behavior than I’ve ever seen in other parks. But is that chicken or the egg activity? And is it driven by dollars and cents rather than compassion and sense? I can’t say.
Ultimately, I’m just happy that the Patriots lost badly this week and that the experience will play itself out repeatedly for the next two weeks (Pats have a bye this week) as they try to figure out what went wrong.
I hope the loss also gives Pats fans a touch of humility and the understanding that their team has some shortcomings. The last loss the Patriots suffered before today’s was more than a year ago to these very same Miami Dolphins.
That day, the uniforms on the backs of the Dolphins were bright orange. I’m sure it doesn’t matter to Belichick, the Patriots or their fans what color took them down a peg today. I’m just glad it was the Dolphins who were able to put another black mark on the Patriots’ record.
Today is National (or International) Talk Like a Pirate Day. It began as the musings of two guys, John Baur and Mark Summers, and has blossomed into a quasi-holiday among people who like to drink and talk like thieving sailors.
It’s a grand idea for a celebration for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that September only gets one holiday. And that poor day creates angst and anger and sadness among legions of children and parents. Labor Day signals the end of summer, the start of school, the return to real responsibilities, the end of the golf season, and so much more.
TLAPD is also great because there aren’t many pirates lurking around the highways and byways of the world. That means there’s nobody around to criticize how you say Arghhh or Yarrrrrr or Shiver Me Timberrrrrs. I prefer to give a lusty thrust with my right arm and shout Yarrrrghh! as loud as I can. I find that it’s jarring to people, but odd enough that they find some glee in playing along.
You can even host movie parties and watch famous pirate films or shows like The Princess Bride, Dodge Ball or even three or four episodes of Gilligan’s Island.
TLAPD’s placement on the calendar affords many people the opportunity to have one last cookout at the beach (quite appropriate) or lake before the weather is downright miserable.
Please hold your comments if you’re a wuss who lives in some warm and weak climatic zone. If you’re from Stuart, Florida, Manhattan Beach, California or even Asheville, NC (thanks to fact checker chrislebrun.com), you can still play along, but you’d better have some of the best pirate events the world has seen because you can host TLAPD any day of the year.
Getting back to the last reason TLAPD is a grand celebration, it’s completely frivolous. Sure, we have Halloween, but that’s been getting more serious ever since Linus found the Great Pumpkin. And we have Easter, but what is that except some egg hunts on the White House lawn and lots of hams? And who doesn’t have fun when the May Day Mole leaves a little treat in your sneaker?
But TLAPD is something larger and smaller than all that. The only reason it’s prominent today is because Dave Barry mentioned it in a column about seven years ago. Otherwise, those two pirate fanatics might be living together in a retarded-men’s home on Long Island.
Regardless, TLAPD is fun in a manageable package. You can treat it like a cool summer rain on a 90-degree day. If it doesn’t occur, you wouldn’t really miss it and it’s only around for an instant. Some people at the office might wear a pirate hat or shout some Yarrr’s your way, but that’s it.
So take hold of your inner pirate and enjoy the day. The next holiday on the calendar is October 13, Columbus Day. Who’s to say you couldn’t do a second TLAPD then? Didn’t Columbus spend a lot of time on the water? He could have been our first talking pirate here in the United States.
I’m headed to the voting booth in about an hour and I’m discouraged and amazed at the same time. Not because we live in a great country that allows us to voice our opinions by voting. Not because I am free to hop on my scooter and vote with a minimum of fuss and red tape.
I’m amazed and discouraged that someone like me – a professional journalist and self-proclaimed genius – is so ill-informed about today’s election. Essentially, my main reason for going to vote isn’t to exercise my rights, it’s to find out what the issues are and to see if I can learn something about my community, region and state through the info posted on the ballot.
Today’s election isn’t for the Presidency or any major Senate seats (I think), but it could be a primary of some sort and it could decide certain municipal issues.
The stuff I hope this election addresses are myriad and related to my life. I don’t care much about environmental issues because I think recycling wastes more energy than it saves. But I certainly care about traffic enforcement, maintaining a level playing field for communications and access providers (e.g. making it illegal for one company to hold a town hostage as the only local cable company or phone service provider), limiting cell phone firms’ ability to jack up rates and lock people into plans*, and educating cyclists, pedestrians and scooter operators that the laws of the road apply to them as well as to cars.
When it comes to government matters, I get my information in a bunch of ways. I read the papers, I listen to the news, I subscribe to podcasts, and I search the Internet. And I’m pretty sure I’m only touching the tip of the iceberg. How in the world can I be qualified to decide who is our best next leader?
I can see where some candidates might have gaping holes in their resume (Palin’s kid being pregnant out of wedlock, Palin thinking Alaska borders Russia, Palin thinking the Georgian conflict was unprovoked. Hmm, maybe I just don’t like Palin), but I don’t have any idea what goes on behind the doors of our democracy when big decisions are being made.
Does George Bush make everyone hold hands and pray? Will Obama as president put too much faith in his advisers?
So, as I hop on the scooter and get ready to vote, I bear in mind one thought. At least I’m not basing my decision on who is the best candidate by wondering if they’d be fun at a bar or interesting at the dinner table. I want my next leader to have the interests of the country in mind when he or she takes office.
And I’m part of that country. Today I’m going to prove it with just one vote.
*A recent California court ruled that termination fees levied by cell companies were illegal. I’ll follow that story for you as it unfolds. But wouldn’t it be an even better country if you could change providers at will and wield some of your own power instead of being raped for $.49 a minute?
When’s the last time you were thrilled with the performance of a Boston police officer? Was it when he or she waved you through a red light while working a construction detail? Or was it when you got directions from him? Or was it when he or she let you go after you got stopped for that crazy no-left-turn onto Comm. Ave. off of Mass Ave.?
Regardless, an article I read the other day brought up the painful subject of how cops sit around aimlessly at construction details and their only contribution is to add to the ire of drivers and pedestrians. The police on the detail do this by talking on the phone, pretending that they know something about sewer or telephone work by staring into whatever hole is being worked on, drinking Dunkin’s coffee, and ultimately ignoring their tasks at hand – which I’ve always thought was to ensure a smooth flow of traffic and people around said work site.
My angst at the thumb-twiddling cops at construction sites has been magnified since I’ve been riding a scooter. That’s because most cops behave just like the light-tripping mechanism at the stoplights around town and ignore any vehicle smaller than a Yugo. On four separate occasions I’ve had to wait an interminable amount of time just to be waved past a tiny hole in the ground.
Ironically, if I had broken the law and behaved as if my scooter were a bike (as some scooters are allowed to do based on engine size) I could have just buzzed past the roadway annoyance.
Add a feeling of being ripped off to my annoyance of being delayed at work sites and you might see how getting regular people to work these details would seem like a genius move. It makes perfect sense to allow cops to go do cop things instead of giving them eight-hour paid vacations standing around the streets of Boston. But not to the police unions.
In today’s (Sunday) Boston Globe, a story on the front page shouted that unions rush to protect details!
There is actually an October deadline for a cop an state agreement about details. If the Governor gets his way (and likely the preferred way for most citizens who are tired of seeing cops munching on snacks and drinking coffee while talking on the phone), then ‘flaggers’ will be allowed to work sites that previously were staffed by cops.
According to the Globe story, the rules that Deval Patrick is trying to introduce will follow a level of dangerousness and allow work sites that are less dangerous to be manned by these citizen flaggers.
The real wrinkle appears – also according to the Globe – when local cities and towns are brought into the mix. If a town decides that all details in its borders require cops on details, then their decision will overrule the state’s decision.
Right now, unions and anyone who sells donuts to cops is rushing around to make sure that our men and women in blue are allowed to keep their cushy positions wandering the side of the road, ignoring the flow of traffic and collecting hefty paychecks.
A public hearing will occur Monday at 5PM at the Massachusetts State Transportation building.
I urge anyone who cares about taxes, pork and lazy cops to be present. I plan to ride my scooter into the city to see what happens. I hope there aren’t too many construction sites in that area or else nobody will make it to that meeting on time.
Maybe we’ll even get people with video cameras to attend the hearing and live blog it for those who can’t make it into town at 5PM on a work day. I’m betting that lots of cops will be present.
Got comments? Please leave them here for all to see. Maybe a cop on his iPhone will click over here and read what people are saying.
This column was first published the other day on my other blog, but I found that the more I looked at it the more I liked how it was written (back patting noted) and wanted to share it with the people who don’t subscribe to both publications.
Let me know if you like the story and the style. And tell me if it should become a podcast column as well.
Thanks!
I’m surrounded by crap and I’ve decided to unload it on other people. The way we do that here in the United States is by putting up paper signs all over town, taking an ad out in the local paper, posting a note on Craigslist, and then spending the best part of a weekend sitting at card tables surrounded by this crap while people paw through it and toss coins at us.
I’m certain that if you did this sort of thing on a city street it would be called panhandling and you’d be arrested for it. But on the back roads of New England, people find these little sales quaint.
They used to be called ‘tag’ sales because the pricing method in the past was to tie little tags to each item with a price on it. Hence, price-tags.
Now we use stickers (or the absence of stickers) to garner what we want for our junk.
I’m prone to haggling. I think without tags people are either frozen and can’t buy anything OR they bid high and you leave with more money than you planned. Clownface feels differently. She says that her goal in the yard sale process is to rid herself of everything and if she makes any money, that’s a bonus.
One big problem is that I remember with glee and a sense of nostalgic economics, when and where I got something, the feelings that the item evoked, and pretty much what it cost.
I want to get a couple hundred bucks for each camera I’m selling this Saturday, but I’ll probably get about $15 each. That will pain me.
There are also some cassettes. It doesn’t matter that I can’t listen to them anymore or that I’m not inclined to digitize them and add them to my iTunes library. But it does matter that CF put a price of $3 on nearly 120 tapes. Thinking back, each one of those – even if it was a K-Mart bargain bin buy – went for more than $3. That’s a loss of about $357 just to save a little space.
I know I’m going to take a bath on the N64 system too. I hardly ever play it, but I put a ton of cash into the games and the accessories. Maybe I should list that separately and see what it will bring on the video game boards.
And then there are the dishes and multiple household implements that are now duplicates with CF’s recent migration to Hingham. Stuff I bought a year ago at IKEA is going for a song. So are the glass dishes I bought in 1984. Maybe some of the stuff on the chopping block should have been there a while ago.
Is letting go of belongings something only humans do? And then, is it something in which only a percentage of the population partakes?
Think of the havoc that’s wreaked when a building or home burns to the ground. The horror can’t be just that a dwelling is gone. It’s got to be partially the loss of belongings. But the prevailing wisdom says that people can’t be replaced and that stuff is just here to remind us of the people who can’t be replaced. So what’s with the long faces? Why the shrieks of despair?
In a move that anyone with half a brain should duplicate, I put my photos and music and essential files on a backup drive and then backed that backup drive up as well. Now I have no fewer than three copies of my important files and memories, and I’m still not calm.
I can’t wrap my head around the reasons for this separation anxiety, but that’s probably all it is.
The other day I was thrown off kilter when I found that the Ramen Noodles had been moved to a cabinet across the room. My sense of balance was offended and my world was tipped a few degrees sideways for a second.
Are some of us so uneasy with change that selling a mix tape from 1985 necessitates a psychologist referral? Don’t you think I could probably function productively without Perfect Dark, that fabulous futuristic game on N64?
You’re right. I’m probably too infantile to take to this new situation of a trimmed-down pile of stuff right away. But you’re also right if you think that I will adapt and the money earned by foisting my crap on other people will ease my pain a little.
The recent admission by Lance Armstrong that he’s planning to try and win an eighth Tour de France title has me reeling. I’ve seen Lance in the Tour IN PERSON twice and would likely make every effort to attend his next attempt if he follows through with this promise.
Here’s are two shots I took of Lance in 2005 on the slopes of the Alps near Courchevel France. One is of the finish on the Alps, one is of the downhill start the next day.
You can see that he’s all alone and is hammering up the hill. OK, you can see only that he’s alone. And he actually came in second on that stage, but it was great to see him in person and to have the ability to take photos and report on the event.
In the other shot you can see he’s in yellow and poised to win his 7th Tour de France.
That’s what I’m thinking about today as I look forward to assignments at CES in January and Spring Training in Florida in February and March.
If you’re at a news outlet and need a versatile freelancer for these types of assignments, gimme a shout in the comments on this post or send me an email… jeff (@) jeffcutler (dot . ) com.
Oh, if you want the full resolution shots I took at the 2005 Tour de France, get in touch. I’m willing to sell one-time rights.
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