Rough and Tough Bicycles

This week I starting riding my bike to work again. This is a early start to the season, but the weather is too nice to spend riding on the subway. So, I took out my trustee stead and hit the road.

Tough and Awesome Mountain Bike

When I bought my current bike (read was bought for by my dad) I was a college student in Worcester. I have owned many a bike growing up and was a bicycle mechanic for a while in high school. I really liked riding mountain bikes both on and off road. Riding was an activity where I got to test my steal and see how long I could go before tiring out. In high school I rode all over my home town and I was thrilled to be getting a new bike to explore my college town.

Clipless peddles

Healthy Choices

So the changes to my bike have been happening in waves in the last decade. At some point I added the following:

It’s really important that I ride my bike as much as I can.

Inspired by my friend Julien’s post, I would like to start sharing a bit about what I am reading and my take aways.

Yesterday I started and completed reading The Hunger Games (affiliate link). I picked it up because I had heard a little about it from friends and had seen the movie trailer. I was compelled to read it and see what the fuss was about, needless to say… I am now fussing over this book as well.

Twitterized  notes:

recap:
A girl takes her sisters place in a deadly game and is faced with love and loss on the battle field

takeaway:
Kids these days don’t lack for well written new sci-fi future fiction

recommendation:
This book is great for the rebel teenager in all of us, it is such a pleasure to read

lesson learned:
The future, good or bad, is still being dreamed about by very thoughtful storytellers

DUO ORFEO

My friend Jamie is an amazing musician who is working on a new recording melding electric guitar with classical music. Having bought and listened to his first album, I have to admit I am really excited about his next one.

I really like his first album, it’s like a meditation on classical music with guitars. This is my goto album when trying to wind down and clear my head. It is both skillfully executed with a sense of of emotional longing.

You can check out his first album on CD Baby.

He is now in the process of putting together a new album and is using KickStarter to help fund the recording. He is now in the final week of his kickstarter and is within a couple hundred dollars of reaching his goal. He needs to reach his goal by the end of the week for his project to get funded.

Please support this great new album by clicking here.

photo credit: Brian Tomlinson

I have been lusting over the Kindle Fire since it was announced. It is a beautiful tablet like device and it is directly tied to Amazon online media. I have been buying and storing mp3s on Amazon cloud, been buying a few kindle books,  and both renting and purchasing videos with instant videos as well. I was hoping that the Kindle Fire would allow me to have access to all my media for use in my house.

On black Friday my wife and I went shopping for a Kindle Fire. I was really excited that I could go to Target and pick one up in person. Based on all the online hype I was thrilled that I could find one at the first Target store I went to and it was ready to go.

So, after breaking into the simple packaging and starting it up I suddenly realized that it was not going to work out for me…

To start, it is a really heavy little device for the 7 inch screen. I could learn to live with this, but I couldn’t understand why it was so heavy. Here is what ended my love affair, the Kindle Fire does not have HDMI and Bluetooth connectivity. If I am going to drop money on a toy for my media then I want my media to be available to my TVand my Bluetooth headphones/speakers.  Why would I want a device that allows me to stream video only on my 7″ screen, even my phone can push streaming video to HDMI. #FAIL

I went out again on a new mission. I still had the itch for a tablet and I wanted to see if I could get a deal because it was still Black Friday. I went to Micro Center, Best Buy, and returned to Target. I wanted a tablet that was around the same price as the Kindle with Android and that had the missing connectivity I found on the Kindle Fire.

On this mission I came away with a Acer Iconia a100, and I now think I am in love. I found this device at BestBuy for less than $200 and it has HDMI out, Bluetooth, expandable micro SD, and one of the latest versions of Android. It’s still a little heavy, needs a special charger, and has screen issues, but…  it is a good solid tablet and allows me to do everything I could have done on the Kindle.

One caviet, if you want to watch video from Amazon Instant Video you need to download the dolphin browser. In my frustration with Amazon not having a video app, I did find that Google rents movies as well directly. That is the only service from Amazon you cannot get directly in Android, the others (kindle, music, shopping) all have Android apps.

After this experience, I have to say… I can’t understand how Amazon couldn’t have made a 7″ android tablet with all the fixing if Acer can. It’s too bad that the color part of their kindle line is so weak. That all said, I still think a black and white kindle is worth getting for an ereader, it has superior battery life, no-glare viewing, and it’s weigh lighter than all the tablets out there.

Final thought: Acer Iconia a100 puts the smack down on the Kindle Fire

Sex… as in sexy cellos.

I haven’t felt this connected to the electricity in the music since I was writing papers about Beethoven at two in the morning as a freshman in college. Daft Punk’s Soundtrack is only one reason to watch this movie, but like the other reasons… it’s rich and amazing.

I saw  Tron: Legacy on Sunday, bought the soundtrack on Monday, saw it again on Tuesday, and can’t wait to see it again in IMAX before it leaves the theater. Something about this movie really gets to me. There is the music, the amazingly slick and beautiful graphics, the geek factor, the tie in to something from my youth… But there is something else that really pulls me in…

I think at the end of the day, the thing that pulls me in about this movie is the basic charm and idea of a digital world and things that can exist in a digital world. This may seem a bit stale in todays super connected networky world, but I feel like their used to be a sense of magic around the idea of computers. Back when the ideas of limitless exploration in and around computers included the idea of a world existing within your computer, not just a tool to connect your real world.

In the 80s the future of computers included a more ghost in the machine/fantasy aspect. It was like there was another world built into the circuits that we could not see or get a handle on. Like a world that exists between the cracks that one cannot understand if you can’t even see the cracks.

So it’s within this fantasy world that the movie takes place. The imagery was awe inducing, I love the darkness of the GRID world and the simple clean lines that represent everything designed by programs and users. The contrast of that against the rocky terrain and mountains is striking and thought provoking. This juxtaposition was to push along the idea of different understanding of perfection. Bravo!

Overall, the movie was a wonderful omage to the original movie and gaming world. The music and art both seemed to refine the original concept but still leave the basic idea in tact.  This movie was a lot like seeing what Tron might have been like if the tools existed two decades ago, but the same thoughts and ideas were trying to be executed. Unlike the Star Wars Prequels, this did not leave you scratching your head trying to decide if the newly introduced technology and sequences were just a little to 90s and missing that original 70′s joy.

So go see it, buy the album and let me know what you think.

Photos used under Creative Commons from Davide Restivo

I once had a professor in college that referred to my writing as elliptical. To him, it felt like you could put an ellipses (‘…’) before and after many of my statements, leaving large wholes in my arguments like potholes in the road.

Even today I am plagued with this style of communication. I think and write at the big picture and detail level, failing to connect the two. I have real problems adding context and building connective tissue in my communication.

There are many reasons why this might be. I have minor forms of dyslexia and ADD. I assume everything is obvious. I have trouble seeing the missing details. Did I mention the ADD… ooh… shiny.. BRB

In my life I have found that my closest friends and I seem to be able to communicate telepathically or my friends are smarter than I and can piece my thoughts together. Sometimes my thoughts are no greater than gestures at possible strings of thought.

So why is this a topic to bring up on my blog?

A moment of revelation…

I realized that one of the reasons I love and flourish in social media circles is because of my elliptical thought. This media is one place where elliptical thought is not only OK, but a powerful tool.

Twitter is a great place for dropping my big ideas in little packages.

Blogging let’s me tease out and examine some of the smaller details of some of my thoughts.

And with both, I do not need a connection point, it can all be tangential and that is perfectly acceptable.

Long live elliptical thought and social media!!

Infographic by College Scholarships.org

Thanks to Brooklyn Museum and Flicker

Growing up I was taught to be inspired by the art and ideas of the Renaissance period. It was a time of great creativity and production. There was great opportunity for those who were looking for it. There was also a sense of holistic value, as we all know “Renaissance Man” refers to one who is edcuated and caught up in many topics.

To be a “Renaissance Man” means to have a lot of good ideas about lots of different things.

Today… it seems, we may be experiencing a new Renaissance. Through the internet and social media we are all connecting to new opportunities and trying out new ideas every day. We share our ideas through blogs, our news through twitter, our pictures through flicker… and on and on. This shared content becomes a way for opportunity to come to find us, as much as giving us the ability to find opportunities.

Well… great… this sounds like a good thing, but I am begining to wonder if it is really a good thing or not. Here is the problem:

I have lot’s of ideas, and they are blowing my brain up and leaking out my ears…

I begin to wonder how I choose the ideas that are of value, hell… I begin to wonder how to decide what is of value. The way I see it is that somethings we do for love, and others for money… but there must be a way to combine these things??

Currently the big themes in my life are GIS/Technology(work), Knitting/Fiber, Community Building, Social Media, Family… I find myself tagging on new ideas to each of these categories everyday, and am not sure where to spend my time. For example, I have a programming idea that relatest to the fiber world, so I could be working on that, but then it distracts from me learning new technology for GIS?

I am sure that i am not the only who feels pulled in all direction these days, perhap we need to start a tweet-up for people who need to find focus.

5 Ways to Cultivate an Active Social Network by Intersection Consulting

First, if you like this image check out more like this by Intersection Consulting on their flickr page.

When people talk about community they think about neighborhoods or communities that are focused around a theme. So in some ways, community is an issue of geography or topic. For example, there is a strong community around fiber arts/crafts that lives at Ravelry.com that has on the order of 400,000 users. The reason many of the people joined this group is to take advantage of the shared knowledge about fiber projects.

With the internet as a gathering place for community, geography is no longer a factor for many and their has also been a blurring of the focus of topic as well. The idea of community is no longer just about one topic. Ravelry, again for example, has many groups that talk about a wide vareity of topics that have nothing to do with fiber projects. You can find people talking about Dr. Who, Obama, McCain, parenting, and even podcasting (not just the fiber related ones either).

Social media tools have begun to create a new type of community. One that extends beyond any specific focus and geography. This is both confusing and frightening.

It is no longer a question of shared theme as it is about contribution to the conversation. For people on twitter and even with blogs in general, each contribution is judged on it’s own as valuable or not, and these contributions are not expected to always relate to a topic you are expecting. With this new community/conversation comes a new understanding of what you share. As some may begin to worry about what they are putting out there,

I think it is also important to know why you are contributing in the first place. For some it’s business and for others, like me, it’s personal. As someone who posts about places I go and people I talk to, I do put conscious thought into my own security, but that is not the only thing that drives me to share information.. it’s just a part of what I am putting out there.

So, it’s a brave new world where contribution and conversation are not analogues with community… In a way it’s a new “Society”…

I ask you, how do you value contribution, what do you think about all of this, is this something new?