Len Edgerly » Cambridge

The Joy of Getting Seen

Len — Tue, 04 May 2010 11:28:48 +0000

Photo by Steve Garfield of SteveGarfield.com at Boston Media Makers on May 2, 2010

As we settle in for our seasonal relocation to Cambridge, Mass., I’m thinking of how many great things have come into my life over the past few months because of the Internet. I’m taking as my text for this rumination a book published this year by my friend Steve Garfield, Get Seen: Video Secrets to Building Your Business (Click here for Kindle edition.)

Steve’s book is about how to get seen using video, which he knows something about, since he was one of the first bloggers to figure out how to put video on a blog. He created Steve Garfield’s Video Blog on January 1, 2004. I’m thinking about video this morning, but more broadly, I’m thinking about the joy of risking any kind of exposure using the powerful tools of the Internet.

Here is a sample of what’s happened in my own life lately because of getting seen:

1. Yesterday, for the first time, I met in person a listener of The Kindle Chronicles who in a Facebook comment offered to help with a project I’d started to provide Kindles to active-duty soldiers in Afghanistan. Ken Clark and I visited for a couple of hours here at the house, planning next steps for E-Books for Troops, and sharing some more of our stories. With his help as co-founder, my initial idea has already reached an entirely new level, with our filing yesterday to create a non-profit organization, and I’ve met someone with a keen interest in things I care about, from EB4T to all things Apple, to the joys of family and reading.

2. Before Ken arrived yesterday, I met here for two hours with Adam Weiss, a brilliant podcasting consultant whom I met at Boston Media Makers, an event created and hosted every single first Sunday of the month by Steve Garfield. Adam has helped me create show notes pages for my two podcasts, and yesterday he took me deep into the bowels of GarageBand to tweak the audio quality of the shows.

3. Podcasting about the Kindle and e-books has been fun, but the best part has been meeting listeners and fellow pioneers in the Kindlesphere. My current posse includes Stephen Windwalker, Andrys Basten, Bufo Calvin, and Abhi.

4. The Reading Edge Facebook page is like a club I created in a tree house, where there is always someone hanging out that I want to visit with.

You get the idea. I had friends and a life before the Internet, but in the past few months (and years) the connections I’ve made go way beyond what I could have imagined in normal hours. I’m also pretty much of an introvert, which makes the Internet a comfortable way to begin getting seen. You sit in a room with your laptop or iPhone or iPad and you type stuff, or upload video, photos, or audio. You are alone at the same time you are connecting. Perfect. And if you keep it up, sooner or later the virtual images of people will lead you to being in their actual presence, at a PodCamp or your own living room. You will be amazed at how your life can unfold.

It’s IT takes getting seen to really see what’s out there. There’s genius in it, and many possibilities to make a difference.

Odds and Ends Toward the End of a Year

Len — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:03:41 +0000

The Road to Harvard Square

Cory Doctorow and Stephen King have hijacked my Kindle with great fiction reads.

My pre-ordered copy of King’s Under the Dome arrived, as promised, on Christmas Eve. It’s scary how well he tells a story. I suspect that I will soon be drawn into a dead run toward the end of the story, even as the initial beckonings are small and odd. A dome gets dropped over the sock-shaped Maine town of Chester Mills. This ridiculous premise already seems plausible, because of gruesome bits like an unlucky woodchuck chopped in half on Dome Day. Spoiler alert: If you don’t want to know how the story ends, don’t click on this Wikipedia item.

Doctorow’s Makers, downloaded for free from his site in .mobi edition, has taken longer to draw me into the story, even though story itself is a central artifice of the novel. It’s set in a troubling future, and you’ll never think of Disneyworld the same again.

I like Chrome, the new browser from Google now available for Macintosh. It’s slightly different from Firefox and Safari, but I can’t tell you how or testify to any of its advantages, except that you type search terms or URL addresses in the same place, called the “Omnibox.” I like the pretty icon, which looks like a camera lens. It’s peeking at me from the dock on my MacBook Air, saying, “click on me.”

I’ve had it with the nook. The gee-whiz phase lasted about two weeks, peaking one night at the Barnes & Noble store in Chestnut Hill when I got a free oatmeal cookie by showing the puzzled barrista a coupon that had appeared on my nook once it found the B&N store network. The same coupon appeared when I entered the palatial B&N store across from the Burlington Mall, so I got another cookie. You could make your way across the country with your nook, apparently, grazing on free cookies at every store. Except that the Burlington barrista did not check the coupon number, which was the same at each store. If she had entered it in the cash register, perhaps there would have been a message: “Seize this impostor! He has already obtained his free cookie at the Chestnut Hill store. He is a suspected Kindle provocateur.”

It was also cool to download two library books to the nook from the Denver Public Library, but there’s no way I’m going to finish them before they expire, and I doubt I’ll be able to renew them.

So after straying from my Kindle, I’m back home with fuller appreciation of its amazing tool set for reading. For example, there is no way on the nook to search for a character’s name and see all the references to it, including the first, when the character enters the story. With the Kindle, I can do this with ease, and then use the magic “Back” button to jump back into the story, with a clear sense of who this person is. The nook’s dictionary is a joke. It’s painfully slow and awkward to maneuver the cursor to a word, and the definitions are truncated and lame.

I still don’t hope the nook fails. Driving up to the Burlington B&N book palace, I had a strong sense of how many people work there, and how sad it will be if places like that cease to exist, never mind classy independent bookstores like the Tattered Cover in Denver and the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. They guy at the nook kiosk in Burlington really knew his stuff. How odd, though, to have an eBook sales desk in the midst of all those paper volumes. Do the other sales people hate the nook guy? Do they look on him as their only hope to survive the coming revolution? It’s a great story unfolding, and I’m glad I invested in a nook so I can follow it firsthand. But for the pure joy of reading, I’m back to dancing with the eBook that brought me.

I realized the other day that I am in my sixties. I’ve been 59 years old since August, and that comforting “fifty” in my age had disguised the fact that I am well into my 60th year, the first year of a new decade. The realization hit me not with sadness and dread, but with the hope of impending wisdom, if I play my cards right.

Ross Douthat in a recent New York Times op-ed piece has totally nailed what makes Obama tick, in my humble opinion. As a hard-core moderate, I am thrilled to read an insight like this:

“Both right and left have had trouble processing Obama’s institutionalism. Conservatives have exaggerated his liberal instincts into radicalism, ignoring the fact that a president who takes advice from Lawrence Summers and Robert Gates probably isn’t a closet Marxist-Leninist. The left has been frustrated, again and again, by the gulf between Obama’s professed principles and the compromises that he’s willing to accept, and some liberals have become convinced that he isn’t one of them at all.”

I have to say that this is the Obama I thought I was working for since early in the primaries. At this point in his presidency, it takes a lot of hope and faith to expect him to leave a legacy of peace and prosperity in these impossible times. But when it comes to Barack Obama, I have become used to long odds paying off handsomely. My wife and I first saw him in person during the 2004 election campaign, shortly after his keynote speech to the Democratic Convention on July 27, 2004. With a huge lead in his own Illinois U.S. Senate race, Obama had come to Denver to support Ken Salazar’s much tougher Senate bid. He looked tall, thin and slight as he entered the small gymnasium. But as soon as he began to speak, I could imagine him as president. It’s with a similar awareness of long odds that I now can imagine him as a truly successful president. Time will tell.

It’s not always easy to find a fact on the Internet. I spent two hours trying to learn the date of Obama’s 2004 appearance in Denver. The only trace I found was a blog entry stating that Colorado State Treasurer Cary Kennedy has a photo on her wall of Obama at a 2004 rally with Salazar and some congressional candidates.” I’ve emailed her in hopes there is a date on the back of the photo.

“It’s Complicated” with Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, and Alec Baldwin was much more satisfying a movie than I had expected. My wife and her sister and I saw it last night in Harvard Square. We also enjoyed a very different movie, “The Young Victoria” the night before at the Kendall Square Theatre. On the way out, I rang Cha Cha up on my iPhone to ask what relation the current queen is to Victoria, and by the time we’d reached the car I had a text message informing me that Queen Victoria was Queen Elizabeth II’s great-great-grandmother.

My sister totally surprised me with a Christmas gadget gift that I had not even known enough to lust for. It’s a tiny Veho Micro DV camcorder that I strapped to my head for some of the big family dinner here on Christmas day. I can’t wait to try it while rowing on the Charles next spring. You can also clip it to a shirt pocket. The resulting videos are headache-inducing because the view jumps around so much. But it’s definitely a cool addition to my tech arsenal.

It’s been fantastic to spend most of the past six months here in Cambridge. Next week we return to Denver till the spring. No matter where the suitcase lands, it’s nice to hang out “here.”

Stuff

Len — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:02:06 +0000

The stuff on my desk is beyond organizing. I have not cleared my email inbox for weeks. I have not done a Weekly Review for months – sorry David Allen. I am a lapsed Getting Things Done-er, and it kind of scares me. I lurch from deadline to deadline, mainly for my weekly Kindle Chronicles podcast, put to bed yesterday afternoon. I’m enjoying the Day After Deadline Reprieve when a long week stretches out before me, full of opportunities to “get organized.” Instead, today I took a photo of the pile of stuff and TwitPic-ed it to Twitter. Next I will blog about it. It’s all I can think to do at this point. The pile is too overwhelming. It does look pretty, though, with sunlight cast upon it from the tall windows. The Yorkie Claire just hopped up on my leather chair, looking for food I might have dropped. I’m listening to Norah Jones-like songs on Pandora. I’ve got a warm dose of Starbucks Christmas Blend in my mug, next to a bowl of little carrots. The carrots have a suspicious white covering, because they’ve been in the refrigerator for weeks, ready for that day when I decide to replace cookies and potato chips with healthy snacks. Today might be that day.

But what about the pile of Stuff? How about if I reach over there and pull out a plum, a representative sample? And it’s….

A pie chart of proposed investments optimistically labeled “Growth with Moderate Income.” That would be nice! It all looks so orderly. The pie has geometrically perfect wedges for fixed income, alternatives, emerging markets, international equities, US equities, and cash. I need to file it somewhere. The David Allen method is coming back to me, like a religion that I once believed in. I bought the labeler for neatly printed file folder labels. I know the drill. But should I file this pretty pie here or in Denver? I have no idea. I eat a carrot. I told my financial wizard that it looks fine, so he will implement the strategy. He will send me emails, and we’ll have an in-person meeting in a few months to see how the “growth” part of the strategy is doing. So I’m done with this piece of paper. Into the wastebasket it goes. Next!

I look the other way and reach for the pile, as if I’m drawing a winning lottery number. It feels like, yes it is…

…a piece of mail, and it hasn’t even been opened yet! I slice the top with a wooden opener that my sister gave me for Christmas or a birthday. The smooth wood feels good, and all of a sudden I am channeling Nicholson Baker, observing my life at a granular level where everything, if you catch it right, which he always seems to do–it all seems literary and amazing. Take this zen-like swoop of wood that someone carved and sanded and stained with care and attention, with letter opening in mind. I’ve never really noticed it before. What a nice gift. It does the job, delivering to my view information from my bank about my finances, a “snapshot” with tables and bar graphs – no pies and no color. I can find all this information online, so it nicely follows the pie chart into the trash.

But what would David Allen do with this vague prompting that I feel to tell the bank they can quit sending me paper reports? I’m not ready for that, actually. It feels more responsible to deal with paper on a regular basis, scanning the reports with a knowing eye, the way I remember my father poring over green budget paper at his desk after work. I always assumed he could see into those numbers all the way to the next market turn, up or down. So I want to keep getting paper; it connects me with Dad, whose desk in his office in Harvard Square always has lots of piles on it. He loves plowing through them, throwing things away, getting his desk clean once in a while. At 82, he always seems happy when he’s working at his desk, leaning toward his big Mac screen, his hand on a mouse and his mind looking into numbers to see things before they happen. Next!

Here’s a good one, a book by Jay Berkowitz that he emailed me, because I was the first one to send him a Direct Message on Twitter in response to a question. I met Jay at a Podcamp Boston and loved his enthusiasm and kindness as he presented a session about podcasting. This book is The Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing Workbook: Turn Your Website into a Profit Center. I started reading it this morning, which makes it the first paper book I’ve read in months. I even found an orange highlighter and enjoyed the tactile pleasure of marking the paper with it, something I guess I miss from my Kindle reading. Highlighting on the Kindle is cool, too, and there’s the advantage that I can go to kindle.amazon.com and see all the passages of books I’ve highlighted. I don’t ever really do that, but I could. I’d like to read Jay’s book and use it to strategize what might be ahead for the Kindle Chronicles. It’s enough of a challenge to maintain my rock-solid commitment to posting the podcast every single Friday. To consider changing its focus, or how to keep up with the wonderful flow of comments I receive from listeners–those are tasks which I sometimes ponder for a couple of days after the last episode is safely posted on the Internet, when the week feels long and unhurried. But by Tuesday it’s time to plan the next interview, to paw through my Google Reader feed for news stories, to figure out the Tech Tip. I’ll put Jay’s book on the round extension from my leather chair (Claire’s left, having found nothing to eat there), which means it will be handy to reach for in the coming days. … I just tweeted Jay to thank him. He actually sent me two copies of the book, so if you’d like one, let me know somehow. It’s even got a free CD featuring past episodes of his good podcast. Next!

I touch rough fabric, and find my “Life is Good” bag beneath a layer of paper. I love this bag. It’s where I carry my Kindle, or nook, or MacBook Air when I’m out and about. This morning it contains my Olympus LS-10 recorder, which I realize contains the last recording I did of my father in our “Decades” project. We sit down once a week with the Olympus, and he speaks into my Edirol CS-15 microphone, referring to careful notes he’s prepared with help from his journals. Each session covers 10 years. We began with zero to 10, and the one I have not yet transferred to GarageBand covers 60 to 70. He talks without interruption for about 20 minutes, and then we take a short break before I take the mic for another 20-minute recording of questions about things he’s mentioned. It’s one of the most satisfying projects I’ve been doing during this long stay in Cambridge, and Dad seems to be enjoying it, too. The result will be available only for family. I love the idea of my three-year-old grandson someday being able to listen to “Decades” as a young man, perhaps in the middle of his career, wondering where to turn. These recordings will give him the opportunity to learn what his great-grandfather did at a similar time in his life, and he’ll hear the resonant, strong voice of that man, preserved for many decades to come. Action: Connect the Olympus to the MacBook Pro with a black USB cable (remembering Nicholson Baker’s engaging rant about how come they designed that damn USB connection so you only have a 50-50 chance of ever having it right-side-up when you press it into the port). I move the two audio files to the laptop, with a copy up in my MobileMe cloud, where I assume they will be safe as a backup. Next?

Well, I think I’ll end the game here. I have figured out a way to make some progress on my Stuff while scratching the itch to post to my blog. Nice. Darlene is getting ready for our planned Boston outing, to see a craft fair somewhere, and maybe catch George Clooney’s latest hit, “Up in the Air.” All of this grand Stuff will be waiting for me when I return. It’s the stuff of my life, is all. No need to let it torture and torment me. Thank goodness I’m not done with it yet…. Next?

Aboard the Henry Longfellow

Len — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 02:41:14 +0000

The Head of the Charles Regatta seemed like ages ago this afternoon as we took a leisurely boat ride upstream from the Galleria Mall aboard the Henry Longfellow. It’s the type of tourist thing a local would seldom enjoy, so I’m grateful to our Wyoming guest, Tom Atkinson, who found the Charles Riverboat Co. on the web and suggested we go. What fun! The Longfellow is a handsome wooden boat, 20 years old, and it just barely fits beneath the low bridges of the Charles.

The river was quiet and uneventful, of course, compared with the frenzy of activity a week ago when 7,000 rowers were competing during weather that offered everything except hail and lightning. Snow? You bet – click here for my video shot from the River Street Bridge. High winds? Of course. Still, the regatta went on with the full course, despite talk Sunday of shortening it to avoid singles getting swamped in The Basin as they lined up to start.

I’ve had a chance to return to the river in a Cambridge Boat Club single since the regatta, during some sparkling fall days. Tom’s wife, Tish, took a photo of me near the Hawthorn umpire station, close to our house. My rowing is still tentative, but I’m feeling more and more at home in the boat and look forward to more lessons in the spring to improve my form. One of these years I would love to compete in the Head of the Charles myself, in one of those categories for incredibly fit old guys who laugh at snow and stop at nothing.

My Head of the Charles Regatta List

Len — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:21:38 +0000

When I haven’t posted to the blog for a while, I feel a nearly physical pressure to check in here, even when I should be doing something else. Today is an excellent example, because I have lots to do in my role as umpire transportation guy for the Head of the Charles Regatta. This is the largest two-day rowing event in the world, and there will be more than 100 umpires to transport various places. So rather that blather on about the beauty and power of trained crews, or the awesome ability of bad weather to change everything, or how cool it is to be able to load info on 100 umpires into my iPhone system, I will bend my attention back to what needs to be done today. To wit:

1. Revise route map for Umpires’ van for Saturday delivery to the 15 umpire stations.

2. Practice 5-minute explanation of transportation plan for tonight’s all-ump planning meeting at Buckingham, Browne & Nichols School.

3. Doublecheck list of umps in my Address Book on Mac and sync to iPhone.

4. Take 156 copies of “2009 Umpire Transportation Details” handout to Cambridge Boat Club this morning at 9:45 am to meet with fellow Ump Team volunteers Pete Peterson and Polly Whiteside.

5. Get the 15-seat UMP-Van at 11 a.m. at Peter Fuller Rentals and Pre-Owned Car Sales, at 160 Arsenal Street, Watertown. (Thanks, Jim Cubeta, for great service!)

6. Check the regatta’s Twitter feed regularly. (Search for HOCR here.)

7. Take out-of-state umps from La Quinta at 23 Cummings St., Somerville, to the BB&N meeting. Don’t forget to bring footstool for easy accessibility to van.

8. When unexpected requests for help arise, always say yes.

A Touch of Fall

Len — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:26:27 +0000

I took this photo the other day at Whole Foods, 340 River St., Cambridge. If you’re reading the post on your Kindle, you won’t see the brilliant orange color of these pumpkins, but the shapes themselves will convey, I hope, a taste of the season tiptoeing its way through Cambridge, Mass., and environs.

My grandson, 3, had his first day at preschool last week. My daughter outfitted him with the required knapsack, and he headed off armed with a booklet they’d printed out for him, showing all the rooms of the school and his teachers. It looks to be a brilliant place, ready for a brilliant little boy. He told us stories of his teachers and the names of his new friends. Last night when Darlene and I went over for supper and presided over the bedtime story and going-to-bed ritual while my daughter went to a meeting, my grandson was on about his fourth wind of the day, running circles around the apartment, talking earnestly to his precious cloth friend, Ducky, and informing us which books would be suitable for reading in the big chair in his room. My delight was to read him the Robert McCloskey classic, One Morning in Maine. At about the point in the story where Sal and Jane and their father take the boat to town, I felt my grandson’s head gently settle against my chest. Darlene got to read The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, and I enjoyed the sound of her voice so much I recorded this AudioBoo on my iPhone. I love Thing One and Thing Two.

My other pre-autumn delight has been rowing on the Charles River from the Cambridge Boat Club. On Sunday I passed my “Captain’s Test,” which means I now row a big-boy Club Single instead of the tubby training shell, an Alden star which I rowed for 50 miles, grateful for its stability. But it was too heavy for me to launch on my own, so Darlene had to come each rowing day to help out. Now I’m rowing a Club Single named the Barbara Goodchild, and I can very carefully maneuver it from its rack and down the ramp to the dock all on my own. It’s a wooden Graeme King shell, probably about 20 years old. I have not yet discovered a reliable sense of balance in it, but yesterday I rowed all the way upstream to the Northeastern Boathouse and back without catching a crab and ending up in the drink. I love the feel of the smooth, old wood when I towel off the Goodchild in the rack at the end of a good workout. And being out on the leisurely curves of the Charles amidst the precise power of college eights preparing for battle – well, that’s beyond words.

I hope fall has touched your life with the bittersweet joy of endings and beginnings. It’s a spectacular time to be in New England, or anywhere.