The view from my desk at 6 a.m.

As for resolutions, one might be to tend this outpost on the net more regularly. But I’ll just mention that as a possibility. Higher up the list of intentions is eating well, which I define as eating a fruit or a vegetable every day except Sunday, when I shall consume only Ritz Crackers and Cheez Whiz. I will resume my daily huff-and-puff workouts on the cross trainer, enhanced this year by content on my Kindle Fire. Currently playing are The Wire, Arrested Development, and a black-and-white 1960 classic film, “Never on Sunday” starring Melina Mercouri.

It’s good to be back in downtown Denver, but part of me is always in 02138, staying abreast of the family doings medical and otherwise. It’s all accessible two time zones away via phone, Skype, e-mail, and prayer. But where you are matters, and far away makes a difference. Some part of me gets renewed out here in the West. I like to imagine standing by the banks of the Charles River and looking up a mile to see a high rise condo in the sky. That’s where I am now, way up here where the air is thin and dry, closer to the sun. Something inside me awakens and knows it is home.

But after a paltry ZQ score of 45 I’m not fit to dive deeply into philosophical probings of The West. I’ll be napping before noon to recharge and reboot. And I’ll be winding this up now in order to fulfill today’s dose of another resolution, to press ahead five days a week on research for my book project. Thus, to Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy to make more notes in Evernote. The stakes will be higher this week, because I will talk with the media savant’s son, Dr. Eric McLuhan, on Wednesday for this week’s Kindle Chronicles interview. I want to know what he thinks of the e-book revolution and if he can intuit with a son’s empathy what his famous father might have seen in the modest gray screen of the Kindle.

Tish and Darlene on their way to return the handy OccasionalCar rental.

Downtown Denver, it turns out, is a pretty good place to live without a car.

We are learning the truth of this while we wait for our 2012 Ford Focus to arrive, probably in about three weeks.  Dimples, our beloved hail-battered blue Volvo S60, has taken up residence in Cambridge, Mass.  So ever since returning to Denver from Cambridge in January, we have looked to alternate transportation.  Our Wyoming friends Tom and Tish helped out by leaving their Volvo here during their extended visit to New Zealand and Australia. But since their return several weeks ago, this has gotten serious.

We are very fortunate to live in Denver’s Lower Downtown, known locally as LoDo, near the the Free MallRide that runs up and down the I.M. Pei-designed 16th Street pedestrian mall every minute or so during business hours, less frequently on weekends and nights.  This vital connector makes it

Free Mall Shuttle - photo by Paul Swansen

easy to walk out of our building and reach City Hall or the State Capitol, for example, within 10 minutes.  Denver’s amazing Performing Arts Complex, the second-largest performing arts center in the world after New York’s Lincoln Center, is an eight-minute walk from here, so to reach our seat at a show we don’t even need to hop the free shuttle, unless it happens to pull up as we’re walking and maybe it’s raining.

We can also walk 15 minutes in the other direction, past Union Station, through Commons Park, over the historic Platte River to a funky collection of shops and eateries on Platte Street.  Our favorite is The House of Commons, a fantastic English tea room on Platte just north of 15th Street.

All of which is to say that even when Dimples was with us, Darlene and I didn’t drive much here in Denver. We always take the RTD SkyRide to Denver International Airport and back, since it’s so easy to wheel our bags to the Market Street Station for the hourly departures. And I love the ride of 50 minutes to and from the airport, for listening to podcasts or dozing.  Before or after zipping across a couple of time zones to Boston, I always find the bus ride to be a pleasant, grounding interlude.

I could tell Darlene was nervous about our time without a car.  While we were still using Tom and Tish’s Volvo, she made repeated trips to Whole Foods and King Sooper, stocking up on supplies like she was getting ready for a blizzard.  So I have three big jars of chai tea to last me a month, not to mention enough toilet paper and paper towels to equip a battalion. She wasn’t sure she was going to ever get comfortable with the most crucial tool in our carless sojourn – a locally based hourly rental business named OccasionalCar.

It’s a fantastic system that I’ve been playing with both here and in Cambridge, where the best-known model is ZipCar. When you know you’ll need a car, you go to the OccasionalCar web site, enter your membership number and password, and then enter the date and hours you need the car.  We have several OC cars within a few minutes’ walk.  You click “reserve” and that’s it.  What I love most is when the time comes to drive the car away, you hold a gray fob next to a sensor attached to the windshield and wait to hear the click of the doors unlocking.  Inside, the key to start the car is attached to a retractable chain, so there’s no risk of walking off with it.  OccasionalCar is using the Toyota Yaris, a sensible compact similar in size to the Ford Focus.  When the gasoline level falls to a quarter tank, you’re supposed to fill it up using a credit card in the glove compartment.  The first time I did this I got  everything wrong – I entered the trip mileage instead of the odometer reading at the pump, and I couldn’t remember if I had listed our home phone number or my mobile number in the OC registration.  You need to know that, because your PIN is the last six digits of the registered phone number.

Darlene has now used OccasionalCar a couple of times, and she loves it. She has found the call center support staff to be very friendly and helpful for extending the time of a rental and generally passing along useful information, including the fact you can rent one of the cars for a whole day for $40.  That was handy yesterday, when her quilting marathon with Tish and Karen went well into the night.  I was not thrilled about them returning the car to a questionable area of Colfax Avenue past 10 p.m., so instead she simply kept the car in our parking space overnight and returned it this morning.

Photo by e pants

So we’ve got a walkable downtown, a great bus system, and convenient hourly car rentals. But wait — there’s more! Denver last April launched what then was the largest bike-sharing program in the nation, with 500 bikes located at 50 kiosks.  In September, Washington D.C. took the lead, with a system of 1,000 bikes at 100 kiosks. The Mile-High version is named Denver B-Cycle, and the bikes will return to their racks soon after a brief winter hiatus.  To support the program and for added convenience, I signed up for the annual membership for $65.  You can also sign up for passes that offer use for 24 hours, seven days, or 30 days.  Google Maps now offers a bike feature, in addition to walking, driving, and public transportation.  So I can see how a certain route will take full advantage of the Cherry Creek Bike Path, minimizing my time on the streets.

Depending on how going carless in Denver works out during the next few weeks, we may extend the experiment indefinitely. I’m excited about the 2012 Focus, because of its latest-generation Microsoft Sync technology, called MyFordTouch. It’s a gadget on wheels, which appeals to me. But I couldn’t get MyFordTouch on a hybrid vehicle, and with gasoline headed for $4 a gallon, maybe, hybrids are going to be the way to drive in cities.  Think of the savings and the smaller carbon footprint!  But when you compare going carless to a hybrid, it gets even better.  I’ll be interested to compare our current transportation costs with the costs of owning a car, but even with a fair amount of use of OccasionalCar, I bet we’re spending less a month than we did on Dimples, what with car insurance, taxes, and maintenance costs.

Still, the convenience of having your own personal car, available without going onto a website, with no planning required – that’s a lot to give up. The Focus, when it arrives, may lure us to remaining carless in Denver till 2012, because I’m going to be tempted to drive it to Cambridge in May or June when we migrate East for the rest of the year. I’m not sure what would become of Dimples under than scenario, because it’s certainly crazy to have two cars in Cambridge.

As for the soon-to-arrive gadget on wheels, the 2012 Kona Blue Ford Focus, I plan to chronicle my adventures with it in a new podcast, The Edge of the Road, which I’ve set up with a pilot episode, but I don’t have it at the iTunes Store yet. Stay tuned!

I’ve begun several days of immersion in the work of Internet marketing thinker Seth Godin, as I prepare to interview him on Wednesday for the Reading Edge podcast.

Last night I took notes while watching his presentation a year ago at the O’Reilly Media Tools of Change conference.  He took the audience, largely drawn from the ranks of worried publishers, on a book-by-book tour of what he had learned to that point in the publishing of his own 10 books.  Each represented a separate experiment, from free samples to packaging a book as a milk carton.

That relentless experimentation is what impresses me so far in my Seth Godin Immersion Project. He is finding the way forward by daring to try anything, by courageously following his own curiosity.  He appears to have a high tolerance for his own mistakes, as when he chose this title for a book he hoped marketers would purchase: All Marketers are Liars. At TOC, he ruefully noted that if the title had been All Marketers are Great Lovers he probably would have sold a lot more copies.

Seth Godin

I will confess that I have been arguing with some of Godin’s latest book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? As I’ve read it on my Kindle, I’ve irritably typed notes questioning his stereotyped view of corporations, whom he portrays as uniformly seeking cogs as employees, not original thinkers and creative team members.  “The goal is to hire as many cheap but talented people as possible, give them a rule book, and have them follow instructions to the letter” he writes at one point.  I wonder what planet Seth was inhabiting in the 1990s during the employee participation movement inspired by the work of W. Edwards Deming.  At that time, I was an exec at a regulated gas utility company in Casper, Wyoming–not exactly a hotbed of the latest in management thinking. But I can assure you that any member of management who espoused the strategies Godin mocks in Linchpin would have been out on the prairie faster than you can say “does not get it.”

I also take issue of WITH his portrayal of artists, which he posits as a model for linchpins. He writes, “…all artists have this optimism, because artists can honestly say that they are working to make things better.”  His artists are happy, optimistic super-creatives who can market tofu just as easily as write War and Peace.  A simple place to begin questioning that one would be the number of artists whose lives became so desperate they ended them by their own hands.

But though I have my quibbles with Linchpin,  I have already been changed by this book. I am asking myself how I can become a linchpin. By that, I’m taking his point that the more human, remarkable, and fast on my feet I can become as a podcaster covering the eBook Revolution, the more I will connect with listeners and readers, which is how I can become indispensable.  This will, in fact, be the second time Seth Godin has changed my life.  When I read The Dip, I decided to abandon two weekly podcasts I’d been using to lean tricks of the trade, because by then it was clear that my best opportunity lay in the Kindle Chronicles.

Seth Godin wants to spread ideas that change people.  In pursuit of that goal, he is selling a ton of books and getting invited to all the best places to give speeches, like TED.  But beyond curiosity and innovation, I suggest that his real secret sauce is credibility. When I watch him prowl the stage like a casual leopard, sharing his ideas and questions, I believe he’s mainly telling the truth as he perceives it in that moment.  If he can write a book teaching us how to do that, he won’t need to make it look like a milk carton.

Darlene and I have spent a couple of days here at Ocean Park, Maine, before our return to Denver tomorrow.  The openness and austere beauty of a summer colony in winter makes this a wonderful place for taking in new ideas.  Seth Godin has been good company.  I look forward to my conversation with him three days from now.