Having lost almost everything from my laptop has some upsides. Since the machine’s reincarnation, I’ve been digging through closets and boxes for old CDs, trying to piece together a sort of hodgepodge backup for everything that was lost.
So far, I’ve unearthed my teenage music collection, including They Might Be Giants, Savage Garden and Matchbox 20. I found a disc from my trip to eastern Germany, with pictures of me in Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig. Most exciting was the re-discovery of my graduation PowerPoint, including a brief photo history of the first 18 years of my life, complete with a Five For Fighting soundtrack. continue reading »
My family arrived today from Anchorage. Over the next two weeks, we’re going to try to see a lot of Scotland, and maybe some of England too. American culture is not that far removed from British culture, but I expect we’ll focus a lot on the differences: Con-TRO-ver-sy versus CON-tro-ver-sy; biscuits and tea versus coffee and doughnuts; Toyota Yarises versus Toyota Tundras.
I’ve been here long enough that I don’t notice a lot of the differences any more. I don’t hear the accents of people I know well. Even better, I don’t hear my own, sticking out like a flat vowel. continue reading »
Social Innovation Camp is even nearer now and I’m still thinking about ideas.
One of the themes this year is “distance”. I spend 90 percent of the year communicating with my family via email, Skype and phone, so I can relate to distance as a social problem. On the family level, distance is a tangible barrier to overcome. Some technologies help shrink this distance, but there is a lot of room for development.
I have already mentioned one distance-shrinking technology: Skype. The service is a revolution. Previously, the main alternative was expensive long distance calls. Skype cuts the cost of communicating with my family to almost nothing (I still occasionally have to make calls on my cell phone). It is much easier to stay in touch. continue reading »
