Why I think many are missing the point of the iPad: it was invented for people like me!

I was among those waiting with bated breath to see what Steve Jobs would be unveiling last Wednesday morning at the latest Apple event.

I was among those really impressed and excited by what I saw when the iPad was unveiled. I’m not really surprised about the many who are jumping on the critical bandwagon, but I think they are missing something big.

First, about the name. As someone tweeted a few days ago, there are lots of people who still giggle about male and female plugs. Kinda silly, I think. Picking a name is really hard, especially one that’s not already mostly taken. I don’t think the name is all that important.

What I think many of the critics miss is that I believe the iPad is aimed at people like me.

I’m a baby boomer. But I love technology. And I especially love it when it loves me back.

Here’s an example:  For years, I had a cell phone. I could barely use it…I could never remember, for example, exactly what combination of buttons I needed to hit to retrieve a voice mail. I could never remember how to text. And texting was just way too much trouble. And so on. While I wanted to love my cell phone, I felt it hated me and wanted to make my life as difficult as possible.

The Mac Plus (from wikipedia)

Granted, I’ve been a Mac person since 1986. I remember using a DOS PC at work in the mid-80s, struggling to make flyers with Harvard Graphics. OMG, it almost killed me. I could tell it hated me intensely. What took me 6 hours at work, I did in 15 minutes on my Mac Plus when I got home. I felt like my Mac wanted my life and work to be easy. It wanted me to spend my energy being creative rather than wrestling with remembering command lines, trying to change and move text with command lines, etc. I did better work, learned more faster, tapped into more creativity, etc. as a result of my Mac.

My beloved University of Chicago

It’s not that my brain wasn’t capable of doing geeky stuff. I took a computer programming course in 1971 in my last quarter in college at the University of Chicago and got an A. That was in the day when you turned your punch cards in to be run through the mainframe overnight. In that class, we learned several languages and had to invent our own programming language. It was hard, but I loved the hell out of it. (I even remember the error message I invented… I thought it was so cool I figured out to tell exactly what card the error was on, so in celebration, I wrote this error message:  ”Roses are red, violets are blue, Card #6 is fucked up, and so are you.” We found way to make everything fun in the late 60s/early 70s, didn’t we??? )

I loved understanding how computers worked, the whole flow chart binary logic decision tree thing, and so forth. Having that very basic knowledge made me not afraid of technology when it came to every home and workplace several years later. I was a fairly early adopter, especially when the Mac came along because it exactly matched my brain.

But I digress.

When the iPhone came along, I was one of those in line at 6 p.m. on launch day at the Pioneer Place Apple Store in downtown Portland. From what I had heard, I would finally have a cell phone that loved me back. And I was so right! Bascially, in less than 5 minutes, I had figured out how to do the whole thing and do it with joy. It really was that good!

Where I bought my first iPhone

Now many of my more geeky friends have looked down on the iPhone because the “phone” part is not geeky enough for them. But I don’t think Apple was trying to make the geekiest possible phone. They were making something incredibly useful for people like me: people who want their devices to be joyful to use.

My iPhone has made my life more joyful and efficient and less stressful and painful. Mostly because I grokked it immediately and it is just effortless and fun.

About the iPad, I’ve been hearing comments like this: “It won’t replace my laptop.” Well, hello, it’s not designed to do that. I’ll still need my laptop for the geekier stuff I do. I wouldn’t dream of doing without it, I’m not looking to get rid of it.

Also: “It doesn’t have a camera.” So what? I’ll still have my iPhone, and use its camera. Or my Flip video cam. Do I really want to hold up a flat thing that is a little less than the size of an 8×10 piece of paper and use it as a camera. Hell no. I want something I can whip around with one hand with essentially no effort (and allows me to be a little discreet sometimes).

Also: “It’s just a bigger iPod touch.” Uh, no, not really. Having the iWork suite of programs on it puts it light years ahead of the iPod in my book. Do you know what a joy those programs are to use. Let’s just put it this way: once I did one presentation in Keynote, I could not go back to Powerpoint if you sat on me.

Also, it is big enough for practical book and other print media reading. I don’t enjoy that so much on my iPhone because either the font size stays too small or there’s not enough real estate for enough words.  Yes, I have a Kindle (first generation). I’ve loved it, especially the part that makes it possible to download a book and read it immediately. But woe to those of us who buy a Kindle book that has charts, maps or any kind of images. Just an utter fail. Can’t even make them out, and you can’t enlarge them like you can the font text size.

From what I see, the iPad totally overcomes that issue. For magazines and newspapers as well. Have you seen the quality of the photos and images on the iPad. And what you can do to go further??? Looks like it will be another joyful experience! As joyful as reading a dead tree magazine or newspaper, if not more so…

It seems to me that Apple has, once again, found a way to make experiences I like to have more enjoyable. It makes things I love that love me back!

And that’s really Apple’s point, is it not?

A day for helping Haiti, we need an app for that

Today was Mission Day at  Meyer Memorial Trust.  Sayer Jones and Aaron Nelson initiated MMT Mission Days, when all staff members head out to local nonprofits to provide hands-on help for a day.

Little did they know when they selected this month’s organization that it would provide us with an opportunity to help with the world’s latest worst disaster.  We went to Medical Teams International, a nonprofit organization with headquarters in the Portland metro area that provides medical disaster relief wherever it is needed around the world. Today, for example, it sent a group of doctors and nurses to Haiti to join the front line response to the crisis following the earthquake two days ago. (If you want to know more about MTI, you can watch a short video we made a while back, when it was called Northwest Medical Teams.)

MMT staff divided into two groups: the largest group sorted donated medical supplies and equipment diverted from Goodwill donations while

GoGetEm Grant

the rest of us worked the crisis phone bank. I was in the latter group.  Four of us got a brief training session using the brand new phone bank system, scripts for answering the most anticipated calls, and we hit the ground running.

Lots and lots of calls. Grant Kruger’s lightening reflexes meant he was first to answer, so he more than likely fielded more calls than anyone. Sally Yee was only slightly slower. Phoebe Owens and I covered the rear flank.

Mustang Sally

Some people called in tears. Caller after caller – from all over the country – had been watching television or listening to the radio and were so affected by the tragic state of affairs they needed to do something. Now. Anything. Just needed to help.

By far the most calls I took were from people who wanted to go directly to Haiti. Now. They wanted to help in the worst way. Many were more than qualified, lots of nurses, doctors and other health professionals. A fair number had years of experience working in Haiti. Several spoke French and Creole.  And it wasn’t just medical professionals calling. One man who called said he had operated heavy equipment for 26 years and he figured there would be a need for people to help remove all that rubble… another man called who said he was just young and strong and could do a lot of heavy lifting.

A student nurse in Arizona wanted to organize a first aid drive among nursing students there, companies called wanting to send medical supplies, medicine, all sorts of emergency equipment. The calls kept coming.

FairlyFast Phoebe

While we directed callers to departments and hotlines at MTI when appropriate, unfortunately we had to tell many callers that organizations like MTI have to prepare far ahead of a disaster in order to effectively respond, so we wouldn’t be able to put them on the next plane and deliver them to the streets of Haiti, they would have to fill out a volunteer application and be screened and someone would get back to them. And while I know all that is true, and delivering people to the disaster zone would just clog things up and make things worse, I hated having to tell people to fill out a form and wait. Many callers had already heard the same message from many other organizations they had already called. But they didn’t want to take no for an answer. They needed to help.

And while I write this, I’m watching Anderson Cooper 360 and seeing all the people in pain and anguish, without food or water, needing medial care and someone to operate heavy equipment and do heavy lifting, and my heart is breaking.

The privilege of speaking to so many ordinary Americans today touched me deeply. Some gave monetary donations, but a fair number told me they were unemployed and were free to travel right now. They wanted to do something with this time on their hands.

I’m wondering if we can marshall our compassion and energy and wish to help into planning ahead, to filling out forms and figuring out a way to help before disaster strikes, when adrenalin isn’t flowing. So we can be ready when it is. There’s so much we could do before the next crisis comes. And one thing we know for sure, it will. We need to prepare for that one now.

I think we need an app for that.

—–

Please do whatever you can to help Haiti now. What relief organizations need most is money, because it gives them flexibility to respond in the most helpful way.  You can check nonprofit organizations out on Charity Navigator. You can help two world class organizations with headquarters in Portland provide on-the-ground help now: MTI and Mercy Corps. The Red Cross is also providing direct relief.

The US government has a comprehensive overview of ways to help here and through the Center for International Disaster Information.

There are lots of ways to matter, even if you can’t get to Haiti.

Check out my co-workers’ great blog entries about this subject:

Grant Kruger’s blog post.

Phoebe Owens’ blog post and update.

Help Beth Kanter celebrate turning 53!

Beth Kanter in her most common pose: sharing knowledge with others

Today is Beth Kanter’s 53rd birthday!

Why should you care?

Because Beth is, flat out, the real deal. As I am heard to say whenever I open my mouth in a nonprofit setting, “If your organization does only one thing to make itself better, subscribe to Beth’s Blog. She shares everything she knows, and she knows everything!”

Seriously, she is the nonprofit social media brain. And she’s the most generous professional in that space I’ve ever known. She learns in order to share. She’s a living example of why sharing knowledge works so much better than hoarding it.

Beth came to Portland a couple of years ago to present at Meyer Memorial Trust’s social media workshop, so a bunch of us (including Amy Sample Ward) got to hang with her for a couple of days. I learned a lot of content from her, but the most important thing I learned was this:  the old dictum that knowledge is power is not enough; it’s actually SHARING knowledge that gives it power.

The other most critical lesson I learned: Listening is even more important than sharing. If we don’t listen, we have nothing to share.

In honor of Beth’s birthday, I am making a donation to Beth’s favorite cause – helping children in Cambodia further their education. She’s using the occasion of her birthday to raise enough money to send 53 kids in Cambodia to school!

I want to help make this happen and I bet you do too! Do it in the name of sharing! Go here now!

In search of weightlessness

I’m about to take a very big step onto a limb that probably won’t hold me. Yes indeed. I’m going to finally face a big truth in my life. That would be my weight. Maybe the hardest thing of all for me to talk about. I have a lot of shame attached to this one…

What’s really weird is that when I was a child, I was so ashamed of being too skinny. Or “poor” as Granny used to call it. “Marie,” she would say, “you don’t eat enough to keep a bird alive. You’re too poor.”

By far the strongest memory I have from grade school is the humiliation and down-to-the-marrow shame I felt on weigh-in day at school. I doubt very many people where and when I grew up had scales at home. I certainly never saw one in any house in the vicinity of Star Route, Milo, Oregon back then.  In fact, most health screening children got when I was growing up happened at school.

Twice a year, at the beginning and the end of each school year, the scales (the kind you stand on and move the weight along the bar until it balances in the middle of the space on the right) was brought into the classroom and one by one, we went up, took off our shoes, and stepped on the platform. The teacher would adjust the bar and call out the number, write it down in a chart, and call out the next student’s name.

The afternoon of the day of the second weigh-in during first grade, as I passed my teacher and the second grade teacher in the hall, my teacher said to the other: “Marie is the only student in first grade that didn’t gain a bit of weight the whole school year. She weighed 46 pounds at the beginning of the year, and 46 pounds today.” She shook her head, and said to me, “You’re going to have to put on some weight or you’ll blow away.”

I can still feel my face burning with shame. Hearing that and feeling that changed who I am, I believe.

In second grade, when the scales were wheeled into the room, I could hardly breathe. Every time a name was called and got one student closer to my desk in my row, my panic went up another notch. By the time my name was called, I felt about to faint.

The strangest part of this memory is that, even at age 7, I was remarkably aware that I needed to not let my anxiety show, that I was alone in this experience, and I could not admit it or share it with anyone. I needed to keep my shame to myself.

Where on earth do children learn this by this tender age??  Well, maybe that’s another blog post.

I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I was when she called out the number 49. Yes!! I had put on weight!!! I didn’t need to feel shame anymore that day!! I was ecstatic! For a while.

I continued to be skin and bones through high school. I started gaining weight after leaving home for college, but then only finally reached what would be considered appropriate for my height. I started filling out more in my late 20s, then packed on quite a few pounds when I was pregnant. I was 30 when Blaine was born, and finally got back in shape over the next few years, when I ran nearly seven miles nearly every day.  I loved running so much, it was my meditation and salvation during some really stressful times.  I never fully recovered my running form after a stress fracture in my right foot put me into one of those wooden bootie things for a couple of months.

In fact, I’ve never really achieved regular demanding exercise for a sustained period of more than a few months for the past 20 years.  I also have an addictive fondness for chocolate (among other calorie laden food items). And it shows. I now weigh significantly more than I did when I was pregnant. More than I’ve ever weighed in my life. Twice my weight in high school.

You notice I am not naming a number? I tried. No can do. The shame, I am still drowning in it. I can only say it is way too high.

And I need to fix it. I remember visiting my Aunt Cora not long before she died, after her leg had been amputated because of diabetes. (Everybody called it “sugar diabetes” where I grew up. Haven’t heard that phrase in so many years.)  I could be her.

I don’t want to be. I want 2010 to be the year I face this and fix it. I don’t really have a plan at this point, but I’m going to make one. My coworkers are in this with me; each of us in our department faces our health issues and we have resolved to tackle this together.

I will track my plan and progress here in coming months. Please help me. I need your support. Have you faced this and fixed it for good? What worked? What advice do you have?

I have a feeling I need to go after the shame as well as the pounds. I guess you could say I’m seeking weightlessness in more ways than one.

30 hour day results

Stats from @30hourday:

$5390 donated

71,500 unique viewers

133,000 viewer sessions

and a high of 830 viewers

Thanks so much to everyone involved. Amazing results for first time event with shortest planning time in the history of the universe.

It’s almost 30 hour day!

Tomorrow is the premiere of an event, the likes of which the world has never seen: 30 hour day.

No sleep. All for charity.

A bunch of really kind and creative and brilliant and geeky people in Portland are streamcasting a telethon. A streamcastathon, for lack of a better word.

For 30 straight hours. No sleep. To raise money for charity. It starts at 4 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 18th and runs til 10 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 19th.

I’m really excited about this, and I’m one of the people on the schedule around 10 p.m. tomorrow night. I would love it if you tuned in and watched, made a donation, bid for an auction item, and generally just became part of this awesome community for at least part of 30 hours.

Some of the money will go to Free Geek, where Blaine makes his second home! Hope you can stop by!

My tweetcloud

So this is what I tweet about:

What I think happened at #wmtm (We Make the Media conference)

I’ve started and aborted several posts on my experience at We Make the Media conference in Portland on Saturday. All my former attempts ended in a sense of futility. We’ll see if I make it through this time… First, the disclaimer: nothing I say here is any reflection on my employer, nobody has seen or considered my post, it was written on my own time, etc.

I was among those who observed and felt the divide in the room at the We Make the Media conference in Portland on November 21, 2009.

Here’s what I think is behind it.

I believe that much of the discontent with mainstream media — and in the #wmtm room — has more to do with disrupting longstanding social order and traditional ways of handling information than it does with journalism standards, tools, digital formats, etc. What the internet and social media in particular make possible is taking control away from the powers that have had control for so long.

That’s what the planners and keynote speaker and panelists seemed not to understand, and I think why there was so much resistance bubbling in the room.

The fact that the conference did not begin by announcing: “Here’s how to use the wifi here” or “we’re using this hashtag” and not being streamed or even videotaped was shocking to me and invited a questioning stance. Some of those things still happened, of course, but in a completely underground channel. Why was it underground and what does that have to do with power and control?

When the conference opened, other clues emerged. The old way of designating power is through academic degrees, awards won, years in the biz, etc. Because the day began with speakers being introduced that way, the tone was set identifying with the legacy way of assigning authority, power, and so forth. Users of social media are much more impressed by the quality of one’s content, rather than the length of one’s resume. Relying on resume recitations as a way of granting authority casts an event immediately on the side of the old power structure for many, including me. It doesn’t mean the person is not wise or doesn’t have something very important to say, it just signals to me that I am expected to be deferential and more than likely expected to be impressed into silence and passivity.

The fact that the keynote speaker referred to content aggregators on the web as thieves reinforced that perception for me. That kind of statement implies to me that the speaker is defending keeping power and ownership and control in the hands of a few, with no real understanding of or appreciation for how much traffic those aggregators drive to their content, how the aggregators might actually be contributing to a greater understanding of things and making people much more informed, and so forth. They’re just dismissed as thieves in a single sentence. My skepticism that had already begun rose to another level.

Referring to bloggers as digital ranters added further reinforcement.

The fact that he said content of mainstream media has never been and is not a problem put another tally in that column.

The fact that one of the pre-selected breakout sessions was assigned to discuss planning a cable tv show was another.

The fact that the moderator had never heard the term copyleft? Yet another.

Raising the issue of micropayments. Still another. And so it went…

In other words, even though I think the conference planners intended to begin an open conversation about the future of journalism that might go far beyond traditional boundaries, the format/content/speakers/topics suggested that we had to begin from the point of view of command and control. There were just too many clues to ignore, and those of us who welcome the disrupting influence of web and social media tools couldn’t help but ask WTF?

Though we know it brings noise, utter crap, falsehoods, snark and other messiness, many of us believe we that something closer to the “truth” and more trustworthy emerges at the end of a messy process that includes those things than what comes from information that is issued from a command and control system that has the voices of only a few. And I don’t think the powers that be get that yet.

Maybe I’m alone, but it feel like this explains part of the reason for the divide in the room.

Why I am a Block of the Month

For several months now, I’ve been enrolled in two “block of the month” classes at Cool Cottons, just a few feet from my house as the crow flies. (And you won’t believe how many crows actually fly there, but that’s another post.)

One class is the Quilt as You Go Block of the Month, taught by quilter and teacher extraordinaire Joyln Buhl.

Handout from Jolyn Buhl's Quilt-as-you-go Block of the Month Class

Each month we get instructions and fabric to make a block. Many of the blocks are quite intricate.  Joyln loves her triangles! (And lucky for us, she teaches a totally cool way of constructing them…you need to take a class from her so you can learn it too!)

Once we finish a 9-inch-square block, we then add sashing from fabric of our own choice to increase its size to 15 inches.  We make a companion block called a setting block, from the same fabric as the sashing.

Then we machine quilt each block, then sew the quilted squares together in pairs, then join the pairs, and so on… the idea is that at the end of the year, we have a completed quilt of 24 squares (a square of a different pattern and its setting block for each month of the year).  Of course, this happens only if we keep up on our homework.  Because I fell so far behind before escaping from nerve pain hell, I’ve been sewing and quilting double time for the past few weekends.

The Maple Star square

Maple Star with sashing

And you just keep going and going.

After quilting both blocks, you add the setting block to the main block.

Then you sew two 2-block sets together like this:

Note how the setting blocks and main blocks are set opposite one another in all directions.

I’ve taken care to find fat quarters to use in the same color family for the backs of the blocks.

The back of a 4-block set.

If that weren’t enough, I also joined a Wool Applique Block of the Month club.  We’re working from one of Sue Spargo’s Folk Art Quilt patterns – Flowerbed

Each month, get luscious hand-dyed wool for one block, which we finish and embellish as we wish. You can see that my confidence is gaining:  my first few blocks were very basic, but now I’m adding embroidery and thinking more outside the box….I mean block.

So that’s how I’ve been spending lots of my weekend hours. There’s something so soothing about creating something with your hands when you spend your work hours making things with your mind. It’s my mediation and therapy all rolled into one.

One of the first blocks I did. That's why it's so simple and unembellished.

One of the last blocks I did. Note all the embroidery embellishment.

Why global warming keeps me up at night

As I’ve confessed here before, I am something of a weather geek. I watch the weather, track the weather, watch weather disaster shows on tv, consult the weather channel frequently, and think about the weather.

I actually studied the weather in college and grad school in the early 1970s, and learned about the greenhouse effect and global warming long before it became a popular media subject.

The amount of carbon dioxide human activity pumps into the atmosphere has only increased dramatically since then, of course. As has general awareness of the issue. And since today is a day when bloggers are invited to blog action day on climate change (see blogactionday.org for more info) participate in a global project to bring more attention to this issue, I am compelled to share what I believe I know for sure. (Sorry Oprah!)

What I believe I know for sure about global warming:

1. There has been a dramatic rise in CO2 in the last three centuries of human history. While there are short term variations, the graph below shows an unmistakable exponential increase over time since 1700. This is not a scam, it is not a conspiracy, it is simply data. Period. It’s not political, it’s not left or right, it’s just data. Data doesn’t care about our debates and arguments. It just exists. It doesn’t lie, it doesn’t care whether we listen or not. It just is.

2. If you look at the graph, you see that the dramatic rise started around the mid-19th century. What happened at that time? The industrial revolution, of course. Just as it dramatically altered the human experience, it dramatically changed the extent to which human activity produced CO2, and the only place for it to go was the atmosphere.  I think there is a lot of evidence that human activity is contributing significantly to CO2 level increases. It’s not the only cause, of course, but it is a contributing factor.

3. The global warming effect that gets the most airtime is rising sea levels. While that would be catastrophic for much of humanity because they live next to the sea, I think there are worse things to worry about. Like the release of methane, released into the atmosphere from melting permafrost, from the ocean as water temperature rises.  And methane traps heat radiating from the earth (which is where our heat comes from as opposed from direct solar radiation) 20 times more efficiently than CO2. At certain levels, it actually begins to burn. As in massive fire. The atmosphere ablaze? Now that would be bad. Even worse than rising water.

3. Given that data clearly shows that global temperatures (see right hand graph above) are on a rising trend, wouldn’t we humans want to do everything we can to keep our actions in check so we aren’t fouling our own nest? Disrespecting the only home we have? Can’t we live without consuming so much, satisfying our every desire or fancy? Can we bring it down a notch? Might it actually improve our quality of life? Beginning with us. Me. You?

4. And in the end, as this video shows, we may as well do whatever we can to take action to save our planet, because it’s a win-win or lose-lose proposition.  Please take the 10 minutes to watch this video. Do it for me. Do it for you. Do it for the future of humanity.