Communities and Technologies 2007 – Power
I'm in East Lansing for the Communities and Technologies conference, and I have some thoughts to share. First, the world needs more power outlets or wireless power. I'm glad I have a MacBook with a long battery life, but my MacBook often refuses to wake from sleep but does spin the hard drive as fast and hot as its little heart can. That, not surprisingly, runs down the battery, and then I'm stuck with no way to take notes. Remember, paper and I don't travel together. I walked over 7 other power cords to get back to my seat in a conference presentation room about an hour ago, and now I'm among a select group of people laptopping outside the auditorium. I'm all charged up, so I'm on a couch in the middle of the room. The other 6 people are lined up against the wall, slightly clumped near the few power outlets available in this room. The outlet scarcity does encourage some impromptu communication, I guess; I've had to ask irresponsible outlet users to rotate their plugs so I can use another plug on a multi-plug outlet or powerstrip too. Apparently we don't like to plug our computers in right next to someone else's. Every powerstrip I've seen has power cords spaced like single movie-goers - at least one empty plug between cords. I understand infrastructure like electrical wiring is pretty tough to change. Maybe I should start traveling with a portable power strip. Wouldn't it be great if it could fold up as small as my power cord and then pop out when I needed it? (Or maybe a wireless extension cord - found while I was looking for the link about MIT's wireless power project) Surge protection plus outlet multiplication = bliss!
Where did all the senses of humor go?
Hillary Clinton cracks me up. She posted (or had someone post, whatever) a funny video to YouTube that you should go watch - only 53 seconds. What's even more funny than the video are the comments. Unfortunately, the comments are funny-sad, not funny-haha like the video. I can't imagine taking myself so seriously that I think Hillary Clinton would not be speaking tongue-in-cheek when asking me to help her pick a campaign song. shpongolina, kamason86, and company might just need something to complain about.
While getting those user profile links for the cranky commenters, I learned that kamason86 is a Ron Paul supporter. sphongolina's a Dennis Kucinich guy/gal. Hm, ok.
Libby = still undecided
Oh, Canada
Some friends invited me on a last minute trip to Toronto Saturday, and of course, I went. This was my first trip to Toronto, and I had a wonderful time. I took a lot of pictures. My favorite place on our whirlwind tour was definitely
They have yummy oysters and a fantastic beer selection (250+). The bar staff was super friendly and helpful. One of them (d'oh, I can't remember his name!) makes homemade hot sauces that are fantastic. I highly recommend oysters with his papaya habanero sauce and a little lemon juice. I would've eaten all they had if my stomach and wallet had room.
The real reason for our trip was to catch the True Colors Tour at the Molson Amphitheatre. The tour supports the Human Rights Campaign. HRC works for equal rights, and you should support them too. Jolie's friend Tara road managed The Gossip for this tour, and she hooked us up big time. We got VIP passes, free tickets, and to stand BACKSTAGE ON THE STAGE during Erasure and Margaret Cho. We would've been there for Cyndi Lauper too, but Ms. Lauper actually asked us not to come out on stage. The stage manager freaked and asked us to leave. I think Ms. Lauper just wanted us to stay put, not that she wanted us to walk away, but whatever.
Here's the video produced for HRC and the True Colors Tour:
Small things…
Here's a story from today's NY Times that you might like: Putting Energy Hogs in the Home on a Strict Low-Power Diet
I was happy to see the article not only because it has useful tips about reducing energy consumption at home but because it's at the top of the "Most Emailed" list. My heart is happy that Times readers are sending each other this story, and I wanted to join in. Maybe we really are starting to care about how much energy we use. Let's keep buying notebooks and turning stuff off when we're not using it. 1700 lbs is a lot of CO2 to save!
The Pearl lasts for.ev.er
So I was on the phone for almost 200 minutes today, and the Pearl still has battery remaining. In fact, it has more than one bar of battery remaining. I didn't even have time to get the thing fully charged! I'm impressed. Yes, I got another BlackBerry Pearl today. I ran back to the comforting arms of T-Mobile, and I'm thrilled. It took literally 30 seconds to sync all my data to the phone, and I could not be more pleased. Given the 4+ hour debacle of trying to get the Treo and the Mac to get along, I was bracing myself for difficulty. Everything worked smoothly though.
I just returned from a couple hours out with some friends at the 8 Ball Saloon. The 8 Ball is a truly wonderful place. Ann Arbor doesn't have many bars that combine dart boards, pool tables, cheap drinks, laid back attitudes, and permanent hand stamps. In fact, I'm not sure we have any other bars that have all those things. Oh, and popcorn! Yum. I stopped after one drink tonight, but you wouldn't know it if you'd seen me lying in the back of a pickup during a post-midnight McDonald's run. My friend Jessie and I needed some French fries, and Cory obliged. Here's the evidence to prove it:
Libby finds music on YouTube
Gentle readers, I must confess, I love pop music. Not all of it, obviously, but sometimes I can't help myself. Have you seen Josie and The Pussycats? Many things in that movie grabbed my attention, but I identified most with the poor saps who were mesmerized by the pop music. YouTube is the newest way pop music infiltrates my life. A couple weeks ago I was reading a thing on Forbes.com about the most popular videos on YouTube. They definitely lumped me with 13 year old girls because I, too, love Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" and its video. At first, I was worried that my cultural growth had stopped at 13, but I think my May travels to historical places and museums is recent evidence to the contrary. I wanted to share this video with you all though because I find that people who hear the song in my car get hooked. It's catchy, especially if you're a girl who went to high school.
I also found a video from the Nadas, an Iowa band I miss seeing live. Lucky for me, I'll be in Iowa for their show in Arnolds Park in July. Many of my friends from Michigan and Chicago will be there too, and it will be a great day. I love friends!
Bubble wrap
Jolie's school is putting in air conditioning, so she needed to pack up her whole library. I got to help out for a couple hours on Saturday, and I got to play with bubble wrap! Sadly, I couldn't pop the bubbles because we were packing things for safe keeping. You can see how seriously Sandra and I took this charge:
I'm pretty excited about how long my hair is getting. Thank you, Nicole at art + science (wicker park), for rescuing it!
Impoverished Media and My Inner Archivist
So I mentioned that I'd had a couple long IM conversations in the last few days. I'm a regular IMer, but short conversations (< 20 minutes) are my norm. I think the last time I had really long ones was in college when I was home over breaks and missing my friends from school. These longer conversations in the last week were with someone who's a few states away, so maybe the length is a function of distance. I don't think that's the whole story though. I think the model for describing this is actually a function of distance, interest, and intrigue (and some noise/variance I haven't identified yet). Regardless of the coefficients, the result is a sleepy, introspective Libby who's been staying up late IMing.
These IMs made me think. I route all the email I regularly read (i.e. not my secret SPAM accounts) through Gmail. Gmail saves everything I send and receive by default. These long IMs took place in GoogleTalk which stores my IMs within Gmail. So, all the emails IM Buddy (IMB) and I have sent live in my Gmail; all the lines of our IMs live in my Gmail. Am I the only person who goes back to re-read such things? In fact, last night, I was re-reading an email when IMB IMed me. Talk about embarrassing! Well, maybe the re-reading wasn't embarrassing, but typing so fast that I admitted to IMB that I was re-reading our emails sure was.
I've been working to better understand how I'm personally relating to people, and I think these archived conversations are helpful for that enterprise. I can go back and see what I said, and my fresh eyes help me notice things I said that might've been confusing or misinterpreted. Re-reading also shows me which topics were discussed and which were abandoned. Now I'm curious about why some topics were abandoned, and I'm not sure what the social conventions are for bringing those back up. Once a topic is abandoned in impoverished media, am I supposed to let it go? It's been awhile since I've had so much I want to hear from and want to say to one person!
I was tempted to use my IM transcripts as a conversation analysis pilot study, but that would be wrong. Afterall, IMB and I are just talking, and IMB did not sign on to be a research subject. Besides, I wouldn't want our behavior to change because of an analytic intervention. But still, I'm fascinated by our exchanges.
I feel a little silly blogging about this, but I really do want to know if other people do this. Are you all out there carefully reading and re-reading email and IM too? I suspect you are. If you're a true archivist - one who carefully selects email/IM to save and to delete - how do you decide? Do you ever have regrets?
I wonder how saving all this stuff and re-reading it changes the way I interact with people. I've had a few other IM conversations in the last few months that covered sensitive territory. I wonder how those conversations would have gone face-to-face or on the phone. Is it even fair for me to save this stuff if my conversation partners aren't? My distributed cognition is Google-enabled, but that's not true for everyone.
Field Trips and Impoverished Media
You may be surprised to hear that the rest of life continued as usual even while my days were full of documentary filming. In the last few days, I went on a rather interesting field trip and had a couple long IM conversations.
My field trip was a Saturday night at the Detroit Eagle with one of my gay boyfriends and one of his friends from out of town. You may think a gay leather bar would be a dangerous or skeevey place, but you'd be wrong. The men at the Eagle were friendly (to me and to each other) and interesting. The bar was cleaner, less expensive, and less creepy than your average Ann Arbor bar. The Eagle is nicer than Scorekeepers, the Monkey Bar, Touchdown Cafe, maybe even Conor O'Neills on the weekend. There was an air of respect at the Eagle that is definitely lacking in those straight meat markets.
I was going to continue this post and include stuff about my IMing, but I think I'll start a new post. Is that the right convention? 1 post ~ 1ish topics?