Ultranormal

  • Why I’ll Be Tired Later

    a police car races down the street

    I have a very long day of cab – train – airport – airplane – airport – airplane – airport – car ahead of me. The hotel fire alarm going off around 3AM and my inability to get back to sleep so far is not going to help the situation.\
    I have a lot of photos from my trip to The British Museum to post, but they’ll have to wait until I get home.

  • I am going to ask him for help on my taxes

    I was finally able to get someone to test Max’s reading level. Remember, this is the kid who taught himself to read when he was 1. He used to figure out atomic masses of compounds for fun when he was 3. For years he has been reading his uncle’s old science magazines. I can’t describe the ways in which his brain is so much better than mine (and probably yours, no offense). So……… Max is reading at a 12th grade level.\
    Holy cow.

  • Friday Five

    Another mom asked me out for coffee and I felt scandalized.\
    This has been a rough week for us and I irrationally want Kevin to be here, suffering too. And/or I want some sort of reward. I am shallow that way.\
    Brian has toy show-and-tell at school on Fridays. Today he chose to take an empty tape roll.\
    Max is working on two big school projects and I am irked at how much oversight I have to do. When he becomes a big, fat, fucking success, I am going to lap up any praise people choose to bestow on me. (Before I always claimed it wasn’t me who made Max so great, but no more of that!)

  • 25 Things About Me

    Because I’m now been tagged three times for the 25 things list on Facebook, and twice for the seven things list, I figured I had to do it… so here I go.

    1. I am horribly addicted to caffeine. I’ve tried to quit in the past, but when work pressure/stress increases, so does my caffeine intake.
    2. I love clementines. I can go through a case a week, easily. I don’t like regular tangerines or oranges, because the seeds are a pain, but clementines are fantastic.
    3. I have an over-developed sense of guilt. I don’t know why. I’ve tried to figure it out and get over it, but nothing’s worked so far.
    4. I’m allergic to shellfish. My allergy developed in my twenties, and I hate it – because I love shrimp, crawfish, crab and lobster. Stupid allergies
    5. I’m snobby about TV (hate most broadcast TV, all my favorite shows get canceled, etc), but still watch some horrible rubbish. But, thankfully, I think I’m finally over my addiction to the various nationalities’ Big Brother‘s
    6. I miss the people I worked with at AOL, but I don’t miss AOL’s management at all.
    7. Aside from my allergies, I really like living in Savannah, but I wish there was more of a tech community there.
    8. I’m very organized at work, but a complete mess at home. Thankfully, Jen keeps things in order.
    9. I’m in awe of my kids most of the time. Sometimes, I want to drop kick them, but most of the time, I’m in awe.
    10. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be drunk, but not enough to try it.
    11. I don’t understand pet people – dogs, cats, whatever. My mom and I are both allergic to dander, so we never really had dogs or cats when I was growing up. We had a dog for a little while, but that really didn’t work. I don’t understand how people get so attached to things that will basically always be toddlers. My kids eventually stopped crapping on the floor and putting things in their mouths. Like I said, I just don’t get it.
    12. I know I’m not normal, and I’ve decided that I don’t care. The only time I really feel like I belong is at home, work, SxSW or Mashup Camp.
    13. As I’ve gotten older and seen more of the world, my political views have moved farther and farther to the left. I’m pretty sure I’ll never enter Hippie-ville or buy a beret and grow a scraggly revolution beard, but you may hear me muttering “revolution” under my breath from time to time.
    14. I think funny trumps pretty much everything else. If it’s funny, I don’t really care how offensive it might be.
    15. I miss doing Tech X every week. It was a long time ago, but having that weekly goofy performance was a blast. I put an episode up last year. It wasn’t the first, because it took us a good 10-12 episodes to find our “stride”, which feels ridiculous to say, but I said it anyway.
    16. I’m afraid of what will happen when I get tired of writing code.
    17. I love building things and solving problems. I don’t write code for the sake of code. I’ve got to be trying to solve something for it to be fun.
    18. I swear a lot. I keep catching myself and trying to cut back, but I’m really good at it, and the Bible says we’re supposed to develop our talents, right?
    19. I’m not handy. I’m not good with tools or fixing things outside of a computer.
    20. I’ve always wondered how I’d do at standup. Once, in high school, a friend’s mom offered me a gig doing stand up on Saturday nights. I turned her down, but I’ve always regretted it. Of course, I don’t regret it enough to do anything about it now.
    21. I’m inherently lazy. I’d much rather watch TV or play video games than do something productive. I’m not much for creating my own inertia. You wouldn’t know it by how much I work, but once I’m done with work for the day, I’m really done.
    22. I suck at setting and keeping goals outside of work.
    23. I can’t help it, I really really like The Polyphonic Spree. Sometimes, it’s good to be without irony or sarcasm.
    24. I like Thanksgiving more than Christmas. Let’s give it up, people, Christmas is no longer religious, it’s just a stressful gift-giving tradition with ever-mounting expectations for expenditure. I like making Thanksgiving dinner and just hanging out. That’s my kind of holiday.
    25. The manliest thing I do is grill. I love grilling stuff. I’d grill breakfast cereal if I could figure out how.

  • My Slides from Future of Social Media

    Making Marketing More Human Through Technology

    View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: cluetrain tumblr)

    I finished speaking at *The Future of Social Media”… it was fun telling them not to join twitter if they’re just going to be marketers and not actually be human. I told them other stuff too, I think.\
    I didn’t have a lot of time to talk about the future, so I didn’t get to talk about identity vs. persona and my three categories of social networks… maybe next time. I’m pretty sure I scared the hell out of them when I talked about reputation stuff.\
    Some things I mentioned that either I didn’t put the URL for in the slides or didn’t have in the slides at all:

    • The quote from Jeremy Tanner about twitter spammers comes from his fantastic blog post – read the whole thing.
    • You can read The Cluetrain Manifesto online for free.
    • I talked a little bit about Seth Godin. His blog may be a little pat, but I’ve learned a lot about marketing and product development from his books.
    • My interest in reputation started with Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom. It introduces the idea of “whuffie” which captured my imagination. I hope to some day implement a real whuffie system online. I came really close once.\
      I think that’s it… hopefully the people who saw it enjoyed it and got something out of it. It was a lot of fun preparing it.

  • Kids!

    Max’s school requires a uniform, but every couple of months they allow the kids to dress in t-shirts if they bring \$1 for a local charity. I think this is a neat idea and so far the school has raised \$1400, but Max has never been able to participate. These casual days have themes and we’ve never had the right shirt. Once the theme was “favorite vacation shirt.” Since the grandparents have stopped going on vacation, we don’t have any for Max. (Brian has Max’s old ones, so he is ready!) Another theme was “favorite sweatshirt.” Which, no. We don’t do sweatshirts. I feel lame that my kid can’t participate in these casual days.\
    Brian has had pizza six times this week. Oops.\
    Max received his ITBS scores this week. This is a standardized test that compares students to other students of the same grade (nationally, I think). Max got the highest possible score.\
    I have been trying to teach Brian to read, which isn’t going well. I am not trying to push him, nor am I worried, and his teachers say he is at least where he should be, but I don’t want to assume he isn’t ready and just ignore the reading. (Wow, that sentence.)\
    Max’s school’s website vexes me. I can never find the info I need. Today he has a half-day, woe, but the site doesn’t say what time school gets out. What’s up with that?\
    Don’t tell the kids that there is snow in Virginia. They’d be heartbroken that they are missing it.\
    Max is on his third backpack of the year. The school requires see-through backpacks, which are either plastic or mesh and they don’t hold up as well. Boo.\
    Once a week, Brian has pizza at school for \$2. Sometimes coming up with \$2 in cash is really difficult. Does that make me sound poor? All of the woe!economy media coverage is starting to seep in my brain. Last week I bought mini brie to fancy-up my lunch salads and I was all, “Brie! We can’t afford no stinking brie! Woe.” I bought it anyway. Heh.

  • Writing Conference Bios

    Kevin Lawver doing his best Glamour Shots pose

    I’m speaking at a conference this week in London, and am speaking at SxSW again this year, which means I’ve had to write two conference bios in short succession. I hate writing conference bios, mostly because I feel like a complete ass writing about myself in the third person. But, I’m rather proud of these two. Oh, that picture up there? That’s the headshot I’m using for SxSW.\
    For the conference in London, where I’m supposed to talk about new technology and software in the social media world, but I’m really going to talk about how to be human and not be a complete tool on twitter:\
    bq. Kevin Lawver lives on the internet. He’s been blogging since 2000, been uploading to flickr since before it was in beta, tweets all day long about whatever moves him, and can be found on most of the major social networks and many of the minor ones. He worked for AOL for thirteen years building massive web products that millions of people used every day. When not tilting at windmills, Kevin: helped write a book about web development, won some awards, helped create some web standards, got his name on a patent, been interviewed on Canadian radio, invented a holiday celebrated by literally tens of people, and spoke at conferences just like this one all over the world. Kevin currently lives in Savannah, Georgia, and works for Music Intelligence Solutions building awesome web products that will hopefully revolutionize the music industry. You can find out more about Kevin at http://kevinlawver.com and about his work at http://uplaya.com.\
    For SxSW, where I’m honored to be on the Amazing Mr. Smokler’s how to stay inspired after SxSW panel:\
    bq. Kevin Lawver is a man among people of every gender. Kevin used to work for a larger internet company, but now works for a small music technology company telling people what to do and building killer web sites for independent artists. He loves working on the web, taking pictures, writing code that works, and making a fool of himself. He’s very very good at the last one. He invented a holiday to celebrate “awesomeness”, helped write a book about standards based development, won awards for building cool web stuff, and looks forward to having his face put on a commemorative plate. Kevin blogs with his wife over at http://lawver.net and launches web stuff over at http://uplaya.com.\
    Yeah, they’re not that different… I still hate writing them.

  • Musings

    • A Hershey kiss tastes so much better than a mini Hershey bar.
    • Kevin works too much. How do I know? I have been the one to haul the garbage cans to the curb and back.
    • Tomorrow is my 11th wedding anniversary!
    • I still can’t believe that 1) Arizona made it to the conference championship and 2) that they won. WOW.
    • I have been reading way too many trashy historical romance books lately. Better than not reading at all, I guess.

  • Going to raspberry the world

    Months ago, Kevin and I decided to stop attending the LDS Church over their support of anti-gay rights legislation. This probably doesn’t come as a shock to most of you, but it actually is a really big deal.\
    We talked to the kids about this and they understand as best as they can. We are planning to continue to pray when we want, draw inspiration from the Scriptures, abstain from alcohol, disavow divorce, avoid sleeping with hookers, refrain from becoming crack addicts, and basically try to be good people. We told our families and the news was probably met with much disappointment. (My parents aren’t members of the Church but I know they are saddened to hear about our struggles.)\
    We have been struggling with this particular issue for years. The Church isn’t going to change its mind regardless of what we think. While the Church has seen numerous changes in the past, its handling of this issue seems different.\
    I joined the Church over 15 years ago and expected it to be a lifelong commitment. There have been times when it has been rough and times when it has been great. It is difficult to do everything the Church asks, but it felt like a worthy struggle. Kind of like marriage. Or, the typical idea of marriage where there are fights and happiness and bad times and good times and all that. (Kevin and I aren’t like that though, and marriage has been much better than I ever anticipated, but that is a post for another day). Since my commitment to the Church was supposed to be lifelong… I sort of feel like I am getting divorced. As much as I decry divorce in most cases, there do exist times when it is acceptable and even prudent.\
    So, blah.\
    I hate the idea of being ex-Mormon. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. But, I can’t stand the thought of continuing to attend and support the LDS Church.\
    Objectively, I am thankful that the Church got me through my college years. Maybe I just needed it then and “don’t” now. (Though I am not sure it is possible to not need a church, a community.) It helped me make decisions that kept me safe. It gave me many opportunities to grow and lead and learn and teach. It gave me friends who felt like family and family who felt like friends. It gave me purpose and direction in my life at a critical point between adolescence and adulthood. It led me to Kevin.\
    I don’t know what this decision means for my future, my marriage, my kids’ futures, and I am honestly worried about it. I don’t know how to teach the kids to abstain from premarital sex and alcohol without the Church to back me up. It’s not that I think either of those two things are inherently EVIL! Just that… there is just so much unnecessary heartache attached to those two activities that I want to protect my kids from.\
    So, yeah.\
    I can’t imagine going through something like this without Kevin feeling the same way I do. I am not sure how that happened, but I am really grateful for it.\
    ETA- Some people/media are choosing to bring up other issues with the Church, since it is a hot topic right now. I don’t like this and don’t want to hear [other] bad things about the Church.

  • Something to watch