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Posts Tagged ‘Life’

Things I Love about Fall

13 Sep

By shockingly popular demand, a big, unorganized list of things I love about fall. Fall is just over a week away, and the weather feels like it’s starting it’s slow turn around the corner. Today was a gray, rainy, dreary day but it got me excited for the change of seasons.

Central Park, New York City, in the autumn.

  • The smell. Cold air has its own smell—crisp and clean—and in fall you start getting a hint of it in the breeze.
  • The food, in general. Summer is a time for light fare, both in flavor and weight. Fall is harvest time, and time for more substantial, savory stuff.
  • Inclement weather. Summer storms are good, but there’s so much more variety in fall. Sometimes it’s just windy, bright and clear and cool and windy. You get light rain and heavy rain and thunderstorms.
  • And those beautiful, red and orange fall days.
  • Pie. I’m usually unwilling to stand near a hot oven or eat hot, oven-fresh pie during the summer, but once it starts cooling down, and apples and pumpkins are plentiful, it’s pie time.
  • The clothes. I like long sleeves, sweaters, coats. It’s just the temperature where you’ll be comfortable in heavy clothes.
  • Hiding inside. One of the best parts of the weather is how warm and comfortable home feels compared to the outdoors.
  • The colors. Summer is green and yellow, winter is white and gray, spring is light green and pink, but fall is red and brown and orange: deep, saturated colors.
  • Hot tea on a cold day.
  • Dry leaves skittering across the road.
  • The holidays. Almost all of the best are in the fall, including my favorite, Thanksgiving.
  • The tension, suspense, and feeling of change. The world changes around you, rapidly. Weather is hard to predict and changes often. Hot, summer days give way to frosted breath and first snows. Trees start green and end stark and bare.
  • Leaving cider with cloves and allspice in a slow cooker all day.
  • In fact, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice, in general.
  • The light. As fall progresses the light goes through more and more of the atmosphere. It helps give fall, especially mornings and evenings during the golden hour, a really distinctive feel.
  • Really thick socks.
 
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Moving to New York

30 Jun

It’s summer, and you know what that means: big life change blog post!

This one isn’t quite as big. I love the work I’m doing at Mozilla and not looking to make a change there. But I am moving across the country. Again.

In July, a week after the Mozilla Summit, I’ll be picking up and making the move to New York.

I will miss the Mozilla office. As I deliberated and thought about this decision, that was the colossal “pro” for staying in the Bay Area. I’ve made a number of friends here, even though I haven’t done a good enough job of getting to know people. Feel free to think back on your favorite, relevant Bilbo Baggins quote.

I’ll also miss the fantastic working environment Mozilla HQ offers. I joked about having 20 people in the same room talking to each other on IRC, but the truth is it’s a wonderfully collaborative environment, and having people nearby to talk through a problem will be hard to replace.

Seriously, it’s awesome.

But the East Coast, and New York in particular, has my family. And my family can take Mozilla HQ in a fight.

It’s not just about family, but family by itself is enough to sway me. It’s family and a bucket of little-to-medium things. The more I thought about it, the more of those piled up on the New York side—weather and climate, time zone, culture, music, night life, urban personality, getting rid of my car, and so on—all the little things to add up to quality of life.

(“Weather and climate?” I hear you inquire. Yes, weather. I’m a northerner. I grew up with 4 seasons—they weren’t all 3 months but they were all there—and they mark time for me. And frankly, I miss weather. The Valley has a climate, but it doesn’t really have “weather,” not in the sense I know.)

I don’t know exactly where I’ll be yet. Definitely Manhattan or Brooklyn, but I’m looking at a number of different neighborhoods, from the Upper West Side to Murray Hill to Fort Greene.

Fortunately—obviously, I suppose—I have family I can stay with for a bit while I find a place. If anyone has realtor recommendations, I’m very interested!

New York is home. It’s where I was born. It’s where my father was born. It’s the best city in the world—Paris is a surprisingly close second—and it’s where I want to be.

See the form below?

Where’s home for you?

 
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In the Shadows of Media Giants

23 Oct

The McCain campaign will probably go down in history as one of the worst-run campaigns in American history. Not because of a few horrible gaffs (“helped create” the BlackBerry? intended to insult the Prime Minister of Spain? speaking in front of a green screen?) but because they forgot who their candidate was.

The following does not constitute rigorous proof. Just observation and conjecture.

For an experiment, I went to Google News and searched for “mccain” “palin” “obama” and “biden”, all separately, and just looked at the total results. (I looked on the second page because Google’s duplicate-finding algorithms usually seem to pare down results by the time you get to page 2.)

Here are the results:

Obama and McCain are fairly even (unsurprising, since most articles that mention one mention the other). What shocks me is that Sarah Palin, who almost no one in the country had heard of until two months ago, has already caught up to half of the candidates, who have been on the trail for a year and a half.

Unless Michael Palin has been making tons of news, lately?

She’s got two and a half times the press of Joe Biden, who’s been a US Senator for 35 years, so probably has some old mentions in there.

We see a similar trend in the regular Google search:

Here I attribute the difference between Obama and McCain to Obama’s lead among young voters. But Palin has even more momentum here, half of Obama and two-thirds of McCain. (I re-ran this search several times, because Google said it was customizing my results based on my recent queries.)

Why?

McCain picked an ambitious, photogenic campaigner. He, on the other hand, is an occasionally ornery, but usually soft-spoken old man. Barack Obama is a well-spoken Black man with a thousand-watt smile. Biden is the soft-spoken older man on that ticket.

Unfortunately for Senator McCain, he also picked an unknown, inexperienced Governor who usually sounds like a high school student who didn’t read the book, and looks like Tina Fey. Comic. Gold.

I realize that picking someone less exciting that John McCain may have been difficult, but picking someone much more interesting, and not in a particularly good way, was definitely a bad choice. Yes she energized the base. She also energized every comedian and reporter. So much so that they forgot about John McCain.

They are “voting for the chick.”

For disclosure, I only identify as a Democrat because they’re as far left as I can get and still have a realistic chance of winning. I’m roughly in the left side of the British Liberal Democrat party.

But, if I was a Republican, I would be angry about this. As a liberal, it’s just funny.

 
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Identity 2.0 – A Primer

01 Jul

Google your name. Right now. I’ll wait.

Good. What came up?

Look at the first page of results and ask yourself these questions about each one:

  1. Is it really me?
  2. Did I create this?
  3. Do I control this?

You need to be able to say “yes” to all of these for at least the top two or three results. (As I write this, the RSSmeme page repeating my Google Reader shared items has crawled above my blog, and I’m upset about it.)

Creating Identity

I’m lucky. My last name is very rare, so even if you Google just “Socol” I come in second—only to my father, and ahead of Wikipedia. You may not be so lucky, saddled with a name like Jones or Smith or, even worse, you might have the same name as a celebrity. You may have an uphill battle.

People with common names need to get creative. It can be as simple as adding an initial—my friend became Alec R. Johnston to distinguish himself. Something a little more creative—Lisa Bettany named her blog Mostly Lisa. Or you can geek out, like Ben Lew, who uses the name n0s0ap. (Those are zeros.)

Ben uses the name n0s0ap on del.icio.us, flickr, Last.fm, Digg, Twitter, etc. Lisa uses a combination of “MostlyLisa” and “LisaBettany.” I use a combination of an old name, “UrbaneExistance” (I know it’s spelled wrong) and “JamesSocol” for all new registrations.

But all of us, Alec, Ben, Lisa, and I, make sure our real names are linked to our identities. It’s no Clark Kent: n0s0ap is Ben Lew, with the glasses on or off.

Owning Identity

Do you own your own domain name? Why not? Go buy it. Now. Go!

I have this conversation with friends all the time. Would you want someone signing your name on paper documents? Of course not, so why would you let them do the same thing online? I own jamessocol.com, jamessocol.net, and jamessocol.org, just so no one else does. Even if you do nothing but have it redirect to your social network of choice, you should own your name.

If your name is taken, reread the last section and get creative.

Now, about those social networks. You don’t need to be on every one, but get on a few, build a profile, and put your name on it. You can create and control your own Facebook and MySpace pages without knowing a single HTML tag. Once you’ve got a name, whether it’s your real name or something else, use it. last.fm/user/you. twitter.com/you.

Controlling Identity

The best way I’ve found to control what the web knows about you is to start your own propaganda campaign. Put your name on a lot of things, preferably with links back to your own site.

An easy way to start is by commenting. Blog comments help the most, since you spread that influence around the whole internet, but within MySpace or Facebook posting real, meaningful, interesting comments on profiles and walls will make sure people think of you when they hear your name.

If you have the time, try blogging. There are a lot of blogs with great advice, but you can always just “write what you know.” Once you find your voice, the writing flows.

What else? It depends what you like. If you take pictures, get a Flickr stream. Last.fm is a great way to share and find music you like. GoodReads is a similar site for books. Twitter is great for finding people with similar interests and building connections. LinkedIn is a professional social network, particularly good for people in marketing or new media. Blogger, while not the best blogging platform, has some good community features. There is a lot out there.

Be Yourself

Don’t let someone else be you! Own your own identity and be proud of it. It will help you build authority and when a potential employer or client googles you, they’ll get a good idea about you from the first page of results.

What else, 2.0-savvy readers? What did I forget?

 
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The Hunt

04 May

So many apartments around here, and the whole local method of finding apartments, are based on these out-of-the-city, suburb-light developments. I don’t want to live there. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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