Frequent topics of conversation with strangers: the weather, the time, the fact that it’s still snowing in April, the reason the bus is always late.
If you’re one of those people that loves bemoaning traffic, public transit, bike access, and a lack of great walkways, keep reading. If you’re one of those people that is not only frustrated, but has some fantastic ideas and solutions as well, I urge you to read the rest of this post.
Still reading? Good. I’d like to introduce you to Metronauts.
Uh, what is it?
To put it simply, it’s a way for people passionate about transportation in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton region to voice their opinions on the upcoming Regional Transportation Plan being drafted by Metrolinx. But how about I let the project introduce itself:
Metronauts.ca is an open community of people from across the sprawling greater Toronto region who care about the future of their cities. Metronauts are explorers of the future form of our cities and the role transportation has in our lives.
The Metronauts community exists online at Metronauts.ca, and also includes a series of physical events taking place across the region over the next few months.
Cool, so what can I do?
The first thing you need to do is get involved in the online community. The only way we can encourage good discussion and share exciting ideas is if we get a diversity of voices involved. You don’t have to be from Toronto; you don’t have to be a transit junkie to voice your opinion either. All you need is some ideas and a willingness to discuss them with others. So go register now.
Once you’ve got yourself signed up for the online community, come out to an event! The first Metronauts Transit Camp (sweet, it’s an unconference) is this coming Saturday, and even though registration is closed for now, if you put your name on the waiting list, there’s a good chance more spots will open up.
Wow, are you a rockstar?
I’m no rockstar, but I am pretty proud to be working with a great bunch of people on this project. Here are the members of the band:
Mark Kuznicki (Steward-in-Chief), Wendy Koslow (Cruise Director), Sean Howard (Participatory Research Strategist), Misha Glouberman (Conversationalist & Facilitator), Sameer Vasta (ME!), Jed Kilbourn (Cultural Anthropologist), Qasim Virjee (Online Community Architect), Matt Rintoul and Lee Dale (Community Site Design), Alistair Morton (Visual Identity Designer), Daniel Rose (Collaborative Innovation Facilitator), David Eaves (Public Sector Renewalist), Michele Perras (Innovation Design Strategist), Jay Goldman (Social Technology Advisor), Eli Singer (Social Media Advisor), David Crow (transitcamp.org Domain Steward), Joey deVilla (Accordion Guy), Mark Raheja (Experience Strategist), Mark Surman (Professor of Open).
In high school, I’d hear stories of jet-setters who would be traveling non-stop for work, hopping from city to city, hotel to hotel, never staying still and living the fast-paced life. I dreamt of being one of those jet-setters, living the high-flying life.
I was seriously deluded.
As someone who now spends a considerable amount of time traveling — and a considerable amount of time living in unfamiliar hotels, crowded airports, and stuffy airplanes — I can now admit that the jet-set life is highly overrated.
My friends don’t seem to understand my traveling malaise. They keep reminding me that I’m getting paid to fly to places like London, Paris, Brussels, and Lisbon on a regular basis. They remind me that I’m getting the opportunity to meet new people, explore new places, and have new experiences, all under the aegis of my freelance career.
I agree with their perspectives, and am thankful of the opportunities that I have. My traveling woes are perhaps somewhat more melancholic: I miss routine, stability, comfort. I love the bliss of strolling through Portobello Market or having dinner at a charcuterie near Champs-Elysees, but I miss the sensation of being in control of my time and activities.
What am I talking about?
While it’s not exactly the same, Rosencrans Baldwin expresses a similar sentiment of his experiences in Paris:
No one hears you when you say you’re sick of Paris. Sick of Paris: three words that make sense to people separately, but not in sequence. And they’re right—what am I talking about? What about champagne for sale in gas stations? And aisles dedicated to yogurt in grocery stores? And grocery stores that only sell frozen food of such high quality that, when reheated, it beats most bistro meals? And my boss and his thousand Lacoste shirts in every color? And all the gossip and insights: how French men go to pieces when they’re dumped; how Parisian girls won’t sleep with you unless you have permanent residency papers.
No one hears you when you say you’re sick of traveling. Sick of traveling: three words that make sense to people separately, but not in sequence. And they’re right — what am I talking about? What about being treated to fancy dinners at over-priced restaurants? And staying at hotels I could normally never afford? And watching rugby in crowded and rowdy bars? And having a choice of various kinds of bottles of water at ever meal? And walking past the line at customs and walking straight to baggage claim after getting my iris scanned?
I’ll tell you what I’m talking about. There are a lot of things I miss when traveling. What about the luxury of opening the fridge at any time of the day and drinking milk straight from the carton? And the comfort of being able to do your laundry whenever you feel like you want to wear that t-shirt again later in the week? And the ease of going to the gym and working out some aggression after a long day at work? And the ability to call a friend at any time of the night and grab a cup of much-needed coffee?
This year, my travel schedule has been much lighter, and I’m much happier for that. I’m looking at new ways of slowing down and making my life work for me, instead of my life being work.
Next time you hear me complaining about my travel schedule, please don’t look at me in contempt. It’s just my malaise being vocal — next week I’ll be grabbing lunch in Parque das Nacoes and smiling at the ocean. Remind me of those times when I’m a bit fed up.
Sorry if I confused you by the title of this post, but today, March 21st, is the new year, so I thought I’d send some warm wishes your way.
Still confused? Well, along with being the first day of spring, today is Navroz, the celebration of the Persian New Year. It’s a bit of a big deal in my family, and we’re not the only one: millions of households around the world will be celebrating the holiday today.
In honor of the new year, I’m making some goals for the upcoming twelve months. They’re not quite resolutions, because I won’t be upset if I don’t get them done, but they are large goals that I hope to work towards as this year goes on:
I’m going to need your help in making a lot of these happen. I need places to find cheap used guitars and bikes, suggestions on what good beginner camera to buy, ideas on what type of yoga is best for me, and introductions to the right people who can help me in my career development. Let me know if you’re willing to help in any way, I’d really appreciate it.
In the meantime, enjoy the new year. Navroz Mubarak!
At this point in the US presidential race, it doesn’t really matter who wins. What matters is that Barack Obama has managed to reinvigorate Americans to look at politics as a system for change instead of simply an exercise in power.
I have praised Obama on his oratory skills before — going so far as saying that he was the best orator American politics has ever seen — but his speech yesterday brought political discourse to a whole new level. Instead of simply denouncing Reverend Wright’s previous comments and simplifying the race issue, he used the opportunity to address the complexity of (and lend relevance and validity to) America’s inherent frustrations with the way things have been happening in their country.
For those of you that haven’t seen the video, I strongly recommend you check it out in its entirety to understand the true historical impact that his speech will have on American society.
History textbook writers across the nation woke up this morning with an important task ahead of them: to incorporate this speech into the historical canon of American politics. If there’s anything high school students in the USA need to learn, it’s how to take adversity and turn into inspiration — how to use other people’s anger and frustration as a springboard for enlightened discussion and motivation for change.
I’m not here to tell you to vote for one candidate or another. I’m here to share with you the vision of a man who truly believes in the potential of the people in his country.
In a post earlier this year, I explained why I felt Obama was what America needed more than anyone else:
Obama was not only insightful and intelligent, but he also had a passion. Not a passion to win an election or to gain power and respect — instead, he had a passion to discuss what was on my mind, to learn more from who I am, where I came from, and what I knew. It is this passion to learn, to grow, and to inspire that makes me hope that Barack Obama is the next President of the United States of America. After all, if America needs anything right now, it’s the passion to learn from the people within and outside its borders.
I have not wavered from that sentiment. Obama is a man that embraces potential and rigorous discourse instead of petty politicking. That’s my kind of world leader.
Remember how, four years ago, some Americans threatened to move to Canada if George W. Bush won the election? Well, if Barack Obama wins the election, I’m promising to move to the United States of America.
Update: In even more impressive news, it turns out Obama wrote the speech himself. No speechwriters involved. Wow.
For a span of two or three years, I didn’t update my resume once. All the employment opportunities that came my way were filtered through word-of-mouth and potential employers were able to review my work and credentials through my blog and web presence.
So when Seth Godin recently wrote his post entitled Why bother having a resume? and claimed that remarkable people don’t need resumes, I was ready to wholeheartedly agree. After all, as Seth says:
A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, “oh, they’re missing this or they’re missing that,” and boom, you’re out.
Recently, however, I’ve learned that a resume is not only a good thing to have, but still almost necessary when searching for a job.
There are still several companies and organizations that require a resume in order to apply for certain positions. To people like Seth, those “average jobs” in the “corporate behemoth” might be worthy of derision, but to many of us still starting out in our respective industries they are learning opportunities and chances to build experience that makes us all the more remarkable.
I won’t argue that having a resume is the best way to be recruited: truly spectacular people will have projects, blogs, and portfolios that accentuate their talents. Having a resume, however, is a good way to get those projects, blogs, and portfolios noticed by people who aren’t usually in the habit of looking at those things.
Because of that, I have and use a resume. It’s not the only tool in my employability arsenal, but it’s a good first move when necessary.
I get upset with the anti-gay rhetoric here in North America quite regularly. I often forget, however, that in other parts of the world, there’s more than just an cultural sentiment opposing sexual minorities: there’s law and policy opposing them as well.
I received a link from Yuvraj Joshi a few days ago detailing some of the work being done by Voices Against 377, a coalition in India speaking out against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which criminalizes private consensual sexual acts that are considered “against the order of nature.”
According to the website:
The law penalizes certain sexual acts equally. For example oral sex, regardless of whether it is heterosexual or homosexual; even penile-masturbation of one person by another is considered criminal. Although facially neutral, the law has effectively stigmatized and criminalized a section more than others, namely same-sex desiring people, including those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT), hijra, kothi and other Queer people. The law has been used by the police to intimidate same sex desiring people and has been a source of serious human rights violations.
People can think what they want about the morality of sexuality and philosophical discourse like that, but it’s hard to argue against the fact that having a law that denies fundamental freedoms is a violation of basic human rights, whatever your stance on the moral issues.
Several high profile citizens — including Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Amartya Sen, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Nitin Desai — have sent an open letter to the Indian government urging them to consider the consequences of such an antiquated and discriminatory law:
In independent India, as earlier, this archaic and brutal law has served no good purpose. It has been used to systematically persecute, blackmail, arrest and terrorize sexual minorities. It has spawned public intolerance and abuse, forcing tens of millions of gay and bisexual men and women to live in fear and secrecy, at tragic cost to themselves and their families. It is especially disgraceful that Section 377 has on several recent occasions been used by homophobic officials to suppress the work of legitimate HIV-prevention groups, leaving gay and bisexual men in India even more defenceless against HIV infection.
I strongly urge you all to read the rest of the open letter, and if you feel so inclined, add your name to the list of the people speaking out against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.
As a former Georgetown student, it’s no surprise that I’m a huge Hoya basketball fan.
Their Final Four appearance last year was not a flash in the pan as many have been suggesting: they recently won the Big East conference for the second year in a row (no easy feat in one of the best conferences in the nation) and are in position to win the Big East tournament and make a strong case for a high seed in the NCAA tournament starting later this month.
Of course, you don’t need to take my word for it. Dana O’Neil wrote a fantastic piece on ESPN about how JTIII is bringing the Hoyas back to their glory days. From the article:
The game for the regular-season crown was sweetly indicative of what the Big East is about.
It was brutal and ugly and beautiful all at once. Shots were harder to come by than Kleenex at a Brett Favre news conference, and the unforced and forced errors rivaled those of a crummy tennis match. Ten minutes in, the score stood at 10-7. Georgetown had five turnovers, Louisville six. Louisville went 15 consecutive possessions in the first half without scoring; not to be outdone, Georgetown all but blew an 11-point second-half lead with three cough-ups on three trips down the court.
But for people reared in the heyday of the league, there was nothing painful about it. It was exactly right.
I’m extremely proud of my Hoyas this year, and have been wearing my GU t-shirt all season. Before I break out into the fight song, check out this great site celebrating 100 years of Georgetown basketball. Let’s make our 100th year special by winning the national title.
Hoya Saxa.
“Too dumb for geeks, too geeky for dummies.”
That’s a horrible place to be stuck if you’re a new web application, and that’s exactly the reaction I received from Jay Moonah when discussing the newly launched Alltop.
For those of you that missed the big announcement by Guy Kawasaki this morning, Alltop is basically an aggregator that groups feeds based on certain topics. According to their website:
You can think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se.
I’ve been playing with Alltop for a few weeks now (it has been up for quite some time pre-launch) and have already put it to good use, but it was only after my conversation with Jay today that I realized that the true power of Alltop is its role as a gateway drug.
Alltop is easy to get and easy to like
For reference, here’s a snippet of the conversation I had with Jay over Twitter today:
- jmoonah: Hmmm, not sure I get http://alltop.com/ — is it just a bunch of pages with a bunch of RSS feeds? Am I missing something?
- vasta: That’s all it is. You’re not missing anything. It’s really feed aggregation for dummies, to be honest, and that’s why it’s smart.
- jmoonah: I sort of get it, but I have no idea who I’d point here. To me it looks too dumb for geeks, too geeky for dummies. Who’s the target?
- vasta: A friend asked me yesterday, “how do you stay on top of all that Mac news?” I pointed him to http://mac.alltop.com/. He=impressed.
- vasta: *I* don’t use Alltop, but it’s a good way to introduce people to feeds if they’re willing to learn but don’t have an entry point.
- jmoonah: Yeah that makes some sense. Be interesting to see how it does.
The anecdote about my friend is completely true, and it’s not the first time I have referred someone to the site.
A few weeks ago, a relatively tech-savvy friend was ruing the fact that there was no central repository for all the big sports news stories on the web. (ESPN ignored several smaller sports on its homepage.) I recommended subscribing to the RSS feeds of several sports sites, but my friend wanted a much easier way to get his news. The Alltop Sports page solved his problems.
Alltop makes you yearn for more
It may be too “dumb” for the geeks, but there is a large portion of the internet-using public that aren’t using tools like RSS but still are pretty comfortable with using the web and browsing extensively. Alltop is perfect for them.
The best part of it all will be the time when those same people using Alltop will stop and say, “I wish there was some way I could customize this page.” As soon as that time comes, these people will become new potential users of tools like RSS, Netvibes, and iGoogle. And that, if I may say so, will be a good day for the web.
Alltop is the first step — easy, fun, and seemingly harmless — to turn dabblers into hardcore users. Support groups to follow.
I am, what some may call, a Twitter evangelist. I preach the gospel of Twitter to everyone I meet. Most people look at me in confusion.
Today, my work has been made easier.
Thanks to the great folks at CommonCraft, I can now show people a simple video that explains Twitter in everyday English.
Once you’re done watching the video, go sign up for a Twitter account and then let me know so I can add you as a follower. Then, come back and read why Twitter is so much more than what you saw on the video.
Twitter is conversation, links, and ideas
Once you get used to the status update functionality of Twitter, the next logical step is discovering how the service is an excellent tool for asynchronous conversation. Like those in a chat room (from the old days of the internet), your conversations on Twitter are (usually) open to the public. This allows for fresh infusions of ideas and it also allows facilitates the discovery of new people to follow who have similar interests or stimulating ideas.
Conversation, undoubtedly, leads to ideas that reside outside the Twitter framework. This, in fact, is what I believe is the true power of Twitter: the ability to share links and ideas to people that want to engage with those same links and ideas.
Slowly, Twitter has been replacing my RSS reader as my main way of discovering good content. Essentially, following good people on Twitter lets me have access to personally-selected curators of the web, leading me to new places with every link they post.
What’s great about this targeted link-sharing is that the conversational aspect of Twitter comes back into play, allowing users to engage and interact with the links and content being shared.
Twitter is what you make it
I know people that are using Twitter for many other reasons than the ones I outlined above. In the end, Twitter isn’t just what you see in the video (though it’s definitely a great starting point) — instead, Twitter is anything you want to make of the most addictive asynchronous messaging platform to come about in years.
So go sign up and let me know so I can follow you.
About four months ago, I wrote a post about a middle school principal in Oak Park, Illinois that decided to ban hugging in her school. While I found the entire concept of banning hugging ridiculous, it turns out that other principals were in favor of the idea.
A principal in Mesa, Arizona, recently instituted an anti-hugging policy where small hugs of less than two seconds are permitted, but anything longer is not.
The ridiculousness of this policy baffles my mind. Are there hall monitors that stand there with stopwatches in order to measure the length of the hug? How is a three-second hug less appropriate than a two-second hug?
Luckily, the students of this school are smarter than the administration, and spoke out against the new rule with a giant group hug. This alone proves the value of the hug. Instead of protesting with violence, furor, or disruption, they decided to speak up and speak out using one of the most peaceful and supportive methods possible: embracing each other.
Students of Shepherd Junior High School in east Mesa, I support you and join you in your efforts to eradicate such irresponsible and ridiculous school policies such as bans on hugging. In your honor, I will hug all my friends I see today and tell them about your plight.
In the meantime, try and giving your principal a hug. Maybe a lack of hugs is the actual root of the problem in the first place.
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