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Happiness is… Making a Human Connection
Is our culture is moving towards making connections that are deeply rooted in the physical world around us using technology? Â I certainly think so. Â For me text just isn’t enough anymore; I crave the complexity of human interactions and the thrill and challenge that comes with meeting new people. Â
Today I had a moment of serendipity that thrilled me.  I was reading this post and decided that I should email the author with some questions and thoughts.  I clicked through his contact page but there was no email address; instead there was a link to Skype.  I’m not a huge Skype user (although after this experience I don’t know why) but I figured: he posted the info, so I might as well start a chat.
Turns out Stuart Henshall is one of the founders of Phweet and in our twenty-minute-ish conversation he downloaded Whrrl (I asked if he had feedback for us) and gave me a walk through of the Phweet service.  Phweet makes it easy to connect and talk, for free, without even revealling your phone number – using Twitter usernames as your credentials.  Stuart told me that it should be able to support a very large number of users.  I can’t wait!  Think of what this means for coordinating tweetups, or even just providing customer service.
In the course of just twenty minutes I used two technologies; one that I wasn’t that familiar with and another that was brand new, and out of it I got a real human being on the other end of the line (and over a thousand miles away) and had an interesting and friendly conversation with a complete stranger. Â And to top it off – I felt completely safe! Â I’m going to try this out, I wonder what will happen if I get out of my comfort zone to contact more of the people who I usually just read passively. What is to stop any of us from connecting with people who interest, inspire, or even infuriate us?
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(I Am) Discovering Screencasting
If you’re not familiar with screencasting, wikipedia has a helpful entry. Screencasting has been around since at least 2004, and maybe even earlier, but I just have gotten into it in the past month and I have a sense that it could be an excellent freelance business that has yet to really hit the mainstream. I wonder if in the future every software product will strive to present themselves through well-designed screencasts. I’d like to be a part of that. You can check out a few videos I’ve made that are public work product for Pelago, and I have a lot more in production now.
Introspection. Making a video under three minutes in length requires a clean distillation of the key ideas behind a product or feature, which can be very revealing when someone who isn’t as close to the product tries to do it. For example, sometimes I give more attention to certain areas than the product creators would like – simply because those are the parts of the product with a value proposition I can grasp, get excited about, and explain to others with confidence.
Engagement. Show instead of tell and even ADHD viewers will engage their brains actively for a short burst of focus, as long as the content is interesting and well organized.
Portability. Video is unbelievably easy to distribute on the web, and can immediately influence SEO for your product or product blog as well. Embedding video into blog posts, FAQs, and licensing it under creative commons can virally promote your product for free if the content is worth watching.
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Pelago Day 2 – and other notes
Today wrapped up day two of my new job at the Seattle start up Pelago
, where I am working on the data team. I am very excited to be working for this company, I am surrounded by really smart passionate people and that is just the best thing for me. I have already been working on really interesting things that have me thinking in new directions and stretching parts of my brain that have be used, but never to this extent. I like that I am outside of my comfort zone, and my whole goal is to be as much of a sponge as possible. The work enviroment is really fun and laid back, and people still work really hard in this kind of enviroment. It is just a huge change from what I used to see – I can’t even imagine wearing my suit into this office and never will. I wore jeans and my chuck taylors to work today! It is really different, I am still figuring out what makes me comfortable.Our new Dell computer came today at home and I am still enjoying my first hour of pleasurably faster, well, everything. Vista is actually really cool on a computer that is powerful enough to run it, and everything looks beautiful on the gigantic monitor. Kevin is de-cluttering the house and I suppose I should be helping, but I am not very motivated. He is talking about putting our condo on the market after looking at houses on the east side this past weekend, but I am not really interested in going through yet another major transition in addition to getting married and changing jobs, at least not just yet. He thinks that this de-cluttering has to do with staging the house to show – but really I think it is just about living better. No two people were ever better suited 820 sq. ft., mainly because neither one of us is here all that much.
I finally broke down and got a Gmail account yesterday, since most everyone in the office uses Gtalk to message each other. I actually really like it, it is much more user friendly than Hotmail/MSN/Livemail (whatever they are calling it these days). I think I am slowly being weaned off Microsoft products, although my new machine at work does run Vista.
The next big purchase thing I need to figure out is what phone I want to have, since I really need to upgrade to some kind of smartphone that has email and a web browser, at the very least. There is the iPhone of course, and also the Blackberry, Treo, and some other stuff. I am tempted to just go for the iPhone since I know I would have so much fun with it and I experience excruciating gadget envy whenever I see Blake or Andrew with theirs. I really should just do it – my hot pink LG Chocolate phone is all scratched up, and besides having a pink phone is so, like, 2006. hehe. I also would really like to have an MP3 player. I know this is really weird, but I have never ever owned one. My phone now can actually be an MP3 player for a fat fee – but we have iTunes on our CPU and I’d rather just upload my songs to the iPhone.
The only other big purchase that I am looking forward to is, eventually, having a car again. Basically what I decided when I left my job at Expeditors was that, since I was living downtown, I might as well let my Dad take over the payments on the Land Rover so that my sister could take it with her to college at Washington State University. I feel badly because the car has recently started to have engine trouble and I know it is a hassle for them, but he also had the car for a month while I was on vacation and even took it to mechanic so I don’t feel like I was dishonest, it’s just unlucky. He should have looked at the consumer reports. Of course, it was already partially his liability, since we were both on the deed together – now it’s just his sole liability. On the flip side, I am very happy to be rid of it. I am not sure what kind of car would be practical and enjoyable yet, I feel like I lean towards something with good performance – but I also like having a larger car that is a bit luxurious and can seat more than two people. I think the solution to this might be a BMW M3 convertible. 🙂
