Marry Me! I Like You and I Love You
May 29th, 2010Julie and I decided to send an electronic invitation to all of our wedding guests who are internet savvy. So rather than making hundreds of fancy cards, we made a little video.
Specific details were with held so that we could share the video through YouTube. I am quite happy with how it turned out. It was a fun way to spend a couple hours.
We have fun.
Tags: video, wedding
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First World Problems
May 13th, 2010And from the archives, this little ditty was recorded during the Winter8 Sessions at the Office. Brandon Hughes played guitar and Moog, Andrew Woodill played bass and piano, and if I remember correctly, I played Nintendo DS and a bottle of red wine. The piano outro was recorded at Bev and Jim’s under the teddy bear Christmas tree.
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Seligman and the Meaningful Life
March 11th, 2010Martin Seligman at the TED Conference:
Know what your five highest strengths are, recraft your life to use them as much as you can. Recraft your work, your love, your play, your friendship, your parenting.
Know your strengths and use them to belong to, and in the service of something larger than you are.
I think this is such an important notion, often overlooked:
Belong to a community.
Work hard.
Make a difference.
If you have meaning and engagement, pleasure is the whip cream.
As mentioned in the video, Seligman has published a host of positivity tests that assess happiness as well as strengths.
The Strengths Survey test took me about 15 minutes to complete. Here are my current results:
- Curiosity and interest in the world
- Capacity to love and be loved
- Hope, optimism, and future-mindedness
- Love of learning
- Social intelligence
These tests always find a way of using at least 2 top spots to tell me I’m a chronic learner. Funny that.
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Quiet on the Radio #004
March 3rd, 2010Quiet on the Radio is a potluck of mentionable items from my story. I group them together, not because they aren’t important enough for their own post. But because if I wait for the right amount of time the urge to divulge will pass.
The Mama Papa
There is a new Plants and Animals video. It’s quirky and française and I love it.
The Mama Papa by Plants and Animals from Secret City Records on Vimeo.
VideoFACT dollars hard at work. I am eagerly awaiting this new album. La La Land will drops April 20. You can hear another track, “Tom Cruise” here.
Plug a plug
Dan wrote a very nice piece congratulating Julie and my upcoming nuptuals. He also echoes my discoveries about how unpopular marriage is among the kids these days.
The funny little technicality that I would add is that not only are we having a short engagement, we had just celebrated one year of knowing each other the week before I proposed.
A mentor of mine commented in an email, “Man you don’t waste time. When did you meet this girl?”
To which I had to point out that my parents met and married within the timeframe Julie and I took to meet and get engaged. Needless to say, they aren’t concerned
Dan and I have yet to meet in person. We’ve been passing bits online for nearly a year now. He is a fellow musician and RSS junkie with exceptional taste. I’ve been able to cut way down on my feeds but still daily find interesting links through his feed. His Facebook Hiatus has challenged me to reconsider the value I receive from that service. I’ll write more on that to come. Maybe.
You Should Have Seen This
Greg Rutter has written a great list of ridiculous Internet memes. I quite like the simple design of the site, and depending on your cache clearing habits, items that you have already visited will be grayed out. Part 1 and Part 2
Warning: this will suck you in for a long time.
Wedding Dresses
….
Rube Goldberg Machines Too Shall Pass
Ok Go must have won a battle with their label about making their videos embedable. I’ve always been a huge fan of Rube Goldberg machines. Especially smashy ones. This video is certainly one of the greatest I’ve ever seen. A nice evolution for Ok Go’s string of single-continuous shot videos.
Update: Here is a link to a behind the scenes, “How they did it” of the video.
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Facebook and Death: The Sequel
February 9th, 2010Is Your Facebook Persona Real?
Is it really you?
Years ago, I wrote an article, “What Happens to your Facebook When You Die?” This article continues to be the most popular thing on my blog. Google sends me lots of people who are wondering this question. Back in November 2009, Nael Shiab, a student journalist at l’Université du Québec à Montréal wrote to me and asked me if I would answer a few follow up questions for an article that he was writing about Social Networks and death.
Here is a link to the article, On ne poke pas les morts (warning, it’s in French.) I wrote a lot more than the bytes that appear in the finished piece. And I thought I might as well share them here.
NS: Now that we have friends all around the world and electronic messages are often the only one way for us to communicate with. Should we think about an “electronic will” with all our passwords, email accounts, and profiles?
I think it’s a good idea to leave this information with a loved one. But the importance of it depends on the type of person and how they use these services.
Some people use Facebook just as a means of keeping in touch with old friends, or sharing photos of your goobery baby. For this kind of person, I don’t think it’s so crucial that their password is left in a will.
There are other people, such as myself (although less lately) who use Facebook as a kind of public diary. Their participation in posting status updates, pictures, links, etc is a part of how they keep track of what has happened in their day, what they learned, a funny thing that happened.
This is very similar to blogging, but A LOT easier, AND you are guaranteed a much larger audience than if you are starting a new blog.
For this type of person, I definitely think it’s important to leave instructions and passwords in a will. Why? because that is the fastest, easiest, and in some instances only way, to get in touch with all of the people that person is connected to online. Through their email, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter. If this is the modern address book, then this is the best way for a family to contact a persons community to notify in case of death.
Imagine someone is an active member of an anonymous online forum community. The relationships they have online can be real and meaningful. And if they pass away, how will word get out to the online community that he died, and did not just stop visiting the site?
Maybe to some people, these online relationships are less meaningful, and therefore do not deserve/require the same kind of grieving and respect to be paid in the sad event of a death. BUT, for the kind of person who spends a lot of their lives online, especially a large percentage of their social life online, CERTAINLY these people and connections are important.
NS: Is our virtual life a part of real life?
Most certainly. And if you don’t think so, maybe you need to watch the Matrix a second time. (Spoiler alert: there is no spoon.) As narcissistic as it sounds, the chronic facebooker I described above is defining themselves and their existence by posting status updates. Is it real? Absolutely. Is it the same thing as talking to real people? Not at all. And there is a danger of getting fb obsessed and mistaking fb for genuine human contact. A facebook poke is not the same thing as a hug. And we all need a hug once in a while.
How you choose to perceive yourself affects how other people will perceive you.
And for the Facebook obsessed, there is the fear that if you stop updating you cease to exist. Poof. You become invisible, and people will forget you’re alive.
NS: Some websites, such as Facebook, transform the page of people who have passed away into a “memorial page” where friends can left a message. Is this a new way to cope with bereavement? Is it as strong as the old way, which didn’t use the Internet?
I can’t really make the comparison between the “new way” and “old way” to grieve the death of a friend. I only know of one friend who has passed away that I was connected to on Facebook. But I can say that her page is a place where people visit to deal with their grief. This friend passed in 2007, but even as recently as today, yesterday last week, friends visit her Facebook page and write on her wall.
I think it’s therapeutic and healing for people to be able to remember a loved one by sharing a message, and sharing it in a place where other friends of hers can see it and smile, and share in the memories. Yes. I think it’s a good thing.
As I think back over all of this, one of the most interesting points is how many people have (and continue to) migrate symbolic importance of their existence into a virtual realm. Sounds sci-fi, but it’s reality.
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