December is often a time of reflection, with good reason.  It's a natural opportunity to consider how things are progressing on a longer time-scale than we often do.  For me, 2009 was a year of making long-term commitments.  I made two huge ones, and I'm extremely happy with both of them.  The process of making these commitments kept me quite busy for almost the entire year.

Most significantly, I married the most amazing woman I know.  Maegan Ashworth and I permanently committed ourselves to each other on September 19th.  Our promises to each other were conversational, humorous, long-winded, personal and deadly serious.  We made them in the most public way we could manage, and were still sad to miss the company of many important people in our lives.  I could fill a book with everything I love about Maegan, but that's even more self-indulgent than I'm willing to be right now.  Suffice to say I am confident this will turn out to be one of the most important positive changes in my life ever.

The real planning for our wedding was compressed into just a couple months because it was difficult to focus on the ceremony while the other major event of the year was uncertain.  But in July we moved into a new house, ending 8 months of ambiguity about where we'd call home.  The process started in November 2008 when we first became interested in the house.  (Just before Maegan and I left for our bicycle tour across Vietnam, where we got engaged.)  It took months to reach agreement with the sellers and then months more to finish the process.  

I went in with a group of friends to buy the house together.  For years we had dreamed of living together in something like an "urban kibbutz".  I've liked that phrase ever since I read it applied to Barack & Michelle's early domestic life.  But for a more complete description of our situation, see our co-habitation blog.  (currently unpublished.  sorry.)

Getting a mortgage was particularly complicated.  The global financial crisis obviously did not help, but our situation was especially difficult.  Living comfortably with lots of good friends requires a big house, which means an expensive house.  In real-estate, expensive is also referred to as "jumbo" meaning that it's too much for any kind of government guarantee.  So banks would either need to make a long-term commitment to us themselves (a so-called "portfolio loan") or re-sell the mortgage to another bank on the secondary market.  We learned that the secondary market was "frozen" to use the popular vernacular, probably at about the same time as one particular bank which had all but committed to giving us a loan.  Another complication was that we needed 3 unrelated applicants to demonstrate our collective ability to pay back the debt, which was unusual enough to make many mid-crisis banks feel extra skittish.  I spent a large part of 2009 working on different aspects of how to finance this house.

Happily the stars aligned one evening when I was walking over to the house of my then-future, now-current roommates.  It was quite common for me at the time to walk those several blocks to sign yet another thick stack of papers to give to some agent or broker or other helpful professional.  Along the way I noticed a four-leafed clover in the grass, and picked it up.  In grade school I spent a surprisingly large amount of my recesses scanning the lawn for these botanical mutants, and once had quite an eye for finding them.  So it wasn't an unusual or significant event for me, but it had been years since I'd found one.  We taped the clover onto the application-du-jour which was going to a small local bank, in an act that signified frustration, exhaustion and powerlessness more than hope.  This bank ended up financing our house.

So that took up most of my year.  Trying to buy a house for about the first half, with moving and settling.  Then a wedding followed by a fabulous honeymoon.

http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/stop-yellow-pages/

and stop the unsolicited deliver of unwanted phone books.  Even if recycled, these books waste resources through paper processing, transportation and the recycling process which produces a lower quality paper, supported by inefficient advertising.

While I’m on the subject, if you haven’t tried Google SMS, it’s a great way to look things up.  Just send a text to 466453 ("GOOGLE") with the name of the business you want, and a location specified in writing or zip-code and it’ll respond with what you’re looking for.  It does all sorts of other good things too.  Works on all phones.  I’m a big fan.

Steve Martin was very excited to get the new phone book because his name in it meant he was somebody.  But in 2007 when 10 pounds of dead tree show up on my front porch, I’m just annoyed.  The phone company wants to deliver this to me because their advertising rates are based on the number of phone books they deliver.  It doesn’t matter that there is zero chance I will even open the thing.  I take it straight from my porch to the recycling bin.  Like many things, the internet has made these objects obsolete for many of us.  But the old business model tries to hang on anyway.

So I decided to do the planet a favor and help support the robolucion and try to get them to stop sending me these things.  I called…

…which was printed on the front of the bag, and after navigating their phone tree managed to speak to somebody who was happy to take my name off their distribution list.  I encourage you all to do the same. It was painless.

The conference is small and invitation only, and pretty much everybody there was happy to be invited to spend a weekend with such a carefully chosen group of thought-leaders.  I was personally quite honored and surprised to be invited back this year because last year it was made quite clear that we shouldn’t expect to be invited back since keeping fresh opinions around is important for the function of the event.

This year I met far more people than last year, and felt much more comfortable striking up a conversation with whomever happened to be standing next to me.  Part of that is of course my own attitude, but based on others’ comments it sounded like a lot of people had similar experiences.  Several people remarked publicly at how uncharacteristically social they felt.

I suspect that a big contributor to this effect was a comment that Tim made on the first day during introductions.  Tim said to not just talk to your existing friends, and that we were all more likely to get invited back if we were more social with strangers.  He said that we were all invited for a reason, and so we all had interesting ideas to share.  This concept helped me break down shyness and intimidation barriers.  Later Tim made an analogy to making new synapses in the global brain.  (I rather like the idea of being a neuron in some huge hive mind.  I’m excited to read Toby Segaran’s upcoming book on collective intelligence, and really enjoyed meeting him this weekend.)

If the causal relationship I’m hypothesizing here is real, I see it as a great example of the economic principal that incentives effect behavior, and more specifically how small incentives can shift social dynamics.  I didn’t get a chance to ask Tim how deliberate or off-hand that comment was, but I’ll encourage him to repeat it next year.

I’d like to take a few moments out of my busy schedule to apologize in advance to anybody expecting a polished coherent lecture from me.  I decided to take an extra class at school this quarter, and midterms are on us in a big way.  That combined with a great wilderness first aid class that took up my entire weekend, I’ve been averaging less than 5 hours of sleep each night for the last week, and it’s starting to limit my critical thinking abilities.

This format is also completely absurd.  But I think that’s part of the idea.  My friend Barry is taking a rather sensible approach of repeating a few slides with minor variations — a sensible cop out if you ask me!

Still, I encourage everybody to come.  It’s starts at 6:30 PM at CHAC which is at 12th and Pinke.  It’s going to be a fun information-rich geeky thought-provoking chaotic time.  For my loopy part, I’m embracing the chaos.  Go team!

The last Ignite Seattle event was tons of fun and highly educational.  A really good crowd of people — a great way to meet like-minded geeks in town that you didn’t know existed.  I wrote about the bridge breaking competition.  There will be another Make Magazine competition this time around, but I won’t spoil the surprise.  Brady and Bre have promised us more space since it was so packed last time around.

So if you’re in town and want to hear me blather, come by the CHAC next Tuesday, February 13th at 8:30 pm for talks.  (Or even better, at 6:30 for the Make Contest which should be rad.)  Hope to see y’all there!

What is Dodgeball?

If your friends have discovered dodgeball, I’d guess you’re probably in one of three states:

• Infatuated with this neato service that broadcasts SMS text messages to your friends when you go out
• Wondering what your friends are always doing with their phones under the table and what the big deal is
• Sick of dodgeball spam to the point of being about to cancel it, or having already done so

For those of you lucky enough to have never experienced dodgeball, here’s how it works: every time you go to a bar or something like that, you send a text message to dodgeball telling it where you are.  Then dodgeball broadcasts that out to all your friends.  You can similarly send out non-location messages like "Anybody want to see a movie tonight?"  As a dodgeball user the result is that most evenings you get some (sometimes several dozen) text messages about what your friends are doing or thinking.  So many, in fact, that you will likely start to take the buzzing in your pocket less seriously than you used to.  At this point the service’s name and logo start to make some sense:

You see an innocent guy who’s just been hit in the back of the head with a ball.  Again.  It’s hurts.  It’s not much fun.  But at least he’s used to it.  And for some reason that he doesn’t really understand himself, he continues to put up with it.  Seek it out even.  The SMS noise on my phone now sounds like the "Bonk!" of a cherry ball striking the base of the skull.

Dodgeball Abuse

Knowing that your friends are hanging out at a bar is great.  That’s what it’s about.  These kinds of dodgeballs are intrinsic invitations to come hang out.  But if your friends are at all like mine, pretty soon you’ll start getting dodgeballs reporting that they are "on a small boat in the middle of lake serene" or "in a seaplane over Puget Sound."  These kinds of posts are much more bragging than invitations to join since clearly there’s no way to get where they are.  Private parties, distant airports and obscenely expensive restaurants are similar.  Also, sending messages like "my parents are driving me crazy" or "I’m stuck in traffic" really don’t add value for your friends.  Unless you’ve got a crush on the sender, they’re just whiny and annoying.

Several times in recent months, my social mailing lists have been filled with pleas for restraint in sending this kind of dodgeball, with only limited results.  Generally the consensus seems to be that you can always cancel the service if you don’t like it.  I find this somewhat disappointing because I think there is a good way to use the service. 

I consciously choose to put up with the perpetual annoyance for a couple of reasons.  Most importantly, the extra messages aren’t much of a burden for me — I’m not charged for them and my phone is "smart" enough to handle them.  There’s also some entertainment value in keeping in closer touch this way.  But most importantly it’s because about once a month I’m involved with a positive serendipitous social interaction from the service the way it was intended.  I’ll be walking down the street and my pocket buzzes and tells me that a friend I don’t see much is a block away, so I drop in and say hi, or vice versa.  That makes it worth while for me.

Managing Dodgeballs

A lot of these problems could be avoided by dodgeball adding a few more personalization features around delivery.  Right now you can completely block a user.  The so-called ex-girlfriend feature allows a user to appear to be your friend in the social network, but not exchange any messages with them.  This is a good way of dealing with friends who send lots of dodgeball spam.  Another mechanism that some of my friends have chosen is to have all dodgeballs delivered via email to a dedicated address.

But a better way for those of us with "smart" phones would be to segment which of our friends’ dodgeballs get delivered via SMS and which get delivered via e-mail.  Then certain A-list friends could actually send you text messages, and everybody else’s dodgeballs would get queued up in a place where you could see them, but wouldn’t get interrupted by them. 

Until the newly indocrinated googlers add this, I think there are some guidelines we can all follow to dodgeball responsibly.

Proper Dodgeball Etiquette

It’s become quickly obvious to my group of friends that the only obviously appropriate time to dodgeball is to report your location when others are welcome to join you.  (My friends have collectively chosen to ignore this guideline about as fast as they identified it, but that’s a different issue.)  Saying you’re at a bar or a concert, or even "in bed" are all totally valid dodgeballs, if used when others are welcome.  Sending messages like "drinks for happy hour?" or even "the sunset is absolutely gorgeous" are also completely socially responsible, IMHO.

The question of dodgeballing on a date has lingered as an interesting one.  Some of my friends like to dodgeball as a record of the places they’ve been.  But if you’re hanging out with just one person, do you really want company?  Rose, social genius that she is, figured out the right protocol for that one when she asked me "should we dodgeball?"  Recognizing that a dodgeball is an invitation for company, she asked me if I felt like inviting others to join us semi-serendipitously, or if I’d rather protect our hard-scheduled time as one-on-one. 

Really, asking first should be the standard protocol for dodgeballing.  When you’re with a large group of people at a bar, there might not be a point.  But if you’re over at a friend’s house for dinner or a movie, asking first is the responsible thing to do.  Otherwise whatstheirface might show up.  ;)

Now go forth and dodgeball responsibly.

Why?  To slow down traffic of course!  How does paint on the ground cause people to drive slower?  I’m not really sure, but it sure does.  I see cars slow down and even try to "go around" whatever this thing is in the middle of the street.  I think the fact that it’s so unusual is enough to make drivers question what’s going on.  It reminds me of the uncomfortable feeling I get when I see a car driving the wrong way down a one-way street: "Something’s wrong here.  I’m not sure what’s happening.  I’d better slow down because who knows what will happen next." 

I understand they’ve done two of these now.  And I understand they have further plans for this intersection.  If these street murals become commonplace they probably won’t be so effective.  But for now it’s a beautifully creative and constructive way to address a local community problem.  And now that I know about the fantastic group in my neighborhood, I’m looking forward to participating in future projects.  Go team!