January 2008 archive

Why We Still Need Meatspace

Although I have made money off enabling online activities (primarily securing finance industry work), I have serious reservations about the idea that we can fully meet without meeting physically. I use video conferencing, teleconferencing, chat, and chatrooms regularly to get work done. My current coworker is in the UK / Europe / Australia / Southeast Asia, depending on the time of the year, so I get a goodly workout with using email, chat and Skype, conducting much of our business in "cyberspacee" or "virtual meetings". But we still have to meet face to face, in "meatspace".

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Chocolate Working: Stretching

Sitting here again, like an idiot, in the South Bend Chocolate Company's cafe in beautiful downtown Valpo. And indeed Valpo has a pretty decent looking downtown, as these things go. There has been some more money poured into it, mostly due to Valpo being the county seat and all the county and city employees would like to have someplace to eat for lunch. There's Jimmy's Cafe, a local diner that gets a lot of the old time city employees. People who remember when there was a big department store downtown. The service is decent, the food hearty, and the prices low. And they only take cash. (Yes, Ioannis, Jimmy's is owned by Greek Americans.) But right now, I'm just having a cup of coffee here in chocolate land. We bought a bunch of chocolate for shipping off to folks in January — lots of birthdays this month in my family — and we got to taste some of it. The chocolate-covered cherries are particularly wonderful. For a variety of reasons, mostly surrounding its position next to the courthouse off which the morning sun bounces, SBCC is my coffeehouse of choice for when I'm working. One of the local pastors, a guy named Kevin who has moved down to Virginia to work with a national group, used to call this place his office. I suppose that he and I had seen each other a dozen times or more before we finally met, about the time he left. But now there aren't the regulars like there used to be. I'm probably the most consistent customer that they have. Which says something bad, I think.

Some Shots From the Alps

I had to go to Switzerland for the quarterly meeting. The boss has a place up in the Francophone side, in what is frankly a town that is very pretty (see below) but past its prime. Good value on the property.

Beforehand, I stopped in Zurich to have lunch with my sister-in-law's fiancé, who is singing in this opera.

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Al eats some toys

Al decided to eat one of her toys and L grabbed the shot and sent it to me when I was working in the Alps. She's pretty cute.

Wasting Time

I'm sitting here at the public library, a great one here in the North End, wasting time. Actually, I'm actively avoiding doing work. I've committed to learning an ontology editor for OWL and the process is like sitting in a really boring math class, one without real world examples. It's frustrating to have to work my way through this awful tutorial. I mean, it's a nightmare. Sure, I'm someone who can both speak and write, and have the "been a professional trainer with classes across the US" pedigree, so maybe I just can't stand stuff that isn't competently done.

Or perhaps I really have lost my mind over the last few years. I find it very difficult to do these technical things any longer. I really just don't care about them. Frankly, I'd rather be weaving stories that convey some point. Not that I ever have one, but you know that.

Speaking of being incoherent, this blog recently had a wonderful comment that was so off-topic (and 20x too long) that I have not bothered to approve it. A selection of it follows:

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