Due to my continuing transportation issues I have to drop out of presenting at BarCamp Sarasota this weekend. I’m überbummed but it’s a consequence of what brought me to sharing my story in the first place.

Steve Jobs passed away today after an apparently long battle with cancer.

Very few people have managed to accomplish what the head of Apple did. After being ousted as its CEO, he returned ten years later to a company on the brink of collapse and brought it to the top of technology, with a valuation that for a moment exceed ExxonMobil's as the highest in the United States. His company has all but monopolized mobility, leapfrogging over much larger and more dominant Microsoft, with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and brought to the market devices that nobody knew they actually wanted until Apple unveiled them with nothing more than Jobs, a Keynote deck, and a stage. Nearly all of the more recent innovations in computing and mobility came from Apple, or came from other companies trying to catch up to or outdo Apple (had the iPhone never been produced, would we have seen Android and Windows Phone? Would we have seen the proliferation of touchscreen devices that we have today? Without OS X, what would Linux GUIs and Windows 8 look like?)

Other companies that Jobs led became the vanguard of their fields (Pixar brought us "Toy Story" and all the other Disney films that came after, bringing such success that Disney eventually bought the company and Jobs became Disney's largest shareholder).

And through all of this over the years he led Apple, his "uniform"--black mock turtleneck and blue jeans--never changed. Not once.

Somebody got it right when CNN quoted them as saying that Steve Jobs was a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci.

Fortunately Jobs has cultivated a deep bench of people at Apple who are more than talented enough to fill the void, but it will take many to fill that gap left by a single individual innovator.

Farewell, Steve.

I’m taking C. C. Chapman’s bait on this one. Of course, he didn’t mention what time he gets up in the morning. ;–)

I’m up at 5:00 AM (or 5:15 AM if I’m really out of it). The first of two commuter buses from Plant City to downtown Tampa leaves at 6:20 AM, and I like to be up at least an hour before I have to leave in order to fully wake up, do any personal hygiene habits that need to be done, and get a feel for what to expect during the day. I already know that today I will be scrubbing data for monthly and quarterly reports, so that’s a no-brainer. I’m at the computer doing a quick run through email.

Most of my morning routine takes place during the hour and 20 minutes (give or take) that I’m on the bus system heading to work, reading feeds and checking email (I primarily use Windows Live Mail for both on the iDuo running the Windows 8 Developer Preview. I chose to read feeds in Live Mail versus Google Reader because I can download the articles to read offline while on the bus or when the 3G hotspot on my mobile device doesn’t pick up for one reason or another, and my email is also all in one place (much like I did with Apple Mail when I was on the ‘light side’ of The Force™). I’ll also remotely log into my desktop workstation at work and start up the desktop so that it has a chance to run all its startup applications (especially the Wednesday virus scan) before I get there.

The rest of my routine on the bus involves checking my personal and work email and sorting the messages where they need to go (in Outlook 2010 I have shortcuts to flag and move messages I need to act on into an “Action” folder on the server, an “Archive” action to move an item into my email archive (I keep everything except junk and commercials), and a “Done” action that marks an item in my Action folder as done and moves it into my email archive).

So what’s your routine?

I just got the Google Analytics report for September, and traffic this past month increased tenfold over August, mainly because of my posting after Trey Pennington’s suicide, which got 1,665 views according to Google (Posterous reports 1,859 views). Of course readership tailed back down to usual levels within a few days of the posting, so we’re back to our usual 5 – 10 reads a day (it was never about the numbers, but the graph definitely dwarfed last month’s).

Overall, the site got 2,016 hits in September versus 176 last month (1,045.45% increase, according to Google). Thanks for reading.

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I did two presentations that day, as Blog Camp Tampa occupied one of the rooms, so I did my first-ever presentation on the Posterous platform that drives this blog, giving some of the advantages and disadvantages of the platform and showing how it can be a useful platform for pushing content all over the internet. Turns out I was in hostile territory—when I asked about what platforms people were currently using, nearly everyone was using WordPress, with platforms like Blogger and Tumblr way behind. The questions were great.

The second presentation was the one I had come to do, and it was an updated hour-long version of my "Shattering Your Small Cosmos™" talk, this time with Sara and Stan from BarCamp Sarasota in the audience, who weren't able to hear the results of their challenge when I first did the talk at their event. I never expect the SYSC presentation to draw a large audience given its content and the fact that the title does little to provide insight into what the content will actually be, but it still gets an amazing response in spite of me. I hope that some of those who were listening in were able to be inspired to tell their own stories, or to encourage someone else to tell their story.  Of course, once I get started in that kind of environment my notes usually get thrown by the wayside, even though I write them to help keep me focus on what I want to say.

All of the sessions were video recorded, complete with wireless microphones, so I'm hoping to be able to get a copy of my presentation on video very soon as there wasn't time between sessions to set my own recording equipment up.

A very special thanks are in order to Sean Davis and the entire volunteer crew who put this event together, and the folks at KForce Staffing who hosted the event at their state-of-the-art headquarters. Antony and Miss D. over at Head of Lettuce Media orchestrated an awesome social media campaign that resulted in over two million impressions on Twitter.

As always, I put copies of my presentations on Slideshare.net, and also at http://sysc.us/presos.

(download)

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An_Amazing_BarCamp_Tampa_Bay_t.zip (4.07 MB)

After a day of editing down over 8 gigs of footage to 8 minutes, and some tears shed, here's my end result to wrap together what was SlutWalk Tampa 2011. I stopped recording at the speakout following the walk, because as people began to tell their stories, it became clear that this was a "sacred moment." In sacred moments, it is simply impossible to fully capture the emotion, the raw passion expressed, unless you are actually there.

As I thought of tracks to use underneath the video outside of the main stories, I remembered a podsafe track by Polaradio that I had featured on SYSC #14, and felt it was worth pulling up again. When I laid the track on the last few minutes of video, I about broke down and cried (music has a way of doing that to me. A lot). It matches so perfectly the call of the event--don't look back to the pain; look forward to the healing and the end of the stigma of being a victim.

The opening track will be recognized by long-time followers of my music as the last half of a draft of a faster version of "Without You" that I had started back when I had a Mac and Garageband but never finished (the full draft is on my Soundcloud profile). I may get around to resurrecting it in Mixcraft on the PC tower and finishing it, but with life as it is that may be a while.

I've now had the chance to feel the emotions of people on both sides of these kinds of tragedies, and both sides have equal amounts of heartbreak and suffering. I don't write that to lessen the significance of rape and sexual abuse on the victims--in the end it takes a conscious decision by the perpetrators to cross that line from respect and restraint to abuse and rape (I like to say in recovery that each of us is one decision away from Stupid), and they must bear the responsibility and consequences of their actions. Victims need our help, healing, and compassion, but so also do those perpetrators who are themselves victims of abuse, for whom crossing that line is the only kind of "love" or "relationship" they have ever known.

So, without further ado, the finished video:

(NOTE: Video coming; there's a lot of it from my pocket video camera that I need to edit down so it may take a day or two.)

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walking-with-sluts-CCFnwlpqgjkuklbiAffo.zip (27.08 MB)

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Ten years ago today I was working for AT&T in Tampa when news tricked across the cubicles and a bunch of us eventually found ourselves huddled around a tiny black-and-white TV watching planes hit buildings in New York City and seeing the eventual collapse of the World Trade Center Towers. By noon all non-essential personnel (including me) were allowed to go home for the day. Nobody is going to get work done today after seeing all that.

On the way home, the local country station WQYK starting playing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” They would keep playing that song, every hour, on the hour, for nearly a month. I’ll admit I cried in my car every time that song came on the radio. I flew one of those American flag window clip-ons until I rolled down the window forgetting it was still there and it flew off the car a month later.

The resulting shutdown of every airport in the U.S. made for interesting travel plans. A group of colleagues who were up at the corporate headquarters in New Jersey turned in all but one of their rental cars and drove back from New Jersey to Tampa Bay in a single car the next day.

Then there were the security consequences once planes were back up the air. We learned to wear sandals to the airport or figure out a way to pull our shoes off at the checkpoints (and in my infinite wisdom, I always wore boots, because of my chosen method of transportation). Companies started making millions off the manufacture of 3-ounce containers for all our liquids. We laughed and cracked jokes at the displays of interesting objects we were no longer allowed to carry onto planes (“If your job requires you to carry a weed whacker onto a plane, you seriously need to rethink your territory”). Since I and my then-wife always flew stand-by on employee-provided passes (my former father-in-law is retired from Continental), I went through more security screenings in two years than I had in my entire lifetime to that point, and I did more of them because of my habit of Hotwiring flights the night before to visit friends back in California after my divorce. I actually heard myself called a “special” at TPA.

Each generation seems to have its one moment where everyone seems to know where they were when it happened. My parents' generation, it was the shooting of John F. Kennedy, the “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” on the moon, or the death of Elvis Presley. My generation looks to the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986 (I was in the eighth grade in junior high school, saw it on a tiny black-and-white TV in the principal’s office, and the L.A. Times pulled me and a few others out of class for an interview) and 9-11. Our kids will have a few: 9-11, Space Shuttle Columbia, Columbine High School, Michael Jackson.

I just now realized the irony of those “where were you moments” in my own life—they were all around a tiny black-and-white TV.

• Challenger—watched the replays on a tiny 4-inch B&W in the principal’s office.

• 9-11—watched it happen on a tiny 4-inch B&W in a co-worker’s cubicle.

• Princess Diana—watched the funeral at 4:00 in the morning on a tiny 4-inch B&W in my studio apartment because it got better reception than my 13-inch color TV.

Another environmental audio recording. This one was done on my Streak 7 using VirtualRecorder, which made a raw 16-bit, 22050Hz PCM file that I then converted to MP3 with Audacity. Decided to record some nasty weather that was coming through while waiting for the bus home in downtown Tampa.

Highlights:

• Brace yourself at about 1:09 for a very loud crack as a lightning strike happened about six or seven blocks east of the transitway stop. It nearly killed VirtualRecorder's limiter. From about 10:00 on things calm down with the weather.
• You'll hear a few of the buses announce themselves. When each bus makes a stop a recording on the bus itself announces the route number and destination. In this one you'll hear Route 14 (Yukon Transfer Center), Route 30 (Northwest Transfer Center via Tampa International Airport), and 47 LX (Limited Express to the US-301 Park & Ride in Wimauma).  A couple of more buses go by (nobody boarding to they don't stop) until I get on board my 28X (Express to East County) for the ride home to Plant City. The recording stops once I'm seated on the 28X.
• The beeping you hear late in the recording is one of the buses' "kneeling" mechanisms engaging. The driver flips a switch to make the front end of the bus drop so the door is at curb level, and then raise it back up to depart.
• As the transitway is limited to buses only until 7 PM, the only vehicles you hear are various types of buses. HART runs a few different kinds, including hybrid gas/electric ones.

20110909_170931.mp3

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20110909_170931.mp3 (14.51 MB)