Mary Panttaja

So, today’s post on Catching the Updraft has been a nightmare. It has so few words—but 9 images. So many things didn’t work right:

1. First, 4 of the images were missing—and I had to recapture them from a document (their source seems to be missing, but they aren’t really right and need to be redone anyway. But not today.) This took most of yesterday’s writing time.
2. Last night our sites were down. Our hosting provider is not very dependable and may have to be replaced. When I have time to write and post I am dependent on the site being up at that moment—a serious flaw in the blogging process exacerbated by the fact that I use images. 90% of my time on this post has been uploading the images.
3. WordPress, my blogging platform, doesn’t really allow you to put open space in the post. I need it to format around the images. Therefore the ugly periods that I had to use to create some space.
4. The upload failed 70% of the time this morning, so it took an hour to get them up.
5. My “cloud” images were made for a white background and therefore look terrible on my gray background, but fixing them today can’t fit into the schedule.

So my apologies. I obviously need to upgrade some technology. I was commiserating with a colleague yesterday about the horrible state of blog and wiki editing. A truly grim situation.

All good. Done now. Fewer images coming up.

A very interesting post this morning by Peter Brantly of O’Reilly Radar on the multiplicity of projects aimed at gathering more sensed information on the state of the planet. This is focused on new science to enable us to learn what is really going on and make better choices.

Everywhere I look in the natural sciences, there is a sudden, significant maturing of large-scale distributed science projects that involve active real-time sensing of one of more aspects of the physical planet and its environs. These projects include Neon, the first widely distributed ecologically-based sensing project; the Keck Hydrowatch project based in the American West, and a burgeoning number of geological and space sensing systems. Together, these efforts are often coalesced together under the sobriquet Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), in the ultimate hope that their data and insights may inform each other.

This made me think about our daily practice of developing more awareness for ourselves; to evolve our ability to actually know what is true and make better choices. It’s critical for ourselves and our planet that we not live inside of some story we tell ourselves, but actually see truly what’s happening. You can’t manage something that you do not see and understand. And you can’t move (yourself or your business) unless you have your feet on the ground with a true sense of where you are. That’s where traction comes from—feet (or wheels) on the real ground.

An apology to my dedicated readers for disappearing the last few weeks. The flow of thoughts has been quite distracted by family, travels, and new work projects. Any day now things will simplify themselves and the updraft of new ideas will start again. Isn’t that what we always tell ourselves? Sometimes it is true. But we need to be compelled by simplicity instead of complexity so we give up the distractions as soon as they can be released.

In addition, Jim and I have stepped up our riding. 10 days ago we started targeting 100-mile weeks—and now we’ve been days with over 120 mile trailing 7 days. This can’t last as our work time grows, but it is a good transition period. (We finally did our “block”; if you leave our place and keep turning right (or left) and take the smallest loop possible—30 miles and one big-ish hill.)

some technical issues to work out, but possible

Okay, it seems cheesy to talk more about the iPhone, but it is taking up a lot of mips at my house, including Jim’s post on his iPhone. So here goes.

What amazes me about the phone:

1. It’s damn beautiful. Really. The unit is beautiful, the images are beautiful, the interface is beautiful. The box it came in is beautiful, as is the bag the box came in. Wow. Every bit of it is a pleasure to look at and hold.
2. The color and resolution enable the images to just glow; and I love the way the images flip when you twist the unit 90 degrees.
3. It’s fabulous to actually just pull up a web pages and browse them. Extra fun that our website, which is so sparely designed, looks elegant on the iPhone. And you can actually read our blogs easily.
4. But what I really love, which is only mentioned in all the writeups, is access to the maps of the entire world with corresponding satellite images. I can see houses in villages in Spain—on my phone. So clearly. The waves coming in from Alaska off the coast of California are as clear as the eddies and drops in the Urumbamba River that surrounds the walls of Machu Picchu—also visible on the phone. Of course, this is just what Google maps does, but to have it always with me is like having a atlas to dream over whenever I want. Very cool.

I’m sure that there will be things wrong with the phone in the long run, but the initial experience really is quite joyous. Now we’ll have to deal with data synchronization (which applications can be made to work, etc) and more nitty-gritty details of contacts and calendars (though musics, photos, email, bookmarks all work easily).

So, is it worth it? Not clear. But if you really enjoy seeing beautiful technology that can change how we think about things—maybe so.

I finished the book today—read that last chapter, which might ought to be read first. WHY do you want a 4-hour work week? Because “work” is just the stuff you do to pay the bills, and you should be spending the bulk of your time on something more important—your “vocation”, your passions, living life, learning, and helping improve things around you.

Another way to spin this is that “making a living”, that is, earning enough money to meet some specified monthly financial goal is not a worthy endeavor if it does not also meet all those other needs and criteria. And maybe there are other ways to get freedom to engage in you calling than to buy it—even if it only takes 4 hours a week.

In Updrafting, we focus on finding that right thing to be doing—the most important and fulfilling activities of your life. If you find and execute on that, then you will have lived YOUR life to the utmost. Financial success may come, but it is not the key relevant goal of the story. Just as security is fine and all, but a concern for safety should not replace your life’s intentions. No one ever climbed a mountain with safety the first thing on their list of goals. One would never leave the bedroom.

This is not to say that there is anything wrong with safety or financial security, but to emphasize that we cannot let our concern for them blind us to what is really important for us to accomplish in this life.

And maybe we don’t have to buy our freedom. Maybe we just take it. Know ourselves to be free of whatever constraints we imagine—or, at least, that we recognize them as challenges to be met, not limitations on our possibilities.

We have a stack of books to read. The choices have come from a lot of different directions: lifestyle, business, new technology, programming, retirement. They all feed into the thinking process: what to create next.

Our process has included: watching what is going on in the blogosphere, attending conferences on new technology, trying to identify the most important thinkers and reading what they write, watching for interesting odd-bits and following their trails.

Tim Ferriss’ new book “The 4-Hour Work Week” came to my attention when he presented at the Ignite portion of the Web 2.0 Conference. His presentation “The Low Information Diet” was voted one of the top four presentations, and so he got to deliver it again at the closing session.

As a writer with books to publish, it has been interesting watching him go through the process of publishing his book, working the publicity trail using all the marketing tricks and techniques available. If anything, he is an agressive marketer and communicator. Something some of us frown at sometimes, though we are interested in the success it produces. This week he has been spoofed by Leno and then collected all the extra marketing appearances that such an event produces.

Reading his book has been on the list for two reasons: 1) Seeing how the publishing process works for him; 2) Learning what he has to say about a 4-hour work week. (Which is, of course, an intriguing idea.)

I was surprised at some of the really good ideas in this book, though I have some issues with some of the attitudes and techniques encouraged. For myself, I can see past the seemingly inappropriate recommendations (to daily manipulate your work efficiency to prove to your boss that you should be allowed to work out of the office, for one), and see that there are some ideas that really shift something about how I think about work and business:

1. It is possible to separate the ideas of earning a living (money to live) and your life and passionate work (see my work on Updrafting). You can build a business that generates the revenue and free time that allows you to dive into whatever you are passionate about. (This does not mean that your passion is not necessarily the same as the business that earns your income, but just that there is a possibility that you can separate them.) (I have done this before in my work, but not figured out Item 3: a strategic mistake; see below.)
2. If you are going to build a business to earn your income, it is most critical to really design a powerful and efficient business model. This is everything, for if the business is not financially efficient, it will not be efficient with your time and resources, and won’t generate income without a struggle. Been there and done that.
3. You can design and build a business model that doesn’t (after it is up and running) create a full-time job for yourself. This was really shocking—I always assume that what I am doing is creating full-time work for myself along with other folks. It was a very new idea to think about creating a business in which, as he says, “you outsource yourself.”
4. You can design an operational process that doesn’t care where you are—helped alot by the current technology platforms available. And he gives a lot of really specific tips, techniques, and references.
5. He gives a few business models for creating a totally outsourced business—they mostly focus around marketing products (things you can buy and resell at a good margin, or books and ideas). They don’t really get into the creative process: some of us are really interested in creating things—which somehow really does take time.
6. But the idea of creating a business the sole purpose of which is to automatically generate the revenue to support your chosen life style is an intriguing new, to me anyway, thought process.
7. If you created an automated income producing machine, then you get to spend your time on whatever you want. Travel and living overseas seem to be his passions, so he has lots of hints on how to do that on the cheap.

One theme that comes up is that where you live is an important part of the cost structure of the lives we have chosen. It is cheaper to live most other places in the world than it is to live here—thereby the reasonableness of really traveling—vagabonding. Many of the new retirement guides also suggest that life can be a lot cheaper for us if we intelligently chose where to live. The nix in the mix is that some of us have extended families that have inhabited neighborhoods for generations (like ours in Northern California), so picking up and leaving isn’t quite as easy as for some. (And though my children don’t live very close, they are also unlikely to follow us to Nevada or Arizona or Wyoming.)

Do I recommend the book? Yes and no. Some really challenging and useful ideas that I have not previously considered, but mixed in a bit with some shortsighted behaviors that are a little too manipulative. But that’s okay, take what’s useful and leave the rest. In general, it is a new angle from which to examine your life and make some decisions. What do you really want to do?

We’re off traveling again after a lovely beginning-of-summer party at our house. Magically, Saturday was the only cool day (in the eighties) we’ve had in a week. So lucky planning. And/or diligent prayers.

All seven us are snuggled into our SUV, an efficient way for us to travel. The aging Lexus only gets used when there are more than four of us to ride, or when we tow the camper. We manage most everything else with the Prius which has become our everyday car. I sold my darling Nissan 300Z (1991) to a local mechanic who can rebuild the engine himself. It was hard to see it go, but a good financial decision, and it was fun to see how excited he was to have it.

Meanwhile, after lunch, everyone is napping, except Jim, who is driving, and Gloria, who is four. Fortunately we are almost there so Corey (six months old) won’t have to tolerate the carseat much longer—which is not one of her stronger skills. We are off to spend a week in Ashland, Oregon at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I think we have six or seven plays planned over five days—a very busy schedule. The week is all about theatre (the plays, the actors, the direction, the music, the dancing), family (there will be eighteen of us here), and food. Okay, it’s all about the food. Choosing restaurants and menus is a critical part of the experience for us. The favorite restaurant by far is Thai Pepper. We’ve been eating there for decades and it ususally takes 4 tables assembled on the deck to serve us. It’s a beautiful place and no one ever seems to get tired of the excellent food.

Tomorrow night, maybe neuvo latino food at the restaurant Tabu with a performance of the Tempest.

(No, this is not about the current season giving way to summer.)

On the train Monday, the people next to us were having a business meeting/consultation of some sort. I couldn’t help but notice a beautiful application that was being shared. (One of the party had developed it.) It was a particularly appealing form of graphic analysis that I have been intrigued with understanding. The visualization is a network graph with dynamic movement. I have come across them in several contexts.

Erik Loyer has used them creatively in some of his digital artwork at his site, The Lair of the Marrow Monkey. Some of his work has been commissioned by MIT Press. A presentation on the book Writing Machines by Anne Burdick is here: Hollowbound Book. (Try moving your mouse over images to elicit interesting behaviors.)

There is a thesaurus available in a network representation: the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus. The intriguing thing about these network diagrams is that they have been animated—they react and self adjust, so they feel a little alive.

I have been searching for software for them and have been stifled by not knowing what to call them. Finally I found a developer, Mark Shepard of Adobe, who has created a Flex component. He calls them spring graphs. Of course, they have the advantage of being built in Flash/Flex which makes them even more intriguing.

They have something to do with the analytic work that has been tickling my brain. Something to do with structuring information, the origins of which have come from my writing requirements that I previously discussed. Jim and I have started exploring how we apply other constructs and constraint based concepts to the basic network structures. Not sure why, but we find it interesting.

The images from the train were also beautiful. Colorful networked gems moving and unfolding on a black night sky. Very intriguing and compelling. Who knows where it leads.

PS. Another source of information is the site TouchGraph.Co; they have Java-based Google and Amazon browsers.

We’ve been traveling light this trip—no car rentals, as few taxis as possible. In Boston, nothing but the T (the Boston subway system) and walking. Yesterday’s trip back to the Newark airport went as follows:

• A mile walk to the subway station with our roller bags and computers.
• A longish subway ride to the train station
• An Amtrak train ride from Boston South Station to New York Penn Station
• A New Jersey transit train from NY Penn to Newark Liberty Airport (on which I penned most of this post)
• A monorail, the AirTrain, across the airport to Portal P
• A phone call to order up the Day’s Inn hotel van to take us to the hotel

All in all, very efficient. Though it was a big day of travel (and today was more of the same: bus to Newark airport, AirTrain to the terminal, flight to LA and then to SF; bus to the car park, and the drive home), we got a lot done. It is really possible to read and work on the trains and subways, so the time is not lost. The airplane is a little more difficult to work on for several reasons (space, power, network access, and that grim sleepiness that overtakes me on the plane), so today was not quite as productive.

Meanwhile, New Jersey was just there gliding by the window.