welcome to the club

high life

So I am in London. Apologies if I didn’t let you know I was coming. I’ve been down with some sort of sinus thing for the past few weeks (yes, weeks) and while I’ve been treating it and superstitiously wishing for better health I haven’t wanted to make a lot of plans. Except for getting out of town which we did, me and Kate.

Yesterday was one of those Long Days where you get a flight in the evening and have three dinners and then sleep for an hour and have breakfast and then wander around like a zombie for ten hours wondering why you decided to come to this awful place. To be fair it WAS raining yesterday and the AirBnB place we got WAS a little cold (and maybe a little strange) but there’s some peculiar frame of mind when you’re over tired and overtraveled which makes you believe that these problems will never get any better. But of course they do. Today looks a lot nicer.

And the ootchy feeling was despite the fact that we mysteriously got upgraded from Business Class (slightly larger seats for not a lot more money) to Club Class (a seat that turns into a bed which would have cost six times what our tickets cost) for no reason we can discern. Like we were just sitting in the airport with bellies full of french fries and heard our names and went to the counter and they said “We’ve moved your seats” and we were all “Awwww, we picked those specially” and they looked at us like we were insane and said “No, seriously, you’ll like these” and we did.

Club Class is clubby. There was a special room in the airport to eat free food, special nonsense on the plane (multiple packages of slippers and toothbrushes and free magazines and alcohol) and even a special passport line when we got to Heathrow. I have traveled first class once before in my life (got bumped and upgraded) and it was full of odd people at least one of whom was actively rude towards me the entire trip in that “You don’t belong here” way. Which I totally buy into because hey, I don’t think I belong there either! While I think it was sort of obvious that Kate and I maybe didn’t belong in the Club Class section (who else plays with the seats for 20 minutes?) we did enjoy it a great deal. I try to take nothing for granted. This was a gift.

Now we’re having a slow loris morning figuring out how weird is TOO weird for an AirBnB place (are two towels enough for two women for six days? Is turning the oven on to get the place above 62 degrees reasonable? Is expecting more than one of the four pillows in your bedroom to have a pillowcase asking too much? Is the place otherwise pretty decent?) and seeing which museums are open on Monday. When I was here in August I went to a lot of meetups and walked around a just looked at things. This time around we’re planning to go to fewer meetups, more museums and work on getting our travel mojo back. So far so good.

old and new stuff

jess and jim try snapchat

So if you only read this page by going to the website (as opposed to clicking a link from facebook or something) you might not know that I redesigned the site’s “front door” which is just Jessamyn.com. It had been a while. Some of the stuff there didn’t actually work anymore. What looked vaguely fresh at the time now looked antique. I am not that person who says “It’s only five years old…” about technology stuff and expects that to be some sort of justification for anything. So, this time I borrowed a template from someone instead of hand-coding it myself. It still required some tweaking but not much. Responsive design (a page that looks the same across all phone/tablet/computer devices) is for people who do web design for a job. That is not me. I think it looks good, feel free to check it out.

Also in ancient technology stories, Jim and I learned how to Snapchat. I am leading a small workshop on some technology topics as part of a local Internet Safety program the schools are running. Part of what I am doing is running down some things parents might not know about or understand. Some of these are things I am pretty good with like Instagram and Facebook. But I’d never used Snapchat before. And so Jim (who now has a smartphone as of last month) and I decided to try to figure it out. Over Skype. Because we are old and a little ridiculous. And it was fun. Jim has an older phone so his version of the app and mine were different. I couldn’t use any of my usual logins because they weren’t available.

The deal with Snapchat is that it’s a way to send texts and photos back and forth. The photos allegedly “self destruct” so you can send racier things that won’t wind up on someone’s phone and eventually the internet. Except for the hacking, of course. I took this (completely tame) screenshot just to highlight that point. The little 5 indicates that the photo will self-destruct in five seconds. Except I screenshotted it before that. I’m glad I’m only learning this for fun and not because I’m worried some child of mine is sexting with a stranger.

Any other apps worth learning for an Internet Privacy talk with parents of kids age 6-16?

the whole “day off” thing and office hours

Having an internet job with no real hours means that there’s no such concept as a day off or a snow day, not really.

Today is a holiday, but a lot of my friends are at work and so am I sort of. Students are home from school but the teachers are at in-service days. Now that I don’t have as much of a regular job organizing the hours of my days, it can be a challenge to accomplish things that I don’t really want to do. Jim has this problem in a different direction, he’s juggling sometimes too MANY things and has to triage some of them. Less-fun things go to the bottom of a list that never gets fully cleared.

We’re going to start having office hours. By this I mean that we’re going to set aside 15-20 minutes once or twice a day for doing all that stupid built up paperwork and phone calls and other five minute projects that just need to be set in motion. Part of this is Pomodoro Technique stuff but part of it is just grouping like with like. Make a bunch of phone calls in a row. Put packages and letters together. Answer those three emails. Sometimes when I feel like I’ve been super lethargic I look back on the time I spent procrastinating about a certain email or other tiny project and realize that I’d been “working on” that email for a month. Unacceptable! So office hours are for this sort of thing. Filing. Putting things back in the toolchest. Etc.

And while I’m home today, I do my librarian thing and put listening/reading lists together. I grew up in a not-very-diverse location and moved to an even-less-diverse one. My mom spent a lot of time when we were kids making sure we were exposed to different kinds of people and ideas and cultures since the town itself wouldn’t really do this. I’ve tried to bring this into my adult life. It was interesting to see Selma become a big hit movie because I went there in 2006 when Greg and I were on a civil rights vacation in Alabama (a great idea and I suggest it for everyone). It’s a place with a lot of history but in 2006 there was very little going on except for annual civil rights remembrance events. I hope that changes. This picture (identical to the one I took above eight years ago) indicates that it isn’t changing quickly.

Today’s reading/listening list.

1. My annual MLK listen, a remake of the I Have a Dream speech with beats added by my friend James.
2. A playlist I made of many different people from all over the world covering Bob Marley’s Redemption Song
3. A report I found on Open Library: Racial harassment in Vermont public schools by the Vermont Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. This report outlines the racial harassment endured by students of color in Vermont in 1999. Not 1899, fifteen years ago.

We can have trouble, in places where “tradition” is one of the commonly held values, appreciating and properly prioritizing diversity of all kinds. This needs constant repeating, but today is a special day to remember that making that happen is a personal responsibility of all of us, every day.

My internet resolutions, an article

When I started writing for The Message (on the website Medium, I know!) one of the things I was asked to help do was help the group cohere, encourage participation, help put some there there. I can’t even really explain to people “Hey I get paid for writing things that are sort of personal essays on a blog-like site that isn’t mine” because it sounds nutty and not-totally-real. But it’s real to have a job and the people I work with are real (and wonderful) and it’s been a month and a half and I like it. So this article was an attempt, mostly successful, at getting some group participation around an idea that is a good conversation starter. There aren’t built-in tools on Medium for multiple people to take credit for a story. All the views and stats and whatnot are linked to a person. It’s coldly efficient. But everyone helped, both with contributing their own Internet Resolutions and helping me refine the parts of this I wrote myself. I even got Jim to pitch in and use the give-me-comments feature.

I’m not saying everyone should use it, I’m just saying it’s nice to interact with a new interface that isn’t terrible. I got so spoiled at MetaFilter where everything was custom made just the way we wanted things. I didn’t really think it was possible to have something I liked out of the box. Medium is, so far, that thing.

Our Internet Resolutions

where to find me, socially

guestroom

I don’t have a good touchstone single-point place where I mention all the other places I might be, so here’s the place for now. I have a resolution to try to mesh more of my online presences. Not like single-stream or anything but at least not have Instagram-jessamyn seem any different than Twitter-jessamyn. Its all me after all.

In short: if you want to get ahold of me there are a lot of good relatively synchronous methods. You can also come visit, the guest bed is nice. If you just want to maybe know what I am up to or share some sort of media stuff, there are a few places where you can get my attention, or tell me I should get yours. Some of these are the usual places. Some are new.

Personal spaces that I more or less own: this blog (crossposted to facebook), librarian.net blog (crossposted to twitter), jessamyn.info for people who might want to hire me, the books I read, the movies I’ve seen.

Social spaces: facebook, twitter, tilde club sandbox (I built a store!), flickr for chunks of pictures, MLKSHK for goofy pictures (crossposted to Tumblr), Instagram for a photo a day (crossposted to facebook), Tumblr for my JP blog, This.cm for one link a day.

I do writing on Medium but that’s more “read me” than “interact with me” though I love getting people’s comments and I guess you can follow me there. I never did much with Ello. I never interacted much on YouTube, though I’ve put a few videos there. I use Slack for a few work-oriented things and I like it. I’m on a lot of random mailing lists.

my year in cities and towns, 2014

Here are photos of the places I slept in 2014. I know I didn’t keep photo-track of the guestrooms I stayed in during 2013, but I didn’t know it had been so long since I’d made a blog post about them. A few years? I’ve been traveling less (and enjoying it more) so a lot of last year was just me going to Westport or my sister’s place. A few notable trips: first visit to London and an epic journey to Mackinac Island.

Here’s the list, it’s short. I decided to stop talking about traveling less and just … travel less. Sixteen places, six different states, two non-US countries. Stars indicate multiple visits to the exact same place. Past years: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 2007, 2006, 2005.

Westport MA* – visting/summering
Sun City West AZ – to see Jim’s folks
Manhattan, NY – library talk
Brooklyn NY – returning from library talk & visiting
Stow MA* – visting
Amherst MA – memorial service
Kewadin MI – Michael’s house
St Ignace MI – en route to talk
Mackinac Island MI – library talk
Montreal QC – heading home from library talk
Duluth MN – library talk
Ashfield MA – library talk
London UK – Wikimania
Brandon VT – wedding
Vicksburg MS – library talk
Sturbridge MA – library talk

medium, and power

candles in a dark room

I had a dream that it was before Thanksgiving again and there was some issue and I was displeased. Something about the drive back from Massachusetts always makes my next night of sleep go weird. Woke up happy that Thanksgiving had already happened, and actually had gone really well. Jim and I mostly hunkered down in Westport and ate food and watched movies and played video pinball and went for long walks. I also managed to pull some mystery muscle in my back so I’ve been laying low since then with Advil and a hot water bottle and a lot of stretching. I am mostly fine but I’ve been happy I don’t have a lot to do these days besides showing up places. Places I am showing up this week include

– a meeting today to see if I can take over the local music hall’s emailing function
– picking up the rest of the ground lamb from my CSA
– ukulele class
– speaking of the CSA, doing something with all this squash I’ve gotten from them
– making cookies for a cookie swap
– two scan-a-thons at local libraries, helping people get their pictures scanned and online or into email, on a thumb drive, whatever
– regular old drop-in time
– maybe a trip or two to the gym?

I’ve also got some writing to do, besides this. For the first time I can remember I’m making the bulk of my job income doing writing: my Computers in Libraries column and a bi-monthly thing for Medium. Medium is sort of odd because it’s both a platform, a place where people can put their essays for free, and a place that some people (like me) get paid to write. I wrote one essay there about Buy Nothing Day. You might like it. There’s a bit of stats-viewing involved in writing there. You’re encouraged to “amplify signal” on your posts and other people’s posts. I write for a section called The Message which has a lot of good writing in it so this is not difficult. Great stuff there. One of the curious things about my article was that it got a lot of traffic from being linked from Digg. Digg is sometimes seen as the Reddit also-ran but it apparently it still around and doing well. It’s always interesting to check in on internet culture. Anyhow, this is the long way of saying that I am a writer for a job now, as some people define job.

Update: I started writing this on Monday but now it’s Wednesday morning and we had one of those snowstorms yesterday that went all day including an exciting power outage at 9 pm that allowed me to realize just how many of my battery-powered devices have ancient batteries in them. I lit some candles, pictured, and read a lot and texted with some people on my phone and went to bed early in a cold house. My drop-in time and uke practice were cancelled. I spent a lot of time worrying about whether the pounds of frozen lamb I had would last night night (they did) and woke up to a hot house because I’d left the thermostat up (To 65°! So decadent.) and wore two pairs of pajamas to bed. Today we’re all back to normal and I didn’t even have an excuse to eat all the lamb.