Darkness consuming
The day’s remnants fade to dust
Monday approaches
Blog
A Sunday afternoon
This Sunday, mid-day
Sunlight streams in through windows
Calmness seeping in
Friendship in the Digital Age
Lately I’ve pondered “connection”. With several hundred Facebook friends, LinkedIn connection, over a thousand Twitter followers….maintaining connection starts to feel easy. Too easy.
I’m noticing that I interact with a smallish group of the same people on those different channels. These are dear friends, but not even close to the larger group of people I want to maintain relationship with. So many good folks that I keep thinking “why don’t we get together more often?” That bothers me.
I signed up for Plaxo ages ago, and I really haven’t done anything to maintain that list. But I get emails reminding me of birthdays and any other events (anniversaries) that I noted in my contact when I synced. These reminders are nice in that they trigger me to reach out. That’s a start.
So, I’m trying to “up my game”. Going to build a list of those contacts to, well, contact. I would like to start sending notecards out, too. That just seems nice.
Any of you feeling this lament? This disconnect from connection. What are you doing about it?
A silent evening
In silence I sit
With the stillest air I’ve known
Echoes of nightfall
Life, Death and Social Media
Yesterday had one of the surrealer moments in my life. A friend from childhood has been ailing at Stevens hospital (properly, it’s now Swedish Edmonds), and was given a few days/weeks to live. So, last night he posted on Facebook that he had just hours to live and that this was his last post. With his deteriorating health, I fully believed the statement.
There’s much within this, but I’m focused on the newness of this. Since he has a phone, which can be worked pretty easily even when weak and exhausted, this contact was able to be pushed out. Made me think of the last minute letters sent by rebels, resisters, those executed for political gain. Those letters were far more effort, and would only be readily sharable with a small group of people. Now, with a few strokes of your thumb, messages are sent to out to thousands, potentially millions. The ease of mass communication deeply changes our connection.
As shocking as such a message is, I expect this to become more commonplace. Perhaps we can eliminate the feeling of isolation. And, in the end, perhaps it’s good. Maintaining connection in the most challenging and intimate of times.
Compassion’s Flow
Remember dear friends
Seek out love and compassion
Flow through you and out
Fixing Youtube “Embedding disabled by request”
So, one of my team’s videos was showing this error: “embedding disabled by request”. I have no idea how that setting got changed, as I simply uploaded it and then tried to embed it into our website.
As you’d expect, this was obnoxious. Finding the solution was a bit annoying, too, as the most recent post I found, from 2009, Which, as you might expect, wasn’t helpful. However, I did get it figured out.
- Go to www.YouTube.com/my_videos. This will give you the master list of all your videos.
- Skim through to the video in question, click “Edit”.
- Go to “Advanced Settings”
- Scroll down to “Distribution Options” & Click Allow Embedding”
The Ever Changing World Of Social Media
Was just reading this piece over at Business Insider: Teens are ditching Instagram for Snapchat at a stunning rate. Well, this reinforces one of my underlying assumptions: that what we’ve currently labeled “social media” is a highly unstable sector.
So, we see that Twitter is falling in relevance; that’s been prognosticated about forever. And the same with the Facebook and it’s sidekick Instagram. But we’re seeing growth with Snapchat. Again, the focus of this article is teens, but I expect they’ll be the leading edge of social media trends.
They have two graphs that really capture things:
And this guy, which I think is more telling:
So, the world is shifting and shifting rapidly. It’ll be good to dive into Snapchat, if you’re not already there.
Scenes from my walk
Wandering my streets
With my basic agenda
And I find magic
Restarts
Rebooting myself
Discipline; thus a refresh
No fresh start promised