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May 8, 2008 I tried to conserve electricity as much as possible this month and still my house is on track to have consumed 650 Kwh, or a consistent 933 watts every hour, since the meter was read on April 9. I can account for at least 165 watts of power from my computer gear, probably 200 watts for the central air fan (or am I being naive on that one). That leaves one or two compact fluorescent bulbs, my refrigerator, stand up freezer, basement dehumidifier, and various idling electronic responsible for the bulk of the base power usage. Obviously when I get home at the end of the day my usage shoots up as many lights and fans get turned on around the house, and I plug in computers and cell phones to charge, but I don't see where my peak usage could distribute to 300 watts per hour in the few hours that I'm here and awake. What am I missing?
 May 7, 2008 Rode from Paper Mill Road to Monkton Road on the Northern Central Railroad trail this evening with Phil G. The weather was great and I barely felt a twinge of exhaustion. We turned around at Monkton because the bike really wasn't properly fit for Phil and he hadn't been out in quite some time. Had a nice dinner at Ashland Cafe afterwards and then I headed home to watch the last episode of Babylon 5 on my latest disc from Netflix and the remainder of the Medium episode I taped last night.
May 6, 2008 Beautiful day for driving with the windows down and the sunroof open. Waiting for Twitter to come back up so I can go through my archives and make a better entry about the last few days. Hoping for my muse to come back soon so I can have a more interesting entries. Hopefully this is not an adjustment to all the coding I've been doing lately and just a side effect of spending my creative energy on Twitter.
May 5, 2008 Awful commute from New Jersey to Hunt Valley that took forever. Came home at the end of the day and got a nice dinner, mowed the lawn and cleaned out and vacuumed the car.
May 4, 2008 Breakfast at the hotel, followed by service and lunch at Olive Garden. Got back to the house and crashed from exhaustion for a few hours. Got up and went out to shoot a box of .38 special rounds with my father. So worn out by the end of the day that I packed up and crashed to head to work early the next morning from NJ.
User Theory A weblog about information technology support. Follow link to User Theory May 3, 2008 
May 2, 2008 Came in for a meeting at work and to donate blood. Have an enviable blood pressure of 92/56 and resting pulse of 72. All this exercise is driving my numbers down. Finished with the day and went to see an art exhibit featuring Suzanne D. Came back home and packed up to go up to NJ. Arrived around 22:30 and had steak dinner with parents.
May 1, 2008 Did the major client kick-off meeting today on the way into the office via cell phone. It's nice to be in the future. Came home at the end of the day and tried to get some additional work done but wound up bringing my sleep schedule back to the way it ought to be. At least I'm pretty much reset back to normal now.
April 30, 2008 After a rocky start, spent the day working at Bluehouse. During the day I met the guy who used to have my position at System Source six years ago. He's a nice fellow, and we talked shop for a while before he had to go. Went back to the house around six and cranked out more architecture choices and documentation for my current project. I've got to make some tough choices now about what logical levels to put things at, and the organizational schemes I want to use so I don't mire myself in my own logistical feces by the end of the project. If I don't have everything quite figured out by the end of the day tomorrow I'll have to move forward anyway to keep on schedule and trust the VS 05 refactoring tools to help me repair any bad naming choices a few weeks down the line. I have every belief that they are up to the task, having played with them pretty extensively a year ago. Caught Amanda U. on Twitter and convinced her to meet me for a burger and fries at Red Robin. We would have picked the Five Guys at Waltham Woods shopping center, but sadly it hasn't been built yet. When it is I'll be the first in line. Caught up on a couple years of changes in our lives (hers somewhat more varied than mine). I enjoyed both the burger and fries and a nicely prepared margarita. My body is now busy incorporating a half pound of cow muscle proteins into my torn up leg muscles and not complaining too badly about it. Got three meetings tomorrow and hopefully some time on the trail. Should be a fun day. Also, a brief public service announcement: My house is messy, my calendar is haphazard and my e-mail box is up to 948 messages. When it hits 1,000 I'm going to tackle everything all at once and bring it back down to 0. Hopefully that'll be before I miss any appointments in May. If I promised to be somewhere or do something with you next month and you haven't heard from me lately, please send me a short e-mail to remind me.
April 29, 2008 Took a bike ride to Wegmans over my lunch break. It was fun but exhausting. The weather is just chilly enough that my windbreaker was enough, but my fingertips were a little sore by the end. That was a little over 3 street miles in the middle of the day. Around 17:45 I hit the Northern Central Railroad trail and biked north until I started to feel overexerted around 18:23. I stopped on the side of the trail, drank a pint of water and ate half a loaf of bread, turned around at what I think was just a bit past the 8.5 mile point, and continued back towards the start. Started back around 18:30, took another 7 minute break at Monkton Road for more bread, and got back to my starting point by 19:15. Definitely did better than when I was riding the mountain bike the same route. I realized my handlebars need to be adjusted up, I probably need a new seat, and I need something to tie back my pant legs for future forays after work. I packed a pair of shorts, but at 58 degrees the windbreaker and jeans was the perfect outfit for the trip. Next time I will try for the 10 mile point (20 mile round trip) in about a week. Even if I only manage to add a mile or two every week I'll still be in great shape by late summer or early fall to do a 60 mile per day trip to Cumberland on the C&O Canal trail. This evening's weigh in: 124 lbs. With all the cardiovascular exercise I've been doing lately, my blood pressure is so low I feel like I could faint. When I hopped in the shower to loosen up my shoulders I got a little dizzy. It's a good feeling, tho, nothing suspiciously unhealthy. I just hope I get used to it quick.
April 28, 2008 Another mobile day around town, with some time spent at Bluehouse and Red Emma's working remotely over the VPN and their wifi connections. My house is so far out of control that I'll need a serious deep cleaning just to get it back. Laundry, dishes, mail, and bike parts are everywhere. I haven't produced all that much garbage (about two kitchen cans) with all the composting but I also haven't put anything out for collection in several weeks because I forget that I'm supposed to do it on Sunday night.
April 27, 2008 As I write this my house is creaking in protest as the nighttime temperature drops to around 50 degrees. Luckily it holds in the heat pretty well so I should not have to turn on the central air system again just yet. I'm hoping to get all the way to the next meter reading just to see how well I did on power consumption this month without it running constantly. A 50% drop in usage under last month would be nice, but I'll take any bill under $100 as a win. Today was quiet and relaxing. I did an awful lot of napping, and finished up another Babylon 5 DVD. I'm almost at the end of the series again, and I will probably start watching The Wire from start to end once that's done. All this exercise lately has done a number on me. I know I need to watch my nutrition better in order to make up for all the extra cardiovascular exercise that I'm doing now that the warm weather is here.
April 26, 2008  Learned that the Eee PC does not travel well in the bag on the back of my bike, but only because the bag itself is like a big bucket that attracts crumbs and debris. The small neoprene envelope that came with the laptop seems to protect it adequately from the elements, so I'll just need to remember to bring it along on future tours and events.
April 25, 2008 Day at work, new gear, more later.
April 24, 2008 Hello, Internets. Today has been pretty great. I fought with SharePoint and XSLT all day and although I wish I could have made it deeper into a solution I am satisfied with the knowledge I gained the last few days. Steve K. came by and we shared pizza and soda made with real sugar and caught up on things. It was quite nice. I wish I wasn't as busy, but being able to sit out in the backyard under the shade of the umbrella and catch up was nice. I would have more to say, but that's all I really need to. Tomorrow will be a very busy day. More then. Random facts: High indoor temperature today was 79.4 at 16:47. Tonight's weigh-in: 124.5 lbs.
April 23, 2008  That's what I'd call this entry if it wasn't just another stream of consciousness day-log entry. Maybe one day I will write the post or essay that I feel comfortable assigning that title to. This is not that essay. These are just thoughts. What is flux? When it appeared in my head it meant what many people suppose it does, "a state of constant change." I look a moment to look it up now and it turns out that flux has many definitions, the most prominent is flow, flowing, flood, or the rate of flow past a given point. Am I in a state of change or renewal right now? It's hard to say. It's hard to achieve balance with an eight hour day filled with work that seems to create imbalance in my life. It's all I can do to set the path right in my remaining 8 awake hours of the day, setting aside the other 8 (hopefully) for sleep. Am I in a state of flow right now? Yes, and the way I know this is indescribable except in metaphor. My imagination sees it something like this: As I stand in the river, I feel as if I have no resistance to the water that flows around me. It passes frictionlessly through and about my sides. I feel it always there around me, but if I close my eyes and pull within myself the flow has no grasp on me. I stand with my feet firmly embedded on the river bed. I know this because in a sense I feel now that am grabbing on to other objects in this flow and allowing them to pull me along their path. These people, ideas, actions, and feeling have a substance that I lack. They pull along with the flow, sometimes weaving and bobbing in their own fancy, but always heading somewhere. These days a hundred arms reach out from my body and claw at the things that appear to be headed in the right direction. Once I get a firm grip on one of these objects, I feel the resistance of the water grip on to me as well. Suddenly the eddies and currents of the flow bat around me playfully and dance over my skin. Suddenly I have motion and my feet are lifted from the murky bottom and I'm pulled as if I'm flying. I've always been in this river. Sometimes I've had substance, sometimes I haven't. Sometimes, like now, I've reached for those things that obviously do to help me along. Sometimes I have closed my eyes and for seasons at a time forgot the river was even around me. And that, in metaphor, is my life right now. I wish I understood it more completely myself. Should I be able to feel the flow around me without the ned to grasp around? Is my lack of substance a failing, or just something I don't readily understand yet? So I'm in flux, definition two. Before I looked up the word, I had no idea. Once I saw it, the connection was as bright and solid as any other fact in my life. Tonight all the lights in the house are off. Since the whole house has been 70 degrees or greater all week, I turned off the central air fan and closed the door to my bedroom. When I close my eyes and lie back on the bed, my ears fill with the squeal of silence. Then a single light shines on my face from the glow of my laptop screen and the tapping of my fingers and the hum of a tiny fan is all I've heard for ten minutes. I grasp onto the light, the feel of the keys beneath my fingertips, the dancing of the sound through the audio spectrum, the flutter of the words through my brain. Now I click "Create"--such a fitting button name--and send a ripple through the delicate spiderweb of my social network and beyond. Perhaps someone takes these words and grabs on as they head off through the flow to whatever their eventual destination may be.
April 22, 2008 Today was spent hopping between Baltimore-area coffee houses and client meetings. This evening was spent at home making up for all the unproductive time spent at coffee houses to get my time sheet to eight respectably billable hours. The important thing is that I did manage to get a fair amount accomplished at the end of the day. This means the experiment can reasonably continue for another day with me secure in the knowledge that even if I can't concentrate out in public I can always come back at home and do 150% better than I do in the office. So I will repeat this tomorrow with much the same itinerary, but much more boldly defined goals of things that must be completed by its end and a much earlier start to make use of some early-morning momentum and caffeine boost. I must say that Bluehouse is a very cool place to hang out and to work. I hope I can attract more local folks to come co-work there and share ideas during the day.
April 21, 2008 Today's schedule:
It looks like this for the rest of the week. I'm so relaxed by this thought.
meditate on the yeasted wheat dough Link to the weblog of S. Dawn Jones. Follow link to meditate on the yeasted wheat dough April 20, 2008  Most of all, it's good to be home again, 27 hours after I left. More later. I decided to get up and go to the supermarket during the torrential rain that kicked up about noon today. I picked up $122 worth of food and drink to last me through my upcoming "hermit week." I decided on 4/16 when I realized this next week had no evening calendar appointments that I was going to keep it that way. This will be an opportunity to sit around the house and decompress in the evenings, and basically recover from all the socializing I've been doing lately. Today's tasks:
April 19, 2008 At PodCamp DC 2008. Getting my learn on. Drinking with the pod people. More when sober. For a free conference, not counting gas and Metro fares, I spent $81.53 on meals and drinks. Of course that included a round of Jameson Whiskey for my new Baltimore-metro area friends that wound up being $8 per shot, plus another one for me for a grand total of $45 with tip.
PodCamp DC 2008 notes Generations by Jessie NewburnBook: The Fourth Turning
Micro-broadcasters
Because blogging has an appeal to gen x and they have the titles and responsbilities that require and use these tools, the tools that meet their needs come to prominence
Millenials - watched, watching, seen, being special, communicating and conformist, Generation that was driven to school until they were 13, they trust authority and adult created situation. Safety, trust, people are watching and protecting.
This room is like an apple commerical What do you think the millenial generation is going to do when they need to use tagging tools? Millenials are a dominant generation and they are going to create new systems. The more that they can be peer to peer they become profoundly powerful, Don't tell them to just figure out their system on their own Media message has to follow a fractal pattern, You need to change your strategy for your brand to get the message of the brand across Creating a graphic identity by Richard Harrington www.rhedpixel.comLocal DC podcaster alliance Duotone and tint with the client's colors, then use photographs of varying quality kuler.adobe.com helps you pick a color pallete Graphic identity is Colors and Fonts Will carry into the website and into your show artwork Even at small sizes in the thumbnails you can still read the title of the show Adobe video player adobe.com/go/mp Very easy to change the feed to Walled gardens vs a more freeform identity use a projector to put your show title in the background with transparency paper Use some set elements like computers and stuff Graphic blurred to look further away to provide depth of field, make it look like a very deep studio. Carry through the graphic identity to a field segment like a news footer, Flag on your microphone with the show logo, looking the part of a interviewer Add ghosting to make things look like analog production Go back and have a consistent experience by updating old content with the new header Is there a similar practice in old media or is this a new media thing
Don't like youtube because you can't monetize them. It should at least pay for itself and then it will be for promotion. Not everybody understands podcasting, some people understand the web better Podango
Tied together to business cards and other print media Social groups, media groups, professional interest May not understand podcasting, but a business card will explain to them Fonts:
Get card, get link to podcast. Podsafe music, Garage Band, Sony Acid, loop based programs, and free and bought music loops, Photoshop for Video uses loops from Fatboy Slim (Norman Cook)
By being the producers force them to use big fonts on their powerpoint All presententations made available, that gives them the call to action for the Google presentations
Education 2.0 by Whitney HoffmanCan gather information on a ton of things about children Figure out if they have ADHD and their educational needs If you don't have the data you can only access the numbers and averages That doesn't help you make cause and effect connections Can't replace the nature of the student teacher relationship or school setting and social structure. if you don't get that practice, you won't get it later in life.
Stupid and hard means the kids might have a problem, kids need to be asked how the feel about the learning process on a regular basis. Ask kids you are teaching for a job review. Teach the kids to use tech tools responsibly so they don't have to learn how to use them responsibly when they get to the workplace. Can teach them "laptops down" and how to use the tools productively and tune out of them when its time to focus one to many. Teach them that the Internet has a memory, and there are things they need to not share on the internet. As a teacher, consider public and non-public functions. Figure out how big or how small that circle of people need to be. Team based, outcomes and objectives, rhetoric and debate applied to issues. Tools like collecting business cards and social networking. Teach rule of thirds for photography, helpful tips, etc. Not a script to teach, but more of an interaction on helpful life skills. twitter and new media by Andy Carvin and Jim Long
Every breaking story that they have seen the last n months hes discovered through twitter. What is it about catostrophic events that galvanize people? Human need to communicate about tragedy. Key to success is honesty and authenticity, don't do it if you just want another outlet, only if you are willing to reply and have a discussion. Jim Long is a ham. New Media Leadership by joel mark witt folkmedia.orgWhat do you do when you have this stuff. Leadership: Lets see if we can make a connection between resources that you have, bridges the gap. Lots of people on the high level, lots of people making videos, nobody bridging the gap.
Connecting people together because the more connections we make the more valuable we all are. Soaking up: Be a sponge -- absorb as much as possible, squeeze it to get it out
Last scene of American Beauty Constant catalogging, being able to separate the wheat from the chaff The feeling of marking "all read" and feeling that you might lose something
Think for your own posts/production: Are you adding noise or signal? Think for what you read: Is this mostly noise or signal? How do you take signal and make more signal by connecting things.
New media geeky bubble - how to get free of the bubble ("twitter") People who are not inside new media still consume media, but they're never going to be twitterers, or SMS. While we grow we are separating ourselves faster and faster from the mainstream.
April 18, 2008 Weighed in at 120.5 this morning. I'm not delighted about that, but things could be worse. I have my mountain bike attached to the back of my car and I'm going to attempt my first ride up the NCR trail today until the sun sets to see how far I can get. Civil twilight is about 20:16 this evening so assuming I get out of here around 17:30 I will have about an hour and a quarter to ride out and an hour and a quarter to get back to the lot, which at a reasonable speed of 13 miles an hour will get me about seven miles short of the PA line. Update: 14.5 miles. Only 36 more miles round trip to go before I can make it to the Pennsylvania line after work on my bike. Go me.
April 17, 2008 Today is going to have an exceedingly lovely evening, but I will be spending it indoors in the Baltimore County public safety building playing a tabletop simulated emergency exercise with ham radio operators on our portable radios. There's something deeply wrong with that. Ah, the things I do for my community in the name of disaster preparedness. I also have 553 messages sitting in my inbox waiting to be processed. The mundane is starting to obnoxiously creep back into my life again. Can dirty dishes reproduce? I feel like I have more in the sink than I ever have clean in the cabinets. PodCamp DC is this weekend. Does anyone want to drive and metro down to Rosslyn station with me to catch some ad hoc lectures on audio and video podcasting followed by networking and drinking?
April 16, 2008  I may also try to make a dent in the 491 personal e-mails that are sitting in my mailbox. Evening spent watching Eric Schwartz at a house concert at Margie R.'s place. More to come from my notes when I have a moment to edit it and upload a picture.
April 15, 2008 I have a box of homemade cookies on my desk. When co-workers ask about it, I explain that I'm having trouble keeping my weight up and my mother made them for me to try to get back up to 130 pounds. The male response is to push out their beer bellies, pat it with both hands and chuckle "Boy, I sure wish I had that problem." Then they will ask for a cookie. The female response is an immediately darkened countenance and quiet seething as they stomp away. Several have refused to speak to me for the rest of the day. Also, on April 15, nobody wants to hear about the fact that you got your taxes done in mid-February about two weeks after your last W4 and 1099 showed up. This is the day to simply nod and make sympathetic noises. Tonight I got CPR and AED certified.
David Weigel David Weigel is associate editor at Reason Magazine. Follow link to David Weigel Megan McArdle The libertarian leaning weblog of Megan McArdle at The Atlantic. Follow link to Megan McArdle Julian Sanchez Link to the weblog of Julian Sanchez. Follow link to Julian Sanchez
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Hi, I'm Rob Carlson. I'm a 28 year old software developer born and raised in the suburbs of New Jersey and currently living and working in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland. I enjoy going to talks I find in the City Paper on topics I know nothing about, hanging out with my friends in the park, taking hundreds of pictures a month, writing every day, bike riding on trails and around town, keeping up on local politics, doing stuff with the folks in my neighborhood to make it a better place, drinking coffee, drinking beer, cooking (poorly for now, but I keep trying), pistol shooting, ham radio, camping whenever I get the chance, and being a geek. My goals in life are to harness the best technology available to solve problems, shatter bottlenecks, do cool stuff, get things done, impress my peers, lead by example, and change the world. Contact info:
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