Login and Socialize

Much have been said about our inability to unglue ourselves from any screen and interact with surrounding humans, nature, or approaching buses.

I won’t argue against this.

However, I’m typing this after finding a killer album on the music library of a friend in Singapore. Later —now for you— I’ll post this on my blog and 2 or 3 people will read it. A Facebook post will probably get me a few more courtesy likes – most of them from another time zone. Throw in a tweet, and a few hundred more people will be exposed to the title of my nonsense.

Yes, we are shallow and with the attention span of a mosquito. But no, we are’t anti-social. We are hypersocial1. Projecting our lives online and creating a narrative out of them — real or fake, that’s another matter.

Maybe our kids will look at our online profiles with the same horror as I do at disco fashion. But it doesn’t matter, they weren’t going to follow us either way.

  1. Maybe we have hypersocialnetworkability? Putting it here just to see if Google indexes it. ↩

On Execs and Promises

Dave Winer on My one talk with Marissa Mayer :

All this is to say that the promises execs make on acquisitions are meaningless. They own the thing, they will do what they want to with it.

I’ve been planning on leaving Tumblr for some time, mainly because I only want a blog, not the social stuff. And I’m still hopeful that something cool will come out of this, however, as Marco Arment says:

On a long enough timescale, Dave Winer is usually proven right.

Shorts for 2013-04-23

Mou, my favorite Markdown App now has a physical iPad stand. ➜ Add a Mini Display on your iPad for everything that doesn’t fit on the MacBook Air Screen ➜ More Clipboard History with search on the Mac with Collective. Complements LaunchBar perfectly. ➜ Switched my Note Taking app to nvALT. ➜ The Twitter #music app is kinda useless to me, but a beautiful way to discover new music. ➜ I want to love Triage for sorting through email, but still not working reliably for me.

Testing yet-another-link-style. This time shamelessly lifted from SimplicityBliss

Inside Oculus

Sean Hollister, on The Verge:

With the 3D visuals, the wide field of view, and the motion tracking that shows you whatever your head points at, it feels like you’re truly in another world… only you’re looking at that world through a mesh helmet.

This is the glass experience I’m more interested in. I’ve read enough sci-fi to know this is going to be amazing… and also that something will go terribly wrong, but never mind that. Amazing.

On Looking Across the River

Years ago I swam across two rivers.

This doesn’t make much sense, specially when you’re standing on one side looking across and mostly see a body of water. But in-between you and a barely visible balloons arch, two rivers flow alongside each other.

When you swim a few kilometers down from where the Orinoco and Caroni river meet, you cross rivers. It has something to do with density and composition of the water — should have stayed awake during that physics class (or was it chemistry?).

The point is, halfway across the 3.1 Km swim something happens. The water changes color, the temperature is different, and even the resistance of water against your stroke feels new. You still must try to paddle as hard as you can without getting too tired, since rivers have a tendency of taking you parallel from where you actually want to go.

I thought about this for a few seconds before pulling my head out of the water to see where the heck I had to swim towards (you also can’t see shit in most rivers). The experience was forgotten for the next 21 minutes, as I made my way to the finish line.

Once on the other end, I gulped down a sports drink, had an orange and looked back. I could now clearly see the two rivers, side by side.

Sometimes you get flash insights during specific moments, but it’s not until a little while later than you really appreciate how your views were changed.

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