Move over Mercer Island

The weather has finally changed enough that I can close my eyes and imagine it’s springtime, and that’s a good time to think about adjusting a bunch of things, including my blogs.  When I started years ago, this blog was a central place to keep my stuff.  Why post book reviews at Amazon, or restaurant opinions on Yelp, or advice about contractors at <fly-by-night websites> when it’s just easier to keep track of everything on my own site?  Plus, the engineer in me says if you want to understand the Web you need to jump in and do it yourself—don’t just read about it.   The downside of this is that my blog has tended to be a bit of a jungle: a little of this, a little of that, with no obvious theme or relevance to anybody but me.  (Even my mom doesn’t read me that much anymore).

So I’m switching to be a bit more thematical and that means focusing my posts in a way I didn’t in the past.  I didn’t expect that so many people would read me for the posts I made about Mercer Island.  I love it here, of course, but unless you do too it’s not going to be all that interesting.   Careful readers will note that I haven’t posted much about Mercer Island lately  because for the past several months I’ve been posting instead on a new site: iMercerIsland.com.  Go there if you want to read about local issues.  I may cross-post now and then, but generally speaking from now on richardsprague.com will be more about general ideas that I find interesting and less about the wonderful place where I happen to live.

The nice thing about iMercerIsland.com is that it’s open to posters besides me, so feel free to contribute yourself (email me if you want to learn how). 

By the way, if you want to get even more up-to-date MI information, you’ll want to follow Mercer Island on Twitter.  See you there!

The many faces of me

I’m a blog social media hobbiest.  I do this for fun, not for a living.  But as more people come on line, both friends and work-related colleagues, and as more people shift to online as their main source of information, I’m finding myself worried a lot more about my “brand” and how I appear online.  It’s enough to give me writer’s block. Here’s why:

Every one of us who uses online social networking can point to interesting and fulfilling experiences that wouldn't have happened otherwise, and we become evangelists for the cause. I think it's because any interesting person lives a complex, multi-dimensional life with at least the following faces:

1. Locational [people who happen to be physically near you] neighbors, the mailman, your barista.
2. Professional [how you make your living]: work colleagues, your boss; customers, others in your industry
3. Situational [associated with a particular time or event in your life]: your college years, grad school, that summer you spent in a timeshare in the Hamptons
4. Associational [organizations you belong to]: church or synagogue, service organizations like Rotary Club, the PTA.
5. Beliefs [people who share opinions or beliefs about something]: religion, politics, superstitions
6. Familial [immediate family and relatives] : brothers & sisters, uncles, ex-wife.

In the real world, these faces collide only occasionally, and when they do it can be an experience that ranges anywhere from wonderful to embarrassing.

In some cultures, these dimensions are marked with strict rules about clothing, use of eye contact, and even language. In Japanese for example, you literally change your vocabulary to suit the dimension you are in at a given moment, and it can be awkward -- even offensive -- to use certain styles of speech in an inappropriate situation. Even in English, we switch "speech registers" all the time: think about the words you use around your poker buddies versus the way you talk in a job interview.

Which of these is the real you?

Although we generally socialize with a given person based on only one of these dimensions, sometimes seeing little snippets of another dimension can make that person seem more alive and interesting. But go too far, expose too much of another dimension, and you've violated some rule that is awkward for you and your listeners.

Politics and religion are the easiest examples: what happens if your professional relationships find that you have a different (perhaps unpopular) opinion than they do? You are hopefully proud of your political or religious opinions, but express it too loudly among people who disagree (or who don’t understand) and it can be an unnecessary distraction.  Instead of being “that really smart guy who works hard and knows a lot about X”, you’ll be “That <member of minority group> who somehow knows about X”.  Even outside the obvious politics/religion examples, this can be true on lots of topics like health or even favorite movies and books.  Will it really help your “brand” if people know you like <such-and-such sappy musical group>?

A few weeks ago I heard a talk by Dalton Conley, sociologist at NYU and author of Elsewhere, U.S.A. who thinks the future might require us to meld these worlds into one. You will become a "hall of mirrors", with so many of your dimensions exposed that people simply won't be able to tell which of you is "real" except in context -- and we'll all just take it for granted that people are multi-dimensional.

Many of the “leaders” I know in marketing or management think they’ve solved this problem by ignoring their personal brand identity.  “I’m too important to be online” or “I make my team be online, so I don’t have to”.  But I think that’s dinosaur thinking.  You can’t understand the digital world if you don’t live in it yourself.  There are many faces of me, but I’m not going to figure this out unless I jump in.

How many books in your house?

We must have thousands of books in our house, on top of the hundreds (thousands?) we’ve donated to libraries and various book sales over the years.  But are we unusual?

from Hit & Run

The answer is surprisingly hard to find. Data from the 2000 National Survey on Childhood Health indicate an average of 83 children's books in white households (the corresponding numbers for black and Hispanic households were 41 and 33, respectively). I assume adults would tend to have more books than children (although maybe I'm wrong about that), in which case the average would be well above 100. In 2005, according to the Book Industry Study Group, 3.1 billion books were sold in the U.S., about 28 per household.

It’s tempting to dismiss the “average” American as a dumb TV-watching couch potato, but 28 books per household per year seems like a lot to me – even if there are a lot of non-readers out there.   Maybe the voracious readers out there are driving up the averages?

Meeting Online friends

Today was the first time I’d ever met Ken Camp and Sheryl Breuker.  For real, at least.  But I feel like Ive known them well for a long time, through Twitter and through their blogging.  Thanks to Google Latitude, I knew they were driving through the area this afternoon, so a few tweets later and we agreed to meet in person here at the Mercer Island Tully’s. 

There’s nothing like meeting an online person face to face for the first time. I can’t wait till the technology becomes ubiquitous enough that more of my friends are able to meet spontaneously this way.

One thing we talked about was my experience living in Japan years ago, where it seemed like I was constantly bumping into people I knew.  Of course it was easy to spot me back then, since I’m so much taller and just stick out in a crowd of Japanese people.  But I’m convinced that the same thing happens right now, wherever I am, but I just don’t know about it because we get lost in the crowd.  What happens in the future when technology makes that it possible to stick out of the crowd no matter where you are?

Twitter helps lazy people express themselves online

I think I finally understand the appeal of Twitter and why it’s making it harder and harder for me to get excited about blogging. 

For all the talk about how blogs have dumbed down the world’s discourse, the fact is that most of us take a certain amount of time before we post.  Much as I’d like to write more often, the process of creating something readable just takes too much effort, and it means I write only a fraction of the things I would write if I had more time.

But with Twitter’s 140 character limitation, I don’t worry about the time constraint.  I just whip something out:  very brief and very ephemeral.  Ultimately that’s the seductive appeal of Twitter: the short message FORCES me to set aside the universe of things I’d like to write and focus just on the things I CAN write in the here and now.

Plus, Twitter space is full of so much crap that, paradoxically, it makes me MORE LIKELY to write, since it feels like nobody will be taking it seriously anyway. 

That said, i do feel that Twitter is more of a fad than a permanent fixture of the future.  Ultimately it will have to be replaced by something a little more substantive, something more worth reading.  The signal to noise ratio on Twitter seems to be dropping over time and eventually I’ll seek out something with more staying power.  But for now I’m having a blast.

Better stay away from cocaine

A new study reported on the 23andme blog shows a link between cocaine-induced paranoia and the SNP rs9387522.  Turns out that I have the TT variation of this gene, which correlates with increased odds of cocaine-induced paranoia.

Guess I better stay away from cocaine.

I find this to be a problem with many (most?) of the conclusions I get from my 23andme results.  So far most of the actionable consequences of my genes tell me to avoid behavior that my mother taught me long ago was bad anyway.  Although I’m glad I took the test, and I eagerly look for a reason to recommend the test to others, so far I haven’t found many examples of why I think you should pay $300 to see your results.

No more Vitamin D shortage

Late last Summer at my annual physical, my doctor tested my Vitamin D levels and found that, like most residents of the Northwest, I was well below optimal—only 16.2 nl/ML in my case.  Since then, I began taking Vitamin D3 supplements to the tune of between 2000 and 4000 I.U. per day.  Basically, this means I pop two pills in the morning and another one or two in the evening.

Well, I’m happy to report that this week I had my levels tested again and I’m now up to a healthy  52.0 nl/ML.  Since the ideal range is between 32 and 100, I’m not going to bother increasing my dose.  By the way, although the test was covered by my insurance, the normal price for the test is $150 – outrageous!

I found that I was able to get good results by taking relatively cheap supplements purchased at Costco  for something like $10 for a bottle of 300 (on the left in this photo).  Lately I’ve been trying the drop version (on the right, below) which is about the same price but takes up less space.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, and knock on wood and all that, but I haven’t had any colds or flu or any other significant sickness since last summer.  We’ll see if that lasts, but I’m pretty convinced this is a good idea when you live in an area without much sunshine.