*** NOTE ***
I’m deviating from my usual tech-oriented content today.
Today has been perhaps the saddest day of my life. My best friend, Ryan, passed away after suffering a heart attack brought on by a genetic condition.
His wife, family, and I have spent the last few days at his bedside in what turned out to be a futile vigil. The hours of lonely solitude were broken and punctuated by bad news from the doctors and overwhelming sadness. There was quiet conversation accompanied by the constant hum of monitors. There was the routine of the ICU nurses. And now he is gone.
As a general rule, you can’t pick friends. A best friend is a completely different animal where circumstances throw you together and one day you realize that something very different exists between the two of you. Something that you never quite put your finger on.
For nearly forty years, I’ve had a friend who I knew counted on me with a steadfastness that goes beyond words; I did the same for him. It was never a matter of proximity but rather one of empathy. It was rooted in the knowledge that there was no physical distance that would prevent either of us from coming to the others aid.
In the quiet periods during the week, I often reflected on what my friend had meant to me and to others. I recounted stories from school, work, and life in general. I thought about the many different people who had come to visit and what motivated them to overcome the natural apprehension to visit a dying acquaintance. Although each of them had a different experience and story. It occurred to me that there was a common thread.
I know that it sounds trite to say that he touched people’s lives, but it was true. Without exception, every person had at least one story that revolved around Ryan teaching them a valuable lesson. Whether it was the former boss who had learned the value of humility or the special education teachers he taught how to respect their charges, he made a tangible impact on all these people.
As for me, Ryan challenged me to be a better person in just about everything I did. Whether it was school, sports, work, and especially ethics, he innately knew what I wanted and found a way to get me to meet my own expectations. He never dictated, he never scolded, but he always motivated. He set a great example and just let me come along at a speed that was comfortable for me.
If I’m lucky, I will miss my friend until the day that I die. That’s because by missing him, I honor him and what he meant to me. Good bye friend.
So That's Life? 
Where Have All the Good Times Gone?
03/30/2009I took some time off from writing for the blog in hopes that I could renew the batteries a bit. Of course, I’ve been online and reading, but nothing caught my eye or ear to write about. As I read Facebook updates and tweets during this time, I began to notice an old creeping sensation slowly moving up my spine.
As you may remember from my early posts, I was initially hesitant to start using Twitter and Facebook because I didn’t feel that I had anything relevant to share with the world. What I had for lunch or even what I thought of a movie was not something that I felt would be interesting. Since then, I’ve been exposed to some fascinating interaction during the December 2009 blackout in Honolulu and I’ve even managed to help get 29 of my high school classmates to create Facebook accounts.
What’s the problem you ask? It starts with the running “feud” between Facebook and Twitter users that can summed up with the phrase, “Facebook is to keep in touch with people you knew before and Twitter is for talking to people you’d like to know”. In case you’ve been fortunate enough NOT to have encountered this schism, Facebook people are snobs about roping-in the most people from their past and Tweeters take pride in ridiculous numbers of followers who they’ve never met. Does either extreme sound good to you?
OK, ignoring fringe elements has been a hobby of mine for many years so I should have been able to let this pass with ease. I was successful at first, but recently it’s been more difficult. I thought maybe it was the Twitter overload I talked about before. Then it struck me. Just like IRL (in real life), there are morons everywhere! I guess I should have realized right off the bat that creating communities from a (at the base level) socially challenged group would be problematic. There’s a reason why geeks have the reputation they have and they’ve only redoubled their efforts in the new medium. Speaking as a (almost) reformed geek, overcoming this anti-social DNA requires some strong medicine. When you combine this bunch with the casual computer user who joins because the interface is easy to use, you get a volatile mix that is liable to burst into flames.
Facebook is full of people I barely knew, those who want to be my friend only because they want me to join a game with them, or gambling addicts looking for a poker chip handout. Twitter is replete with people who would have been gagged and stuffed into a dumpster for failing to curtail their predilection to blurt every thought that popped into their head. But these are domains where they rule. Places where they have all the knowledge and the general public has none.
So what is a person to do? Well, I’ve reviewed my Twitter follows and removed a bunch that irritate me on a regular basis. I’m eyeing a few who, while mildly entertaining, blather endlessly on topics only a middle-schooler would care about. On Facebook, I could easily delete people without their knowledge. Instead, I’ve created lists of friends and carefully segmented who can see what. Neither of these is a perfect solution, but it keeps me sane while I wait for some real software to handle things like this in an automated fashion.
So, where does all this leave me? Sadly, it brings me full circle with the same questions I started out with. Stay tuned for and see if I break free from the grip of inertia or mire in the quicksand.
Posted in commentary, tech | 5 Comments »