Spousal email* before inflection tags:

Hi honey, I’m going to be late today. How about you start dinner and I’ll grab some kind of dessert on the way home?

Dang it, you think, s/he’s weaseling out of making dinner again! But wait. Here’s the same email, after inflection tags are added:

<tone="happy" chirpy="+3">Hi honey, I’m going to be late today. How about you start dinner and I’ll grab some kind of dessert on the way home?</tone>

Ohh, you think. S/he’s in a good mood, just running a little late. Okay. Maybe s/he’ll bring home some chocolate!

Just think what a difference it could make.

——————-
*This email is entirely fictitious. Any resemblance to any email sent by any person or persons, living or dead (can the dead send email?), is entirely coincidental.
——————-

I hit “reload” to find out what everyone was doing just before I quit for the night.

Nothing.

Blank white page, little spinny Firefox icon. No updates. No avatars. Okay, I thought. I can cope with this. It’s late, and I can just check in the morning. No problem.

Except I can’t. It’s STILL DOWN. I can’t say good morning to the Twitter world. I can’t find out how the class went for @BryanAlexander in San Francisco last night. I don’t know whether @blamb and @cogdog got their morning coffee. How was @mburtis‘s birthday? Is @mapetite still sick? I DON’T KNOW.

Which raises a question for me: why does it matter so much? Obviously Twitter gives me something that, when it’s not there, I miss. I feel unconnected, uninformed, unaware, and, yes, lonely, out here in the California satellite office of the NMC. I know you are all still out there, doing things. Maybe some of you can actually get to Twitter; I got a direct message from @mapetite this morning (it went to my phone), and http://istwitterdown.com gives me a resounding NO (linktribution to CogDog, thank goodness for IM). Great, so now I fear that everyone is happily twittering along without me. This is worse than being the last kid picked for the basketball team.

Twitter, where are you? Come back!

[Dear Reader: If you don't care how it happened but just want to know my five things, please skip down to the numbered list below. Otherwise, read on.] It happened thus: Brian Lamb twittered a Churchill quote and a link to his Five Things (written almost as long ago as Alan’s tap; as you will see, this is sort of a theme here), so I went to check it out. I’m glad I did, too, as now I know to bring my bulletproof vest to places where Brian is likely to be. In the post, Brian lamented that most folks had already been tapped ages ago (true, and a problem I shall face shortly). He also thoughtfully provided the link to Alan’s Five Things, in which Gardner C. and Bryan A. were already snagged, in a comment. Of course I followed the link, because CogDog’s Five Things were bound to be interesting (and again I was not disappointed). Imagine my surprise to find that down at the bottom of that post, I too had been tapped. Thing #0, therefore, is that I can be a little slow on the uptake. There, threw that one in for free. Five Things:

1. I can draw a mean Bill the Cat.
2. One of my early jobs was as a secretary. I sucked. Oh, I was so unbelievably bad at it that I can’t even tell you how awful I was. I hung on for six months through sheer bloody-mindedness and then I quit.
3. While it’s commonly known that I have a background in art, not many people know that one of the media I like to work with is metal. I prefer oxy-acet to arc welding… there is something alive about the flame that I don’t get from the sparks. Unfortunately I don’t have the equipment at the moment so it’s been way too long since I’ve had the opportunity to wield a flaming 6000-degree F (3000 C) torch.
4. In the spring of 1992 I spent a semester as a Peace Corps Intern in Libreville, Gabon. The internship program doesn’t exist any more, or didn’t last time I checked (mine was the second-to-last group. I don’t think this was my fault, but you never know). Twice a year, six interns were selected to go to various Peace Corps countries to do things like organize the central office library or, in my case, to set up and maintain their computer network. Yes, I hooked up an AppleTalk network, in Africa, and taught people how to use FoxBase, in French. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life and I loved every minute (except for the 48 hours when I had malaria; that I could do without). I learned to drink beer there, so I am naturally suspicious of any beer that you can see through.
5. I performed double trapeeze, Spanish web and shoot-thru (balancing ladder) in the circus when I was in college (sorry, no pix, don’t ask). My undergraduate alma mater, Florida State University, has a collegiate circus, and I performed in the homeshows. They take the circus on the road in the summer, but summer is such a lovely, pleasant season in Tallahassee that I always remained at home. Oh wait, no it’s not. I stayed home because I was broke and taking summer classes.

My turn to tap: as has been noted elsewhere, many have already been tapped. I couldn’t find a Five Things post from Gardner C., so I hereby tap him again. I further tap Vidya A., Martha B., Nancy W., and Fleep T. Go get ‘em, girls (and Gardner)!

I gather, from reading the Five Things posts of people I respect, that there’s sort of a feeling that this kind of thing is done in spite of our better judgement, and preserving the meme is frowned upon a little bit. I’m delighted that I could bring it back over a year after decent people thought it was over.

Thpthpthpthpthpthpthp.

“…today, for the first time ever, we’re releasing some of the best TED talks to the public, and I would like to request your help in letting people know just how a special a treat they have in store.

“The talks are available as a podcast series, TEDTalks, at http://www.ted.com/tedtalks and http://tedblog.typepad.com. We’ve launched with six remarkable talks – in audio and video – and will add more each week. Thanks to a partnership with BMW, all the talks will be entirely FREE.

“It’s a big moment: Until now, the TED experience has been limited to 1,000 people each year. But we’ve always known these talks deserve a much wider audience. Indeed, the whole vision of my foundation which owns TED, is to leverage the power of ideas to make a difference in the world. Now thanks to the maturation of online video and podcasting, and the visionary sponsorship of BMW we can share some of the best of TED widely for the first time. We’re excited about this and trust that you share our enthusiasm.

“I hope you’ll make the time to rediscover some of the most moving presentations from TED2006: Al Gore’s sage advice on living a carbon-neutral life; Hans Rosling’s inspired interpretation of global statistics; Ken Robinson’s vision for an education system that values creativity; Majora Carter’s commitment to environmental justice; Tony Robbins’ roadmap for reaching our potential; and David Pogue’s software-inspired show tunes. We’ve launched with these six, and will add more weekly, pulling primarily from TED2006 and TEDGlobal, but also dipping into previous years.”

I’m over the moon. Go listen to Hans Rosling’s talk. Then listen to the others. Then do it again. Then tell a friend…

[Edited to add categories, which for some reason I keep forgetting to do]

I'm a big fan of usability testing, and market research is its distant cousin, so I like to help; but I think it was the fact that she laughed that convinced me to stay on the phone. I'm glad I did. For the next 15 minutes I had a very entertaining time answering some of the most bizarre questions I've ever heard. The caller was great — she fully recognized the absurdity of some of them, and she did her job gracefully anyway. For example, the irony of the following sequence was not lost on her:

Caller: How many hours of television have you watched per week for the last 30 days?
Me: Zero [this is true, by the way].
Caller: Have you seen any television commercials for the phone book in the last 30 days?
Me: No.
Caller: I'm going to describe three television commercials for the phone book that recently aired in your area. Please tell me if you have seen any of them. I am not allowed to record your answer until I have finished describing each commercial, but they are not long. [90 second storyboard-type description of the first commercial follows] Have you seen this commercial?
Me: No.

Two more commercial descriptions followed the first one; by the time she finished, I was laughing too hard to speak. She waited patiently until I had recovered and thanked me for not hanging up. "Are you kidding?" I said. "This is the most fun I've had all day!" Apparently she loses a lot of respondents at the point where she has to read the commercials.

My favorite part of the call, though, was the personality assessment of my phone book:

Caller: If your phone book were to come alive and speak to you like a person, would it be authoritative?
Me: Is that really what the question says? I have no idea. I can't picture my phone book as a person.
Caller: So, I'll put "I don't know," okay?
Me: Sure.
Caller: If your phone book were to come alive and speak to you like a person, would it be polite?
Me: How many phone book personality questions do you have there?
Caller: Fifteen.

At this point she waited patiently while I lost it again. She ran through the personality questions with me randomly saying yes, no, or I don't know — the user study from hell, but come on, what kind of a question is that? Still, I was almost sorry when she ran out of questions.

If the marketing exec who approved those questions were to come alive and speak to me like a person, would s/he be funny? Probably not.

Every night I read a book or two to my son, who is six, just before he goes to bed. Last night we read McElligot's Pool by Dr. Seuss. We've read it before — he loves all the funny fishes. After we finished, he climbed up into his loft and I tucked him in and turned out the light and said "good night, sweet dreams" as I always do. That's when it happened.

As I was about to leave, out of the goodnight-moon quiet of his just-darkened room, I heard him say, "Mom… would it be okay if I read McElligot's Pool one more time?"

"You mean you want to hear it again?" I asked.

"No, I want to read it myself. Is that okay? I'll tuck myself in again after."

Is that okay? Is that OKAY? Of course it's okay! My boy wants to READ! He wants to actually READ the WORDS in a BOOK before he goes to bed. Is that okay? That's totally awesome. That's one of those things that they don't tell you about. Sure, there are nighttime feedings for 15 months and you don't sleep through the night forever. There are epic battles over eating food, wearing clothes, and using the toilet. There are terrifying moments when he falls down and cuts or breaks or bumps some part of his body and you can't fix it with a band-aid.

But last night I left the light on, and my son read a book to himself before bed.

I had no idea it would feel that good.