Now starts a new week, a new month, a new season. Behind me the falling forward feeling of the Saint John pilot proposal. Behind me the ingratitude over my UFS and histbeth efforts. The "why of waveplace" still holds, though it may not take form in the way we had planned. There's still the spirit of Papert, which is worthy of our passion. There's the rightness of OLPC, which sorely needs our support....

Blogging is too easy. It fills a need in a snack food sort of way, and while I've met with some success, I'm on the whole not motivated to write much here anymore. Something deeper is brewing, and blogging can't seem to touch it. My last longer post was an attempt to dig deeper, but re-reading it now I can see how hollow these little dispatches can be. Something within me ... more private ... wants out, and blogging merely saps the power from it. "Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of...

One year ago, we'd just finished a week beyond my telling, an eight day trip to Bismarck, North Dakota, to witness a birth and bring home a baby girl. We'd been there once a month earlier, to meet the birth couple, their rock band, and parents. They'd flown to our house a few weeks later. We all got along in a "meant-to-be" way that felt like new family, which given recent deaths and other losses, was most welcome. Day One, we fly there with our car seat and baby clothes in tow. We meet Jamie and David for dinner and...

I'm amazed now thinking I've been back from Florida three weeks. Amazed at both how long and how short it seems, which usually means some life's been lived, which couldn't be truer for me these last weeks. Someday I'll write about our trials down in Florida with adoption and bureaucrats. I'll write when I've had more reflection and walkaway time. It's an amazing story. I'll also write about little Isabel and I finally driving into Bethlehem during Moravian Vespers, which my wife conducts, and Isabel spending her first hour in town listening to Paula's choir and watching handmade Christmas candles...

Early this morning, the sweetest purest heart I've known stopped beating. Our constant cat companion, Ishtar, has joined her sister Chloe among the stars, just days after we brought our daughter Isabel home to meet her. Ishtar saw us through so many rough times, giving us unconditional affection when we needed it most. She saw us through to Isabel's arrival, then left with uncommon timing. What a good, good kitty. A rare soul....

Re-reading Cluetrain this morning, thesis 23 leapt out at me: Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about. On the surface, this request is simply reinforcing the cluetrain imperative: be real, be human, talk to your market. Like many of the 95 theses, I've always read right through number 23 as so much connective tissue, supporting the major points but not stopping my eye. This morning, 23 stopped me cold. I put the book down, stared a while at the ceiling, and started this post. With still...

In a dream just now, I was staying in my childhood house, which in real life has been destroyed. I was returning from living elsewhere, so I must have been in college, or otherwise in my twenties. My whole birth family was there, even those that have died. To be in that house again, with everyone alive ... it's a hard dream to wake up from. But that's not the point. In the dream, I was talking with my brother Mark. He was looking at something small and strange and I said, "I've got a hobbyscope if you want a...

A frisky family of deer galavant on past my window as I watch the clouds deepen their sunset reddened rippling. Okay, so it's just the baby deer that are galavanting. The moms are more sedate, more alert. Afraid. I wish often I could tell them they have nothing to fear from me. I imagine myself being able to simply say, "You are safe here" and have them believe it. This thought is immediately followed by another: the moment they trust, the moment they die. Hunters live across the street, and you better believe they want to say, "You are safe...

We go through life holding the dearest parts of ourselves hidden, and while a casual read of my "being real" section might make you think I'm somewhat open, there's an ocean of siphoned language and situation welled within me, which were it let loose, I imagine it'd explode like this summerstorm I'm now watching: lightning strikes and sheets of rain and numbing grayness, all around. Why must the very most important moments in my memory remain unspoken, while the rest is only only chatter. Were you to spend enough time in our house, enough time so I'd forget you were...

*teefal wakes as from a long dream, picks up pen and paper, and begins again* Four months ago, we finished the fruits of our work, Tidepool and Storymill, our self-named "Project Realize." The plan after finishing was to engage the blogerati and publicize ourselves with links across the blogosphere. Instead, as such things in the web world usually do, someone stole our thunder: Flickr got bought by Yahoo a week after our launch. They soon snapped up the mindshare we were after; Flickr's become quite the phenonemena, in an area we were aimed directly at. For a while there, it...

The last eight months have been for me a forced march through some pretty awful terrain ... chloe's death, my sister's cancer, some surreal brother battles, and .. and .. and .. and .. Hard to even write about this last one, this recent, rotted, overwhelming undertow. Some things are just bigger than words allow, and so with pathetic resignation I find myself talking in a trance, watching words babble out my mouth, feeling like I'm playing a harp with oven mitts. A month ago, my wife and I were joyful beyond measure, celebrating the birth of our adopted baby...

Three weeks since my last post, and a month before that one... guess I'm not doing too well on my one-a-day plan :) Here's the thing: wow. In the last two months we've been scrambling here at Immuexa like we've never scrambled before. If anyone remembers me & Jon at www2004, or me & the other Jon at FOAF-Galway ... multiply the intensity and drag it out for weeks. We've been on the edge of our big public release of Tidepool & Storymill since Thanksgiving. "When the apple is ripe, it will fall from the tree." Personally, it's been grueling....

I'm beyond the reach of words tonight....

There's three reasons I write: 1) because it's fun, 2) because I want to impress people, 3) because I need to. The last one's the kicker. I don't mean "need" in the normal logistical requirement sense ... I mean it in the way Rilke described: There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all - ask yourself...

Spent most of today adding photo functionality to a client's website so we could display some amazing flood photos, such as this one: Historic Bethlehem Partnership maintains all of these buildings, many of which mean a lot to me, as evidenced by my use of the 1762 Waterworks in the design of Lehigh Valley Storymill as well as the basis for the Storymill logo. Please give what you can. These buildings belong to everyone....

My wife is my hero. There's so many reasons for it, but this morning it's because she figured out how to put the spacebar back on my laptop. Before she came downstairs, I had fumbled for a good twenty minutes, stymied by such a simple mechanical task. When there's work to be done in a stressful time, losing your spacebar is about as frustrating a minor emergency as one can have. It started because my darling cat Chloe has developed a fondness for sitting on my keyboard. While she ignored my wife's Thinkpad for years, something about the soft-springing feel...

Friday was my father's birthday, a day whose impact on me has lessened over the eight years since his death, but this last one, this hurricane, hit me hard. Two days earlier, on Wednesday, we sold my parent's Florida home, ending fifteen years of my life along the the southwest Florida coast, starting when I moved there after college in 1989, continuing for a few years in exile, then leaving when circumstance flung me back to Pennsylvania in 1992. After that, I returned to Bonita at least once or twice a year to visit my folks. The southwest Florida coast...

Streaming past are lives all around, like stars above that circle the world, like cars sweeping past on the road outside, like strangers on the sidewalk, all a blur. We're busy, so we don't notice as much as we might. Some days we miss the sad frown on the little boy sitting with her sister on a park bench. Some days the quick reflexive hug between them speaks volumes. Who's to say what frames attract our notice. Where do our viewfinders rest and why? What warrants the click? What then from the roll do we recall when back again under...

My wife Paula and I are taking Photo One at Moravian College, where she's a professor. She's taking the class for kicks, but I'm there to return to my roots. Between the ages of ten and thirteen, I lived and breathed photography, taking solace in my darkroom at a very difficult time. (ten year old tim, hanging around) Yesterday I developed my first "wet-lab" photographic print in more than twenty-five years. What amazes me most is that nearly nothing about it has changed in all that time. The chemicals and equipment all look and work the same, the brand names...

I started Cluetrain last night. Yeah, I know, I'm a little late in the game, though in some ways I'm not (written at the same time). The Cluetrain tone is actually where I started (both written pre-Web). Since then, my challenge has been in avoiding the corporate siren call before it dashes me against the inhuman rocks of pointless posturing. #33, Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can't be "picked up" at some tony conference. My current project's been stressing me out, though not because of the tech or the schedule or the...

Let me apologize in advance on behalf of the state of Pennsylvania for Punxsutawney Phil. Immortalized in the movie Groundhog Day, this February 2nd tradition takes place about 250 miles from here. Each year, thousands of people show up to watch a guy in a weird hat lift a groundhog in the air. Now there's even a webcam. Only in America. It's not the tradition that bothers me. It's the spectacle. I'm willing to bet this little rodent ritual will get more airtime across the country tomorrow than was devoted to the 1991 fall of apartheid or the entire bosnian...

A year ago this morning, I wrote my mom's eulogy just hours before her funeral. I'd had a whole week to do it, but was understandably overwhelmed by her recent death, to say nothing of the gargantuan and dubious task of summing up such a woman's life in a few paragraphs. I'd hoped to work on it the night before, but instead we spent our time shopping for new clothes because the airline lost our luggage. That morning, I woke with my guts clenched in knots, feeling a pressure I'll never forget. I had a few hours to write something...

After two terrific concerts, one last night and one this morning, the choir stopped in Baltimore to visit the Inner Harbor and the aquarium. It was my first time back to Baltimore in 17 years, since I'd dated a woman who went to Johns Hopkins in 1987. Something about young love makes a place doubly nostalgic. I'm glad I got to make new memories with my wife Paula, so now Baltimore's not just "the Lauri city", but instead that place we saw the cool aquarium together. It's strange now writing about this, since I didn't even bring Lauri up while...

Today I rode on a bus with 40 college students to Washington DC, tagging along with my wife and her choir for a short two-day tour. On the way down, we watched "Legally Blonde 2", which is kind of a "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" for a new generation. Even though it was pretty cliche throughout, I'll admit to a weakness for anything having to do with how the US Congress makes a law. The driver dropped us off under the Washington Monument and my wife and I walked to the Smithsonian castle. It was very cold, with snow flurries,...

May 15, 1931 — January 23, 2003 Rich in love, a woman whose gift was giving. Her heart, her warmth, her laugh, she gives herself continually. Like a stream, her love flows through everyone she meets. From Chicago brat to Bonita Rose, she served the skies till she met a man to love. Together they made a home and raised a family, but it was she that taught us all to love. Her kindness, her strength, her wisdom, she's mom ... the reason we are all rich in love...

Today's my birthday, which ordinarily doesn't mean much to me, but this year I've been dreading it. No, I don't mean the usual "I'm getting old" thing. Today I'm sad because of my memories of my last birthday, which was really sad. On my last birthday, I'd been home less than a week after a rough month in Florida, most of it unplanned. My mother was dying from cancer. She'd just been brought home by the hospice folks. Though she was still fighting with a risky chemo treatment, her prognosis was very bleak. Ever since I moved out of my...

In Shelley Power's "The Value of Human on a Humanless Web", she talks about the mom scenerio in the Scientific American article: "Mom needs therapy? Oh no! Well, we'll work together and make sure she's taken care of!" In this picture, I search for available plans in the area and then call the hospitals and I talk to the people to see if I can trust them to take care of mother; neither I nor [my sister] is so busy as to begrudge the time taken. " While I agree with most of her article, this part rang false for...