brewery33

An awkward moment

Residents of undeveloped nations would scoff at my personal journey. The fact that I am at such an odds with myself, that the focus of my life at this point is to regain a focus, is a metaphor of excess for the gluttony that has entangled the world’s perception of our “culture”. I ridicule myself for having such a paltry outlook. People are dying from disease, famine and violence and I am sitting here pretty in my upper middle class tax bracket with a loving wife, cute daughter, expensive PC’s (that’s right multiple computers), newish car, and job (yes I even have a job) that allows me flexibility in my personal endeavors (blogging, civic involvement, philanthropy). What the fuck do I have to complain about? I feel like such a pussy and a dick at the same time for even exercising my mental ineptitude as a real problem.

Whether you agree with my judgment of myself, or care to add to the findings, I could really give a flying you know what. My goal is focus and innovation. Without imagination, innovation is impossible. In order to find my wayward imagination, I must focus. Focus requires concentration. Hallways as noisy as my social media outlets diffuse focus.

Riding with my Dad the other day, on our way to get ashes I vocalized my issue with him. We had an awkward father/son moment where we weren’t sure how to deal with the emotions, and then after some added forced conversation I happened upon a possible obstacle that could be the first clue in locating my imagination.

Since the death of my mother I have found that the dynamic of my family has changed. Before you face palm and close the tab that you are viewing my stupid writing on, the statement deserves merit. You see with the death of my mother, I basically have become an orphan. My dad being a man from an all boy family and me being the oldest boy of yet another all boy family, emotional fortitude is not really our strongest characteristic. With that said, I always had two parents, but recently had one exit this dimension and move on to whatever lies on the other side. The other, my dad for those of you keeping score, is reeling from the sudden shock of a 35+ year mate vanishing. In his plight of a now upside down life, the role of a father has been displaced with the rest of his displaced existence.

As I sat and pondered the direction that this revelation had the potential to take me I listened to the message of the ashes, which was suffer silently. Great, so now that I have made the decision to go to social media rehab, which we will call my blog, I get an M. Night Shyamalan plot twist thrown at me. Here I think that I am having a complete epiphany, only to find that once again the location of my imagination has eluded me.

Suffer in silence for the world doesn’t hold the answer to your toils. Kind of makes my blog useless.

I’ve lost something

In the past few weeks I have noticed something happening. The subtle nuance of this wretched annoyance has been gaining momentum and advancing upon our community with the grace of an ogre pillaging a rural Swedish community. The white elephant in the room has taken its place on the stage and announced that he is present. Everyone at the party has been empowered to acknowledge the subject that we all spoke of indiscreetly.

University of the Pacific is an institution that is quite honestly one of the most immaculate grounds in the City of Stockton. A short stroll through the meticulously pruned rose garden to admire the art of maintaining these visually delicate yet astonishingly resilient plants allows escape. A saunter into the small forum of columns that is easily recognizable as you have seen the image in a coveted family portrait that takes proud residence in the living room of a beloved friend or family member. These and many more monuments of visual expression are valuable to the atmosphere of experimental and free thought, as well as the surrounding community.

Stockton Beautiful is an organization of concerned individuals that have a mission to beautify their community. The board and membership of the philanthropic group from the young and energetic to the wise and accomplished infuse each other with the notion of beauty. Beauty goes further than its superficial stereotype. Beauty creates a culture. Pride comes from beauty. Stockton Beautiful is no stranger to efforts of invigorating a community of individuals to accomplish unthinkable feats of excellence. We can see the fruits of their work in the collaborative spectacle made possible through driven community philanthropic exertion, in the Rose Garden that resides in Victory Park on the north side of the Haggin Museum.

Greg Bahr is a citizen of Stockton. If you have spent any time on the Miracle Mile enjoying a sunny walk on Sunday, or patronizing one of the loving merchants, you have probably come across Greg. He is responsible for community events in the district such as the wildly successful Miracle Mile Night through his interaction with a group of focused individuals that serve on the little known, highly experimental, yet overwhelmingly effective Neighborhood Renaissance Committee. This group is of the mind that if neighborhood events are present the fabric of the community will be strengthened. Communities with strong fabric tend to employ a lighter outlook on the grim offerings that life brings. My opinion of Greg is rather skewed, due to my respect for his efforts, but I am fairly confident that if you stop and listen to his pleas for a cohesive effort in the infinite quest for betterment, we will most definitely agree.

These three groups evidence the presence of positive movement in our City. People are working to create the nirvana of community. As we spoke of earlier, a white elephant that has come from the shadows of civic conversation in Stockton. His presence has been embraced. It is all too easy to make fun, stay cynical and ignore our emotions. The perception of mediocrity and ignorance is lavished upon us by our national media publications. Our local media has become snarky and arrogant to the population of new media consumers. I have found myself embroiled in passion fueled discourse that is not contributing to the solution but rather of symptom of the white elephant. This is the most troubling to me.

It is through my faith that I have weathered the stormy waters of loss. I am no person to preach and ladle my ideological rhetoric upon you. My only mention of this is to make apparent of my plans to regain my imagination and focus my efforts. In my loss of imagination I plan to embark upon a spiritual journey in search of the treasure that has befallen me.

The white elephant’s message is a dangerous path. His call to acceptance is my cue to reboot my operating system. With the Lenten season upon us and the coming of Ash Wednesday, I will be disconnecting from the matrix of chatter, and focus on real efforts. I will leave the acoustically challenged halls of Twitter to find the voice that I have lost. I plan to engage the philanthropy that is meaningful to me and shed the cynicism that has polluted my mind. I plan to detoxify my spirit in an effort to return with the child like wonder that I desire.

Words are not meaningful if not built upon action. My grand plans of success through philanthropy are on trial and it is my turn to stand in front of the judge and plea our case for freedom. I will not be participating in any form of social media other than blogging. I will not be Twitter alerting my blog. My reason for this is that the core of my answer lies in personal discovery. Vanity and narcissism are the foes in which I am at battle with. It is the constant quest for the laugh, that I have lost the ability to entertain myself.

Easter will be the day in which I emerge back to the scene with a hopefully fresh look and box of hustle. I will look to the people that are fixtures in my life for support and share the journey through this little piece of real estate on the internet I call brewery33 aka my stupid writing.

I leave you with a quote that hopefully bounces around your cranium and ferments for a while. I actually don’t know who said it, but it is in no way my work. I hope that works for citing purposes.

“In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts.”

Stockton will win.

Drinking beer with a purpose, a civic purpose that is

Lot’s of talk regarding this little issue of the public servant sector moving forward with utilizing a more social web. Where I think we lose ground is by attaching the proprietary names of Twitter and Facebook. Try to think concepts and not solutions just yet. I hate when peeps try to force the square block through the circle hole. Just getting on Facebook is not the answer. In fact I don’t even think that Facebook has any real relevance within politics or public service.

The social web movement is a much deeper concept than it seems on the surface.

Here is a little video that will give you some sort of idea of just how intense this whole dissemination of information really is. That is if you aren’t one of the 10 million nerds that have already watched it.

While we talk a lot about our ideas of how we would do it better, and how they don’t utilize the power of the tools put before them, we don’t really act. So here is my challenge. All three of you that have read this post, head on over to the Stocktoberfest on the Miracle Mile. I will be attending, God willing, and we should meet, drink a beer (or a hundred) and put a face to this little digital revolution. Without practicing the art of conversation we will not succeed. Our dribble will be reduced to that of the trolls that lurk on the web espousing their genius solutions to the world’s problems while never taking that walk up the steps that lead out of their parent’s basement and into the real world.

Doesn’t it suck that just because I happen to be able to use a computer good, that I am socially deemed a basement dweller? Well stereotypes will always plague us. It doesn’t bother me, because I get mine.

Hope to see all of my fellow basement dwellers at the Stocktoberfest this Thursday October 1, 2009, if you want to change the world that is.

I will be the guy in the red Polo shirt with a beer in my hand.

Innovate and stay fresh.

~andy

The City is my new favorite search engine

I just got done (well I have about 40 more pages to go) with the futuristic sci-fi novel by Vernor Vinge Rainbows End. I was prompted to read this novel when I posted my intrigue regarding the augmented reality feature of the Yelp iPhone application, by my buddy Greg Bahr. I don’t usually read the sci-fi genre of books, but I was pleasantly surprised with the tight plot structure and swift pace that the book adhered to. Why am I telling you this? Well, throughout this book the future people access a wealth of information that is intelligently disseminated. In other words the producers of content were able coordinate their submissions to the virtual “fire hose” of information.

This brings me to the current little fire that was sparked with the mention of government and social media. Apparently there is interest, at least with the little group my Tweetdeck so lovingly refers to Stockton Tweeple. Think of the possibilities of aggregating information on a civic level in a uniform fashion. It is this very thing that the get-rich-quick community has been trying to with their busted ass search engines that scour the internet, producing lackluster results. Think if we could get all of, or even most of, the content producers within a community to buy into a best practices standard for a community.

Our band of brothers here in Stockton is on the trail that we think leads to the dissemination of the civically relevant content. We are lucky enough to have a City that is willing to listen (scroll to the comments). Now rather than wait for the City to roll out a brand new hunk of junk website that doesn’t work symbiotically with the content providers within our community, we must form an alliance to ensure the usability we crave. I like the idea of a City portal that I am able to go and view the logically tagged events. Now this will not happen all on one side or the other. It will be an effort of the team nature. And with that effort no person will have the ability to be taken advantage of, we hope.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, let’s take a look at a governmental institution that through teamwork has successfully organized a seemingly unrelated mountain of information. A public library. To the untrained eye the library seems like a menagerie of books stacked to the ceiling with no true order. However, as I have done in the name of expediency, if you ask a library attendant to find a book, they proceed to use the best practice standard that has been implemented, and find the book with ease and efficiency. Now this is not to say that the untrained individual that is in search of the book would have never found the book, but it does say that with order, the retrieval of the information is both beneficial to the producer and the consumer. The producer is better served to accommodate the request of the consumer with ease and the consumer receives the information requested in a matter of time that would not have been possible without a logical best practice standard.

The best practice standard has evolved over time to accommodate the advent of more efficient technology, within the library. So much that a library patron has access to the library inventory through the web in these “high tech” times. This is beneficial to the consumer in the interest of making efficient usage of your time, aka no wasted trips. We could even spin this for the greeniacs, but I won’t digress.

All this talk of libraries, has me feeling guilty that the places that I loved so much as a child, I never go to. But that is another post. In the metaphorical story of the library its books, an answer starts to materialize. What if the City website was the library? The books, well the books are the mountains of civically relevant information available on websites that are in the “library”. And if you aren’t all the way stupid, you will have figured out that you play the same role in both scenarios, the patron, or consumer.

Think of it, a symbiotic open working platform that subscribes to a best practice standard. Not only would the political, governmental mumbo jumbo, be present and filed away, but the events, social interaction, community pulse. All of this information could be searchable through the “new and improved” City portal that has worked diligently with the interested public to offer such a service. The information could even be aggregated in cool little widgets that could be offered as iPhone applications or desktop client application displaying the day’s most popular, or what people are talking about in the form of meta information that is entered when a link is submitted to the City portal.

As the provider of the content that wishes to attract a crowd to the City of Stockton you are not left out of the loop, you will merely supply the civically relevant information submit a link through a secure and literally spam free form, attach tags and viola you are now Stockton Certifiably Relevant.

The open portion of the platform would allow all the users of the portal to also attach tags to each respective event based upon their likes. Such as I search art show, find Snap Jackson’s latest photo gallery being displayed at the Tidewater Cafe, I might tag this as badass, or must see. Now not only does the event carry the best practice standard metadata (ie tags), but it also carries my personalized tags that my friends and I use to describe events. This is how the engine would evolve would be by the monitoring of the most used tags and popular links. The pulse of the City could be realized resulting in a vibrant well informed group of citizens.
In the name of, I don’t want to steal any more of your precious time, we will leave this thought to ferment in the minds of the believers.

Keep the conversation going, keep innovating and always stay fresh.

This is only the beginning.

Where is the conversation?

First and foremost, a shout to my fellow blogging gang homey, @slickdiaz, who shouted out the brewery33 voice over on his turf. He fights the good fight of intellectualism while staying fresh with brevity. If I am giving props to one of the Stockton peeps then I can’t leave out the one and only @podcaststockton. Matt puts an actual voice to the plight of “most miserable” City in the United States and shows you that you can’t believe everything you read (especially anything here). If you are interested in either one of these guys I have placed some links over on the right hand side of the blog for you enlighten your Stockton mind. .

And now the news………..

Amongst all of the hubbub surrounding the latest uprising of the 6 people in Stockton that use social media, I have tried to find clarity within the questions of new media tactics implemented by our public sector. Of course, me being the geek that I am, I would love to see them make use of this brand new and shiny technology that currently is the object of my desire, besides my wife and daughter naturally. Just look at the success that I have realized within the space, I can now “talk” to 6 other techno-weenies just like myself and we can go on and on about the latest client application’s strengths and weaknesses.

I hope that my sarcasm present in the above text has jumped off the page and punched you out. I have been told to successfully use sarcasm in text form is the mark of a master. Since I am only a hack blogger, I must make you aware of my futile attempts at using the advanced literary tool.

I think that it is in the best interest of the establishment to at least attempt to create a conversation regarding the new media issue. That is all this whole thing we call the social web, or web 2.0, or new media, is, a conversation. We have evolved from the static web of the ‘90’s to the interactive web of today. Our browsing habits are changing as information is aggregated. Gone are the days of copy and pasting links to yourself in emails to read it later, now we can bookmark. Remember when you used to have check in on a site every day to see if your favorite portal posted any new nugget of information that you could then ravenously consume? Yep that is gone too with the advent of RSS.

The means of communication are in the midst of an awkward growth spurt that is akin the adolescent male battle with puberty. The change is discomfited. We are uneasy. We don’t understand why we are growing hair in strange spots. OK, except for that last descriptor, the similarities are uncanny. But think of this, the State of California thinks that the pubescent changes that your body experiences are so confusing that curriculum has been conceived to educate our grammar and middle school brood. So why do we shy away from the use or implementation of the uncomfortable yet inevitable change in transmission of information.

The implementation of this new dimension of discourse that is available to our communities can only heighten the awareness of our issues. This use of the shiny new technological toy can only be useful upon educating ourselves about the capabilities and limitations of the medium. In order to educate a community of people regarding the power of new conversation, is to do just that converse. Along with that conversation we should do a little experimentation.

I don’t claim to have the answer to the quandary, but I will say that I have at least recognized that there is opportunity to be realized. Another thing, if I decided that my way was right, wouldn’t that be the antithesis of my concern? I invite the critics. I want to hear the concerns surrounding this nary talked about issue.

So I invite all the Stockton Tweeps to blog, tweet, hell if you want to get out from in front that 22” widescreen monitor and talk to some actual people then have at it. Stockton has the potential to lead a informational revolution, as we are one of the most diverse cities in the good old US of A. What if we had an actual intelligent conversation regarding the use of new media?

Excuse the curt ending to this post, as my mind was just blown.