Agood - BART Experience

There are enough bad things going on in the world right now. You've read about them, you might have even blogged about them. I want to do something about it. It is time to try infecting the world with a meme of my own creation. I am going to start a couple new words today that might help to that end.

My two words are (And I want comments about this so we can decide which works better)

1) Agood - n; a·good
An experience that stands out as better than average, usually due to the considerate behavior of another person. "I had an agood today, when the cashier called me back because I had forgotten my change."

2) Tnar - n; t·när
A written account of a positive experience. The opposite of a rant.

Tnar - v; t·när
To write an account of a positive experience "I am going to tnar about this great service when I get home."

Hopefully this gives you an idea of what I am trying for here. If you have a better or more precise definition, or can write a better example sentence, leave me a message.

My idea is that by focusing on just how many _positive_ experiences we have on a regular basis, three things will happen:

1. We will notice that, by the percentages, we actually live in a better world than the news and other old medias would have us believe.


2. By consciously being alert to the agoods that happen to us, with the goal of being able to influence the world by tnarring about them, we will actually notice that more of them happen to us than we think.


3. A positive feedback loop will happen that leads you right back to number 1.

I also believe that by posting your tnars on a blog, or just making a point to tell another person about this concept with a concrete example from your personal experience, you might be able to start the positive feedback loop in another person.

I have posted this article to Del.icio.us with the tags "tnar" and "agood" and will do the same with Technorati when I get that going. Do the same and help spread the words!

So now, I am going to tnar about my most recent agood. :)
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I know that most of you have had a bad experience at one time or another on BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in the San Francisco Bay Area. Missed a train? Train delays? Train too full to get on? You get the idea. These things are going to happen on almost any subway system you try. Today was different.

I was on my way home from downtown San Francisco (I live in Oakland) after doing a little Father's day shopping, and was a little loaded down with bags. I was walking quickly down the escalator, and as I neared the bottom, I saw a train going in my direction, with the doors open. I sped up as best I could, but just as I got to the doors, they closed in my face. Sound familiar? Well, here is where it becomes an agood.

"Sir!"

"Huh?"

"Down here!"

I see the conductor (pilot? driver?) hanging out of the window at the front of the train. Waving at me! I hoof it a car and a half towards him, and as I approach the lead car, its doors OPEN again! Wave a big "Thank You", hop on the train, and away I go!

Now, this wasn't a busy afternoon, nor was the train full, but one conductor for BART at least is really watching out for his passengers. If this ever finds its way to that conductor (Powell St. BART, Eastbound, about 3:15PM, 6/17/06) I want to say Thank You from one slightly less disillusioned human being, who has just that much more respect in mankind.

Chain - 8 Little known things about me

1) Have you ever had a big project that took a lot of time, that when you finally got it finished, it just made you proud of yourself? Think something on the scope of High School as a whole. Now double it. Now add a little more. Getting the idea? Keep going.

For me, this was the feeling that I had when I stood up in front of my family, friends and mentors, and received my Eagle Scout rank in Boy Scouts.

This path started in Cub Scouts at age 7 or 8 and I finished my service project for my Eagle Scout on my 18th Birthday. What other activites can you name that cover 10 years, at that age, and during the period of time in your life that you grow both mentally and physically the most?

I will call this the one activity in my life that has made me more of who I am than any other. I learned more about life, being a good human being, and being a man than in any other activity.

I will never forget the Scout Law, and continue to remind myself of it on a regular basis in order to reflect on whether or not I am still living up to it:

"A Scout is: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent."

I still think I do pretty well at it, and only wish that more people could take these ideals to heart. The world would be a better place by far.

2) Halloween, 1^st grade, and I am going to be a Pirate! Why? I had a limp like I had a peg-leg! What we didn't know was that I had come down with something called Legg-Calvé-Perthes Disease. In writing out these questions I did a little research about it and have learned a lot more about it than I knew at the time.

All I knew then was that my hip hurt, I was going to have to spend time in the hospital, and that they were going to be shooting x-rays at my hips, while covering my nuts with lead. I spent a week in traction with about 20% of my body weight hanging off my leg, and then another month (or two?) in one of the strangest brace things you have ever seen.

I managed to get around, looking like a hobbled horse, while scuffing every baseboard in the house. Recess at school really wasn't much fun. The only good memories I have of this period were the Big yellow butcher paper sign that everyone in my class signed for me while I was in the hospital, and the older student that took it upon herself (was assigned?) to help me out during recess and find some fun things that I _could_ do.

To this day, when I am really relaxed (like after a massage) one of my legs is about 1 inch shorter than the other, though I can't remember which one. The remaining problems (which will only get worse over time) is that I tend to favor one hip over the other as the pain switches from side to side.

3) I am extremely shy around people I do not know. Though I have gotten a little better about this, mostly due to my wife's infectious personality, I still have a hard time initiating conversations with people I don't know. I also find it almost impossible to maintain eye contact while I am speaking. Looking at someone else while they are speaking is much less of a problem than it used to be.

4) I hate awkward humor. In fact, I find most humor that comes at the expense of the person being "funny" almost impossible to watch. An example of this would be Chris Farley. I have a hard time watching almost anything he does. For this same reason, I have a very hard time watching the "audition" period of most reality shows. I just can't watch someone fail so publicly, often making a fool of themselves in the process.

A parallel pet peeve to this would be any situation in which a person portrays a "Look at how stupid I am" image. If you know you have a weekness in some area, and that you might need to have some level of knowledge in it, why not learn about it instead of relying on someone else to do it for you later. Are you that lazy? And what happens when that person says "No, I won't help you"?

I don't know everything. I never will. And with the passage of time, I know less and less of what mankind knows. I do however posses the humility to recognize and acknowledge when I don't know something. It was tough to get to this point, but obviously not impossible. The next time you are tempted to toss off a flippant "I don't know that/how to do that", I charge you to seriously contemplate learning about it instead.

5) I taught myself how to ride a bike. There were training wheels involved, but I learned how to stay off them by myself. Somewhere is a home movie of that day.

6) Do you know that comedy bit where two people are rapidly approaching each other on/in a car/horse/bike etc., and they both go to the right, then the left, then the right and finally crash straight into each other? Well, that happened to me once. I woke up a block away, on a couch, possibly missing a tooth. So much for impressing the relatives!

7) One of my favorite, though at the time scariest, memories was of one day at Camp Mather, a family camp near the Hetch Hetchy resevoir run by the City of San Francisco.

We had been going to the camp for one week each summer for several years. This year, I was FINALLY big enough to go for the all-day trail horse ride. I don't think I slept much the night before, because I was so excited. I got dressed that morning in jeans and a jeans jacket (must have been super-cute!) and went out to the stables to meet my ride.

I had riden ponys/donkeys there before, but that was usually a trail through the camp, with one donkey tied to the next. When I was put on top of the HORSE, I think I had my first reservations. Wow, this thing is tall!

Off we go, with 15 or so people going for a nice early morning trail ride. The sky, for the first time that week, was completely grey and slightly drizzly. Usually the sun comes out later in the day, so my light clothes should be fine.

After the parents fade from view, this became one of my first large solo adventures. And by large I mean scary, liberating, eye and mind opening, terrifying, and educational. I think that this was the point that I learned my place in the world. After the fear of losing sight of my parents subsided, I realized that I was not an appendix of thiers, I was my own person! The world did not blink out of existence! Everything would be fine!

That was, until the bees...
Came STREAMING out of the friggin' GROUND!
and spooked the horses in every different direction they could go...
Jumping over streams
Me barely holding on
the rain
cold
wet
alone.

By the time my horse decided (I had NO say in it) that it was safe from those NASTY bees, there was not another person in sight. I was by myself, on a HUGE horse, and when he wanted a drink, almost pulled me off his neck.

It was about at this point that I started getting cold, and the sky went from grey to dripping.
Now, as the horse went its merry way (I still had no say in where it went, how fast, or if it stopped) I started seeing signs that we were still near people. Small bridges, trails, that kind of thing. And then he came out of the trees into what I can only think was the original high country meadow upon which all others were based. Multi colored wildflowers, a tiny little pond, butterflys. I think I still see this meadow in my dreams any time my brain needs to show me that the terror time has passed, and that the world is still an ok place.

The rest of the day was more observational. I was the first or second person that the trail guide found, and we spent the rest of the day wandering around, trying to find all of the other riders and get them back together. This meant that I got to ride around in the forest all day and not just along a trail looking at a horse butt and human back all day.

I don't remember much after the adrenaline burst wore off. I don't remember getting back to camp nor really being picked up by my parents. But that is all right as the important part of the experience was the middle part anyway.

Thank you to the BEES! for my first truly terrifying, growing experience, that had a beginning, middle, and end, that I went through by myself. You taught me I am my own person, and not an extension of anyone else.

All of this at 7 years old. Nice early start.

8) I have knitted one scarf in my life, and probably could make another one if pressed to do so.
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TAG - Abbot, Josh, Mark
How: Write 8 things that people probably do not know about you and put them online. Tell me where they are, and I will link your name here to your answers there.

DIY - Control iTunes from a Mac SE/30

Setup: iMac 20" with iTunes installed and running in office. Streaming music to AirPort base station in living room.

This setup has served me pretty well for playing music from my collection or streaming media while having dinner with friends or cleaning the house. As long as I am happy with the music, it works great. But throw in a party of people, with different tastes and the changing needs for music over the course of an evening, and you have a new problem.

Problem: How to control iTunes from behind my home bar while bartending.

Solution: I needed a "remote" that could change, pause, resume, and search my iTunes library.

There is a helpful tutorial that basically uses the built-in Apache server that comes with OS X. People have used this to control iTunes with things like their web-enabled cell phone and a Sony PSP. This seems like a great idea, and I will probably do this soon so I can change tunes from another apartment. This also seemed like a bigger project than I had time for (guests coming over in a couple hours). Besides, I wanted a slightly more "retro" solution. What to do then?

First, I knew that I could get a web-browser running on one of several old macs I had, but the easiest would be the Mac SE/30 FD/HD that was part of my dust collection experiment/Apple museum. It had a built in ethernet card, so I knew it would be online quickly. Run one long CAT5 cable from the hub in the office, to its location beind the bar and plug it in. Powerup and launch Netscape 4.07 (You can find many old browsers here. You will be able to find one that runs on almost any old computer you have). Cool! I now have a Net connection behind the bar. If books weren't so easy to use, I could look up recipes for drinks on it!

Second, what can I connect to to control iTunes? After several attempts with different programs, I settled on browserTunes by Mark Burgess. The last version is 0.2.2 and it was signifigantly less buggy than 0.2.1 (Which I found and tried first). Load this application on the computer that has iTunes and is streaming to your AirPort Base Station. After clicking "Load DB" in the preferences pane (which scans your music library and builds a SQL database) and finding the IP address of your computer, go to the remote computer and put the IP number in the address field of the browser (http://###.###.###.###:8080) You should get some form of page (depending on settings, I chose the PDA type, just to keep things simple for the SE) that has next, back, pause/play, volume, etc. All of the controls I need! You should also see choices for search and playlists, the two most important in my opinion. Music too much for late night? Search Genre for "Downtempo" and hit play all! One thing I ran into a lot was that it wouldn't automatically remember that I want to shuffle after changing genre/artists/playlist/whatever. Easy solution? add "shuffleon" to the end of the current URL (http://###.###.###.###:8080/shuffleon) and the music starts shuffling again!

Further steps: I realised that most of what this program does is send simple XML formatted requests to the browserTunes software. If I were to make a simple HTML page that had some of the ones I used a lot, it would look cooler, and I could design it for the B&W screen on the Mac SE. In general, this setup works really well, and until I get the low-power radio transmitter working and need to control the music from other aprtments in my building, I will leave the Apache version alone.

Pictures coming soon!