Jon Udell

Over the years I’ve had a number of overuse injuries: tendinitis from too much typing or mousing or music playing, a sore shoulder from too much swimming, painful knees and ankles from too much running. The key phrase here is “too much” and you’d think I’d learn my lesson eventually. But no. When I get excited about doing things I overdo and then, periodically, must back off and recover.

Often, during recovery, as I analyze what’s gone wrong, I find that the problem is not simply overuse but more specifically asymmetric use. Once, during a bout of pain in my right thumb joint, while pondering what the cause might be, I looked down at my hands while I was typing. Clatter clatter clatter BAM! Clatter clatter clatter BAM! The BAM was my right thumb pounding the space bar. I could feel a twinge every time I saw it happen.

In some cases, and that was one of them, shifting to a symmetrical pattern of use is helpful. (As is, of course, not pounding.) I’ve trained myself to alternate thumbs while typing (although, as I look down at my hands now I see that needs reinforcement), to breathe alternately left and right while swimming, to change mouse hands from time to time, to become a switch hitter with the garden shovel.

Every time I go through one of these retraining exercises I reflect on the difficulty of the process. The steps are:

- surface a bad habit that was unconscious

- consciously develop a good habit

- submerge the new habit back into the unconscious

In the latest iteration of the process I am relearning how to walk. It sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. But here’s what happened — or rather, my best current understanding of what happened. About a year ago I strained one of the adductors in my right groin. Usually things like that resolve with a bit of rest and some stretching. But this time it didn’t. Last summer I was having trouble lifting my right leg over the bicycle seat when mounting. When the same thing happened on the first ride of this season I knew something had to be corrected. But what?

An acquaintance who does massage asked me to observe the angles of my upper legs while cycling. Next time out I looked down and could hardly believe it. My right knee was out of line by at least 25 degrees! That misalignment was clearly aggravating the injury and not allowing it to heal.

When I got home I put cycling and running on hold and went back to basics. I stood in what felt like a normal position and looked down. Sure enough, my right foot was pointing out noticeably. When I aligned it with my left foot I felt like I was forcing it to pigeon-toe. Then I started to walk. Each step required a conscious effort to align the right foot. It didn’t feel correct. But I could see that it was.

So that’s how it’s gone for the past 5 days. Instead of cycling or running I take the dogs for a hike and focus on alignment. I have to supervise my right foot closely and, when I go up and down over obstacles, I have to supervise my right knee to make sure it stays aligned too.

I can tell that it’s working. But clearly a bad habit that took a year to develop will take more than a few days to correct.

Every time something like this happens I wonder how I could fail to notice something so fundamental. But it really isn’t surprising. We can’t consciously monitor how we use our bodies all the time, and bad habits develop gradually. If there’s any application of wearable computing that will matter to me I think it will be the one that warns me when these kinds of bad habits begin to develop, and helps me correct them. We’re not great analysts of the forces in play as we use our bodies, but computers could be.

Here’s Andy Baio’s farewell to Upcoming, a service I’ve been involved with for a decade. In a March 2005 blog post I wrote about what I hoped Upcoming would become, in my town and elsewhere, and offered some suggestions to help it along. One was a request for an API which Upcoming then lacked. Andy soon responded with an API. It was one of the pillars of my Elm City project for a long while until, as Andy notes in his farewell post, it degraded and became useless.

Today I pulled the plug and decoupled Upcoming from all the Elm City hubs.

In 2009 Andy and I both spoke at a conference in London. Andy was there to announce a new project that would help people crowdsource funding for creative projects. I was there to announce a project that would help people crowdsource public calendars. Now, of course, Kickstarter is a thing. The Elm City project not so much. But I’m pretty sure I’m on the right track, I’m lucky to be in a position to keep pursuing the idea, and although it’s taking longer than I ever imagined I’m making progress. Success, if it comes, won’t look like Upcoming did in its heyday, but it will be a solution to the same problem that Upcoming addressed — a problem we’ve yet to solve.

That same March 2005 blog post resonates with me for another reason. That was the day I walked around my town photographing event flyers on shop windows and kiosks. When I give presentations about the Elm City project I still show a montage of those images. They’re beautiful, and they’re dense with information that isn’t otherwise accessible.

Event flyers outperform web calendars, to this day, because they empower groups and organizations to be the authoritative sources for information about their public events, and to bring those events to the attention of the public. The web doesn’t meet that need yet but it can, and I’m doing my best to see that it does.

My next community calendar workshop will be at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Newport News, on Tuesday April 23 at 6PM. It’s for groups and organizations in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, including Chesapeake, Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Virginia Beach, Williamsburg, and Yorktown. If you’re someone there who’d like help change the way public calendars work in your region, please sign up on EventBrite so we know you’re coming, or contact me directly.

Here’s the pitch from the workshop’s sponsor and host, the Daily Press:

The Community Calendar Project

It’s about time someone came up with a way to get all community events in one place so everyone, everywhere can find out what’s going on at any given time, on any given day.

It’s about time creators of those events – the people, agencies and organizations who work so hard to bring quality education, support and entertainment to the community – had a way to get their messages out there effortlessly.

It’s about time the public can find out about the happenings and events they really care about and never miss an important event again.

AND it’s “time” – or the lack of it – that makes this community initiative being spearheaded by the Daily Press so valuable to everyone. This community calendar will SAVE time – for the event creators, the event seekers and the websites and platforms that work to make this information available.

The Daily Press is partnering with Jon Udell of Microsoft to bring this project to Hampton Roads and make it among the first communities in the country to have an easily searchable, FREE database of events available to the public. And we want to get all of Hampton Roads involved. The only thing required to participate is to agree to use an iCalendar formatted calendar on your own websites or to create events through Facebook. That’s it. Participation guaranteed.

What is an iCalendar? Simply, iCalendar is a computer file format that allows Internet users to exchange calendars with other Internet users. iCalendar is used and supported by personal calendars such as Google Calendar, Apple Calendar (formerly iCal), Microsoft Outlook and Hotmail, Lotus Notes, Yahoo! Calendar, and others, and by web content management systems including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and others.

Many of you may already use one of these applications to publish your calendars online, and that is great! That means you can already participate in the calendar network we are bringing together. The rest of you can easily convert and get on board.We’ll tell you how.

On April 23 you are invited to a presentation of the Community Calendar Project. Jon will be on hand to tell you what it is, why it matters and how to get involved. The gathering will take place at 6 p.m. at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center, 101 Museum Drive (across from The Mariners’ Museum) in Newport News.

Light refreshments will be served. Get your FREE tickets so we know how many are attending.

Hope to see you there.

My dad died of congestive heart failure in 2009. The last weeks of his life weren’t what they could have been had we known enough to get him into hospice care. But we didn’t know, and I’ve felt ashamed about that.

If we had it to do over again things would be very different. We’d have brought him home much sooner, made him comfortable, helped him work through a life review, hung out with him, heard and said some things that needed to be heard and said.

As it was we only managed to bring him home for his last day. It was better than not bringing him home at all, but not much better, at least not for him. For us, though, it was transformative. Two generations of our family — my wife and I, our children — had never seen the kind of death that was normal until the modern era. We’d didn’t know why or how to shift gears from medical treatment to palliative care. Now we do and we’re deeply changed — Luann especially. She’s become a hospice volunteer who comforts the dying, supports their families, and counsels survivors.

From her I’ve learned a lot about hospice care. What happened to us, it turns out, is typical. Many people don’t realize how comfortable a dying person can often be at home with proper medication. As a result many delay until the bitter end, and miss out on the emotional and psychological richness that’s possible in a home hospice setting.

A big reason for the delay is the chasm that divides the culture of hospitals from the culture of hospice. Nobody in the hospital advised us to bring dad home a month before he died. A social worker mentioned it, but dad didn’t know what it could mean to make that choice, we didn’t know enough to advocate for it, and medical professionals speak with vastly more authority than do social workers in our current regime.

What hospitals don’t know about hospice is astonishing. Last night, while reading an anthology of science writing, I happened on an essay by Atul Gawande, a physician/writer who, like Oliver Sacks, Perri Klass, and Abraham Verghese, opens windows into the medical world. In 2010, the year after our experience with my dad, he wrote a New Yorker piece called Letting Go that included these revelations:

One Friday morning this spring, I went on patient rounds with Sarah Creed, a nurse with the hospice service that my hospital system operates. I didn’t know much about hospice. I knew that it specialized in providing “comfort care” for the terminally ill, sometimes in special facilities, though nowadays usually at home. I knew that, in order for a patient of mine to be eligible, I had to write a note certifying that he or she had a life expectancy of less than six months. And I knew few patients who had chosen it, except maybe in their very last few days, because they had to sign a form indicating that they understood their disease was incurable and that they were giving up on medical care to stop it. The picture I had of hospice was of a morphine drip. It was not of this brown-haired and blue-eyed former I.C.U. nurse with a stethoscope, knocking on Lee Cox’s door on a quiet street in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood

And:

Like many people, I had believed that hospice care hastens death, because patients forgo hospital treatments and are allowed high-dose narcotics to combat pain. But studies suggest otherwise. In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months.

These things once surprised me too. Now, thanks to our brief hospice experience with dad and Luann’s volunteer work since, I take them for granted. And while I’ve felt ashamed not to have arrived at this understanding sooner, in time to help dad, I guess I should cut myself some slack. Atul Gawande didn’t get there any sooner than me.

How could that be? How could a leading medical practitioner (and explainer) reach mid-career lacking such basic and useful knowledge? All too easily when we carve the world into fields of knowledge and then build walls around them.

Last month ago I wrote a column for Wired.com, Rebooting web comments, that attracted some unsavory feedback. Had the flamers read beyond the second paragraph they might have seen that I wasn’t insisting everyone must use verifiable identities online. But they didn’t. So I wrote another column last week, Own your words, to clarify my position.

My first blogging tool, back in 2001, was Dave Winer’s Radio UserLand. One of Dave’s mantras was: “Own your words.” As the blogosphere became a conversational medium, I saw what that could mean. Radio UserLand didn’t support comments. That turned out to be a good constraint to embrace. When conversation emerged, as it always will in any system of communication, it was a cross-blog affair. I’d quote something from your blog on mine, and discuss it. You’d notice, and perhaps write something on your blog referring back to mine.

This cross-blog conversational mode had an interesting property: You owned your words. Everything you wrote went into your own online space, was bound to your identity, became part of your permanent record. As a result, discourse tended to be more civil than what often transpired in Usenet newsgroups or web forums. In those kinds of online spaces, your sense of identity is attenuated. You may or may not be pseudonymous, but either way the things you say don’t stick to you in the same way they do if you say them in your own permanent online space.

Later blogs evolved forum-style comments which concentrated discussion but recreated the old problems: attenuation of identity, loss of ownership of data. Then came Twitter and Facebook and, so the story goes, “social killed the blogosphere.” It was easier to read and write in those online spaces, blogging declined, and Google’s recent decision to retire its RSS reader is being widely regarded as the nail in the blogosphere’s coffin.

Of course that’s wrong. One of the staples of tech punditry is the periodic declaration that something — Unix, the Web, Microsoft, Apple, the blogosphere — is dead.

Will Google Reader’s exit spell the end of the blogosphere or its rebirth? Nobody knows, and since I’m no longer in the pageview business I won’t even hazard a prediction. Instead I want to highlight something that’s bigger than blogs, bigger even than social media. Owning your words is a fundamental principle. It seemed new at the dawn of the blogosphere but its roots ran deeper. They were woven into the fabric of the Internet which, at its core, is a network of peers.

For technical reasons I won’t explore here, it’s not possible (or, I should say, not believed possible) for our computers to be first-class peers on that network, as early Internet-connected computers were. But it is possible for various of our avatars — our websites, our blogs, our calendars — to represent us as first-class peers. That means:

- They use domain names that we own

- They converse with other peers in ways that we enable and can control

- They store data in systems that we authorize and can manage

Your Twitter and Facebook avatars are not first-class peers on the network in these ways. Which isn’t to say they aren’t useful. Second-class peers are incredibly useful, largely because they enable us to avoid the complexities that make it challenging to operate first-class peers.

Those challenges are real. But they’re not insurmountable unless we believe that they are. I don’t believe that. I hope you won’t. What some of us learned at the turn of the millenium — about how to use first-class peers called blogs, and how to converse with other first-class peers — gave us a set of understandings that remain critical to the effective and democratic colonization of the virtual realm. It’s unfinished business, and it may never be finished, but don’t let the tech pundits or anyone else convince you it doesn’t matter. It does.

Movie showtimes are easy to find. Just type something like “movies keene nh” into Google or Bing and they pop right up:

You might assume that this is open data, available for anyone to use. Not so, as web developers interested in such data periodically discover. For example, from MetaFilter:

Q: We initially thought it would be as easy as pulling in an RSS feed from somewhere, but places like Yahoo or Google don’t offer RSS feeds for their showtimes. Doing a little research brought up large firms that provide news and data feeds and that serve up showtimes, but that seems like something that’s designed for high-level sites with national audiences.

So, is there any solution for someone who is just trying to display local showtimes?

A: This is more complicated than you might think. Some theatres maintain that their showtimes are copyrighted, and (try to) control the publication of them. Others have proprietary agreements with favored providers and don’t publish their showtimes elsewhere, to give their media partners a content edge.

What applies to RSS feeds applies to calendar feeds as well. It would be nice to have your local showtimes as an overlay on your personal calendar. But since most theaters don’t make the data openly available, you can’t.

Some indie theaters, however, do serve up the data. Here are some movies that don’t appear when you type “movies keene nh” into Google or Bing:

These are listings from the Putnam Theater at Keene State College. They syndicate to the Elm City hub for the Monadnock region of New Hampshire by way of the college calendar which recently, thanks to Ben Caulfield, added support for standard iCalendar feeds. They appear in the film category of that hub. And in fact they’re all that can appear there.

I’ve decided I’m OK with that. I used to forget about movies at the Putnam because they didn’t show up in standard searches. Now I sync them to my phone and I’m more aware of them. Would I want all the mainstream movies there too? I used to think so, but now I’m not so sure. There are plenty of ways to find what’s playing at mainstream theaters. That doesn’t feel like an awareness problem that needs solving. The indie theaters, though, could use a boost. As I build out Elm City hubs in various cities, I’ve been able to highlight a few with open calendars:

- In Berkeley: UC Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA)

- In Toronto: Bloor Cinema

And here are some indies whose calendars could be open, but aren’t:

- In Portland: Academy Theater

- In Cambridge, The Brattle Theatre

If you’re an indie theater and would like your listings to be able to flow directly to personal calendars, and indirectly through hubs to community portals, check out how the Putman, BAM/PFA, and the Bloor Cinema are doing it.

In The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker compiles massive amounts of evidence to show that we are becoming a more civilized species. The principal yardstick he uses to measure progress is the steady decline, over millenia, in per-capita rates of homicide. But he also measures declines in violence directed towards women, racial groups, children, homosexuals, and animals.

It’s hard to read the chapters about the routine brutality of life during the Roman empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and — until more recently than we like to imagine — the modern era. An early example:

Far from being hidden in dungeons, torture-executions were forms of popular entertainment, attracting throngs of jubilant spectators who watched the victim struggle and scream. Bodies broken on wheels, hanging from gibbets, or decomposing in iron cages where the victim had been left to die of starvation and exposure were a familiar part of the landscape.

A modern example:

Consider this Life magazine ad from 1952:

Today this ad’s playful, eroticized treatment of domestic violence would put it beyond the pale of the printable. It was by no means unique.

A reader of that 1950s ad would be as horrified as we are today to imagine cheering a public execution in the 1350s. A lot changed in 600 years. But in the 60 years since more has changed. The ad that seemed OK to a 1950s reader would shock most of us here in the 2010s.

Over time we’ve grown less willing and able to commit or condone violence, and our definition of what counts as violence has grown more inclusive. And yet this is deeply counter-intuitive. We tend to feel that the present is more violent and dangerous than the recent past. And our intuition tells us that the 20th century must have been more so than the distant past. That’s why Pinker has to marshal so much evidence. It’s like Darwin’s rhetorical strategy in The Origin of Species. You remind people of a lot of things that they already know in order to lead them to a conclusion they wouldn’t reach on their own.

Will the trend continue? Will aspects of life in the 2010s seem alien to people fifty years hence in the same way that the coffee ad seems alien to us now, and that torture-execution seemed to our parents? (And if so, which aspects?)

Pinker acknowledges that the civilizing trend may not continue. He doesn’t make predictions. Instead he explores, at very great length, the dynamics that have brought us to this point. I won’t try to summarize them here. If you don’t have time to read the book, though, you might want to carve out an hour to listen to his recent Long Now talk. You’ll get much more out of that than from reading reviews and summaries.

Either way, you may dispute some of the theories and mechanisms that Pinker proposes. But if you buy the premise — that all forms of violence have steadily declined throughout history — I think you’ll have to agree with him on one key point. We’re doing something right, and we ought to know more about why and how.