Jon Udell

When I posted Permalinks and hashtags for city council agenda items last week, I embedded a permalink and a hashtag to illustrate the idea. The post links to the video of Keene’s recent city council meeting, at the point where Patty Little introduces Tom LePage’s request to expand the Armadillo’s sidewalk cafe. The post also refers to this agenda item using the hashtag generated for it by the Granicus system.

I figured this would enable two ways to find pages, like my blog post, that refer to agenda items, like Tom’s request. First, you could search for pages that mention the hashtag. For example, this combined search of Google and Bing for granicus732_7716 finds my blog post because it mentions that tag. These searches also find my tweet containing the tag, and some echoes of the tweet. Finally, of course, you could search Twitter directly for the tag.

A second approach would be to search for pages that link to the video segment. I expected to be able to find my blog post by searching for this permalink which it cites:

http://keene.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=77&meta_id=7716

I planned to use the link: operator, which finds pages pointing to an URL. And I figured this would work for both Google and Bing. But I was wrong on several counts. Bing doesn’t seem to support the link: operator. And even though Google does, this query doesn’t find my blog post.

Using the permalink as a plain search term doesn’t work either. And after reviewing the advanced search operators for both Google and Bing, I’m left wondering: How do you find pages that cite a permalink?

Updated Nov 24 2010, see below

One weekend last year I was hiking with my dog along the Washington Street Extension in Keene, NH. It’s the old Route 9, now an abandoned road that runs alongside Beaver Brook and climbs up to Beaver Brook Falls. The road has been returning to nature since before we came to Keene. It’s lined on both sides, for over a mile, with 25-year trees that now entangle a course of utility cables. On that hike last year, I wondered if the owner of those cables might want to take a look and maybe schedule some pruning.

I tried calling the power company first. Directory services gave me the main number, but I failed repeatedly to find any path through the IVR system that would enable me to report the problem. When I got home I also failed to find the PSNH web page that has number to call: 1-800-662-7764. (Menu path: Residential or Business -> Safety Center -> Tree Trimming. Effective search: tree trimming not report a problem.) When I tweeted my query to Martin Murray (@psnh), though, he got back to me promptly. It turns out these aren’t power cables, they’re telephone cables.

So I tried to report the problem to Fairpoint. Again there was no obvious way to do it online. And I couldn’t find anybody at the phone company who would answer the phone on the weekend. Eventually I got distracted by other things and never followed up.

Fast forward to yesterday. I’m hiking with my dog along the same abandoned road. The 25-year trees are now 26-year trees. And some big 60- and 80-year trees, tilting on banks eroded by spring floods, threaten to bring down the cables.

So I call again. There’s got to be some way to report this, right?

It becomes a game. Every path through the IVR system leads, after much delay — and, infuriatingly, an advertisement — to a message saying that business hours are Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. I might have tried the website again, but:

a) I am not carrying a connected, browser-equipped device.

b) You are the fracking phone company. Answer the phone!

Finally somebody answers. It’s Patrick, in Internet tech support.

Patrick: What’s your phone number for DSL service?

Me: 603.355.xxxx

Patrick: And what operating system are you using?

Me: Never mind that, here’s the deal. I’m standing on the old Washington Street Extension, looking at what I suppose is Keene’s Internet trunk. There are 26-year-old trees entangling it for a mile. And right here, at pole 13-T, there are 60- and 80-year old trees leaning at a 45-degree angle over the cables. They’re going to bring those wires down in the next big ice or wind storm, if not before.

Look, I know this isn’t your department, but I’m having a hell of a time finding anybody at Fairpoint who cares about this. There must be some way to report the problem.

Patrick: I totally get what you’re saying. But you’ve reached the lowest guy on the totem pole. And, I hate to say it, but this really isn’t my department.

Me: I know. But you’re several hops closer to the right department than I am. Can you please just take a report, email it to your supervisor, and cc me on the email?

Patrick: OK, hang on…done.

Me: Thanks Patrick! You may have just prevented a whole shitload of Internet technical support calls!

Update: Got these responses from @MyFairPoint on Monday AM:

@judell Hi, Jon – thanks so much for the heads up (just saw your tweet come up in our alerts). I really appreciate you looking out!

@judell Also, our active acct is @MyFairPoint and we’re working to ramp up our social media efforts, so expect to hear more soon! Thx again!

@judell – I’ll see what I can do based on this and your attached article. ^JP

Nice!

Update #2

On Aug. 15 I went there again, and saw that no trees had been trimmed but now one was leaning on a wire. I mentioned to the Sentinel that this might warrant a story.

On Oct. 27 a reporter invited me to visit the site along with a photographer, and I tweeted:

@MyFairPoint: Remember http://bit.ly/clVj5L? Now a tree is leaning on a wire. A @sentinelsource reporter will go see it Monday. Join her?

Response the same day:

@judell Hey Jon, thanks for following up. I passed along your blog post previously, let me get an update for you & report back. ^DB

Nov 1 follow-up:

@judell Good morning, Jon! Been told tree trimming should begin along the Washington St. Ext. early this week. Will keep you posted! ^DB

I took my dog up there for a ramble on Weds, saw work in progress.

On Nov 20 @myfairpoint wrote:

@judell I received news that the tree trimming on Washington St. was completed. Just wanted to close the loop with you. Thanks Jon! ^DB

On Nov. 24 Tuck and Luann and I went up for a hike. A lot’s been done! Although most of the stuff near the lines is now clear, though, there are still a number of trees across the stream that are leaning toward the lines. I wonder if, at some point, it would make sense to reroute the Keene trunk away from this abandoned road? That’s not a cost/benefit decision I’d want to make, and I sure don’t envy Fairpoint being responsible for that stretch of infrastructure. In any case, thanks! We in much better shape for the next ice or wind storm than we were before.

See also: A conversation with PSNH about the ice storm, social media, and customer service.

Among the agenda items that came before the Keene City Council last night was a request by Tom LePage, who runs Armadillo’s Burritos, to extend his sidewalk cafe around the corner onto Railroad Square. I’m in favor of it! As we head into the summer season, I’ll be going to Armadillo’s a lot. I always want to sit outside, but there are only a few tables out front, and they’re usually occupied. Around the corner, where the restaurant abuts Railroad Square, there’s more space available, and it’d be fun to have a ringside seat for the various musical, artistic, and political activities that happen in the square.

Tom’s proposal came up at this point in the meeting. The relevant piece of video, served up by Granicus, lasts only about five seconds. That’s how long it took for city clerk Patty Little to mention the item, and for mayor Dale Pregent to refer it to the Planning, Licences, and Development Committee. But thanks to a new feature added to the Granicus service, that bit of city business now has a permalink and also a hashtag (#granicus732_7716).

This is a simple idea, it’s easy to implement, yet it’s a powerful enabler of modes of communication that we all envision. When the folks on the Planning, Licenses, and Development Committee gets around to considering Tom’s request, they could — and I hope they will — search the web for pages (like this one) that use the permalink, and tweets (like the one I’m about to write) that cite the hashtag. Citizens who want to express views on the matter can do so in their own online spaces, wherever those may be. No single authority is responsible for monitoring, or gathering, or moderating, or displaying the set of items joined together by these unique tokens. But the web’s ability to find that set of things, easily and reliably, assures that they can be brought together in a variety of contexts, to serve a variety of purposes.

The title of a recent post, Every package has its own home page on the web, echoes an epiphany that Andrew Schulman had in 1997 when he realized the implications of every Fedex package having its own unique URL. Every piece of public business should have one too. It’s easy to mint new unique names for things. It’ll be a bit harder to show people how and why to use those names as rendezvous points for loosely-coupled, decentralized interaction. But I hope examples like this one will help get the idea across.

My wife Luann wants to help promote an annual event called the Fall Foliage Artist Studio Tour (FFAST). The organization has a website, and could publish a calendar there, but a calendar with only a single date doesn’t make much sense. And yet this event wants to be written down only once, then flow through the Keene hub as well as other local and regional hubs. How can you arrange that?

As the curator of the Keene hub, I keep a special calendar of one-off and recurring events. These are events that I happen to know and care about, aren’t available in any existing calendar feed, but ought to be syndicating through the hub. I only do this for stuff that I care about, though, and the FFAST event is Luann’s thing, not my thing.

She’s willing and able to curate certain art-related events for our region. One way to do that would be for her to spin up a new elmcity hub for the purpose. But that’s a heavyweight solution. For things like FFAST she needs something lighter. Hence the method described in this post, which for lack of a better term I am calling subcuration.

The idea, in a nutshell, is to combine private and public use of an online calendar. I’ll demonstrate it for Google Calendar, and also for Windows Live Calendar. In both cases, the method entails:

1. Using a private calendar for your personal stuff.

2. Using an auxiliary public calendar for public stuff.

3. Viewing both calendars together so you see everything, just as if you kept it all in your personal calendar.

4. Making the public calendar’s iCalendar feed available for syndication.

Subcuration with Google Calendar

My personal Google Calendar is called Jon Udell (private). To verify that it’s private, I can follow this trail of links from the GCal home page: Settings -> Calendar Settings -> Calendars -> Jon Udell (private) -> Share this calendar. The checkbox named Mark this calendar public is unchecked, as it should be.

Now I’ll create a new calendar, called Jon Udell (public). To make it public, I check the checkbox.

As Google explains, that means the events here will appear in public Google search results. As Google does not explain, it also means that the iCalendar feed for this calendar is open to syndication.

Now I’ll add the FFAST event to my public calendar:

Here’s a view of both calendars. It combines stuff from my personal calendar (birthdays) with stuff from my public calendar (FFAST). From this point of view, it’s just like keeping everything in my personal calendar.

But there’s a key difference. The public calendar has a public iCalendar feed, and I can give its URL to the curator of a syndication hub. To find the URL, I follow this link trail: Settings -> Calendar Settings -> Calendars -> Jon Udell (public). Scrolling down from there, I find a section labeled Calendar Address which contains:

The URL for the iCalendar feed is hiding behind the green ICAL button. To capture it:

1. Right-click (or alt-click) the button.

2. Copy the link address.

3. Bookmark it (if you’re a curator), or paste it into an email to a curator (if you’re a subcurator).

In case you’re curious, here’s the actual feed that a personal calendar app, or a syndication hub, will retrieve at that URL:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Google Inc//Google Calendar 70.9054//EN
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:Jon Udell (public)
X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20101009
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20101011
DTSTAMP:20100519T151655Z
UID:kf4e4qjk08tfd0cmm1v9mc5kbc@google.com
CREATED:20100519T150628Z
DESCRIPTION:http://www.fallfoliageartstudiotour.com/
LAST-MODIFIED:20100519T151054Z
LOCATION:http://www.fallfoliageartstudiotour.com/
SEQUENCE:2
STATUS:CONFIRMED
SUMMARY:Fall Foliage Art Studio Tour
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Subcuration with Windows Live Calendar

As before, my private calendar is Jon Udell (private). Now I’ll create a new calendar, called Jon Udell (public).

To make it public I click Edit Sharing which leads to:

Here I check Share This Calendar and Make Your Calendar Public.

Now I add the FFAST event to the public calendar:

Here’s the same combined view of private and public events:

To capture the URL of the public iCalendar feed, I follow this link trail from the Live Calendar home page: Calendars -> Jon Udell (public) -> Edit sharing -> ICS: Import into another calendar application. That leads to:

That’s is the URL of the iCalendar feed. When a client (personal calendar app or a syndication hub) retrieves the feed, it gets this:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
METHOD:PUBLISH
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Windows Live Calendar//EN
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:29ca7340-9f29-43f5-a62e-7e989ddb99a9
CLASS:PUBLIC
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-BUSYSTATUS:FREE
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
SEQUENCE:0
CREATED:20100519T164446Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20100519T164446Z
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20101009
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20101011
SUMMARY:Fall Foliage Art Studio Tour
LOCATION:http://www.fallfoliageartstudiotour.com
PRIORITY:0
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Summary

These two examples illustrate a set of principles in the context of two different online calendar applications. The same principles will apply to other calendar applications that support multiple calendars, and can publish selected calendars in iCalendar format to open URLs.

The principles are, once again:

1. Use a private calendar for your personal stuff.

2. Use an auxiliary public calendar for public stuff.

3. View both calendars together so you see everything, just as if you kept it all in your personal calendar.

4. Make the public calendar’s iCalendar feed available for syndication.

The KUOW Speakers’ Forum continues to deliver the most consistently valuable talks I listen to these days. The latest is Hernando de Soto on Shadow Economies. It’s about facts, relationships, linked data, identity, property rights, the rule of law, derivatives, toxic assets, and permanent credit crunch. Bottom line: We need to get the facts about those assets, link them together, and bring them out of the shadows. So far as I can tell, the current crop of financial reform bills aren’t saying that. The following excerpts from de Soto’s talk explain why they should, and also why they probably won’t.

Update: From Crain’s:

The Senate legislation would push most of the $615 trillion in over-the-counter derivatives onto regulated exchanges or similar electronic systems, a measure that would make it easier for the market and regulators to track the trades.

Really? Well OK then! Fingers crossed.

In his latest essay, Cliff Gerrish riffs on my keynote at the Kynetx conference:

There was a moment when he was talking about a meeting in local government where the agenda was managed using a web-based tool. Udell talked about wanting to be able to hyperlink to agenda items, he had a blog post that was relevant to one of the issues under discussion. The idea was that a citizen attending the meeting, in person or virtually, should be able to link those two things together, and that the link should be discoverable by anyone via some kind of search. And while the linking of these two things would be useful in terms of reference, if the link simply pulled Udell’s blog post into the agenda at the relevant spot, that might be even more useful.

The reason this kind of thing probably won’t happen is the local government doesn’t want to be held responsible for things a citizen may choose to attach to their agenda items. A whole raft of legal issues are stirred up by this kind of mixing. However, while the two streams of data can’t be literally mixed, they can be virtually mixed by the user. Udell was looking at this agenda and mixing in his own blog post, creating a mental overlay. A technology like Kynetx allows the presentation of a literal overlay and could provide access to this remix to a whole group of people interested in this kind of interaction with the agenda of the meeting.

The Network provides the kind of environment where two things can be entirely separate and yet completely mixed at the same time. And the mixing together can be located in a personal or group overlay that avoids the issues of liability that the local government was concerned about.

That’s one example of a general pattern and best practice at the core of what we mean when we talk about linked data. In 1997, Andrew Schulman gave a talk entitled The Web is the API in which he meditated on the then-revolutionary UPS tracking application:

A URL can drive a process. Thus, UPS was not only opening up its business practices to its customers, but also publishing an implicit API (hmm, “the UPS software developers kit”?). For example: http://wwwapps.ups.com/tracking/tracking.cgi?tracknum=1Z742E220310270799.

Every package has its own home page on the web!

So should every city council agenda item. So should every ARRA contract. This was obvious in 1997, it’s even more obvious now.

The other day I listened to Tim Berners-Lee’s 2009 TED talk on linked data. He said nothing about RDF, but a whole lot about HTTP. The message boiled down to: “Give everything that matters its own home page on the web.”

That simple idea is easy enough to understand, but entails much that isn’t obvious. It costs nothing to mint new web namespace. We can name trillions of things, and we can declare trillions of relationships among named things. No central authority will govern these names and relationships. There is an infinite supply of unique names, each a needle in a vast haystack. Search engines can easily find any needle in that haystack, and they can easily find related needles too.

Here’s one more non-obvious point: Naming is hard. When we have to stop and think what to name something, we can end up thinking for a long time. In order to get to trillions of named things we’ll need to automate the naming. That’s part of what I was driving at in OData for collaborative sense-making. Given any set of things, the web names for those things, and for the relationships among those things, need to arise organically from the systems we use to create and share them. Information systems should mint usefully granular web namespace. If the right kind of naming is built in, we won’t have to bolt it on later. Things will naturally form relationships with other things. Views of those relationships will emerge from many perspectives, for many purposes.

At a service stop on the Merritt Parkway over the weekend, I was approached by a young couple in a jam. They were halfway to their destination, had pulled in for gas, then realized neither had brought a wallet. They were both on their phones, working the problem, and the guy looked up to ask if I’d heard of a roadside assistance program that could help in that situation. I wound up giving them ten bucks. Maybe it was a scam, in which case I only lost $10. But maybe it wasn’t, in which case I helped some folks in need.

Ten bucks wasn’t enough to get them as far as they said they needed to go, though. And later I got to thinking about how we might have created enough trust, in an ad-hoc way, for me to make a short-term loan of, say, $50. It’s an interesting thought experiment. I wonder what solutions you can imagine? Here are a few that occurred to me.

Web identity. Given a web connection, I could have searched for the couple’s names, found their web footprints, and verified that their photographs, locations, and other attributes matched what they claimed.

Six degrees of separation. If we could trace our connection through social network space, that might be enough. It might even be possible to do that with voice calls, but with a web connection it could be almost trivial.

PayPal. Given a web connection, we could have brought up a browser and done a PayPal transaction. In that case I wouldn’t even be making a loan, I’d know that the funds had been transferred before handing over cash.

Losing my wallet while traveling is a nightmare scenario for me. It’s never happened but I dread the thought. I hate being so dependent on documents that I carry around in a wallet that could easily be lost or stolen.

Those documents embody claims made on my behalf by identity providers that we have all agreed to trust. That arrangement became necessary when society grew beyond what interpersonal trust could scale out to support. And it will remain necessary. But as voice and data connectivity become ubiquitous, and as interpersonal trust scales out in ways it never could before, I wonder if we’ll see a re-emergence of pre-bureaucratic modes of identity.

Last week I said that confusion about the visibility of events in Facebook had thwarted my plan to include Facebook as an event source for elmcity hubs. The day after I wrote that post, though, Stephen Judd noted in a comment that a new data entry method has appeared — one that clears up the confusion.

Until April 30, your choices when publishing an event were:

Some people opted for Closed when they really ought to have picked Secret. With the advent of API-based search that meant automated tools like the elmcity aggregator could surface events — like surprise birthday parties — not meant to be seen.

But on May 1 the choices had narrowed to just public or private. It’s implemented as a checkbox:

[x] Anyone can view and RSVP (public event)

It defaults to checked, i.e. public. That’s consistent with the general tilt, in Facebook, toward public rather than private defaults. Many people think that’s the wrong default, and I’m inclined to agree. But at least a confusing three-valued choice has been reduced to an easier-to-understand two-valued choice.

Given that, I’ve decided to add Facebook as an elmcity event source. I’m mindful of the power of defaults, so haven’t made this a default behavior. When a curator spins up a new elmcity hub, the event sources included by default — that is, before you add any iCalendar feeds to your registry — were, and still are, Eventful, Upcoming, and EventBrite. If you want to add Facebook events, you can now do so by adding a new name/value pair to your hub’s metadata record in delicious:

facebook=yes

Curators can, by the way, now include or exclude any of the services. These are the defaults:

eventful=yes
upcoming=yes
eventbrite=yes
facebook=no

All of these settings can be tweaked.

The elmcity service finds Facebook events by searching for them using the location you specify in your metadata record. Here are some sample searches:

If you change the location parameter in that URL you can see which Facebook events will be included for your town. So far, I’m not seeing many public events, even for very populous locations. Facebook’s event system was always more appropriate for friends-and-family events that you wouldn’t expect to see on a community calendar. If you wanted to advertise an event open to the general public, services like Eventful or Upcoming or EventBrite were better ways to do it. Or you can create a public iCalendar feed.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s new event system, which defaults to public, produces more public events than before. To the extent that it does, it could become a useful source for elmcity curators. But if people who create public events in Facebook want that to happen, they’ll need to learn more about those events appear in other contexts.

Consider this event, one of a handful that turns up in a search for Keene, NH. Here’s what anyone can see in Facebook:

What film is being screened? Neither the title nor the description tells us. My guess is that if you know Susan Hay, and are affiliated with mothersuniting.org, that information is part of a shared context that Susan just took for granted when she posted this “public” Facebook event. When she marked the event Public it hadn’t occurred to her that the actual scope of Public means she ought to have named the film in the title or description.

Note that there is an events page at mothersuniting.org, albeit five years behind the times. My own view is that mothersuniting.org should be the authoritative source for its own event information. It could use Google Calendar, for example, to publish an HTML view of a calendar into the events page on its website, while at the same time producing an iCalendar feed that could be listed in a community registry. Facebook really ought to be a downstream consumer of that kind of event source, not an upstream producer.

But no matter what I think, there will be people, maybe a lot of people, who end up making Facebook the authoritative source for their event information, instead of their own websites. So I’m enabling curators to capture those streams. We’ll see how it unfolds. As always, it’ll be fascinating to watch people walk the slippery path that divides private from public.

PS: If you’re a developer working with the new events API, here’s an odd quirk I’ve uncovered. Dates and times reported through the Facebook API don’t correlate sensibly with dates and times reported in the Facebook application.

At first I thought this was a timezone issue, and tried various Ptolemaic adjustments to make things work out. It got weirder and weirder, until finally I went empirical and made this table of observations:

    Where: Keene: GMT-5
 FB start: 2010-05-09 19:00
API start: 2010-05-10 02:00
     Diff: +7 hours

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=113825365318937

    Where: Chicago: GMT-6
 FB start: 2010-05-01 11:00
API start: 2010-05-02 06:00
     Diff: +7 hours

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=114150548619789

    Where: Salt Lake City: GMT-7
 FB start: 2010-04-28 06:00
API start: 2010-04-28 13:00
     Diff: +7 hours  

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=115044215191908

    Where: Fresno: GMT-8
 FB start: 2010-05-03 11:00
API start: 2010-05-03 18:00
     Diff: +7 hours

For no reason I can see, the API reports a local time that’s 7 hours ahead of the time you see when you view the event in Facebook. After making that adjustment, things seem to work. Why 7 hours? Beats me.

After long study of the psychological effects that computers and information systems are having on us, Linda Stone has turned to the physiological effects. Her elevator pitch used to be continuous partial attention. Now it’s email apnea. When we use these technologies, Linda says, we project ourselves into them, we become disembodied, we lose the ability to regulate our posture and breathing. On this week’s Innovators show she discusses what she has learned, and challenges us to find ways to remain embodied as we interact with networked devices and information systems.

Coincidentally, I got to hang out with Linda this weekend and try the HeartMath system that she’s been experimenting with. It sense your pulse, displays the variability of your heart rate, and then guides you through a breathing exercise that helps you regulate it. The HeartMath hardware and software supports regulation of the autonomic nervous system, bringing awareness to breathing patterns that emphasize fight or flight (sympathetic) or a rest and digest (parasympathetic) state.

One expert in this field, Steve Elliott, refers to this state as Coherent Breathing, and also offers a set of exercises. Now, to be honest, when I land on web pages like this one, where scholarly charts and footnotes rub elbows with ads for Swarovski Crystal Reminder Bracelets, my instinct is to move along. I’m fiercely non-mystical. I had to quit a yoga class because I just couldn’t listen to all the chatter about sun energy and moon energy. Can’t we just breathe and stretch?

The thing is, I’m also fiercely rational about physiology and health. I know that good posture, deep breathing, and slow stretching have profound benefits. I have resolved several health crises, ones that our medical system would prefer to address with drugs and surgery, by paying attention to my body and then adjusting how I use it. But I’ve never had a chance to try biofeedback. So I was intensely curious about the HeartMath system. It uses a pulse monitor clipped to your earlobe to monitor your heart rate, plus software to guide you through an exercise that levels out the variability and leads you into a state of breathing and pulse “coherence.”

For me it was easy, and fun, to achieve a high coherence score. Linda asked: “Are you a meditator?” No. “An athlete?” Yes. So that makes sense. I have decades of experience regulating my own breathing and heart rate. But never in a work context, and that’s the point Linda is driving at. In our work environments we leave our bodies and project ourselves into computers and networks. If we can reconnect with our bodies in those environments, we’ll be healthier. I can’t prove that, but I feel sure that it’s right.

I haven’t yet plunked down $300 for the HeartMath system, but I’m trying to talk myself into it. Although the company advertises it as a “desktop personal stress relief system,” I like the way that Linda is articulating a larger vision. For her, its about human performance. We are more powerful when augmented by computers and networks, but also less healthy. One answer is to decouple ourselves from computers and networks, and sometimes that’s the right answer. But another answer is to find ways to remain embodied as we use computers and networks. Linda thinks that’s a crucial way forward, and I agree.

Why not just jump on the bandwagon then? Because my antipathy to mysticism has lately also extended to geek crazes. I’m suspicious of the instinct to solve problems created by our computerized gadgets by acquiring and using more computerized gadgets. And I’m wary of the quasi-autistic compulsion at the heart of the quantified self movement whose manifesto, the data-driven life, appeared in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

I have been a runner and a biker for decades. People always ask: How far did you run? How fast do you bike? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. It’s enough for me to be outside, moving over the landscape, breathing deeply, thinking my own thoughts and listening to other people’s thoughts.

I’m the kind of guy who hates waiting for a machine at the Y while the person who just did 20 reps pauses to scribble in a journal that he did 20 reps.

I’m certain that we will see, in a year or two, the emergence of 12-step programs for people who are addicted to self-monitoring.

And yet…I really liked the coherent breathing exercise. I want to repeat it, and I think it can become a helpful part of my routine.