It’s the eve of my departure for California and what did I learn today? That Fray Day Toronto is a bust. Seems that the person organizing the event here has gone AWOL. I suspected it a few weeks ago after volunteering vigorously to help out, and not ever being contacted. I’m hoping to meet Derek this week and maybe we can pull it out of the fire somehow…If you are in the Toronto area (and I’m defining that very widely for this purpose) and you might be interested in some sort of Fray event on September 8, please contact me and let me know you care!
Author: James McNally
Props to Derek!
Credit where credit is due: I found the stuff on Geocaching and Nervous Industries from this article by Derek Powazek. I’m really looking forward to his book, due out this month. Look for a review soon…
Double Dog Dare
Jason has issued a “double dog dare” to webloggers to post some of their pre-web journal entries. Not only did I keep a regular journal from 1985-1998, but I’ve already posted a particularly overwrought account of 20 strange days in 1997. But if he wants more, I’ll try to dredge up more, though my journal was never a repository for ideas, good or bad, but more of an angst dump and a place to obsess on girls. I did/do keep notebooks just for writing down ideas, scraps of poetry, quotes and lists and some of that might be interesting blog fodder too. (Hey, I like that — blogfodder. Coming soon, “The BlogFodder” on DVD!!!)
Offline Pursuits
I’ve been reading a lot and getting excited lately about several “offline” extensions of online communities.
- Nervous Industries is a community site for facilitating real-life exchanges of art objects and other creative expressions. I’ve always loved “snail” mail and mail art and this site makes it possible to find interesting people all over the world with whom to connect. A great use of the web.
- Geocaching is almost like a sportier version of a giant worldwide scavenger hunt. People hide “caches” (boxes of trinkets, postcards, stamps, etc.) and then give GPS coordinates on the Geocaching site directing people to their hidden treasure. Another great way to connect people and send us away from our screens for a while.
Reading about geocaching has me obsessed with getting a handheld GPS unit now. I’m travelling to a strange and large city this weekend and have never had a great sense of direction anyway, so I’d love to play with one of these gadgets. I’m especially enamoured of the Garmin eTrex units. Does anyone have any experience with these? Or better yet, does anyone know where I could borrow or rent one of these in San Francisco?
“the net” circa 1995
In my packing and unpacking the last couple of weeks, I found a magazine called “the net” from June 1995 (Premiere Issue!). It’s filled with screenshots of horrid grey-background sites and URLs like http://debra.dgbt.doc.ca:80/opengov/ (that was the government of Canada’s website!). The only non-cringeworthy thing in it is an interview with Douglas Rushkoff. One thing I learned is that he’s only been on the net a year longer than I have (he got on in 1991.) I also laughed as he described his experiences with online communities: “I realized that the same conversation is going on all over. It’s about different things, but it’s the exact same conversation. It starts with someone saying something provocative, then a bunch of people come down on him really hard, and then he’s just about to give up when someone else comes down on his side, and then people start arguing about the tactics that are used in the arguing, and the conversation dissipates into this metaconversation.” Ah, the more things change….