I am jogging past when the teenagers jump onto the hood of the car. It’s not a good decision but who am I to tell them. And I am worried about this heart of mine. The doctor said my blood pressure is way too high. Exercise he said, and my diet… something about a sea-change. Running now, I wonder if my heart might just give up. Here on the street, in front of these teenagers, riding on the hood of the car.

I hear the bump.

The car wasn’t going very fast, only 5 miles an hour. They must have bumped the curb… or a trash can. Yes. I am sure it was a trash can. They are behind me now and I don’t want to look back. I am sure they are fine.

I look to my left and see a man hopping on one foot. His other leg is missing. I am sure that it has always been that way. The missing leg that is. And not always missing, but missing prior to this. Prior to the bump.

I continue running. They weren’t going that fast.

I get a telegram. I am running, straining to read the telegram. Worried about my heart.
He is dead. Stop. Hit by car. Stop. Lost leg. Stop. Couldnt stop bleeding. Stop.

I Stop.

“He”, is a friend of mine. Or was, I suppose. He is dead now. The fact that I did not recognize him, hurt and hopping - hurts. Makes me feel as if I never knew him at all. I am awake now feeling loss - his death a fact. I am feeling the regret that comes with the death of a friend. That sense of never having spent the time you were given properly.

I awake now (turns out I wasn’t awake the first time) and realize that my dead friend is, in fact, not dead. I get out of bed knowing that I will call him today. Knowing he will not understand the smile on my face.

I am doing some research that requires reading portions of the election code for each of the 50 states. I just found this gem of a law in Arizona.

If the ballots in the box are still found to exceed in number the names on the poll lists, the ballots, except those destroyed, shall be replaced in the box, and one of the judges shall, without looking in the box, draw therefrom, one at a time, and destroy unopened, a number of ballots equal to the excess…

I can’t think of a better solution off the top of my head, but the thought of a law that intentionally requires that votes be destroyed is scary.

There is a northern bottlenose whale swimming in the Thames. It just passed Big Ben.

And it begins. I have been wondering for some months how long it would take law enforcementy types to realize that they could use social networks like MySpace and Flickr to track down graffiti and streetartists and the evidence (or leads to the evidence) they would need to bring a case. Users add fresh pictures of their latest escapades near daily. While I hoped that the Police would never get wise, it appears that the Boston Police just used MySpace to catch some kids (to the tune of $75,000 in damages).

I think this will become a series of posts on usability or at least incompetent practices I encounter on the web. I just followed a link to Fool.com and was asked to register (only an email address) before continuing to the content (”it’s free!” they said). I entered asd@asd.com (literally), I was thanked by the Fool team and was off to the races.

What good does that do any of us? You get a fake email and I had to drive over a speed bumb before getting to the content. If you are going to ask me to register, at least confirm the email before giving me access. If you believe your content deserves an email address, get an email address. Otherwise you are just wasting everyone’s time.

I can’t take it anymore. Used to be when I got ready to leave the house I had a simple routine:

Wallet? Check. Keys? Check. Let’s ride.

Now, my routine approximates the flight check preceeding the take-off of a Boeing 747.

Wallet? Check. Keys? Check. Phone? Check. iPod? Check. Digital Camera? Check. Camera Charger? iPod Charger? Phone Charger? Check. Check. Check.

When did these extra gadgets (and their incompatible power sources) become indispensable to my way of life? Wasn’t wireless’ promise, in the end, supposed to be an untethered existence? Yet here I am, more connected to my gadgets and less connected to the world I live in and the people I live with.

Flashback to my time in Baltimore. I went over a year without a cellphone (or a home phone for that matter). My friends reflect on that time with pure awe? How did anyone reach you? How did you make plans? Making plans was difficult. No doubt. But not for the reasons you might imagine. See. People don’t make plans anymore. Or rather I should say, people only make plans to make plans. A typical “plan” goes something like this:

Hey whatcha doin’ later?

Don’t know. Chillin’. You?

Same?

Want to get into something?

Sounds good. Whatcha thinking?

Dunno. Maybe go see this flick. Maybe grab a beer.

Cool. Give me a shout later?

Cool.

Those aren’t plans. That is one person naming some activities and another person saying that if he hasn’t found anything better to do he will commit later when you call and ask him again. You should have seen the look on my friends faces when I tried to make real plans in my phone-less days. It was akin to the look claustrophobic people get when you put them in a closet.

Hey, want to get together later tonight?

Sounds cool. What’d you have in mind?

Movie? Drinks? Just want to hang out.

Yeah man, call me later and… (digusted sigh)… why don’t you get a damn cell phone!

Let’s meet up at O’Sheas at 8:00.

I… um…

Well, I’ll be there at 8:00. If you can make it drop by. If not no worries.

Ok… Cool.

The “I… Um” was my friend’s realization that if he committed he couldn’t back out if something better came along. Backing out would leave me sitting at a bar all by my lonesome (truth be told, I have been left alone in worse places than a bar).

When did we move from making plans to evaluating options like a day trader? Can we go back?
Though I love my iPod, it presents a similar problem. Have we become so bored (or boring) that we can’t walk to the bodega without a soundtrack? The iPod could, in time, represent the end of meeting strangers or overhearing interesting conversations. It could spell the end of chance run-ins and right place right time coincidences. All because we have earbuds where our earholes should be.

The senses are connected and when we have loud music in our ears, we litteraly see less. How many times have I seen a friend who says, “I walked past you yesterday on Houston and said hello, but then I saw you had your earplugs in”? What might have happened had we stopped and chatted. What untold fun (or trouble) might I have gotten into had it not been for “iPod etiquette” which says that if a person has earbuds in they mustn’t be interrupted?

A few weeks ago I would have argued that my camera had no bad side-effects. I found myself wanting to walk instead of taking the train. I was seeing more. Every turned corner was an opportunity for a once in a lifetime shot. The details jumped out at me. I was seeing things in my everyday environ that had gone unnoticed for months or years. Has that building always had that beautiful trim? Look at the way that awning hangs… just so. But then I realized. I was living through a lens. I wasn’t experiencing life. I was capturing it. Did I think that by doing so I could live it later?

So, can I become untethered from these machines and someone reconnect with people? I took my first step yesterday when I called Verizon and asked them to turn off the text-message feature on my phone so that I could not send or receive text messages. A small gesture to be sure, but the beginning of a personal revolt I suspect. Why text-messaging? I don’t like that we, as a people, have gotten so efficient that even talking on the phone has become innefficient. Now, we communicate without sound (in part, I suspect, because voice communication would require us to remove the earbuds from our ears).

If I do go totally untethered, will there be anything left to experience if everyone else noiselessly goes through life, earbuds firmly rooted, fingers busily doing the work that used to be assigned to the larynyx?

I just might have to see for myself. I am betting the world will be as interesting as I remember.

Update: Mike over at TechDirt points to an interesting article entitled “Is mobile entertainment empowering or imprisoning — or both?” over at Post-Gazette. I also enjoyed Mark Cuban’s post “The End of Boredom”.

How did I miss this?

Granted, I skimmed over the Google / AOL news from a few weeks ago. According to the New York Times:

Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before.

That doesn’t sound like ads… that sounds like prioritized results.

Boo.