January 30, 2008
My heart is full
I'm in an introspective mood.
I turned 46 a couple of weeks ago. That's an x-ray of my chest, taken at a recent trip to the doctor. I had the flu around my birthday, and had a nagging cough that wouldn't go away. Hence the x-ray, which was just a precaution. All is well, other than a little wheezing.
I liked it when my doctor pointed to that big dark lump on the bottom right (my left) side of my rib-cage and said, "Your heart looks great."
My heart feels great. My heart is full. I feel very blessed by all the good people in my life and the good work I get to do:
-I am blessed by my wife, Leslie, who I have been with for more than 28 years since our first official date. (But who's counting?) What an incredible thing it is to share one's life with a partner who is your best friend.
-My daughter Mira, who just turned 18. OMG! She can vote this coming Tuesday! And she's going to a great college next year. And she'll be doing what she loves, playing softball, and exploring all the academic subjects she's interested in.
-My son Jesse, who is 14 and is a remarkable young man. Thoughtful, caring, hardworking, and somehow he's developed a better sense of humor than me. Damn!
-We have a good home. It's not a palace, but it's comfortable, and we should never take that for granted. The heat works, the water works, the electricity works, the phones (mostly) work, and we have fiber to the home. Can't beat that.
-All the family that surrounds us. All four grandparents are with us, and living full lives of their own. My sister has a beautiful first-born son. Two of Leslie's siblings are also relatively new parents. My brother has two delightful amazing young kids. Children renew my sense of purpose.
-I have amazing work that enriches and challenges and educates me everyday, and great colleagues and partners to share it with. Andrew, Josh, Anthony, Ellen, Mike, Greg--we are blessed to live in such interesting times, and to be able to, maybe just maybe, tip them in even more beneficial directions.
-I would never have guessed this maybe ten or fifteen years ago, but I also feel blessed to have found a vibrant Jewish community to be part of, Mishkan Ha'am, and to be able to share in all of the cycle of life with an intimate circle of real friends.
What can I say? My heart is full.
January 21, 2008
Understanding the Power of Online Video
I was Brian Lehrer's weekly cable TV show last week, talking about online political video and other aspects of techPresident's coverage of the election. You can watch the video here. Hopefully it will be up on blip.tv soon. My main points:
1. Online video is the opposite of paid TV ads. People choose to watch, and most attention comes because friends share video clips with each other. Contrast that to 30-second attack ads, which are literally forced on viewers, interrupting their favorites shows.
2. Online video is deeper than TV. The typical Barack Obama video is anywhere from five to ten minutes long. YouTube only counts a video as "viewed" if the viewer watches it all the way through. Thus, for Obama to have more than 8 million views, or 600,000 the day after he won the Iowa primary, tells you that many more people have probably watched part of one of his videos. This is yet more example of how the web is a world of abundance, not scarcity.
3. When we track viewership, or people "friending" a candidate or mentioning them in their blogs, what we're watching is a sign of intensity of support. Bloggers and their ilk are like super-charged citizens, and so the tracking numbers online aren't the same as polls, but more like measures of intensity of interest and support.