The (old) Alpha Mind

I’m near a tipping point… I can feel it.

I just know, down in my bones, that the day is coming–soon–when I’ll be pretty sure that the available cures for spam are as bad as the disease.

It’s happened twice in two months, now, that critically important emails, either from me or to me, have been blocked as spam. In the first case the planning for a public event was rather badly messed up. In the other case, only an extraordinary initiative on the part of a supplier (he realized some information was missing and took a last-minute guess–turned out to be a good one) saved us from embarassment at another public event.

People only get into my house if I’ve trusted them enough to give them a key. People only know how to reach me by phone if I’ve given them my number. And many friends of mine won’t take a call from a number that doesn’t identify itself. Why can’t these three concepts be thrown together into a stew rather tastier and more effective than the kludgy spam blockers currently on offer?

A system that’s conceptually simple and also wouldn’t be too hard to implement is simply that I give a key to my emailbox (write-only), to anyone I want to be able to reach me. No key, it’s spam and I don’t see it. It’s a unique key for each person, and I can revoke someone’s key at any time if that person or company has abused the privilege of emailing me.

Why isn’t this happening?

Today I start a new category on this blog: Berkeley Waste. In this category, I’ll post each failure of the city of Berkeley to help Berkeley Friends Church recycle.

The saga began at least a year ago. I don’t want to recount it now. Suffice it to say that yesterday’s missed pickup of cardboard is far from being the first. I’m posting it to the blog so that if it goes on another half-year or so, I will have a written record starting from today. I’ll try to use a consistent format for missed pickups, like this:

Missed Pickup: Tuesday, 2/21/06, cardboard and mixed paper.

This year’s Quaker Heritage Day at Berkeley Friends Church will be the first ever to be:

• televised (on Berkeley public access television and beyond)
• blogged in advance,
• podcast (if beppe doesn’t I will, and even if he does I will.)

And all because… well, just because the world is ready to blog and podcast, and we at Berkeley Friends Church are ready to make television.

Our video team had an adventure this evening. We took a Studio Directing Workshop, where we were asked to direct a scripted narrative episode, and I think we all found it quite challenging.

I can easily understand why many people get themselves trained and certified at an access TV station, and then don’t do anything. I can also understand why some people get hooked on TV directing. In either case it’s the very challenge of the thing. Some people don’t like adrenaline, some love it. And adrenaline is your only possible response as you try to catch the very best of something that’s flying past you. It’s flying past you in infinite channels, and you have to narrow it all into three channels (three cameras), and of the three, finally into one.

When I say it’s flying past, I’m speaking figuratively, but I’m hardly exaggerating. Things happen really quickly, really suddenly. This is true even when, like tonight, you have a script in front of you that you’ve spent an hour marking up, and which the talent is to a reasonable degree following. Having experienced this relatively simple scenario, and having been humbled by it, my broadbrimmed hat is off to the people who televise breaking news, sports, and other unscripted live events.

So, my life changed big-time starting in August. The bright side is that the changes were growthful for me, if not all pleasant. The brighter side is that some of them were very pleasant indeed. The down side, at least as regarding my blogging career, is that I can’t write about them, not in any detail.

I’ll just give some hints: One change was the answer to two decades of intense and desparate prayer, and I can’t write about it, because even changing the names won’t protect the innocent as much as is necessary. Another change involved losing my only consulting client, so that I have to rebuild my consulting business from almost-scratch. (This is a growthful and even rather pleasant change because I’d been wanting to make the transition for some time, and this compels me to do what I might otherwise have avoided due to inertia.) Another change involved my having to speak, for the first time ever, to an on-duty homicide detective. It was a shocking and stressful introduction to the very hard lives some folks lead in Oakland.

In all three cases, even protecting the innocent isn’t the whole reason for not writing about it. Sometimes even the guilty need to be cut a break.

Now I’m back, and my church work is exciting and my consulting work hasn’t paid a dime in months but is still exciting and life is incredibly good. And I hope I’ll be able to blog consistently. Even the pleasantest of surprises can be stressful, and I think I’ve had enough for a while.