The (old) Alpha Mind

Today I finished directing my first televion project. It was amazing. It was exhausting. It was wonderful. And of course it’s not over. Many hours of post-production await me and my fine video team.

We set up a complete three-camera studio at Berkeley Friends Church in order to tape Quaker Heritage Day. We put the control room out in the narthex, and let the church sound system take care of the sound, which it does quite will without much intervention. If there’s anything really bad about this production, it’ll probably be the sound, and that would be, ironically, because the sound system is so good — it might have made us complacent. We were very sloppy about miking the speakers and teaching them how to use the equipment.

Many thanks to Berkeley Community Media for the use of their equipment, and for lending us intern Myriam Beltran, who did a superb job on camera 3.

We hope to have this thing ready for cablecast by mid-April. Our next project: a training video for conscientious objectors. Watch this space!

Robin M: “I still can’t quite believe that I invited all these people over to my house and all we ate was take out pizza and salad.” She also served good drinks. Blueberry juice, yum! But I was there for the company and conversation, which were both wonderful.

Here’s the gang:

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.

On this blog last night, listing the best presenters at BBS, I forgot Mary Hodder. I forgot because I was using the original speakers list to jog my memory. (Justly afraid I was of pulling out my actual notes–I’d never have gotten to bed.) Mary wasn’t on that list. She was called in last-minute to fill in for another speaker, and gave the kind of straight-on, cover-the-subject talk I appreciated from Rebecca Blood.

It’ll take me a couple of days more to finish evaluating BBS. What I can say before signing off for the night is that Rebecca Blood did a fine presentation. And for the sake of the whole conference, it was a shame she went last, because she made it so obvious how far most of the other presentations had been off the mark. She was on topic, she made every word count, she kept to her allotted time, she simply did what I wished every other speaker had done. If you follow the link to her site, you’ll even see she immediately posted a link that several people had asked for during her pres. Superb, a true pro.

She wan’t the only one who did us right. Sally Falkow was spot-on, too. John Cass and Laurie Mayers also delivered.

And Buzz Bruggeman was great, shamelessly hawking his product at every turn, and doing so in such a way as to show how it’s done–with charm, humor, and above all, great storytelling. One of the ways he gets you not to be turned off by his salesmanship is the beams of positive light he sheds on others, many others. For example, he did a good job of plugging his friend David Allen.

Three pictures from BBS:

Chris Pirillo and Jessica from Tennessee

Buzz Bruggeman, Sean Lyndersay, Scoble

Scoble, Steve Gillmor

End of day 2 of the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco. I’ll blog about it in more detail later. But some quick comments:

The day started slow and became more exciting as it went along. Evelyn Rodriguez started us off by explaining the blogosphere by the metaphore of the marketplace. Not a new metaphor, but a good exposition of it, and anyone who quotes both Donne and Yeats in a 15-min presentation is cool in my book.

Scoble has plenty to say, a good thing considering how much he blogs. Details on what he said today will come either tomorrow night on this blog or in audio later in the weekend. The last session of the day he spoke about defensive strategies for companies that blog, and it was a good presentation with lively audience interaction.

After the sessions, I had a great talk with Shel Israel and Steve Gillmor. A trio of children of the 60s we are, and we shared war stories about an old and very ugly war (Nam, which all of us opposed and in which one of us lost a brother). The three of us standing together drew rather more good-natured ageist comments from others than we really needed.

We talked about our shared admiration for Dave Winer. Then one of us, Shel or I made a comment (I honestly can’t remember who, or the content) about Dave that was, gee, not even negative, but which sort of qualified our admiration. Gillmor went to Dave’s defense like a bulldog.

I was meeting all of these luminaries in person for the first time. It was great. By coincidence, I’ll be meeting Winer for the first time on Saturday, at the OPML Roadshow in Berkeley. What an influential bunch of characters to meet in three days.

Lest I forget, I need to thank my friend and sometime business partner Glen Allmendinger of Harbor Research for his offer to foot the bill for my conference registration. I accepted his offer, of course. What a great gift!