Showing posts tagged life

Coming back

My experiment with Tumblr last year lasted barely two months. I started writing in February of 2010, and suddenly stopped in the middle of April when I was diagnosed with cancer —on April 28th, the day before I had surgery to remove my right kidney, the postings suddenly stopped. I remember the experience of writing and posting as very pleasurable, but my attention was completely diverted the the health issues, and I stopped having the time or the energies to write.

Today I happened to “stumble upon” my old Tumblr, and found so many interesting notes, and some many beautiful pictures of Teo, and of our lives last year. It made me quite nostalgic, for sure (Teo is now double the size, for one thing!), and it also made feel like writing again. Now that life has come back to normal, it’d be great to start taking notes of interesting things again and sharing my thoughts and our recent pictures.  I’ll do just that —there’s a lot of interesting things to share.

April 1st: Designers Rahul Mahtani & Yofred Moik from the Industrial Design program at Syracuse University came up with this concept called Google Envelopes. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to map the course of snail mail and how it tells a story? Of course, it’s a now a Beta Feature in GMail… ;-) This would of course have made Milgram’s small-worlds experiment much easier to do! And, by the way, I hear that it’s in fact possible to print and mail envelopes with a map of your current location, thanks (again) to Google Maps. Seriously now, I truly appreciate this kind of thinking. It is in a way related to what Anita and I had in mind when we designed FromABirdie (who just turned 1, by the way!): in a world of ever accelerating communication, we wanted to create a place that encourage people to take their time to write deep letters to friends. Through the promise of absolute privacy, and by adding an artificial delay in the delivery of the letter (basically, by being the opposite of Facebook or Twitter), FromABirdie manages to create an environment where people think, open up, tell deep and meaningful stories, and focus on giving rather than receiving. It all the albums of letters that we have seen on the site, the average message is one and a half pages long. It is a source of pride for us, to have created a tool that leverages modern technologies (to increase its reach and accessibility, for example) and at the same time restores a sense of slowness and an awareness of time and distance that seem to be disappearing from this world. The Google Envelopes would be another neat way to increase awareness of distance and time, as the path of snail mail is traced on the envelope itself. But who writes letters these days anyways?  (via @informationaesthetics) View high resolution

April 1st: Designers Rahul Mahtani & Yofred Moik from the Industrial Design program at Syracuse University came up with this concept called Google Envelopes. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to map the course of snail mail and how it tells a story? Of course, it’s a now a Beta Feature in GMail… ;-)

This would of course have made Milgram’s small-worlds experiment much easier to do!

And, by the way, I hear that it’s in fact possible to print and mail envelopes with a map of your current location, thanks (again) to Google Maps.

Seriously now, I truly appreciate this kind of thinking. It is in a way related to what Anita and I had in mind when we designed FromABirdie (who just turned 1, by the way!): in a world of ever accelerating communication, we wanted to create a place that encourage people to take their time to write deep letters to friends. Through the promise of absolute privacy, and by adding an artificial delay in the delivery of the letter (basically, by being the opposite of Facebook or Twitter), FromABirdie manages to create an environment where people think, open up, tell deep and meaningful stories, and focus on giving rather than receiving. It all the albums of letters that we have seen on the site, the average message is one and a half pages long. It is a source of pride for us, to have created a tool that leverages modern technologies (to increase its reach and accessibility, for example) and at the same time restores a sense of slowness and an awareness of time and distance that seem to be disappearing from this world.

The Google Envelopes would be another neat way to increase awareness of distance and time, as the path of snail mail is traced on the envelope itself. But who writes letters these days anyways? 

(via @informationaesthetics)

I read and liked Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice (although, to be fair, I thought it was too long and that his —very valuable— point could have been made in 50 pages instead of 250). 

This talk that he gave last year at TED, around the time of Obama’s inauguration, was both inspiring and a perfect articulation of what I believe to be important: the desire and the courage to do the right thing following the spirit of the law (with common sense), instead of taking refuge in the brain-dead alternative of just following it verbatim.

“
Y yo que me la lleve al río
creyendo que era mozuela,
pero tenía marido.