The Dandelife Blog

Video Snapshot of Pam Abbott 8,
originally uploaded by kga245.

This is my favorite part of the week. Sunday’s we all get online and woot it up with gusto. This week we got to see Max walk, which is a first for us all. He’s been walking for af ew weeks, but this week he was fully mobile. Max is also Mia’s new teddy bear, so she drags him around the house, dresses him up and generally has her way with him - none of which he seems to mind much. Noel and Sara did some gardening today. Noel bought a lawnmower and weed wacker. So he’s not only fully domesticated, but a card-carrying adult. I was quick to remind him that he may be an adult when he buys his first lawnmower, but he’s only a real Abbott Man if he’s beaten the crap out of a garbage can with a baseball bat. An inside Abbott joke, which we all came to agree should be kept an inside.

For a time I was an early-adopter and therfore only-geek-on-the-block with Wi-Fi. It became known that if you wanted to learn how to set up a wireless network at home, I was the guy to help with such a task. Soon after I started helping people install wireless networks, teaching them the principles of what I was doing, it wasn’t long before I was hearing thier accounts of doing the same at work — unbeknownst to their IT departments. This was only 3 years ago. Now, I can’t think of the last time I was at a business function that did not have wi-fi. Wi-Fi is in every board room, every conference hall, and every convening place on all the corporate campuses and office buildings I frequent. It’s even in every starbucks I know.

If you want to get to some Web 2.0 truisms let’s start with these:

When Web 2.0 is in every starbucks - that’s when every office will want it too.

Web 2.0 will come through the back door into the enterprise. Microprenuers and change agents (those white-collar, cubicle revolutionaries among us) are the ones who’ll bring it in.

It will take at least three years from now before every crook and nanny knows what Web 2.0 really means — systems-interconnectedness and platform-independence.

San Diego Hotel Implosion,
originally uploaded by kga245.

One of several shots I took of the San Diego Hotel demolition that took place yestrday. We had front row seats for the event on the 15th floor of the building to its immediate West. We had to get up at 6AM to make it into the building before they closed off the area. Probably a once in a lifetime experience - so it necessitated booze and plenty of 80’s music. Here’s a link to the Video I put together yesterday to accompany the photos.

Updated with video

One of the best things to happen to me this year has been iSight. My mom recently bought a Mac laptop at my request. She was going to buy the thing anyway, but needed me to recommend PC or Mac. My dad’s got a PC which he totes to and from work. So when it came time to get mom online and using email, browsing the web and, perhaps one day even designing a quilt pattern with her new computer, to me the answer was obvious: buy a Mac.

What I didn’t know was how my mom having a Mac would factor into me and my brother communicating more as well. You see, my brother talks to my mom once a week. I talk to my mom once a week. So vicariously through her, we talk to each other once a week as well. I find out about his kids from my mom. He finds out about my meanderings similarly. He doesn’t use flickr, even though he has a digital camera. He never emails, even though he uses it all the time for work. And he’s reluctant to talk on the phone because he has pizzamanophobia. One thing he does have though, is a Mac.

So last month, as my parents departed for Chicago for one of their long weekends with the grandkids, Noel and Sara, I asked my mom to go to the Apple store and buy an iSight for my brother. That way on Sunday we could have a video conference while they were there and we’d all see each other and talk like we were in the same room. They did. And we did. And you know what? It was marvelous.

My mom loved it so much, she bought an iSight for herself when she got home. The next weekend we were teleconferencing between San Diego, Columbus and Chicago. Last weekend we missed a call due to Noel and the kids traveling to the other Grandparents in Michigan. And by miss I mean miss. We really enjoy our Sunday chats. For the first time ever, Mia is interested in talking to her aunt and uncle in far-away San Diego. She stops and makes faces at the screen, tells me about the museums, her classes, and even showed me the doll we sent her for her birthday last month. And it being video means that much more. Mom and Dad can see my new facial hair experiment. Noel took us on a tour of his new house (untethering the laptop and going wireless through the house). We can spot dad nodding off. The format is every bit as important as the circumstance.