Category Archives: Life

Of Leaf Bags, Yankee Frugality And Our Disposable Society

Lawn bagsThere I was at the Keene dump at 7:00am this week about to drop off nine bags full of leaves that we’d raked up in our lawn. (The down side of all that beautiful foliage we enjoy!) I backed my Subaru Baja up to the massive pile of leaves and got out to start dumping my bags of leaves into the pile with all the other ones.

As I did so, I noticed a guy with a pickup truck about 20 feet away who was meticulously folding up the now empty paper bags that he had obviously used to bring leaves to the dump.

We gave the silent nods of acknowledgement that people often do at the dump… and then curiosity got the better of me and I asked “so do you re-use your bags?”

“Oh, sure! I usually get a good three years out of them,” he said.

I nodded… and we both continued our separate work. But what blew my mind at that moment was simply this:

I had never considered re-using the paper leaf bags!

They were just the things you put leaves in and then threw out at the dump. Nothing more than that.

My package of 5 bags cost me $3.29 at my local hardware store. I bought two packages and so my investment thus far was a bit under $7. ($6.58 if we’re being precise.) I was figuring I would probably need another set of bags to finish out the season and so I’d buy another set soon.

$10

In my mind just “the cost of doing business” and living in New England. Since the drop-off of leaves is free at our city dump, that $10 is my cost for the season, plus of course the bit of gas to drive out to the dump.

Not a big deal in the flow of our regular household budget.

But still…

$10 can buy other things. $10 could pay for the gas I need to drive back and forth. $10 could be donated to someone who might need it more.

It was a reminder to me that we live in such a consumeristic society where we just think about everything as being disposable. I was thinking about things as being disposable, particularly because these are just paper bags that will automatically degrade along with all of the leaves in them.

But why not re-use them?

By the time I unloaded my nine bags the guy had driven away and I was the only one at the pile. A couple of my bags were ripped from sticks and needed to be thrown in the pile… but I did save seven of them. Just emptied out the leaves and then folded them somewhat back together.

Now I don’t have to buy that third set of bags – and if I’m careful I can probably not rip these bags and hold on to them for next year.

The only way out of being a “disposable” society is for us to think about ways that we can indeed reduce, re-use and recycle… and in this case I chose to re-use!

What about you? Do you re-use leaf bags? (If you are in the part of the world that needs them.) Or have you never bothered with leaf bags anyway and just used tarps and such?

You can hear an audio version of this post on SoundCloud:

My Four Words For 2014

2014fourwordsAs has been my custom now for the past few years, I like to start my writing off in a new year with a post about a few “words” that I intend to use as guides for the year. They aren’t “resolutions” as much as they are areas of my personal life in which I aspire to be active this year. In previous years (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010) I’ve chosen three words, following a meme started by Chris Brogan many years ago.

This year, I found myself struggling to reduce four words down to three… and finally said “Hey, wait a minute, it’s MY blog… if I want to have four words this year, I can! ;-)” And so… here is my list for 2014…

RUNNING

Those following my writing here have known that running became an important part of my life over the last 3.5 years. I even recorded an audio commentary last year (while running) about how important it is to me.

But I suffered a real crisis in confidence – and enjoyment – when I ran an extremely frustrating half-marathon in September. I never wrote a response to my post about preparing to run the half-marathon… rather than “third time is a charm”, it was more “three strikes and you’re out!”

I’ll write some other time about that particular race and the resulting mental fallout, but suffice it to say that I’ve had a hard time getting back out there. I know intellectually that I just need to get back out there and do it… and in 2014 I intend to once again make running a core part of a healthy lifestyle!

And maybe I’ll get to where I do try another half-marathon…. (but probably at a cooler time of year).

UPDATE: – I started off the year on a good note here by running a 5K on New Year’s Day on our treadmill that we’d relocated to our basement. It was fine as long as I kept my head straight up so that it stays between the rafters!

RELIGION

You wouldn’t know it from any of my online writing or any of my activities on social networks, but religion and spirituality are topics I’m incredibly passionate about and care deeply about. My father is a (now retired) Methodist minister, as was his father before him, and so I grew up deeply steeped in a progressive Christian church.

Yes, I am a “preacher’s kid.” 🙂

When I was in my late teens and into college I had a severe falling out with the Methodist faith of my fathers and spent a significant amount of time searching for a religious community where I could belong. Like anything I do, I plunged in and dived deeply into reading, visiting churches, etc…. but never found anything until a random invitation from a friend some 20+ years ago introduced me to the world of Unitarian Universalism. Many years (and many UU churches) later, I’m president of the board of trustees of our local Keene UU Church and in fact led the worship service there last Sunday giving a sermon/message about the challenges of being open about religion in the age of Facebook.

But you wouldn’t know any of this from what I write and post online. There are thousands of blog posts online from me since 2000 and many thousand tweets/updates/posts on social media…

… but pretty much NONE of them say ANYTHING about religion.

There are a lot of reasons for WHY I have been silent about the religious side of my life in my online activity… and I’ll write a post about that at some point (probably soon).

But I’ve realized that in being silent and hiding this aspect of myself I’m not really letting myself be truly whole.

So I’m going to start… I’ve been letting pieces of that side of me leak out into Facebook lately. THIS blog post is a huge step for me.

I’m not going to be “in your face” about religion or anything (that’s not the UU way! 😉 ). But I’m going to stop hiding that side of me. I will treat it instead just as yet another facet of the complicated person that I am (and that we all are).

We’ll see… this will, in all honesty, be a bit challenging for me… but is an area I’d like to grow personally.

AUDIO

In a change from past years, I’m carrying a word over from the previous year. I did a great amount with audio in 2013, but in 2014 I intend to do more. I want to move forward with “FIR On Technology” and have a number of interviews in mind. I want to bring back Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast for some interviews… and I’m hoping to do more audio components in my daily work with the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme.

I’m excited… and “stay tuned” has never been more appropriate!

STRATEGY

Finally, there is an exquisite irony to me that while my job title at the Internet Society is “Senior Content Strategist”, my own personal content online is severely lacking a strategy. I am inconsistently writing across 8 or 9 different places online – and I’m adding more sites like the Monadnock Curling Club… and there are a few other projects in the works.

Yes, this is a bit of a case of the proverbial “cobbler’s shoes”, but in 2014 I’d like to pull some of this together a bit more and have a bit more discipline about what I’m doing with all my online content. I’m at least aggregating my online content at my danyork.me site, but this year I want to do more with getting more consistent with the creation of content.

That’s my list for 2014. What about you?

What are you going to do this year with your one wild and precious life?

An audio version of this post is available on in my “The Dan York Report” podcast:

With Our Every Action, We Create The Kind Of World We Want To Live In

PhotoIn our every moment… in our every action… we create the kind of world we want to live in. We can choose to build people up, and help build a world of optimism and hope. Or we can choose to tear people down, and help build a world of divisiveness and negativity.

Build people up – or tear people down. Your choice.

I have been reminded of this several times lately in choices I have been confronted with. One stark moment was a few weeks back when we here in New England were being hit by an incredibly unseasonably cold spell. On Facebook, my newsfeed was full of friends in the region complaining about having to turn their heat on, about how strange this was, etc.

Now, a couple of friends of mine in the region maintain a fairly constant stream of political posts on Facebook and have a rather hardline conservative view of the world. Their posts are full of extremely negative text and links about President Obama, Congress, Democrats, “liberals” and pretty much anyone else that doesn’t fit their worldview… usually delivered with a VERY heavy degree of sarcasm and anger.

They take it to such extremes that I often do find it hard to read their posts, but I haven’t “hidden” their feeds on Facebook primarily because I don’t want to be stuck in a self-affirming “echo chamber” of views like mine. I keep their posts coming because I want to be reminded of the many divergent views we have… but that’s a good topic for a different blog post…

Anyway, one of these friends wrote on Facebook about how unseasonably cold it was and just expressed his surprise at having to turn the heat on at this time of year.

My immediate reaction was to click in the comment field and start typing the snarky reply:

What? You haven’t figured out how to blame Obama yet?

And then I paused before hitting return and publishing the comment.

Just a few days prior to this I’d been having a couple of different discussions with people about the divisiveness within our society, the lack of civility, the way that sides within our political world here in the US seem to be getting more deeply entrenched … and just about how there seemed to be acrimony and negativity online.

And here I was… about to add to that.

I deleted the text and cancelled adding the comment.

Sure, the comment would have been “fun”. I would have enjoyed leaving it. It would have been enjoyable to poke a little bit at the fact that yes, indeed, some things out there are beyond the control of even your bitterest enemies.

But was it really necessary?

Here was a friend writing about his current condition. No politics. No name-calling. Just stating how things were.

I could have been empathetic / compassionate and joined him in commenting on the strange weather. Or I could have done what I was about to do and get a dig in (where there wasn’t one) and add to the divisiveness.

Build people up – or tear people down.

A day or so later I saw on Facebook a graphic circulating that attributed to Sufism three questions to think about before speaking or writing something:

1. Is it true?

2. Is it necessary?

3. Is it kind?

I haven’t been able to find a definitive source for these questions – the closest seems to be these sources in a Daily Kos article – but regardless of origin, the questions are good ones. And in this particular case my proposed writing failed #2 and #3 in a big way.

The good news is that I did pause, reflect, and pulled back from that instant response.

That time.

Now, to be honest, in another recent case I did send an email response I probably shouldn’t have and while it was true and perhaps necessary, it wasn’t really kind.

Every moment. Every action.

Build people up… or tear people down.

The choice we make, in each moment, defines the kind of world we want to live in.

Your choice…

P.S. For those curious, the photo is one I took of “Eartha”, a giant globe at the DeLorme headquarters store in Yarmouth, Maine.

My 3 Words For 2013

3 words for 2013

As has become my tradition since 2010, I like to start the year off by posting my “three words” for the year. These are not “goals” or “resolutions” but rather words that I hope will define how 2013 will go for me. They are more guides for how I aspire for my life to be.

EXECUTION

While last year I was trying to focus more on fewer things, this year I want to execute on some of the plans I have had for some time. There are some things I have been thinking about, talking about and even writing about for several years… but have yet to actually start. Not so much in my professional/work life, as I have been all about executing plans there, but rather in my personal life with some of my various side projects. As an example, 2013 really needs to be the year I either reboot VOIPSA or just close it down. There are a number of other similar projects and activities that are stalled, including a couple of boards of organizations I am on where I have not been able to fully participate. There are some projects, too, around our house that I have been wanting to do for quite some time.

Now, in fairness, a lot of these projects have been stalled for most of the past two years because of the unwelcome intruder in our lives that has sucked up pretty much all of my time outside of work. My wife is and always will be a FAR higher priority than all these other activities (as will my daughters be). She and I are hoping, though, that with her last treatment in early January we can stop living our life in 3-week increments and get back to having a more regular life. We’ll see how it all goes, but that is certainly our hope for this year.

Outside of projects, though, there is another aspect to “execution” that hits on a daily basis – it is far too easy to get distracted by social networks and online news sources. Instead of spending time creating content, I find myself reading about other people’s content. I need to change the priority there and focus more on creating content first and THEN engaging with social networks. (As an example, it would have been extremely easy to get sucked into Facebook instead of writing this post.) I need to be executing on my content plans first.

AUDIO

In 2012 I came to a realization that… I really miss working with audio. As I have for the past seven years, I continue to contribute my weekly reports into the For Immediate Release podcast and I enjoy that immensely… but I have found a hunger to do even more again. There is something about working with the medium of audio that I just really enjoy. It is a wonderful way for telling stories, explaining topics, providing education and interacting with people.

I don’t know yet the full form this will take this year. We’ve been toying with adding a podcast component to the Deploy360 Programme. I have been thinking about reviving the Blue Box Podcast, at least for some interviews. I am intrigued by SoundCloud and may expand my experiments there. I have half a dozen other ideas running around inside my head for new podcasts and other projects… all I know is that I would like 2013 to be the year I expand my usage of audio.

TRANSFORM

In a 2012 leadership workshop for one of the boards I am on, we were asked some questions that could perhaps best be summarized as “how are you using your life to transform the world?” To make it a better place? To bring people together? To strengthen connections and build stronger communities?

That question stayed with me because in all honesty the last two years have really had to be all about surviving. In the process of just getting through each day, I haven’t had the luxury of spending much time to contemplate the bigger picture. But as we move through all that, the question returns to my mind.

Obviously, as a parent a large part of this work involves the raising of our two daughters and giving them the foundation, strength, knowledge and skills to affect change in the world. That is perhaps the ultimate transformation that all of us can do as parents.

But is there something more direct… that can even involve them in some way?

Not necessarily something grand and glorious, but perhaps something simple and local… I have ideas… It all kind of comes back to that first word earlier in this post! 🙂

What are your aspirations for 2013? What are your goals? Or guides?

Whatever they may be, may 2013 be a great year for you all – Happy New Year!

 

Walking In Red Square – Reflections Of A Child Of The 1970s

Dan moscow 1I was born in the late 1960’s and grew up in the U.S. in the 70’s and 80’s when the Russians were the enemy. When the Soviet Union was the evil empire bent on the destruction of freedom, democracy and everything we held dear. When calling someone a “Russki” was an insult and when the news media routinely showed images of the Soviet military parades in Red Square. When we were sure that the Kremlin was sending spies into our country to steal all our secrets and would do whatever it could to destroy our lifestyle.

And when the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” meant that we didn’t practice hiding under desks, as our parents might have, because we all knew that if the Soviets launched their missiles, we’d launch ours and the world as we knew it would end. (How many movies were made on this theme in the early 80s?)

Of course, the only “Russians” we really knew of were the evil villians of the James Bond movies and countless spy thrillers… or the state-sponsored “super athletes” that we saw in the Olympic Games and who we understood to be intent on showing how Communism was so much better and would triumph over Capitalism.

In many ways it was a much simpler world-view.

The Russians were the enemy.

Period.

Kremlin wallsI thought of all this tonight as I strolled along through Red Square taking photos. Drinking in the magnificent beauty of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Taking photos of the walls of the Kremlin. Stopping to look at Lenin’s Tomb.

How could I ever have even remotely imagined that I would someday be here?

Moscow… Red Square!

Unbelievable.

Granted, we were also the generation that watched as glasnost and perestroika took hold in the Soviet Union under the reins of Mikhail Gorbachev. We saw the Berlin Wall fall. We saw the opposition under Boris Yeltsin. We saw the Soviet Union dissolve and simply cease… to… exist. We saw multiple nations and economies emerge.

StbasilWe watched as the story we’d been telling and retelling for so long was shattered into a million shards… to be reborn anew into new stories of new nations… of a new worldview… of new threats… of new powers.

It’s been 20 years now since Russia was reborn, and no sooner do you arrive than you immediately understand that this is a vibrant market economy full of energy and full of passion. I’ve had the privilege of spending the last two days in a room full of technologists and business people, of marketers and politicians … all focused on how to make the Internet more capable within Russia and the surrounding countries. To make the Internet faster, better, safer, more secure, more powerful… and more open. It’s been an outstanding event where I’ve both learned a great deal and met some truly remarkable people.

Yet still… I am a product of my childhood.

As I went for a morning run looping down through Red Square this morning… and then walked back there tonight… I could not help but be utterly amazed by how our world has changed. How different it is today from those decades ago.

Alas, I will not get to explore more. This was my typical business trip where I took a taxi from the airport to the hotel, spent two days inside a hotel and now will leave in a few hours to go back to the airport to fly home. My morning run and evening walk were the only times I got to see anything beyond the hotel walls.

But I have learned much from this visit – and would welcome the opportunity to return.

Perhaps there was no greater sign of the change in Russia… at least for those of us grew up in the 70’s and 80’s and can appreciate the exquisite irony… than this, an advertisement for the latest James Bond film, prominently displayed on the sidewalk in Moscow:

Jamesbond moscow

Our world has indeed changed. And this is a good thing.

Flying A Foreign Flag – One Day A Year

Canada dayToday, July 1, here at our home in little old Keene, New Hampshire, USA, we flew a foreign flag from our our front porch.

As we have done on every July 1st since 2002… and probably will do for every July 1st in the years ahead.

You see, today is Canada Day and our 10-year old daughter was born in Canada during the 5 years that we lived in Ottawa, Ontario. Through the beauty of the great relationship between the USA and Canada, she is both a US and Canadian citizen.

So today we proudly flew the Canadian flag to honor our daughter, to honor her birthplace and to honor all the friends we made up there.

At something like 5:30am she was softly singing “O, Canada” and we all joined her in singing renditions of the tune multiple times during the day. (In English only, of course, as none of us know French well enough to do that verse, although our daughter is learning French in her school.)

This we all do gladly for her.

Tomorrow, the Stars and Strips will be back on the flagpole… for another 364 days…

Happy Canada Day to all our friends living up north of us… and to our daughter!

P.S. And I hope that any of you celebrating today up North did get a chance to have a beavertail, some poutine, or at least a double-double or some timbits from Timmy’s, eh?

My 3 Words for 2012

3WordsFor2012

Following on the tradition I've started over the past couple of years (2011, 2010) after enjoying Chris Brogan's take on this, here are my three words for 2012. They aren't goals, per se, or resolutions, but more just three words to guide my actions through the year.

FOCUS

In our age of distraction, it's insanely easy to lose focus and suddenly find yourself hours later not having accomplished anything you set out to do. It's an inherent challenge for those of us who are by nature bright-shiny-object chasers and whose job involves being on the edge of communication technologies…

Over the past six months or so I've been taking some very deliberate steps to reduce distractions and give me more time to focus.

I've reduced or eliminated many of the notifications on my computer. I've gone to checking email only at certain times of the day. I've blocked off time in my schedule where I just shut down all social media, IM, and email and just work on specific tasks. Friends would not recognize my desk these days because it is CLEAN… as I've worked on simplifying the distractions in my home office.

Still, these are just steps… and one of the areas I want to work on in 2012 is really bringing some discipline to this and trying to focus more on what is important to get done. (Oh, look, there's a butterfly…..)

QUEUE

There are two aspects to this word for me. First, due primarily to the unwelcome intruder in our life in 2011, I have a great queue of projects, both online and offline, that I want to work on in 2012. Naturally I have a l…o…n…g… queue of blog posts I'd like to clear out. I need to update my Migrating Applications to IPv6 book. I really MUST reboot the VoIP Security Alliance (VOIPSA) this year. There are some health issues I've put on hold that I need to address. There's a lot that was put on the proverbial back-burner… and I need to clear out that queue a good bit. There are a great many stories still left untold.

The second aspect of "queue" is that this year I really want to focus on maintaining a healthy queue of blog posts that are scheduled out in advance. Each week I'd like to be lining up some posts for the next week. Certainly there will be posts written in the moment to respond to other posts or to recent events… but I want to keep a schedule queue going so that my content is appearing regularly throughout the year. You do not need to hit the Publish button right now… and I want to work on that this year.

BALANCE

Finally, I've made some lifestyle changes over the past year… I've made a job change which also has brought some changes… I'm looking in 2012 at how to find a bit more of that ever-elusive "balance" between work and personal life. Beyond all that I do at work and online, I'm also a father of two daughters, a husband to a wonderful woman, a son, a brother, a friend, a community member… and many other roles.

This past year has once again reminded me of the incredible importance of all of that.

The challenge, of course, is that when you absolutely love what you do… when "work" is not a chore as much as almost "play"… well… it's hard to shut down the brain sometimes and let it go. Something I've always struggled with… to give that marvelous gift of being truly present with those around you.

So while I've made some changes in 2011, there's definitely further I can go… 

Those are my "words" for 2012… we'll see how the year goes. What are you going to focus on this year?

My 3 Words for 2011 – How Did I Do?

2011So as 2011 enters its final hours, it’s time to take a look back and see how I did with my “3 Words For 2011“. As a reminder, they were:

  • CONTENT
  • PORTFOLIO
  • LIFESTYLE

Well, to start with, they – and most all my plans for 2011 – were rather subsumed by an extremely unwelcome fourth word that dominated my year:

CANCER

Yes, indeed, the defining thread of 2011 has definitely been my wife’s diagnosis and subsequent battle with breast cancer. It truly did consume the entire year – she had what was otherwise a routine doctor visit in January that started raising questions… and then her last chemo treatment was in early December.

In between, of course, were horrific months dealing with tests leading to the diagnosis in May, then the operation in July with the long recovery, and then the pathology reports of invasive breast cancer and then the start of chemotherapy in September and all the nastiness that followed.

She’s not “done” now… next month she begins five years of a daily hormone therapy called Tamoxifen as well as one year of an every-three-week infusion of a drug called Herceptin.

But in theory we’re through the worst of it. We hope.

So looking at 2011 through the cancer-colored lens, just surviving was a beautiful thing… but how did I do with the words that were to guide my activities? Let’s see…

CONTENT

My big goal was to increase the amount of actual writing I was doing across my blogs and other sites. Unfortunately I don’t have a count for 2010 to know how my writing exactly compares, but I know that I did write more this year. My total was:

Given that I was manually tracking all those entries across several different blogging platforms, it could certainly be off to a certain degree… but it’s probably in the general area. Through the first half of the year I was writing more and averaging out about 2 to 3 posts each day. I had aimed to get at least one post out every day of 2011, but that goal feel by the wayside in March and then with all the cancer happenings it never really became a goal again.

Still, I’m pleased with a good body of work out there for 2011. Some of it shorter content… some of it the longer, deeper pieces I love to write. There’s still a ton of stories left untold that are sitting in my queue… but I did get a good bit out.

Add to that, I believe, 51 podcast contributions to For Immediate Release. I seem to recall Shel & Neville taking one show off… and I don’t think I missed any of the weeks. (And if they didn’t take a week off this year, then it was 52 contributions.)

Plus, I published another book, this time with O’Reilly, “Migrating Applications to IPv6“. The idea was that this was to be primarily an “ebook” that could then be frequently updated… which, given everything else going on, didn’t happen (updates), despite my best of intentions. I’m looking forward to making some updates in 2012.

Where I had hoped to do more in 2011 was with photography and videos. My camera traveled with me a good bit… and I shot lots of photos… I just didn’t have a whole lot of the curation/post-production time to then get photos online. 2012! Ditto video.

PORTFOLIO

I made some progress on this… I haven’t really publicized it yet, but I’ve been aggregating my content from across various blogs into a new site at:

danyork.me

It’s my attempt to bring together all my content into one central site. There’s still much I would like to do with that and it’s still not working the way I want, but it’s a start.

I never did move my main blogs off of TypePad… perhaps 2012 will be the year I finally make that happen. And I still would like to improve how this site (DanYork.com) presents me…

LIFESTYLE

This is one where I did make serious progress. I had wondered a year ago if running would be something I really continued.

I did!

In fact, I ran 5 miles yesterday morning and will probably go for a similar run tomorrow. (Today’s a resting day.) Over the course of 2011 I probably ran 400 or 500 miles… hard to know exactly as I’m not tracking all my running (such as on the treadmill).

I also ran in 6 actual races, including my first-ever half-marathon in September.

2011 also marked the time when I brought my running gear with me on every business trip and speaking engagement – and actually RAN!

Wellllll… except for the trip to Orlando where I left my shorts back in New Hampshire! On every other trip (including multiple trips to Orlando), I managed to get out and run at least once if not more. New York… Miami Beach… Toronto… San Francisco… Orlando… Virginia… Austin… I was quite pleased with this, actually, because it’s so easy NOT to run while traveling.

So yes, running has become part and parcel of who I am.

Outside of running, there were some other lifestyle changes, too. Some tweaking of what we eat. Trying to do some more of the offline things I enjoy. Adding curling back into my life. Continuing to try to find that balance between the work I love and the family I love… The sudden job change from Voxeo to the Internet Society also brought some lifestyle changes, too.

Outside of the cancer chaos, or perhaps because of the chaos making me think more about priorities, 2011 was definitely one of thinking about – and acting on – lifestyle changes.

More changes to come, I hope, but this was a big part of 2011.

What’s on tap for my 3 Words for 2012? Well… I’ll write about that soon… 😉

Starting Work Today at the Internet Society

ISOC logo After some of my tweets today I had friends contacting me in great surprise asking if I had really left Voxeo.

Yes, to a certain degree of my own great surprise, I actually did.  

I started today (Sept 19, 2011) in a brand new role on a brand new project at the Internet Society, based in Reston, VA.  I’m still working remotely from my home office in Keene, NH, so that didn’t (and won’t) change.

The full story of my job change can be found over on my Disruptive Telephony blog.

And yes, with all the other chaos going on in my life, it probably wasn’t the ideal time to make a job change… but is there ever really such a time?  And in fact I can say that to a certain degree my change is because of some of the perspective gained from that ongoing experience…