Pink Lids & Akoha

We pause our adventures for a small public service announcement.... 

If you eat Yoplait yogurt & have pink lids, Yoplait will donate 10 cents to Susan G. Komen for the Cure for each lid received by 12/31/2008 at:

Save Lids to Save Lives®
P.O. Box 420704
El Paso, TX 88542-0704

If you write on the back of the envelope "Team #114686," the Akoha Wild Ones team will get 'credit' for participating. You may also join the team at the Yoplait site &/or share Akoha missions with me! 

For those not already familiar with the idea of Akoha, it's a social "game" whose object is to gather karma points by... well... being nice. The game starts with a deck of cards, featuring "missions" like "Invite someone for coffee," and "Make someone smile." 

The idea is to perform the action on the card, which increases the happiness in one person's life, then give that person the card & ask them to log onto Akoha, type some meaningful message about how much they enjoyed having this mission "played" on them. They then, hopefully, will be eager to "play it forward," making a great chain of happy people. 

You can then track your "mission" as it makes its way around the world, hopefully passing from one happy person to another. It's a little like a Where's George based on kindness rather than cash.

Based on my experience with Where's George, I don't hope that my missions will hop around all that much.  According to Where's George stats, I have entered 189 bills, and only 14 people have ever jumped online to report finding them. Perhaps when I am handing someone a mission card, having just done something nice, they will be more amenable to reporting their pleasure & joining the game. 

In the great scheme of things, the idea of Akoha is that it encourages people to do nice things for others and increase overall world happiness by some small token, or even larger tokens, depending on the mission. It's irrelevant that the recipient does or does not respond online -- but it would make the game more fun.

(By the way, Akoha is in closed beta, but if someone performs a mission on you -- and some of them can be played via e-mail -- then you can get into the beta as well. If you send me an e-mail, a Facebook message or or a direct Tweet saying you'd like to play, I'll work to share a mission with you, so you can Play it Forward!)

Ike Looks to Mess Up a Weekend

It appears Hurricane Ike is going to rampage across Southeast Texas this weekend. 

I'm something like 65 miles inland from Galveston, but the latest update to the National Hurricane Center map (right) looks like Ike may come a lot closer than storms of recent memory. (Remember Rita?) If you look very closely at the map, you'll see a little reddish "x" just north of the 30-degree line and just a tad east of the hurricane path. That's approximately where I am. 

Assuming there's anything to say, I'll blog here and/or microblog via Twitter as the cable connection + iPhone allow. 

Edouard comes to visit

There's a tropical storm in the neighborhood, and apparently he is due to drop in with high winds & heavy rain sometime this afternoon. 

The last hurricane to threaten the area was Rita, whom I wrote about back in 2005. This Edouard was headed directly for Houston but veered off in a somewhat Rita-like direction. He's heading a little more obliquely north, however, which should put tropical storm force winds right over The Woodlands sometime this afternoon.

For now, it's just raining with a few gusts. No thunder/lightning, even. Just a pleasant, cool, rainy Houston day. I brought in most of my outdoor furniture because of the threat of high winds. My neighbor behind, however, has left his screened-in tent out there. Could be interesting....  

I'll update whenever it seems like there is something to say, assuming I still have Internet + power. When power is gone, I will still be able to Twitter from the iPhone. Thus far, I can still hear birds singing while they enjoy the much-needed shower. The birdback out back is almost full, and the fountain is not yet overflowing, so we haven't gotten more than a sprinkle here yet. 

Scissors

scissors

A number of Twitter users have created 'color teams' for a geek Olympics, of a sort. Event #1 involves posting photos of ourselves in 'team uniforms,' throwing rocks, paper or scissors.

Being geeky, I am on FF1CAEteam, which is the hex color designation of a lovely bright pink. Amazingly, the racing Nomex still fits and is mostly still pink although wow it faded over the years.

Had to post the photo on Flickr, which I had not used before. Now I'm blogging from there -- an experiment. Does it work? If so, I also took some 'before' photos of the non-landscaping today & the glorious trees that keep the sun from allowing any grass to grow in the backyard.

Friends & Twits

So how's this for irony in the digital age: My first 'friend' on Facebook is a neighbor. Sorta. Well, he lives in The Woodlands and has a dog, so I've probably actually at least seen him at a dog park. Or walking the dog. Or not. Anyway, he founded the Facebook "Pet Owners of The Woodlands" group, and after I posted a picture of Lakrids on there, this fella 'friended' me. I feel so (sniff) friendly!

I also got 'poked' by a perfect stranger, which was worth a giggle. I poked her back. I hope that was the right thing to do heh.

My second friend is a real friend, albeit one from work and one who lives in Brazil. I wrote to him in Danish, saying my Danish is miles better than my Portuguese (I really gotta get back to those Rosetta Stone exercises before the Unnamed Male Relative's wedding in November.) My Brazilian friend doesn't speak Danish. So naturally, he wrote back in French. It's a fun world...

Meanwhile in real life, another friend from work (who happens to live in Kilgore, Texas) was in town yesterday to take a class, so we had dinner & the world's margaritas. He's the fella who -- oh my goodness, I never blogged about that adventure (#2 on this link). Briefly, he let me operate a piece of coveted machinery on a job site, which I will blog about another day. I giggled like a girl about being allowed to do this, and he & his cohorts were greatly amused. I've since made him famous in print, which made him smile.

All the while, people have been "tweeting" on Twitter. Feel free to call me a "twit" for falling into it, but it reminds me of the best part of old 1980s chatting, but even better -- because if you log off & go to sleep, all the messages from people overnight are there waiting for you in the morning.

It's a sickness. I think you either 'get' it or you don't. I'm not sure I 'get' it in the long term, but it's a giggle at the moment. There's something very amusing about the fact that my very first 'follower' was Robert Scoble.. If you don't know who that is, then you probably won't 'get' Twitter, anyway.

Old People in Social Media

Egged on by something I read on the Internet recently, I decided to try some Social Media sites. I had already joined myRagan.com, a Social Media site for people in the communications industry, but I read something last week about MySpace and Facebook being useful 'networking tools' for grown-ups. So I thought, what the heck.

Understand that I have been "networking" online since about 1984, when I ran the Chameleon BBS here in Houston and "networked" with friends from across the metropolitan area . I also "networked" with people around the country to develop new applications/code for the particular brand of BBS software we used on our Apple II computers. We all used 300-baud modems and dialup, when "online chat" was typing, without avatars, graphical smilies, video, audio or anything else. Many of us could type faster than our modems could send/receive the data for realtime chat, and for the BBSes, many of us could read messages as fast as the modems could retrieve data.

But it turns out I am old & have no clue about how these new networks "work." First, it appears (to an old fart like me) that 99% of the users on these things are under 30. Oddly, so was I back when I started online networking. But more importantly, none of them are people I know -- or maybe I just can't find the people I know. So I have no "friends," which is just (pout) pathetic.

In the real world, when you move to a new place, you join some groups of like-minded people and you "make friends." So I started that this weekend. Joined some "groups" to see what happens. I've heard/read stories about so-called "creepers" who "friend" anyone and everyone in an effort to appear popular. (And thus, the perfectly nice noun, friend, becomes a verb.) There is some debate about whether this is a horrible breach of etiquette or enthusiastic extraversion. Until I figure it out, I'm not "friending" anyone, even if I think I may know them. But I did "poke" someone I'm *sure* I know, but now I'm not sure that was wise -- but I don't know because I'm old & out of it. I feel a bit like my parents must have felt when I started online chats in the 1980s: "Why don't you just pick up the phone?"

Anyway, this is me on Facebook. If you're not on facebook, that link won't take you anywhere. If you are, but you're not a friend, I don't know what you will see: maybe everything, maybe nothing? (The dog refuses to log on & find out.) I also made a MySpace account but I'm not going to do anything with that right now.

So give me a .... poke? I don't really have any idea what I'm talking about here.

(Addendum: I also joined Twitter, which I really don't understand. It's like a global chat room... Very interesting...)