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!)

Photos & phlowers

Pink Hibiscus Bits

When I bought my house two years ago, the yard included a number of climbing rose bushes, most of which have produced no or very few blooms and many feet of annoying, thorny, scraggly stems. I hate the things.

Saturday, mom & I went over to my favorite garden store, Arbor Gate, because it was nice out, and mom wanted to mess up her hair in the convertible. Among other little plants I snagged for the front yard, we found a couple of gorgeous hibiscus plants to replace the annoying, non-blooming, killer roses on either side of my garage.

After struggling to rip out the thorn bushes, I planted the new flowering bushes, which are covered with flower buds. (Dad came over on Sunday to single-handedly plant the annuals -- yay dad!)

Wednesday morning, I had my first hibiscus bloom, which I shot with the new camera. The uncropped version is here on Flickr, where I have been playing a lot lately. 

I'll close with my other neat photo of the day, a work photo:

LinkedIn

I don't remember how I stumbled into it, but I've located yet another "Social Network," this one called LinkedIn. Call it Facebook for boring old grown-ups. That is to say, it is where I have found most of my current & former colleagues & friends. Unfortunately, it's boring. It's like going to a convention & having no fascinating speakers, no fun dinner parties, no drinks at the bar, just one enormous poster session of everybody's resumes. Yawn!

I suppose if I were looking for a job, it would be the hot ticket. If I were looking to hire someone, it might be the hot ticket, too. In fact, I think I found it because there was a post on one of my Facebook groups about a job opportunity available by visiting someone's LinkedIn profile. I wasn't interested in the job, but I was curious about LinkedIn. Go figure.

Anyway, it's sad to say that I have more 'connections' on LinkedIn after a couple of days than I do on Facebook after a couple of weeks. I believe this means I am old (sigh) How did that happen?

Facebook is more fun. My birthday is ... soon. I'll be 24. Again. One of these days, I'm going to get it right.

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...)