The State of this Human

Part the First: What the hell is going on here

The original idea for this post came kind of early in the year. Of course the problem is at that time of the year, everyone is doing these kind of posts. Programs of all sorts look back on their pasts, talk about current projects and dream about their futures. Toking at some of the title these kind of things get, plays on the US State of the Union, I realized that I am able to do is speak for myself.

And thus the title, “State of this Human.”

The next time the idea of this post came up was around the time of my birthday. And that just seemed rather boring. But the idea kept.

This week (or two) I'm here alone. Seemed like a reasonably good time to be a little bit introspective.

Part the Second: Life in general

Would statistics work here for starting things off? 37. Overweight. Underpaid. How about some categorical assignments? Husband, Father of 2 boys, Technology Consultant. Insomniac.

The phrase that has seemed to sum up everything for me for the last couple of years has been “I'm not really all that interesting.”

But you already knew that, didn't you? Otherwise, you would be here reading this, and not off doing something more interesting. But I'll leave that for when I talk about the website.

What do I mean by interesting?

I wish the hell I even knew.

Part the Third: Work

I sometimes find it hard to explain what it is I do for a living. Who I work for, that's easy. HP is a brand that it's fairly safe that most of the people I know and will meet have some experience with. What I do for them? Well, I make paper go away. Or at least I try.

Trying to work in Enterprise Content management is sometimes very hard. On a given day, I deal with the how a company's information gets moved around and made available to the people doing the work.

But it's not always that easy. Nor are the borders between what I do and what any number of people in other disciplines very clean.

At the end, almost everyone who deals with any computer system plays in the same space I do.

It's not just the ingestion of paper, but the management of documents after capture, even if the document was never rendered to pulped skin of a dead tree.

At a certain level, I compete and cooperate with everyone who has anything to do with the movement of information around the enterprise. Which is to say, everyone else in IT and everyone else in business.

The image that I've put with this section I created after a meeting where I was being asked to eliminate a number of issues that buzzed around like so many flies. But by the end of that meeting, the person driving the solution to these problems made me feel like I was just another issue that had to be managed. And the outcome was this image.

Part the Fourth: Life, Online

When I think about how I deal with the digital world, I actually have to consider myself a failure.

I deal with a lot of people who don't concern themselves with the details of how this network works. And most of them are happier that way. I know much more about how all of this woks. And it's not as much fun as it used to be.

I haven't been participating in anything recently. Not online at least.

There just isn't much of anything out there that is really holding my interest. I never got into the mainstream of MMO, and the stuff that is catching my interesting, I don't have the hardware to support.

The image that goes with this section (click on it to see the larger version) is called Connected.

The image came out of an idea I got from looking at a birthday present sitting on my arm.

What's funny is that right now I'm sitting here watching You've Got Mail. And here I am writing about how much my online life kind of sucks.

I'm actually surprised, because I am having some difficultly finding anything online that I feel I would be worth the investment of my free time.

There are plenty of community already out there for things that I'm more or less interested in, but right now, a lot of that just feels like work. I do content management. At home we have a small content management system. It's not a system I'm an expert in.

Not being an expert is a little bit by design. I didn't want to get caught up in the how to do something and not actually do something. And so far that's been working. I'm probably learning more about what I need it to do versus how it does every little thing.

The majority of my online life is boring. Completely uninteresting.

Leaving the tangle of social networks aside for a moment, I am really not involved with much of anything in the digital world. Just lurking.

In the past couple of years, I had tried to get involved in a couple of MMO, but for the most part never found a reason to go beyond a trial subscription. The failure here is social. Going into a game without having a developed social network already in that game is not my strong suit. But I've not been trying to go into a game to join yet another social network. I want a story. And to that end, I will always find that what is there is lacking.

Incredible that one cannot find a story to play in given the number of people I know who were so completely into what was going on with LOST.

Turning back to social networks for a bit, I have yet another revision of my personal social networking map.

This is the third revision of this map, and I can say that it has been hard ever time I've tried to create it.

There are no API that I know of for any of the networks that help with determining what sites that site either sends content to or gets content from. That means all this work needs to be done by hand.

The map has changed a bit from the first version. This reflects more my feeling about some of the services that were on the map, especially after I created the second version. There intent of the map was lost in version 2 trying to model hardware tools (phones, Chumby) and utility services (some I wasn't even using) and social networks and non-social network (IM) all together. It even included a picture of me, trying to show how I fit into this mess of things.

There were a number of services dropped because I stopped using them or they no longer fit the parameters for inclusion on the map. This doesn't mean that I've stopped using some of the tools on version 2. Some I still use almost every day. But they are not social networking services. More parts of the plumbing.

The map, as with the predecessors, was created using Graphviz to describe the connections between sites and then generate the graph. There are a couple of graph producing tools that all take the same input file and produce different types of graphs. Which leads me to a rather silly question.

What animal does your social network look like?

My social network, when mapped a certain way, looks like a fish.

There's a lot going on in these maps. And the fish diagram actually has some funny things in it. FriendFeed eats just about everything. Some networks are parts of the tail, just dragging behind everything. Facebook is pretty much the asshole. All the location services sit near the feet. And the the top, where the brains would be, is here, SysMango.com.

I guess I'm at least doing that something right.

some conclusions

Please don't take anything I've said or drawn/rendered here to suggest that I am in any way unhappy. First off, being unhappy forces change. This post has taken me spare time over most of this past week to write and rewrite and rewrite again and again. And overall, I'm still not sure it says what I mean, or what I want it to say. I am kind of happy with the pictures (go ahead click on them).

I'm still making decisions about changes to how I use this site. It's just a blog, but there is no audience.

Like a lot of people, I have mostly moved towards other services for putting content on the web. Most people I know use Facebook. I've taken to Twitter and constantly look for other services that might be a better match for what it is I'm trying to do (at least when I'm trying to do it).

Writing a blog post that I feel is worth reading is hard. It forces me to remove myself from everything going on around me, just to try to make it work in writing. And I'm just not practiced enough anymore to just write anything without a fair amount of editing and filtering. Not having an audience makes that harder. There really is never any feedback about how the site looks, how the content reads or the directions I'm moving. The rest of you have lives.

This isn't to say that the site is going away or going to become idle. I'm not doing this site for you.

And with that, I'll leave you. There some other stuff I want or need to do other than sitting here writing stuff no one is going to read.