I want to keep this as a snapshot. 2dbbd607d5b43021a2e6b3dcdb45208a302410fbdcaec9dbb4770e3cf5680b49 (#2dbbd60 for short)

I am living in Colorado. I am a human being, not a human do-ing. I am two months into retirement but freelancing as a Technologist. (Not getting paid for it.)

I am replying to Dave Winer and pray that he accepts my request to be mentored.

I am caring for the people I love the most, striving to love my family, friends, and neighbors; and I am re-energizing (my primary hobby is reading and writing on the internet) so I can pace myself to do what matters most. I’m chatting with my daugher-in-law at Philotimo. You can join us! Left as an exercise for the student to figure out how.

Every day I listen to the ESV: Daily Office Lectionary. You should, too. (Derek Sivers, you are in my prayers.)

I ride my bicycle when the weather starts fair. I don’t mind riding in the rain. I hike even when it’s not so fair. Look me up on Strava, as biking and hiking are a couple ways I re-energize.

Kudos Derek Sivers for the idea to make a Now page. See nownownow.com.

I love the art of digital letter writing (AoDLW)! It’s not the same as ephemeral email. (You do archive your important email, don’t you?) My handwriting is poor (a disability of being left-handed), but I still enjoy breaking out the fountain pen every so often and committing words to paper in my ugly (but unique and personal) script. Script isn’t even taught in all elementary schools anymore. May I live long enough to see that trend reversed! Many cultures know the value of communicating with one’s hands. Not all people have the ability to write with their hands, but for the able-bodied, typing is not what it means to be fully human.

Here’s the first rule of digital letter writing: No TOFU (“Text Over, Fullquote Under”). A letter should stand alone. Most mail apps add TOFU by default. Delete it before sending. Email has meta-data that automatically “threads” replies, anyway. Making every letter stand on its own is more challenging than continuing to top-post replies. It’s good to think about style. For daily email—and even for informal letters—TOFU helps keep the entire conversation in one place. But I find it liberating to write without TOFU. I can associate freely, and I can choose how much context to include.

There is a risk that the letter writer won’t include enough context, and the recipient will have to review previous correspondence. Again, that’s what email “threads” are for. Also, don’t give up the ancient tradition of saving correspondence for future reference. (I Twittered about letter-writing a long time ago [1of2, 2of2]). Before email, I made photocopies of my letters. Before photocopies, we used carbon paper, and before that people had to copy letters by hand before sending. Not all practiced such discipline, and more’s the pity. Note that we have Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence because he made copies of all the letters he sent. Jefferson (not counting his flaws) is one of my heroes. (And Clay Jenkinson is also my hero because he brings Jefferson to life through chautauqua. But I digress.) So the second rule of letter writing is: Archive your correspondence!

I’ve seen the difference that social media makes regarding the AoDLW. Letters in the past century were normally the main way people communicated at a distance. Some might catch up (or get to know a pen pal more closely) with long distance phone calls. But unless they actually met face to face, their lives were relatively isolated. Now it’s so easy to stay in touch. Some would say it’s too easy, but just because it’s easy shouldn’t mean one should settle for shallow. Samuel Johnson wrote, “A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation;—a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.” But Johnson didn’t have email. The third rule is: Buy time by sending a note or SMS.

It is also common to send “newsletters” to multiple recipients, and I would argue that’s also a good use of technology. I loved writing annual letters to include with Christmas cards (writer’s block since my mom died, but that doesn’t distract from the principle), and I love getting the same from friends and family. It’s more challenging to write to an audience larger than one. Those letters can inspire personal correspondence, phone calls and face to face visits, though. I myself now have twenty years of snapshots of family life that gives me great enjoyment to share (reminisce) with my now-grown children and grandchildren.

Finally, to my readers with whom I am behind in correspondence: Please forgive me. Time is more precious than gold these days. May we all live long enough to see that destructive trend reversed! I believe technology makes us more efficient with only a minor cost to our humanity. Txt me or DM me on Twitter (tbc0) if you’d like to chat!

Let’s get this project going together! I’m eager to hear how you practice the art of digital letter writing.

The author of this post is Tim Chambers 1E4AF729D5CEFFD0 aka tbc0. I first published this on the now-defunct Posterous. I am pleased with how well it reads now (ten years later.) I made light edits from the version I published today at post.news (link).

Think hard about how much knowledge you give away! At the least, save copies of what you write in your personal commonplace book so that changes in employment don't leave you without access to your own thoughts and ideas! Social networks in business situations are most susceptible to this.

My job responsibilities give me access to the Workday Community (WC). It's a walled garden with a different feel compared with Salesforce Trailblazer Community (SFDC TC). It struck me today that Workday's wall is high. They keep a very tight leash on customer access through Named Support Contacts (NSCs). Access to the WC is tightly controlled. You must be a customer. In contrast, SFDC's TC is open to anyone—customer or not.

I get it. SFDC is huge. The corporation has made enormous acquisitions, Tableau and Slack are a couple that caught my attention recently. I became a Workday customer through their acquisition of Adaptive Insights, now Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive for short. (Adaptive is a financial planning & analysis tool.) Workday is huge compared with Adaptive, but they are smaller than SFDC. Their technology doesn't seem quite as mature, though much progress has been made since I was introduced to the product four years ago.

I wrote an answer to a simple question today: What training is recommended for users new to Workday Adaptive Planning? You have to be a Workday customer to read my answer. This decreases my motivation to contribute to the community. Only a little, though. I can imagine why Workday controls access. Their technology doesn't yet have the broad market that SFDC has. No incentive to make knowledge accessible to non-customers (yet?).

Anyway, this is a blog post, not an essay. I don't have all the answers. But trust me on the Own Your Words™ advice. Don't lose your knowledge that is locked behind garden walls. (Following all contractual obligations, of course. Some content you write as an employee doesn't belong to you. You do read and understand before you sign anything, right?)

"File:Whose Knowledge? logo.svg" by Anasuyas is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

A decentralized network consists of multiple domains working peer to peer. Ideally, there is one domain per identity. If you want multiple, distinct identities, register multiple domains. As I look at my list, I see that I have already done that. Just waiting for the right time to stand up more of them. Recently I went from one ( (timchambersusa.com) to two (that one plus tbc0.com).

In the beginning, the internet was decentralized. Consider email. Before @gmail.com, you could choose from @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com or @msn.com and the list goes on. Anyone here ever have an @aol.com email address? Now it seems as if every random person I interact with has a Gmail address. That’s a single point of failure. (Though I bet Google is reviewing its business processes this week in light of Facebook to ensure they don’t have a failure like that.) Anyway, the best two examples of decentralization are the World Wide Web as a whole (despite the fact that everyone seems to start browsing the web from google.com), and the blogosphere.

Also see encyclosphere.org/forums?wpfs=decentralization

I’m sitting at my kitchen table in my southeast-facing nook, enjoying the view of Pikes Peak outside my window [1], writing on my mbike. That’s short for mind-bike, which is short for mind-bicycle, which is short for bicycle for the mind. I’m too lazy to research the quote. Whether or not he said it, and regardless of the context in which it was said, I’ll credit Steve Jobs with coining the description of a personal computer (PC) as a bicycle for the mind. If he said it, he said it in the earliest days of the PC, B.I. (Before the Internet), in the age of the ARPANET, of which I suspect Jobs was relatively ignorant because the ARPANET was not accessible from PCs. He was all about the PC. (Some say he invented it!) Modern mbikes unleash the power of the internet. An mbike is the third of four levels of computing power.

I have written before about the four levels of computing power. (Ducksearch it.) The lowest level is six cubic inches of wireless computing in an LGR, which is short for little glowing rectangle. Everyone else calls an LGR a phone, which is short for smartphone. I used to think I could live with three cubic inches. That was how tiny the first iPhone was. I have never owned an iPhone. Steve Jobs did not invent the smartphone. The Handspring Trēo was my first smartphone—which, remember, is an LGR—in 2003. I upgraded to a Palm Prē in 2009, still about three cubic inches. These days, now that Jobs is dead (it didn’t happen when he was alive because he was fixated on three cubic inches) at the lowest level, I need at least six cubic inches. An LG G7 suffices. It still fits in my pocket.

The highest level is defined simply by a maximum-size display—the largest display an individual can afford. I’m happy to go with the accepted term, big-screen TV, but let’s shorten that to BSTV. I still use a now-obsolete HP SmartTV.

Between LGR and BSTV are two more levels. When I want to read, I switch from my LGR to the second level: a tablet. I have an Amazon Kindle, but that’s an appliance. My iPad has more computing power than my LGR, but less than the third level, my mbike.

An mbike is bigger than a tablet and smaller than a BSTV. All the power of the internet is unleashed in mbikes. LGRs and tablets are not powerful enough to be bicycles for the mind. To be mobile, they make compromises on size, computing power, and electric power consumption. When we talk about the third level of computing power, we are talking about power with no compromises. My mbike is a notebook computer with a reasonably-sized clamshell design for integrated keyboard and display. My work mbike (wmbike for short) is a desktop tower with traditional keyboard, video (I love my 4K display!), and mouse (KVM). All are glowing rectangles: the LGR, the tablet, the mbike, and BSTV. (We spend too much time in front of glowing rectangles, don’t you think?) Anyway, the mbike is special. It is where human creativity is fully unleashed. How creative can you get without a keyboard? [2]

What about servers? you ask. What about them? I answer. Servers are mbikes. And “the cloud” is merely somebody else’s mbike—an mbike that you don’t control. The internet is simply LGRs, tablets, mbikes, and BSTVs talking to somebody else’s mbike and through that mbike to other LGRs, tablets, mbikes, and BSTVs. Soon, neighbors won’t need mbikes to use the internet. When that happens, human freedom and creativity will be expanded in peer-to-peer connections. Peer-to-peer (p2p) is not a very catchy name. It’s all about decentralizing the internet. (Ok, that term isn’t much better.) Decentralization, d14n for short (and decentralizing = d12g and decentralize = d10e and a decentralizer is a d10er), is another way of thinking about p2p. That takes us back to the way the internet used to work. Back when it was more free as in freedom. There are already some p2p services. (We won’t be truly p2p anytime soon, unless we all want to get amateur radio licenses. I’m considering it for myself, thinking of my friends Bdale and Stephen.) I’m rambling too much. That’s enough for today.

I have spoken.

[1] I would love to get to know you, Neighbor, well enough to have you at my home to enjoy my view! Let’s connect! In the accompanying photo, you can see Pikes Peak as viewed from the bridge between America the Beautiful Park and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum.

[2] Ok, ok, that’s not quite accurate. My tablet (at the second level) is the platform for my recording studio, so I can create raw content for podcasts without an mbike. But I move to my mbike to edit my podcasts. (Audacity rocks!) I’m talking about true human creativity. Creativity that extends beyond the effort that “thinkers” put into Facebook and Nextdoor posts and TikTok videos and tweets. We call it micro-blogging for a reason. Twitter and other micro-blog platforms compromise human creativity. God forbid if politics was ever exclusively energized by micro-blog-sized thoughts. Can you imagine the Federalist Papers as tweets? That’s a Bad Idea.

Edited to fix typos and add tbc tags; original word count was 878, character count was 5019.

This post is tbci0828a; tbch0429a is a tag (Ducksearch it)

This is the end of a journey I started on Twitter last year: “Would you please share a picture of a clock in a public place on Chinese soil that has Roman numerals?” It has 2,958 impressions and 14 engagements, still counting. Nobody responded to my request, though.

I tried again in June. Only 211 impressions and 4 engagements: “Would you please share a picture of a clock in a public place on Chinese soil that has Roman numerals? And I am not afraid of CCP. …”

Next, in October, I Twittered, “Do you have a picture of a clock in a public place in mainland China that has Roman numerals? Please show me,” and paid $5 to promote it. That was a fun experiment. As I write, it continues to draw attention: 34,802 impressions and 1,892 engagements, etc.

But still no help.

Last month, Mega Wolf @WolfEyeRight asked, “So. You still haven’t got that result?”

I replied, “Kinda spooky. I’ll chalk it up to serendipity. I got motivated this afternoon. As you Twittered this, I was searching and found several results on my own.…”

It turns out, results are easy to find. I think I still have those search results open on my notebook. I’m writing on my desktop though, too lazy to check. I simply searched Flickr today for china clocktower, beijing clocktower, and tianjin clocktower. I’m only going to share one: Here’s a crop of what I was looking for, from a typical picture of the China Railway Museum’s clocktower in downtown Beijing by kitmasterbloke.

Wolf saw my ad and Retweeted because they thought it was “weird” that I would pay to promote my request. And they wondered “why someone wants to find out something so specific.” Well, Wolf, this may be disappointing, but here’s why. Last year it struck me that China has a long history all its own, and the Chinese have invented many devices ahead of or in parallel with the West. I wondered what place, if any, Western clocktowers, Roman numerals and all, hold in Chinese architecture. After I got that in my head, I attached it to Twitter and wondered if any Tweeps would see my request. When I got no reply, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could pay a modest sum to motivate a response. Not the response I was looking for, but I’m glad you asked, anyway.

It’s been fun. Moving on…

"Clocktower of China Railway Museum, downtown Beijing" by kitmasterbloke is licensed under CC BY 2.0

A few people I need to work with—and a few friends—use email as their go-to communication tool. One CEO told me that he finds having only one way to write to be most efficient and refuses to use Slack. Prior to the pandemic some colleagues had Slack installed but seemed more comfortable in email. That’s changed. I have seen the pandemic push many people to more Slack and less email. Yay. For personal chat where we do not share a workspace, I prefer Keybase or WhatsApp or even Signal; I’ll use MMS or SMS if old-school texters insist. I have older relatives who have calcified on email, though. So fine. More and more I’m dropping notes to friends and family in subject lines and blasting them off. I put [chat] in the subject line once and decided it was redundant. Occasionally I’ll end with [EOM]. I’m still evolving my use of email. The medium is the message. Compare with AODLW.

tbch0911a

I had a unique interaction with a cold-caller today. (His LinkedIn profile shows 51 endorsements!) I told him I am not a LION, but if he follows me at Salesforce #Trailblazer I’ll follow him back. Sure, why not. I’ll make the same offer to you, dear readers. Visit my SFDC Trailblazer profile.