A Different List Five

A classmate of mine had an excellent idea for a blog last year and I couldn't resist piggy-backing on the name she gave it.

Twitter turned five years old this week, though I hesitate to call something old when it is actually so young. Biz Stone has been touring the talk show circuit all this week and still seems surprised at how much his social media invention has revolutionized communication. I had to wonder though. What was happening on this week five years ago when Twitter first hit the collective consciousness?

1. March 20, 2006 Separation anxiety?

2. March 21, 2006 Are humans more powerful than asteroids?

3. March 22, 2006 Who knew that the word pandemic would rise and fizzle so quickly?

4. March 23, 2006 There's no dip with this chip.

5. March 24, 2006 Oh, LEGO. Is there anything you can't do?

I think social media is brilliant. I am not fully immersed in it, but at this point I have more than dipped my toe into the water. There's a simple beauty in Twitter's 140 character limit to be convincing and succinct. And thanks to tools like bit.ly, it's very easy to drive a user to your website.

I feel Twitter is superior due to the managing capacity that Facebook seems to involve. If your resources are low, this simple two-way communication is an excellent place to begin, and you can drive visitors to your website and encourage them to comment. If you don't have this minimum set-up, you should probably fire your website-builder.

It's a safe guess that none of the stories above were "tweeted" back in 2006. Would they be now? Except for the last two items, the rest of the issues are pretty complicated subject matter. Our modern day challenge is to disseminate and "whittle down" this information so that a wider audience can appreciate and understand it. More and more organizations are adapting to this style of communication. I'm no authority on the matter, but I predict Twitter will continue to expand its role and eventually contribute more to organizations' bottom line while creating closer engagement with their audiences. It will create a more educated and informed world, all in 140 characters or less.

Unfortunately, we'll still have to navigate around the Kardashian's and Sheen's of the world.

A Wave of Heartbreak and Death

tsunami /tsoo-nah-mi/. n. a tidal wave caused by an earthquake or other disturbance. – ORIGIN Japanese, 'harbour wave'.

Natural disasters have a way of catching people when they least expect it. The magnitude 7 earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 hit its citizens as they were about to wind down for the evening. They would have sat down to meals in a few short hours; men, women, and children would have later retired for the night to start a new day. A new day came, but it was filled with destruction as cities and villages were reduced to rubble and had buried people where they stood. Nations began humanitarian efforts that exist more than a year later and will continue indefinitely. A tsunami swept over the coast of Haiti on that day as well, but it's damage was minute in comparison to what Japan has seen in recent days.

I woke up last Friday, March 11, ate breakfast, showered, and got ready to come to the college. As I turned on the television to catch up on the overnight news, I was troubled by what I saw. Breaking news was still coming in, so much of the Western World had yet to understand what had happened, but Japan had suffered an earthquake. I turned off the television and felt a sickening feeling build in my gut. I knew this would be a catastrophe. I kissed my wife goodbye and wished her a good day before I left. As she still lay in bed, I was compelled to tell her what I had seen.

"Japan has hit by an earthquake. 8.9 I think. It's pretty bad."

"Oh no."

"A wave came onto land and wiped away whole towns. It doesn't look good."

As I turned to leave, we expressed our reciprocal, "be safe, I love you," to each other, and I left for the day. When I came home later that evening, I entered the living room to discover she had been glued to the television all day. Nearly seven-hundred kilometres of coastal Japan had suffered a direct hit from the tsunami and there was an untold amount of people unaccounted for. But a man-made threat had entered the arena while I had been away from home. Several nuclear reactors at a Fukushima generating station were severely damaged and clouds laced with radioactivity had dispersed into the air.

I write this one week later and the situation has gone from "worst-case" to whatever can be described beyond that qualifier. Foreign nations are pulling their citizens out of Japan as some of its cities are in survival mode due to rolling blackouts, food shortages, and an exodus of Japanese evacuating out of an area that some say could become the next Chernobyl. It may even be worse. As per usual, the selfishness of stock markets don't take kindly to disaster regions and money is being ripped out of Japan's economy as well. It should be the stuff of filmmaking, but this is real life and death.

I like to set off my posts with an image–something that relates to the content I've written below. There is little I could contribute to the discussion by doing this, so I opted out on this occasion. There's more than enough images of Japan's heartbreak in the public sphere for everyone to see.

Grump to the Pump

Even if you don't drive a car, you've likely heard in the news about the recent spike in the price of gasoline. Due to a middle-east in turmoil (the go-to supplier and main repository of fossil-fuel energies) the price of a barrel of oil has once again topped $100. I, for one, am tired of being a passive hostage to the fluctuating cost of oil. Especially when we know as soon as its burned for energy its emissions harm our environment.

As a commuter, I know that I am part of the problem. But I am full of glee (yes, glee) about the options that are coming down the pipe from many of the world's automakers. I have never purchased a V8 vehicle in my life, nor do I feel they are even necessary for the private owner. I drive a four-cylinder, manual transmission, four-door car, and it has all the power I would ever need–probably all 90 per cent of the driving public needs, but I digress.

Electric cars are nothing new. They've been around since the late 19th century. But as soon as gasoline was used to propel us through the 20th century, the technology was virtually shelved. General Motors' EV1 received customer and critical acclaim in the late 1990's, but due to a promotion campaign that confused people, sales for the car never took off, and the cars were reduced to shrapnel.

Now in 2011, electric cars are making the news in full force. It's been a long time coming. A plethora of manufacturers are developing plug-in electric cars. See it for yourself once you begin to search around. Well-known automakers such as Ford, Chevrolet, Nissan, Toyota, Chrysler, and Honda are getting into the EV (electric vehicle) game. Lesser-known manufacturers such as Zenn, Coda, Li-ion, Tesla, and Flybo-EV, among a slew of others (I'm sure) have finally "got it" and are preparing themselves for the coming new-world-order in personal transportation.

My four-cylinder car is only six years old, and it still has plenty of life. But as relatively economical as this car is, I know it is the last gasoline-powered vehicle I will ever buy. As excited as I was to buy it in 2005 (my first new car), I am far more excited for the EV car I will purchase in the coming years.

Oil is a finite resource that IS polluting our environment, I hope many people feel the same way and embrace this new technology once it hits the showroom floor.

The Web Awaits

Some of my past assignments in Web Design struck fear in the heart of this man (sorry for the second-person reference). Between all the new lingo I had to interpret (divs, AP divs, tags, ID's, padding), sometimes my brain felt like it was idling at 60 km/h when it should have been cruising at 100. I received a "B" on my last assignment for web design, so I'm not totally lost in the woods. But I want to knock my next assignment, "out of the park."

This will be the last assignment that our instructor gives us. I really want to have a strong finish for this course and for the program. The website is meant to be a portfolio for our work. In our previous class we were encouraged to look at other websites to get design inspiration from. There must be over a million websites out there by now, but here are a few that got my attention.

http://www.maurivan.com/

http://www.sohtanaka.com/

http://themeforest.net/item/london-creative-portfolio-blog-wp-theme/full_screen_preview/70613

When my site is complete, I will take screen-shots of the finished product for you to see. If I'm not mistaken, the assignment needs to be done by April 7.

Come check it out when the time comes!