Friday, February 04, 2005

Intuitive Understanding of Systems and Design - new word "urbanophile"

Well nothing as deadly to a blog as posting a poem, so much for being a rule breaker!

All the real bloggers' rules I am breaking - you know who, where and what I am because I have associated my writing with my business, or at least with my business resume. And because I want you to know. But blogging in a freestyle with energy may be more effective and fun if you don't know the author, and if the author doesn't let on who he or she is.

It's like putting your business sign on your car - it's fine if you are a careful and considerate driver, but if like to drive your sportscar fast and you cut someone off accidently or they take offence, it is your business that is represented on the road.

Reading the real bloggers you don't even know what gender they are (Say hello George Sands). The wild and woolly days of self expression on the information hiway are here, to stay. There are ways to control traffic and monitize these sources of information, but real writing by real people is out and loose in the world.

So why did I do it this way-- because as a creative it must be sort of well, restrictive? Yes, well fundamentally it is, one only has so much time to do things like write. But for the greater good as both a left and right brained person, I want to have the left brained ones be able to find me so they can make clever use of my right brain & left brain bridges to help build a better world.

The techies, the geeks, and nerds thought we had our brave new world in our hands - even some retired before the snakeoil salesmen took over what had been a grand fun time leading up to the high tech craze and crash of 2001. Nothing was as hollow as the white man's getto of Silicon Valley in 2000.

I even laughed off my "psychic friends" who warned me, prior to 1995, that things were going to hit the wall and turn ugly after about 2000 - they warned me that money would be more difficult to come by. Look at all this money I am making I thought! Hey I'll be able to buy a house, continue to travel and meet some of my nerdy interior goals. It doesn't even matter that I left millions of dollars worth of stock on the table at Microsoft in '93 and at RealNetworks in '96.

But my feeling that despite how much torture I had to endure in the linear thinking, instructional based, right brain repressive, non-expressive universe of the technical knowledgeworker, that some day it would be worth the trauma appears to be coming to fruition.

In the old days my heart hurt alot. After working in tech my personality changed significantly - I became kinder, truer, and gentler. I found that there is no where to hide and nothing to defend, because you are always with you. The wildchild was tamer, but rather than sensing immediate changes, continued to use my intuition to sense things as they might become - with some accuracy. I gave the first public speech at Microsoft on the advent of the Internet, asking the user education folks to store their files intended for printing instead of deleting them so we could distribute them in the future.

Being fundamentally (one could say 'terminally') creative is not something you erase by working with technology, but it is important to get along with people in the world. To me not just get along with them, by hopefully to teach by example, and encourage them on their mission in the world. It is not my job to change others, I found, only myself.

The tech industry now needs me to be a nexialist - a jack of all trades - a designer with an INTUITIVE urbanophile understanding of systems, software and design so we can more effectively combine it with meeting human needs.

We are very much in the early days of technology, and even if I and other can see clearly into the future, it is step by step that we meet that future creating it as it arises.

Yes, I still love Paul Simon's melodic ballads and Green Day's rants, En Vogue is major eye candy but who cares? I can't spell worth a darn because I still think words can be spelled all kinds of different ways. Sometimes I have to hear something twice to memorize it. I was made to feel terrible about that in a work review 15-20 years ago - "Some times Linda has to hear information twice". But then I was reading the life story of one of the world's great ancient pandits, and there it was, "Sometimes I have to hear something twice" What a relief! If the smartest man in the world admitted that sometimes he had to hear something twice, what hope is there for the rest of us?

People have their own problems, it does not one twit of good if we take it on ourselves.

NOTE: Torture is a word so uncommon to my use that I looked it up on the front page of CNN - some woman named Linda is happily married to some man named John and they love to torture kids in Florida by pulling out their toenails and beating them with a hammer - and people worry about Jackson - harm comes in all kinds of ways and affects people really differently. I could not spell torture well enough to find it via Dictionary.com - technology is for me not against me - at least I can spell it.