"Honking is so East-Coast." -Luke, Oakland, CA 9.14.98
Since the Dreamweaver Team is moving from Redwood City to the San Francisco office, Mer and I have decided that we only need one car. So, I sold the Subaru and bought a Specialized.
I compile resources for the San Francisco bicycle commuter:
Along with this shift from gas-power to human-power, my brain is rearranging itself. I feel lightness, happiness, freedom.
Slid into the fourth decade of my life this weekend
Implausibly warm in a birthday suit of neoprene and nylon
Many blessings
Totally open to the love around us
An impression of one long, large gift
Had a new best day of my life yesterday
Got married and smiled all day long
It was perfect
Yesterday I asked someone from Contribute (our sister app - controls access for groups to edit web sites), "Are you reading your own news?"
I showed her NetNewsWire for Mac and Feedreader for PC, and we debated the relative merits of push and pull technologies for news.
What about you? Where do you get your news? How do you sort through It All?
(thanks eric)
I made this Flash graphic from some common visual memes:
Circle, triangle, square, two lines, two arrows.
I used Illustrator, then Flash to acheive maximum abstraction, an approach to japanese calligraphy.
It evolved from this drawing:
 |  |  |  |  |  |
Recognize it? Record, play, stop, pause, back, forward... like a CD or a tape player. I chose them because they are common ways that I access memory, and this is a site to help me learn and teach.
The symbols have come to represent six philosophies in my life.
Do more, play music, draw pictures, write fast, back to work, and travel forward.
This site is my ongoing experiment in aethetics and design. I encourage feedback, and have much more to say, but my main message is this: Whatever you do, do more!
The year began with a new job at HP. This time, I was a contractor working with the HP/Compaq merger folks and learning first hand about large-scale change management. We sold her house and moved just south of San Francisco into an apartment. I bought a used car to commute along the world's most beautiful highway. Meredith took the train each day and we had many adventures then in the Sierras and Los Angeles. That Spring, Meredith was invited to attend a seminar on cell biology in Kyoto, Japan. I joined her for a week of warm weather, cherry blossoms, and serene temple walks. We came back quite changed and dedicated to the Japanese aesthetic of minimalism. A long weekend in Telluride, CO for the Bluegrass Festival changed that and we were back to our hippie American selves soon enough. That summer my family and I took a cruise through Alaska - I highly recommend this - in August. For Labor Day, Meredith and I attended a posh wedding in DC and I showed off Swarthmore to her in a brief visit.
Last fall, we completed our search for a house in San Francisco. Beaming with pride for Meredith in all of her efforts to close on this perfect house with 3 bedrooms, a backyard, fireplace, shed, attic, and hardwood floors on a quiet, residential street, I saved up and bought her a diamond. A friend of her family shaped a ring for her and I brought it down to LA for Thanksgiving. The day before holiday, I brought her down to the cove where my brother and I visited during our first time in California. He was surfing within sight as I proposed to her and just then the clouds broke open and the tide came in. She said yes, and we have had enormous fun telling everyone since then!
Read on at domnmer.net!
With the recession officially under way, I interviewed tirelessly to no avail until Meredith suggested that I follow my love of music. First I interviewed with media companies, then wrote some music and traveled to Boston, Swarthmore, Bucks County, and New York City. Upon my return I started "dom net llc" and began freelance consulting. During that summer and fall, I worked right around the corner from Mer's laboratory, at a musical instrument store that can only be described as "true Berkeley". It was a real blessing to be there during 9/11 when I received a call from my dad who was a block away during the attack on New York. He escaped the chaos by grace and ingenuity, but that's another story. Our family flourished over the holidays!
| -1- | | [dom.net/work] | |
| sustain
a business for education, media, and music. |
|
| -2- | | [music] | |
|
produce
innovative audio [recordings],
back them up on [tour]. |
|
| -3- | | [write] | |
|
develop the discipline to generate works of fiction, (e.g. a hard-hitting science/speculative fiction novel) and short stories, and commentary. |
|
| -4- | | [band] | |
| bring
together traditions of bluegrass and [barbershop] ,
electronica and [improvization]. |
|
| -5- | | [travel] | |
|
[circumnavigate] the world to network communities and search for unique vibrations. meet and make friends with different people. document the journey as an inspiration for others. |
|
This year began with a dip in the Pacific and then another connection with Meredith. I visited Nick in San Francisco during school break and we went dancing. Being the grooviest of our mutual friends of course she was there as well! Perhaps our vibrations that night were the proverbial flap of a butterfly's wings that trigger a hurricane. Both of our previous relationships came to term that year, under independent circumstances on separate coasts. Namaste.
In the June, I finished graduate school, my brother finished college, and my sister graduated from high school!
After completing my EdM, I worked at the MIT Media Lab. I moved out of the apartment into a storage pod in Somerville and just kicked it all summer with my friends. I wrote Web pages, played ultimate, jammed, and watched the stock market slide. That summer was the most blissful of many in memory as I sailed on the Charles, lived out of a suitcase, and once again visited the Burning Man for our best community gathering yet. We built a huge camp, hosted famous DJs, and truly Meredith and I connected with each other. Feeling young and free, we fell helplessly in love, surrounded by friends and fresh tunes and art.
That fall we decided to tempt fate, and I moved back to California to live with her. I thought of course there would be jobs!
I was accepted by the Harvard Graduate School of Education in May. Early that summer, I rolled up to the Boulder Creek post office in my cruiser, thinking, "Do I really want to give up my manageable life for a life in the city, 3000 miles away, again?" Yes, of course! What better subject to study than the subject of learning and education itself? Especially when one can't decide between love of science, music, art, writing and teaching? I left HP on good terms and moved to Cambridge in a whirlwind of change.
Meredith and I were both still in other relationships then, but we managed to connect during our community's annual camping trip and made fast friends. I made such new music and memories, but I had to put them on hold while I struggled with an entirely new discipline at Harvard. I took classes at MIT and Harvard Law and completely changed my worldview within six months. Many friends were well met and I discovered new music learning and teaching techniques. I had sold my car, and could be seen biking through leaves, then snow, then ice.
Meanwhile, in California...
That year Meredith bought her own house north of Berkeley, where she had been accepted into the PhD program in molecular and cell biology! She was seen researching mitosis, teaching undergrads, and tending a garden. What a year of hard work, good fortune, and change for both of us.
I moved to a solar house and weathered el niño (flooding, mudslides, broken panels and waterwheel, no power, many books, many candles). I lived in that house for six months and every day was an adventure! Feeling a quite restless and curious (and overworked), I took a three month sabbatical from HP. How did I manage this? I hadn't taken any
time off for two years, borrowed from future time off, and took unpaid time off. HP was going through a split at the time, so no one really noticed that I was driving solo across the US, visiting universities, playing coffeehouses, attending a wedding, a graduation, and traipsing through Italy with my family. When I got back, everything at work had changed, and I decided to apply to graduate school and reshape my life.
I moved into a small wooden house (again) in Boulder Creek (this time on the grid), and applied to four schools: two on the east coast and two on the west. I didn't think that I would get into any of them. My music really took off this year as I collaborated with Nick Peters, who also introduced me to a truly divine soul named Meredith. I was
inspired. She had just graduated from University of California at Davis with a degree in biology, and would have minored in dance if they'd had that back then. She took a job at the Carnegie Institute on Stanford Campus and moved to Redwood City, a neighboring town. We were both seeing other people then, and had a lot of growing to do before we were meant to be together.
I was promoted to Emerging Technologies Consultant which really freed me up to travel: New York & LA (Internet World), Swarthmore (recruiting), Seattle (Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility), and especially Cambridge (Media Lab). During this year I also published a small "broadcast" of my musical adventures, and met many DJs and fun people in California. This year was the 16th year of Swarthmore's Sixteen Feet, so we gathered together for a reunion concert and I met and sang with many old and new friends. I produced and distributed a tape (!) of our concert and this really kick-started my desire to produce and make music. This year I also had a great roommate, Phil Degreen, who introduced me to friends in the mountains of Santa Cruz and many other wonders (e.g. The Simpsons).
After graduating from Swarthmore with a degree in english literature and a proclivity for computer science, I took a job with Hewlett-Packard Company in Santa Clara. I worked as a Web developer while finding friends in San Francisco and living in Menlo Park. I missed Swarthmore a lot during this time, and living alone was a challenge. I threw myself into my work and helped HP out of the stone age ("What's a Web?"). At this time, dom.net was born. I could be found skateboarding around HP's pristine concrete campus, dialing up the "internet", and driving around lost a lot. Ben Vigoda moved out to CA for a while to work at HP and we had a blast, jamming during "The Salad Days".
I have many thoughts on my home for the past four years, most of which are contained in a guided tour of the college that was in place while you were attending. Now, they have this.
