Carl Setzer

A Day At The Beach , originally uploaded by carl.setzer . My family spent the early part of the day at the beach along the Edmonds waterfront. Quite a bit of marine life readily viewable. The three of us delight in tide-pools. Quite the variety, from three different crab species (red-rock, dungeness & kelp), a couple gunnels, shrimp (possibily dock shrimp, but I'm not too sure), a regular convention of nudibrachs, sunflower stars, ochre and blood-stars. These were the stand outs. There also were all the standard players: sea cucumbers, anenomes, barnacles and the like. Via BlackBerry

Edmonds Beach , originally uploaded by carl.setzer . The extreme low tide today. -3.6, I do believe. Lots of marine life to see. Via BlackBerry

There are a good many things I like about Twitter . Most exciting is the range and speed of communications. With that is a serious problem: filters. The receptive element of communications gets overwhelmed by the volume of data. Breaking down the stream into manageable chunks is cumbersome. There are some good tools, though. I have become somewhat fond of Tweetdeck . It helps separate out some of the streams (replies and direct messages, in particular). It does a good job letting you set up groups and favorites. Thus the stream is far easier to manage. This, for me at least, makes this the best Twitter client I’ve worked with so far.

We have a bear running around the Seattle area . Amazing for a bear to racing around our urban confines. What's fun, though, is how the social media scene is taking this and running with it. Twitter has a few threads: #bearalert and #seattlebear . Also, someone has started posted to Twitter as Seattlebear . If you're interested, you can go to seattlepi.com and vote on a name for the fella .

My friend Bill forwarded me a great piece from siliconvalley.com discussing the ways that layoffs have been impacting people's family lives. My layoff has affected me far more deeply than I would've expected. Fortunately, on the whole, I'd say the experience has been positive. This interim gives me much more time with my son, which I take with relish. The tension that I have felt with my wife has been externally focused. The feeling is as the two of us facing out, backs together. For such, I'm quite grateful. The opposite would be an aggravation beyond pale. I have focused on growth and understanding during this time. Watching the news, it's easy to see the greater state of the economy. It's easy for me to not take the quiet after the hundreds of resumes personally. I quite expect that this economic mess will take years to fully recover from. Many years ago I decided my life would not be about wealth or power, but about service and impact. And about living...

Perhaps you've noticed, about one half the way down the page, that there's a graphic for IP2Location.com . It's really a delight to see all the different locales represented in my readership. Though it is a humble wee blog, I have readers all over.

Just listened to Cat’s In the Cradle by Harry Chapin . Funny, really, how a song that I’ve listened to my whole life can be so profoundly impactful. The narrator’s connection with his family, the sorrow he feels from his disconnect with his son is something that I have committed myself to avoiding. I try to be present each and every day in my son’s life. Perhaps I’ve had to sacrifice for this, giving up opportunities to advance, to grow more mighty in some enterprise. However, those opportunities seem so empty. I’ve always preferred to be at home then in some office. The promise of greater salary, power, or prestige has not held a strong enough attraction (that’s not to say that there hasn’t been any attractiveness to these choices - just not enough). Perhaps it’s the power of this song, or, more likely, having watched too many people die too young, I realize what is truly precious in this life.

One thing I let slip over the past few years is learning. I was studying, mostly with a future focus. However, I grudgingly did so, and it was somewhat painful. I need to actively learn from this point on. For instance, I used Excel quite extensively in my last few roles. However, there were several tools built in that could have made my work easier and more effective if I had taken the time to continue exploring. I generally only explored Excel when I needed to come up with something new. That generally only gave me the most basic of results. Now I will budget time for in-depth study and learning. Proactivity must be my new mantra. Via BlackBerry

Another of my chums has abandoned Twitter . For him, the problem boils down to communication. The platform blasts out 140 character tidbits, a pretty small droplet of information. Twitter's strength is for the mobile, sending these small info drops from moment to moment, wherever you are. Such things are the FreeRoxana campaigns utilize this amazingly well. For many of us, though, perhaps most of us, Facebook is better. It's easier to control who sees what, you can post more information, and for many of the key platforms, there are robust mobile applications. Twitter is still a valuable tool, but it looks like it is starting to shake out, as far as who it is valuable to.

Lately, much has been pontificated online about media hyperbole surrounding the Swine Flu. I offer something of an apologia for the current state of affairs here. Mainly, the issue stems from "the public's" inability to pay attention to anything without an immense headline. Well, unless it has to do with a celebrity's underwear habits, but I digress. My frustration for this element of society goes deep. Television news focuses on the shallow, sound-bite, executive summary. Brief, quick, gone. It amazes me, to this day, that so many people use this as their primary information source. So quick, vacant and empty, full of alarmist notions and language. You see this, however, within print as well. Particularly, headlines. Most of them are barely connected with a story's content. And many people don't read a story past the headline. Long ago, I gave up on this as a source of information. NPR took on a piece of it, as I have often had some commute time. My pref...

The folks over at Lifehaker found this clever little item to help control those constantly tangling earbuds. If you have a laser cutter laying around, you can download the plans and build one yourself. These tips might be more useful to the rest of us.