Good Morning Internet

This semes­ter, I’m tak­ing a class on elec­tronic pub­lish­ing. As part of the class, we set up blogs. No big sweat for me, but I was sur­prised how many peo­ple in my class didn’t really know what a blog was, and a lot had never tried to set one up.

Some­times I for­get that my Tweet­ing, blog­ging, pod­cast­ing friends and I are a small frac­tion of Inter­net users. It’s nice to get a real­ity check every now and then.

I decided to write my blog about the future of elec­tronic pub­lish­ing. We are allowed to write about any­thing we want, but I thought I’d try my hand at some­thing more focused than I’m used to, just to see what happens.

So, if you’d like to fol­low along with my thoughts about the past, present, and future of pub­lish­ing, I invite you to check out Dinosaurs and Fire­works.

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It was all over the news when Endeav­our made its land­ing on Sun­day night: There are only four space shut­tle mis­sions left. As of this moment, they are sched­uled for:

• Dis­cov­ery - Mon­day, April 5, 6:27 a.m.
• Atlantis - Fri­day, May 14, 2:28 p.m.
• Endeav­our - Thurs­day, July 29, 7:51 a.m.
• Dis­cov­ery - Thurs­day, Sep­tem­ber 16, 11:57 a.m.

Ever since I was a lit­tle space geek, I’ve dreamed of see­ing a shut­tle launch in per­son. In the spirit of the Year of Adven­ture, cou­pled with the fact that 2010 will see the last shut­tle mis­sions, I’m adding a launch to my list of things to do this year. I’m not sure which one yet, I’m not sure how I’ll get to Florida, I’m not sure where I’ll stay, and I’m not sure how I’ll make it jive with my work sched­ule, but I’m not let­ting the shut­tle pro­gram end with­out hav­ing seen at least one launch.

Have you ever been to a shut­tle launch? Do you have any tips?

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In this episode I intro­duce you to my friend Mike Camillo. He’s decided to eat bet­ter, exer­cise more, and lose weight.

In order to track his progress and keep him­self moti­vated, he takes a shirt­less pho­tos of him­self each Fri­day and posts it to Face­book for every­one to see, along with the lat­est scale read­ing. Bold stuff.

Sub­scribe with iTunes.

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The Olympics

We’re still in the mid­dle of the Win­ter Games in Van­cou­ver. I admit, I was pretty cyn­i­cal about the games when they first started. I thought I didn’t see the appeal any­more. I skipped the open­ing cer­e­mony. Then, while work­ing on other things around the apart­ment, I the TV on in the back­ground and caught some of the Nordic com­bined events. About an hour later I real­ized I was still watch­ing. Not only that, but I was into it.

By the time the puck dropped for the U.S./Canada hockey game last Sun­day, I was an Olympic fan. I might not be obsess­ing over medal counts (yet), but I know there are still great events to watch before the clos­ing cer­e­monies on Sunday.

Apple’s iPad

Part of why I love my grad school pro­gram so much is its explo­ration of lit­er­ary pub­lish­ing, includ­ing elec­tronic pub­lish­ing. The iPad, aside from being Apple’s next cool thing, has a tremen­dous amount of poten­tial for unknown or inde­pen­dent writ­ers (like me) to get their writ­ing into the hands of read­ers, poten­tial fans, and pos­si­ble pub­lish­ers. The rules in lit­er­ary pub­lish­ing world are being re-written, and I think Apple’s new prod­uct is going to help jump-start the indus­try, or at least give it a healthy push into the dig­i­tal age. Ten years from now this will all seem so prim­i­tive and rudi­men­tary, but for those of us here on the fron­tier, it’s a really, really excit­ing time.

Plus, it’s really cool-looking.

The World Cup

Two major sports events in one year? Oh yeah.

It’s pretty hard to not get excited about the World Cup. I have friends who usu­ally couldn’t care less about sports, but when it’s time for the World Cup, they’re glued to the TV right there with me. It’s much more than just a series of soc­cer matches, it’s a major global event.

All over the world, busi­nesses close down. Peo­ple put aside dif­fer­ences and drop argu­ments, even if only tem­porar­ily. Peo­ple across the socioe­co­nomic spec­trum are all con­nected to this one event. It tran­scends race, bor­ders, and class. It set­tles grudges and awak­ens new ones. It’s some­thing tan­gi­ble that brings peo­ple together in ways that war, reli­gion, or ide­ol­ogy never could. Even if only for a short time, some­thing amaz­ing hap­pens dur­ing the World Cup.

If you’ve never fol­lowed a World Cup before, (and in the U.S., that might be likely), you owe it to your­self to watch this summer.

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March 12–21: South by Southwest

This is going to be my first out-of-town adven­ture of the year, and my first SXSW. I’ve signed up for sen­sory over­load via plat­inum badge, and I can’t wait. Between the film, music, and inter­ac­tive ses­sions, I’ll have no short­age of things to write about, pho­tos to take, and gen­eral inspi­ra­tion for the rest of the year. I’m really, really pumped.

May 7–9: MaxFunCon

About a month and a half of rest after SXSW, I’m head­ing to Lake Arrow­head for Max­Fun­Con! Hosted by Jesse Thorn, it’s going to be a solid week­end of “cook­ing, crafts, edu­ca­tion, and s’mores” fea­tur­ing the likes of John Hodg­man, Andrew WK, Maria Bam­ford, Jonathan Coul­ton, Marc Maron, and more.

Unfor­tu­nately, their web­site is down right now because the data cen­ter had a fire drill which set off the sprin­klers in the server room. Oops.

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Oh hell no.

We just finally started to thaw out from the Snow­poca­lypses! (Snow­poca­lypsi? Snow­poca­lypso?) And now they’re pre­dict­ing some­thing in the Bal­ti­more area called a “snow hur­ri­cane”, which sounds as ter­ri­fy­ing as it does silly.

Tonight, I did what I did dur­ing the last snow­fall and checked in with Foot’s Fore­cast (a site that really needs its own iPhone app, if only for my own per­sonal con­ve­nience). Fore­caster Foot and his weather posse (if they don’t call them­selves that, they should) are really good at deliv­er­ing the facts with just the right about of humor, and forego the sen­sa­tion­al­ism in which our local TV affil­i­ates seem to indulge. (Exam­ple: “IT IS STILL SNOWING DEATH FLAKES FROM CLOUDS OF DOOM, WITH A BLIZZARD FROM SATAN’S FREEZER ON THE WAY, AND THIS TIME IT’S COMING AFTER YOUR CHILDREN. More after these mes­sages.” I’m paraphrasing.)

The bot­tom line of the fore­cast is this: Bal­ti­more might catch the south­ern­most tip of this next storm which has the poten­tial to be pretty severe north and east of the city. We might catch some­where in the neigh­bor­hood of five inches, but nobody really knows for cer­tain right now. The National Weather Ser­vice issued a Win­ter Storm Watch that starts tomor­row night and extends to Thurs­day night.

Com­pared to what we just went through, five inches of snow doesn’t seem like much.

Accord­ing to AccuWeather.com, New Jer­sey, Penn­syl­va­nia, and New York bet­ter hold on tight:

Stay tuned, folks. This just got real-er. Again.

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2010 is going to be packed with trips, global events, new tech­nol­ogy, great sports, and lots of cool stuff I’m sure I don’t even know about yet.

But it all starts right here, at home in Baltimore.

March 6 — My 30th Birthday

I will be 30 years old in less than two weeks.

I just had to see that sen­tence writ­ten out. Granted, this is much more of an adven­ture for me than it is for any­body else, but it’s a big event nonethe­less. Truth­fully, I’m pretty stoked to be enter­ing my thir­ties. It’s like reach­ing a new level, a place where I can take all the things I learned in my twen­ties and apply to a brand-new, awe­some decade. Some peo­ple might call it “grow­ing up”, but I pre­fer my description.

April 9 — Open­ing Day for the Orioles

Another year, another base­ball sea­son for my Bal­ti­more Ori­oles. No, we’re not expect­ing this to be a record-shattering year for the birds. No, most fans aren’t mak­ing plans for the play­offs. Many peo­ple doubt the team will even have a win­ning record. But, sea­son after wretched sea­son, we have Open­ing Day, the day when we all rally behind the Ori­oles, when the slate is wiped clean and a brand-new base­ball sea­son stretches out before the team and the city of Bal­ti­more, they day we halfway expect for all the tum­blers to fall into place, for the team to come together as a cohe­sive unit, and rack up the wins. Even if we lose our opti­mism for every pro­ceed­ing game, even if Cam­den Yards is mostly empty in August, we’ll always have the magic of Open­ing Day.

Grad School

In May, I will fin­ish my first year in the Cre­ative Writ­ing and Pub­lish­ing Arts MFA pro­gram at the Uni­ver­sity of Bal­ti­more. So far, I love this pro­gram. It’s moti­vat­ing me to write more and spark­ing all kinds of great ideas. I’m chan­nel­ing my thoughts and ideas about the future of pub­lish­ing into honest-to-goodness school­work. Plus, I’m sur­rounded by tal­ented and friendly peo­ple who pro­vide a seem­ingly lim­it­less sup­ply of cre­ative fuel.

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That’s Krafty on the bass and me on gui­tar, singing.

Whether or not it was wel­come to every­one, 2010 started off as a very adven­tur­ous for pretty much every­body in the mid-Atlantic region when we received more snow in a sin­gle sea­son than we’ve ever seen before. Har­row­ing as it some­times was, it was still excit­ing to see three feet of snow stacked on every­thing in the city, and side­walks dug out in long ice canyons along the road.

There was some­thing thrilling about being stuck in the neigh­bor­hood, weath­er­ing the storm. When the sun came out, so did the peo­ple of Ham­p­den who walked their dogs, went sled­ding down 37th street, and packed the bars and restau­rants. Most peo­ple, it seemed, were mak­ing the best of it. So many peo­ple found fun in the face of an emer­gency. Though it took me a week to move my car from the ski slope that used to be my street (which also meant a week away from work with­out pay), it was nice to have time to spend watch­ing the storm, with friends, at the bars, or a com­bi­na­tion of all three.

A week after the storm, I played a reunion show with my close friends Josh and Matt in our old col­lege band, Three Track Mind. It was amaz­ing to play the old songs, our first show in six years, and catch up with a huge num­ber of friends who braved the ice to see us per­form. It was a won­der­ful, touch­ing night all around.

Last night, I looked at my cal­en­dar and was aston­ished at the excit­ing chain of events still to come. So, I’m offi­cially declar­ing 2010 the Year of Adven­ture, and I plan on using this site as a way to doc­u­ment as much of it as I can through blog posts, pho­tos, pod­casts, and video.

Over the next few days, I’ll high­light some of the big events I’m look­ing for­ward to. I was going to put it all into one post, but I real­ized halfway through that it was going to be a really long one.

Are you hav­ing a Year of Adven­ture, too?

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10:37 — P.S. ICE DANCING? REALLY?

10:23 — Great land­ing, great mis­sion. Kudos to STS-130!

10:21 — Did they say that its approach was 20 times faster and seven times steeper than a com­mer­cial air­line land­ing? Yeesh!

10:21 — On CNN, they’ve appar­ently already landed safely. I guess this web stream is close enough to real time for gov­ern­ment work!

10:20 — Endeav­our: “Run­way in sight.” Ohboyohboyohboyohboy!

10:19 — The first grainy night vision cam­era shot! Oh wait… it’s just show­ing other cam­era crews for some rea­son. That’s gov­ern­ment cam­era work for you!

10:16 — It just occurred to me that more Amer­i­cans are watch­ing ice danc­ing than a group of their fel­low Amer­i­cans on the way back home from freak­ing outer space.

10:12 — Hous­ton: “It’s a beau­ti­ful night to land in Florida.” Aww.

10:11 — The out­line of Florida on Mis­sion Control’s mon­i­tor looks like some­thing out of Tron.

10:09 — Wait, 13,000 miles per hour? That’s… insane! 12 min­utes to touchdown.

10:03 — Endeav­our is on its way to the Kennedy Space Cen­ter in Florida. Right now it’s less than 18 min­utes to touch­down and about to pass over Cen­tral Amer­ica, fly­ing at 13,000 miles per hour. Yowza!

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I love base­ball. From the chilly open­ing week to the oppres­sively hot last games (no mat­ter how hor­ri­bly my Bal­ti­more Ori­oles play), I love watch­ing the sport.

Last sea­son was rough. The Ori­oles just didn’t come together as a team, and to add insult to injury, the stu­pid Yan­kees for jerks won the World Series.

Some think (and vocal­ize on Twit­ter) that fan­tasy base­ball is the most bor­ing thing in the world. To me, it’s a sign that spring is just around the cor­ner. And as we slowly melt our way through two feet of snow and ice here in Charm City (with rumors that more might be head­ing our way next week), I can use all the signs of spring I can get.

And when you love a team that plays so hor­ri­bly, root­ing for a fan­tasy team helps add some joy to what would oth­er­wise be a mis­er­able season.

The first spring work­outs start this week, and I’ve set up a fan­tasy base­ball team on Yahoo. If fan­tasy base­ball is your thing, or if you’d like to give it a try, I invite you to the offi­cial league of The Gavin Show.

The league ID is 262008 and the pass­word is “yan­keessuck” because, well, they do, champs or not. (Base­ball fan logic doesn’t have to make sense.)

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