Once again, I was off to Germany… home of good friends, heavy food, wacky long sentences, and Lufthansa, the airline whose plane I was unceremoniously squished into not like a sardine, but wurst.

I had the foot-munching-tray aisle to my right, and a stupendously larger-than-life and dumber-than-devil-fossils young fella to my left.  To his left sat an acquaintance of his, seemingly of equal gelatinousness and dimwittedness. For the purposes of this entry, we’ll call them Slad and Elad, respectively if not respectfully.

* * *

Slad had no sense.  No sense of etiquette, culture, space, or time.  No sense at all, really.  And he was happy to share this nonsense with me, loudly… cheerfully interrupting the safety instructions which were actually melodious and fascinating in comparison.

Slad: HEY!
Me: Hi.
Slad: THEY’RE TALKING GERMAN!
Me: Yeah.
Slad: WHY ARE THEY TALKING GERMAN?
Me: It’s Lufthansa, a German airline.
Slad: [A look even blanker than usual]
Me: ...And we’re going to Germany, so there are Germans on board.

Only the first part had sunk in.  And barely at that.

Slad: LUFTHANGLE?
Me: Lufthansa.
Slad: YEAH!?  BUT THEY’RE STILL TALKING GERMAN!
Me: [speechless]

About 30 minutes into the flight…

A friend of mine just let me know of a frustrating and seemingly unfair issue in his neck of the woods:  A popular and much-loved priest in South Dakota is apparently about to be deported due to what seems to be a pretty lame bureaucratic snafu (pemanent residency application accepted but later lost/misplaced).  An advocacy site is here: HelpFather.

Something you can count on

I managed to get up at 8am to go to the gym today.  This is impressive, because:
- Today is Saturday.
- I went to the gym yesterday.

But that’s not really the story here.  Rather, we had a substitute teacher for our gym class who giggled in an adorable, Japanese-school-girl’ish way, and apologized for not speaking much English.  Continuing on in mildly broken English, she pleaded for us to just follow her and everything would be okay.

Okay, then. But I soon realized that something wasn’t quite okay.

I’m not a crazy athlete, but I like working out at the gym and also dancing a few times a week.

Finding good dance shoes wasn’t so hard for me.  I got personal recommendations from some of my lindy hopping friends, and was also delighted that the friendly folks at dancestore.com were happy to offer personalized suggestions over the phone.  For the record (and now from personal experience), I recommend that all lindy hoppers get this dance sneaker; it makes turning and spinning a breeze.

But I’m having a much harder time finding good cross-training and running shoes.  I’ve had good luck with New Balance shoes in the past, but it’s hard to find a good selection of ‘em locally in my size, so I decided to go online.  Sure enough, via Amazon.com or Zappos and undoubtedly countless other sites, I have a choice of zillions of shoes.  And that would be okay if there was some help filtering… but there’s not! :o

Yesterday, I bought ”Wii Fit” (a balance board + training CD). I decided I was really committed to exercise more and eat right. Today, unfortunately, I missed breakfast due to a dentist appointment and came into work late.  I grabbed a pack of cashews… not too bad.

And that’s when it happened.  Charles walked by my desk.

In junior high, I was not thinking about love.
In high school, love was for everyone but me.
In undergrad, love was only for the Bad Boys.
In grad school, I was delighted to realize that good guys could find love, too.

And now, I am tempted to believe that love is surprisingly, frustratingly, completely random.

The Rational Me yearns to apply logic to love, typically less out of need than pure intellectual curiosity.  Do [x] and you will find love.  Be [y] and you will find love.  Or, most simplistically and IMHO reasonably, be a Good Person and you will be well-deserving of love and will be correspondingly likely to find it.

And yet, despite seemingly having many data points, I fail to find many firm correlations, much less prerequisites or guarantees.

Here are a few thoughts on music services I’m in love with online.  CAVEAT:  Many, if not all of these only work in a limited number of countries due to lame licensing complications… typically the United States, often coupled with Canada and/or the UK.  And it’d be wrong, oh so wrong to use proxies to get around this .

* * *

I just learned that on Last.fm you can not only play tons of (full length!) songs on demand now, but do so without even having an account.  This makes it a great service to share neat music finds with others!

Here’s an example:
The short, catchy, and wordless 47 Reasons, from the charming and often hilarious a cappella group, The Bobs.

Downside:  Individuals are technically only supposed to be able to stream a song full-length three times.

Other music services online that I love:

I recently joined an interesting little aggregator / life-streaming sort of service called FriendFeed.  I’m finding both the service and the customer service to be admirable.  Here’s a recent set of comments on their support list from one of the founders:

That is a very good point [...] this was unintended [...] This was a bad decision, and we will undo it promptly today.  Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

And then soon after:

This issue has been fixed and pushed [live to production]

This, typically along with other communications from the company, contains several core components of what I feel is (typically) effective customer service communications.  The note…

- Thanks the user for the feedback.
- Acknowledges the problem.
- Expresses regret.
- Specifies action that will be taken.
- Confirms the action, reiterates the appreciation, and closes the loop.

Or, more succinctly, here’s an often-good cycle for similar situations:  Thank, Acknowledge, Apologize, Promise, Provide closure.

So why don’t more companies communicate in this way?

As many friends have reminded me, I haven’t blogged for a while.

Here’s a refresher on what I wrote a while back about why I blog.

And here are a few reasons why I haven’t been blogging for a while:

• Scrubbing
  I had to prepare my apartment for a parental visit. ‘nuff said.

• Traveling
  I visited Seattle, Ottawa, and Toronto… which involved preparing presentations, doing my first-ever TV interview, filing expense reports, escalating/acting upon tons of awesome webmaster feedback, recovering from staying in a tiny room above a Mexican restaurant (which cost nearly $150 a night!), helping a friend break up, and beforehand personally booking plane rides, train rides, hotel rooms, and more.  Trips are a lot of work, especially those that combine business and pleasure.

• Recovering
  I spent time recovering from having many bits of glass fly into my head.  This was associated with an accident involving me, my parents, my new car, and a very, very stupid and/or suicidal skateboarder who ignored a stop sign at a busy intersection and collided at high velocity with my slowly-moving vehicle.  While my parents and I are thankfully all healed up, I’m still dealing with financial and legal ramifications… and my car is still in the shop.  Upside:  I’ve been getting lots more exercise from walking and jogging and have lost two pounds of fat .

• Practicing and performing
  I recently performed on stage at the huge Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California.  What a scary and exhilarating experience!!!  I hope to have a recording that I can post here in the near future.

• And yet more travel-planning
  I’m planning trips in the remainder of this year to Dublin, Seville, Louisville, Los Angeles, Chicago or Las Vegas, Viernheim, Mannheim, and Caracas.  I’m excited but stressed about this, as you can imagine.

• Working
  I’m heading up two major events at Google, taking on new responsibilities, attending Search Engine Strategies San Jose in August, and much more.

• Apartment searching
  Though this has been temporarily put on hold while I’m carless, I have been scouting out a new place to call my own closer to the Googleplex to eliminate the generally-comfy-but-time-consuming daily commute from San Francisco to Mountain View.

• Facebooking
  Facebook has both taken time away from my blogging and has dried up much of my drive to blog.  With Facebook, I’ve been able to share what’s going on in my life with friends, highlight interesting articles, ask questions and get answers, show off music and photos, and learn what’s going on in my communities, in my friends’ lives, and so on.  Still, though, Facebook isn’t (yet) a complete replacement for self-hosted blogging as I see it, so don’t count on me shuttering BLADAM just yet .

  * * *

  I always have tons of stuff I want to share… continually have blog drafts bouncing around in my noggin.  But now you understand why those have remained mental drafts for the last months.

  So… no promises that I’ll blog more often—sorry.  But be assured that I’m not just belching in front of the T.V.

   

  ---

  - Blathered by Adam on Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 19:49 Permalink
  - Filed under Personal
  - Commented on by 57 folks so far. Visit the full entry page and join in!

I just learned from BLADAM member Flathead in the Netherlands that there’s a worldwide movement involving Free Hugs.  I just watched a few snippets, and this just totally made my day!

It also brings to mind some thoughts I shared in an early blog entry (”Non-sexual Healin’” )

[...] It was then that I realized how much the whole concept of touch means to me and likely many of my Lindy Hop crazy friends. There’s such a comfort and warmth in—if you’ll forgive the modified Moulin Rouge reference—holding someone and being held in return.

At least in my case (and I suspect, for most others as well), this is all not really about sex or even necessarily flirting. As a heterosexual fella, I still enjoy hugging my friends regardless of their gender, and I likewise appreciate being a follower in Lindy Hop, even with guys.

Sure, there’s sometimes an underlying sensuality in dancing, especially when blues-dancing with someone you are attracted to from the way they look or the way they dance, and so on. But I still think that the overall non-sexual pleasure of touch is one of the leading factors that contributes to folks’ joy in dancing, and this also highlights just how much closeness our American society often lacks.

In much of Europe and Latin America, for instance, there seems to be less perceived overlap between friendly touching and sexual overtures, and I really like and respect that. When I lived in Europe, I found that I was encouraged to give and receive friendly hugs or even snuggle with others without ulterior motives or expectations.

Anyway, thanks, Flathead, for the neat link and good feelings .