Catching Up, Globalization, Carnival, Expertise and Birds

I've been offline, trying to get some things done for a local company. While everyone's been having fun down the street, I've been manning the keyboard and Dancing With Servers. Fun, fun, fun. And while I've been doing that, with the annoying bandwidth problem while the Trinispora (Trinidad and Tobago diaspora) are watching Carnival live on the internet and file servers are shuffling files around, the world has been rolling by. I decided to handle them within the next 24 hours, but before that - a few notes.

First off, I'm still alive, busy, and am working on finishing up a contract.

It hasn't all been work. Time between keystrokes and mouseclicks has been spent pretty productively - plenty of pictures with birds and stuff. There's even a few Carnival pictures in there somewhere - children's Carnival, which was on Sunday and was the only day that I really wasn't working.

Globalization and Carnival

The last few days have been an example of globalization. The work I'm doing for a local company will allow them to deal with a company in a foreign country which... doesn't have Carnival Monday and Tuesday off. In other words, if you want the business - you get things done on a global calendar. So while, half a kilometer away, alcohol soaked people have their Carnival, I'm in a global economy. The difference, of course, is that I can hear them and they can't hear me.

My Uncle called me throughout Carnival, discussing land issues and business issues with me the entire time. Today we talked about the music we're hearing. I think he likes knowing that someone else is operating in a global economy as well.

Expertise

Paul Currion hit me with a meme:

...So here’s my meme: what five resources - online or otherwise - would you point people to, if you wanted to give them an entry into your field of expertise?...

I'm drawing a blank. I don't think of myself as an expert on anything, so I'm not sure what Paul thinks my area of expertise is... Some say that I'm an expert on emergency communications, some say I'm an expert on ICT technology, but I don't really claim 'expertise'. I'm good at some things, I suck at others, and all I can say on a general level is that I read widely, drink lots of coffee (though less these days), and just sit down and think about things instead of being spoon fed opinions. I imagine things, I consider things... I write what I think about.

I also say that there 'are no experts' because someone always comes along and retires the experts. Except marketers. They market marketing as expertise and sell their knowledge of marketing... sort of like the 'get rich quick' schemes that used to be (thankfully) stuck in the back of magazines.

So I don't know. Maybe some people think I am an expert on some things. Maybe I'm not. I'm just trying to figure out the truth of things and share as I go along. People don't call themselves experts. Other people call people experts because they respect what they're good at. I've got my fingers in so many pies, I don't know what I could be an expert at. On the bleeding edge, a lot of fumbling goes on. :-)

Groups, Social Software...

Enough Already. Quit inviting me to Flickr Groups. I host my pictures on Flickr. I don't want to join every group. That's the thing that kills 'social software' for me. There's no way that I can spend enough time in all of those groups to be productive in any aspect of life.

I never did get a hang of the 'social' stuff, and 'social software' for me is real simple. Email is social software. It doesn't pester me, it doesn't make loud noises, and I can respond in my own time. That's social, and a lot more respectful than a lot of this stuff.

Look, if you have a group and you're real happy about it, that's great. If you want to invite me, that's great and I thank you for thinking of me. But don't get your feelings hurt if I ignore it. I float between social groups, not in them. At any given point in time, I am where I belong. :-)

Birds, Birds, Birds

Lots of pictures of birds over the last few days - the noise of Carnival displaced them, and they got food here. I was trying to identify the bird to the left, and ended up at the The Trinidad and Tobago Field Naturalists' Club, so I emailed Martyn Kenefick and he told me it is a Grayish Saltator. A pretty common bird, though they are new around here. And it wasn't in 'Birds of Trinidad and Tobago by Richard Ffrench. And it was hell to find anything online on these birds.

Maybe I should do an open content online book on the birds? Makes sense. Yet Another Project. Each bird gets their own page, links to pictures, and so on and so forth. I'm no expert (there we are again), but I can write and I can put down my own observations and others can help make it better. The objective stuff will find it's way into the Wikipedia, the subjective and objective into the online book.

Everywhere I turn, I find more things to do because other people haven't done them...