Mister Chairman, fellow toastmasters, I’d like to Welcome again our guests for joining us during open house. Some of you may be wondering what we’re doing here half past the crack of dawn every Friday. Well, as I’ve said before, if I can give a speech out of one bloodshot eye, I could give one anywhere. But what else are we doing here? The Toastmasters mandate says we’re here to make effective oral communication a worldwide reality.

Now why would we want to do something like that? Sure, it could help you with a career or a best man’s speech, but what does public speaking do really? I’ve only been part of the club since December, but from what I’ve seen, public speaking is the art of creating a moment.

Right you are not just listening to the words coming out of my mouth. You are hearing my voice. You are seeing me gesture. You are seeing the way I stand. You’re also experiencing the sights and sounds of this room and your fellow audience members. This is something that you can’t get from a letter, a phone call, or even a video. It is a moment in time, happening right here, right now.

In that moment you’ve created, something wonderful happens. Things change. Suddenly your idea for a little weekend side business becomes a real commercial venture. Suddenly a rag-tag sports team you coach becomes a true cohesive unit. Suddenly the friends and family at your wedding realize just how much your new wife means to you.

At Toastmasters, we are not just filling space behind a podium. We are bringing ideas to people. When many people focus on an idea at the same time it creates a moment. And in the very moment, the world changes.

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• February 18, 2011 -- Icebreaker Speech (1)
• February 11, 2011 -- Inspirational Speech for Toastmasters Feb. 11, 2011 (0)

I want to introduce you to Less Everything, a Ruby on Rails development team, (more of a duo, really) based out of Florida. They make Lovedbyless, an open source social networking system that anyone can download. Their revenue for setting up said social network software: 1.5 million over the past 2 years.

I just worked on my first project using 37signal’s project management app, Basecamp. I previously shied away from using it because it didn’t seem any different from any other project software I had worked with. Besides, paying a fee to use software? What kind of scam is this? My tune quickly changed when I saw the clients actually using the software to give feedback on the project. It cut out a lot of hours of second-guessing and in person meetings. I learned I was working with a $12 a month account that was grandfathered into. The lowest price plan is now $24 a month. The software basically doubled in price, and the CEO had enough scratch to commission an Italian supercar for himself.

There is just too much money in ruby apps right now that people just leave on the table. These are simple applications that Microsoft would have laughed at 10 years ago, but they are making money hand over fist. It’s not the complexity of the programs that keeps us from writing them. I think that the people with the kind of skills to build these apps, (and by that, and I mean us, and YOU) are simply trying to channel the wisdom of the graveyard.

For each one of these current internet success stories, we can name 10 companies just like them that went bankrupt. If so many of them failed, what chance do we have? The business model doesn’t make sense too us because can’t see ourselves paying for such apps when there are perfectly viable open source counterparts out there. Besides, there is no way it could be so easy. A company that makes a million dollars per employee wouldn’t just release their secret formulae to the general public! It goes against all our preconceptions about business and scarcity.

However, we ignore the fact that there are 700 million more people on the internet since the Dot com crash. We don’t realize that most people have no idea what an open-source counterpart is, wouldn’t know how to find it, and couldn’t install it to save their life. Not everyone has heard of 37 signals or Less Everything either. They might be perfectly willing to subscribe to YOUR software if YOU are the one willing to sell it to them and tailor it to their needs. Conventional wisdom says success is fixed commodity reserved only for the few, but conventional wisdom cannot hold up to an Italian supercar parked in your driveway.

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Why, as adults, do we over-analyze holidays? Christmas is too commercialized, dressing up for Halloween might offend other religions, or Valentine’s Day is so hurtful to the single people. This weekend, it’s Mother’s Day that appears to be on the chopping block. I’m still trying to figure out where people came up with the idea that Mother’s Day is celebrated to recognize the perfect mother, with the June Cleaver pearls and the dust-free living room, whose devoted husband and children have placed her on a pedestal as the angel of the household. I don’t know what day they’re used to celebrating, but it sure as heck is not my vision of Mother’s Day.

The Modern Mother’s Day began to be significantly recognized in the US by 1914. There had been earlier 19th century attempts to recognize a day for mothers, largely due to the idea that there should be a “Mother’s Day for Peace” to protest the atrocities of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. However, the event that allowed this day to be formally recognized by governments began with two sisters mourning the loss of their mother. At a time when most women remained in the home, Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis worked tirelessly to teach American women basic nursing and sanitation skills, and her efforts helped to save lives on both sides of the American Civil War. When she died in 1905 her two daughters, Anna and Elsinore, missed her terribly, and felt that children fail to appreciate their mothers enough when they are still around to receive said appreciation. Therefore, a campaign to establish an official Mother’s Day began, concluding with President Woodrow Wilson encouraging United States citizens to display flags on the second Sunday in May “as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country”.

So, let’s summarize:

• Previous Mother’s Day celebrations were tied to a need for peace and a wish to leave a better world for their children
• The official holiday began as an act by two sisters who loved her mother deeply and wanted the kindness of all mothers recognized

Now, nowhere in that summary does the word “perfect” appear. We do not celebrate Mother’s Day because a mother is the epitome of womanhood. We celebrate to acknowledge that mothers deserve to be recognized. Now, some might argue that Mother’s Day is also too commercialized (and Anna Jarvis would agree with you, based on the way she protested this commercialization in her later years). However, if it’s the commercialization that bothers you, I say change your perception of the holiday. Forget the Hallmark greeting cards. Create your own family traditions. Just quit complaining about how Mother’s Day does not demonstrate “real” motherhood. We all have different definitions of what that “real” is, and we would do well to remember that mothering is the most important job a person can be faced with, and a little recognition now and then for a lot of hard work shouldn’t hurt anyone.

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If you happen to own your own website, you may have installed google analytics to track your web stats. You might write a kickass post that’s been dugg, retweeted, or otherwise talked about on your favorite social media site and thought to yourself, “I know there’s a spike happening in my traffic, but I want to see it nooooow!”

Well, whine no longer, my friends. It’s Woopra to the rescue!

Woopra is a real time website tracking service. You can either install its javascript code directly into your site, or install one of the many CMS plugins developed for it. You download the multi-platform desktop client and voila! You have real time access to all the visits on your website. You can sort users by geography, by referrer, and  just about any other statistic you can track. There’s a feature coming soon will enable to initiate live chat sessions with visitors on the site.  Woopra is also free up to 30,000 pageviews a month. Be careful though, watching your own meteoric rise to internet fame can be addictive.

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• October 26, 2010 -- Internet Bystander Syndrome (1)
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• April 13, 2010 -- BS in Religion (1)
• April 8, 2010 -- Ode to Overshare (1)

I’ve ranted before about overshare. I’ve disparaged people like Penelope Trunk because they employ the entire internet as an amateur therapist. I try to keep this blog free and clear of any of the drama that goes on in my life. Lately though, I’ve been having second thoughts.

When oversharers make the decision to start opening their life up to internet, something unexpected happens. They are not ostracized or passed by like a raving street preacher. People start to trust them because of this volunteered information. There are still detractors and critics, but they either remain silent or can be silenced by a draconic comment moderation policy. You might say that the oversharers only surround themselves with yes-men and sycophants, that this is only hollow tribalism, but consider this: Your only other option is to be invisible, a mere statistic on google analytics. By keeping guarded about our personal lives, and by extension our very individuality, we are ignored, we are downsized, and we are passed over.

I am trying very hard to convince myself that this isn’t true. My hardships are my own, I have no right to burden others with them. But I notice that rapport that forms around bloggers that offer their very bodily functions for public debate. Can we afford to remain aloof in such a society?

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• March 2, 2010 -- Criticism and the Web (0)
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• May 12, 2010 -- Facebook and the Tragedy of Free Software (0)
• April 30, 2010 -- Woopra (1)

Darth Vader would have been much more popular with the Admirals on the Death Star if he had displayed this handy info-graphic instead of Force-choking people, don’t you agree? A desktop version can be found at Gizmodo.

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Sometimes it just doesn’t seem real.

Aren’t those just numbers on a board, or ticks on a stopwatch?

Just what are we getting from all this?

Sure, we aren’t exactly solving the problems of the world out there, but sometimes challenges and competitions just need to exist for their own sake.

We need to be reminded.

It’s easy to keep things the way they are, to go through the motions. We have to remember what it feels like to not be satisfied with our lot in life. The joy of victory and the pain of defeat remind us of what it’s like to risk it all for a dream.

So Thanks goes to you, Team Canada, and all Olympic Athletes. Thanks for teaching us all to dare to be great.

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The computer industry implants in the minds of many the legend of the lone programmer, sequestered in a parents basement coding the next paradigm shift of technology. The myth is not that far from the truth, since many of the big names in software, Microsoft, Apple, and Google, were all created by hobbyists charting unknown territory in code.

I’m sure that everyone working in computers today, everyone, has some crazy project roiling in the back of their heads. But the majority of us don’t even start, let alone finish these projects out of fear that we aren’t qualified to do this, that we should let someone with “expertise” eventually make that app we want.  What we fail to realize is that the “experts” rarely know more than we do what unwritten programs look like. The only reason they are experts is that they’ve made their fear work for them. The frustration and uneasiness that comes from a new language and technology drives them forward instead of holding them back.

So if you’ve got an app or a script or whatever on the back burner, get it up on the monitor right now. Find that spot where you left off and feel that mixture of rage, terror, and embarrassment that made you shelve it. That feeling isn’t telling you that there is something wrong, it is telling you that you are working on something challenging and worthy of your skills. That feeling, right there, is the frontier of software development.

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My friend Jen over at Interface Media sent me this Economist article about a book called The Pinch: How Baby Boomers took their children’s future-and why they should give it back. Apparently, the number disparity between the baby boom and subsequent generations is more serious than I thought, at least in Britain. The entire population under 40 owns 15% of all real estate and financial assets in their country. At the same time, 20% of everyone in their 50′s owns a second home.

I don’t know if Canada is in the same situation, but these stats are something to think about. I don’t think this situation is entirely anyone’s fault. The Boomers acquired their wealth through years of accelerated technological advancement and industrial production. Now that technology has advanced and so much has been produced, the same sources of wealth that produced all that prosperity can’t be relied upon any more. The factories are either closed or moved to China. Mining and oil production is peaking all over the world. The rules have changed, but that’s okay. Your food budget (potentially) is a tenth of what it was a generation ago. There’s more public transit than there used to be. And computing power? A single paycheck from McDonald’s can put you in touch with the world. We might not make as much as our parents, but if we can make use of what we have available, it might not matter.

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