Technical Difficulties

There are some issues with this site that I’ll get to in a moment.

So I’m no engineer. That was Jeremy’s job. I just bounced ideas off this beautiful person and brought my social scientist training to bear thinking about the social implications of technology with no idea about how one actually implements technology. Jeremy—a consummate, brilliant, engineer—could gone on wonderful wild tangents about technology, but what interested him fundamentally was the difference that this technology would make in people’s lives. The result was many fun and amazing conversations.

Jeremy and I spent a lot of time with me working through the pros and cons of various blogging software solutions. Should I install MoveableType? (I did but couldn’t use it) Should I just publish in HTML? We talked through the issues, the tradeoffs, the dynamic of ease of use v. power and flexibility. I settled on TypePad.

So here’s the deal--I’m working on figuring out how to optimize for a bunch of things:

*Ease of use for viewers

*Ease of posting

*Flexibility to do things that are important, easily (like post funeral arrangements and “how you post” instructions)

*Speed of load time

And I’m not very good at this so there may be annoying things happening (like taking forever to load as the posts roll in).

But I’m OK with this because I think you can understand what’s going on . . . Jeremy is messing with me in the way only I ever saw him mess with anyone: playfully and kindly.

Where ever he is he’s saying: “Mark, why don’t you try this” “ And this” and “What’s your hypothesis?” and “ Well I think this will work” and I’m sure that what’s happening is similar to when I saw Ian and Jeremy working last week to install Ian’s new PC sound system—brilliant minds at work on a simple project. Lots of laughter, cables being plugged in, no worky . . . until Jeremy realized we hadn’t actually connected the PC to the speakers. We laughed our asses off.