A goodbye to an old friend

This post was originally published at ChannelOmaha.com where Gabe is a guest blogger.

I can’t think of a more inappropriate first blog to ChanelOmaha.com than a story about how I traveled to Kansas City.  But that’s just how this is going to be.

On Wednesday night I traveled to Kansas City to say goodbye to an old friend.

I arrived, got comfortable, and heard him tell the same stories he’s told so many times before.  But this time he was a little more jovial, just a little less stone cold serious.  But each tale still had the complete power and inspiration as every time he told it before.  I still was able to mouth the words with him, as I’ve heard the stories so many times.

Of course I’m talking about seeing Nine Inch Nails perform in Kansas City.  From the t-shirts saying "Wave Goodbye" to Trent closing his show with "Hurt" instead of something like "Closer", it was nothing less than an old friend giving a large collective hug and saying "Thanks."

For those who’ve seen Trent and Company perform before, this wasn’t like previous tours.  No video screens.  No lasers.  No special effects.  Just some guys on stage, a fog machine, and some of the best music ever made.

He didn’t play a lot of what many fans call "the new stuff."  And to me, that was a downer.  I don’t recall anything from Ghosts being played.  But it seemed to work.  This is Trent’s goodbye, and from the crowd screaming the lyrics it got a lot quieter during "Discipline" and "Echoplex" anyway.  But like any other NIN show the place erupted with "Sin", "Wish" and "Head like a hole."

I can’t think of a better way to say goodbye to an old friend than how I did Wednesday night.

Day one of a new project.

So I’m starting a new project today.  It’s my idea of barcodes, iPhone apps, and social connectivity.  Merging in person and internet relationships.  It’s become easy to meet someone online and then meet them in person, but meeting someone in person and then tracking them down later online is a chore.  Misspellings or forgetting of names, odd twitter usernames that either you have to write down or somehow remember… we’re all going through it now.

So to start this project today I did the following.

1. Became a Barnes & Noble book club member
2. Purchased iPhone SDK by Jonathan Zdziarski on O’Reilly
3. Purchased Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X for Dummes by Erick Tejkowski
4. Installed Xcode
5. Installed iPhone SDK
6. Had a Dominos pasta bowl delivered
7. Became an Apple iPhone Developer member

Where friendship and responsibility collides in a community

In the years I’ve had this blog I’ve rearely talked about the nitty-gritty of running an IRC channel.  In theory, there’s not much to it.  But in reality, it’s a community of people, many who have been there for many, many years.

This is where a large group of my friends are.  All types of people from all over the world.

But lately the topic of respect and seniority has been brought up more and more often.  Why certain people have different levels of privileges than others.  Those who are asking, and feel they deserve the elevated rights state loyalty and seniority as the reason for it.  But I feel very differently, and I wanted to discuss it here.  I’m probably not the only one who has encountered these issues in whatever type of community they happen to run.

I have the highest respect for those who have been a party of a community for an extended length of time.  In fact, any group of people would just slowly disappear if people didn’t stick around.  So that’s common sense, you need a core group of people that you know will be around.  It makes it more comfortable for new people knowing that if the group has been there that long, then it must be something special.

But I personally see a very distinct difference between quantity and quality.  Especially online you know the difference between people who “use” something, and who “take part” in something.  On digg.com there’s people who use it to see what stuff is popular and go and read it.  And then there’s people who go out and find new stuff and submit it to the site.  On twitter there’s people who only follow celebrities and read what they have to say, and then there’s people who submit 140 character pieces of content to keep the community alive.  The examples can go on and on.  There’s people who use it, and there’s people who are it.

On IRC it’s no difference.  We have people who run the web site, we have people who run the wiki, we have people who take care of the bot, host podcasts, etc etc etc.  There’s been so many things over the years that people have stepped up and said “I can take care of that for us.”  While there’s people who have been there 15yrs and never once even logged into the wiki to update their profile page, or used the website for anything.  Those are two completely different groups of people.  While giving elevated privileges to the people who have been loyal members of the community for many years, they never earned it.  Never made an attempt, never even showed interest.

This is an issue for me.  As both groups of people are my friends.  All who are long-time friends and I care about.  The question becomes am I willing to to please a friend, and gift them with something that shows I respect them while at the same time disrespecting the community as a whole and how it operates?  My answer I determined was no.  I’m not.  This hurts people, and that really sucks.

How to communicate, by Gary Vaynerchuk

What great conversation between Gary Vaynerchuk, the internet and I today.  There’s something invigorating about a really constructive conversation where you come out of it feeling better about the topic than when you went in.  While it’s a great business and brand technique, the world would in general be a much better place if it happened more often.

Gary reached out to me after reading my blog post that I had Alex (@alexpgates) check out, and wanted to clear up any miscommunication with me, and everyone else on how he’s seen or interpreted.

I probably came off harsh on my post.  Few can deny that Gary is not only a very talented salesman of wine, but also a successful brand consultant and inspiring speaker.  While his ideas are great, and probably very likely to succeed, if you’re watching his video, and you have ideas yourself… yours probably are great as well.  I promise I’ll take my own advice someday soon :)

Thanks Gary, you’re a good guy.  And that’s meant outside of any speaker/consultant/expert role that you fill.  Being a good person will always be what matters in the end.

My BIG post on BIGOmaha

I’m not going to talk about what Big Omaha was, or was not in the “Big Omaha brought the counties best and brightest creative blah blah blah” type thing.  I’m not going to write much about what the speakers had to say.  I’m going to tell my tale of the first ever Big Omaha conference and the parts that mattered to me.  This will probably be long and spread with random photos.

Everyone knows I was excited.   If you were to ask me why, I’d be completely honest and tell you that I didn’t know.  I even posted a video for Big Omaha’s use explaining that It’s going to be great, and I won’t be able to tell you why until Friday night. Friday night came and went, and now I can tell you why it was awesome.

It was the perfect mix of new and “old” friends. You know I’m going to have a great time hanging out with people like KT and Lasertron.  I’ll always have some great tech conversations with Matt and Corey.  But the new faces were awesome.  I finally met Chris Rich, I’ve only known him from Twitter since forever.  Met Steff Childs at Slowdown at the kickoff party.  A handful of KC’ers were around that I got to meet.  While at the awesome What Cheer / Secret Penguin party Thursday night I met Jolie O’Dell because of a tweet she sent out.  Now I have a crush on her, I won’t lie.   I also met a new friend, LeAnn, who now hangs in #TheCabin… so that’s a big win there.  Jimmy Winter introducted himself to me and we had a chat while waiting in line for beer.  By the way, the beer line is a huge opportunity to meet people.  Man, I met so many awesome people.  I can’t really go on any longer just listing them… but seriously.  Cool.

Thursday night was the kick-off party featuring Gary Vaynerchuk. Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a fan of Gary.   There’s a ton to like, and he’s one inspiring bastard, but there’s one reason I can’t click with him.  He positions himself differently online than he does in person.   During his talk on Friday he said he doesn’t have the answers, and he told the story that worked for him, and all he can do is hope you’ll find what works for you.  But online he positions himself as a role model with all the answers, when in reality: he’s a wine salesman.  When he gives an idea online, many people jump at it believing that his spontaneous ideas are somehow better than their own.   And I think Gary would be the first to agree that it’s not cool.  After seeing him in person he wants people to succeed based on what they want, not because they copy verbatim what he has to say.    I really believe he means well, but it’s hard to be an online personality, and also say “I have no idea” at the same time.

I only bring this up because during the awesome speaker panel he told the crowd to quit college, and it’s an outdated institution that is “going down”.   Jason Fried said it’s the next big bubble to burst.  I sent out a tweet saying it’s probably the first thing I’ve ever agreed with coming from Gary.

Gary replied via twitter with a smile.  He then mentioned my comment during his talk saying he’s bummed when people have problems with him.  I found him at the party that night he looked like he had his plate full,  so I left it at that.   So all in all, I learned Gary Vaynerchuk is human. But I still think he’s a salesman who doesn’t have the answers.

I also found Micah Baldwin to be way cooler than when I checked him out online.  His personality and stories were infectious.  He was completely honest about things that have happened in his life to bring him to his point.  Things like “you have to wake up in a pool of your own vomit” really made him personable.   We then connected over Twitter that night, and I met him in person at the Tweetup Saturday morning.  Very glad to come out feeling like I met someone who is really a good person and doing well in the space we’re all interested in.

Other highlights of the actual conference?  Seeing my good friends Megan and Kt up on stage representing Omaha’s chapter of Girls in Tech.  That was seriously great.  Also the presentation from Ben Rattray from Change.org, I expected to be “do your part to help blah blah”, while a great message, wasn’t what I was there for; it ended up being a “do something that matters, make it important”.  What a kick in the ass.  The slide that says “Are you working on the most important problem you can think of?” made my jaw drop.  No matter how important your corporate management thinks your job is, it isn’t.  Another slide saying “If your company was gone tomorrow, would anyone notice?” was another question.  I answer “NO” to both of those questions.  And so begins the journey to make my life worthwhile and do something to enrich the world.

Another great surprise were the sponsor presentations.  I thought Yahoo! would be full of “Hi, we’re yahoo.  Let me tell you why you should use our search engine.  Now look at Flickr, cool huh?”  It turned out to be this great guy, Micah Laaker, who is originally from Omaha, presenting all the APIs and developer tools Yahoo offers.  I learned a lot.  I met him at the Girls in Tech party and we chatted for a while.  I told him about how some of the tools I’ve used in projects, and some I’ve never even heard of and was thankful he was there to tell me about them.  A really great guy.  Another high point was the local Omaha panel where we saw the co-founder of Saddle Creek records, the person who runs Film Streams, the guy who started Nomad, etc.  How cool is that.  Local success stories from people that matter.

But I’m being long winded.  So let me narrow this down.  The quality was 150%.  Every detail from the coffee cups, to the VIP lanyards, the signs for the bathrooms, the lunch, the sponsors for the parties… everything.  Top of the line in every single way.  The speakers, where I expected them to be cocky “I’m important and let me tell you how to do things” type of personalities turned out to be completely different.  They were fun, intriguing, and approachable.  They wanted to be there, and they all wanted to meet you.  Most of them even gave out their personal telephone numbers to *everyone* who attended.  (Micah Baldwin gave out his mom’s too.  I got her voicemail.)

There’s one hundred things I missed talking about, but that’s ok.  Anyone who was there experienced it, and anyone who wasn’t has a glimpse into the first ever Big Omaha conference.  What a wild ride.