Live-blogging is a fascinating concept. You sit down at a computer, and you blog about an activity as it happens. I’ve toyed with the idea of live-blogging. There are some events that I would live-blog the crap out of. There are the hilarious events that I would live-blog the crap out of, like hot yoga, or post-hernia surgery constipation. There are other serious events that I would love to live-blog the crap out of in a more philosophical way, like a surf session in big waves at Ocean Beach, or a barefoot run at night wearing a headlamp.

However, the truth is, that by calling live-blogging a fascinating concept, I really mean that it is pretty dumb. Live-blogging is a running commentary on a specific event…and as a historian, I say you always go for the primary source (the event itself) over a running commentary. Live-blogging tends to be thoughtful in sporadic bursts, but is otherwise relatively lame and lacking insight. Why? Because the event hasn’t been fully completed, it’s still going on, and so the author has not yet taken the time to think through all of the various elements to synthesize. And live-tweeting…don’t get me started. As soon as someone goes to a conference and starts live-tweeting it, I temporarily (sometimes permanently) unfollow while wishing that the person hates the conference.

So to prove my point, I have live-blogged my evening on the couch. Because let’s be honest, in order to live-blog, you need to be sitting somewhere with your laptop up and running for a long period of time (see these “cool guys” above)….usually in the audience of some speaker, or else on your couch watching a TV broadcast that apparently is so important that you need to live-blog it. (In fact, I got this idea after seeing someone update on twitter various live-blogs that were live-blogging the Oprah/Sarah Palin interview. How fascinating! And by fascinating, I once again mean pretty dumb.)

Now of course, my live-blog is the exception to the rule. It’s fascinating, and you know what I actually mean. So delve in and enjoy my night with me as I live-blog the crap out of my night on the couch.

5:35pm arrive on couch with Chinese food. Devour it. My fortune: “Don’t be discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”
5:55pm Augustus is waking up and wants to play. He seems to be inclined to chew his nasty rope on our couch and cover it with his slobber.
6pm Feed the fat bastard. (Augustus.) (The other fat bastard just ate Chinese food.)
6:09pm I’m off to pick up my wife from yoga. It was raining so I drove her, rather than have her take the scooter. I’ve also decided that I need to start running commentary of my thoughts more, and not just my actions. I’m looking forward to tonight: The Office mini-marathon on TBS, just like every Tuesday.
6:58pm Back on the couch, and Jeopardy! is just about to start. The middle contestant is hilarious, Rob with a green jacket on. I love this show, mostly because I typically tear it up.
7:03pm Green jacket Rob listed his job as a custodial supervisor. I’m starting to launch a theory that he is in character…the glasses, moustache, and suit just all seem too perfectly goofy, and so a character may be a fresh new way to be on Jeopardy! I should also add that I’m working on a bad-ass idea for Daraja whil watching Jeopardy! (God I love ending a sentence with Jeopardy! so that I can excessively use exclamation marks!!!)
7:20pm Green jacket Rob seems to be down and out. He is in third going into final Jeopardy! and has less than half the cash that the leader has. It looks like we won’t get to learn more about Rob in future rounds of Jeopardy!
7:53pm I have gotten immersed in Mashable’s HOW TO: Set up a Facebook Fan Page, which I’m working on for Daraja. I think there is good potential to actually make our fan page more functional, and also to spend this time on the couch a bit productively tonight by doing just that.
8pm It’s go-time for the TBS Office Mini-Marathon. Hell to the yeah.
8:02pm My wife moved onto the couch next to me. Augustus, who had been sleeping on the other couch, in his incredibly adorable way, jumped down from his empty couch, slowly sauntered across the room, and then jumped up into my wife’s lap. He is in a cuddly move, and we both love it.
8:09pm I love “The Office.” I’ll be honest: I at first kind of semi-boycotted the American Office. I had religiously watched the British Office on DVD, and when I heard that the American Office was coming out, I was not that thrilled…especially when the first few episodes were more or less exact replicas of the British Office. However, I have lately changed my views. In thinking about this quite a bit–the British Office truly was incredible, but the show was almost exclusively about David Brent, the boss character. Yes, there was the love between Tim and Dawn, and Gareth Keenan was pretty hilarious, but the supporting roles were very much supporting roles. I don’t think we ever learned the names of more than half toe employees of Wernan Hogg, or whatever the company was named. Meanwhile, David Brent was a caricature. Hilarious, but a bit one-dimensional. In the American Office a) all the employees get their part, and have pretty complex characters, and as a result b) you love and hate all of them. Of course I love Pam and Jim the most, I mean who doesn’t, but Michael Scott is likeable just as much as he is despicable, and so on and so forth. And so in conclusion: I actually think that after giving this much thought, I like the American Office more than the British Office.
8:17pm There’s the TV commercial with Payton Manning and Justin Timberlake sitting on the panel of experts who approve the TV. First off: who gives a crap if they approve it? Second: who is the third panelist? I keep waiting for a new commercial to come out that reveals the identity to be a different celebrity.
8:56pm 2 episodes down: Jim and Pam are re-united after her time in NYC, I’ve added youtube videos and our blog to the Daraja fan page, and Augustus is snoring quite enthusiastically.
8:58pm I just made a huge mistake by going to vimeo.com’s support page. They have pictures of their Help Center employees, and now I want to vomit directly onto the faces of Dalas Verdugo and Andreas Allen.
9:01pm Why does Michael Scott hate Toby so much?
9:14pm Dwight is fricking hilarious. Too bad Rainn Wilson on Twitter is actually not that funny at all, and is in fact more annoying than funny.
9:25pm Once again, I love Jim and Pam.
9:26pm My wife is totally asleep. I am not sure how long she has been asleep, but she’s totally out.
9:31pm I’m going back and bolding all of the times from this entry. After that, I will switch to HTML view and get rid of the spaces between entries.
9:39pm I just noticed that my wife is snoozing with her face resting on her left hand, and my dog is snoozing resting his face on his left paw. HOW. CUTE. IS. THAT.
10:02pm I just wrote the introduction to this blog entry, and I’m starting to fade. Starting the fifth episode of The Office, holy crap my Tuesday nights are exciting. I also just remembered that Twitter shuts down in an hour, so I want to wrap this up before then so I can post this up there.

How much of a nerd am I becoming???

Just under a month ago I started a new hashtag on my @oceanbeach twitter account called #weirdshitwasheduponOB. When you walk along Ocean Beach as much as I typically do, you see a ton of crap. Unfortunately, being so exposed to the Pacific and with major tidal swings bringing a ton of water out from the SF Bay, Ocean Beach takes the brunt of a lot of the ocean’s litter.

I’ve witnessed many creative ways to try and draw attention to all of the trash on beaches throughout the world. A branch of the Surfrider Foundation, down in Southern California, rented out a billboard and put all the trash collected from a beach clean-up onto the billboard. My friend Kathleen, as I’ve blogged about before, has made artwork in the shape of waves using plastic trash.

My feeble addition to the efforts is this hashtag. I’ve got close to 300 people following the @oceanbeach account, and so the hope is that if I post some quirky trash pictures on a regular basis, people will get more used to walking the beach with an eye on the ground for trash…and on occasion, pick the trash up on the way back to the dunes.

Here’s a couple quick highlights…

A single running shoe

Plastic Shot Glass from Ikea

Condom Wrapper

etc, etc. Feel free to subscribe via RSS to the #weirdshitwasheduponOB hashtag to see further trash. And definitely feel free to pick up trash from your local beach whenever you go enjoy yourself on the sand.

This morning at around 8am I got the single greatest voice mail that I’ve ever gotten from a friend of mine. He was out surfing at Ocean Beach yesterday evening, and a seal farted on him.

I don’t think I need to say much more about this, just sit back, click the link below called “sealfart.mp3,” and enjoy the hilarity.

sealfart.mp3

I love this time of year because it’s marathon season, and so each city’s paper inevitably has an article or two about running in anticipation of hosting tens of thousands of crazed marathon runners for a weekend. I ran the Marine Corps marathon several years ago, my first and only marathon, and I’ve run several half’s. I like running, a lot, and naturally I enjoy reading these articles when they come out, as I get to pretend I’m being sophisticated by “reading the newspaper” when instead I’m reading relatively irrelevant fluff about running. The NYTimes this fall has mostly emphasized whether or not long-distance running is even naturally human or not, but the stories that have mostly caught my attention have been the ones about barefoot running.

Yes, there is a fringe movement within the burgeoning running community that is openly advocating running barefoot, in any and all situations. Weird, huh. I’ve told this to a couple of people and they don’t believe me. The basic argument is that throughout our long evolution, humans have almost always been barefoot. Our feet were not naturally in shoes, which is only an invention of a few hundred years…a drop in the bucket of human existence. Running shoes, an even newer invention at maybe a century old, overly pad our heels, and so humans run and land much of their weight on their padded heels. However, when you run barefoot, you instead put your weight on the balls of your feet, which is how the foot is structured to actually support your own body weight. If you landed on your heels when you are barefoot, it hurts a lot. But with padding, you can ignore that pain, and subsequently, run in poor form. In other words, by running barefoot, you’re using your foot how it’s supposed to be used; when you run in protective shoes, you let yourself run more sloppily, and invite more injuries.

I’ve been intrigued by this concept since I first heard about it over a year ago, but for some reason it came to the tipping point for me today, so I went for my first barefoot run. While I anticipated doing an 8 mile run, I instead went for about 6.5 miles. The first 1/2 mile was on the road, and the slapping of my bare feet on pavement, I have to admit, felt pretty good. I deliberately designed my run to spend the bulk of it on the beach, as I live very close to Ocean Beach. This is totally consistent with barefoot running ethos, which in general advocates starting your barefoot running on sand and grass, which is also more historically consistent with the material that humans have run on. (Cement, in the grand scheme of human evolution, is a very new invention.) I spent about 70% of the run on the sand, with the last 30% on pavement, and felt great throughout it, as well as through the rest of the day.

Running barefoot is almost unavoidably elitist. It’s hard to not run barefoot and feel a tad bit superior to everyone else. It’s kind of like biking as your commute, rather than driving. You know the type. You meet a new person, say a friend of a friend at a bar somewhere, you’re chatting, somehow your 40 minute drive commute comes up in the conversation, and new conversationalist that you’re talking to sort of nods emphatically, sighing a bit, saying, “Yeah, too bad you’re trapped in your car. I bike to work, feeling the freedom of the fresh air every morning.” So yeah, as I was running, I felt a bit elite about it all. Look at those poor saps walking along the beach in shoes. Suckers. When the waves rush up on the sand, they have to skittishly avoid the water so their shoes and socks don’t get wet. I pity these people. Me, on the other hand, I am splashing through the water proudly, in slow-motion no doubt, with the heavens playing the “Chariots of Fire” theme song, because I’m barefoot, I don’t care about my feet getting wet. For a real-life example of this type of attitude, get this line from a forum on runningbarefoot.org: “Don’t get disheartened, it takes a while to transition from foot-coffins to freedom!” Foot-coffins, huh.

No seriously, it is pretty cool to run barefoot. You’re more in tune with the feeling of the run, as your feet are literally on the earth and absorbing every bit of it. It’s a no-brainer that running on sand and grass feels good (pretty much every established article on barefoot running starts with a nostalgic memory of running through sprinkles during the summer, as a kid, carefree…..wait for it……BAREFOOT!), but it’s cool to find that running barefoot on pavement actually doesn’t hurt that much. Sidewalks are particularly smooth and feel quite good. Roads can be a bit more inconsistent, and so I found it’s best to run on the sidewalk.

I definitely plan on repeating the experience. Next run I do, it’ll be barefoot. It’s prime surf season, so running may be sporadic, but whenever I do it, it’ll be barefoot. Oh, and I refuse to even consider shoes like the “Nike Free 5.0,” or worse, the “Vibram Five Fingers.” These shoes are made to feel like you are actually barefoot, all for the low cost of $70. You’re kidding right. When you can run barefoot for free, you instead will pay $70 for a token rubber sole on your feet that is otherwise intended to simulate barefoot running? It’s not like you can kind of wear a condom, you either do or you don’t. Same thing with barefoot running. You do it, or you wear shoes.

I am maybe, just a tad bit, starting to worry about myself. First I formalize my indifference for showering (I went from Wednesday 10pm to Monday 6pm this past week without showering. That’s almost 5 DAYS PEOPLE), and now I’m talking about barefoot running. To clear the slate: yes, I enjoy swimming naked, who the hell doesn’t, but I don’t plan on becoming a nude-beach attendee, and while I’m not a huge shaver, I’m not gonna grow a Jesus beard either. I’m flirting with full-fledged hippiedom, but I’m not there yet. Don’t worry, I’m monitoring the situation closely.

On October 20, 2009, Twitter co-creator and author Dom Sagolla held his book premiere for 140 Characters at the Bookshop West Portal in San Francisco. Dom has been studying short form communication since its inception, and has written a fantastic style book that helps to explain the value of short form communcation, and encourages a thoughtful engagement of tools like Twitter and Facebook. The video clip below, which I shot and edited, gives a small sampling of Dom’s talk, to introduce you to his insightful approach to Twitter and short form communication. However, it’s just a preview. Read the book or attend one of Dom’s talks for a more full appreciation.

The book event featured a packed house, and Dom spoke for a while before answering a wide array of questions. The climax of the event was at the end when he offered demos of a Beta version of an iPhone app for his new book, a concept that excites the hell out of me. However, I’ll have to wait until the app is available for public consumption before I write about it…

For more information on 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form, including where to get a copy of it, go to www.140characters.com, or follow @dom, @thebook, and @bookapp on Twitter.

I’ve been surfing for just about half of my life, and although I’m only in my late twenties, my early days of surfing were in the time when the Internet was a strange, foreign concept, like Finland, or McDonald’s chicken nuggets. I remember watching the weather obsessively, and making dozens of wrong predictions, getting out of bed at 5:30am to drive to the beach and be skunked with crap, yet to occasionally be paid of with gorgeous dawn patrol surf, relatively alone.

Nowadays, we are inundated with online opportunities to learn about the surf conditions. I’m pretty sure the first to get into the game was Surfline, but quick on Surfline’s heels were Wavewatch, Magicseaweed, and many others. Out here in the Bay Area, there was Surfpulse, blakestah, and now the hugely popular Stokereport.com. On Twitter there are surfers throughout the world who post live-update tweets and pictures of surf conditions, and so between all of these options, it’s almost impossible to not know when there is good surf. I contribute to Stokereport, so my feelings on this question might be obvious. But I thought it important to give voice to the unspoken controversy that I know is out there: are online surf reports good or bad for surfing?

Let me first voice the opinion of those who think that over-sharing of surf conditions on the Internet is a bad thing. I have several friends of this school of thought, and so summarizing them shouldn’t be tough. The sentiment is relatively simple: the more people that know about good surf, the more people will actually go and surf when it’s good, and the more crowded it will be. More crowds = less waves for you, so that’s obviously a bad thing. Some places, like the wide-open Ocean Beach or in-front-of-everyone’s-face spots like Linda Mar or Surfer’s Beach in HMB, are going to be crowded regardless, because it doesn’t take any work to go and find them. But scattered up and down the coast are tons of secret spots, and if word got out onto Stokereport.com with updates about spots like (insert, for example, the SF spot that we all know but I refuse to put in writing on the internet, or coves up North and South), there might be real anger about things. I remember reading that when a live surf cam was installed at Linda Mar, locals stormed a town hall meeting after the camera was stolen, literally armed with pitchforks and torches. (Ironically enough, I read about this story in a book about California surf spots.) (It’s more ironic because Linda Mar kind of sucks as a surf spot.) In short: surf reports are equivalent to crowds, which surfers don’t like.

Going to the good side of the argument, surf reports are incredibly convenient. We all generally know that surf is better on a falling tide at most Bay Area spots, but the winds can change, the fog can roll in, the sand bars can shift–the unpredictability of surf in general, but specifically at Ocean Beach, makes real-time updates via cameras or tweets extremely useful. Also, you can better plan around surfing if you know how conditions might be. You can strategically plan a sick day if you have a high degree of confidence, based on multiple sources, that the surf is worth skipping work over. This also applies to the at-home negotiations we must manage in order to occasionally sneak out of familial responsibilities in order to score when it’s firing. Few things suck more than taking on additional chores for the weekend and sitting through a chick flick on Saturday night, all to clear a two-hour window for surf on a Sunday afternoon, only to get to the surf on Sunday and find out it’s awful. Online surf reports greatly decrease such incidents. Likewise, you will know if you’re going to be over your head, if you might be under-gunned, what board to bring, etc etc.

I think the basic argument has always been convenience vs. crowds. However, I’d like to push this argument a bit deeper. Surfing, it’s fair to say, is an activity that is good for you. It’s good exercise, it’s good for your soul, it’s good for your friendships, it’s just a good thing to do. When I finish surfing, I am in a good mood, and treat people better, which includes my family as well as strangers. And yes, at its essence, surfing is an extremely selfish pursuit. Few waves are best when shared, and so the attitude in the water is of Adam Smithian self-interest. However, in the modern era of anxiety and obesity, it seems to me that encouraging others to engage in a fundamentally wholesome, healthy activity like surfing is good for all. If more people built time into their schedules to do something like surf, we’d have more mellow, balanced people out there, people who constantly appreciate the beauty of a sunset, or a hollow barrel that looks like this.

A society of surfers sounds pretty good. Of course, I don’t claim that online surf reports will create a society of surfers. But knowing the wave conditions in advance, getting advice from other surfers through forums, and meeting people online to surf with in the real water, all which is lubricated by online surf activity, is likely contributing to an increase in the amount of surfers out there. And so if surf reports can help make learning to surf more manageable for newbies, or can allow more people to score a memorable wave or two, then isn’t that good for all of us? I’m not saying that I encourage crowds, but I don’t mind them too much either. The more people out there that are stoked, the more we’ll tolerate waiting in the line together at the grocery store, the less we’ll cut each other off on the road, and in general the happier and more fit we’ll be. And if this sounds overly naive, maybe it’s because I’m writing this in the glow of having surfed almost 4 hours today, in beautiful conditions. Was it crowded? Sure it was. Everyone knew it was going to be good today. But, I still got my fair share of waves, and really enjoyed watching the rest of the surfed waves. I can’t help but wonder if everyone else out there who had fun surfing today is feeling equally naive, idealistic, and let’s just say…optimistic.

So I will absolutely continue to contribute reports to stokereport.com, I will tweet surf-related tweets from @oceanbeach, and in general I’ll encourage people to enjoy the waves. Spread the goodness.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been tweeting with pictures about a surfboard shelf project my wife and I have been working on. We have finally completed it, and I thought it was worthwhile to post all the pictures together with a bit of a description of the steps. I want to also point out: my wife and I never do stuff like this. I’m not a handyman nor a craftsy guy, I prefer film for my creative outlet, so we both feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment in completing this.

First off, surfboards break all the time, especially at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where the waves can be very powerful. I took this picture a few weeks ago, thankfully it’s not my board.

This, however, is my board. I bought a longboard to try and hopefully score some more surf, as it would allow me to paddle out on small days, but it buckled one day in the water. I figured that a longboard is a huge canvas that could be somehow used for something cool, and after brainstorming a bit, we decided to go with making shelves for our guest room. As you can see, Augustus was an integral part of the observation of this project.

The first step was to cut the board down into usable parts. I took a saw and sawed along the wood stringer that runs through the middle of the board, and also made a clean line cut along the part where the board had broken. After sawing, we applied white primer to the board so that when we painted it, it would stick.

After priming, we explored designs a lot, and decided to do a Hawaiian flower, along with some traditional stripes. We found a great stencil online for a Hawaiian flower, and then cut it out with a razor.

From there, it was time to paint. We ended up going with a creamy yellow base for the board, with a blue and green pinstripe leading to our Hawaiian flower. The painting was one of the more fun steps: we set up shop in the garage, played music, and in general really enjoyed ourselves. After the paint dried, with several coat applications, we got a sealant spray can to add a bit of a glossy finish to the shelf, and also to prevent it from chipping.

Finally, it was time to install. I searched for the studs in the wall, and couldn’t find them. As such, we got dry wall anchors to put in the wall, and then screwed the brackets into the anchors. From there, it was easy: just rest the surfboard on the brackets, and we have a complete shelf! The pictures are only the first shelf, as the second shelf had a bit of paint that chipped out that we need to re-coat before installation.

Of course, we had to sign the fin, and the pictures we have up there are one of me surfing (makes sense, you can see the picture here) as well as a pretty awesome collage that a former student of mine made from pictures she took while at the Daraja Academy this summer.

Rad? I think so.

I place showering pretty low on my priority list. It is not uncommon for me to go several days without showering. Many of my friends find this utterly disgusting. Today I tweeted that it had been about 64 hours since my last shower, and I think that several people vomited in their mouths when they read that.

Why? What’s so important about showering?

Let me talk you through my typical fall weekend. It’ll start with a shower on Friday morning before work. Friday after school I’ll go to water polo practice and swim in the pool, getting chlorinated. Then typically on Saturday I’ll surf in the ocean, the greatest shower in the world. I really like the feeling of the ocean on me after a surf, so I’m not eager to rinse it off. I make it till Sunday, hopefully surfing again, and then by dinner time on Sunday it’s like “hey, why do it now? I’m gonna shower tomorrow morning anyway, so what’s the big rush?” And boom, there you have it, shower Friday morning, and not again until Monday morning.

My “typical” schedule is a bit off lately for various reasons, but one thing that hasn’t changed is my showering. I’ll go several days without it, because it’s not that big of a deal. Granted, I’ll still wash my face pretty much every night. I also apply deodorant so I hopefully don’t smell too terrible. My hair is pretty short, so it’s not like I’m covered in grease.

Some people say “how can you get into bed when you’re all dirty?” Two thoughts on that. A) many, many people shower in the morning only. As such, many, many people go to bed after a long day of whatever, so a lot of people get in bed dirty. But the bigger point is B) We spend on average 8 hours a night in bed. That’s maybe half the time you spend in your clothes on a given day. So 2 nights in bed = one day in clothes. How often do you wash your bed sheets? Or even bigger, your comforter? Maybe once every two weeks for the sheets, but much much longer for comforter. That is more or less the same thing as wearing the same clothes for a week. Awesome! Also, it’s not like sleeping is totally hygenic. We drool, fart, and in general smell like ass while we sleep. Ever notice how bad your breathe is in the morning? Yeah, that’s because sleeping is in itself a bit smelly. And if you need any more proof, read this absolutely hilarious post by my friend Sans Your Pants on the “4 ‘ates that you do in bed.” Holy crap is it good. My point is: your bed isn’t as clean as you think it is, so it’s not necessary that you show up to your bed smelling peachy fresh.

Beyond just these arguments, I recently listened to a really cool RadioLab episode on Parasites. Amazing. At the core of its awesomeness was this story about a guy who deliberately got hookworm, a parasite that lives in human poop, in order to fight his crippling asthma and allergies. It is unbelievable, and introduced me to something called the Hygiene Hypothesis. This idea is fascinating, and basically states that while of course hygiene is good, too much care for our cleanliness may actually deprive us of useful parasites and bacteria that actually help us fight off infections. Makes sense to me, and reminds me of the scene in “Knocked Up” when the chubby dude with curly hair is going on and on about the “Baby Book,” (rationally) stating that humans have successfully been having babies for a very long time without the aid of books telling them how to do so. Same thing with excessive hygiene. I may not smell minty fresh, but maybe covering myself in chemical soap daily to scrub away dirt may actually be worse for my skin than it is good. Not to mention the waste of water.

If I was a chick, and I looked like the surf chick in Blue Crush in her shower scene, maybe I’d shower more. And I’ll admit with full heterosexual preferences that if I looked like Christian Bale in American Psycho in the shower, maybe I’d shower more too. (Side note: very easy to find picture to link for Christian Bale’s buttcheeks; almost impossible for the blond chick’s. When you google “Blue Crush Shower” it turns out that you get a ton of images of the blue garters.)

But you see my point. Try it. You may really like avoiding a shower or two. I showered today, Friday, and it’s the fall, so me and my shower will likely hang out again at some point on Monday. Till then, smell ya later.

No, I’m not talking about that Foursquare. That is obviously loved by all. I used to teach at a school in Maryland where kids would quite passionately and obsessively play Foursquare at all hours of the day. The game is awesome.

I am instead talking about Foursquare the geeky iPhone social networking game. I first tried Foursquare back in March and April of 2009, soon after it launched. Yes, I’m proud to say that I was a relatively early adopter. If you need proof, here’s proof:

So what is it? Basically, whenever you are out doing something in your city (I think there’s 21 cities now registered) you “check-in,” and basically it broadcasts to your friends where you are. For example, last night I “checked in” at La Playa Taqueria while I was getting my usual order of carne asada Super Burrito with black beans.

When you check-in, you get Points. I don’t really like that, but I’ll get back to that. You also send a push notification to anyone else who is your friend, so that they get what looks like a text message sent to their iPhone and tells them where they are. This is kind of nice, as it allows you to get a sense of where your friends are…increased chance of bumping into someone. While at a big Festival like the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival this weekend, if someone updates that they are at the Arrow Stage at a given time, that’ll get sent to me immediately, rather than I having to go in, search through my Twitter stream, etc etc. In addition to this, whenever you check in you can get details on the location…for example, there’s a place to automatically get taken to the location’s Yelp reviews, you can check out tweets that were generated in its general vicinity and therefore may be (most likely not) about the place you are at. This is also kind of nice, as Foursquare serves as a one-stop for many different services.

There are some other nice features. For example, there’s a “To-Do” list. I don’t really understand that, but basically whenever you’re in a given location, you can search the public “to-do” list. That will look up any suggested things to do based on where you are. This is kind of cool. For example, if I’m standing at a certain corner downtown with some time on my hands, I could look up the public To-Do list, and find a bunch of nifty little favorite things that I could do that are pretty close to that corner, like antagonize a certain homeless person, find a funny road sign, or order just the right milkshake at just the right place. This I like.

There are definitely features I don’t like. First off, the Points system. Basically, this is a way to peer pressure you into being “social” and “outgoing” and “out in the world doing things.” Big freaking deal. Yeah, I need something telling me to go out and “be in the world” and not just chilling in my house. I like my house, I like chilling in it, and I’m not in high school anymore where people peer pressure you into conducting the type of social life that others want. I like the way I spend my time–surfing, skateboarding, biking, and enjoying time at my house with my wife. So yeah, I’m not particularly into that facet of it. Especially considering you can “check-in” and get points in really stupid places, like grocery stores. The game is supposed to be about engaging a social life. Since when is going to a grocery store a socially cool thing to do? Honestly, WTF. (Notice: I checked in at Costco early on in the game. I am ashamed. Very ashamed. Yet I will do so again.)

In addition to that, their location element is a bit buggy. When I first joined in March, their location was way off. One night I went to the Pizza Place on Noriega, and tried to “Check-In.” They located me as being at the Presidio Bowling Lane, which is a good 15 minute drive away. Not even close. So I had to type in my own address: pain in the butt for something that was broadcasting itself as very, very easy. Later that night, after seeing the Presidio Bowling Lane in Foursquare, we all went bowling in the Presidio. I went to check in there, and I kid you not: Foursquare located me as being at the Pizza Place on Noriega. That’s a huge WTF, and so I dropped the game. (I was also growing sick of the point mentioned above about the peer pressuring.) However, I now acknowledge that this is what comes with being an early adopter: you catch on early, but you get the very buggy version. I don’t know from firsthand experience, but apparently Twitter’s Fail Whale was very common for early adopters to that service. Since re-signing back up yesterday, I’m more impressed with the location apparatus.

There’s this one other complicated thing about it, and that is being the Mayor. Basically, if you check in at a given location regularly, in fact more regularly than anyone else, you become Mayor of the place. It’s supposed to make you feel cool to be the Mayor. I’m not the Mayor of anything, so I can’t verify whether or not it actually makes you feel cool. My friend Dom is the Mayor of South Ocean Beach, and since I basically take my dog there every day and it’s one of my go-to surf spots, I’m planning on taking Dom down, big time, and so I’ll get my first sense of what Mayorship feels like.

Beyond the supposed cool factor, Mayorship is where Foursquare actually can make some money, and this is what makes it interesting, and why I’m back checking the service out again. (That, and their icon is really nice looking, and to be honest, I like seeing it when I turn on my iPhone. Yes, I’m superficial and like things like look good. Why else would I still be holding onto my high school crush for Gwen Stefani?) Since Foursquare is obviously location specific, apparently businesses have taken to advertising exclusively through Foursquare, and provide promos and coupons just to people on Foursquare, and better coupons and discounts for the Mayors. Makes sense right? Being a Mayor is like being a Regular. If you’re the well-known Regular at some hip bar, the bar rewards just you with a pretty sweet special. If others are aware of that sweet special, they too want to be the most well-known Regular, so they frequent your bar more as well. Business makes more money because there’s an increase in Regulars all bucking for that some special. You dig? Of course, since I don’t drink, I couldn’t give a crap about a drink special unless we’re talking about being the Mayor of Polly-Ann Ice Cream, in which case a free milkshake for Mayorship would turn my whole life around. Unfortunately, however, I anticipate that the spots I actually visit with a fair degree of Regularity are nowhere close enough to be hip enough to advertise through Foursquare, but it’s a nice idea.

So I’m back and giving it a shot. It’s very easy to find which twitter friends are on foursquare, so it increases the chance of actually meeting in real life some of the people whose writing you enjoy. There are many of those for me, so I’m siked about that. I’m cautiously interested in re-engaging, which basically in my language means I’ll be checking in at every chance that I get. I imagine that this game will bring out my competitive side. So what. Just rest assured: I will NEVER update through Twitter that “I’m at Trader Joe’s (blah blah address) with a link to a map.” I hate that.

Two summers ago my wife cut a mohawk for me. I loved it, and I kept it through about the first two months of the school year.

When Brian Wilson, the closer for the San Francisco Giants who comes in and hurls fastballs at close to 100mph, showed up this season with a mohawk that looked strikingly similar to the one I had two years ago, I loved it. Still do.

So now, the Giants are really damn close to getting into the play-offs. They have a huge month ahead of them, with every game having tremendous significance. So I started to toy with the idea of re-igniting the joy of the mohawk to a) change it up a bit, but much more importantly b) show some solidarity and support for the Giants in their effort to make it to the playoffs.

I thought out-loud today on Twitter about it.

By the end of the day, these are the replies I had gotten about the idea:

How rad is that? This was by far the single loudest outpouring of comments I’ve gotten since joining Twitter, and to me, it stands as a fun example of the type of community that can be built through social networking. It was really fun throughout the day to get different people’s reactions, all of them positive, to get me more juiced.

So I came home, and my wife grabbed the shears and clipped away. We’ve got the end result. My hope is to encourage any other Giants fans out there that Hell Yeah, We’re In This, and that with a little love and support, even if it’s nutty, we could have one incredible September and October in San Francisco for baseball. Wouldn’t that be something.

One simple question remains…..Who is cutting a mohawk next?