I’ll spare you the narrative of my ENTIRE life since my own birth, but I know having an umbilical hernia for me at least goes all the way back to 2004, when I gave birth to our wonderful girl. I had occasionally noticed in the years post-partum that I had a small lump above my belly button. Sometimes. Usually not while lying down, but more prominent while standing. I just guessed it was one of the many ways my body has been touched by the pregnancy experience. It never bothered me.

Until Tuesday, May 1, 2012 (MAY DAY). I had a typical workout in the afternoon which included some basic abdominal crunches. I didn’t notice anything at first, but while I was driving home I was in sudden, throbbing abdominal pain which came in waves and caused me to remember childbirth and breathing exercises. At first I thought it was yet another strike of the norovirus and that I was about to vomit — but the pain stayed constant and I did not, in fact, vomit.

By the time I reached home, I felt and looked at my belly and noticed a larger protrusion than ever before above my belly button, and I knew I was destined for the emergency room. Had I thought about icing in advance, I might have saved myself that trip, but I don’t think I would have had such a fast plan to action had I not visited the ER.

In the lovely Davies ER, the doctor tried to palpate to see if he could press my Sigourney Weaver lump back in (ok, maybe it wasn’t THAT big), but it was way way too tender for him to get near. I was given Dilaudid for the pain, and an ice pack over my belly. When the doctor returned a bit later to see if he could press the protrusion back in, surprise: it had already slipped back in. This made the essential difference, I believe, between having a “strangulated hernia” (a medical emergency requiring immediate surgery) and an “incarcerated hernia” (for which repair can be scheduled at leisure). Fortunately my body opted for the latter. I went home (I walked! Carefully. I felt too nauseated for a car) about two hours later.

I got to meet with the surgeon, Dr. Robert Murray, the next day. He was great, and came quickly to the point. He determined that it was a relatively small tear, that he could stitch it up instead of having to use mesh, and that there was no rush but that I was not to lift anything heavier than 20 pounds until 4-6 weeks after getting it repaired. Since I have been trying to exercise regularly, and since I LOVE holding my 50-lb 7-year-old girl, I opted for as soon as possible. Miraculously and with much aligning of stars, surgery was scheduled for the following Monday, May 7, at (the also lovely) St. Mary’s Medical Center.

I spent Friday getting a blood panel and EKG as preparation for surgery, didn’t eat anything Sunday night, and arrived at St. Mary’s at 8am on Monday morning.

There was very little waiting around — it was my first time at St. Marys and I found it pleasant overall. The rooms were private, the nurses and attendants responsive, and everything seemed efficient. By 9a my IV was in (first try — with much relief and thanks to nurse Debbie), and I was down in the prep area. I met with Dr. Murray and consulted with the anesthesiologist – who then rattled off an intriguing cocktail of complicated sounding drugs that would soon be flowing into my veins.

I was wheeled into the operating room, which was pleasantly chilly and decorated all over with blue tile, as if we were in a bathtub. On the gurney, arms out to sides, the anesthesiologist said “it will be about 10 seconds.” I looked at the clock — 9:30 — and that was that.

Suddenly, I was told to breathe in through a mask (oxygen?) and was back in the post-op room – the same room as the pre-op room. The clock said 10:30.

I was asked my name – several times through the process – was asked about pain (none at that time) and waited around being generally out of it for a bit. I looked at my belly, which was patched with gauze and a 4″x4″ plastic adhesive. I was told not to scratch my eyes. Suddenly it was 11:15. I was wheeled back up to my room, where my lovely wife Leanne was waiting for me.

That’s all it took — I eschewed Vicodin as a pain-killer since it depresses me, and favored Percocet, which I had not tried before. I was back home by 1p. The first day was fine — almost pleasant.

I felt a bit sea-sick lying down to sleep and had a disturbed rest. I kept feeling like I was biting my tongue (a ramification of pain killers?) and started to experience significant pain. I took Percocet and Zofran at least every four hours. The next day was not so great. I awoke to find my gauze pad completely bloody, and was in a lot of pain as if there were a knife in my stomach. It was hard to sit up from lying down. I felt like I really needed to roll over, then stand from being sideways. I must have had about 8 Percocet in the first day post-op and didn’t feel like it had any effect. I called the doctor about the bloody gauze – I was afraid I would never stop bleeding – and got an appointment for Thursday.

Dr. Murray changed the bandage on Thursday and assured me it was going well, but that I should remove the bandage on Saturday because I was evidently allergic to the plastic cover. He also told me I needed to be taking Ibuprofen together with the Percocet — something I was not told before. I’m not sure if doing this for the next couple of days or if just the passage of time made the pain start to ease.

It was after that that I noticed the hives all over my belly. Still not sure if this was because of the Percocet or the plastic. And my bowels hadn’t worked for – well – days, despite Colace.

Things started to get better on Saturday and I pitched the Percocet and was excited to take off the bandage, having fully forgotten about steristrips. The steristrips came off by Monday, and I used a little antibiotic and a bandaid for the next week.

The area looked bloody and spotted with rash for the first few days, but today I just have a slightly swollen red line around the rim of my navel where the surgeon inserted the tiny tools. I don’t see any trace of infection, which I had been worried about.

The really unpleasant part of post-op included my bowels, as a side-effect of the pain medication. I had never had such pain getting started again … The Colace seemed to do nothing. I tried some laxatives upon the advice of my mom, which worked fine — a couple days later. It seemed to take my body awhile to react to these medications. If I were to do this over again, I would have asked if I could have started the stool-softener process in advance of surgery.

Which brings us today, 11 days post-op. I probably won’t wear a bandaid by tomorrow and I only feel the smallest bit of a twinge — a little tiny pinch, really — on my navel. One disconcerting thing is a bit of swelling and hardness around my whole navel, almost as if I still have a hernia and in fact as if it has grown. I gather this is normal post-op and is a sort of swelling and healing that will eventually subside. I have a checkup with the surgeon in 10 days and after that I’m expecting the go-or-no-go for lifting and carrying things and generally exercising back to normal again.

So my key recommendations for you, dear readers, are these:

1. Feeling a hernia? Try ice first. But of course, also go to the emergency room if you need to.
2. Talk in advance with your surgeon about pain medications. Be clear not only on what you want, if you have a preference, but how to use it and with what other medications.
3. Ask in advance what to expect from the bandaging — bleeding OK?
4. Plan for constipation: is it OK to take stool softeners in advance? I don’t know the answer…
5. Uber is a great way to get to and from your surgeries. Costs a bit more, but worth it.
6. Have amazing friends lined up to drive and deliver things (Leanne, Liz, Rob, David… hugs).

Things really went well as a whole, and I’m looking forward to being stronger than ever in a few weeks when I can start exercising again. Thanks for witnessing this part of my life story and I hope it brings some comfort if you are facing the same experience.

Shout out to this wonderful story by Nate St. Pierre:

A patent request for Facebook, filed by Abraham Lincoln in 1845.

…

So that’s what I did on my day off: a random road trip, a circus graveyard, a poker game between a showman and a president, and the discovery that good ol’ Honest Abe was a man well ahead of his time.

http://natestpierre.me/2012/05/08/abraham-lincoln-patent-facebook/

Social Intranet talks about the many aspects of SAP’s successful internal communications platform — our “social intranet” — which is managed by the organization called Knowledge Management Competency Center.

This chapter talks about Media Share, the project I am pleased to have shepherded into existence at SAP. In this project, we identified the need — and then set out to fulfill it — to help people easily share videos inside the company. While it’s easy to share media externally on countless social internet channels, internal sharing comes with its own challenges, which are both technological and business-related. We ended being part of a vibrant communications platform backed by an avid community and a company that demands new ways to be open and transparent internally. It has been a real privilege to be involved with this project.

Video sharing with Media Share is only one piece of the social intranet pie at SAP. Check out the whole book for more details on the vibrant platform inside SAP (if you read German since it’s only in German at this point).

Key excerpt auf English:
“Critical to our growth was listening to our community of users, seeing how they were using Media Share, and responding, as well as learning of the many bright ideas out there on valuable ways to use a video sharing platform,” Moya notes.

2011 has been a very good year for music.  While it’s not over yet, I got a jump on my end-of-year mix because of the urgency of the task. I’ve been so saved by much of the year’s music in many ways. I’m also including a nod to some of the nice surprises from 2010, but the balance is all new, all this year.

I used to do a mix every year but haven’t for the last couple of years. I’m happy to be pressing again. This one investigates the qualities and battles of light and dark — inside.  We’ve got it all.

1. Muppet Show Theme Song • OK Go • Muppets: The Green Album • 2011
2. Wake Up Your Saints • The National • High Violet (Expanded Edition) • 2010
3. Holy Holy • Wye Oak • Civilian • 2011
4. Midnight City • M83 • Hurry Up We’re Dreaming • 2011
5. Hair • Lady Gaga • Born This Way • 2011
6. The Change • Evanescence • Evanescence • 2011
7. Dear Rosemary • Foo Fighters • Wasting Light • 2011
8. Stamp • The Rural Alberta Advantage • Departing • 2011
9. The Bad In Each Other • Feist • Metals • 2011
10. Lily (Director’s Cut) • Kate Bush • Director’s Cut • 2011
11. Only If For A Night • Florence + The Machine • Ceremonials • 2011
12. Keep Your Heart • TV On The Radio • Nine Types Of Light • 2011
13. I Don’t Want Love • The Antlers • Burst Apart • 2011
14. Perth • Bon Iver • Bon Iver • 2011
15. The Rip Tide • Beirut • The Rip Tide • 2011
16. The Devil’s Tears • Angus & Julia Stone • Down The Way • 2010
17. Like Me • Chely Wright • Lifted Off The Ground • 2010
18. Mercy Of The Fallen • Dar Williams • Many Great Companions • 2010

it’s time to light the lights
wake up your saints
for the blessed
city is my church
this is my prayer
screaming on the inside
you’re part of me you know you are
i will save you and i don’t need you
the good man and good woman
as we journey to thy sacred feet
you came over me like some holy rite
these words are not a bit profound
climb up the stairs
something faint
the waves and i
she’s my home
they’ll love you
we have some of them inside us

PS: hands-down the best musical show of the year and certainly in the top of all time: Beirut at the Independent. Thank you Victor.

facebook business by Sean MacEntee, on Flickr

FACEBOOK

Trend One.  It’s nothing new.  But Facebook continues to be a top trend at the Web 2.0 Summit. Chatter about being “friends” with Facebook was in the background of many of the sessions – and *everybody* – except maybe Google – is friends with Facebook (and now Facebook doesn’t even have to friend you back).  This is not a surprise — as KPCB’s Mary Meeker put it in her always fabulous Internet Trends report, “There are as many people using social networking sites now as there were Internet users in 2006.” From what I could tell from my seat in the third row back at the Palace Hotel, at least in the US, Facebook is still winning the social game — despite Google taking pains to talk about how great Google+ is doing and even trotting Sergey Brin out in a surprise appearance together with Vic Gundotra to say so.

The balance of power in social seems to be between the “caution to the wind” nature of existing social tell-alls, and Google — which is taking a specifically cautious approach to social — contending that this is what people want. Google is not only trying to win on these more conservative terms (“There’s a reason why every thought in your head does not come out of your mouth,” said Vic Gundotra, and maintaining somewhat vehemently that Google is “taking a cautious approach to releasing an API”) but also could be preparing to bet the farm on tying Google’s offerings together with Google+, at least by later in the year, if I caught the hints.

But the Facebook party is full-swing. Everyone from Microsoft (“Facebook defines the word social and we work with them closely — combined with Bing” — Steve Ballmer) to eBay (“We’re bringing the open graph into the eBay experience, and bring the eBay experience into the Facebook environment” — John Donahoe) to Salesforce (“Facebook is eating the Web. People are spending much more time on Facebook than on the Internet.  It’s a social revolution” — Marc Benioff) to beyond reports that Facebook is hot.

For Facebook’s part, Bret Taylor, Chief Technology Officer, didn’t just rest there: “Google+ to me is validating to what we at Facebook have convinced the world of: Products are better when they’re social,” he said.

It continues to be a virtual Facebook lovefest.

Saving the world one email at a time by Ryan Vaarsi, on Flickr

PERSON AS PLATFORM

But “the problem is that my data is somewhere else…” was a common refrain during the data frame discussions, and Facebook and Google got no free pass here.

“When are you guys and Google gonna get over it and start sharing,” sparred John Battelle to Bret Taylor, to audience applause. “Why can’t I use Facebook Connect to populate my circles or lists? Isn’t that data that is ours and should be simple to move?”  Although Battelle meant this as a serious question, there was no serious response to be heard. The fact is, data — our data, data about us and from us — is still what’s worth the bank to social companies.

Many speakers however echoed a fresh refrain about data and your personal identity — and whether your personal data belongs to you or at a minimum can be portable to whatever (social) network you want.  Chris Poole of 4chan/Canvas kicked off this identity crisis with an excellent talk, concluding that as far as online identity goes, “Facebook & Google do it wrong; Twitter does it better; I want to think about a world that does it right.”

Beyond straight social networking technology, personal identity took a stunning turn with Anne Wojcicki’s talk about 23andMe — the “retail DNA testing service providing information and tools for consumers to learn about and explore their DNA.” 23andMe straddles biotech and Web 2.0 with the powers of a huge genetic dataset that can, in combination with its growing passionate community, go beyond straight ancestry queries to help identify individuals that have variants and prevent disease or identify genes that look like modifiers – just for a couple of examples. “The community has been so successful that in such a short time we found something that could be a modifier that leads to a druggable target,” said Wojcicki.

One big question this begs is whose data is this genetic information? Is this owned by the pharmaceutical companies? The community itself? Individuals – in so far as you “own” pieces of yourself?

It was Mitchell Baker (Mozilla Foundation) that took the next step that started to put a finger on the actual idea of person as platform:

We create data online but we have little control. We can turn privacy up and down but that’s it. We have essentially giant data factories — it is at heart an industrial era process. The core process of my data footprint lives as part of the data factory’s process. The customization all lives within a single model. Let’s think differently about data for a moment – what could data be? In that world, I am the platform for my data, and you are the platform for your data.

Baker’s bottom line: “If I become the platform, that allows the big data providers to continue to operate at scale (provide experiences we like with customization at edges but not core) and allows economic generation.”

Do we have this yet? “We don’t have all this infrastructure today but at Mozilla we’re building blocks of where I can be the center of my life.” Brilliant future, with Baker as our guide and person at the center.

Buy More Stuff, Black Friday 2009 by Michael Holden, on Flickr

HOW WE BUY

We’re still buying.  People can log on to 23andme.com and start exploring their DNA today, for example. We keep buying more and more stuff — but the message was clear at the Summit: the way we buy is undergoing massive disruption.  Analogous to what was happening outside a few blocks away with the Occupy Wall Street movement hitting San Francisco streets with #OccupySF, and referenced obliquely by Benioff as the “Corporate Spring,” I think it’s the disruption of the way we buy, right down to the very the payment itself.

During the conference, John Battelle made sure to ask most speakers what they thought of the Occupy movement. For their part, Visa president John Partridge and American Express group president Dan Schulman echoed that there’s “a concern for what’s transpired around the world economically… and significant pent-up anger about how did we end up in this situation” — but seemed eager to allocate blame towards the federal government or elsewhere for the debt crisis, rather than, of course, looking inward. And to John Battelle’s question whether Visa and AMEX are afraid of eBay now that merchants, frustrated with transaction fees, are is implementing direct payments, we of course heard non-answers.

But there were dramatic backdrops to that perspective, with not only eBay (and the demonstrations themselves), but with  Alex Rampell’s TrialPay — which makes the excellent point that there is so much to be gained from the data in online payments that it makes no sense whatsoever to charge consumers a transaction fee just to pay. “At TrialPay, we think payments should be free” — because the underlying data that happens in a transaction is worth more, is the disruptive point behind the service.

It makes it look like credit card companies, despite their protesting otherwise, have to be worried about going the way of the record industry.

Mary Meeker also echoed an impression of Occupy that was equally affirming yet implicated:

I think people are angry — everybody’s angry and deserves to be angry. Finger-pointing is not good. I look at it in a holistic way. Over last 40 years, government has been pretty loose with spending and interest rates have been at low-level, so people were looking for places to invest and went to houses. Credit was easy.  Government sets up a situation where it’s easy to borrow. Wall Street was giving instruments to trade and they traded it like crazy.    … The way out? We all have a problem and we all have to sacrifice.

(Spending five minutes a day on (the hugely hyped) One Kings Lane five days a week, as Meeker admitted to doing, seems a bit like a strange sacrifice.)

If you are making sacrifices, you can look forward to what can be known in the future as “Web 3.0” — and we don’t mean the Semantic Web.   As Tim O’Reilly said in the conference introduction, “Now we know what Web 3 will be — Web 3 will be whatever pulls us out of the economy now” (since Web 2.0 is what pulled us out before).

Tenha medo by jampa, on Flickr

SOUND

This leads me to two more fairly unconventional top tech trends to personify. Did you know Sound is the Next Big Thing? “Sound is going to be bigger than video. Record is bigger than QWERTY,” said Mary Meeker, quoting Alexander Ljung from SoundCloud, and then she rattled off a number of sound technologies from bluetooth devices, headsets, SoundCloud, Spotify (“which changed way I listen to music”), connected car audio, sound recognition — all ready for and undergoing massive disruption.

Both Pandora and Spotify were there to speak at the Summit, though “Pandora doesn’t compete with Spotify,” Tim Westergren insisted, “It competes with radio — and radio is where people just want to turn it on and play.”

Sound will be big not only on our devices but in our cars.  Says Westergren, “One half of radio listening happens in the car. The smartphone is your modem, bringing it into car. The car hijacks controls of Pandora into the dashboard.”

Driving into the Andes by Stuck in Customs, on Flickr

CARS

Which leads me to the last big trend to notice.  Cars — clean fuel cars, electric cars, social cars, apps for cars, connected cars — Google cars.  Cars are big.

On the apps side, from Waze — with which 7 million users in Israel beat traffic — to Pandora to many other apps, lots of lonely commuters driving solo in cars aren’t so much a plague for sustainability, but create in fact a huge whitespace.

Part of the reason cars are such a rich whitespace for applications right now is because of this Data Frame. We’re realizing that there is much data to be harvested from cars themselves in the Big Data Frame view.  From David Hornik at August Capital:

We figured out about six years ago there lots of systems creating data exhaust. If we harness it, that’s big value… Cars are reporting a lot of things — from how fast the car is going, to the temperature outside (is the road about to ice over?), to exactly where they go (so maps can be way more accurate), to whether the windshield wipers are on – are they high or low? This allows our cars of the future to say “here’s the right driving route for you today based on all this factual data.”

It seems to me that one of the biggest future disruptors of the Data Frame just might be the coming of broadband in cars.

On the side of the cars as platforms themselves, we see a trend towards both social cars — as Marc Benioff wants a car he can friend — to electric vehicles with ventures such as Fisker, Tesla, and GE building factories here in the US.

As if that’s not enough going on, Sergey Brin said Google is building an “autonomous car” – a self-driving car that he says will be cool. “There is a tremendous opportunity to improve the world with advanced research projects like this,” said Sir Google.

This led Battelle to say: “I’m going to start a conference about cars.”  I believe it, too. And if he does, I hope to be there to write way too much about it yet again.

Maybe I’ll ride there in my all-electric Tesla while listening to Pandora, connecting with friends online, and talking with my car (let’s call her “Sira”), about the latest deals on One Kings Lane.  Or maybe, like the fact that we predicted the flying car but not the Internet, the future will look a lot different than any of us know now.

Because trends may be unstoppable, but data is feral, says Genevieve Bell. “Data keeps it real — physical objects resist being digitized. There’s something about data that will resist being incessantly digitized.”

The wildcard is the person in the platform.

I think I started to like you when Leanne pointed out your cuff links at yesterday’s trial.   To watch the trial, I was sitting in the overflow room behind a personal hero of mine, Kate Kendell, executive director at National Center for Lesbian Rights, and I know she has been known to sport some pretty excellent cuff links as well. I, too, like cuff links. It’s really silly, I know, but I get excited when I think: This is something we all have in common!

Sitting behind Kate Kendell and Melanie Rowan of NCLR

When we left the overflow room shortly after the hearing ended at noon, we walked up the hallway to the real trial room to just peek inside.  At that exact moment you were walking out of the room. You looked tired – you had obviously been working hard.  We ran away to sort of hide – then we were concerned we might be in the same elevator as you on the way down.  You instead went to the Men’s room first so we were spared that situation.

My view of Charles Cooper on the video from the overflow room - terrible phone picture I know

Afterward I felt guilty:  running away is silly.  I wonder what it would be like to talk with you.   I would have tried to shake your hand and I would have asked about your cuff links and probably found some nice things to say.  Maybe we’d later have a drink together.  I could show you San Francisco from some of my favorite views. You’d meet our beautiful daughter…

I’ve dreamed this sort of thing before.  I just wanted to dream it out loud a little longer.  For the sake of my daughter’s future — our future. It could happen.

Thank you,

-m

PS: Here are the rulings from the trial, out today (the following day). You lost on both counts. How I wish I could help you know it’s going to be OK.

jon klinkroth

Our friend Jon died on Friday the 13th, in May.

I have not been able to make but a whit of sense about it but the amazing Becky (on the left, above) has written poignantly about it. I’m pretty sure I did my own “sink low” interpretation since learning about his death over a week later, only a couple days after Lisa (to Jon’s left, above) herself heard about it.  That night I got on the phone with Sheila, the excellent redhead above, and made sure the news was complete.

Though the picture was taken at Leanne and my wedding in 2008, which I think is the last time I saw Jon, the row of us above met in late 1982 on the 8th floor of the dorm called Ida Sproul in Berkeley.  We were charmed ever since then. It is a measure of the time and of our unique bravado that over 25 years later so many of us are still fast friends.

Funny. I still say Jon is a friend.

Jon and I used to scream our bikes in the dark of night through the streets of Berkeley and Oakland.  Not safe; not by the book — Jon never wearing shoes.  Jon was brilliant — but moreso, kind and gentle.  Was he fully misfit? Clearly he was addicted, but how did he die?  Was he hellbent on destruction in the world, or in a world hellbent on destruction, was he an honest precious being?

I didn’t answer any of this, so I instead thought of a playlist of what we used to listen to.  It goes something like this:

1) This Charming Man — the Smiths — (long version)

2) Wild Child — Lou Reed

3) Kometenmelodie — Kraftwerk

4) Some Song by Phillip Glass which I forget but he swears they sing “Call Lisa” in

5) Atrocity Exhibition — Joy Division

6) Lou Reed — Perfect Day

7) Lou Reed — pretty much forever. Lou Reed forever.

Jon, Jon.

This week, two videos in particular have caught my interest at the intersection of Video and Politics. Let’s start with Charlie Crist:

A colleague passed along the news story behind this to me: Crist, Byrne settle lawsuit over campaign song.

We know a bit about the potential issues of music copyright infringement through our work on our video project, so it’s surprising that this video was ever made. Charlie Crist should have known better when he used the Talking Heads’ song Road To Nowhere in his campaign ad, but in the realities of political campaigning he (or likely his campaign) could well have realized a “cease and desist” order might not have even taken effect until the campaign was long over.  Seems anything goes in the fast lawless heat of political campaigns.

On the other hand, Prop 8 proponents are targeting Judge Vaughn Walker over his public use of videotapes from the trial in the long long journey of Prop 8 through the courts. Seems back on February 18, at an event on courts and new media in Arizona, Judge Walker delivered a session called Shooting the Messenger: How Cameras in the Courtroom Got a Bad Wrap, and during that session he showed pieces of the videotaped trial, including testimony from a Prop 8 proponent.  C-SPAN was there to record it, which amounted essentially to “broadcasting the testimony on TV,” which is of course what the Prop 8  folks never wanted in the first place.  Since a stern motion about this apparent “illegal” release of videotape was delivered today, you should watch it there while you can (I can’t get a version with embed strings but will come back and embed if I find one).

The Ninth Circuit Court later had no problem showing the Prop 8 trial live on C-SPAN. You can watch it in its entirety to this day:

Beyond Walker’s district court however there are no live witnesses to testify. All records of people’s motivations are preserved back in the district court.

For the moment let’s ignore the the obvious question “What do Prop 8 proponents continue to want to hide?” I used to think that The Law was one of the next biggest areas of disruption in the “Web 2.0″ space. Now that I’m involved in a video project, naturally I think video is the current huge disruption in politics.

Of course — none of these things are new, but whereas Law seems to be purposefully designed to be slow in a fast-media world, Politics is far from it.  A quick campaign ad released the day before an election can change its course.  Thankfully, checks and balances are however still in tact. A targeted attack on a meticulously prepared, thoroughly researched and fairly tried case (or the relevance of the case’s judge’s sexuality) will amount to nothing except passing fancy in the “court of public opinion.”

Video however? Video can reveal to anyone who cares to see the real motivations behind Prop 8 as revealed in the courtroom from its proponents under testimony, and you can try to pull it down, but the record is cast. The Internet will continue to remember. And we’re here to see it.

Moments later, we watched in awe as the bear stunned a fish and then dragged it up to the rocks to enjoy a fresh sake feast. Crows followed on cleanup duty.

Disasters – natural or otherwise – don’t always strike at reasonable hours – and when an insistent pounding on the front door woke me from a deep sleep early in the morning of Friday, March 11, it wasn’t a reasonable hour.

It was 1:30am and our neighbor had woken us to tell us about the hugely incomprehensible 8.9 (later revised to 9.0) earthquake in Japan — and to warn us of the massive tsunami headed our way.

I then proceeded to try to figure out what was really going on — and what, if anything, to do about it. I pored over the tweets for credible news, first relieved that our good friends in Japan were safe, second reading about terrible devastation, in-between baffled by regular life apparently continuing with #ipad2 and #sxsw, and finally trying to parse the warnings about the West Coast of the USA, where I lay awake all night.

Tsunami warning San Francisco Bay Area - from National Weather Service at http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mtr/

On the Web beyond the tweets, I gaped at incredible maps with great red bands all up and down the coast of Northern California – red meaning “warning” – and “warning” apparently meaning, according to the automatically generated Tsunami information I could find, evacuate.

While I tried to parse this information to figure out whether I did, in fact, need to pack my family up and ship out, the official word from San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management was to “monitor local media for updates.” “Which local media would that be?” said SF friend @jamiedsongs. Good question.

At SFGate, the Web site that backs San Francisco’s major newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle, the lights were on but there appeared to be nobody home.

SFGate in the early morning on March 11, 2011

Though it had apparently been (automatically?) alerted to the major quake and tsunami, the front page was obviously stale to say the least, advising “no warning for CA coast” when the National Weather Service had already stuck us in the red “Tsunami Warning” category. Featured feeds were truly strange (live TV from Al Jazeera? Live blog from WSJ?) or virtually irrelevant (a quake details page leading to California earthquakes).

Automatic news is often worse than no news at all. I desperately wished for the “local media” to wake up and interpret all of this.

The only live person I found anywhere close to SFGate was featured columnist Jeanne Cooper, @Hawaii_Insider, who was putting out actual analysis in real-time and for whom I felt immensely thankful.

There was also sign of life at a site I had never previously relied on for news, California Beat, but this wasn’t entirely reassuring when a masthead mistakenly read “Tsunami evacuations issued for Bay Area.”

Tsunami evacuations on California Beat -- later retracted

retraction

At 4:49am San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee tweeted with a welcome voice of official authority, at last saying that although San Francisco had activated the Emergency Operations center, there was no evacuation ordered.

But still the giant wave was coming. BART indicated they might close down entirely between peak Friday morning commute hours of 7-9am (or they might not), while waiting to see the extent of the hit on Hawaii (which was thankfully minimal) and then later Crescent City — which was not spared.

At the exact moment of tsunami impact in Crescent City, local newspaper the Daily Triplicate was apparently automatically chirping birth announcements (several weeks late), while thetriplicate.com Web site was down.

Crescent City Daily Triplicate, around 7:30am on March 11, 2011

In this age of information overload, I realized I knew where to go for tons information and in real time, but not where to go for the right, local information. It was a bizarre world online throughout the night, but bizarre was trivial compared to the real tragedies unfolding across the Pacific in Japan.

The current big problem of information during disasters is that these places we rely on for local, up-to-date news, like all-too-often the cities themselves, are suffering economic woes. I don’t know much about Crescent City’s Daily Triplicate, but it’s likely to be in as much financial peril at the moment as its devastated harbor city itself.

Aside from wishing the very best and holding out hope for Japan and the global community, I only hope existing news channels can materialize the real opportunities that exist here and survive and evolve, not necessarily in that order. Until then, we have each other, in the middle of the night, on Twitter…

And while Lenin read a book on Marx
The quartet practiced in the park
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died
Don McLean – American Pie