Island Time vs. Mainland Time

May 3, 2011 By

Let’s hope this works. My first dashboard cam video. Julio rode along with me to Baltimore and we talked of, well, shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings. Somewhere along the way we figured out how to do the camera/mic thing without me causing an accident. Here’s a snippet: a discussion of island time vs. Mainland time. If you’ve lived on or visited an island (SMALL, UK doesn’t count), weigh in.

The Tempo of Food

May 3, 2011 By
P98

 

A packed first day. Am sitting here in a bar in downtown Philly watching a Salsa lesson and attempting my first non-trivial iPhone post. I am here because I am tagging along with my couchsurfing host, Chuck. More about Chuck later, but let me get caught up on older stuff.

At the Cafe Amouri in Vienna (a DC suburb), I had a mini meetup with three readers: Left to right, we have Julio, Ben and Jared.

We ranged over a whole bunch of topics. Two book recommendations came out of the meeting: The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp and Titan by Ron Chernow.

Main topic: The tempo of food. The table agreed that improv cooking beats recipe cooking. Still processing the conversation. Here’s a picture for you though.

The Tempo Road Trip

April 21, 2011 By

A big claim I have made in Tempo is that I hope to help readers develop a new perspective from which to view the world. When I finally released the book, the question that immediately occurred to me was this:  how could I demonstrate the value of the perspective? What if, I asked myself, I grabbed a camera and microphone an iPhone and went around interviewing readers and actually trying to look at different things with the lens I am selling others?

And the answer popped out at me: Road Trip!

Here is the rough route (click for larger image or here for the live Google Map) and dates. I will be liveblogging the whole trip (mainly video and photo blogging) right here on the Tempo blog.

The first leg starts next week. Between Tuesday, May 3 and approximately May 24, I will be driving zig-zag from Washington, DC to Las Vegas, NV, which is going to be my base for the next few months. I haven’t yet decided whether to start out going North and looping through Canada, or heading South.

Later in the summer (late June/early July), I’ll be doing the second leg: driving in a loop from Vegas, up the West Coast to Vancouver, and back.

If you want to meet me…

So if you live somewhere near the planned  route, I’d like to meet you.  The primary purpose is to really stress-test the Tempo perspective, but I’ll also be opportunistically looking for fodder for my other writing venues, and continuing my normal work for my consulting clients. I am open to anything interesting, including, but not limited to:

  • A quick 1:1 coffee
  • A group meetup if there are enough readers in an area
  • Doing an informal talk about the book at your workplace or a local group you belong to
  • Having you show me something interesting in your area
  • Having you ride along with me on a local side-trip or just to enjoy a good chat

If you are up for it, simply post a comment on this post mentioning what you’d like to do, and include your location (city, state). If someone from your area has already posted a comment, please post yours as a reply to theirs. Please use your real name, and if possible link to some sort of profile (LinkedIn, Facebook or a blog for instance) in the URL field. If you’d rather email me privately, you can do that too, but I’d prefer a comment here so I can see all the information in one place and make sense of it. If I decide to pass through a particular city/area, I’ll email all the readers in that area and arrange the logistics.

Quality of experiences, rather than quantity, is the criterion, so I am more likely to drive 100 miles out of my way to meet one person who I know well through ribbonfarm, or someone new who can show me a landfill or container-port than stop at a dull place to meet someone with whom I’ve never interacted before. I may spend several days on a 10-mile stretch and zip through 500 miles in a day depending on how interesting things are. The tempo of the trip is going to be highly variable.

I will also be slumming it a bit to save money. I plan on experimenting with Couch Surfing (my handle there is ribbonfarm) and Airbnb. If you’ve got a couch or spare bed you can offer me, please mention that in your comment (and I’d prefer to do that through the couchsurfing.org site).

I plan on posting several times a day, and this short format, high-frequency multimedia format will be very new for me (if you are a ribbonfarm reader, you know that my normal comfort zone is 2000+ word posts once a week).

And don’t forget. If you’ve finished the book, please post a blurb for me on the Reader Reactions page.