It was slightly too big but not so much so that it looked horrible on me. I imagined the slightly oversize fit would be perfect for wearing with a chunky sweater underneath. The ideal business casual outfit for late fall in Minnesota. Not so much for late spring in Arizona. Hence the price, I suspect.

I brought the jacket home and it served me well for a couple of solid years. Especially at first when I was just a tad bit heavier. It was still big but not enough for me to care.

This year, as the first chilly blush of fall came, I put it on and it seemed not quite right. A bit too roomy in too many places. Even more so than the past. I had lost a little weight but not too much. Enough to make a difference though. It did not look bad but it did not look its best. I finally had to care.

It took this realization to spark my mind to the idea that I could take it into a tailor. We have a really great one close by. One who takes tremendous pride in his craft. One who learned the trade through apprenticeship and years of study. One I’ve taken other things to in the past.

I felt sheepishly dumbstruck that this had not occurred to me before. Perhaps it was because I paid so little for it that I felt I had to accept the jacket as it was off-the-rack. Perhaps, in my mind, I thought (correctly as it turned out) the price of having it tailored would far outweigh the price I paid which stopped me from even considering it as an option in the first place. No matter the reason, I’m glad I got past it.

The price to have it tailored to fit me perfectly was still less than I would have paid to buy that same jacket at full retail. Doing so would not only made the jacket look better on me now but allows it to continue to be a mainstay of my wardrobe for many years to come — perhaps even a lifetime. Well worth it. Should have done it right away. And, if I ever need to, um, let it out a bit again I now know I should take it back to my tailor and he will make it perfect for the me yet to come.

I believe there is a place for this is the world of technology. I think there is a need for a Software Tailor. For instance, you have a text editor that works well but could use just a few changes to make it work perfectly for you. You take it to the Software Tailor and they do that for you. Or perhaps you go to one to build the perfect task management app to fit your specific working style. In my mind, many who program are crafts people and I think there is a growing opportunity and need for such a service by people with these skills.

Of course, this would mean we would need to have a culture in place to support this. Those who make such products from the beginning would need to “leave a bit of extra fabric” in their products to allow for such growth (or to take it in a little in the middle). Just like a tailor can tell much about the manufacture of a garment from the threading and seams, and make adjustments accordingly, so too would code have to be clean and well commented. But, once again, if a culture and system to were support this, those that take the software trade seriously would excel from builder and tailor. Those that did not would be revealed and expelled.

Can you imagine a future where, for a price, a key software tool that you rely on can be bespoke? That programming would be a trade craft passed down through apprenticeship and study. That when you want a piece of software to fit you just right, you can take it to someone to make do that?

I can and I wish it so.

The recent controversy and numerous arguments and counter-arguments around Apple’s mute switch is really arguing about philosophy. Apple clearly has a philosophy about the way the hardware and software should treat the mute switch. Basically, mute means mute except in the cases where the user has asked it not to be. When a user asks for an alarm to sound or a video to play, ignore the switch. You don’t have to agree with this philosophy. There are several ways to get around this philosophy (one being to turn the phone off entirely). But, regardless, when you bought that phone part of what you were buying was this philosophy and any others Apple has decided to imbue.

The discussions back and forth about comments being a good or bad thing — philosophy. If you go to a site with comments enabled, the site’s owner is making a philosophical statement about a belief that comments from, and discussion with, others are an essential part of the ideas expressed. By your participation, whether it be reading them or participating by adding your own, you are buying into this philosophy. There are options to opt-out of this philosophy, one being not to visit the site at all. But, make no mistake, there is a philosophy being expressed and you are being given the opportunity to agree with and participate in it.

The solution is simple, if you are not willing to agree to or buy into someone else’s philosophy, learn the skills required to build something that closely matches your own.

I walk to our local grocery co-op (2.5 blocks) no matter the weather. I walk to our local bread shop (4.5 blocks) and wine shop (4.75 blocks). On a nice day, I walk to a small independent bookstore I love (6 blocks). The great little park , recently refurbished after years of city neglect, where my daughter likes to play (3.5 blocks). When the time allows, I enjoy meeting a friend for beer at a great restaurant and bar with a fantastic selection of beers (5 blocks) which I enjoy more than the one with less selection across the street (100 feet). These places are designed for walking to. They have limited parking if they have any dedicated at all. In the time it would take to get in the car and navigate traffic, one could be there already on foot.

What I love most, beside the walking itself, is the occasional friend or neighbor I run into. And, even when I don’t, most of these shop owners and barkeeps are friends and neighbors as well. For this is where I find out the news that matters most — that which is happening right around me…

“Did you hear about the break-in just around the corner?”

“What’s the deal with the two seemingly competing chocolate shops opening on the same street two blocks from each other?”

“Mr. Councilman, sorry to disturb your coffee. Can I ask you about your vote against the stop reminder I asked about for the pedestrian walkway?”

Thus, though a walk may be only a few blocks it can sometimes take an hour if I’m in no hurry which is just fine with me.

Increasingly it seems, so many of us live in places without sidewalks. So many suburbs and exurbs we are moving to are without them. So many of these communities we build are purposefully absent this integral part (in my mind at least) of community. Though I can’t imagine a worse fate then to be somewhere without them, I increasingly feel in the minority.

The planners know that less people want them. They are moving out of the urban area for a sense of country living. Part of which means, in their mind, to have lawn that extends to the road. Even though that road may be a asphalt beach. Sidewalks are simply a reminder of all those things they are trying to venture from.

These concrete paths are not technically ours. They belong to the city — the community. Even the ones that are just in front of where you live you must share and allow others to pass through. As such, you must maintain them despite this domain. You must shovel them when it snows. You must keep them free of ice. You must pay the cost to repair if damaged. More people, it seems, would rather have a few feet of green space instead. One that they own outright and can tell people to get off of when crossed.

Because there are less sidewalks in these places, people tend to make their connections elsewhere. At work or at the kids hockey practice or at the dog park. They tend to know their actual neighbors less. There are few opportunities to do so since they never cross each other’s paths except within the protected bubble of vehicles and traffic laws. They drive to all the places they need to go. Which are the similar to the places I go but all decidedly further away and designed for cars. Upon return, they go straight into the garage and then shut the door.

They turn on the TV before dinner to get news that is happening half a world away and consider themselves informed. Why should’t they? For the news they may get from conversations with people who do not live near them might as well be the same distance and equally as relevant. And because these connections are with people who live not near us they must discuss what things we have in common which does not start with community for there is none.

I wonder too if our communities in the virtual world are following this same path.

My first sense of being “online” was on a dial up connection to a local BBS. I knew the people there offline as well. It was small enough that one could. The topics discussed were often a continuation of the ones we did when we were together. If there was a problem that needed sorting (or a quarrel that needed moderating) one messaged the sysop who, once again, was a friend as well as neighbor. There were sidewalks there.

Then AOL came along. The first suburb. A place where you could form relationships, of a sort, with people from all over the country. They were not neighbors or people you would likely see in real life. Yet, you felt like you knew them just as well. You felt like you were being informed about things that mattered. And, as long as you stayed there, there were sidewalks.

Now we have Facebook and Twitter. The exurbs. Communities and relationships that span the globe. People on the other side of the planet that we know better than those real humans right next door. We can now know the first hand, on the ground, news of a community in Iran in real time. Or assist in the search for someone we barely know who has gone missing and is feared dead. Are we building sidewalks here?

If you pressed me to come up with one reason I feel so drawn to a service such as Path versus the rest is that it feels like a sidewalk to me.

There is only one big tech story for the year and only one to watch for the year to come. The biggest tech story of last year is the one that mattered the most to you. Perhaps that is your privacy concerns when using certain social networks. Perhaps that is the new gadget you got and how it makes your life just a tad bit better. Perhaps that is the concern about a tech company you have come to rely upon now that its leader has passed (or, in the case of some, gone insane). No matter what it is, it is the story that affects you the most.

The biggest tech story of the new year will be what you are going to do to change it.

Is there an app or service that is not meeting your needs? Learn to code and build a replacement for yourself.

Concerned about the ownership of the things you share? Create a Personal RSS feed or pipe everything through a service like Pinboard. (You can and should subscribe to mine)

Feeling overwhelmed by all of this info-tech-social-stuff? Get yourself on a proper information diet.

The point is that the biggest tech story of 2012 will not be anything talked about in the media or some blog. The biggest tech story will be the same one it has always been…

You.

I have never used Ho Daddy (mis-type intended and a bit more honest judging from their commercials). They always came off as unsavory to my discerning tastes. There is an ocean of good hosting and domain registration out there that does not smell nearly as fishy.

As for me, I have been using Dreamhost for what seems like forever. Good hosting, great support, and they have a sense of humor. They are great for the .coms, .nets, and .orgs. Then there is IWantMyName for the fancy stuff. You know, the .me, .in, .wtf. They have a nice clean easy to use interface and can register just about anything that is registrable. I have also heard great things about Hover though I’ve not used them myself.

The point being, if you have a domain parked or hosted with So Daddy please know that they likely don’t care about the Internet you care about and therefore you should consider taking your Internet business elsewhere.

Update: Here is a step by step guide to do just that. Only 19 simple steps.

We would like to believe that that which we put up on the internet or save to the cloud is available forever. But how can we, who shall never see forever, possibly understand what forever is or agree on what it means? And what happens when we have the skill and the will to decide to erase our creations for that same forever — permanently?

We all now have access to tools that allow us to recover those things we delete — either through accident or purpose — for as far back as the backup storage space will allow. What then is to stop us from hitting delete instead of sorting it to some virtual folder and saving it? Why not let the clouds we are building do this for us? Why not erase these things with the knowledge that, in the rare times we might need them later we can get them back? Especially for those items we are not certain we will ever have to access again? Is it that despite our desire to have faith in digital permanence we, in fact, know the truth of all things in inherent impermanence?

I know people that have had a hard drive crash and lost everything because they had no backup. Years later, it happens again. I then inquire as to why they did not have a backup — especially after the lesson they should have learned the first time. The reason: Though the previous loss was painful at first, they rebuilt. They moved on. They survived. They saw no value in backup because they knew if the drive crashed they would rebuild, move on, and survive again.

I’d like to think that embracing such impermanence grants them a level of effortless peace. It gives them a certain confidence that their digital creations are not stronger than their ability to survive without them.

Perhaps it is this peace and confidence that fuels one to declare Status 410 and walk away. Knowing that what good you could do has been done — in a place, for a time. Now, it is gone. Life and all of it’s creations are permanently impermanent. When the permanence we and others have come to rely on suddenly reveals itself to be less so, we can only rebuild, move on, and survive.

The Buddha Machine is not an iPod. It’s not loaded with features. It’s simply a small plastic box — available in an assortment of colors — that plays nine different loops. The possibilities of how you listen to it, however, are infinite.

I received one of these today, a surprise gift from John Carey of Fifty Foot Shadows (THE place to get beautiful desktops, by the way). I have know about them for quite some time and wanted one but never pulled the trigger. It was incredibly thoughtful of him and it is even better than I imagined it.

My little girl has suffered with a really bad little flu bug that had her over a bucket all of last night. Not wanting to risk the same tonight I was looking for a way to ease her misery and lull her to sleep without her normal bottle of milk. I turned on the Buddha Machine and laid down next to her. She was calmed and asleep within minutes. Magical.

Typerighter is a new application that I have been testing for a while. As the developer is a close personal friend of mine and willing to listen to my, um, gentle persuasion, I have been giving active feedback since the very beginning and I hope you, like I, will find it the perfect web based writing tool.

My favorite feature is it’s complete lack of features. The only visible feature is a blank page and the occasional “save” that happens automatically. That’s it, one feature.

OK, l lied. But not completely. It has more features but the rest of the “features” are completely hidden.

Want to save your file as plain text? No problem. Just type “.txt” at the end of the url.

Oh, you write in Markdown and wish there was a way to convert it to valid HTML without an extra step? No problem, just type “.html” at the end of the URL.

Oh, and if you are a paid user, you get nifty things like your own user space and being able to create a filename URL by typing http://username.typerighter.com/filename and you will always be able to access your document directly at that address.

So yes, it has a few features but none of them, ever, get between you and that blank page. The way a writing app should be.

And, it works in the browser so, you know, everywhere is disco. iPad? Disco. iPhone? Hustle! Heck, throw it on your Chromebook.

I’m using it to write this letter. I drafted an essay of my book using it (on my iPad, naturally). It’s really neat. I keep it open in a browser window with a page I have set as my scratchpad. I can type a quick note in there if I’m working in Safari and not break my stride too much.

To get the extra goodness a personal Typerighter domain provides, and to support independent development, I recommend you pay the current $5.00+ cost. Because, you see, that cost increases by one cent for each person who signs up. So getting in now gets you the best price. But, you don’t have to pay to use it. Just use the “Try it out” link at the bottom of the sign up page and use it for as long as you wish.

Seriously, I hope you love this thing as much as I do. Just head on over to https://typerighter.com/ and play with it for a bit. Like I said, my good friend Garrick van Buren is the developer and he would love your feedback. Make any feature request you want as long as it can be completely invisible .

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

– Henry David Thoreau in Walden

Please forgive the repetition, but this has been on my mind lately. Namely, what are my three chairs? Is three chairs a reasonable and good sensible default for ones own approach to digital communication?

I don’t assume I have any right answer to those questions. That said, I have some ideas surrounding them.

Solitude

This could be any for working with ones dialog with self. This could take the form of a paper or digital journal, diary, etc. Those that are familiar with The Artists Way would have this with morning pages. Digitally, projects and services like OhLife and 750 Words might be good. Or local applications like MacJournal. Some may find this reflection and introspection simply with writing to plain text files. Regardless, I think it essential to external communications to first foster a healthy and regular internal one, no matter how one achieves it.

Friendship

This is one to one. It is interpersonal and private by default. Digitally, email would fit this idea. As would instant messaging, SMS, or even a phone call. It is dialog between two people. Unguarded and non-judgmental. It is an open exchange. A honest sharing. The opportunity for back and forth.

Society

This is where a social network may fit in. A forum would fit here as well. Even a blog with comments and an active and engaged readership might fit. The idea is that it should be productive dialog between a limited many. Greater than one-to-one but not so many that the conversation becomes noise and ideas are lost.

What are your three chairs?

The challenge, of course, is to use this as a healthy constraint. To choose three chairs that you are comfortable with and abandon or, at least, greatly decrease the use of others. To let others know of your choice where appropriate. For instance, “I prefer contact via email” or “I’m on Twitter and not on any other social network.” And even then, to have a clear intention about how and when you wish to use those chairs and with whom.

I would also like to think that balance is important here as well. That spending too much time in any one chair adversely affects the others. That the health of our internal dialog reflects well on when engaging our friends and society. That, equally true, the quality of those external engagements feed the quality of the internal. Therefore, choosing each chair with care and purpose is not to be taken lightly.

I share such moments with my daughter too often to count. She and I crowded around an iPhone, an iPad, an iMac. Watching movies, dancing to music, learning, growing.

Without his vision, none of these moments would exist the way they do today.

Thank you, Steve Jobs, for each moment like this.