Sunday morning I went to Greenfield Village, an open air historical museum in Dearborn, Michigan. It’s a wonderful place to take your children to give them a hands-on immersion experience of history. Historical interpreters (actors dressed in period costume) are everywhere for you to interact with. Edison’s laboratory, Henry Ford’s childhood home, a farmhouse from the Puritan era are all wonderful things you can discover and enjoy at the Village.
Memorial Day weekend is always Civil War rememberance weekend at Greenfield Village and there are reenactments and Civil War soldiers roaming all through the place! I managed to get a couple videos with my cell phone, albeit with slightly poor sound quality. I still feel they are interesting nonetheless.
This video is of the Union soldiers band playing some music under a tree. I apologize again for the poor sound quality in both videos.
When I was a kid, my family went on a lot of road trips. We would head north to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or up into the thumb. Sometimes, we’d head into Ohio and camp there for a week. I remember in fourth grade, my family went on a six week long trip from our home in Detroit, down south to New Orleans then out west to San Diego and back north again to head home.
I traveled through almost thirty states in that trip. I stood in four different states at one time. I went swimming in U.S. Military protected water and ran away before anyone showed up to arrest us. I climbed a glacier in the middle of July and slid down the snow of a mountain on a trash bag. I experienced so many different sights and sounds in those six weeks. I doubt I will ever be able to replicate the wonder and amazement that trip instilled within me.
We did a lot of driving on that trip. I sat between my Mom and Dad and had the honor of changing the tapes in the car when we wanted to listen to something new. In the middle of the desert in Arizona or possibly New Mexico, my mother and older sister had dozed off in the truck. My dad and I decided it was best not to wake them when we made a quick pit stop.
I looked at a map of the country hanging in the rest stop bathroom. I traced the path I (assumed) we had taken. My dad came out of the men’s room and walked to a vending machine where he bought a box of Everlasting Gobstoppers – my favorite candy at the time.
We walked back to the truck and hopped inside. My mother mumbled something in her half-roused state and then fell back to sleep. I buckled myself back in and my dad turned the key. An old episode of “The Shadow” resumed. My dad handed me the box of gobstoppers and I gave him an orange one before popping a yellow one into my mouth.
For the next hour or so, my dad and I listened to Lamont Cranston solve crimes while sucking on a gobstopper and laughing with my dad. Despite all of the amazing things I saw and all the great people I met during those six weeks, the memory of eating candy and laughing with my dad is the one I remember with the most fondness.
This city is killing us. I’m certain of it as I brush the hair out of your eyes in the park. Your gaze squarely set on the skyscrapers surrounding us; enveloping us; consuming us. I chuckle at the thought of the two of us and take a drink of sweet tea.
My laptop sits on the corner of our blanket playing song after song. We silently listen to the swells and crashes of each. I gently hum along with a bar or two while I lay my head in your lap and you watch the taxis drive by, honking their horns and transporting their fares. I pick a blade of grass and tickle your hand with it. You laugh and lean down to kiss me.
“We should run away. Pack the car with the odds and ends of our life and run away. We could go from town to town and pick up random jobs and make money for the next gas tank. We should run away.”
I’d never heard you so excited without the aid of alcohol; without the aid of cocaine; without my aid. You seem more alive in this moment than I had ever seen you. You look into my eyes and I can feel you waiting for my response. I feel your eagerness to do something, but more importantly, that I be involved in what you wanted to do.
Twitter is a microblogging client that allows users to make updates (tweets) in 140 characters or less and view other users’ tweets, as well. The networking aspect of Twitter is far superior to that of most other social networks insofar as you can follow whomever you desire without feeling “creepy.”
That being said, each user has a very different reason for following who they follow. Some decide to only read the updates of various cewebrities. Whereas others stick to their own niche of friends. In my case, there weren’t many people who I knew on Twitter, so I ended up following a few cewebrities and a two or three people I (sort of) knew and then branched out slowly from there. I question some of the depth of the relationships I’ve forged through Twitter but, admittedly, it has proven to be a great networking tool for me.
As my networking on Twitter grew and my various relationships there flourished, I began using the service more and more. I now jump into various conversations and get replies to questions posed in my tweets. If you look at the following graph, you will see that although I have been on Twitter since May 2007, my use spiked just this past March. I am now a regular twitterer receiving updates through SMS and my favorite Twitter client, Twhirl.
My experiences with Twitter haven’t all been good. Twitter frequently goes down. This issue with scaling has become so prevalent that websites such as Is Twitter Down have been created to allow users to, well, find out if Twitter is experiencing downtime. Nonetheless, Twitter is gaining popularity and is picking up more casual users rather than just the core of tech enthusiasts who adopted the service early on. The service has a lot of growing to do and must learn to scale in order for that growth to persist.
Questions of the Day:
How do you choose who you follow? Do you follow everyone who follows you? Do you keep your tweets private? What is your Twitter experience and how do you think it can be improved?
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