Asymptomatic

I've been casting about online for some kind of portable training device, something that can keep track of my time on the road while I train for a particular race later this year. There are quite a few options for watches, each with options of their own.

One of the more fascinating watch brands out there is Suunto. There are a couple of other makes that have similar capabilities, but Suunto looks to have expanded on an interesting idea of connecting wirelessly to peripherals like a chest-worn heart-rate monitor, a bike cadence monitor, and even a GPS. The watch acts as a central processor for the peripherals, receiving, recording, and presenting a subset of the information, and then relaying it (via USB tether) to a computer for more intense processing and output.

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I've lately had the inclination to rebuild my blog's relevancy from the last year of once-per-month posting. Maybe you've noticed the last few days. By integrating blogging into my daily schedule, I think I can churn out blog posts with regular enough frequency to get "back in the game." As with most things, it would probably be easier to have someone to do this with rather than doing it alone.

So I was thinking about Inksmith lately. We've seen ideas like this come and go, but I think the idea of a new blogging fraternity is a good one. A membership system would simply relate all of the bloggers to the others, maybe aggregate posts, and provide a topic support system.

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Alex and I have been going back and forth in comments over the areas of our interest that overlap. In his recent post, he asks, "how long can organic communities self-moderate?"

I admit that I haven't read the Starfish and the Spider, although I did just one-click it into my Kindle, so it's doomed to suffer my analysis. Nevertheless, I had some comments about how leaderless organizations can thrive, particularly in open source communities, of which I happen to be a part of a couple.

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We had a discussion at work the other day, and again on IRC recently, about what to name our computers. At first this might sound like a silly thing, especially to people who use a single home computer, but for people with more than one at home or who use computers every day at work, it's something that you probably end up thinking about at some point.

All of my computers at home are named after "characters" in books. This computer is Defiant, named after a spaceship in Bill Baldwin's Galactic Convoy novel. My file server is Naruto after the manga character, and my notebook is named Runcible, after a much higher-tech device that is the center of the Neal Stephenson novel The Diamond Age.

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A few of the folks I "hang with" online are/were involved in the 9rules network. I am not a member, but I had tried to become one at one point. I've been following the recent actions of the network with some interest, and thought I would save my thoughts for later as they may be relevant for other communities in which I am involved and have influence. Some background on the current issue is probably in order.

Essentially, many people had joined the network for the purpose of being affiliated with other bloggers who created great content. Their goal was to enrich the web. These folks chose to participate in the network insofar as they posted new, quality content to their own blogs, which were syndicated specifically to the rest of the members. Although the network powers-that-be had created a site for interaction among members, these folks never saw participation in those forums as a requirement to their membership, simply their continued contribution of quality blog content.

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