The Zumbox blog has an entry called "I've Got My Zumbox. Now What?," but comments are closed. I just got set up tonight. I am asking the same question: now what?

I heard about Zumbox from Triple Pundit. The idea is simple: register your postal address at zumbox.com, and you can receive mail targeted at that address. The mail is, of course, electronic. They've done the work to validate 150 million U.S. addresses already. You may have mail waiting for you. It's ideal for organizations (both for-profit and non-profit) to send you mail that they would normally pay to prepare, print, and have delivered by your postal carrier.

Individuals can send 50 pieces per month for free. I tried sending a postcard to demo addresses listed at the Zumbox site, but they're not valid.

One obvious question regarding person-to-person mail is, why not send email instead? I can give you one reason. Let's say I want to contact all my neighbors. I don't know all their email addresses. With Zumbox, I can do it electronically. There's a certain attraction to the semi-privacy of sending email to a postal address instead of an email address. I don't know their email address, and they don't know mine. But using Zumbox we can still communicate electronically.

So here are my first impressions:

1. I need a way to query whether an address has been claimed. At other social media sites, I'm asked to upload my address book to see which email addresses are active at the social media site. Zumbox should do the same. Then automatically add those addresses into my Zumbox contacts list so I can easily send them Zumbox mail.
2. Looking the other way, Zumbox should list the organizations who are set up to send mail to me. It's self-evident if the organizations I care about are using Zumbox. I would be getting mail from them. But maybe I want to support organizations who have gone paperless. For example, if L.L. Bean was set up, but Eddie Bauer wasn't, then maybe I want to do business with the former and not the latter.
3. Building off the previous idea, Zumbox should also have an easy way for me to petition the organizations I care about to start using Zumbox. I should be able to search for organizations, and check a "me, too" box if someone has already petitioned them. This will be powerful ammunition for Zumbox's marketing efforts if they can show organizations that their constituencies are asking for them.
4. Here's another variation of this idea of using demand from constituencies to drive businesses to use Zumbox: give me an email address where I can forward all of my opt-in commercial email to Zumbox. Then Zumbox can tally the pieces they're getting and market Zumbox to those commercial email producers. This could be powerful bait -- do you want to manage a list of email addresses, or do you want to reach your customers literally where they live? Having a postal mailing list guarantees no bounces, and it allows detailed analysis based on ZIP codes. Thus Zumbox could become a powerful competitor against other opt-in commerical email services. I would encourage organizations with whom I already have relationships (Amazon, eBay, etc.) to use Zumbox to reach me. I am more likely to read ads, etc. in my Zumbox account than I am in my regular mail account. I want my email inbox back! I know email is essentially free and Zumbox charges $0.05 per piece. But don't you think both sides would be willing to deal?
5. Zumbox needs to be thinking in both directions. They're obviously set up for electronic correspondence. But it's advantageous to connect to the paper world during the transition to paperless. They should create some attractive postcard designs. Greeting cards, too. I would pay to have these pieces printed and delivered to my friends and family. They get snail mail from me, and Zumbox gets viral marketing paid for by me! How about linking up with electronic greeting card companies?

Finally, I'll point out that if this idea fragments, chaos could destroy it. I'm not going to deal with multiple providers. The U.S. Postal Office should have thought of this first. or FedEx. Or UPS. But Zumbox is in the game. I wish them the best of luck.

I'm not even done listening to the Philosophy Bites podcast featuring Allen Buchanan, who discusses biological enhancement with Nigel Warburton. I had to make a few comments immediately. This is one of the most fascinating conversations Dr. Warburton has hosted! Very fresh and thought-provoking subject! Humans have been enhancing themselves for millenia. Literacy is an enhancement. Caffeine is an enhancement. Now biology is revealing new vistas of human enhancement. What are the ethical implications?

Two other personal observations: First, I was surprised to learn that prosthetic legs give runners such an advantage that they are now disqualified from competing. I plan to look into that more. Second, this is one of my favorite podcast episodes for no other reason than because Dr. Buchanan uses the word "err" and pronounces it correctly. :)

On this tenth anniversary of the Columbine tragedy, I saw Time's story mentioned at Twitter about Americans' refusal to give up their guns. "Whatever momentum the Columbine killings gave to gun control has long since petered out." See "Ten Years After Columbine, It's Easier to Bear Arms." My first reaction was, "And this is a bad thing why?" I will always remember driving past New Life Church in Colorado Springs only hours after the tragedy was ended by a trained, armed parishioner who stopped a gunman with her concealed handgun and saved lives. The cowardly gunman was only wounded. Instead of fighting back, he committed suicide. Read Jeanne Assam's story. Why didn't Time talk about that example? We all know why. There's only one side to the debate in the mainstream media: they think the only way to reduce violence is to disarm society. I'm coming to the opposite conclusion: I'm seriously considering honoring the Columbine victims by taking firearms training, purchasing a handgun, and applying for a concealed carry permit. We all have a civic duty to protect the weak from the strong.

I'm willing to keep an open mind, but it seems to me that an armed society is a polite society. If there were more stories of trained citizens stopping homicidal gunmen, there would be a certain level of deterrence. Gunmen not deterred risk experiencing suicide by a concealed weapon wielded by a trained citizen. I would feel differently if there were news reports of trained, law-abiding citizens causing loss of life. But what we have now are murderers preying on the unarmed. We can reduce the likelihood of future Columbine tragedies by doing our civic duty and producing more New Life Church stories.

Since blogging about becoming a Twitterer I have learned a little more. I gave up social media for Lent. (That was a very liberating and inspiring experience. I dedicated the time I had been spending socializing online toward communion with God.) Now in Easter season, I'm rethinking how I use social media. I am trying to focus the stream I'm following to a level that I can actually keep up with. I got the idea from Yammer. Not sure how long it will last, but for now both my @alum.mit.edu and @hp.com streams are quiet enough that I can read every update from everyone. To accomplish that feat with Twitter meant unfollowing several people. I expect to be more bold about following new people and unfollowing others. I haven't found the balance yet, but the initial results have been a great relief of stress. I am already using Twitter search more so I can explore what strangers have to say about things I care about. And I feel closer to the people I still follow. I actually engage in conversation, which is what Twitter is all about.

My dad sent me a copy of a poem illuminated with some attractive graphics, so I decided to share it with my readers. It goes like this:

How to Plant Your Garden

First, you come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses

For the garden of your daily living,
Plant three rows of peas:

   1. Peace of mind
   2. Peace of heart
   3. Peace of soul

Plant four rows of squash:

   1. Squash gossip
   2. Squash indifference
   3. Squash grumbling
   4. Squash selfishness

Plant four rows of lettuce:

   1. Let us be faithful
   2. Let us be kind
   3. Let us be patient
   4. Let us love one another

No garden is without turnips:

   1. Turn up for meetings
   2. Turn up for service
   3. Turn up to help one another

To conclude our garden we must have thyme:

   1. Time for each other
   2. Time for family
   3. Time for friends

Water freely with patience and cultivate with love.
There is much fruit in your garden because you reap what you sow.

-- Author Unknown

I have several reasons for posting this poem on my blog even though you can find it at several other places on the Web. First, I like the graphics so much that I made my own illuminated copy of the poem at http://purl.org/net/tbc/garden/. Have a look. It's simply but attractively formatted so that you can easily copy & paste it into email. Second, I want to see how my copy spreads compared with others. Is an initial link from a blog to a PURL enough for Google to give my copy good placement? Third, since it seems that there's no stopping people from forwarding chain email, I'd like to model how to do it. Note how my illuminated copy is formatted, and note how I cite my sources. If you know the author of the poem or the designer of the graphics, please let me know. Finally, note how I add myself to the chain: "HTML formatting by Tim Chambers 1E4AF729D5CEFFD0." It frustrates me when I get chain email without sources. And note how I couple this blog entry to the copy that's suitable for forwarding. I'm sure it's a lost cause, but if I can convince just one person to improve Internet communications then it was worth the time I spent writing this blog entry.

And in case you're wondering about "1E4AF729D5CEFFD0" -- it's my GPG fingerprint. It's my totally unique identifier. Who else but me would bother including that particular hexadecimal number on Web pages? So far I've been able to use it to ensure that Google returns content unique to me with 100% accuracy.

 Today I had occasion to explain the origin of my username, so I decided to blog the answer so I can point others to it in the future.

I've been tbc on the Internet since 1981. Those are my initials. My computer account at university was automatically assigned tbc as the login ID. I've never been convinced of any reason to deviate from this convention. In 1994 AOL started infesting the Internet with hundreds of thousands of induhviduals and other naïve folk who didn't know what they were getting into. Services started springing up, and rules proliferated. I often had to use tbchambers because tbc was too short. Occasionally, tbc was already taken. I'm a computer scientist by training. We always start counting from zero. So I started using tbc0.

I've had a Twitter account (tbc0) for almost 8 months. I tried to use it as advertised, tweeting about what I was doing. But that got boring quickly because none of my friends were on Twitter. I tried to enforce my own intended use by blocking people I didn't know who started following me. I wasn't sensitive to the way Twitter has evolved.

November 30th I got stuck in a snowstorm heading home on I-70. That's the day I discovered search.twitter.com. I found weather information that confirmed my decision to get off the road for the night. I explored with other search terms and started to see the possibilities. I learned that hashtags (Twitter user | Web site) facilitate ad hoc conversations.

During the snowstorm I caught on to how Twitter is being used. It's not just for people you already know. It's a way to connect with new people. I started noting my observations as #twittertips, and etiquette opinions as #tweetiquette.

My interests fall into a number of categories: (1) Twitter has exploded since I first joined, and a variety of people I'm acquainted with outside Twitter now tweet; (2) accomplished people I know and respect; (3) conservatives related to the Top Conservatives on Twitter (#tcot) and Rebuild the Party (#rebuild) movements; (4) Twitterers in Colorado, especially @COTweeters and #cstweetup (about half in the real estate industry); and (5) high-tech / social media.

It's also worth pointing out that one doesn't have to follow Twitterers to enjoy their streams. John Cleese and Wil Wheaton fall into that category for me. (Caution: their language is not family-friendly.) I wish William Shatner would tweet more. I also admire Chris Brogan, who "uses Twitter at volume." (tinyurl.com/followaton). When I checked today, he was following almost 23,000 (including me), had over 27,000 followers, and over 28,000 updates.

I maintain my Tweeple page at lilurl.org/mg97dg so that I can make sense of the Twitterverse.

Update 2009-04-20: Balancing Twitter with the rest of my life.

4 stars out of 10.

I wanted to give this film zero stars for being so preachy. But I have to give it 4 stars for the excellent casting (Reeves, Connelly, Bates, Cleese, and others), cool Gort, and overall good Hollywood production quality. I would've given the movie an extra star if only they had found a way to fit "klaatu berada nikto" into the remake script.

I can accept that the "stop being mean to one another" message of the original needed an update, but "stop killing the planet" wasn't convincing. It made me think of "The Arrival" starting Charlie Sheen. (That film wouldn't play today, though, because it portrays global warming as not being humanity's fault.)

Today a friend sent me a stumble that started, "I know this music isn't your cup of tea..." The music was ok, but he was right -- not my cup of tea. What he couldn't have known is that I had never visited a musical group's MySpace page before. It struck me right away as a brilliant idea. The group gets an explicit measure of the size of its fandom, and the stickiness of the page is helped by the group's music playing in the background. I searched and found my two favorite artists (don't force me to choose!): Basia and The Idea of North. This is the first good use I've found for my MySpace page. I'm impressed that MySpace even allows categories of friends. I have two "artist" friend requests pending. Thanks, Eric!

I'll be using two computers quite a lot this month, so I set up Synergy this morning. It took me a while to figure out how to make it work in my office. Maybe my experience will be helpful to others.

I haven't been able to get domain names working on my home network, so I have to talk to my systems by IP address. My mouse and keyboard are attached to eddie; marvin is the client. The Synergy troubleshooting page shows the errors I was seeing: "Server already has a connected client with name 'XXX'" and "Server refused client with name 'XXX'." But it was only by trial and error that I figured out I need to register my client by IP address and set up an alias for the IP address to the client name. Here's the config that works:

 

section: screens
        eddie:
        Top:
        10.100.326.102:
end
section: links
        eddie:
                up = Top
                right = 10.100.326.102
        Top:
                down = eddie
        10.100.326.102:
                left = eddie
end
section: aliases
10.100.326.102:
 marvin
end

Then I just connect to eddie using its IP address (e.g. 10.100.326.101). I'll bet synergy would have worked out of the box if my domain name resolution was working they way it's supposed to. I know I should fix that, but for now I'm simply glad I have Synergy working.