Stories

Speaking Disasters and Lessons Learned

In Conferences, Stories on 26 June 2009 with 2 comments

Scott Bekun is writing a book for O’Reilly Media, due out in October, called Confessions of a Public Speaker. He’s asking for stories of public speaking disasters. I couldn’t help but add a couple of my own.
Story 1: Always Carry a Thumb Drive
I was doing a day-long session on Community Design and had prepared an [...]

Someone’s Always Listening

In Stories, TILTHW, Work on 29 January 2009 with 5 comments

I was working for a tech company that will go unnamed a few years ago, and I had a bad day. A really bad day. So that night, I went out to a favorite restaurant with a couple of friends and got a bottle of wine.

Tamed By the Beast

In Life, Stories on 6 January 2009 with 16 comments

A snowmobile is basically the biggest, meanest chainsaw you’ve ever seen, with two skis bolted to the front and a seat slapped on top. It roars. It spits diesel fumes. It wants to go faster. My mistake was listening to it.

A couple nights before I met the beast, I was at a New Years Eve [...]

Regina Powazek 1919-2008

In Life, Stories on 8 October 2008 with 171 comments

Regina Powazek is my father’s mother. She was born in Dobre, Poland, in 1919. When she was 20, the nazis invaded, and she fled to Russia. The border was closed behind her. Most of the rest of the Polish Powazeks were murdered. She escaped along with my grandpa Ben, her sister Hanka, and her brother [...]

White Folks for Obama

In Life, Politics, Stories on 27 August 2008 with 9 comments

One of the many things I love about my dear wife is her patronage of the arts. After too many years living in cities, I’ve got my defenses up when we’re out on the street. But Heather loves artists and will usually buy from someone selling their work.
Over a year ago, we were walking down [...]

Chihuahuas and Children, a Story in Three Parts

In Life, Stories on 21 July 2008 with 9 comments

Photo by Heather
1.
Heather’s traveling for work, which means that I’m on Early Morning Walk duty. The dogs are used to walking with Heather at ungodly early hours, so my main goal in the morning is to stay as quiet as possible, lest they realize I’m awake. One early morning sigh and I’ll have two Chihuahuas [...]

On Permanence and Scars of Choice

In Life, Stories, Tattoos on 25 June 2008 with 18 comments

The thing that gives me pause about getting a tattoo is all the awful things I would have gotten tattoos of earlier in life.
Think of photos of yourself in the 80s. Imagine if, somehow, that powder blue Don Johnson suit you loved, the one you wore with a white t-shirt and the sleeves rolled [...]

90-Second Stories

In 90-Second Stories, Fray, Stories, Video on 16 April 2008 with 1 comment

A short personal story by yours truly. This is the first entry in Fray’s new 90-Second Stories group. What’s your 90-Second Story?

How Pixish Happened

In Business, Life, Pixish, Stories on 10 February 2008 with 11 comments

With some stories, it’s hard to know where to begin. I could start with my obsession with photography and magazines that goes back to when I was a kid. Or I could talk about running a newspaper in college and working at HotWired in the ’90s. Or when I started a photography magazine and a [...]

New in Fray: Busted in Jena

In Fray, Magazines, News, Politics, Stories on 7 January 2008 with Comments Off

When a group of black students in Jena, Louisiana, defied tradition and sat under a “whites only” tree, no one could have predicted that it would become a national story, that Reverend Al Sharpton would lead a march through town, or that Michael David Murphy would quit his job and travel to Jena to meet, [...]