TheListServe Blog

Whoops, I got the notice on Saturday and rarely check my emails on the weekends. So here I am putting something together fairly quickly! The Listserve is such a neat concept. I want you all to know that I really do read (or, at least skim) each and every message you send. Especially, thanks to George F. (Guy) McHendry (A Matter of Words, Words that Matter), Jr. and Ryan (Productively Creative Thinking), whose emails I actually printed out and hung up over my desk at work. :-) A bit about myself. I'm a software engineer at an aerospace company by day, which is pretty cool, but my passion is dabbling in electronic music and interactive technology with a view to its artistic and creative potential. I have a "band" (more of a project, really) called Schema Factor - If you're into electronic dance music and want to hear/support something a bit different from the mainstream, please check it out on Facebook and the Web. Looking for similarly minded folks to collaborate ...

Have you ever tried microwaving a doughnut? Enjoying the simple pleasures, Heather heatherhart+listserve[AT]gmail.com Venice, CA

I am the mother of a young man who is non-verbal, intellectually delayed, and on the autism spectrum. He is also a gentleman who loves holding doors open for people, loves helping strangers anytime he can. Like most men his age, he loves video games and pretty girls. Unlike most men his age, he is not planning a career. He will most likely never get married. Our highest ambitions for him involve things like Supported Employment and Group Homes. But that's okay. After all, what are our highest ambitions for any of our children? For them to be a doctor, a lawyer, a businessman/woman? No, not when you get right down to it. Most parents I know have dreams for their children that are much more basic. For them to have a good life. A happy life. Friends, family, joy, love. My son will have all of that, in abundance. I became an advocate while raising him. At first, I was advocating for him. Then I gradually started coaching his classmates' parents on how to advocate for their children...

A few years ago, I was in a very bad place in my life. I was trying to get over a loss, and I'd spent more than a year hiding away, avoiding friends, conversations, or challenges. Life wasn't really going anywhere. Come May and a beautiful springtime, I decided I had to do something to snap out of it. I drove a couple hours out of town and set out on a hiking trail I'd never been on before. I'd heard something about being in nature as a cure for all stresses, or exercise as a mood fix, or something. It had sounded right. I hoped to be entirely alone in the woods, and to emerge at the end of the day finally happy again. After an hour and a half of walking, and encountering maybe two or three other people, I came out onto a bay on the lake. The pebble beach stretched a couple hundred metres in a wide curve, and the water was still. As I walked along the beach, I noticed how many butterflies were sunning themselves on the rocks. It was quiet, and warm, and I was looking fo...

I'm looking for responses here; advice from you. I'm 30 years old and much of the sense of purpose in my life has drifted away. When I was younger I had aspirations to do two things: to become a biologist and to write music. Those pursuits were intended to give a backbone to my life. To expand the boundaries of human knowledge and to create a permanent record of my thoughts passed down through the ages. As I got older those things became less satisfying. The realities of life as a biologist turned me off from pursuing it as a career. As for music, the idea that it is in any way permanent began to feel absurd. Technology and ephemeral taste and the vast expanse of existing music will certainly obliterate anything I create over a couple hundred years. A thousand and I'm definitely toast. Without those guiding principles in my life though, I'm not sure how to feel about my time on earth. I've found a profession I can sustain, but the world is not enriched by my ou...

Hi I have to confess I’ve not been keeping up with my Listserv reading so if you’re reading this let me first say thank you for indulging me a few moments. I live in a desert in the north west of Australia, what I like to call Mad Max country. As a result my oldest son goes to boarding school far away and we see him once a month. This has been hard on me (not on him, he loves it) as I always wanted to be there for all his experiences. So I wanted to share a little something with him, and I guess all of you, about love and about his mother. I had known Gayle for a few years in passing as a friend, actually a girlfriend, of a friend. After I’d been away for a while, I went for drinks with friends at the house she was living at. She was single at the time and so was I and during the slightly intoxicated chatting we accidentally finished each other’s sentence. We glanced at each other, she smiled slyly, I grinned like a Muppet, and a spark leapt between us. I know, I know; it sounds painfu...

“I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.” - Steve Jobs, The Lost Interview Programming is not just for nerds. It’s surprisingly fun, creative, and accessible. If you like solving puzzles, being creative, and working on DIY projects, you will enjoy programming. Learning to program is easier than learning a foreign language (I speak three and code, so I can compare). Once you know how to program, you can build things you are passionate about and hopefully make the world a better place. Mark Zuckerberg wanted to make more friends so he built Facebook. I wanted to dress better so I created Clothia, a fashion app that makes styling outfits easy. Learning to code was the first step in working toward our dreams. Along with Bill Clinton, will.i.am, Chris Bosh and Bill Gates, I am honored to be involved in Code.org, a great initiative that promotes computer science education in schools. Please check it out and see how you can...

I was going to tell you about having a heart attack, and adopting two kids, and striving to be ethical and kind in a world that doesn't often encourage these things. But all my friends said "NO LIFE ADVICE!" So instead, here are a series of short bedtime stories told to me by my daughter, Olivia (5). Note, Henry is her brother, 22 months old, recently adopted; these stories were told before he came home to us, when he was just a picture and a name, an unknown quantity to her: March 23 2013: OK dad. So Henry went to the park! All by himself. He went to the park and he climb up in the tree. And then he fell down! OH NO! and he got a bloody. On his arm! So you have to put a band aid on it. Next time I will go with him to the park and say NO HENRY, YOU DO NOT CLIMB A TREE, YOU ARE TOO LITTLE. And if he goes in the tree and fall down I will catch him, but then he has a time out, because climbing trees is DAMEROUS. And then Henry grew up. And he is going to be a bug doctor. Wha...

I'll keep it brief because I tend to not read the long ones. From the legendary farmer and real food activist, Joel Salatin: 1. Get involved. 2. Read widely. 3. Come home. Do these three things and I think you'll have a better chance of being happy, content, and creating meaningful relationships. It's working for me. To hear more from the interview where Joel talks about those things, you can just Google "Bulletproof Exec podcast #29" and the specific part is at the 57:30 mark. Be well. Jess Moore moorestile[AT]gmail.com Worthington, OH

Dear Listserve, cc You and 20k others To: The Year of Hibernation If you have curly hair Listen up. Saying hello is easy and incredibly tasty. Usually, listserves serve a list - man too. If quantum theory is correct. The whole theory that adrenaline gives you an incorrect pin on a writing. While doing it or even email ever again after sending the data for the sake of continuity, it's talk about how I really knew, and read book on ethnobotany and learned of this week. She came home knowing how to fix the previous weekend and rambunctiously slapping each other often. I thought was merely a dream and I can possibly do with the wind crash against my face, allow me to take a penny from them somehow. The bass drum of her more unusual habits. Because once you get a little bit better instead of receiving advice. Hell, if anything, because without inclusive, intelligent, open-hearted vision of people dislike semantic versioning takes, I have no Chicken Soup for the first time, pause a bit...

Hey y’all, For those of you that haven’t been to San Francisco, here is a list of my favorite things to do in the area: 1. Eat Bi-Rite ice cream in Dolores Park 2. Tan yourself with other hip San Francisco residents at Dolores Park 3. Visit Bi-Rite grocery store in the Mission 4. Visit Golden Gate park and climb to the top of the DeYoung Museum 5. Stare at beautiful art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (“SFMoMA”) 6. Window shop on Valencia St in The Mission - start at 16th and Valencia and walk to 25th and Valencia 7. Visit the Ferry Building Farmers Market (on Saturdays) under the Bay Bridge 8. Take a cable car on the California Line to Pac Heights and meander back down Fillmore St 9. Eat dim-sum in the largest China Town in the USA (Koi Palace in Daly City which is South of San Francisco is considered excellent for this) 10. See a concert at the Great American Music Hall 11. check out the jazz at Yoshi’s 12. Catch the SF Symphony at the beautiful Davies Hall 13. Rent a car a...

I became a volunteer firefighter in 2005 in York, Pennsylvania. I don’t know why I joined, it just seemed like something to do at the time. Everybody loves a fire truck, and the station was covered in photographs from before my grandparents were even born. The people had a dry, morbid sense of humor, which seemed to fit my personality. It seemed like it would be something different to do with my days. I passed fire school, got a few years of experience under my belt, and decided that I wanted to do this for a living. 2 years and 3 applications later, I was accepted into the Baltimore City Fire Department in 2008. I began the fire academy. More push-ups and yelling than I could have ever expected, but I learned all of the quirks that my local county training had never taught me. Baltimore was much different than little old York ever was. I learned about checking your hydrants for drugs or guns before hooking up and charging supply lines. I learned never to stand directly in front...

GISHWHES. The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen. This year, it started at 9.08 GMT on Sunday 11th August. It’s officially the world’s largest scavenger hunt and it sees thousands of people going about doing crazy creative things for one week. I first took part last year, in the second GISHWHES and have decided that I’m just about recovered enough from last year to do it again now. Deciding to join a GISHWHES team was probably one of the best decisions I made last year. I was contributing a little money towards the grand prize fund, and some to a charity that’s linked with the Hunt. GISHWHES joined me and my friends to a group of complete strangers that we had to work with to get the items completed. We ended up working on a 3 foot high dinosaur made of sanitary towels and a 12 foot long scarf. The thing about GISHWHES is not the weird stuff you end up doing, or the slightly freaked out cashier at the till when you buy 20 packs of extra strong sanitary pads, ...

For the last decade I have studied and taught courses in Communication and Rhetoric and I am always surprised at how easily people overlook the role communication plays in our lives. While we often speak in clichés like actions speak louder than words, we forget how intimately tied words and actions are. We establish credibility with others, build relationships, and maintain the minutiae of daily life with and through communication. Instead of lamenting that a person or a politician is all rhetoric and no action, take some time to think about how our shared cultural values generate the rhetoric we use and connect to the actions we do and do not take. Because our words and actions are so closely connected I want to take the opportunity the Listserve has provided to encourage you to be more mindful of how you communicate. These are a few tips and suggestions I often share with my students in an attempt to encourage more careful and mindful communication. While none of them are earth shat...

I can’t take credit for most of what I’m about to share with you. I’m just passing along borrowed "words of wisdom" that I've received and keep coming back to. Hopefully they will mean something to some of you too. 1) Read Panarchy by Lance Gunderson and C.S. Holling. I have to admit I haven’t read the entire book, but the premise itself is worth sharing. To me the book is about our innate fear/inability to deal with change. The idea is that in nature, as well as in our day-to-day life, things are in a constant state of flux - growth and decline. This happens for a lot of predictable and unpredictable reasons. But nature deals with change much more gracefully than humans do and we can learn a lot from natural systems. The book applies to every aspect of human life from relationships, to running a company, to planning a city, the list goes on. What I’ve taken from the book (these are my words, not the authors’) is that we have to expect that things won’t always be go...

Some Degree of Separation – Let's try this. By reaching out to total strangers, would we find a known connection within a minimal number of links? Below are some info related to me. Do any of them ring a bell to you? Or know anyone who just might? Do email me your related info, if any, or send my email to someone you think may be interested. It's really just a way of finding out if long-lost acquaintances, friends, relatives or friends of friends are just a few email threads away. Don't worry; I have no intention of spamming anyone. I loathe those things. (And yes, there's always Facebook to search for people, but wouldn't this be fun too?) These are random information about me or related to people close to me: • Arayat Pampanga • Fabie Estate Paco • University of Santo Tomas • City University Bellevue 1999 • The AdPlanet • Veronica Ellen Bautista • Far East Bank and Trust Company • Supreme Court of The Philippines Thank you for your time, and to Listserve for this ...

Antidisanthropomorphizationism (n) — 1) the belief in being opposed to being against relating to things in human terms 2) candidate for longest non-technical word in the English language (2 char > antidisestablishmentarianism) Danya Henninger imagicdigital[AT]gmail.com Philadelphia, PA

The thing is…I have actually put off writing for a long time. Much too long in fact. There has always been some reason to not write. Some more legitimate than others. But the desire to put pen to paper has always been there. And as time and life have progressed, the need to just sit down and dump the weight of my world onto a blank page has become overwhelmingly cathartic. I have long felt the need to start some kind of an online journal or blog, not just to share my life but also share in the lives of others. In the end, I think I just needed something to force me out of my shell, push me over the edge and put myself out there on the interwebs. I can’t think of a better opportunity to do so than The Listserve project, and I am grateful for the chance to read about your lives and share a bit about mine. It feels like I have lived more than my share of life in 33 years. Far more than I can boil down into a 600 word email. I have traveled the world, married the love of my lif...

Beer. I spent a large chunk of my childhood in Germany (in Bavaria and Schwabia to be exact) and thus was inculcated from a very early age with the bias that German beer is superior to every other beer. While that bias was difficult to overcome, it finally happened during my first trip with my beer nerd boyfriend—to Belgium. Beyond gorging ourselves on chocolate while there, we spent a lot of time in various beer bars and breweries, drinking lambics and observing the culture. If you guys ever get a chance to go to Belgium, I would highly recommend you go out of your way to visit breweries like Cantillon or De Struise; even Delirium Cafe in the heart of Brussels will give you a sense of it (but don't drink Delirium, use the bottle list). By the end of the trip, I was just so obsessed with the culture and sour beer that I was forced to accept that while German beer is absolutely fantastic, there is a whole world of beer out there that is just waiting for you to discover it. So how to...

Hello everyone. I'm 40 years old and I was hoping someone could help me. I'm at a time in my life where I just don't know what to do. I wish to have a better job, a better paying job. But I was foolish and never went to college. I think I'd make a great nurse, but I can't afford to go back full time, and going at night would take about 6 or so years. I make about $30,000 a year. It's an okay amount, but I can't take care of myself. What would happen if my husband got sick and no longer could work? What would happen if we divorced? I push paper around. It's so boring. It's the same thing every day. What are some positions I could look into that pay a bit more? I am now making an amount that I think is the most a company would be willing to pay me without additional schooling. What are some careers I could learn in 2 years including prereqs? A 2 year program at night would probably be around 4 years... I find that all the research I've done is misl...

Two facts: 1) I love "self-help" books and 2) in high school I was the prom king. For whatever reason, "self-help" and "self-improvement" have gotten a bad rap. There seems to be an attitude that a book titled "The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are" is necessarily a book written for "losers." It's not. I promise you. It's an awesome book filled with real insights. And there are tons of other books, seminars, blogs, coaches, and therapists that are so wise and so helpful, but we often don't take advantage of them because we don't want to be in the company of the "losers" who need those kinds of things. Many people would be more comfortable browsing the hemorrhoid treatment aisle in the drug store than the self-help aisle of the library. "What if someone SEES me?!" But when it comes to real relief from pain and the end of discomfort, th...

Hello there, Fellow Listservers! I come from the vast and diverse land, India, where Education is given the top most priority in our lives. In fact, most of our parents decide what we will study even before we are born. I often come across people who say that the Education system is broken. I beg to differ. The system is not broken, rather it's becoming less relevant as we enter into a new era. Henry Ford, once said, You cannot learn in School what the World is going to do tomorrow. How true! A majority of our time (20-23 years! GOSH!) is spent in school. Rather than preparing us for the world and teaching us real skills, we are asked to mug up answers and spit it out in examinations. My country will have a huge population of youth by the end of this decade - And many of these will turn out to be unskilled. Our biggest asset may turn out to be our biggest liability. How am I solving this? After I graduated, I started up with my startup - LearnFlow. We train individuals who are abou...

The listserve. The listserve is so invigorating, and yet I'm not sure how to express myself and open the conversation I'm looking for without something semi-confessional. I guess I'll start here: when I was about 5 years old, I loved to hug. Not just hugs themselves, but the act of hugging. My family members always found me clutching around their knees or their stomachs that were too large for me to wrap my arms around. I interrupted class and visits to my ailing grandfather and movie theaters with hugs. When I went to summer camp, I'd stop playing baseball or hop off the monkey bars to give my counselors hugs. I can't imagine 15 and 16-year-olds particularly enjoyed that kind of attention, considering raging hormones and all. Nothing beat a good hug at that age; it was a way of feeling safe, and of feeling out another person in a way that conversation couldn't. Anyway, I'm not sure when I grew out of hugs, but I did. I wish I hadn't, because the warmth,...

I am an Indie game developer with couple of my own games already built. Also I have 8 years of web development experience under my belt. Never stopped learning! At the age of 12 I already knew what I wanted to do (make games and tell computers do what I want them to do!). And never could understand those who did not know. And do not know even today. So.. find what you love to do! Because if you love what you do, eventually you will be very proficient at that. And rewards (money, satisfaction) will come for your outstanding work, which will be like a hobby to you. And others will benefit from that. Equals Happiness. One should re-read a book of 37signals founders called "REWORK" each year. Just to make sure not to drift away from great things/ideas/common sense. It's full of short essays. Favorite quote: "The fastest way to get an engineer to solve a problem is to declare that the problem is unsolvable. No engineer can walk away from an unsolvable problem until it’s s...

One of the things that have always filled me with curiosity is men’s attitude towards female sexuality. Even though they are supposed to want sex all the time, every time a girl actually satisfies that craving, most men act like real jerks and make her feel bad and not worthy of their attention/respect/kindness. I will drop a bomb at you: women love sex. From my experience, I think that girls like sex even more than guys, but the rules that our western society has imposed to all of us, prevents us from really making the best of what nature has given us. I ask you guys: Do you have a part of your body which whole existence is just related to your pleasure? We do. Can you literally spend all your day having sex non-stop? We actually could (with proper training and the adequate inspiration :P) So, why is all the fuzz with girls enjoying pleasure? Why do you think that the time that a girl prevents you from seeing her naked is directly proportional to their worth as a human being/possible ...

I've tried every dating site you can think of. I've tried big ones, small ones, free ones, expensive ones, exclusive ones and niche ones. For the last 6 years, on and off. The one thing they have in common is that they're mostly rotten and dishonest. I'd say they're giving the industry a bad name, but they *are* the industry, and that's the problem. Dating sites started in the 90s with good intentions. In the 00s, it all started going wrong. Smaller sites had to look big, so they made fake profiles and sent fake messages to their users to grab their subscription money. And unfortunately, nothing's really changed. If you live in the UK you might even have seen a Panorama documentary about it recently. Free sites are spam-ridden cattlemarkets, where men send huge amounts of degrading, filthy and often bizarre messages to women, whose inboxes are so full that the genuine down-to-earth good guys are drowned out. Generally, if you're not willing to pay to fin...

good morning, I hope all of you are well. I am brahmin from the city of Chennai in India who moved to NYC 9 years ago for school and has been here since. IF you have a minute, you should read about brahmins. I am not a brahmin in the traditional sense. My girlfriend is an American Jew, I practice mixed martial arts and i don't believe in God. But growing up in a Brahman household blessed with a good work ethic and strong family committment and that's the only thing i have going for me. I work in a financial start up in NYC. I play a lot of sport (cricket, MMA, squash, tennis, boxing, biking, running). I am a sessions guitar player (with over 19 years experience). But i noticed a few cracks start to appear in my personality. Over the last few years i have discovered that i have symptoms of the following nacrolepsy, bipolar disorder, and some minor symptoms of personality disorder (narcissistic). I also have gambling problems. Any help regd the above, tips / experiences would ...

Last year I wrote and published a book that I'm extremely proud of. It's a memoir about growing up geeky. If you're a nerd like me, you might like it. It's called Terrible Nerd. It's available at Amazon for Kindle and as a dead-tree book. Here's a tiny bit from the introduction: "My generation was the first one to have access to computers at such a young age. In the early 1980s, middle class kids could get their hands on Apple //s and Commodore 64s, Atari 800s and TRS-80s, and other machines that offered the kind of computing power that would have been impossible just a few years before. While that level of power did exist just a few years before, it wouldn’t have been able to fit on your desk, nor was it affordable to anyone other than a university, corporation, or government. Here we were, kids embarking on the threshold of a whole new thing, which for us started out as a hobby, or a toy to play games on, and for many of us, ended up being our careers, so...

I want to recommend the book "Pornland:: how porn has hijacked our sexuality" by Gail dines. it will change your perception of pornography and its effects on our society. Jackie Ozark JackieOzark[AT]gmail.com west Hartford, CT