open your eyes, jackass

Lots of drivers hate motorcycles. Some people get aggressive whenever they see a bike, maybe feeling the standard testosterone urge to race or dealing with whatever latent resentment they have for that biker goon that cut them off 12 years ago.

The aggro response is completely stupid (and mostly futile), but it's preferable to those who just FREAK OUT for no apparent reason. My favorite are the cagers who suddenly hit their brakes when a motorcycle comes up behind them; from their body language, it's apparent that they haven't looked in their rearview mirror since they left the house, and panic when they finally observe a single headlight closing in on them.

The main problem is that too many people are flat out lazy behind the wheel. How many commuters do you see concentrating on make-up application, dial (or iPod) scanning, cell phone manipulation, child appeasement, and pretty much anything else that doesn't involve the road?

Some civilized cultures actually take pride in their ability to maneuver and manipulate motorized vehicles with some semblance of performance. Not us ... the crowning achievement of American transportation is to disconnect yourself from the driving experience as much as possible. In Europe, your driving skills speak for themself. In the US, even the most incapable driver can represent with 20" spinners and a road-numbed SUV while stupidly floating across lanes and generally ignoring their traffic environment.

That's why you'll never see this ad [.mpg] in the US. Pity, because it's a good one. (Note: video may take awhile to load)

[link originally found at Bikes in the Fast Lane]

+2 mace of networking

Collaboration has been the buzzword behind Internet-based productivity ever since Ph.D's started swapping ASCII art over IP. But the explosion of information exchange afforded by technology has also created the additional hurdles of filtering meaningful information and identifying meaningful collaborators. Collaboration is great when you and the offshore consultant brainstorm on a virtual whiteboard; not so good when an intern overwrites your final report.

Fortunately, online gaming seems to provide a better solution than Lotus Notes ever did. That's right, the 20-sided dice crowd are using the World of Warcraft as a platform for networking and collaboration while braining orcs and chatting up wood nymphs. And it's not just sysadmins swapping Linux hacks; C|Net profiled a WoW guild filled with digirati like Joi Ito and Sean Bonner who use the gaming community as a sounding board, development resource, and rolodex.

Joi Ito and others have started calling WoW "the new golf," presumably referencing the social networking opportunities rather than the tedium and frustration involved with both activities. But unlike golf, the Warcraft guilds are comparatively open, and membership is considerably cheaper than at Torrey Pines.

Gaming and geekery have come a long way from dark basements littered with TSR manuals. The subject matter is no different, but role-playing has gone from stigma to phenomenon because technology now enables a richer experience with a broader audience. Communities like Warcraft may seem an unlikely source of collaboration, but they are proof that common experience is one of the best ways to produce meaningful connections in an increasingly dense communications environment.