It is with deep grief that we learn of the magnitude of the loss of life caused by yesterday’s tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. That so many of the victims were children is especially sad. Parents, especially, know it is the realization of that which we fear the most. Below is a re-posting of a blog post I’ve written, in various ways, in the past. As I know is true for all of us, my thoughts and prayers are with the people who are now coping with the aftermath of this disaster:

Over the years, I have written about many natural disasters and the human toll they’ve taken. I believe social media, writ large, make such events more personal to us all — a shared phenomena, even for those of us not on the scene.

When we start to see the images of these disasters, our first impulse is “go help.”

However, I’ve also learned from writing about these disasters (and having one occur in my hometown) that it’s always better to give the local citizens and experienced officials and non-government agencies a few days to address the immediate needs and to assess what the longer-term needs will be.

As I’ve written before, in the first days of any disaster, for those of us not on the scene, the best way we can help is always: first, send money.

This is especially true when a disaster is so widespread as Hurricane Sandy appears to be.

Personally, and because of advice I’ve been given by individuals who have been on the front lines of such disasters, I contribute, in a designated way, to the Salvation Army as it is supposed to be one of the most efficient ways to support first-responder, essential needs efforts.

Of course, there are many groups through which you can make such contributions.

[It's National Bike Month. And yes, this is another post about bicycling. You'll really like this one. I promise.]

Last fall, I had the privilege of spending six Thursday evenings volunteering at Nashville’s Oasis Center’s Bike Workshop. As I said in a Flickr set I posted at the time, during a six week session at the Workshop, disadvantaged kids get to choose a bike they will learn how (by doing) to take apart and then completely rebuild. At the end of the program, their work will be rewarded by earning the bike — and the knowledge to know how to keep it maintained.

Last Thursday, CNN posted the video below (full page) about the program. I am a tremendous fan of Dan Furbish, the founder and leader of the program, and the narrator of the video, and Adams Carroll, the other guy who you’ll see helping guide the kids.

It’s a wonderful program, and this is a wonderful video.

I  try to ride my bike to work 2-3 times a week, rain or shine, hot or cold. When I tell that to people who know where I live and work, they picture in their minds me riding down Nashville’s busy Harding Road/West End Corridor.

“No,” I tell them. All but a few blocks of my commute is free from traffic and I can hear birds chirping the entire way. Indeed, most of the route is via designated bike lanes, greenways or limited-access streets. At a nice and easy pace on my commuter bike (think pick-up truck), the commute takes about 40-45 minutes.

When I explain my route to those who live in Nashville, they quickly connect the dots and realize there are ways to ride long distances while still avoiding streets clogged by drivers who don’t know (or don’t care) that bicyclists have the right to ride on the street.

As Friday, May 17, is Bike to Work Day (all the others are bike to play, I presume), I’ve embedded below the RexWay bicycle route from Phillips Toy Mart in Belle Meade to the Downtown YMCA on Church Street. I selected these start- and end-points because the traffic light on Harding Road at that point allows for safe crossing of Harding and the railroad tracks — making it easy to jump onto the designated bike lanes on Post Road. This western terminus is easily and safely accessisible by thousands of residents of Belle Meade, West Meade and surrounding neighborhoods.

On Friday, rain or shine, I will be at Phillips Toy Mart ready to ride on Friday. Join me if you can and we’ll go to the festivities at the Metro Courthouse.

For more maps and information about Nashville’s Bike to Work Day, visit Walk/Bike Nashville.

Click through on the map below for my turn-by-turn route, created on RunKeeper.com.

This is a “fly-over” animation of the route created on the site, Map My Ride (Needs Google Earth plug-in.):

More of my bike geek stuff:

• A Bicycle Pinterest Board
• Photos on my Flickr account tagged “bicycle“
• The first time I blogged about participating in Bike to Work day was 9 years ago.

Recently, Chris Brogan invited me onto his very popular podcast where we talked a lot about how companies and businesses are using media and content to connect directly with their customers.

It’s sometimes challenging to explain what I do (especially to people with tweet-sized concentration), but Chris’ approach helped me come close. If you are one of the 12 readers of this blog, you may find it of interest.

Or not.

Either way, I had fun talking with him.

I’m glad to see that a PDF of this past weekend’s Baccalaureate Address by David Brooks has been posted on the Sewanee.edu website. It is filled with wonderful gems like this:

“The first thing to worry about: Will I marry well? This is the most important decision you’re going to make in your life. If you have a great marriage and a crappy career, you will be happy. If you have a great career and a crappy marriage, you will be unhappy. I tell university presidents that since the marriage decision is so central, they should have academic departments on how to marry. They should teach the neuroscience of marriage, the sociology of marriage, the psychology of marriage. Everybody should get a degree in how to marry. Nobody listens to me. So give yourself a degree. Read Jane Austen novels or George Eliot novels. Learn how to think about this problem from the masters. And take your time.”

At some point, I’ll be posting a link to lots of photos of the weekend our family celebrated with our son, the graduate.

One of this blog’s 12 readers (and a brother of mine, too boot) sent me a link to a story today because he recalls that in 2008, I decided to blog for a year about the technology I feel I’ve been cheated out of, as it’s been promised to me by science fiction writers my entire life: Flying cars. (That links to a year-end wrap-up of the stories I ran across during the year. And here’s a link to a Delicious list of about 50 articles I ran across that year.)

Since then, I’ve rarely blogged about flying car startups and concepts, but it’s fun when people send me items they run across.

Some of the most persistent press about flying car concepts comes from a company in Massachusettes called Terrafugia. I don’t know about their cars, but they have a great PR company working for them. Every year or so, they get coverage when they announce they’ll have a flying vehicle (or roadable plane) on the market “next July.” (I think they’ve gone through about six “next Julys” since I first heard about them.)

Today, there’s an article on Xconomy.com (a site I wasn’t aware my brother frequents) about Terrafugia’s newest idea, a self-flying car. Like everything Terrafugia describes, it sounds pretty cool. Indeed, I think it’s cooler than any internet start-up I’ve heard about lately.

However, I’m guessing it won’t be available until next July, if you know what I mean.

Note to the 12 readers of the blog. Excuse me.

I’m trying out a way to post to this blog using an approach I’ll be explaining in more detail in a later post.

That post will be:

• A little-bit country
• A little-bit rock-n-roll

That post will be about Fargo.io, an outliner web application

• An outliner is type of text editor (I guess it could edit more than text, but let’s stick with that now) that lets you arrange your text (ideas, thoughts, tasks) in a hierarchy.

• Doc Searls blogs about using an outliner in this post.
• An outliner is not an outfielder, a position in baseball
• An outliner is not an outlier, a person who does not reside in the tall part of a bell-shaped curve

While one of the things you can do with Fargo.io is write a blog post, the way it displays on this post doesn’t really look like what I’m seeing. However, if you click on this link, you can see a “read-only” version of what I’m seeing.

• Double-click on a dark wedge to expand or collapse what’s nested beneath that outline heading
• It works just like the outlines you created in elementary school — the kind with Roman numerals. (Or maybe they stopped using Roman numerals when kindergarteners started using PowerPoint.)

This test will continue, but feel free to change channels to another station.

I hope you are subscribing to The Idea Email, the fortnightly (biweekly) from Hammock. There’s an interesting look this week at whether or not “size matters” when in come to communicating with customers.

Quote:

“Content of any length or format that helps your customers learn how to better use your products or services to do their jobs more effectively, or enjoy their passions more deeply, adds value to your products. It is what turns marketing into results.”

Read the current issue here. Subscribe to receive each issue via email here.

On the Hammock Blog, I’ve contributed a post the 12 readers of RexBlog may find familiar. It’s about my former long-running complaint-rant about those who keep hanging the “new” adjective on media created by companies for their customers. (The only thing new is the form of media or the new buzzword it’s being called, but the concept has been around since the cave dwellers.) I emphasize the word former because I’ve decided to join in with those who believe what we do at Hammock is the next, new thing. As I say in the post, “Being cutting edge is awesome.”

Quote:

When I first started blogging 13 years ago, I thought I’d attempt to correct the misperception that there’s something new about companies creating informative, high-quality and helpful media for customers. Back then, the conventional wisdom among media and marketing reporters (and most marketers) was that companies communicate with customers by purchasing advertising in media that other companies own, not via media they own. But I knew the truth: Media created by companies for their customers has been around since Fred Flintstone invented it.

Read the entire post on Hammock.com.

[See Update at end of post.]

This post is not about investing. [***] In fact, let’s get that out of the way: Sell your Apple stock and quit worrying about it. Or buy it and quit worrying about it. Just stop worrying about Apple, the stock. Better yet, just stop worrying, period.

At the bottom of this post is a long quote from a documentary that was comprised of a 70 minute interview with Steve Jobs recorded in 1995. Parts of the interview were edited into a 1996 PBS documentary by Robert X. Cringely called, The Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires . The full interview was released in 2011 under the title, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview. The portion I’ve included below is quoted from a transcript I found on Fortune.com.

I post it today with the following observation. So much of Apple reporting and punditry and financial analysis is reduced to sound-bites and silly-sounding obviousness about what Apple should do, or not do — what products they should bring out, or not bring out, whether or not they should have a dividend and declare that the “era of innovation and growth” is over. Or not.

Those who have used the company’s products for as long as I have know that Apple’s success (and failures) have rarely hinged on “the idea.” Speed to market has never been a part of the culture — or their forumla for past successes, or their reasons for past failures.

Execution is the key to their success (and the fault of their failures).

I post this not as a suggestion that Apple’s stock is a good buy, or not. (As I said, I think if you’re worrying about that question, you should avoid the stock — buy an index fund, or something.)

I do know this: The company’s pipeline is not dry. And, whether the products come out in September or December only matters to investors, not those of us who use the products.

Quote from Steve Jobs, 1995:

You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen.

And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do.

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

And it’s that process that is the magic.

And so we had a lot of great ideas when we started [the Mac]. But what I’ve always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like is like when I was a young kid there was a widowed man that lived up the street. He was in his eighties. He was a little scary looking. And I got to know him a little bit. I think he may have paid me to mow his lawn or something.

And one day he said to me, “come on into my garage I want to show you something.” And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a little band between them. And he said, “come on with me.” We went out into the back and we got just some rocks. Some regular old ugly rocks. And we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and little bit of grit powder, and we closed the can up and he turned this motor on and he said, “come back tomorrow.”

And this can was making a racket as the stones went around.

And I came back the next day, and we opened the can. And we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in, through rubbing against each other like this (clapping his hands), creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks.

That’s always been in my mind my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.

Update: A discussion about this post on Hacker News is interesting. After a lively debate over my wasting time writing about Apple stock (note: the context of this post was in the hours after the company has released quarterly numbers) and my use of the word “parable” (which I picked up from CNN.com when they first posted it a few years ago), the comments get around to the point I believe Jobs was trying to make — a point that those who want to create products and build business of any kind should consider.