Sunset Stories

Porchlight Storytellers: seventh birthday, and tales of the human body

Kathy, the woman I met sitting to my left, was right: getting up in front of a group of strangers to tell your story is wonderful-- and oddly healing. In fact, she's been so inspired by Porchlight Storytellers that she's learning to start her own storytelling show, telling me all about a workshop she took at Esalen Institute, sitting in vintage high-backed plastic chairs, lined up theater style facing a open-mouth stage among romantic prom-night lights, in the Verdi Club auditorium.

Porchlight Storytellers celebrated it's seventh birthday with a show, themed "The Skin We're In: Tales of the Human Body." Six scheduled storytellers and a handful of spontaneous audience participants told tales about bodies: from Tara Jepsen's black-lit zit cover-up to Reny Ryan's Boy-zillian wax client, to Ed Wolf's Hush-Puppied size 15 feet, to Frank Andrick's Interferion medication warning "bleeding from the eyes."

I love telling stories too, and I'll be back for more as the newest member of Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, offering a first-ever partnership to give $50-level members half off Porchlight tickets for a year.

Weekend for cycling

It was a weekend for cycling: first for a little elongating of my frame and re-alignment of my right cleat at Roaring Mouse, then for a wet ride out to the ocean on Saturday morning in "mizzle" ("it's not fog and it's not drizzle--it's mizzle," says Roaring Mouse owner Chris Lane).

Sunday morning, joined the Velo Girls for a sunshiney Paradise Loop in Tiburon.

Thanks to Jackie Link for the photo!

Chihuly at the de Young

A Sunday afternoon experiencing the wonderland of psychedelic glass creations at the stunning Chihuly at the de Young, the largest show he’s ever done.   

My favorite of the 11 rooms.

Just read: How the Web Was Won

I discovered that I'm familiar with just about every other frontier that's been won, except for the one of this day and age: the Internet.

Especially one that is rooted in my backyard (Silicon Valley) and rooted in my career (marketing) and nearly every part of my life. So when I came across the history of the Web in the July issue of VF, I decided to dig into Mayo and Newcomb's impressive oral history of the most ubiquitous information and communication medium of our age, on its 50th anniversary.

Spurred by the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the Internet's building block -- packet switching -- was conceived at Rand Corporation in 1960. Then came Arpanet developed by NASA veterans at MIT, the basic linking structure developed at UCLA, the first worm, the first spam, Apple vs. IBM, and the famous Netscape-Microsoft browser wars which opened the flood gates for a new frontier of connectivity, creativity, and breakthrough technologies that changed the world.

Big-name silicon valley heavyweights like Vinod Khosla, pioneer funders like Jim Clark out of Silicon Graphics, Marc Andreessen's specialty of creating the next big thing, social networking leaders who followed on the success of AOL's phophecy that community trumps content, and of course Al Gore, who paved the way (for necessary government funding, not creating the Internet).

Without it, we wouldn't have our online communities, research at our fingertips, or this blog you are reading. And, the proof of Metcalfe's Law: as the number of users on a network grows, the value of that network grows exponentially.