Hello world. This weekend, I bought a bike from Calmar Bicycles this weekend. Today, I rode it to work. A 5 mile ride, and my first in about 5 or 7 years. Believe it or not, riding a bike to work on a regular basis has been one of my big Life To-Dos.

Speaking of Life To-Dos: I've actually managed to do quite a few of them in the last few years. I've written books, married my dream girl, got a job in Silicon Valley, rode a bike to work... Someday I really need to write that blog entry I've got stewing in my head about what it's like to realize that you're becoming exactly what you wanted to be when you grew up - and that your 10-year-old self would think that you're pretty cool.

Anne Truitt Zelenka: "So what's the answer to being relatively poor? Mine was to leave Silicon Valley. It is very hard to feel successful there, surrounded as you are by the ultra-rich and the ultra-ultra-rich and the ultra-ultra-ultra-rich. My solution was to choose a more comfortable pond. I moved to Denver."

Am I weird, or unusually well adjusted? I've read things David Brin has had to say about satiation and sanity, and I have to say I can't see myself being sated by large amounts of wealth. Sure, I could always use more than the decent salary I have now - but I'm more sated by checking off items on my big life to-do list. Money's good insofar as it helps me with that, but following my bliss is what I'm really after.

The kind of bliss I've worked out for myself demands quite a lot of work - but it's not a thing that necessarily compares against the relative situations of others. I don't care how rich the Joneses are - I care about how many things I've learned today, or how many things I've created, or how close to my personal ethics I've stayed today. Don't get me wrong - I adore gadgets and expensive blinkenlights. But, I'm not too sad to be without an iPhone when I've got a bike to ride to work and year-round good weather to ride it in. Is that a weird attitude for the Valley?

Dave Winer: "You might as well live somewhere else and create, the network effect of being in the valley is negative."

I wonder if and how, after a tour of duty in the Valley, I could move back near Ann Arbor to successfully live and create.

Joseph Campbell: "If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are -- if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time." Too bad about his anti-semitism, but I think the man got a few things right.

Wired News: "Damn the Facebooks and the MySpaces. The last time we checked, there was this thing called the internet that had 6 billion users. It's time to take our personal data out of Mr. McGregor's little gardens and put it back where it belongs -- free and open on the open web."

I'm still warily circling and poking at ideas for building my own personal content aggregator and tumblelog thingy. I've been playing with OpenID and wondering how it could facilitate federated web-based messaging, ala Twitter. I think the pieces are all out there, for want of a bit of glue and for hope of some adoption and network effects. Depending on how it's done, I think some of the adoption and network effects can be enhanced up front by building in clients for various services into a self-hosted node.

My big showstopper for building the next WordPress with respect to distributed social networking is that I'm actually a bit of a grouchy misanthropist without much patience for supporting a product myself. :)