SSDD on the bus, 3 parts to a genuine apology, ASB starts up, and happiness social media style…

~Tuesday~  I caught the 8:15 city bus, and although Stagnant Driver wasn’t the driver, it was stagnant on the bus anyway. I just don’t understand. What’s so hard about sensing that even just a fan blowing to circulate the air on the bus would make it more comfortable?

A guy who got on at Gorman and Conifer opened two windows and took seats about two behind those windows in order to catch the breeze after it made its way into the bus.

Library Man was on board, and I assumed he was reading that local paper from wherever he’s from, as the photos were in color again, but I could have sworn when he turned the page it said, “The News & Observer,” our local Raleigh paper. There was a section laying on the seat entitled, “Best of the Blogs.”


I meant to capture this from our salon meeting last night. Kim noted that there are three parts to a genuine apology, and it’s not a genuine apology unless it contains all three parts:

  1. Saying, verbalizing, writing, “I’m sorry.”
  2. Admitting your mistake; taking responsibility for your part in the problem, “I was wrong.”
  3. Making it right, “How can I make it up to you?”

I want to remember this.


I spent an hour with our intern this morning, getting her up to speed with our content management system, and taking her through an iteration of setting up a task force website, after which she did two more of them for me. Yay!

During lunch, I attended the first of the 2010-2011 Alternative Service Break Advisor Roundtables, at which we went around the room introducing ourselves saying where we worked in the university, what trip we were advisors for, and if we’d had any previous ASB experience:

“John Martin. I work in the Office of Information Technology in the Information & News Services department, and I’m advising on the Gulf Coast trip to New Orleans over Spring Break 2011. I had an awesome trip to that same area last year.”

I also met Joyce, the other advisor who will be traveling with us, and in the next day or two the student leader of our group will set up a meeting for the three of us to get to know each other and start the planning for the entire team.


I pointed the salon members to this podcast I listened to while last at the gym, as it’s some kind of freaky fusion between two of our agenda items—#5 (Sick of Social Media), and #6 (Measuring Happiness).

It’s a 17-minute audio broadcast about how social media is changing the way we take the pulse of the country, described as: “The Big Money’s Twitter blogger, Steve Spillman, joins, as does a researcher from Harvard who has analyzed years’ worth of tweets to see how happy we are,” and it includes notions such as:

  • “n” as 500 million (a la Facebook) vs. “n” as ~1000 (a Gallup poll)
  • “moods” of status updates (Twitter and Facebook)
  • Linguistic representations of “moods”
  • research approach with an admittedly butt-load of caveats at this point (i.e., it’s very preliminary and not-yet-ready-for-publication)

If You’re Happy, and You Tweet It, Raise Your Hand!


At home, I had the leftover portion of my Piedmont Burger from Porter’s last night, and at 9:00 I lay down for what I imagined would be about a two-hour nap, but what in fact turned out to be nine hours of sleep. Yay!

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