Evolutionarily, I understand why conformity is such a desirable trait in a species like our own. There’s something to be said for gained collective wisdom of what plants are poisonous, what animals can kill us, what a frown on another person’s face means or what goosebumps tell us about our immediate surroundings.

However, the balance between conforming to that shared wisdom in order to keep our biological selves alive and the type of conformity that stymies or ridicules potentially positive-for-the-group (or at least interesting) individual growth is something we’ll never be able to achieve.

Photo by Martin Parr

We are still a young and suspicious type of animal and our lizard brains are still in control of many of our projections and judgments.

So, what to do?

“Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
They sing while you slave and I just get bored.
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.”

Of course, there’s no one complete switch that can be pulled in order to be a creative person free of the wheels that Lennon sat back to watch. That there is not a switch is frustrating. Much like everything else in this existence, originality and not conforming for conformity’s sake is a continual process that demands constant attention and deliberation.

That process is not easy, which is why it’s much easier to love the bomb and watch America’s Got Talent.

For this week, at least, I’m going to try and be more deliberate and attentive to the points of possible originality as they come up in my teaching, my thoughts, my use of technology or just my facial hair.

Strange family tradition we Harrelson’s have is to gorge on pickeled peppers with every meal. Obviously, Anna hates this… but yum!

Sent from my iPhone

Thanks to one of my (awesome) students (Sarah) for this correction of
the They Might Be Giants song…

I had every intention of spending the majority of the weekend working on end-of-the-quarter grades and comments for the 100 or so students that I teach. I did get a little work done on Friday evening, but I still had plenty to do on Saturday.

So, Saturday afternoon I cranked up the school-issued white Macbook fully expecting to get to work. However, the keyboard isn’t working properly. I think I’ve diagnosed the problem after doing some searching (on the iPhone browser), and the fix will require some under-the-hood work that I’ll leave to our tech department. However, I decided to do a battery pull and a few hard restarts… which were good ideas except that I’m pretty much locked out of the computer unless I hook up an external keyboard.

In the meantime, I had a moment of pre-cloud crisis when I realized that I couldn’t get access to the files I needed on the computer. Then, I remembered it is 2009 and I could get this work done and data accessed via my iPhone. Yes, I do have other computers in the house, but they are all desktop boxes in our (non-heated) basement office and it’s Daddy Day Care weekend since the wife is on-call. On top of that, my MSi Wind is at school 1.5 hours away.

Nonetheless, the iPhone has been a champ of a device. I’m still sorry I moved from Verizon service-wise and I do wish I had an Android device (the coming Droid looks like a dream phone). However, between web access to my online gradebook, access to all of my data via Dropbox and Google Apps, TextExpander WriteRoom and QuickOffice, I’m all set and have been banging out paragraphs long comments on my students at a quick clip. Frankly, I’ve surprised myself with how quick and painless this process is on my iPhone because I anticipated a weekend of torture and sore thumbs.

So, yes… you can do “real” work on an iPhone in a pinch. Increasingly, it might not just be pinch moments.

And yes, I composed this on my iPhone.

A web site is admittedly a nice thing to have if you’re a web-based professional. But if your business isn’t dependent upon it (which it would most likely be if you were a web site designer, for example), then that’s all it is: a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have. If you can let it go, maybe you should. You’ll save yourself time, money and possibly even face in the bargain.

via Why I’m Letting My Server Space Subscription Lapse.

I completely disagree with the main point of this post because of one simple reason… digital legacy.

Whether you’re an SEO expert or not, it’s very easy to make your personal web site attached to your name and discoverable in Google. Personally, I view it as a responsibility to organize the content I’m creating now (and previously) around a personal site like this one in order that my children or future generations may find something of value or at least know and better understand the provenance.

Keeping this content in a walled-garden type social network (Facebook) that will someday go bust or forget I existed is not much of a guarantee for me there.

So I decided to use this space for what it should be used for… my online home.

As I mentioned earlier, I have been blogging regularly on samharrelson.me. I’ve also had my email hosted through an @gmail.com address, have been reading feeds through Google Reader, keeping my calendar on a free @gmail Google Calendar, keeping my documents dispersed through that associated Google Docs account as well as my Dropbox account, precious family photos on Flickr, Facebook, Posterous, Picasa and SmugMug and notes on Evernote.

That needed to change.

So, I’ve been streamlining and pulling things together to reflect a little web content creation maturity. My criteria were; 1) apps/data have to provide a mobile access point 2) apps/data had to have their root on the samharrelson.com domain and 3) backups, backups, backups and 4) data portability or an export function (even RSS or XML works for me).

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far in my efforts…

- My email is now an @samharrelson.com address accessed through a Google Apps Premier account. As much as I wanted to use only IMAP or POP through my server here, GMail is just too good to leave behind. If things go awry, I can always point that MX record elsewhere and take my mail (downloaded hourly on a Thunderbird backup on my “backup computer”) elsewhere.

- My calendar is also associated with that @samharrelson.com Google Apps account now, but I’m really considering switching that to the calendar I’ve set up on samharrelson.com/cal. It’s a private installation of WebCalendar that isn’t as pretty as Google Calendar and doesn’t integrate into GMail as well… but it lives on this server. I haven’t decided yet but I’ll probably stick with the hosted GCal app for the time being.

- I’m moving my documents from everywhere around the web into that Google Docs App account. I’ve also got backups here on the server.

- Pictures are in transition from god-knows-where to samharrelson.com/pics where there will be physical and virtual backups as well as a password required for access. Flickr, etc are great but the older I get (and my child gets) the more uncomfortable I am with family images being out and about on the network. Call me old-fashioned.

- My feed reading has been moved here as well. Thanks to the awesome Fever self-installed app (at http://www.feedafever.com), I’m able to have my very own powerful RSS reader (complete with a fantastic iPhone interface) right here. You can see (or subscribe to) my shared items from Fever down below in the footer. I highly recommend it if you like my style since I subscribe to a good number of feeds and find some interesting posts throughout the week.

- I’ve been using WriteRoom for notes the last few months and love the service. Best of all, I can bake my own WriteRoom instance on this server. I’m working on that now.

- I’m still using Dropbox for file storage and access along with the new backups here and the redundant physical backups I keep. I’ll also be hanging onto that Posterous account and Twitter account (of course). However, I’m making a conscious effort to have much more of my flow originate from my home here.

- Speaking of home, I have to thank Pavel and the good folks at LivingDot who have provided the hosting for this blog (and all of my sites) for the last three years. They are pros and I do feel like my home here is safe in their neighborhood.

I love the social web and the incredible apps that have come along these last five years. However, I also love my independence. There’s something to the “Coral Reef” idea that Dave Winer spoke of in regards to Twitter a couple of years back that appeals to me in terms of net identity. I like to think of samharrelson.com as my digital coral reef that provides the biosphere and anchor for all the species of web apps that make up my online content ecosystem. That’s the hope here.

I’ll keep you updated on my progress.