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Hurry up and wait. The perpetual condition of every sailor, marine and soldier. And stage managers too.

Wait for lights. Wait for the set. When will the sofa be delivered? Can’t start until props figures out the preset. Everybody is busy, or waiting for someone.

Why aren’t the actors in costume?

So what is the stage manager to do? Hurry up and wait.

The secret is to know when to push and the patience to accept what can not be hurried. And in the mean time to exude that air of confidence that leaders have.

Magically, it all comes together.

Final dress tonight…

Lunch at Chicken Out in McLean. Several tables away sits a woman who could be a well dressed refugee from the 1960s. Scoop collar basic black dress, two strands of pearls. Dark hair pulled up in an almost beehive.

Even her makeup was right.

Totally out of place lunching with a thoroughly 2011 no nonsense businesswoman.

They get up, the whole effect is spoiled by thick cork sole ultra high wedge shoes like no cork soled shoes ever seen in the 60s.

Sometimes you wish you could take a picture.

No bread here, but this large cup of cafe con leche brought back a memory of long ago and an even larger coffee cup.

Once upon a time, long, long ago my family lived in a large house with a staff of cook, butler, maids, a gardener and a driver. Every morning the staff had breakfast in the kitchen. Everyone had cafe con leche.

The driver had his in a cup so large it was a small bowl, which he filled half full of coffee and milk. To this he added chunks of bread that soaked up much of the coffee.

A complete breakfast, coffee milk and bread all in one cup, eaten with a spoon. Makes dunking donuts such a little thing.

This is the stuff of memories.

When you want to know something, find someone, organize something, where do you go? To your cell phone. The computer just can’t get it done these days… at least not as easily and efficiently.

When did this happen? How did this happen?

It sort of snuck up on us.

On your phone, at least on an Android phone, apps share under the covers. My contact list knows about my Facebook contacts, my Google+ contacts, my LinkedIn contacts, my Skype contacts, and even bunches of calendars. When I’m looking at something the phone can offer me a wide range of ways to share the “content” or distribute it. It can be my locally produced content like an email, or a photo, or a video clip. It can be something someone sent me that I want to pass on or publicize. It can be something I found on the web.

Better yet, with all this undercover sharing going on, you share and create and distribute as you think about it… no saving a file or copying a link, then going to an address book to bring up a contact to send it too.

It’s almost like a Mac, or OS/2, where you don’t think about applications but more the data, the information and the system takes care of the proper distribution or communications channel and app.

On the PC things are much more stove-piped, there’s the browser, there are specific applications for specific tasks.

And then there’s the whole bit of being able to know more about someone, including what they’re up to simply by touching their image or name in some context.

The icing on the cake is that your information and communications and social channels are all right there, all the time. No going to a box when you can get to the box before you can reach out. Even with a laptop, you have get it out of the bag.

I don’t know about you, but my phone has become my device of first resort.

This morning at the Ballston Metro I witnessed a simple act of kindness.

Two participants:

Recipient: a blind woman who rides my bus with her guide dog.

Doer: the man who hands out free newspapers at the entrance to the Metro escalator.

The woman set off from the bus heading 45° away from the escalator, where she goes every morning.

Without stopping hawking his papers the newspaper man calmly got her attention and, in a few simple, clear instructions got her to turn in the right direction and moving towards the escalator.

He didn’t have to care, but he did.

You know how you can’t eat just one potato chip? Getting a new smart phone doesn’t end with getting the phone.

HTC Sensation

I got an HTC Sensation last Saturday. That purchase is the tip of the iceberg.

• When you get a new phone you need to get a new case, the one for the previous phone is sure not to fit
• And you need a new shell or gel skin to protect your new treasure, in case you should have the mischance to drop it
• And of course you need a new extended battery, smart phones drain batteries like college kids guzzle beer.

Ka Ching… Ka Ching… listen to the money flowing out.

Somehow no technology purchase seems able to stand alone. I got a new LCD TV recently. The stand for the old CRT TV wouldn’t work, it had two end pieces that stood up too much for the width of the new TV… so hi-ho, hi-ho it’s off to Target we went for a new cabinet.

Why can’t gadgets and tech toys come with all the pieces you now you’ll need anyway?

When you’re planning your next purchase, how much do you need to budget for the extras you’ll forget you need?

Yesterday morning I heard an item on NPR’s Morning Edition that struck me as a little creepy. Or maybe it’s a concern about the boundaries of personal freedom and the trust between parents and children.

It seems that OnStar, the telematics company, is preparing to roll out a new service. Parents who subscribe to OnStar will be able to log on to a web site to see where there vehicle has been, to see where young Jack of Jill have been.

I’m all for parents knowing what they’re children are doing, but this seems to me to be over the top. Mom and Dad knowing exactly where the kids parked down at the lake last nigh? TMI!

At some point there has to be a bond of trust between children and parents. This technology seems bound to shrink the amount of trust a parent has to have.

I’ve heard of helicopter parents who fly in and out of their children’s lives. But this goes to a whole new level, satellite surveillance. What next, teleport the children out of “danger”?

I’m not talking about birds here. I’m talking about upgrading an Android phone. This post is brought to you from my HTC Sensation. My Nexus One retired Saturday, but that’s another story.

Android really does make it quite easy to upgrade a phone, as long as you link the phone to the same Google account as old phone. A no-brainer since I had no intention of starting out with Gmail, etc. all over again.

The associate at the T-Mobile store made sure I could log into the phone before I left the store. This starts the syncing of mail, contacts, calendar, and…

By the time I got to my car all my apps that had been on the old phone had downloaded to the new one! All I had to do was set up what app would go on which home screen.

The Sensation comes with HTC’s Sense UI. My Nexus One was “pure” Google on which I was running the ADW EX launcher. Turns out that ADW EX must be more closely modeled on Sense UI than I imagined. My Sensation home screens are set up pretty much the home screens on the Nexus One were.

I had a very nice set of custom widgets on the Nexus One. Sense UI comes with equivalents that are as good or better. Wow!

With the Sensation I’ve made the final step to all virtual input. My first Android phone was a G1 with an excellent slide out physical keyboard. My next was the Nexus One. No physical keyboard, but still a tiny BlackBerry-like track ball for fine cursor movement while editing.

There’s no track ball on the Sensation, and I’m not missing it. HTC’s touch screen is amazingly accurate.

I’m going to like my new phone.

Of course, everything is not sweetness and light. HTC’s Android Gingerbread on the Sensation lacks voice dialing through Bluetooth headsets, a feature I really appreciated on the Nexus One. Oh, well, I shouldn’t be dialing calls while I’m driving.

Say “social network” and “Facebook” and “MySpace” and now “Google+” come to mind almost immediately.

Are social networks something new, or have they been around for a while? What are the characteristics of a social network? Do you belong to social networks? Why?

Say social network today and electronic social networks are what we think of, but the term has its roots in sociology and has nothing to do with electronic networks. According to Wikipedia:

A social network is a social structure made up of individuals (or organizations) called “nodes”, which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.

Interesting. So, it would seem Facebook and Google+ are trying to exploit these characteristics of networks of people to create an electronic set of linkages for communication and sharing. Wikipedia discusses social networking services and distinguishes them from communities.

I believe social networks have existed on-line since before the days of the Internet, we just haven’t recognized them for what they are. We know about CompuServe and AOL, and Prodigy, but they were there even before those services. I think the roots of today’s social network services lie in bulletin board systems.

Once upon a time I spent a not insignificant sum of money to get a 1200 bps modem so I could discover CompuServe, which I’d seen at a trade show, and participate in a friend’s BBS (he actually made money running it!).

In my opinion community is the desirable characteristic I look for in a social networking service. How about you?

I’ve been noticing that when people want to comment on other people doing the same thing the memo meme pops up. As in “I see you got the memo to wear blue today”.

How many people who say that actually know what a memo is? A lot of this crowd have never seen a typewriter in an office.

Memos outlasted the typewriter, PCs may even have facilitated a golden age of memo writing. And then came email. Except for the most formal of decision documents, nobody writes memos anymore.

And yet everyone knows what you mean when you say “you didn’t get the memo”.

Why do the meanings of some cultural artifacts persist after the physical thing fades away? The next time you save a document in Word or Excel look at the icon you click. Sure looks like a floppy disc.

Maybe they just haven’t gotten the memo that they’re done.