View from the Mountain

The Disappearing Narrative of Our Lives

Cathedral of Trees, Rich Park, Mocksville, NC

For years there has been a rush for our lives to become digital. Few people I know write letters requiring a stamp. The staffing at local newspapers continues a long-term decline. The bits and pieces of local life are more and more under-reported. Email with changing clients and no good way to preserve the important ones has always been a poor choice to preserve history. Now people seem to be abandoning email for SMS or even the less reliable Facebook messenger. Try finding something from fifteen years ago in your text messages.

I suspect we are losing the really interesting things that might help historians understand us and our times. What is film worthy today might not be as important years down the road as the letter you did not write to your cousin living in another state. As my wife and I have moved over the years and downsized our living spaces, we have been forced to jettison many of pieces of paper that at one time I hoped to preserve. I suspect we are not alone.

Even if you are among the few of us who still read paper newspapers and you do have a copy of that newspaper article that meant so much to you, can you actually put your hands on it? Part of my early life in Mount Airy, North Carolina, was defined by my knowing R.J. Berrier. R.J. as he was known to his friends spent fifty-two years writing for the Mount Airy Times and then the Mount Airy News. I wrote about him in a post, Love and Respect for Print. When I woke up today to read that one of R.J.’s friends, Eleanor Powell, had died at the age of ninety, I was immediately reminded of the article that she wrote around twenty years ago celebrating R.J.’s many years in the world of newspapers.

I tried a Google search and then a search on the Mount News Archive. The searches returned nothing which surprised me because I remember Eleanor getting an award from the Associated Press for her article on R.J. It seems a shame that so much of what makes life memorable is so hard to keep close. I likely have a copy of the article somewhere in the boxes that followed us to our new home. I might have been able to have put my fingers on it two houses ago, but not now.

Modern life throws enough challenges at us that it is hard enough keeping up with the needs of today without trying to organize the past. If nothing else I think this demonstrates why writing for yourself is so critically important. When I went to write this piece, I could not remember exactly how long R.J. had worked in newspapers. There is certainly no one alive that could tell me. I thought it was around fifty years. Fortunately, a little over fifteen years ago, I wrote that post about R.J. and the information was there. I am sorry that I did not scan Eleanor Powell’s article about R.J. at the time.

Perhaps the best narrative of history is the one you write yourself. I am pleased to chronicle my own times and how the world has looked to me. Writing to record your own view of the world might be the best remedy.

There are advantages. Just before we left the coast and moved inland, my new neighbor, Bill, told me that he wanted to debate me about something I said about the history of the White Oak River. He said he changed his mind when a Google search showed that I was the author of one of the top-ranked articles on the subject. There is nothing like being your own authority on the subject because no one else thought it was important enough to write about it.

Another in a long line of home offices

I have been lucky to work in home offices most of my professional career.  The office was also the dining room on our Tay Creek farm.  In Halifax it was a small, designed-for-an-office space just off the main entrance. My wife claimed it was a great place to see the back of my head.

Our Columbia home had another tiny office just off the entrance.  When we moved to Roanoke in 1989, I got to use a huge space in our newly finished basement.  I takes three pictures to get a good view of it, picture 1, picture 2, and picture 3. It might seem overly large but for over a decade I ran Apple sales teams from there including the last few years when I was director of federal sales and had a national sales team.  I did everything from generate bids for colleges to house equipment that had no other home.

The Apple office made a great place for kids to play some of the first networked games. It also served as a second home for many projects from the Roanoke Valley Governor's School. There were always students borrowing the demo color laser printer that Apple was afraid to ship around and consequently dropped from the product line.  The Roanoke office was where I first got on the Internet.  We went from modems of varying speeds to line of sight antennae to DSL and finally to a cable modem.  I spent a lot of time on the modem dialing into Apple's IBM mainframe and downloading sales reports.

In 2006 after I had left Apple and was president of sales at WebMail.us, we had a water leak that meant the office got a remodeling and I had to start over.  I wrote this post, The Saturday afternoon technologist, electronic hair, just as I was starting up once again.  Sometimes it is good to start over because you get to clean up the cables which have a tendency to become like a ball of snakes after a decade or so.

The fact is that starting over is easier and easier. I have written about the instant economy that allows businesses to get what they need to start up in hours instead of months.  It is also very easy for a home office to get everything that it needs.  Sometimes all it takes is an afternoon trip to Best Buy or Staples.

Eleven years ago when I wrote about setting up my home office on the Crystal Coast in the post, The not so reluctant home system engineer, I had worked through a number of challenges getting things running smoothly.  Things have gotten a lot easier when it comes to networking and printers.  Because I have a son with even greater geek tendencies than me, I now have a NAS (Network Attached Store) with multiple terabytes of storage.  After thirty-five years in the technology world, I also have a pretty good idea of what works well.  With that in mind I had Cat 5 Ethernet run from my old office to my new office. 

I was a little surprised when our electrician did not know how to install the Ethernet jacks since I had seen our system engineers at Apple do it plenty of times.  I ordered from Amazon the needed punch down tool and punch down block with the right jacks and did it myself.  This being my first time at putting ends on Ethernet cables, I wondered if it would all work.  I hauled a laser printer upstairs to the new office and connected it to the wall jack. Then I ran an Ethernet cable from my current Ethernet switch to the new wall jack in my old office.  I sat down at my Mac and printed a document to the printer upstairs in the new office.  It worked.  Now I can gradually move things from the old office to the new one and never lose connectivity.  I am very happy that laser printers are a lot lighter than they used to be back in the eighties.

It is amazing how much technology has changed. My first blog post on View from the Mountain was almost thirteen years ago and I was wrestling with my first Windows/Linux machine.  My desktop has changed a lot since then. Windows occupies a much great part of it but I still have some vintage Macs chugging along in addition to my Windows computers and now Linux runs on my Mac instead of my Windows computer. My photo work is now all done on Windows but I think iMac from 2010 which got rescued by a repair will have a place in the new office for a while.

Some things do not change. I am still using an IKEA table as a first desk as I build my new office just like I did back in 2006. This is the first post written from my nice new office. It is a great spot to write.

Ten Years Of A More Personal Look At Our World

Looking north on the White Oak River

Somehow I never had time to really honor the end of my eleventh year of writing on Typepad back in November 2015.  As of February 2016, there are over 1,400 posts on View from the Mountain.  Recent ones include everything from a homage to Southern biscuits to thoughts on saving our digital photographs. Below is the original article written in 2014.

_____________________________________________

Ten years ago on November 23, 2004.  I started writing here at Typepad. 

My first private soapbox, View from the Mountain, began simply with My Welcome to Windows, a basic recounting of my first adventure with a Windows computer after spending nearly twenty years at Apple.

Applepeels was my next blog at Typepad.  The hundreds of early posts there eventually led to my book, The Pomme Company.  There were times during its heyday when an Applepeels article might get twenty thousand views from around the world in a twenty-four hour period.

Though I no longer write as often at View from the Mountain or Applepeels, I have continued to write at both. Over the years I have also added three more sites at Typepad.  One, The Crystal Coast, Saltwater on my feet, gets regular monthly updates. The others, The Canada I Miss, and Once A Reston Resident, get far more infrequent updates.  They are basically on a when the spirit moves me schedule. Still I have more that two thousand posts among all these blogs with the vast majority being at View from the Mountain.

Eight years ago I wrote a post about writing for free.  Since that time I have done a lot of writing that resulted in a paycheck. It is a little ironic that my first blog post here was about my entry into the world of Windows and one of my recent paid articles was How I Moved Away From The Mac After Leaving Apple.  What goes around comes around.  I still have to chuckle at some of the Apple fanatics not reading far enough into that article to learn that I still use a Mac. They should have paid more attention to the article URL instead of the title an editor chose to get lots of hits.

Having your own place in our connected world lets you speak out if you feel you have been wronged on the Internet. I have done that more than once. You can also write about things like On Being A Dad which might never reach the people who inspired the post. Maybe I am wrong but I think my family long ago stopped reading what I write.

View from the Mountain has content that covers a huge range of topics from The Three Things You Need To Grow In The South to Why Do I Have To Lose For You To Win.  There is even Advice To My Children, recent restaurant reviews like Crystal Coast Dining - Angie's Lighthouse, Cape Carteret  and more nostalgic ones like Saturday night at Odell's, everything is all right.

I have written a post, Honeysuckle Pink and the Secrets to Happiness, to honor my wife and others like Memories of Mother to say thanks to my mother. I have even penned articles about the stages of my own life in posts like Happy to still be considered an adult.

The site also has travel advice like Roanoke to the beach in 5.5 hours or A Summer Excursion Through New Brunswick, PEI, & Nova Scotia.  I like to think that the post, Swansboro, NC travel guide, might have led to the writing of our successful travel book, A Week At The Beach, The Emerald Isle Travel Guide, which is now in its fourth version in 2014.

I have also recorded family events like our move from Roanoke and the realization of our dream of living along the North Carolina coast.

With everything from our family's famous recipe for hushpuppies to how to find your way to leadership, it is hard to characterize View from the Mountain in a few words.  Perhaps the title comes closest because this blog and in fact all my other ones including Crystal Coast Life, Coastal Paradise, and Ocracoke Waves make no pretension to being anything more than a more personal look at the world through my eyes.

This morning I got an interesting note from the folks at City-Data forum.  The gist of the note was asking me to come back and write some more posts.

Your posts have been read 34,948 times in last 14 days, and more than 2,332,485 times...

An over-zealous moderator chased me away from there over four years ago because he/she believed that I was trying to trick people into buying real estate from me. Obviously the moderator had missed the crashed real estate market which made certain that people were uninterested in buying and unlikely to be tricked into anything.

Selling real estate was not the goal behind my writing even then, but the moderator's attitude did convince me that if I was going to write for free, it should be someplace that I enjoyed the experience and where I could, in essence, set my own rules. 

While I left the world of real estate shortly afterward in 2011, going back to City-Data never seemed important to me.  Unfortunately even I do not have as much time to write.   One site where I no longer have time to write has hundreds of posts written over five years with many of them being read thousands of times.  I migrated some of them, but that also takes time.

Typepad has been a remarkably stable environment so Typepad and especially View from the Mountain still get a slice of my busy life and I have put up a site with a few of my favorites.

The truth is that I write because I enjoy writing. Writing helps me make sense of life.  It is hard to say what the next five or ten years will bring, but God willing I plan to keep adding to the posts that I have already written here at Typepad.  I also hope that people keep enjoying them and get at least as much pleasure from the reading as I do from the writing.

Of course the pictures that I include are just as important to my story as the words that I write. This tenth anniversary picture was taken one day prior on Saturday, October 22, 2014.  I took the picture from my kayak on the White Oak River not far from my favorite spot on the oyster rocks near Swansboro, North Carolina.

Saturday night at Odell's, everything is all right

Crystal Coast Dining - Angie's Lighthouse, Cape Carteret

- See more at: http://viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/david_sobotta_weblog/2014/07/crystal-coat-dining-angies-lighthouse-cape-carteret.html#sthash.PSouo0OC.dpuf

Crystal Coast Dining - Angie's Lighthouse, Cape Carteret

- See more at: http://viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/david_sobotta_weblog/2014/07/crystal-coat-dining-angies-lighthouse-cape-carteret.html#sthash.PSouo0OC.dpuf

Experts and their skills are no longer needed

Our Dock On Raymond's Gut

Sometimes it seems that anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can do anything including the most difficult tasks that would never have been attempted twenty years ago.

We have commercials that say that if we pick up the latest Apple iPad gadget, we will be writing the next page in human history.  Any task is possible with a computer and Google.

Want to takes the most unbelievable pictures in the world?  Canon, Nikon, and Sony make it dead simple.  Just hand over $1,000 or so and the world will be your digital canvas.

I even saw a commercial that promised that anyone can build a website.  That is certainly true.  Just about anyone can also build a house.  However what you get from a skilled builder will look a little different than what you get from a chain saw carpenter or with a website in a kit.

We live in a really strange world.  On the one hand everyone seems to be trending towards being experts in everything.  On the other hand for those things which cannot be achieved by the iPad or a Google search there is an expectation that those who have taken the time to learn how to do those things or who might be really good at what they do in their jobs should share their knowledge and skills for free.

This is especially the case if you are a writer. I was amazed during the early winter when our local outlet for the Raleigh News & Observer would sell out of the Sunday edition.  I finally asked the clerk what was happening, and it turns out people were coming in and buying five or six copies of the paper just for the coupons.  That means the coupons were worth more than the content.

As a writer that is hard to take, but understandable. With the death of the newspaper, writers are a dime a dozen these days.  On top of that many of us including the newspapers have given some of our content away for free for years in the hopes that some sort of Google model will work for us.  Of course Google is bigger and better at it than the rest of us so we struggle on and sell a few articles or books while continuing to churn out free content.  Writers only find success by drilling down and knowing a subject better than other writers like I recently did in my articles, It’s Time To Give Up On Swiping Credit Cards, and We Worry About Technology Even In Paradise.  It is a fiercely competitive world.

It works the same way on photos.  Rarely a month passes by when someone does not ask if they can use one of my images for free.  If it is for a non-profit or a person who wants one for their desktop background, I always oblige.  However, if it is someone who is going to put my image in their magazine from which they will make money, I expect a little money.  I sold prints for years until it became hard to justify an expensive printer and inks much less the time when you are only going to get $20 for most prints.  I sold some huge prints for only $100.  However, the printer they came from took eight ink cartridges. Each cartridge cost $80.  Usually as soon as you ask a publication for a few dollars, they disappear because the world is awash in free content.

I recently spent a lot of time putting together the best 100 photos that I took in 2013.  I published them in a $2.99 Kindle book, 100 Pictures, 1000 Words, A Crystal Coast Year.  The $2.99 price is only about 75 cents more than that Raleigh paper and unfortunately I do not have grocery coupons.  I did set up a site where you can buy the pictures for your own use for 99 cents.  A print shop can use one for a print for $9.99 and a commercial book publisher has to pay $25.  I have also created a site where I will put occasional free photos.

But in a world filled with expert photographers, I am not surprised that the book has only sold in limited numbers.  I did it more for my own satisfaction that for the money.  I knew upfront that if you have a Nikon around your neck why would you want one of my photos?  Surely your better, more expensive camera takes better pictures than my $400 one.

I recently read a tongue and cheek article about a photographer running an ad looking for people who do their jobs for free. He was obviously tired of being called by people who wanted to use his photos for free for all the great exposure they can provide him.

I share many photos on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Pinterest and Google+.  However, in a world overwhelmed with free content, some of which is mine, why pay for my other photos at 99 cents a piece even if they are great when you can see lots of almost as good or maybe even better photos for free.  I do take very good photos and many of them are from places that only a limited number of people will go but I make no pretension about making my living from photos. I am amazed that there are still photographers out there who can make a living from their craft.

Last fall I read an article about why IT people should never repair friends computers for free.  The article, Ten Reasons Not To Fix Computers For Free, is a good read.

One of his reasons is "People don’t value things that are free."  I have seen that myself.  When I was working in real estate, I was amazed at how unappreciative some people were with the time we spent trying to help them find new homes.  Most real estate agents work for commission only so if they spend six days showing you homes and you do not buy anything, they end up losing money since they are paying to be real estate agents and covering all of their own expenses.  Because real estate agents do not charge for their time, it is not valued.

I have a great working relationship with a couple of clients in my consulting business.  They tell me what they want done and it is sometimes with photos.  I give them some prices and options.  They decide what they want me to do.  I deliver what they picked and they write me a check. Everyone ends up happy.  I get paid for my work and they get the photos that they want and you can be sure that I have never given them one where the picture isn't level like I see so often in real estate listings.

Working with a good client is much easier than when you are writing an article. Sometimes you spend hours on an article, submit it, get a request for revisions, do the revisions and they still end up deciding not to publish the article.  That is how some of my free content gets done.  Often when you have worked on a story for so long, you do not want to fight the battle again with another set of editors so it is easier to start on something new.

It is the reality in the world where we live.  Content may be king but it has a shaky valuation. In a world where everyone has an amazing array of information available to them, why is my knowledge worth anything to anyone?

I have spent much of my life as a sales person and my earnings have been directly tied to my ability to assess customers' needs and suggest solutions that make sense for them.  I have been very successful at sales and on February 28, my friend, Stephen, who is also a very good sales person sent me a WSJ blog article about how big data and analyzing it will "remove the black art from sales." All I have to say is good luck with that.  The world still needs some Stephens.

I guess CISCO has a program that predicts when companies will buy their next router.  I am happy they can do that but there will always be sales situations that are best managed by a good human sales person.  It is a little like me saying that I have a computer program, plenty of sensors and data which will actually predict who is going to catch the first keeper drum out of the surf at the Point this season. I am thinking Dr. Bogus who does measure the water temperature but also spends a lot of time actually fishing will do a lot better job predicting at least when the fish will start biting than any computer.  I think humans still have the upper hand in some situations.  I am predicting that we will continue to hold an advantage because we can be present, use all the tools that God gave us and tap into our years of experience.

There is still room for expertise in our strangely tilted world, it just requires more work and pays less.  Maybe we will get to a point where we value good content as much as we value a ticket to a football game or grocery coupons.  It is a little sad that we gotten to a point in the world where our senses are so overwhelmed that we have a hard time valuing things that will last like a good book or a nice picture.  I am a little bit old school, I still have a couple of boxes of favorite magazines and even some newspaper clippings that I have hauled around with me.  I miss the great newspaper writers, the sometimes stunning covers of Life Magazine and National Geographic. I also enjoy writing enough that I try to rescue and update some of my old free articles that provide useful information.

I still value my own talents and enjoy sharing my pictures and articles with people who seem to appreciate what I write even if it is free.  I can tell you more about what is going on in the picture of our dock at the top of the post than any computer and most of folks reading this article.  There is value in being present and actually on top of a situation. However, most times it will not buy you a cup of coffee.

Just for the record, I have never charged a friend to help them fix their computer.  The only time I have ever turned down a friend with a computer problem is when I really did not have the time or thought I was the wrong person for their problem.  Also most of my close friends have prints of mine hanging on their walls. They came from my big printer and they were all free.  Our former church in Roanoke has more than a few of those prints and I feel blessed they were able to use them in such a wonderful setting.

Life is certainly not about getting money for everything you do. It would be a very miserable life if we could not give freely of our talents. I have friends who are very generous in helping me and I try to be thankful for their help and help them in return.  However we have to be careful in today's world. With all the free stuff we do provide, there is a line that we need to draw in the sand or eventually all of us but the politicians will be working for nothing.

The Internet Can Be A Lonely Spot

While it seems like the Internet has been around forever.  Most of us have been using it for only twenty years or so.

Though we are all connected, the Internet can be a very lonely spot like my picture of the beach at Cedar Island, North Carolina.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Tumblr supplement the many blogs and websites that have sprouted over the years.

If you are like me, when you have a question, the first place you turn is the Internet and probably a Google search.

Yet when you strike out on your own to create an Internet presence beyond a Facebook page, it can feel like no one is listening much less providing any answers.

There are some important things to consider if you want to use the Internet for something beyond finding out what your friends are doing.

1. Your content has to be relevant and interesting.
2. You have to find an audience.
3. You have to keep and build your audience.
4. Writing regularly is the only way to conquer the first three items.
5. Beyond everything a passion for what you write must show through.

These five things are just the absolute basics without considering any of the technology decisions.  When I first started writing for the Internet in 2004, I remember waiting anxiously for the first people to view my posts.  It is pretty easy to question what you are doing if no one is finding your message.

I regularly update a post, The Best Website Advice You Will Get.  It provides information on how to make the step to a website of your own.  If you do not want to take the time to read the article, head on over to WordPress.com and sign up for a free blog.

If you can manage to create at least a post a week for several months, upgrade to a domain name which relates to what you are writing.  Then use accounts at Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and Tumblr to grow the number of people who visit your posts.

Work at being a better writer.  Don't write just to be writing. Always have a message or some worthwhile advice.  If after a year, you barely feel like your head is above water, understand that most people go through the same experience.

Try hard to connect with people who have the same interests. Consider a Google+ community for people with similar interests. Listen to what they are saying.  Does you content add value to the conversation?  If so, don't give up easily.  Writing for the web does get easier and there are many great ways to create a successful Internet presence.  Unfortunately there are no good roadmaps.

Here is some other advice that might help.

Take a break when you don't have anything of value to say.  You will know when it is time to starting writing again.

Finally do not be surprised if your passion for writing and posting on the Internet is not shared by other family members.  If I am lucky my wife will do the first proof reading on my books, but I cannot remember her reading a blog post or article of mine in years.  That is just the way it is.

Writing for the Internet and being successful is a lot like swimming three miles in a pool.  As long as you have the basic skills, most of it is mental and pushing yourself to work harder and go farther than you thought you could go.