These are more general, less about becoming awesome at one thing in particular and more about just being better. I make no guarantees of excellence in particular, but I know from personal experience that these keys just might make you happy in general.

1. Embrace your eccentricities. Embarrassment is a waste of time, so take pride in your strangeness. I’m not advocating an abandonment of common sense. Unless your boss is incredibly understanding, don’t go to work dressed as a Stormtrooper or a Klingon (unless that is your job). But the things that interest you, that bring you joy and fulfillment, they’re worth celebrating without shame.
2. Never stop learning … and whenever possible, learn by doing. You never know when the most obscure fact will suddenly become the most valuable piece of information ever. Ephemera and trivia will save your life … or at least your day.
3. Life is too short. If you have something to say, say it now. The same goes for to do, to be, to learn … practically any verb, really.
4. Be bold. We give this advice to our NFDC actors. If you’re going to do something, do so boldly. Bigger actions risk bigger mistakes, but so be it. Small actions, tiny movements, they look embarrassed and unsure. This applies in life as much as on stage. Life is not to be lived tentatively.
5. Hate is a burden. Like Henry Rollins once said: “Hating someone is giving them too much, Just leave them alone. Its like when someone wants to hand you a big pile of horsesh*t, you don’t have to take it.”
6. Find your tribe. Take those eccentricities from #1 and turn them inside out. Convert your peculiarities into connections. Go forth and find others like yourself, then combine your efforts, share your passions, pool your knowledge.

I’m no Stephen Covey. I don’t see a future for me in motivational speaking or life coaching. I’m just putting these out there because they work for me … and that’s only when I remember them.

So what are yours?

Turns out, the future is closer than I thought. Sort of. Behold: Future Check-In.

Now, this is an iPhone only application. It runs in the background thanks to iOS 4′s multitasking ability, which means it won’t work on my relatively venerable iPhone 3G, only on the 3GS and iPhone 4.

But if you’ve got the hardware and the desire to manage your Foursquare-ing with subtlety, the app is on sale in the App Store this week for a mere 99 pennies.

Thing One: If someone wanted to call me, they wouldn’t get me. Thing Two: I couldn’t check in at The Red Hen, a local brunch spot and one of my FourSquare Mayorships.

My only real competition for that mayorship was the person riding beside me in the car. Conveniently, Nikki left her phone at home as well. So unless some other enterprising social mediaphile stepped into my territory, I was safe.

But for the rest of the afternoon, even after we’d returned home and headed back into the world, I didn’t check in. Not at the shoe store, not at the hippie grocery. Only later did I do so, and even then FourSquare placed me in the wrong location.

But while I wasn’t checking-in to FourSquare, I was checking out Glue.

What is it? It’s like a reviewing platform crossed with a messaging service, parked next door to a 24-hour Barnes & Noble. Or maybe it’s like Twitter, only with more specific prompts. It’s not just “What Are You Doing?” but instead, “What’s that book you’re reading?” Or “What’s that TV show you’re watching?”

And then it gets nosey. “I see you like this TV show, but what do you think about this other TV show? What about this one? And hey, that actor is pretty cool, right?”

This seems like it might be annoying, but it isn’t. Instead, though a sticker-ing system, it becomes kind of addictive. “In just 42 more book reviews, you’ll get a sticker …” And so, because stickers are on the line, you keep clicking “I like it” or “I don’t like it” or “Not for me” on the proffered books, movies, albums, gadgets and so on.

After a weekend’s worth of tentative clicking, I have seven stickers. I’m also the guru of a couple of jazz album pages.

So what’s the point? Well, after telling Glue that I liked a couple of Caleb Carr novels, the system suggested a few others that users said were similar. I looked them up (as they’re linked to Amazon) and sent samples to my Kindle. One of them was a new Matthew Pearl novel that had escaped my notice. I’ll probably buy it.

Even though I enjoy GoodReads and LibraryThing, not once has either service recommended a book that was right up the alley of another I enjoyed. But Glue did, and it did so because users made thematic connections that simple categories could not.

And the reviewing component is rather robust. See something you like, review it. You might become the Guru for that page. Or just make a widget for your blog, like this one (hover over it for the awesome):

(I’m angling to become the Archie Bell & The Drells Guru. Why? Because.)

There’s also Twitter and Facebook integration, as well as browser-installed fun with sites like Amazon and IMDB.

After a weekend with it, I’m impressed. So get it, play with it … and let me know what you think.

A conversation from the other day pulled my focus to the immediate future. In the closing moments of a meeting, the discussion turned to social media, social everything as we know it, and where it will go from here. After all, naysayers at the dawn of the Internet boom declared this magnificent World Wide Web as little more than a curiosity, a passing communications fad that would fade into oblivion once folks grew tired of typing so damned much. Yet here we are, still typing feverishly, even if the keyboard is mobile or virtual. And so, in the context of social media, is there a future for Twitter? For FourSquare?

Tweeting is not forever.

My conjecture is that none of these entities is permanent. Will tweeting become a punchline in ten years’ time? Sure. It already is. Before long, it’ll find a place on the shelf between telexing and two-way paging.

The idea that Twitter represents, however, that isn’t going away. Not to be too touchy-feely about the idea, but given the right opportunity, we enjoy sharing experiences with one another. We’ve gotten a taste of interpersonal communication on a massive scale. So while “tweeting” itself will surely shift out of our everyday vocabulary, something will have to take its place. To put it another way, the act of sharing select bits of information will become far less important than the sharing itself.

Who cares where?

And FourSquare? Even people who get Twitter don’t always understand FourSquare. Why the heck would anyone want anyone else to know they spent an afternoon at the grocery store? I mean, there’s sharing and then there’s a pitiful kind of retail bragging. But the idea of checking-in where we shop, where we dine and where we entertain ourselves, is an idea that needs only a sustained and quantifiable benefit to become just as fundamental as Twitter. Already, FourSquare rewards users with Mayorships that are in turn translated by various establishments. A free latte here, a free beer there. Some locations are just happy to have any check-in at all. And yet, the system could stand to be simpler. Wait on the app to load, wait for the app to gather your location from your phone’s GPS, then scan a list to confirm you’re really where you want to declare your physical presence.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I’m an inveterate FourSquare user, but even I get tired of the business of checking-in. For a quick stop at the drugstore for gum or Advil, it’s just not worth the bother. FourSquare Fatigue sets in. I come and go without a mention.

So what about the future?

The future looked different ten years ago.

In 1997, IBM launched their e-Business campaign. A multi-year series of commercials and print ads — some of which garnered awards for Ogilvy and Mather — showed us what the future could be like. One such commercial from 2000 was entitled “Supermarket.” Here it is in Spanish, though it needs little translation:

The greenish tint, the guyliner, the trenchcoat, it’s all a little too steeped in The Matrix and Y2K to be timeless. But I have never forgotten the idea of a store smart enough to passively know not only the prices of the items purchased but your means of payment. The idea, of course, was that IBM’s innovations in RFID technology would make consumables addressable.

Strangely, this commercial has taken on a new life in the last few years as a warning of things to come, a harbinger of a government conspiracy to inject us all with RFID tags — much like a pet. Just Google “RIFD IBM commercial conspiracy.” Some concerns go beyond the governmental and into the spiritual, citing RFID technology as the work of the Devil, an electronic Mark of the Beast. Of course, RFID as portrayed in the commercial is in the products, not the buyer. And his means of payment is an RFID tagged credit card, presumably. Frankly, I’m more concerned over the safety of the frozen meat he stuffed in his pocket than his immortal soul.

But I’m rambling …

So what about the future? Really?

(A warning. We’re entering the realm of speculation.)

The ease of use presented in the commercial will come, though in a far less dystopian manner. Via RFID tags or a technology even newer, you’ll be able to shop and go as you please. But that’s just eliminating a few minutes at the cash register, a convenience that isn’t all that life-changing in the long run.

The bigger evolution will continue as it has started, in communication.

Social media will move from active participation to passive participation, or perhaps simply acquiescence. It is generally agreed that social media is about collaboration, networking and sharing, but at the moment, it takes effort to do so. I’m confident that this will change.

This can be done now, in part. Last.fm has been collecting our musical tastes for years and Pandora attempts to discern our listening tastes. Facebook and Twitter give us the opportunity to answer, “What are you doing?” Through Flickr, we share our photos. Through YouTube, we share video. Soundcloud is for audio. All we’re missing is a grand and sweeping opt-in. Then we’ll have the ability to share whatever we’re doing at any given time. We will become our own walking broadcasts. Our friends will have the ability to tune in, as if we were radio stations. But how?

The word to keep in mind is ubiquity. If the worst fate for a technology is obsolescence, then the golden ring is ubiquity. When everyone has a powerful mobile platform — and they will, as smartphones are dropping in price and will soon become the free option with a new mobile pland — then everyone will be an independent producer of personal media. Whether or not this becomes a world-changing collaborative engine of Cognitive Surplus as per Clay Shirky’s latest written observations, that is yet to be determined.

But in the meantime, a smartphone will be found in every pocket, all of them location-aware and broadband/wifi-connected. Ubiquity reached.

Automatic for your people.

Our smartphone will take casual notice of the coffee shop we just entered, notifying the barista that this is our 12th visit. More often than not, we’ve ordered a large cup of the daily bold, but some days call for a hazelnut latte. “The usual?” they will ask and we’ll nod. “Anything else?” No, not today. A Paypal account (or evolved equivalent) we’ve previously authorized for this coffee shop will make an effortless transfer of funds. Our beverage ready, we’ll take it with a thank you, then speak the name of our new favorite song aloud and walk out with the tune in our ears.

And all the while, we’ve been telling (and showing) our connected friends where we are, what we ordered and what’s new on our playlist. Perhaps we’ll give them a glance of the barista behind the counter. This communication will not be limited to 140 characters and will be multi-tiered in levels of privacy. The experience will be textual, visual, audible.

Will people fear this? Hate this? Of course they will. But some people have been waiting for this all their lives …

The bigger question is, will you opt-in or not?

In 1997, Prince — or rather, O(+> — started promoting Crystal Ball via love4oneanother.com. The online sale of Crystal Ball was an “xperiment in truth” …

“no charts, no royalty disputes, no returns, no arguing over product placement, no singles and video budgets, no egos and most of all, NO MIDDLEMAN!”

The pre-sold CDs were shipped in January 1998 and fans were directed to crystalcd.newfunk.com, home to interactive liner notes (since archived).

By 2000, Prince was selling merch and music at www.1800newfunk.com. Then came NPGMusicClub.com, a members-only all-Prince download service that ran from 2001 to 2006. This was followed by 3121.com, a website that accompanied the 2006 album of the same name.

In March 2009, Prince introduced lotusflow3r.com, a destination where one could pay $77 yearly for downloads of new albums, access to streaming video and a t-shirt. But as of April 2010, the site is defunct — much to the chagrin of existing patrons charged an additional $77.

So here’s how I see it: The Internet is dead … to Prince.

And with good reason, as he’s given it more than a few opportunities to impress him. He took a mighty leap in the beginning and has kept coming back every few years to try again. You didn’t like the 3-CD set in a plastic petri dish? Fine, then how about six years of live tracks, made-to-order? No, then how about a handful of new albums and a shirt?

Prince kept coming to your door, Internet, looking fine as hell and bearing gifts hand-picked to please you. Were they the gifts you expected, like an easily-affordable remastered back-catalog in MP3 and FLAC format? Hell, no. Because that’s just not Prince’s way, baby. You take him as he is, or you can get the hell out. And don’t expect to sneak around and catch video clips on YouTube or trade concert bootlegs on eBay. Oh, no …

Because you’ve made your bed, Internet, and now you must lie in it.

Without Prince.

(Full Disclosure: I pondered this post during my morning commute … while listening to a bootleg of Prince’s 1985 concert at the Orange Bowl in Miami aka Purple Finale.)

That said, there are a few observations (spoiler-free) that must be made:

- George R.R. Martin is head-over-heels in love with heraldry. No banner’s device is overlooked and no knight takes the field without a thorough description from helm to vambrace to greaves. Helms shaped like rams, breastplates encrusted with rubies and steel is rendered in every color of the rainbow. Like Skittles. Skittles of death.

- Martin likes to fête his characters. Fasts are broken every morning, and wine is always at the pour. Onions are often on the menu, always roasted crispy and always leave the consumer’s fingers and/or beards dripping with grease. As a result, the books leave me with a ferocious need to grill something.

- Much like watching a James Bond film, it is an easy game to read the books in anticipation of one character or another making mention of that books title … or the title of any previous or subsequent book. For the most part, these title-drops are subtle. At other times, there is almost a Horatio Caine vibe. “That’s how you play the game … of thrones.” YEAHHHHHHHHHH!

- Along similar lines, Martin’s career history as a television writer manifests hardcore in the novels’ Prologues. Without fail, you’re brought in media res into a situation that seems perfectly ordinary. Three men are wondering in the snowy woods. An elderly adviser is studying his books. Somebody is grilling onions with greasy fingers. But by the end of the Prologue, things have gone from mundane to HOLY CRAP, backs are against the wall, blood is spilled, and OMGWTF-is-that?!? :cue theme music and opening credits:

- And lastly, it is in the reader’s best interest to forget how young Martin’s protagonists are. At the beginning of A Game of Thrones, the Stark children range from toddler to early teenager. And when the hard knocks of life start kicking them around, Martin gives them little to no quarter. In a futile effort to avoid protestations of “But they’re just kids!”, Martin describes their ages as “three-and-ten” for 13 or “six-and-ten” for 16 and so on, but to no avail. As for me, I just imagine that years must surely be longer in this imagined world. You know, like they’re living on Mars or something.

I’m on Book Four, about 25% through — the Kindle is lovely, but I miss page numbers — and I know full well that Book Five has yet to see the light of day, or even a publication date for that matter. But for all of the recurring tropes, I’m consuming these books like popcorn.

Buttery, salty, bloody popcorn.

* – Be careful with the Martin and Wikipedia links, lest ye be spoiled for plot points.

• 15. Jon Hopkins – Insides. Almost as good as 2007′s Untrue from Burial. Almost. When the machines take over, they will march rather gracefully in time to this. (Listen to “Wire”)
• 14. Alela Diane – To Be Still. There is a certain beauty to spareness, to starkness. Alela Diane has a voice from another time. (Listen to “Dry Grass & Shadows”)
• 13. Tanya Morgan – Brooklynati. Tanya Morgan is not a girl. Tanya Morgan is a rap group. And if you’ve lost hope for hip-hop, Tanya Morgan might restore it. (Listen to “So Damn Down”)
• 12. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion. This album is at the top of so many 2009 lists. Deservedly so. Like a latter day Pet Sounds. (Listen to “My Girls”)
• 11. Noisettes – Wild Young Hearts. Not every album has to be profound or Earth-shattering. Sometimes, you just need something to hum through your day. (Listen to “Wild Young Hearts”)
• 10. Ben Folds – Ben Folds Presents: University A Cappella! Songs by Ben Folds, produced by Ben Folds, performed by college a cappella groups, often sounding much better than Ben Folds himself. There, I said it. (Listen to “Army”)
• 09. Green Day – 21st Century Breakdown. The almost-as-good follow-up to American Idiot (2004), wherein a punk trio uses concept rock to define the state of our national union and does it wonderfully. (Listen to “Peacemaker”)
• 08. Lee Fields – My World. Did you love Amy Winehouse? Really? Then the phone is ringing. It’s Mr Lee Fields. You should take that call. (Listen to “Love Comes And Goes”)
• 07. St Vincent – Actor. This is a collection of twisted pseudo-lovesongs, all orchestrated to (very) loosely resemble the scores of classic Disney cartoons. Really. (Listen to “Laughing With A Mouth Of Blood”)
• 06. God Help The Girl – God Help The Girl. Imagine Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian woke up with the brilliant idea of making a film in reverse, starting with a joyful soundtrack of mostly Belle & Sebastian covers. This is that. (Listen to “Funny Little Frog”)
• 05. The Clientele – Bonfires on the Heath. If Animal Collective produced this year’s Pet Sounds, then this is the Odessey and Oracle of 2009. (Listen to “Harvest Time”)
• 04. Art Brut – Art Brut Vs. Satan. I was not a true believer until I saw them live. Now? I believe. “Bring. Me. Coffee!” (Listen to “Alcoholics Unanimous”)
• 03. Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career. I want our next NFDC show to look as deliriously charming as this album sounds. (Listen to “French Navy”)
• 02. Imogen Heap – Ellipse. She invited any and all to witness the creative process behind this album, building anticipation through participation rather than hype. This is the future of making music. (Listen to “Swoon”)
• 01. Neko Case – Middle Cyclone. As soon as I heard the first track of this album, I knew it would be my number one for the year. Nobody has a voice like Neko Case, and that voice is a force of nature. Who better to sing a love song from the perspective of a spurned and vengeful funnel-cloud? (Listen to “This Tornado Loves You”)

Now it’s your turn to tell me what I missed.

I’ve yet to leave the house. I’m okay with this.

New developments … well, you know how I mentioned that instead of gauze packing, my face is full of this gel stuff? Right. So when the doctor spoke to Nikki after my surgery, he told her that this gel stuff will disintegrate as the days go on. And that I can expect it to come out in bits. Some bits might be bigger than others. This morning, I met one of these larger pieces. This was shocking, albeit pleasantly so once I had determined that this was actually a chunk of gel and not something vital to my continued well-being. You know, like a thyroid or something.

Also, today brought with it spontaneous teardrops. Without warning, a tear will form and race down my cheek. Big ones, much like those that streaked down the face of Iron Eyes Cody.

What else … oh, yes. Sneezing. “With your mouth open,” is the recommendation for sneezing after surgery, but still, every sneeze is greeted with a mildly panicked “Is my nose still attached?” So far, so good. My nose remains where it is.

The pain is still manageable to negligible. Mostly I can breathe however I choose, which is an improvement over last night. So as the day rounds out, I’m annoyed mostly by the fact that my nose won’t stop running. Unpleasant, but hey … I can deal.