One commenter suggested using spare cycles at Sun for folding@home. Interesting personal project -- prior to joining Sun I was a systems programmer for a startup that did molecular modelling and simulation software.
It was a banner week for the
pasteboard monument being built to Patrik Elias, because I
am now the proud owner of one of a very few Country
of Origin cards.
Patrik Elias is something of a hero in our house. He's our favorite New Jersey Devil. He and my son share the same birthday. We have more autographed Elias jerseys, hats, cards, and 8x10 pictures than we do pictures of the four of us together. Elias signed all of those in person, on his own time, because he is a genuinely good person. As the Devils' leading scorer the past few seasons, he is a genuinely good hockey player as well. The 2003-04 NHL season was Patrik's 7th with the Devils and 8th in the New Jersey organization. His career is represented by just over 700 distinct hockey cards, a veritable mosaic of pictures, statistics and thumbnail swatches of jerseys. Country of Origin represents the 503rd in cardinal order, first in price order, addition to our collection.
The most-quoted authority on trading cards is Beckett, authoritative server for determining value for anything that fits in a poly sleeve. Beckett lists no book value for this card. Usually that means there has been no prior sale, or the card is close to unique and no market exists for it. What's the market value of the Hope Diamond? Don't know, and not my domain. But I wouldn't trade. This little gem holds special meaning for my son and me, as we saw Elias play in the 2002 NHL All-Star game, wearing the maroon jersey with the Czech flag patch on the shoulder, one piece of which is now in our posession. And it is, according to those who don't bend it like Beckett, the only known example of the card -- the other 8 or 9 may still be sealed in factory boxes, lost, or simply hidden away in collections where they won't conjure up memories of a dad & lad trip to Los Angeles.
I have long argued that the beauty of the internet isn't disintermediation, as those scared by early success at amazon.com feared. It's re-intermediation, or in the case of eBay, creating an electronic meeting place where new kinds of intermediation occur for the first time. Without eBay, I would have been forced to go to card shows, trawl through dealer inventory, and simply hope that a 3 ounce card and a 250 pound man crossed paths with a "do you know" radix of no more than two. Through eBay's tens of millions of items, millions of users, and tens of thousands of hockey cards up for sale, two circles of one intersected. Seeing my son's face as I showed him the contents of that bubble envelope, and seeing the look of mutual understanding as he recognized where and when he'd seen that fabric square before, is something for which there is no possible feedback rating.
Our main topic of conversation was Abby's participation in last week's Avon Walk For Breast Cancer in New York City. Abby walked a marathon over the course of two days, an athletic accomplishment for which she trained for about a year. It was an intense conversation because it's a topic that touched all of us. My Aunt May, truly a grandparent figure in my childhood, died 15 years ago as a result of breast cancer. Today my daughter carries her memory as a middle name. We have had a number of scares in our own circle of family and friends. Abby walked in honor of her grandmother, who lost the fight, and three of Abby's friends, who have breast cancer and are fighting it daily.
Abby raised a good chunk of change -- several thousand dollars. She did it by using her local and electronic communities, via email and more traditional means. We supported Abby through an on-line donation. By making it trivially easy to learn about, donate to, support and encourage participants in the events, the Avon Walk has created thousands of micro-communities. It's as simple to learn about the Avon Walk and to donate as it is to forward a joke you get from a co-worker. Each circle of many can be grown by passing on an email or a URL. Each circle is bound tightly by someone's pink ribbons.
As a new blogging wonk (a "blonk"?) I still have to write down ideas when they're fresh, otherwise I forget them before I'm near a keyboard. Last night's dinner was captured with "Randall's Island". Abby described the feeling of waking up on the second day of the walk, on Randall's Island just to the east of mid-town New York city. As she surveyed the skyline, she felt that she had just conquered the city. Abby did what every athlete and politician in the city wishes to do -- she came out on top, emotionally, physically, and in pure terms of social benefit. Abby is the pride of Big Media - at home and in the large - as well as her internet circle of many.