Well, it is 4:30AM and I'm completely awake - bright and bleary-eyed This has been a tough few weeks, with both kids getting the flu (or something like it) - and they got it consecutively - first Melody, which knocked her out for a week, now Noah, who is busy snoring away in the swing because that's the only place where he gets any rest. Poor bugger, he can't even blow his own nose yet, so he's just plain uncomfortable.
This leads me to something I've been thinking a lot about lately, especially given the holiday season, and that is giving thanks. I learned a long time ago that having an attitude of gratitude is by far the most healthy thing for me, and especially in these somewhat difficult times of newborn bliss, giving thanks is a great way to remeber just how lucky and blessed I am. I was hoping to get this out for Thanksgiving, but better late than never, and as anyone who knows me well knows, time management isn't my strongest quality. :-)
So here goes. In no particular order.
- My wife and kids, just for being great.
- The rest of my family, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, everybody. Thanks for your love and support.
- All the folks at Sputnik - Dave, Art, Kathy, Scott, Tom, Bryan, Tony, Jeff - Kudos guys.
- All the folks at Technorati - Dan, Kevin, Mike, Kriszti, Louis, Brendyn, Theresa - you folks rock.
- Dan Gillmor, one of the few voices in mainstream journalism who
consistently does great reporting on technology, media, and civil
liberties issues
- Steve Gillmor, tireless supporter for metadata and new journalism
business models
- Dave Winer and the folks at Userland for setting up weblogs.com, the granddaddy of the pinger sites.
- Not to mention all the standards backed up by real money (and bandwidth) that Dave provides. Thanks, man.
- Doc Searls - a constant voice of sanity, wisdom, and good judgement. And the best knack for writing weblog/article titles I've seen.
- Jason DeFillippo and his wonderful Blogrolling service.
- Ben and Mena Trott for producing great tools
- The USA. Yeah, even though this country isn't perfect (and right now, we're going through one of those periods of collective insanity), it is still a great country, and I'm grateful to be living here - only by accident of birth - rather than in one of dozens of incredibly repressive, war-torn, or dirt-poor countries.
- Evan, Steve, Jason, and the folks at Blogger
- Linus and the hordes of open source programmers out there adding to the collective codebase. Thanks.
- The EFF, for its tireless work and fight for our civil rights in cyberspace
- Larry Lessig and the folks at Creative Commons, fighting to preserve the public domain and our collective heritage
- Brewster Kahle and the folks at the Internet Archive, adding a Library of Congress every few months can get wearing after a while, thanks for doing it.
- All you bloggers - who (a) help inspire and inform me, and (b) help make my current business possible. There is a rebirth of civics going on, and you guys are making it happen (as well as posting great kitten photos)
- Yahoo, Google, the New York Times, AOL, the Mozilla Project, the Apache project, the list goes on and on. Thanks.
This just starts to scratch the surface of the list. I am so lucky to be alive and to be right here, right now.