You were but a flicker in my heart.  And now, you're a toddler.  Already!

Yoga Garden celebrated its second birthday today our time, yesterday Japan time.  When we launched in July 2005 I figured I'd be in Japan to help it grow, forever.  Instead, the tide turned and I decided to venture out on a sabbatical in October 2006.  The studio has done nothing but grow since then.  Early this year we added new teachers and a Tai Chi class to the schedule.  The teachers and the new schedule additions have taken off.  Patrick, my co-host at Zen Is Stupid and co-founder of the studio, cares for the studio as though it were a child, and thus, it has grown and grown.


To the teachers, students and students-to-be at Yoga Garden, many thanks.  You have made it what it is today.  For two years we've comminted to creating value for our students, keeping the class size small and personal, and letting students grow at their own pace.  More than a studio, in a time where studios proliferate, we've co-created sanctuary.  Namasté.

I know you've been sitting around scratching your head asking:  Now where oh where are those three geeks?  Well, Vince is back from the East Coast and I'm pre-departure to some other part of the world, so here we are in a super rare three-way podcast, the first one together since we launched.  We're rapping about the development of Buddhist Geeks to date, our new t-shirts and our favorite interviews.  A funny listen.

And more happy news!  Last night Patrick finished editing the new Yoga Garden Sun Salute video.  It features our senior teacher Takako and is really a gracefully produced and lovingly done piece.  If you are already practicing yoga, this might just be a new take on some familiar themes.  If you're new to it, it's a great place to start!

Expatriette. 

Expy is:  Feisty.  Young.  Travel.  Modular Living.  Sexy.

Expatriette launched around midnight on July 1st, 2007.  The same day my first business celebrated its second anniversary.  The launch was all part of the Turn that Frown Upside Down Post-Fire Plan.  The vision and mission has been in my head and heart for many moons.  Years, actually.  Somethings take a while to percolate.

Expy is NOT:  Pre-packaged.  Heavy bags.  Airplane hair.

I know you've wanted to take that trip for a while now.  I know things keep coming up.  I know there's the job, the kids, the mortgage, the car payment, the the.

Wait no longer.  Now is the best time to travel.  If you need inspiration or want to share yours, stop by. 

That up there in the title bar is the latest post at Expatriette.com.  Tuesday is Tips day at Expy.   This is the day that men are allowed on the premises.

The complete posting schedule is as follows:

Monday: Mind Your Manners, Miss--Looking Hot Abroad

Tuesday: Get on the Plane, Jane. Tips, Advice, Encouragement to Travel

Wednesday: Lucky Box--Sometimes Life Defies Categorization! Especially on             Wednesdays!

Thursday: Tech Review-The Latest Products, Services, Raves & Rants

Friday: Taking the Leap--Living Abroad Hacks & Help

If any of these categories sound like good reading, read away.  And if you'd like to write for this emerging genre (Modular Travel), send us an email:  info@expatriette.com.  

When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

This is where I'm at, who I'm with and what I'm doing all weekend.  I'm at my geekiest best!

Start Up Weekend.

I think I'm in Heaven.

Yoga with Laptops! 

Start Up Weekend Day 2 is drawing to a close.  We've got ten minutes until our next deadline/check in.  People are starting to fade.  But we're going to launch this puppy by tomorrow...and that's thrilling. 

Each of us own a share or 2 of stock in the company and the live feed of the event is available here.  We got techcrunched.  It's been a big day and the creative team ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCKS!

Buy a shirt.  They're so cute.  And we did the logo!!

StartUp Weekend continues as more people tune in and want to know what we're doing.  Here it is in a nutshell.

A group of 70 super cool, super talented and surprisingly friendly people got together for a weekend in Boulder.  Our goal was to build a company in a  weekend. 

We have founded and incorporated VoSnap, Inc. 

There's the inevitable smack talking on techcrunch.  But you know how the saying goes...

Keep your eyes open.  We launch tonight by midnight!

Bottom line:  Starting companies is fun!!

Well, I'm nearly back to 100% following Startup Weekend and the near-launch of a new soft innovation, VoSnap.  The idea of VoSnap is that you can make a quick vote, or a "decision in a snap."  Hence the tagline:  It's decided.  (To read more about the weekend, check out the extensive & comprehensive break-down of what went right/wrong, here.)

I'd like to just take a few minutes and free-form on how the weekend and subsequent days have been for me.  As one of only five women (one on the marketing team, one on the CSS team, one on the dev team, one on the lawyer team plus me equals five) I think I have a pretty unique perspective on what went down this weekend.

First of all, because I had no expectations going in, I approached the weekend with beginner's mind.  I was like, ok, I start companies all the time and this will just be like that only bigger.  My hunch was relatively accurate.   It was "bigger" in one sense.  But when I first heard that we'd be launching a web app that would allow us to spend even more time online, I guess I was kind of bummed.  It seemed like too small an idea and too many people.  I figured we'd wrap the project up by Sunday morning at the latest.

Again, I was wrong.  As the room began to break up into teams on Friday night I had a choice to make.  At first I went over to the "I'll do anything to get it done" team.  Sort of a catch-all team for people that weren't sure where they fit in.  I saw that the team was too big and "floaty" for me, so I went over to the Designer's table.  (We soon began to call it the Creatives Table, which made more sense).  My role over the next 24 hours or so was to gather the information, bits and pieces from all the teams, really, aggregate it and then explain it in designer-friendly terms to the Creative team.  I was like a Real Life Feed Aggregator. Once the Creatives executed an idea it was my job to explain it to the whole room of 70 some odd people in a way that everyone could understand.

Oh, and then there was the yoga.

When you get a bunch of tech-types in a room with bagels and Red Bull, you can pretty much forget about any sort of physical exercise.  Friday evening, before we even went home, I pitched the idea to Andrew that we do a minute or two of yoga at each meeting.  As it turns out, we had 8.5 minute meetings on the hour (almost every hour) with 1.5 minutes spend stretching, twisting and laughing.  Because so much of moving around like that is getting a smile back on your face.  It really worked wonders.  At first there was some mild resistance to the idea.  By Sunday, when we missed a "yoga session," I had the dev team coming up to me asking for us to do yoga at the next meeting.  This is no joke.

There was some tension in teams at time throughout the weekend, but overall a sense of quiet harmony pervaded.  It was so different than how I remember teams working together in high school.  Back then kids did as little as they could to get by.  Over the weekend there was a buzz of energy.  Even people that weren't producing very much tangible stuff were outside throwing around ideas for the next viral video, blogging or twittering.  Everyone got involved somehow.

By Saturday night when I finally went to sleep around one a.m. my mind was buzzing with frenetic thoughts.  I wasn't able to wind down right away and knew that I would probably get sick.  I woke up on Sunday morning with a sore throat but determined to go "into the office" and potentially make everyone sick.  :P  Sorry, guys.  So, I went and kept my spirits up for most of the day.  I read some of the more cruel comments left at Techcrunch but just let them pass over my radar.  I hung out a lot withe the Biz/Dev team and had a great time getting to know them. 

Then, Gambit arrived (see pic).

When Gambit the Hedgehog arrived around 11 p.m. on Sunday night I pretty much knew that we wouldn't have a project to launch.  Gambit cheered me up and I bid folks farewell as they packed it in and called it a night around midnight.  And that was that.

Tonight, Tuesday, I hung out with the TechStars of Boulder at New Technology night at the Law School.  The energy from StartUp Weekend every bit as palpable as it was on Sat/Sun. 

Right before the house burned down I was really committed to leaving Boulder and doing some traveling.  Following this weekend, my faith in Boulder and the tech scene is truly restored.  And I'm thinking I might give it another go.

This weekend there were times when more than 100 people at a time tuned in to watch the Live Feed.  Thousands of unique IP addresses were logging into vosnap.com.  It was the most public I've ever been in terms of the web.  I've performed in front of hundreds and sometimes those concerts were recorded, but this was ON AIR. 

This isn't the first time that I've wondered about my level of transparency with people reading my blogs and watching my life as it unfolds.  My blog is one thing.  The sheer number of people writing, reading, watching and commenting on my life this weekend was a little different.

First of all, all mistakes and missteps were recorded and people could give instant feedback on things.  In a way it was like Truman Show.  Most of the time I barely noticed the camera.  When I taught yoga I hardly noticed it was there, but other people remarked on it and looked a bit self-conscious moving their hips with the world watching.  I can understand.  Yoga is typically a semi-private endeavor.  Should it be kept that way?

Then, Buddhist Geeks put up a group podcast.  Some negative comments have rolled in on that, including: 

After I heard on your recent podcast that a host had connections with S Girls and even considered submitting her self pics, I was dismayed. You all are way too young, folks.

Interesting comment.  Interesting because this is an issue I've wrestled with publicly from day one at BGeeks.  How to balance spirituality and sexuality.  And I will continue to do so, even if we lose one listener or a thousand because of it.  That's the truth.  Ain't no shame in my game.   I'm young, I meditate and from time to time, I'm horny.  Big f'in deal.

What's curious about that post is that it's gotten more traffic than any other post or podcast to date.  People are curious about sexuality and afraid to open up about it.  One thing that I saw in Japan and that still seems to me to be the reason it's safe enough for a 12 year old girl to be out on the streets anywhere in the country at 2 am (sorry this is a run on) is that people are open about sexuality.  There is less charge around it.  And fewer hang-ups.  Could it be that our predominantly Protestant upbringings have actually created *more* fear around our sexuality?

Okay, that's not all that I wanted to talk about in this post.  The real point of this post is to take a look at whether we should be as transparent online as we are in our "real lives."  Last night at the new technologies meetup on CU's campus one group made the point that everything you put up online is searchable.  So, if you don't want us to know about it, he said, don't make it public.

I equate transparency with truth-telling.  That doesn't mean my entire life is going to be opened up to the public.  If I had a camera following me around for more than a weekend it might start to get old.  And the truth is, I'm up to a lot of things you probably don't want to know about.

As a Knowledge Worker*, I think it's one of responsibilities to inform others about what's happening with regards to new and emerging technologies.  Even when you mark an entry "friends only" or think your email is for your eyes only, think again.  Just this morning I opened up my gmail account and what appeared on the page was SOMEONE ELSE'S account.  Everything.  Now, it's possible that someone borrowed my computer and forgot to close it, but, the point stands.  You're always vulnerable.  Start setting boundaries now.  Forget feature creep.  Start thinking about privacy creep.

I didn't mean for this to devolve into a bunch of warnings.  Michael Moore will probably take care of that soon enough.  Really, I just want to get a dialog started about how much is too much?  Is there such a thing as too transparent?  Or is it all pretty much up for grabs when you make your life public through blogging, twittering & online social networks (writing about preferences that you can later be target-marketed for?). 

Twitter me with thoughts.  ;)

*The Knowledge Worker:
-Works with ideas and manages teams
-Wants to be able to develop and improve processes and forms; encourage collaboration; create workspace environments
-Needs to create, consume, transform and analyze data
-Works in an unstructured, free-form way, maybe starting with a set of ideas which are collaborated on and built into a new document/report/form/business process.
-Examples of this type of worker include middle/senior managers, consultants, marketing execs.

I think that says it all.  Happy Friday, y'all.

(Oddly, as I was trying to post this, another tempation of sorts came through on twitter.  I'm aghast.)

We were coming out of Belk, this chain store that my grandmother is fairly nuts for. I was still in high school and had been wearing a size 10.5 shoe for several years but still couldn't handle going into the shoe department and being told "no" to all the cute shoes and "yes" to the well-cushioned posturpedic ones.  

We were coming out of Belk, and I was bemoaning my feet and all the awkward things that happen to me because of my size and my grandmother said, "Gwendolyn, be thankful you have feet."  And as though she had timed it to happen, a man without feet, nothing from the ankles down, on crutches, hobbles past us.  Very slowly.  My grandmother summed it up all very nicely by saying, "now, as I was saying, be thankful you have feet."

From that point on I believed my grandmother to be magical, correct on every count and somehow able to control my fate and the fates of others.  I also stopped hating my feet.  And my self.

                                                                         ***

I quit wearing heels when I became a hard-core feminist for a couple of months in college.  And until this summer I had pretty much sworn them off.  I know they're bad for your posture, back, feet and all.  But I found a pair of incredible shoes that I wear once every two weeks or so and they make me feel very lady-like.  Which happens infrequently for me.  I don't know, I'm just weird like that.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is that it doesn't have to be either/or.  It can be both/and.  I'm tall and have big feet AND I wear heels sometimes.  I'm a world traveler AND it's nice to have a home base sometimes.

My grandmother and grandfather celebrate their 50th anniversary next week.  I hope to join them for it and be there to represent for mom and her side of the family.  I think she would have liked to have been there, too. 

And for the record, I still think my grandmother has some magic powers.
I hope she passes them on to me.

I know, right.  Irresistible.  Fur like cotton balls.
(re-posting for Jake & Josh...ya codemonkies, you... ;) )

I'm reporting LIVE from the lobby/bar at W Hotel in Chicago Illinois (hence, the pic).  My cosmo is on its way.  I'll be blogging throughout the entire BlogHer conference.  If you want to keep up with me and all the things going on at the conference, please cruise over to gwenbell.com/blog and take a look.  I'm blogging it over there because it's an open network where anyone can comment on my blog, which makes it fun fun for everyone!  Please join us!