That pretty much sums up my day today. I hate writing negative posts like this, but at this point in the evening I just felt the need to get it off my chest. Keep reading if you don’t mind reading my complaining, or skip to the happy part with the life lesson.

It’s been a rough day.

It started out about as bad as it gets. Shenanigans from the previous evening left me unable to find my sunglasses. My brand new, one-week old, nice pair of sunglasses. They remained lost until about 3 p.m. when the restaurant I left them in called back to tell me that yes, indeed they had them. At least that was some good news.

But unfortunately it just wasn’t meant to be. When I arrived home I turned on my Xbox 360 to put an episode of 30 Rock on, only to see it give me one big “eff you” with three blinking red lights. Online support checked, tweets sent to @xboxsupport, I was then forced to conclude that it’s pretty well dead as dead gets.

I can’t say I didn’t expect it–I purchased it on launch night, November 22, 2005, and I don’t think I know anyone who had an Xbox 360 that lasted as long as mine did (they have been plagued by hardware failures). Now I’m faced with a dilemma: I can pay $99 and wait three weeks to send it to Microsoft, have them repair it, and send it back (it’s obviously not under warranty). OR, I can try to save up a little and splurge for one of the new ones, $299, which is almost certainly not going to fail again anytime soon, and includes a much larger hard drive and built in wifi. I’ll probably do the latter–I was going to buy one at some point anyway. Just hadn’t planned on it this soon.

On top of that, we were hit by a massive storm and, as fate would have it, many of our apartment windows were open, and laundry was still “drying” on the deck. Needless to say I’ve been drying floors and walls for an hour and the clothes outside are probably not going to be dry anytime soon.

The cherry on top? People. Just dealing with some frustrating things right now. But that’s more than I want to get into with this post.

But despite this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, I saw something on the bus today that reminded me to stay happy, regardless of the crap I have to deal with on one particularly bad day.

I wish I had a picture of him, but on the bus, I saw the most unhappy, mean, grumpy, and rude old man I have ever seen. And he muttered. Boy, did he mutter.

“I just don’t understand…” he started. It was a phrase I got to know well by the time I stepped off the bus, as he must’ve said it ten or 15 times.

“I just don’t understand why you would take the bus if you have a bike. Shouldn’t he be on the bike? Lazy kids these days.”

“Lazy kids” of course, meaning me. Me who biked ten miles through the city, had an important phone call at 8 p.m., and didn’t feel like biking up the largest hill in the city.

“I just don’t understand why they let people talk so loud on the bus,” he continued a moment later. This time he was referring to a quiet–literally, I could barely hear them–group of young Asian students talking in the back of the bus.

“I just don’t understand why this kid is practically sitting on me,” he said referring to the man standing politely in front him, standing close due to the crowded bus–ya know, because this is rush hour.

It got to the point where I almost couldn’t stand it anymore. Really, I almost freaked out. I started to turn to him and say, Hey, you know we can hear you. And it’s pretty damn rude. The woman sitting next to him muttered “be nice” a couple times under her breath, but she clearly didn’t care enough to stop the obnoxious comments from flowing.

But when I got off the bus I smiled. I smiled at every person I passed on the sidewalk on the way to my apartment building. And I smiled at the woman waiting inside our doorway, and I hugged my cat when I walked in my front door. Because yea, I had a crap day, but I’m also not that man.

I see good things in the world–despite all the bad. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, and I try not to let my personal emotions offend other people when I’m out in public. I smile at strangers, and say Hi, how are you? even to people I’ve never met before. In my humble opinion, my way is a little better way to go.

I will never be that man. I will never succumb to that kind of hate and sadness. And I’ll never give people such dirty, mean looks as that man did to me today. Because no one deserves that, regardless of how terrible, horrible, no good, very bad my day has been.

Yea, you read that right. The myth.

For those of you who haven’t heard, Dave Weigel is human, with thoughts, emotions, and feelings, like most of the rest of us.

Let me explain. Until yesterday, Dave Weigel was the Washington Post blogger covering the conservative movement. One caveat: he’s not all that conservative. Does that make him a bad blogger? A poor journalist? No. Does it mean he might not have been the best person for the job? Maybe. But that’s missing the larger point here.

The point is that our media is fundamentally flawed. Journalism in the 21st century is facing overwhelming forces, and yesterday’s fiasco at the Washington Post only underscores the futility of trying to fight them. The idea of objective journalism is a myth, for three reasons:

1. News moves faster than people.
2. “Unbiased journalism” is no longer a unique selling point, nor one that consumers are willing to pay for.
3. Journalists have opinions, and hiding them only misleads the public, preventing them from properly interpreting the news they read, hear, and watch.

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I just wanted to post a quick response to this article in Foreign Policy. The author, Golnaz Esfandiari, like so many others, seems intent on discrediting the impact of Twitter on the revolution in Iran. Was Twitter the cause of the attempted revolution? No. Was it the most important communications medium? No. But the article misses the point. The attempted revolution in Iran in 2009 wasn’t a revolution in Iran, it was a revolution in the media and how those of us outside these conflict zones perceive the world around us.

Here’s Esfandiari’s take on what she calls the “Twitter Devolution”:

But it is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right. Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran. As Mehdi Yahyanejad, the manager of “Balatarin,” one of the Internet’s most popular Farsi-language websites, told the Washington Post last June, Twitter’s impact inside Iran is nil. “Here [in the United States], there is lots of buzz,” he said. “But once you look, you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves.”

She’s just missing the point. Of course there wasn’t a Twitter revolution inside Iran. It was a revolution outside Iran. It alerted millions and millions of people in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere that there are serious problems in Iran that need to be fixed. It made the world wake up and realize that the people in Iran aren’t particularly happy with their corrupt and, dare I say, evil government. It showed that the world has become far more interconnected over the past decade than anyone realized.

The article mentions @oxfordgirl, and it does her an incredible disservice. Take a look:

Oxfordgirl was ultimately more successful at gaining publicity for herself than at helping any protesters in Iran. Compare her 10,000 Twitter followers with the 300 followers of a Karaj-based Green activist (who prefers not to be identified or to have his Twitter page publicized). The activist tweets in Persian, which few Western journalists can read, and he is often a source of valuable information about the mood in the country.

Yet again, she’s simply missing the point. Anyone who knows social media, communications, or even marketing knows that comparing number of followers is naive and immature, and insinuating that @oxfordgirl was doing it all for the “publicity” instead of helping the protesters in Iran is offensive to her and to her friends. I know her, respect her, and I understand her background. And if this journalist had done her research, maybe she would too, instead of sounding catty and accusatory.

Esfandiari recovers a bit with the following paragraph:

The story of Oxfordgirl gives a clue about the real role that Twitter played. There is no doubt that she helped spread news about the Iranian protests — often very quickly. Twitter played an important role in getting word about the events in Iran out to the wider world. Together with YouTube, it helped focus the world’s attention on the Iranian people’s fight for democracy and human rights. New media over the last year created and sustained unprecedented international moral solidarity with the Iranian struggle — a struggle that was being bravely waged many years before Twitter was ever conceived.

But that doesn’t make up for the downright misleading nature of the article. In the end, to me this sounds like a frustrated and desperate print journalist, all too self-aware of her impending irrelevance. It sounds jealous, naive, and uninformed. And the accusations pointed at @oxfordgirl are downright mean.

[Foreign Policy]

It’s high time for this wake-up call. It is abundantly clear by the recent outrage at Facebook that the vast majority of the Internet–the social media crowd, in particular–still doesn’t get the business of social media. Social media is not a public service. It is not funded and managed by the government. It is not a nonprofit entity, out to change the world, regardless of the profit margin.

Social media is a business, and it amazes me how much social media users are, quite frankly, acting like entitled, spoiled brats.

Reality is striking the social media space and it’s hitting hard and fast. As we all know, it’s centered on the Facebook privacy debacle, set in motion by a changed privacy policy meant to help further the business–and the continued existence–of a growing international corporation. Couple that with some bad PR on Facebook’s part and a spoiled user base, and you’ve set the stage for a crisis of poisoned Tylenol proportions. But Facebook can relax, because they’re in the right on this one. People need to wake up and smell the roses, because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Three things I want you to learn from this post.

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This is insanity.

- The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, “replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.”

- The Board refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.”

I honestly don’t know what to say about this debate except that it’s absolutely ludicrous and it’s making the United States look foolish. By literally rewriting history to fit some radical conservative ideals, the state of Texas is making the U.S. look as if, instead of governed by a Democratic supermajority, governed by a strange group of radical right-wing nutcases.

Removing Thomas Jefferson from history books? HOW CAN YOU DO THAT?