After lunch today, as Mom and I were walking back to the Museum, she asked if I would mind a detour, she wanted to show me something. No, I didn't mind; sure, let's see what it is.

We walked to a house that was converted to a restaurant, walked up the porch and to a large ficus on the far side of the building. Mom commented, "Yeah, last time I was here, a hummingbird kept dive bombing me. I didn't understand why until a mom came up and asked if we would mind if she let her son take pictures. We looked up and saw the nest. At that point, you couldn't even see their beaks over the edge of the nest."

The baby birds were about 3 cm long, and just sat there as I shoved the camera up their beaks.

I worried about disturbing them too much, but managed not to do so, I think. This one was the best angle, even though it doesn't really show how tiny they were.

Sitting at lunch today with Mom, a piece of paper blew by our table.

I picked it up.

Instant art.

It reads:

Antoinette Apostalou, you destroy love in every man's life even Sonny Apostolou's. My love is eternal so you can't win my [heart] dictates that you continue doing what your [sic] doing and that u at your own risk. You should of never hurt those y[ou] love like my father R Ball

Yeah, art.

Technology has a way of democratizing everything. The easiest one to realize this is the printing press, which brought the bible to the masses, moving services away from the Latin-only masses (the other kind of mass) and communication to the Christian God to the common man. But these days, technology continues at such a seriously fast pace that it's democratizing more and more, faster and faster.

These days, anyone can start a company. With the intarweb, it has become easier and easier to reach more and more people, with niche markets becoming a valid, legitimate way to individual, sustainable work. As I've nominally grown up with the web, many of the changes in it, those happening on and around it, haven't much surprised me. Most steps are small, building on previous work, putting a different spin on the same idea. Much of it, though still interesting, fails to feel magical or impressive.

Until you realize, again, that technology is amazing in its ability to provide opportunity to anyone who is willing to seize it, that it helps to democratize the world, that it can change lives in unexpected ways.

Or, that it can become so common that it fails to be impressive until you really look or are forced to notice it.

Three days ago, David Weekly tweeted:

I know not the origin or circumstances of his tweet, and I didn't really pay much attention to it at the time. When I walked into the Urban Picnic, a local lunch spot for Mom and her cowokers, and saw this setup, however, I recalled it:

Our orders were entered on an iPad, my credit card run through either the Square on the side, or the (apparently newly added) traditional POS card reader on the side. Ten minutes later, we were eating incredibly tasty organic sandwiches at some small tables outside the restaurant. The restaurant itself was nicely decorated, but not over the top. The two employees we saw looked like brothers, so say that they are.

I looked around and thought, wow, okay, the investment to start a new business, to start a new restaurant is thousands less than it was a decade ago. The cash registers along were behemoths and the hoops that needed to be jumped through to process credit cards were so numerous. At this point, wow, uh, no.

In a row of empty shops, knowing that technology has lowered the barriers to entry is a breath of fresh air.

Seriously, some angles will always be unflattering.

An example:

I went into the office this morning with Mom. She leaves the house at 7:00 am, which is really three hours before anyone should be moving, much less heading off to work. Really. When I asked her to wake me at 6:25, she looked at me oddly. "It means I can snooze a bit."

She looked at me harder.

"I'll be up."

"And ready to go by 7?"

"Yes."

And I was, but it was close. And surprising to Mom. I jumped in the shower at 6:47, and really a shower by me that is fewer than 23 minutes in length? Nearly unheard of.

When we arrived at the office, Mom was a little worried for me, how was I going to set up to work, would I be okay, could I work? I didn't have any problem working yesterday, so was surprised she was worried about me this morning. We talked a bit about the project she was working on, and I had an opportunity to introduce the word "metrics" more fully into her vocabulary, replacing "indicators" in her speech patterns.

I consider this a victory.

As Mom was heading out to a meeting, she turned to me and said, "Maybe you can help me. Can you look at my red pencil? Do you think you can fix it?"

She handed me her red mechanical pencil.

She thought the spring was worn out. When I opened up the barrel and dumped out the graphites, I noticed the gripper wasn't closing completely. Three minutes, one piece of paper, and two suggestions to try the shop which has a compressed air blower for cleaning items later, and I had removed the small piece of graphite that was preventing the grippers from closing correctly.

Thirty seconds after that, the pencil was reassembled and my mom had her lucky red pencil back.

Turns out, she's had that pencil for over twenty five years. It's been mistakenly taken by family and friends numerous times, but always returned. It's seen Mom across two different lives, three kids' six graduations, five houses, a half dozen jobs and a retirement. It's been her favorite and it's been her good-luck charm for a long, long time. She was surprisingly happy about my fixing it, which, of course, makes me happy, too.

Now, to find my mechanical pencil. Mine's black: a Pentel P205. Pretty sure it's in the garage.