70 karma · joined October 5, 2012
EDIT: Though, the point I wanted to make was that it was an abstraction over the longer distances between the cities. To rephrase my examples, it's 360mi to Dallas, 430mi to Denver, 260mi to OKC, and 600mi to Houston. (Now that I'm looking up distances, I can add 500mi and 7.5 hours to Austin in that list - that length isn't in my cache, so to speak.)
The only issue? Amarillo is pretty far away from the other larger cities. In the plains, we talk of distances between cities based on the number of hours it would take to drive that distance. Six to Dallas/Fort Worth, six to Denver, four to Oklahoma City, ten to Houston. Combined with the lower population, not much of an urban culture makes it out here. I don't mind, though, and because of the low cost of living and the Internet bringing the world to me, the low cost of living makes up for it. I'm not working with a startup nor on any products of my own at the moment, but should I start, I don't think I'd relocate unless a very compelling offer came my way.
To add my own perspective, I'm not really driven by contributing to the betterment of humanity as a whole. Humanity in the small in the form of a community and/or a (potential) family, perhaps, but I'm not audacious or driven enough to consider that what I do has a rippling effect.
On the other hand, I continue because I'm so interested in what people can create. Music, indie games, a bit of programming, a new novels here and there discussing the tendencies of people and of nature, a modern philosophy for those unversed in its finer languages and arguments. I'm in a rather fortunate position that I can spend a non-trivial amount of time consuming and discovering the volumes of culture that a globally-connected people can make. When the barriers to creative expression have been lowered enough that all you need is an active imagination, the drive to set it to work, and the time to put it down - that's what I get out of life. I want to see what people can come up with.
It seems that the OP talked about what the blog's focus was first, then will come in later (maybe on a different blog?) to talk about anything else.
(1) I'm definitely not conversational in any language other than English. (I'm very slowly working on Japanese, but I haven't really built up much vocabulary or much of the grammar. I'm less driven about learning than I probably should be, but I figure I can continue to work on it this slowly until I get to a certain point.) Have you had any stores of people with differing relative skills doing a language exchange?
(2) I live in a not-quite-densely-populated area (Amarillo, Texas), so I can only wonder how vibrant the CoffeeStrap user-base here would be. There's really no solution to this one other than to sign up and try to start something myself. It's what really kills me about living out here and seeing all of these cool services, but I suppose it comes with the territory.
And I like your point there about the challenge of life.
As I was closing in on the end of my college degree plan, I felt torn between these two seemingly divergent ends. As a result I crept into a disillusioned depression fueled by the realization that it was too late to switch degrees that wildly and by firsthand experience of the job hunt as a CS student from west Texas with little heart in the industry.
So I'm just taking solace in the fact that I'm working a job with a really short commute and a good environment where I can go home at 5:00 and pursue music as a hobby. I might even notice eventually that my life's passion doesn't land in either music or programming, and to be honest I'd be okay with that if it gave me a direction to point in. But at this point, having only graduated from college this year (turning 23 next week), it feels like I just need to to something. Unfortunately, I feel like I'm coasting now that I've "made it" out into the world relatively unscathed.