hal tweets ·7:42 AM
A short piece I wrote for AOLnews about why Peep culture trumps privacy online. http://bit.ly/bQECsC
Diary
2009,
20:59 GMT
They Want to Watch Me Where I Pee Pee: Surveillance in Hal’s House
Posted by: Hal
On Friday the producers of the upcoming documentary based on my upcoming book dropped by along with a surveillance camera expert. They wandered around my house discussing the best places to put surveillance cameras. The plan is for there to be two weeks this summer when the camera streams will be live on the web for all to see. Meanwhile, I’ll be blogging and ruminating about what it’s like to live life in a fish bowl. And you’ll be posting comments about my bed head and absent minded propensity for nose picking when I think nobody else is around.
First Jennicam, then DotComGuy, and then…me? As the Peep Diaries book makes clear, despite my attempts to enter into the Peep world and reveal myself, I never quite managed to do it. Obviously, the documentary is going to take things a step further by, for instance, installing cameras in my house and broadcasting live to the web. Will I like this? I suspect it will be pretty annoying and I won’t like it all. But I think I’ll also like it quite a bit. Oh dear.
Anyway, there were a few tense moments, like when we got down to the nitty gritty and producer Jeannette started talking about cameras in the bedroom and bathroom. (You can read her more polite post about all this here.) At which point I had to remind her that W. had already announced that because of her work (she works in mental health) she cannot be actually seen on camera, and we’d have to obscure her face. This, I think, was a factor that Jeannette was hoping to just ignore until it was dropped. W. isn’t going to drop it, of course, so we needed a work-around. How can Hal be on camera 24/7 for two weeks, but not his wife (and his kid, for that matter?).
The answer: Hal moves into the basement. Yes, for two weeks this summer I’ll live in the basement. I’ll move my office down there (I work from home) I’ll sleep down there and there’s even going to be a bathroom cam to capture my doings in the basement bathroom (which already lacks a door anyway, so I’m used to that). And there’s got to be infrared, announced Jeanette. I want to see him while he sleeps!
In the end, Jeannette was happy to just monitor the basement and first floor and leave the upstairs to W. and the kid, especially when she found out how much each camera was going to cost. So everyone’s happy. Except, uh, me.
Anyway, it’s begun.
2009,
18:57 GMT
E’s Ear Infection: The Case for Peep
Posted by: Hal
Okay since I’ve been raging pretty hard lately against Peep Culture, I thought I’d share something Peep positive.
This morning, I sent the following twitter, which also automatically flowed to my Facebook as a Status Update:
the kid throwing up yesterday, seems fine now. diagnosis by medvisit doc at 10pm: ear infection>
Next thing you know, I had no fewer than 9 comments from 7 different people offering sympathy and advice:
1. Glad she’s okay. How is MedVisit anyway? Do you have to pay? Is it through TeleHealth or OHIP?
2. (from me) medvisit is great as long as it’s a minor issue and you can wait at home 3-5 hours. it’s free! covered by ohip!
3. ear infections— [my kid] gets them a lot and they used to lead to some serious horror movie style vomiting where I really did expect her head t spin around. Poor little thing—hope she gets better quickly. They are pretty tough.
[Hal says: hey E. puked too!]
4. my doberman pinscher gets ear infections quite frequently. i just blow on his ear lightly until he starts wagging his tail.
[note: Hal says: what a hilarious and strange comment!]
5. MedVisit is totally free. You call them and the doc comes to your house. I have always found it to be a good service. My son had constant ear infections until he was 3 and a half. After that, he was never sick again!
[Hal says: yeah it rules to have doc come to your house!]6. Poor kiddo. I hear the hug+antibiotic combo does wonders 
7. When mine was little she got them a lot too. My doctor told me unofficially (for some strange reason)... to try giving her dimetab at night whenever she was really stuffy and to steam her up in the bathroom with a towel under the door to keep everything thinly running. She hasn’t had one since.
[Hal: Makes sense, doc says they usually get them at the end of a cold from being all congested…]
8. Those are the worst. Horrible for the kid and horrifying for the parents. Ibuprofen dents the pain a little. Forget Tylenol.
9. Don’t laugh but I strongly recommend a chiropractor. Yes, for an ear infection! Before replying with ‘it’s Hare Krishna medicine’... look into it. I’m sorta against antibiotics.
[Hal says: I would like to see the look on W’s face when I tell her I’m taking the kid to a chiropractor for her ear infection…]
10. I agree… dimetab is better than antibiotics but if the ear canal could be adjusted a tad to open up and prevent infection even better!
11. (from me) wow! ear infection advice aplenty! thanks for the sympathy and ideas…kid is feeling much better, sleeping it off right now.
So I’m posing this little exchange to help remind me that it’s not all bad. That, in fact, Peep features many sweet exchanges like this one.
2009,
19:52 GMT
Peep Doc - Fact Versus Fiction in the Basement
Posted by: Hal
So the Peep documentary is starting to get into full swing. And things are starting to get…uh…interesting. Right now, the doc people are redoing my basement so I can move my office down there. My actual office on the second floor is too small to film in. Also they want something sleeker, more modern looking. So I’m going to have an entire wall blackboard and a glass desk that glows.
Of course we all know that in documentaries reality is manufactured, but it’s interesting to be part of it, and have an opportunity to chronicle the journey.
Another interesting fake-real thing: Sally Blake, one of the producers, has been worried about the chronology. You see, in the doc, we’re apparently going to pretend that I’m just now starting to explore peep culture. So she keeps trying to find things that I haven’t done yet. Sally: Do you have a webcam? Me: yes. Sally: Ah…too bad. They’re very excited that I don’t have a smart phone yet, key component of Peep (haven’t needed one because I never leave the house) so one of the first things they’ll be filming is me getting a smart phone next week.
It sucks when the truth gets in the way of the story. So we are going to massage the truth where necessary. Does it matter? Does it mean the the documentary will be ‘fake’?
Time will tell.
2009,
14:08 GMT
Notes from Last Night’s Reading
Posted by: Hal
Among those in attendance at my presentation last night on the third floor of the sprawling Harvard Coop bookstore:
*Three black men of retiree age who spoke with African accents. One of them asked me if any of this stuff was going on in the Muslim countries. Another of them asked if he could watch the presentation again, so I started it again and the three of them sat down in front of my netbook and watched the whole thing again while snacking from stuff they brought with them in plastic containers.
*One fiery youngish academic who noted that while my presentation was very interesting and provocative I was mostly wrong about everything.
*An undergraduate activist girl who was of the opinion that activists were successfully using social networks to galvanize young people for the cause of social justice.
*An older gentleman with, I think, white hair in a pony-tail who came up to the podium afterwards, thanked me, and gave me three bananas and a small bag of all dressed bagel chips.
*A middle aged fellow who suggested that we were looking at a total shift in what it means to be social.
*A woman in her fifties who looked away whenever the screen showed something particularly upsetting like the naked wizard being tazered, a woman being spanked, or a woman revealing her abdomen days after gastric bypass surgery. She later spoke elegantly and thoughtfully about how much this whole phenomenon disturbed her.
*A Boston Facebook friend I’d never met before. He declined my offer to buy him a beer after the presentation.
2009,
22:28 GMT
Updates on the Peep Tour: Report from New York
Posted by: Hal
New York Reading: presented the book to a very kind and interested group at the McNally Jackson store in Manhattan. They gave me a coupon for a free book which I forgot to use. Hey New Yorkers: email me a great peep story or link and I’ll send ya a free book coupon. The great thing about McNally is that they do events in their cafe which is open not only to the rest of the bookstore but also very visible from the street. Even in New York, passerbys were tempted by my big screen video of, among other things, a fleshy pair of buttocks getting a spanking and a man skulking over to his neighbor’s driveway and stealing his newspaper.
In New York I also managed to stay up till 3 in the morning 2 nights in a row, something I haven’t done since before the kid was born. Among other things my friend Sax hooked me up with an invite to a cookbook launch party featuring free beer, heaps of fried chicken and buckets of boiled peanuts (in my opinion, boiled peanuts taste like…uh…but everything else was great).
Speaking of the kid, she was pretty happy to see me back at home, even if it was only for a day or two. Originally I was going to just go right from New York to the rest of the tour (I’m writing this in the airport about to board a flight to Chicago) but I decided to come home for a night and a day instead. I’m glad I did. Got to pick up E. from day-care, play with her and do some Daddy stuff. A nice reminder of what really matters.
While in New York I did two things that were surely the top two most surreal author-type experiences of my career. First off, I was a guest on late night talk radio show the Joey Reynold show. Joey (who is ageless and timeless ie. old in a very indeterminate way) sports giant sized yellow tinted sunglasses and wears a leisure suit. His producer, who wandered into the interview quarter of the way through and made herself comfortable at the mic next to me, is a 76 year old bubby inclined to say things like “Oh Joey!” and, in my case, “Blogging is stupid! Stop being stupid!” (She’s probably right….) Also along for the ride were a middle aged couple who were promoting the release of their Fantasy audio book series, the Goddess Forest (or something like that anyway). Meanwhile, out in the main office a group of people including what I think was a midget in a wheelchair with a violin on her lap, were scarfing down a platter of tongue sandwiches. You can see how the whole thing felt a bit strange. Anyway, producer Sally got video of the whole thing so hopefully she’s going to get snippets of it online – bizarre doesn’t do it justice. 
This is Joey…
And then it was on to surreal moment #2: the Jewish Book Council annual pitch session. Every year, all the Jewish book event coordinators from around the world gather in New York. There, Jewish authors with books coming out in the summer or fall each have 2 minutes to pitch their product in the hopes of getting bookings in the fall at Jewish Community Centers all over the land. So there I was amidst the Holocaust memoirs, cooking-like-bubby books, and political tracts on the Middle East. I was a bit nervous – taking the podium to pitch my book was like getting called up for my Bar Mitzvahs. But I think it all went well and afterwards at the post-presentation dinner and speed dating shmooze fest, I got a lot of positive response and interest. Will I be seeing you at the Cherry Hill, New Jersey and Austin, Texas Jewish book festivals? Time will tell.
So now begins the second leg of my trip, which includes a reading tomorrow night at Chicago’s famous Quimby’s bookstore. Come by if you’re in the area, if not check this space and I’ll let you know how it went.
my next stop…
The Bloggist
Hey, I’m Hal Niedzviecki. I’m a writer/thinker who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my wife and daughter. Up till now I’ve always considered myself a private person. But at the same time I’m fascinated by people who effortlessly open themselves up to the whole world. So I’ve… more...
A short piece I wrote for AOLnews about why Peep culture trumps privacy online. http://bit.ly/bQECsC
New content on the Broken Pencil website! Short fiction: Shack the Clam Girl + How to Make Your Own Game Cabinet http://bit.ly/b6CHLP
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