This spring will mark fifteen years since I built my first web site -- years marked by an avalanche of convulsive technological change. It was the spring of 1994, and I was working at Microsoft as the managing editor of the Microsoft Developer Network, in charge of providing information, software development kits, and useful resources to an audience of a few million developers creating software for Windows.

I wrote the following essay almost nine years ago, immediately following the death of my father.

Jogging around Green Lake in Seattle early this morning with my friend Mike, and we caught this stunning view of the sunrise. The air was still and calm, temperature just above freezing, the black bare branches of the trees framing the mirrored sky. A few minutes after Mike snapped this photo, we stopped by a dock so that Mike could practice -- with me as his trial audience -- a talk he will be giving soon to a philanthropy conference in another state. With this view behind him, Mike gave me a 4-minute speech.

An eloquent and thoughtful discourse from Jon Stewart at the beginning of The Daily Show on Monday. I really loved hearing from Jon that it was possible to call for respect and wisdom from all of us who live in this democracy and share responsibility for the tone of our dialogue -- without needing to blame anybody other than the shooter -- for last week's murderous rampage in Arizona. Sometimes crazy people do crazy things, and you just don't know what might have set someone off.

One of the most important books I read this year was by Peggy Holman: Engaging Emergence; Turning Upheaval into Opportunity. As Peggy says in her blog, emergence is a process "through which order arises from chaos as the existing order is disrupted, differences appear, and a new coherence coalesces.