Story Shuffle 10 happened this month and the theme of Parents offered a handful of interesting stories.

See them all here or listen to mine below.

Listen here.

The structure of my story:

• As children, we have an opportunity to experience so many different friends households that its an under appreciated opportunity to evaluate what type of home life we want to live.
• I loved my childhood and my family and my parents but I still sought to find out how others did it.
• Particularly in high school, I remember how distinct the homes of my friends that I visited.
• I loved getting to know people’s parents at an early age. I was the guy in the car to the bowling alley talking to your mom.
• And I fell in love with the idea of personality types. There are lots of theories about how temperament define us. One of the oldest is the four temperaments which anthropologists say has been on display for thousands of years in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
• It was Hippocrates 400 years before Christ who tried to make it a medical theory. That’s all debunked but it’s still a novel way to see the world.
• It says there are four: the sanguine or impulsive pleasure seeking; the choleric or ambitious leader type; the melancholic or introverted and thoughtful and the phlegmatic or relaxed and content.
• The homes and parents I would visit as a kid fit into those groups.
• Reinhardt: ping pong and pool and firework and what gate. His father would play and yell. It was the sanguine house.
• Avondoglio household was neat and across a beautiful pond from the family restaurant. U remember first talking politics and business with Bryant and his father. It was the choleric house.
• Medvidick was behind overgrown bushes, dark and you never went in the front door. Dark and books were everywhere. Father tinkering, mother  referencing literature. It was the melancholic house.
• The Sheehan household was. Always unlocked, simple and cared for. Unnecessary apologetic and nothing ever changed. Time warp, hours passed. It was the phlegmatic house.
• Years later, I have such a broad understanding of how a home cn be run and how parenting can be done. I was give the chance or success because f my parents but had so many other lessons elsewhere.
• And that sharing of learning from one generation to another is parenting.

Near the close of the OpenDataRace, a popularity contest for data sets that affect nonprofit missions, I was asked onto NewsWorks Tonight, the daily, local drive-time news radio show from NPR affiliate WHYY. We recorded the segment last week and it aired Monday.

Read more about the contest here, see the data sets and register to vote here and listen to the NewsWorks segment below.

LISTEN HERE.

I was on the program back in June to talk about the open data movement and other initiatives here. I got some fun comments from friends, like this one.

How jealousy and other bad qualities can be shaped to help motivate you to reach your goals was the focus of the story I told at Story Shuffle 9, with a jealousy theme.

Listen to my story below or find it here, along with the other stories.

LISTEN HERE.

I reported on the funding for Technically Philly. Read her story here.

In the world of radio, there were a few versions, and I don’t have the full version with my audio included, but below hear two of the audio pieces: one from Maiken and my audio clip that was played following the host’s intro.

LISTEN HERE FOR FULL VERSION

LISTEN HERE FOR MY CLIP

Another Story Shuffle, this the 8th, the one year anniversary celebration and a theme of Anniversaries, was held in my Fishtown rowhome last week.

I told the story of Voyager II, an un-manned spacecraft sent out 34 years earlier in order to go farther than we ever have before. Like other ships send to deep space, it had to get far enough away so it could be seen, a subject I found fitting for both the space program and our own depiction of ourselves.

Give it a listen below or find all the stories here.

Listen here.

Below is a Creative Commons photo depiction of the Voyager II spacecraft.

Watch below a video interview with famed scientist Carl Sagan when Voyager II first passed Saturn.

Instagram photo by Daniel Victor.

For Story Shuffle 7, held in a fine rowhome in the Newbold section of South Philadelphia inside a beautiful and eventually stormy night, I told the story of my first hitchhiking experience in South Dakota.

My lesson: trusting in strangers is a great risk that often comes with great reward.

Check out all the stories here. Listen to mine here or by using the player below.

LISTEN HERE

For years, I felt there was a shortage of good, long-form podcasts in and about Philadelphia.

Last year, Talkadelphia came about and has helped, offering weekly conversations with mostly younger Philadelphians in the arts, though Kishwer and Gino have traveled a lot of ground in more than 30 episodes.

The pair visited our Technically Media offices, and we talked about Technically Philly, Philly Tech Week and starting a business. Listen to the podcast here.

Though I was sure to note during my interview that OpenDataPhilly was built by development shop Azavea, unfortunately that was cut in the tight finalized product.

Listen to the entire show here. Below, listen to my short segment with host Dave Heller.

In addition to OpenDataPhilly.org, Heller asks me about the OPA Data Liberator project and SEPTA’s new TransitView initiative. To be clear, while related in audience and now included in ODP, those projects were not specifically created by using the data catalog’s information.

LISTEN HERE

I was recently interviewed for WHYY on eBay’s acquisition of regional e-commerce powerhouse GSI Commerce, but this was the first time I appeared on the new local radio program, which launched in May.

Story Shuffle 6, with a theme of  Rebirth, I remembered a lesson I learned from an old neighbor: If I don’t clean it up, someone might notice.

Find all the stories here. Listen to mine here or below.

Listen here.

James Kennedy, Chris Wink and Shannon McDonald in the story blanket fort. Photo by Rachel Playe.

All of the audio from Story Shuffle 5.0 is now up, featuring the theme of ‘I Love’ and hosted by Roxborough  farmer Rachel Playe. In her infinitely playful manner, Playe had us all tell our stories in a blanket fort she had constructed.

As if that wasn’t enough of a highlight, West Philly folk rock band Flat Mary Road was on hand for a short acoustic set.

My story — Love is like water ice: it’s so much more about the technique than the ingredients.

Or listen here.

The notes I prepared before:

• I love water ice, and, really, water ice is a lot about love.
• When you make water ice, an old woman once told me, it really is so much more about the technique than the ingredients.
• I don’t know how old the woman was, maybe only in her later 50s, but her hair kept me guessing. She had a long gray pony tail, like an early winter had set in before her leaves had the chance to fall like most women do, shortening their hair as they get older.
• Water ice is like love: you boil water and sugar, add the ingredients and freeze with the greatest and most patient of techniques