Maybe they're specifically targeting 26 year old Mustang drivers with tattoos, but AIG Auto just quoted me a rate that's about 35% of what I got from Esurance and Progressive.   

Check them out.

Esurance wanted to insure me for a price that was about 30% of the value of the damn car.

If you haven't picked up on this yet... I got a surprise call from the Ford dealer yesterday... my car is in.  :)

I wonder if anybody notices.

I watched a couple on the train last night...  Youngish... Like 18 or 19.  The guy had his back towards me on one of those corner seats.  He was leaning in, pitching cheap jokes, one liners... Anything to see this girl laugh and smile.  I noticed them.  I notice a lot of people.  Chances are someone's noticing me, right now, thumbing away on my Treo with this dumb leather flap hanging off the back...protecting my phone from myself.  I'm on the subway...not biking because I got a flat yesterday.  Its early for me to leave the city.  I'm going home to do some cooking and some repackaging.  I ordered a whole bunch of chicken and fish that needs to get separated and frozen into meal sized defrostable portions.  Over the weekend I made a peanut sauce for my salmon.  I'm pretty sure that was the wrong fish for it but I like to experiment.

The last year has been a whirlwind of change for me.  One year ago, I was working on my failed Stanford MBA application.  Ask me to flash forward then and I thought I might have been in California.

I haven't been to California in almost a year and now and now it seems like thousands of miles away now.

You know what I mean.

Who I spend my time with is vastly different now, too.  I don't know if changes, through purposeful reevaluation, beget more change, or whether its that they are so disruptive that they tend to unintentially affect other parts of your life.   

I'm feeling a bit small today.  Summer's coming to an end.  Life is settling and going to be quite busy for the next month.  Two more weeks of kayaking. 

This shirt has a faint stain on the front, but I keep forgetting to throw it out. 

I think I need to order some books... And finish my office at home.  That's key.  I need a place to retreat to in order to pound out some bigness.

Link: Crossroads Dispatches: There Is No Spoon, Only Questions.

Do you no-holds-barred really want to know anything? Or are you seeking evidence that you're already right?

Evelyn is the Rob Deer of my blog reading.  She tends to write too much for me to consume regularly, and so, admittedly, I skip past a lot.  However, every so often, she bangs out a real gem that I find inspiring and thought provoking.  Not only does this make me want to watch the Matrix again, but I might buy the book she references, too.  So what do you really know? 

In the last few months, I've seen so many instances of philosophies and strategies that we espouse for entreprenuers and businesses actually apply to my real life.  I think its one of the drivers of the whole "Web 2.0" phenomenon that what's happening how is that we're making the web match how we actually want to live, versus living on the web and changing our habits to do so the first time around.

Therefore, I'm going to reapply my recent list for life...  so be happy, healthy, live long and prosper...

1. Solve small problems.  Instead of trying to do everything at once, divide your issues into smaller ones and get them out of the way.  Keep your solutions simple.

2. Surround yourself with a "responsive and chatty audience"--people who challenge you, give you feedback, and tell it to you straight.

3.  Do something new and different.  Now.  Tomorrow.  Every day.

4.  Distribute.  Distribute.  Distribute.  Get out there and reach people with similar interests, pursue your interests.. i.e. get deeply intertwined in the world around you as opposed to waiting for the world to get deeply intertwined in you.

5.  "Don't hold users against their will."  Don't hold on to relationships with people who clearly aren't excited about being in your life.  All you can do is be the best person you can, if they still don't want in, let them go.

6.  Be mindnumbingly simple.  Don't over complicate your life.

7.  Get people hooked on free--give back to the community by volunteering your time, knowledge, etc and demonstrate your value not by asking for big compensation, but by not asking for any at all for a lot of the things you do.

8. Don't waste any money on marketing... i.e. Don't go tooting your own horn.  If people want to sing your praises, fine, but keep the singing of your own praises to a minimum.

9.  Don't overfund.  Money isn't everything.  Too much of it will also cloud your head.  Just do what you find interesting and don't worry about the money--live within your means.

10.  No one sucks.  Strive to find the unique beauty and interestingness in everyone you meet.  Everyone has something to teach you.

And if this doesn't work for you... try the Sunscreen Song.

Last Friday, I was pissed.   I waited around all day for a bedroom set from Levitz via Furniture.com that never arrived.

So I blogged about it.

But I didn't just blog about it.  I went to LinkedIn and found the guy at Levitz all the way up the chain of command that this delivery screwup led up to... the Senior Vice President of Logistics.  I called him out:

"You know who the buck stops with?  Ward Dingmann, SVP of Logistics at Levitz.  If you leave your image to the guy at the warehouse, forget your company.  So, maybe Ward will Google himself or someone who know him.  He's on LinkedIn, but I'm not connected to him.  So, if anyone knows Ward, let him know there's a pissed off blogger who is without a bedroom set."

Then... I got a comment, for someone at Levitz corporate:

"I read your blog about the problems encountered with your delivery. If you will provide me the delivery document number, your e-mail address, or the phone number you used when you placed the order, I will get the information to Ward so he can personally look into the situation."

Then, at 5:08PM on Tuesday, I hit the jackpot.  One business day later:

Mr. O’Donnell

I wanted to personally apologize for the problems with your recent delivery attempt.  Definitely appreciate any feedback (good or bad), and always attempt to improve our service. 

While it is certainly no excuse in your case, we are in over 3,000 homes nationwide each day and try to perform all deliveries timely and to the satisfaction of our customers.  I’m sorry that it did not happen in this case.

I can assure you we have already looked into the specifics of your delivery, and identified what might have happened.  I have asked our VP of East Coast Warehousing to call you (on Wednesday) once he has all of the facts around what happened, and more importantly, can make a commitment on our attempt to correct and re-deliver.

In the meantime, please to do hesitate to call me directly with any other concerns or comments.  Thanks again for your patience, and we hope you give us an opportunity do earn your trust again.

Sincerely,

Ward

And, like clockwork, Mr. Housein, head of East Coast Warehousing, called me up first thing Wednesday morning.  He was apologetic and didn't pull any punches...  saying they "screwed up" and explained to me in detail, exactly what happened.  Basically, the stuff got barcoded or scanned wrong, and the person who did it didn't doublecheck when it got mixed up and came up cancelled.  That's why there was no follow through, no notification... b/c someone just took a "cancelled" scan and accepted it without doublechecking and following through. 

They do 1200 orders a day out of that place.  It happens.  One slipped through and it happened to be mine.  So when we rescheduled for Saturday and I asked if he could get it to me earlier rather than later, he said, "We'll get it to you first...   we've got to do this one right."

PLUS, I have a later order pending that's supposed to come the first week of October... a couch.  He said that he was getting a shipment in on Friday, and if the couch came in, he'd put it on the truck and get me my couch (a month ahead of schedule) and the bedroom set at the same time.  He even gave me his cell number in case I needed to get in touch with him!

When I asked him about the time that I lost in waiting around and what they were going to do about that, he said he was going to talk with customer service and "do the right thing to make you happy."

So there it is.  After blogging about it on Friday, I get a response the next business day and I hear exactly what the plan to solve the problem is the day after.  I got a total admission of failure by high level people in the company and full transparency into what happened. 

So today was the rescheduled delivery.  8:30AM, the doorbell rings and the furniture is here--both my bedroom set and my couch.  The delivery guys were courtious and quick.  On top of that, after they left, I got a phonecall from the warehouse doublechecking to make sure my stuff arrived.

I have to say, I'm pretty wowed by this whole chain of events and the level of personal care taken by executive level people in the company to make good on a warehouse mixup.  Basically, the won a lost customer back, and hopefully even got a few new ones because of this post.  You should really check out their stuff at furniture.com.  It was reasonably priced and it really looks beautiful now that its here, one week late for the bedroom set and over three weeks early for the couch. In the end a good result made possible by some very dedicated Levitz employees.   Nice job Ward and Housein!

Link: How Long Will I Live? - Life Expectancy Calculator.

Amazingly, this calulator corroborates what the Death Clock told me, even though its a lot more detailed, within reason.  Both put me well into my 85th year. 

The interesting analysis with this one is that it lets you analyze your heath risks and tells you where you could improve your expectancy.  So, for example, if I never wanted to have sex again, I could extend my life 1.67 years.

Umm....   riiiiiight.  I don't see that as such a great tradeoff, especially considering where the years are being tacked on.  Two more years of bingo and tapioca?  No thanks. 

Over the weekend, I did a lot of biking.  On Friday, I went up the west side to the George Washington Bridge and then had a little waterfront picnic.  I snapped off a few sunset pictures, too.  The sunset cloud cover over the Hudson in the city produces some really great skies and I've been having a ball taking pictures of them. 

The moss on these rocks seemed to glow in the sun.

I also biked in Prospect Park in Brooklyn on Saturday.  This picture is from the lake.

Instead of buying ten apples, I accidently bought ten "family packs" of six apples each.

If anyone wants any apples, I have some... well... a lot of them.

You're welcome to come over and make some apple pie, apple cobbler, apple preserves, or apple sauce.

I'll be bringing some apples into work, too.

Perhaps Kerri will cut up some apples to go in her cereal.

Apple.

Apple.