Link: TRENDWATCHING.COM Newsletter | Global Consumer and Marketing Trends | April 2005.

Thanks to Liesbeth den Toom for pointing me in the direction of the permalink for Trendwatching.  They've got an interesting site up and this month's newsletter highlighted "Tryvertising".  The idea:  "Give me free stuff and if I like it, I'll keep using it."  Sure, we've gotten little packets of shampoo in the mail, but did you know that there are some hotels that will let you drive around in a Maybach for free?  I hope this catches on, because I'm all about free stuff.  That's how I got hooked on Fresh Direct.  They had this free $50 of groceries offer and I'm all about food, so it was a can't miss.  Now, I don't think I've bought groceries in a regular supermarket more than twice.  The other day, I ordered mangos.  No mangos in Gristides... at least nothing that looked like a mango anyway.  We used to do the same thing at GM when people tried to sell us data services or research.  The message:  Get us hooked!  Not enough companies are doing that.

I first heard Mitch Hedberg on the XM Radio comedy station.  I think the first think I heard him say was that he wanted to be a race car passenger that bugs the driver. 

"Say man, can I turn on the radio? You should slow down. Why do we gotta keep going in circles? Man, you really like Tide ..."

I thought the Tide thing was hilarious and from then on, I was hooked.  I saw him on Comedy Central once... hair in front of his face, just barely audible, deadpan delivery.  Think of what Steven Wright would be if he looked like Kurt Cobain, and he was more random.  That was Mitch Hedberg.  I missed it, but apparently they found him in a hotel room in Minnesota two weeks ago.   I'm really sorry to see this guy go.  I was actually online looking for tickets to shows and they had an announcement on his site.  Here are some other Mitch quotes:

I hope the next time I move I get a real easy phone number. Something like, 222-2222. I would say sweet. People would say, "Mitch, how do I get a hold of you?" I would say, "Press 2 for a while, and when I answer, you will know that you have pressed 2 enough."

I think Pringles' initial intention was to make tennis balls. But on the day that the rubber was supposed to show up, a big truckload of potatoes arrived. But Pringles was a laid-back company. They said "Fuck it. Cut 'em up."

I get the Reese's candy bar. If you read that name Reese's thats an apostrophe S. Reese's apostrophe S at the end of that name. That means the candy bar is his. I didn't know that. Next time you're eating a Reese's candy bar and a guy name Reese comes by and says "let me have that", you better hand it over. "I'm sorry, Reese. I didn't think I'd ever run into you."

I was in a bar, minding my own business, and this guy came up to me and said, "You're gonna have to move, you're blocking a fire exit." As though if there was a fire, I wasn't gonna run. If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.

When you go to a restaurant on the weekends and it's busy they start a waiting list. They start calling out names, they say "Dufrane, party of two. Dufrane, party of two." And if no one answers they'll say their name again. "Dufrane, party of two, Dufrane, party of two." But then if no one answers they'll just go right on to the next name. "Bush, party of three." Yeah, but what happened to the Dufranes? No one seems to give a shit. Who can eat at a time like this - people are missing. You fuckers are selfish... the Dufranes are in someone's trunk right now, with duct tape over their mouths. And they're hungry! That's a double whammy. We need help. Bush, search party of three! You can eat when you find the Dufranes.

Perhaps someday I can tell you where this picture is from.  Maybe...  hmm..  Valentine's Day?  If you knew, you'd understand how fitting this message is.

I figured I'd take the picture now just for the record before I have to shovel the letters out of the snow....

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This is just such a visually appealing site, I had to post it...    

Link: Welcome to Avalon Chrystie Place.

I guess when you rent one bedrooms for $3000, you can afford a nice website.

These people are probably too "fru-fru" for a blog.

So, I'm taking a 4 day vacation on the West Coast...  Originally, this trip was loosely based around a Stanford visit, but then I just realized that I needed a bit of a break and I had good enough friends out here to welcome me with open arms and open apartments.  :)   So, for now I'm in Walnut Creek.... just chillin', maxin' and relaxin'.   I won't lie... I did do a little bit of work this afternoon for a client presentation, but for the most part, its the first non-family related vacation I've had in a while (visited the bro in Tampa twice this summer.)   Its funny, because as I was telling Charles (my boss) that I was going to be gone the rest week, he's like, "shit."  I'm like, "Dude... look at the calendar...  look at the last time I took time off."   So, here I am.  I'm here, and I'm resting comfortably.  Its a nice way to clear ones mind especially as big decisions may be looming. 

Pics will be coming, too, of course.  Tomorrow, I plan to head over to a Ford dealership I saw that had a Mustang on the lot.  :)

Oh, and by the way, did anyone catch Jack Cafferty ripping on Yassar Arafat this morning on CNN headline news??   I won't repeat what he said, but he basically flipped out on how terrible a guy this once and finished with, "Good riddence."  Solidad O'Brien was speechless.  Interesting stuff...   Apparently billions of dollars in donations to his cause are unaccounted for?  I didn't know this... I need to go check that out.

Link: A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania - Photography by Kathleen Connally.

Fantastic photos on this site... Apparently, this 41 year old mom takes all these pictures within 10 miles of her house.  Thanks to Jeff the Intern for the recommendation.

Link: woot_detail.

I love Woot!  They sell one item per day... well, lots of the same item each day.  The best part?  Their descriptions.  Like this one for a remote control car:

Link: CNN.com - World's oldest man dies in New York - Nov 20, 2004.

*Hale retired 50 years ago as a railroad postal worker and beekeeper

*watched his lifelong favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, win the World Series again after 86 years.

*At age 95, Hale flew to Japan to visit a grandson who was in the Navy. While en route back to the United States, he stopped in Hawaii and even gave boogie-boarding a try.

*At 103, Hale was still living on his own and shoveling the snow off his rooftop.

*Guinness record-holder for the oldest driver. At age 108, he still found slow drivers annoying

*Hale outlived his wife, who died in 1979 (69 years of marriage)

Now that's a life.

Fred Hale.  113.  I may just have to live that long to see the Mets win another championship.

Download 4_to_86th.3g2

After meeting the guys from Vimeo, I've started playing around with my phone's video feature.  What I really need to do is to get my PowerShot fixed and get the video working on that.  I'm sure I'll eat up all my allowable bandwidth on this, but its a video clip of me waiting to arrive at 86th and Lex on the 4 train after a Fordham basketball game last night.  They lost, and I'll post more about that later, but for now, here's the clip.   (Jeff the Analyst has informed me that you need the latest version of Quicktime (6.5) to view it.)

I'm sitting right here...

Its a Starbucks not to far from the Bay.  I stopped here because there's a photo op right around here that I think I'm going to get some cool pics of in a few minutes.   Plus, I was hungry, so I had a rasberry almond scone and a green tea.  :)

So, my friend Carrie loves me enough to open her apartment to me for me to stay, but doesn't love me enough to take any time off for me, so I'm playing by myself today.  It should be interesting, because, to be honest, I don't usually do too much by myself... ever.  I could never sit in a restaurant or movie theater by myself.  I'm just a feedback guy and I like bouncing ideas off of other people while I'm experiencing things.

So here are some other pics that I took...

I'm waiting for the train to the rental car.  I got a convertible...  and of course, its raining and only about 55. 

I know I'm not a good photographer.  I'll admit it now.  But, I'm a good driver, which allows me to take pictures like this safely.  :)

New York does't have land formations like this...  I just think the landscape here is fascinating.  I know, its boring stuff, but for me, its different.

Oh, and I took these pictures on Tuesday...  I thought maybe you'd be curious what my work environment looks like.  I think it goes a long way to explaining why I needed a little vacation.  Not my Fordham banner, nametags from various conferences and annual meetings I've been to, and my thank you letters.  Each time I get a thank you letter for a student for the various mentoring activities I do or for running the internship program, I post it up on my desk.  I think I also have a little note up there from Bob Hellman and Nancy Katz from McCown DeLeeuw.  They're good people.   The chair behind me is where Jeff the Intern sits, but he only works Mondays and Tuesdays.

And finally, here are some Walnut Creek pictures from this morning on my way out...  its really quite quaint.  I can't figure California out...  its like the town council voted one day and decided to put up a state.  Nothing here just "happened" like New York... it was decided upon and planned and it all looks like it fits together nicely.  New York, which is visually more interesting, developed and grew and overgrew and now we're all living in Jenga.  More to come...    I'm going to lunch later with Valarie from CM Capital in Palo Alto.

Apparently, they don't sell Newsday on the Upper East Side.  I may have to trek to Penn Station to get it.  If anyone knows a place on the UES that has copies, please let me know.   My mom said that I'm like the whole front page of the money and career section, but I haven't seen it yet.  So frustrating! 

Link: Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog.

Brian just started a blog about Slidell, Louisiana and the hurricane damage.  He'll be posting as much info as he can gather, which, at the moment, is pretty limited.

Cha-ra

1.    Noun. Means ‘shit’.
2.    Use in sentence: “Man, I feel like chara because I didn’t give Charlie a big good morning hello. I will try not to act like such a little chara in the future.”

Obviously, I called someone out on walking around the office with work blinders on...   :)

UPDATE: Before you embarrass yourself, I just found out that the "ch" sound in this is not like the "ch" in Charlie or cheer... its the flemy gurglely noise that you make when you want to hock something out.  I'm sure that's not a politically correct way of explaining that, but if you can come up with a better way to type out that noise, I'm all ears.

UPDATE: “The eight letter of the Hebrew alphabet is called “chet” (rhymes with mate) and has the (light scraping) sound ‘ch” as in “Bach”.   "Light scraping"...  ok, I guess that's a nicer way of putting it.   (From Hebrew4christians.com)

“The eight letter of the Hebrew alphabet is called “chet” (rhymes with mate) and has the (light scraping) sound ‘ch” as in “Bach”

When you work for an internet company that is mostly staffed with Israelis, you wind up with stuff like this in your inbox:


Hebrew Word of the Day - Mur'al

Mur·al (pronounced as written)

1. slang
2. deriving from the word “poison”
3. Used to describe someone who identifies with and who is deeply associated with a certain goal or mission; for example, many time used to describe a young soldier in the IDF J.
4. Use in sentence: “Wow, that Charlie sure is mur’al. He keeps coming to work with avatar t-shirts.”    

Sometimes, we feel like we have more control over the past than the future.

Weird, no?  Because its already happened.

But the past is somewhat maliable...   its all about perception.

"No, I didn't really mean it that way."

"That's not what I said."

"But you never saw the other thing that happened right before that..."

"You must be mistaken."

In a culture of stories--our own recollections of the past versus hardcoded truth, sweeping over tracks in the sand seems so easy.  Memories are so tenuous and open to interpretation, that we seem to spend more of our time trying to change the past or imagine what would happen if we did (because we know exactly what we things we need to change to make our lives better) than we actually spend trying to change our future.  And yet, the fact of the matter is that the future is unwritten--completely wide open--and the past can't changed.

We could all use a little more work on the future.  Where are you going versus where you think you could have been...   

From Jay Rand...

"When I'm playing on my own mental turf, my batting average at home is very high."

I guess you don't get booed at home, then, like the more neurotic among us do.

I'm working on a project that will enable internet users to explore, express, and aggregate their identity on the web, and have fun doing it.

On the other side of the world, people are working on a project to blow up people who are trying to blow them up, because of religious, cultural, and national identity.  It is not fun for anyone.   

I have a friend who is struggling right now with her identity in terms of how she relates to others.  Who does she want to be with?  Who can she be herself with?  You can't tell someone how to be themselves.  They need to figure it out on their own.  The only thing you can do is remind them that they shouldn't be anyone to anybody but who they want to be, and focus on people who accept them for who they are.  Oh, and then, don't forget to accept them for who they are.

At Union Square, they're trying to identify a candidate that will be a good fit for the team...  On one side they're trying to figure out what the profile of that person is, and on the other, there are some young people out there thinking about whether they would be a fit for that position. 

But really, what does it all matter, unless you have a Facebook account.  And, today, through the magic of being a faculty member, you can finally Facebook me!  Fordham doesn't have alumni e-mail addresses (why, I have no idea... its just a simple forwarding thing)... so getting an account has proven difficult.  However, now that I actually teach there, I legitimately got a profile.  What amazes me is that its really a lot like Friendster, but what keeps it strong and useful is the offline relevency.  When you can write what dorm and room you're in, you can know who's in your hallway before you even move in.  I don't think any social network will ever get more relevent than that, unless someone builds Apartmentster for NYC and people agree to list where they live.  I'm not sure I see that happening.

MySpace is experiencing some... well...  technical difficulties.  (Like total loss of power at their only datacenter.)  The site was almost unusable all weekend and completely down yesterday.  So what are all these kids doing to do in the meantime?

1. Like, um, shop.

2. Watch videos of live action recreations of Goldeneye for Playstation.

3. Make friends with someone from the Philippines.... check out Friendster.

4. Go outside and play...   hahahahahahahaha    j/k!  Outside...ha! 

5. Write a letter of appreciation to Tom...  but write it using cut out letters from all different magazines.  Oh.. and maybe make it about something besides appreciation, too... 

6. Stand in the place where you are.  Think about direction.  Wonder why you haven't before.

7. Go see Clerks II!!   Seriously, it might even be funnier than the first one.

8. Ask your parents a really uncomfortable question about sex.  This works even better the older you are.

9. Break out into total chaos.  Create false idols of MySpace on hilltops...   like a giant golden thong.  Loot.

10.  Write some really profound messages on the sidewalk in chalk...  like...   "This is written in chalk."   Makes you think, doesn't it?

There is ZERO chance it will not rain in NYC tonight.  It WILL happen.  Accuweather says there is 100% chance.

If I were the weathermen, given my track record, I think I'd couch that and just take it down to 90% just in case.  What do you gain by telling us its 100%?  Its just all downside.