Thanks Marc!

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I made a last minute trip up to Boston to go see Mere (@ptrain) because we hadn't seen each other in a while. We weren't planning on seeing each other after Christmas and we were both insanely busy, but I made time to go up anyway.

So, when she brought up the fact that I wasn't doing some of the little things, like asking her how her day was enough or wishing her good luck on her finals, I was kind of thrown. In typical male fashion, my first response was, "But I drove all the way up here!" and "But you don't even care about your grades...you're not going to law school...you don't need the ranking!"

I totally didn't get it... not until I compared it to my own experience with our angels, who are pretty good at this kind of thing. A week or two ago, Pete and Josh just "checked in" to see how we were... not to pressure us, but just to see if there was anything they could do for us and just to catch up. When the Silicon Alley list came out, I got a note from Fred saying that he was more excited that I got on it than being on it himself.

Little emails...they just take two seconds to write, but sometimes they feel just as important as any money we got from these folks, introduction they could make, or strategy they could advise on.

When you're in any kind of relationship, be it dating or an investment, its easy to mark time with big events--board meetings, anniversaries, vacations, launches... but what does the relationship feed on in between? Neither startup life, or, in my case, long distance relationship life, is easy. Sometimes you need a little quick fix to keep you going... cheap love.

I'm generally no good at cheap love in relationships. It feels too easy... a text message, a rote "How was your day?" I'm a big things kinda guy, but now I get it. You just want a ping every now and then just to let you know that the other person is still out there, still thinking about you, and still excited to be part of this relationship.

Send your significant other or angel investment some cheap love today!

• Both make a person look fake
• Both provide a physical advantage in the entertainment industry
• Both are tied to serious medical side effects
• Both are influencing younger and younger kids to have unhealthy self-images and seek out enhancement
• Both don't really fool anyone

And please, no jokes about stiff penalties.

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DailyIdea is a cool video blog run by some friends in Louisville.   One of their staff, Jason Falls, had a run-in with mall security and let 'em have it on their site.

Best quote:

"Interpersonal communications lies at the keystone of the consumer experience.  If applicants for jobs that interface with the public don't have that, don't hire them!

If you're interviewing someone for a low level job, here's a test.  Ask them this question:

"How are you?"

If they respond, "I'm fine, and you?" they're hired.

If they lapse into some saga about their ex-girlfriend, car trouble, or mild case of shingles, cut 'em loose.

"How are you?" is rhetorical.  No one cares how you are.  We just wanna know you're not a mouth breathing sociopath who's going to scare off our customers."

Here's the whole video:

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I'm wearing a big red and black SkySports winter coat because my old coat is still at Oddcast...left there one day that warmed up enough for me not to need a coat on the way home I guess. I haven't had the time to go over there and pick it up. Hopefully I will tomorrow. Still, this coat is the best shwag I ever got... It came from my friend Allison who works at Showtime. Thanks, Babe. You know, bald guys are really susceptable to weather. I hate to admit it, but I get pretty cold in the winter now.

I hate waiting on this platform. 59th Street in Brooklyn...it's cold and everyone's pissed because they're like 20 min into their commute from Bay Ridge and they've made it all of two or three stops. I have Christmas gift I can actually think of wanting this year...a good electric toothbrush...one with a water pic. I love the idea of a water pic.... I'm a flosser, but it just seems so archaic. I need more technology in my mouth. I wouldn't mind bike pedal clips, too.

Train's here. Time to look around me to see if anyone looks like they want to push me in front of it. I do a lot of little things like that to prepare for random acts of violence. When I walk home alone late at night, I also hold my keys in my hand with my biggest key wedged in between my fingers sticking out. So, don't ever sneak up on me late at night, because I'm quite likely to stab you in the throat with the ignition key from my Mustang. What a way to go, huh? I also sit in the back of planes if I can, so I have a fighting chance in a crash. The last row is the safest because you have a shot of that tail breaking off and throwing you from the burning wreckage. Yes, this is something I think about when buying a plane ticket.

I just noticed in a banner ad today that ATT is selling the double sliding phone that Helio had, only with WM6. Pretty slick. Who says people don't notice ads.

I think I should be able to keep a running list of the ads I've seen to go back to them later and give them a thumbs up or down like hot or not.

I'm going to hit the heavy bag in the gym again this morning. I've been getting into that lately and it's a lot of fun.

I miss softball. I think I need to hit the batting cages this week. I'd hit everyday if I could. The Mets used to have this commercial with Lenny Harris as he was chasing the career pinch hits record. He'd carry around a bat all day just saying, "I hope I get to pinch hit today."

I heard my high school girlfriend is getting married. I haven't talked to her in years. It would be fun to just grab coffee one of these days and laugh about how young we were....man, twelve years ago. I watched a video of my first communion over the weekend. Twenty-one years ago...jeez. I had such a crush on my second grade teacher that I invited her to my party...and she came! There she was, twenty-seven year old Laura Cimmino (in case she ever Googles herself), at a party with my family, neighbors, and a bunch of seven and eight year olds. She's a year younger there than I am now. Wow... Mrs. Cimmino is like 48 now. Oh, that's hard to believe. OK, on that note, I'm out of here.

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I'm currently getting digital radio silence from two people I really want to talk to, both of whom I've reached out to more than once.   I just don't get it.

Don't get me wrong, I get a ton of e-mails from people and it is often the case that one slips past me and I don't notice it...  but if anyone ever follows up on it, I'll respond right away, usually with an apology.

The first case is someone who is pretty important and influential, but with whom I've corresponded before, always with a response, even if it took a little while.  I've sent them a number of notes related to Path 101, and even had one of my investors contact them about it--someone with whom this person knows pretty well.  Nothing...  nada.... zip.  They even wound up inviting my investor to some event and ignored the whole mention of the company.  It was actually sort of bizarre.  I mean, if you're not interested, you're not interested.  Just say it..  don't leave us scratching our heads.  It's really unfortunate, too, because I think this person could be a huge help to us and it turns out they're involved with another company we're interested in talking to as well (which I just found out yesterday via LinkedIn).  I was like, "Damn, if only so and so would get back to us, we could get an intro to them, too!" 

The other scenario is a younger front end developer who is clearly a ninja in the making.  She does a little bit of everything, has a great blog, and has a little bit of poking the bear in her, too.  I'm DYING to talk to her about joining.  She's clearly "out there" and so I tried Facebook, e-mail.. . I even complimented her Last.fm station, which I listened to one afternoon.  I'm not stalking... all this stuff is out on her blog...  but I've e-mailed twice to no avail.  Not even a peep.  Zip.  Nada.  Nothing.  *Scratches head.*

Again, a simple, "I'm not really looking to join or work for your company" would do.  But you know, I'd love to sit down with her as a relatively recent college grad just to hear what she thinks of the idea, too.  

Again, just don't get it.  Why put yourself out there if you're going to be completely unresponsive?  If you're busy, that's cool... just take two seconds to write back, "Hey, sorry, I'm really busy... can we talk another time?"

So, do I just keep at it until I get a Cease & Desist?  Do I call them out on their unresponsiveness?  I mean, at the moment, without a response, I have nothing... so what do I have to lose?  Should I just let it go? 

Maybe I should send them a Christopher Walken Voki.

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Please dig/tag/twit/reblog, etc: 

This just came in from my friend Grace...   feel free to leave a comment with a link to yourself and Grace will pick the best ones to forward to her friend:

All,

If you are on this list, it is because I have dated you and/or I think very highly of you. I believe that good people surround themselves with good people, and in truth, it is your friends that I am really after. Before I get ahead of myself, let me explain...

I have a very good friend who is single at the moment.  After a sting of pseudo relationships that haven't amounted to anything substantial, I've decided to intervene and scatter some seeds on her behalf.  (Call it naive, but I believe we are all connected and that the happiness of one person can, in some small way, benefit us all.  Plus it's just fun!)  Ok, back to my friend! I can't for the life of me figure out why this girl is single- she's funny, sharp, she's 31, she's hot and she has substance. She comes from a great family and has great teeth. She is endlessly entertaining and endearing.  She has fantastic fashion sense.  At the end of the day, I adore her and want to help her find "the one".

So this is where you come in. Do you have any friends who could potentially be "the one" for this fantastic woman? Now, some of you might be wondering, "Why not me?".  I don't want to set her up with you for one of the following reasons (it varies from person to person, but I'm sure you can figure out which category you fall into).

Reasons Why You Might not Qualify
1. I know you, and I don't think she would like you :)
2. We've dated and I'm not that generous
3. You already have a girlfriend or are married

Ok, but seriously, think about your friends, co-workers, and family members. Do you know any stand-up guys with good character who have their lives in order and are in a place (emotionally, logistically -she's in NY, and financially) to meet someone really great? If so, please let me know and I will send along her contact info. or something along those lines.  Tis the season folks, let's make this work!

Hope to hear from you!
<3,
Grace

PS-I'm not attaching a photo because I think it's unnecessary. She's hot. All my friends are hot. Get over it.
PPS-It's not me! Really...swear!
*Also, feel free to forward!*

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This is my website. If you don’t want to hire me for this transparency, maybe I don’t want to work for you. If you don’t want to date me for this exposure, maybe I don’t want to date you. And if you can’t handle this, there are millions of other sites you should probably be reading. Because anonymous just isn’t for me - I want you to know me and accept me and to support me. If not, find something else to read.

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I'm said that Equity Private seems to have abandoned her blog.

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You just need to see this site.  It needs no further advertising from me...

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I don't really watch that much television at all.  I've not been a regular follower of the Soprano's, Entourage, Lost, 24, Grey's Anatomy, etc...   even though they're all probably really good shows, to me, there's just not enough time in the day.  

So this writers strike isn't really affecting me at all.

But it got me thinking...

What would happen if both sides dug in, and they just never went back to work?

What if the big media companies said, "Fine, screw it, we'll just put reruns for the next year or two"?

Would people stop watching television?  What would they do with their time?  Would they go and read books?  Would online traffic start to go up?  Maybe we'd emerge from our houses and start to discover the outside world in a big way.  Has attendance at Meetup's gone up since the strike?  Are people in NYC apartments desperately knocking on the doors of neighbors they've lived next door to for years and never talked to before? 

"Please...  entertain me... I'm desperate!  Charades!  Jenga!  Anything!"

How many seasons of reruns and reality television could they put on before they shake loose every last viewer?

I have to be honest, I was surprised that TV writers get royalties.  I thought of it more like a salaried job.

Aren't there tons of creative people dying to be writers anyway?  I could never figure out how workforces get away with striking when there's probably 2x their number waiting to get into that job.  I'm surprised there aren't more hobby writers that wouldn't cross the picket line.  I'd write for one of these shows.  How hard could it be to write for Grey's Anatomy, seriously?

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One of my least favorite things in this whole world is a shower on a cold morning. It doesn't warm me up at all... it just makes me wish I stayed under the covers where I was protected, warm, and most importantly, dry.

Getting on the train this morning, I saw a kid with a Student Metrocard. Kids have it easy these days. If you went to high school in Manhattan, you'll remember trying to get the attention of the token booth clerk to buzz that special gate. She saw the long line of students, but it didn't matter. You still had to wait in line after all those people bought their metrocards.

I think I played my best game of dodgeball last night with the nextNY team.

Shoulda been Mets-Red Sox.

Angel financing is clearly an exercise in herding cats.

While I'll grant that I don't like showers in the morning, I will grant that a post workout morning shower makes me feel fantastic. I wish you all could feel like I do now, Frampton style.

These two girls next to me are whispering about my phone. The amount of hardware and accessories the average teenage girl from Brooklyn carries around is getting out of hand. Somewhere in late 2006, we hit a turning point where phones became so slim, while the size of big hoop earring stayed constant, allowing phones to actually pass through the earrings of their owners.

Its weird how text messages somehow pass through subway walls. I just learned that Brian Oberkirch read a book. Brian's going to hook me up at the Future of Web Apps conference in February, right Brian?

I'm wearing dark jeans and my black hoodie. When I put the hood up, where do you think the polls would wind up on the "Is this guy more likely to mug you or launch a startup?"

I think Facebook may be a bubble unto itself. Is that possible? Can you have a localized bubble? I'll write more on that later.

Mangoes are good eats, but picking mango strands out of your front teeth is a chore. We have seedless watermelons...can someone invent mangoes crumb up instead of shred?

There don't seem to be any movies out there that I want to see, nor have their been for a while.

I'm going applepicking tomorrow.

This week, I instituted a little more structure in my life to make sure all the odds and ends of my life are taken care if. A lot of times, administrative work for your own behalf takes a back seat to all the things you need to do for your startup, for school, for others. Making time becomes an exercise in fixing the squeaky wheel... the unpaid bill, the pile of mail on your table, the friend who complains they never see you.

So yesterday, I drew myself a chart for the week. On the list, I put Gym, Read, Fix, Clean, Build, Friend. Gym is what I want to do during my workout. Read is to manage between the book I'm reading for pleasure and various career related books I'm reading for Path 101. Fix is because things generally seem to need a lot of fixing in my life, from my bike to my bedroom door which has never had a handle on it, to the keyboard on my home computer which just crapped out yesterday. Clean is about clutter. It usually means clearing old mail from my living room table or putting away clean clothes. Build most often means food, actually...like making lunch to save money or just because I like to cook. Friend means catching up with a friend either by IM or email (and maybe the phone, but unlikely because I hate the phone) and really being somewhat purposeful and focused on it, vs just casually paying continuous partial attention to someone.

I wrote down targets for each of these things and hope to get one of each category accomplished each day.

I just got an invite to a "Meet and Greet" hosted by The Action Network.  The Eventbrite invitation gives invitees plenty of opportunity to donate--citing a "suggested" donation--but you can go for free if you want.

There's only one problem with the invite.   I have no idea who The Action Network is, what they do exactly or how I got on their e-mail list.  I checked out their site and it says their mission is to "encourage, sustain, and develop volunteerism among young people in New York City."  When you click on "Program" to find out how, you get a "This page is under construction" message.  There are no names and no pictures of any actual people on the site. 

I'm going to assume that there are well intentioned people behind this endeavor (hopefully) but there's absolutely no way I'm going to show up to an event that asks for money before I even know who's asking that is run by people who won't publicly associate their names with the program.

Does anyone know who is running this and whether or not this is real?

What to say, except that I'm pretty sure this is the first year that we didn't get that same perfectly blue sky we had that day.  It's raining here.  Seriously, if there's anything that stood out to me about September 11th, it was how amazingly blue and clear the sky in NYC was.

And let's see...  we're mired in a war we can't seem to get out of, Ground Zero is still a whole in the ground, 9/11 workers are sick, Bin Laden looks better than he did a few years ago and our immigration policy now seems to keep the people we actually want to come here out, and we still have no idea who's even here.

I dunno, but I hope that by the time the 10th anniversary comes around, we have a little more to show for what happened...   

Bo Jackson: Greatest video game athlete ever

Jason Calcanis "grew up in the famously gritty Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, where violence was as ubiquitous as graffiti", according to Fast Company.

Bay Ridge?

This Bay Ridge? 

So, um... I guess if the violence is as ubiquitous as the graffiti, then there's... um.... no violence.

We do have tornadoes, though.

I just received an unsolicited e-mail from Robert Sexton of Star Positions.   

I've posted the text of the e-mail below.   

Basically, Mr. Sexton and his company are offering search engine optimization.  Of course, the problem is that he's offering his services unsolicited by spamming e-mail addresses, bulletin boards, and forums, and what's worse, threatening anyone who attempts to out him.

Want proof?   Google ""star position" "robert sexton" spam".  You'll get this link which contains a really interesting thread.

"You know,
I also received this email from a Robert Saxton"

"Robert Sexton and his Star Position company are notorious spammmers. He tries to play high and mighty but a few of our company email alias are bombed with UCE from him on a regular basis."

"This outfit sends from comprimised open-relays such as the current one 66.174.76.167

I was once getting over 10 spams from this guy everyday until firewalling the blocking all the sending IP's"

Other people have gotten similar spam from Star Positions, like this woman.

Apparently, Mr. Sexton doesn't know about the CAN SPAM Act, which has the following requirement:

It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender's valid physical postal address.

Yeah, um, Bob, I don't see a valid physical postal address with this e-mail.

I wonder what the penalty for that is.

"Each violation of the above provisions is subject to fines of up to $11,000."

Hmm...  that's going to cost them a pretty penny.

Now about that valid posital address?

Google says it is:

"Without being seen first on the major search engines, your

This is the placement we do for a Los Angeles Realtor, Kathryn Bishop.

What you see above even the names of the search engines is her actual

website! The search terms 'LOS ANGELES REAL ESTATE' and several others

always points to her site on the Network, across  the top sixteen search

engines, including GOOGLE, YAHOO and MSN!

And lastly, this is the placement we do for Stone Canyon Mortgage, What you

see above the names of the search engines is Stone Canyon's actual website!

Stone Canyon has the generic search term 'MORTGAGE' pointing to their

website on our Network, across the top sixteen search engines, including

GOOGLE, YAHOO and MSN! What we've done for Stone Canyon on a nationwide

level, we can do for other mortgage companies on a more localized level.

You too can have this guaranteed type of exposure. Our normal run on the

  Network  goes for one year, but for those who register with us, by the end

of this week , you will only pay for the first six months.  As for the cost, you'll

probably spend more over the next year for your morning coffee than you

would spend for this.

We do make specific guarantees, including a money back guarantee.

I can be reached at my office, from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM Pacific time.

Please feel free to call me if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Robert Sexton

Director of Business Development, Star Position

Phone:        800.481.2979, ext 2001

Direct Line: 949.215.0022

Hilarious...and cute.

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