GM Building, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I worked here for 8 years.

Almost lose.  Stop.  Look back.  Reexamine.  Appreciate.  Save or renew.

That's Eternal Sunshine.  Oh yeah, there's a big of intrusive memory zapping, too.  What lengths we'll go through to forget people we want to remember.

In ESSM, Jim Carrey has to bring every single item that reminds him of his ex into an office to help get rid of her memories.  What does that bag look like for you?  Do you keep anything you should probably get rid of?  When I had my wallet stolen, I had a ten year old Winterfresh gum wrapper in it.  What's your item?  In the spirit of forgetting, and maybe, in turn, appreciating, that's the topic of today's call for comments back.  Name the item you keep from a past love that you should probably get rid of. 

Jim's bag is full of stuff.  Drawings, a snow globe...   and his head is full of stuff, too.  We know that because we get to walk through it and it results in a visually creative, fun, and thoughtful take on how much love depends on our own screwed up heads.  He's great in this movie and I really think he does a great job in most of his pseudo-straight man roles... he's a good actor.

I sweat Kate Winslet in this movie, too.  I've always loved crazy chics with Crayola hair, especially when they have a sensitive, vulnerable side they only show to a select few... always made me feel special. 

The movie is made by Focus Features which also did Lost in Translation.  Its the "specialty" unit of Universal... both movies are indeed very special.

Do you want to make money in your own home?

Forget real estate scams, tupperware, or becoming a spammer.

Create your own Web 2.0 company NOW!!

Its easy.  Just follow these 10 simple steps and you, too, can be seen in fine dining establishments like Jamba Juice and speaking on panels for conferences like Distribucate 2.0, Fred, Bloggerstock and Elfdex.

1. Solve the smallest possible problem (that is still big enough to matter) for the user and know exactly what problem you're trying to solve. Google's first and primary job was very simple:  Help people find stuff.  They didn't start layering on everything else until much later.  Brad calls this the "narrow point of the wedge."  Its the easiest, simplest version of what you're trying to do... the smallest bite your users will ever have to chew--small enough to get hooked on very easily.

2. Get a responsive and chatty audience using the product.  The del.icio.us community eats new features like piranhas.  They pour over the service, discuss it, promote it, and complain when they don't like stuff.  You couldn't have hired a better, more thorough, or more passionate group of alpha testers.  Don't rush to get the service so easy that my dad can use it, because he's not going to really be helpful to you in the early days when you need really hardcore Beta testing.

3.  Launch.  Now.  Tomorrow.  Every day.   Don't wait until its perfect to put it out in the open.  No more closed invite-only betas.  Your idea of perfect may not jive with your users' ideas of perfect.  Put whatever you can out there and get people using it as soon as possible.  Feed them daily with new features to keep them interested and coming back.  No one likes waiting six years for new releases.

4.  Distribute.  Distribute.  Distribute.    Don't force your users to play on your site in a walled garden.  Let them take the service and use it wherever they want.  (See Flickr badges, Google Ads, Amazon affiliates, Indeed jobrolls, del.icio.us linkrolls, moblogging, RSS, e-mail alerts, etc., etc....)  Instead of building it so they will come, go out and get them by placing little bits of your service everywhere on the web.  Be where they are.

5.  Don't hold users against their will.  If they want to leave, let them pick up with all of the content they created while they were on your site and leave... for free.  Charging $0.29 to get back each of the hi rez photos you uploaded to the site (See my upcoming Snapfish post) is thievery.  You have to let the barn door open and focus on keeping your customers fed, so they want to come back, instead of coming back because they're stuck.

6.  Be mindnumbingly simple.  Extra clicks are deadly.  People just won't do it.  Indeed:  One search, all jobs.  Two boxes:  What job and where.  You can't get any easier than that and all it takes is for someone to put one search in for people to go, "Wait...what's this... links to Monster AND Careerbuilder??" 

7.  Get people hooked on free.  Craigslist wouldn't have become Craigslist if it wasn't free for so much for so long.  Even now, they're very profitable and they're only charging for just a few small pieces of their service in just a handful of their 120 markets.  The world is changing.  Service is cheaper to provide now than ever and users are expecting to get more for free than ever before.  Its hard for a lot of big companies to accept that.  I just had lunch recently with a couple of friends from a music publisher.  They were signing some bands to "incubator" deals for just a couple of songs to test the market with them.  I said, "And you're giving those songs away for free, right?"  They nearly choked on their food.  :)    Well, why the heck wouldn't they?  Give a few songs away for free, generate buzz, get lots more people to buy future albums.  Seth Godin did that with his books, releasing e-books that generated buzz around hardcover sales.  Free sells.  Do you think the Facebook would be the Facebook if you had to pay for your smooches  like you do on Match?

8. Don't waste any money on marketing.   Word of mouth has never ever been easier or less expensive in the history of human communication.  Things go viral in a hurry... when they're good.  Ever see a Skype superbowl commercial?  No, but they've had 146 million people download it.  If you don't have the service and the quality to back it up, no amount of fancy marketing is going to help... and people are so quick to share cool stuff, because they want to be the person "in the know".  When they're satisfied, they'll blog about it and e-mail everyone they know.  And they'll tag it furiously on del.icio.us, too.

9.  Don't overfund.  Do you know how many times a day I see companies get funded on Private Equity Week and I'm like, "What the heck are they going to do with all that money??"  Underfunding a company can be a problem, too, but thinking that more money makes you better is a fallacy.  It probably makes you a bit sloppy and fuzzies your focus.  When you raise $2 million, you're much more likely to have a clear sense of exactly where that money is going to go than if you raised $20 million.

10.  No one sucks.  I hate it when someone says that a whole service sucks.  Now, I say it myself, I'll admit, but what that does is it teaches you to discount and generalize, and probably miss a lot of small opportunities that add up.  Now, I think Ofoto sucks versus Flickr, but people still use it.  Why?  There's got to be something there.  AOL sucks... or does it?  They still have 20 million users, so it can't entirely suck.  You should look at every competitor and take the best of what they do right and do it yourself, even if that's only one thing and the rest of their service sucks. 

They should just take this guy's house away and all his stuff, and let the Chinese cook live there...

Link: New York Daily News - Home - Busted in rent-control tenant toss.

So ugly its almost...well, no...its ugly., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I'm sure this dog is well loved by its owner, but definitely not for its looks.  Poor thing.

Cooled off, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Rain washes heat away in NYC.

Hilarious!  Thanks Hunter!

Link: This is going to be BIG! - Jamba is a goldmine..

"Still amazed by the volume constriction that seems to occur during the blending process. I mean, you can suck down a smoothie with no problems, but try to eat four scoops of ice, half glass of OJ, two bananas, eight strawberries and half a frozen mango? No way."

Jamba is a goldmine., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Always packed.

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.

Elevator Shaft, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Meetpacking district company visits with Fred.

I'm fully supportive of this:

WALKEN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2008

A message from the next President of the United States:

walken2008 (comedy_not_real).wav
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We're looking for a cross platform way to present meetings over the web.  We don't need that much online Q&A, but that's nice, but basically we want a sturdy, glitch proof way that dial-up people to our meetings can look at presentations over the web behind a password. 

Which service to people recommend?

A lot of these free trials have ten person limits, too... that sucks.

I don't know wheather this is a quote or Elyssa wrote it, but its pretty cool.

Link: lispsugrl: RIP Common Sense.

I'm fully intent on going to this...  who's in?

Link: Ram News.

Bronx, NY - (June 27, 2005) – The Fordham University men’s basketball Rams will open the 2005-06 season in paradise. The Paradise Jam, that is. Six Division I men’s basketball teams are gearing up for a trip to paradise at the sixth annual Paradise Jam Basketball Tournament hosted by the University of the Virgin Islands in St. Thomas.

The year was 1994.  I was a sophomore at Regis.   

I had recently been introduced to the Mecca that was the local all-girls high schools.  When you go to an all-guys high school, getting an "in" to your sister school was like finding the Holy Grail.

So there I was, with some newly minted friends from Marymount and the older Regis guys they hung out with, and they couldn't wait to see Pulp Fiction.  I was largely unaware of what I was going to see.  In fact, I remember being largely unaware of a lot of cool pop cultural stuff at the time, aside from what I heard on Z100 or from my Brooklyn friends.  I remember in freshmen year being told who the Ramones were by this girl Veronica I met at a Regis dance.  The Ramones!   What a sheltered life. 

Anyway, Pulp Fiction was, by far, the coolest thing I'd ever seen on the screen.  It was edgy, creative, and totally unlike anything else.  I must have easily seen it ten times in the movie theater... also because it played FOREVER.  You could always find it playing somewhere in the city. 

Pulp Fiction marked the resurrection of John Travolta's career as well.  He'd just come off the second sequal of "Look Who's Talking"... (yes, they made THREE of those movies) and hadn't done much since... well, since the early 80's. 

Another first.... it was also the first time was saw all this mix and matching with storylines that were out of order and tied back into each other.  When I saw that the diner scene tied back into itself, I was really wowed.

All the characters...   well, they're all just so fantastic and how many lines from this movie just got repeated over and over again?   "Check out the big brain on ______."   From Pumpkin and Honeybunny to Jules to the Wolf, the casting is kind of like watching art. 

And its got a Christopher Walken monologue...  This scene is just hilarious.  "And I hid the watch..."

There isn't one thing I would have done differently with this movie.  I love every character.  Every scene is art.  Every line is so carefully constructed.  It was part of growing up for me.  I owned the soundtrack, too...  great soundtrack.  Everyone my age had it. 

I think of this list like the Hall of Fame, but some of the movies are like Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb.  They're just on another level that would be a list of like 5 or 10 or something and not make for much interesting comparison.  Pulp Fiction is on that list, Shawshank, and few others.  Truly greay.

Quality quotes from Evelyn

Link: Crossroads Dispatches: Friday Thoughts on Art, Brands, Perfection in Blogs and Business.

In large measure becoming an artist consists in learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal, and in following your own voice, which makes your work distinctive.

What veteran artists know about each other is that they have engaged the issues that matter to them.

To make art is to sing with the human voice. To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have.

Dogsitting instructions, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Now I know exactly how to handle what comes out of Joy.

My parents are selling their house, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Bensonhurst...well kept 2br.  Finished basement.  I think they're asking 525K.

Maybe we're related..., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I was biking down Ft. Hamilton Pkwy by Greenwood Cemetery, and this stone caught my eye.



Anna Hines O'Donnell Ross 1811-1875.  She died 130 years ago, but maybe a long lost relative.  Interesting...wonder what this street looked like when she was buried.

So its a couple of days late and I posted Shawshank last week, so now I've got to come up with something to top it or even on par, right?

Nope.

Not even going to try.

This is a pure Charlie's favorite.  I won't vouch for any kind of quality.  No Oscar caliber performances here.

What do you get when you combine Rammstein, hot chics, fast cars and a bald guy?

No, its not my blog...

Its Vin Diesel in "XXX".

"XXX" is just gratuitous entertainment.  Things go fast, things blow up, and there's cool music from Queens of the Stone Age, Orbital, and  Drowning Pool.  Did I mention things blowing up?  Its also got fantastic lines like, "I like anything fast enough to do something stupid in."

Truly an award winning performance from Vin Diesel--he actually got nominated for Best Male Performance at the MTV Movie Awards. 

At 5.5 stars, its got one of the lowest movie ratings I've seen on IMDB.... but to be honest, how could you dislike this movie if you went to go see it?  You knew it had Vin Diesel in it.  What did you expect?  Where there not enough things exploding?  Should the music have been louder? 

This ain't no Shawshank, folks.  Its the guy who did Riddick.