Before the playoffs, I made some predictions.   Here's how they fared:

Padres vs. Cardinals:  Cardinals in 1.

The Cardinals are going to win the first game 23-1.  The Padres will concede the rest of the series and apoligize for even being in the playoffs with an 82-80 record. 

Result:  Amazingly enough, this actually happened.  I was spot on.

Astros and Braves:  Astros in 4.

The Braves, too, will apoligize for continuing to win the National League East.  Roger Clemens will nail Chipper Jones in the face intentially, ruining a division series perfect game but then get the next guy to preserve the no-hitter.  Clemens will use age and dementia as an excuse for the wayward 97MPH fastball.  Nobody buys it.  Doesn't matter...  everyone's tired of the Braves anyway.

Status: I called this one.  'Stros in four.  No face knocking, though, but Clemens did come up big in the last game, making up for his first effort.

Yanks and Angels:  Angels in 5. 

Garret Anderson will drive in 10 runs.  Still, he will be drafted in the 12th round of most fantasy leagues next year.  He will legally change his name to "No respect."  Arod will go another year without a ring.  Yankee stadium will be packed with fans who got corporate seats and have never been to a baseball game before.  They'll wonder why that Ruth fellow isn't playing.  Mariano Rivera will not give up a run in his 5 appearences.  Neither will K-Rod.

Status:  Called this one, too!   I was off, though.  Garret only drove in 7, but still lead the team.  No one could have called Bengie Molina, though.  K-rod gave up runs and so did Mariano.

Sox vs. Sox:  Red Sox in 4.

Podsednick will steal 8 bases in the series.  Both teams will combine for more than 8 runs in every game.  Red Sox fans won't even watch or attend, because, after last year, everything else is gravy.  I can't seriously pick the White Sox here, mostly because, as Brian pointed out, they're throwing out Jose Contraras in the first game.

Status:  Boy, did I blow this one.  Contraras came up big and the Red Sox didn't.  As for the run scoring, every game had at least 8 runs in it...  almost got that one at least.  Pod:  1 stolen base. 

Angels - White Sox?

Angels in 7...

Garret Anderson:  More RBI.  Series MVP.

Click to see Video

I found this on the del.icio.us Mustang+cars tag. 

So now that the couches are in and the walls are painted, it was time for detailing.  Like, for example, my bare gray walls.  I called in an expert...   Adrianna and I went to Bed Bath and Beyond to look for framed pictures, mirrors, etc.  I had a bunch of postcards of Pike Floyd album covers that I wanted to put up as well, but how to put them up and where to put them? 

We found a few items that we liked and started brainstorming right in the store:

Here's the final product:

Friendster has just added a tool that allows people to see who has viewed their profiles.  In the last week, my profile has really become popular.  The interesting thing is that where its become popular is a bit fishy.

3/4 of these clicks are coming from Malaysia and the Phillipines.  Now, of course I realize the power of my universal appeal, but perhaps we might consider something else going on here.

Clickfraud?  I think that's a real possibility.

There are advertisements on my profile...    I mean, seriously, why the heck would straight Phillipino guys click me... and a lot of them, too. 

Unless its a case of my head looking like the logo of some Asian product, like Homer in the Simpsons.  Maybe I'm the next Mr. Sparkle!

I'm certainly not trying to knock Friendster here, because they've done a lot in the last few months to revamp the service, but this is just kind of weird.

I want to learn some basic MySQL and PHP in order to build a wikipedia-type wiki...  I have a great idea for one.

I want to sit down with Ning for a little while.

I'm curious about Second Life.

Its STILL on my to do list to collaborate with Sean on a new blog about younger VC analysts.

I also really need some more time for original research.

And then there are the people who take my wacky ideas, combine them with their own much better ideas and run with them...   I've got to add a "Don't try this at home" disclaimer.

So much to do.

Will all of you people stop innovating and creating and give me a chance to catch up, try out, and possibly create some stuff on my own?

Or, at least just invent another day.  I'd invest in that. 

Pete Cashmore's Mashable and Chris Baum's User Experience Blog. 

I've been ranking all my blogs... well, most of them little by little, in FeedDemon by title, renaming the titles 0-5. 

My important front line reads are 1's.  This includes Fred's blog and Rob May's Businesspundit.

My 2's are solid.  They fill out the rotation with quality...   but I don't need to read them everyday.  That includes Alex Barnett and Charlene Li. 

3's are things I need to pay attention to, but aren't really part of regular content consumption, like the blogs of our companies, who we hear from anyway, and some MSM feeds.

4's are for something else...  4's are del.icio.us feeds of fun stuff to do and restaurants, and PubSub feeds.

5's are friends.

Then, there's the 0 category.  That's a test.  0's are short lived...   for like a week.  Its a watchlist of stuff I might want to read.  Pete and Chris have graduated from the zeros.

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.  :)

Listening to Al Gore talk about the lost "marketplace of ideas".  TV stations used to (it doesn't seem like they do anymore... at least I can't find it) have some requirement for educational programming?

Should MySpace, Friendster, and the Facebook have the same thing?  Especially when it comes to news.

In fact, I wonder whether or not Newscorp is interested in MySpace to reengage youth from a news a political perspective.  MySpace News...     pump a bunch of news stories into those kinds of networks... an opportunity to research facts, etc...   give them the tools to collaborate and discuss.  That's the way to engage the youth...  not with a young people's version of Fox News or MSNBC.

Need some market testing here.  Has anyone taken out an auto loan in the past 6 months?  What rate did they get?  Leave an anonymous comment with just the number...  :)

I just got quoted 7.8...   was hoping for more around 7.

I guess resale value is why autoloans are so much more expensive than mortages, huh?

Jason just sold Weblogs, Inc. for $20-35 million.  Nice job.  Two years... no office, a bunch of bloggers and AdSense.  In fact, that's more than a nice job.  That's hustle, because here's a company with no technological barriers whatsoever.  Anyone could have done this, but not everyone did. 

There's a great line in the Fountainhead where somebody asks Howard Roark, "... but who's going to let you?"   His answer?

"Who's going to stop me?"

That's been Jason's approach.  And this won't be the last thing he builds either, I'm sure.  What's cool is that he's a Brooklyn guy...   he's from Bay Ridge, where I live now, and he went to Fordham.  Now, I wouldn't be surprised if Fordham doesn't know he went to Fordham.

Do you think that having an alum sell a blogging company for up to $35 million would convince them that maybe they should have a blog?

Congratulations Jason!

That man has a cat on his head, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Now the cat IS the hat.

I voted for Al in '00... and boy, does he know how to capture a crowd... and then put them right to sleep.

Unfortunately, I missed his opening line. "My name is Al Gore, and I used to be the "Next President of the United States."

Powered by Castpost

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.

I sent my roommate from college a link about beer ratings that I found on del.icio.us. 

Where'd I find it?   The beer tag of course!

He doesn't know what RSS is and probably won't become a tagger.  However, he does like beer, so I'm making the beer tag into a Feedblitz e-mail that he can subscribe to.  That way, once a day, he'll get all the links that the community of del.icio.us users have tagged "beer".

Apparently, this is a beer loving crowd, because there are a lot of cool links on it.

Want to subscribe?  Just type your e-mail address here:

I'm the worst gifter ever.  I'm usually late and I never know what to get. 

How about a service where I plug all my gifting birthdays, anniversaries, etc from my cal, the vitals of the giftee and our relationship and it recommends like five gifts for me to choose from. 

I especially have this problem with my nieces in Tampa, mostly because I'm not really in touch with the tween and pre-tween scene.  Anyone have any ideas on gifts for a twelve year old and a nine year old? 

I think you could even run a service like this for free.  I think enough companies would pay for inclusion or ranking on a service where you wouldn't have to charge for the actual recommendations.  Perhaps you could even set it up so that anyone could offer up suggestions  and get paid when people actually purchase the item--recommend items and get paid.  Also, you could probably generate revenue from the metadata one could generate when people selected among recommended items and any kind of post-gift "Did they like it" rankings.  When you're shopping, they could even throw in a "how about something for you" gift or a "while you're shopping for your mom, get your wife some flowers" suggestion.

There have been a number of sites that have been successful playing into the way women shop, mostly because women do something like 70 percent of the non-electronics, non appliance shopping in this country.  This site would particularly play into the key aspect of the male shopper-we're idiots.  We don't have any idea what's good or what to get for anyone.  Plus, we're probably less price sensitive, because we shop less in general and we're willing to pay the idiot tax if we could significantly improve our chances of the gift we got actually being liked.

If this were free, I'd sign up now.  Even it wasn't, I'd still signup and probably pay about $5 an item if the recommendation was really good.

Oh, also, our Annual Meeting is coming up.  What's the best "lovely parting gift" you've ever given/recieved at one of these events?

More Movie Filming, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

This one is right across the street. The NYC film industry is booming!

I saw this the other day and I thought it was just hilarious.  Its amazing how a few carefully collected clips and a little change of soundtrack can do.  Definitely worth watching.

In all seriousness, though, The Shining is one of my favorite movies.  First of all, it makes me feel so conflicted.  On one hand, you have the perfectly deconstructed and torn down psychopath, Jack Nicholson, flipping out and trying to kill his family.

On the other hand, boy do I hate Shelley Duvall in this movie.  I mean, I seriously think if he did clip her with that ax, the audience probably would have cheered.  Can an actress be more irratating??  Watching her flounce around in an attempt to run was just painful.  Well, I suppose if it was Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack wouldn't have been too much of a match for her, so they had to pick an easier target.

Anyhoo, Jack's whole unwinding is done at such a perfect pace.  Its never unbelievable and it never drags on either.  Plus, I like the fact that the ghoul factor is pretty low.  Its scary, but the only thing you really need to be scared of is the woman in the tub.  Other than that, its all just mood and suspence.  Fantastic score, set off by the early Berlioz on the trek up the hill.  I loved the scenes where the charactors from the past appear, and I think maybe the scariest thing in the movie is when he turns up in the picture at the end.

Best unintentional comedy moment:  Scatman Carrother's (the cook) apartment in Miami.  It looks like a scene from "The Ladies Man"...  huge sprawled out female nude painting behind the bed.  Totally 70's decor.  Look out Miami. 

Photo 661, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I ran out of Cascade this morning, and so I used dishsoap.

I've never had a dishwasher before.

My parents never had a dishwasher when I was growing up. How was I supposed to know the outcome?

Well, let me tell you, my floor is really clean now. :/

And that "Cancel/Drain" button? Pure genius.

33 years old... total of 16 2/3 innings of total major league experience. 

Now he's 10-0.

Did anyone get the number of that turnip truck?  I'd like to see if any closers fell off of it for the Mets to use in 2006.

Reminds me of that line about how the Yanks could pick up a hooker on the West Side Highway and insert her at second base and she'd probably manage to hit .280.

They have no place competing this year and I hope the Sox beat the pants off of them this Series.

Ironic how they also wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Jason Giambi, right?  A year ago, he was  dead to them.  Now, he's the prodigal son.

This is a neat little tool to figure out how far you went, especially if you're a runner or biker.

Last night, my fall softball team, "Not Enough Friends to Have Our Own Team" (so named because we all signed up with Zog Sports as individuals) won 12-3, pushing our record to 3-0.  I biked back to my eh-hem... second home from 145th and Lenox Ave.

Here's the route.

Its funny, because the driving directions put it at 14.5 miles.  Turns out I only did 12.9.  I guess I wasn't going as fast as I thought.  Still, it took less than an hour, so it was a good clip. 

One thing I noticed along the way was how much new build there is along Lenox Avenue.  Its really clean and there are a lot of new buildings going up.  I was pleasently surprised by how far that area has come... its definately been a few years since I was up there last. 

Here's my daily commute to work in the morning.  The last little turnaround is because I bike to the gym, work out, shower, then go to work.  And no, I don't bike on the Brooklyn, Queens Expressway... the BQE is elevated along 3rd avenue there.  I bike under it.