LVHRD Superhero's Ball - Me as skeletor, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Do I look pale there?

Link: USATODAY.com - Marriott timeshare unit says customer data is missing.

ORLANDO (AP) — The timeshare unit of Marriott International is notifying more than 200,000 people that their personal data are missing after backup computer tapes went missing from a Florida office.

Link: Jeremy Hermanns dot org � Alaska Flight #536 - Rapid De-Pressurization and Panic at 30K Feet.

Link: In Pursuit of Unhappiness - New York Times.

"Sociologists like to point out that the percentage of those describing themselves as "happy" or "very happy" has remained virtually unchanged in Europe and the United States since such surveys were first conducted in the 1950's. And yet, this January, like last year and next, the self-help industry will pour forth books promising to make us happier than we are today. The very demand for such books is a strong indication that they aren't working."

Great article...   reminds me of Debi (Minnie Driver)'s quote from Grosse Pointe Blank,

"Everybody's coming back to take stock of their lives. You know what I say? Leave your livestock alone."

Link: New York Daily News - Home - Submariner Bradford drops into Mets' relief corps.

I think I speak for all former wiffleballers everywhere when I say that its great to have someone with a ridiculous windup back in the mets bullpen.

Let's bring back Jeff Innis while we're at it.  How's this for a stat?  In 1991, he pitched 69 games -- 84 innings... and didn't have a win or a save.  He had a 2.66 ERA and a 1.05 WHIP.  Anybody know what he's up to now?

I'm usually a fantastic sleeper.

But, once in a while, I just have these odd nights where nothing works and I putz around my place unable to even begin to think about sleeping until way too late.

Its 3:47 AM.

I was going to bike to work tomorrow, but its going to rain.  Sucks, because that's kind of what I was up to in my workout cycle.  I guess I kind of need the sleep now.  Perhaps I'll go at lunch.

Checking AIM...   Tim's on... but he's ALWAYS on.  Guy never sleeps.  He's hilarious, though.  I almost don't want to start chatting with him because then I'll actually have a reason to stay awake.  Jarah's on, too...   but she's on the west coast, so its not so late there.  I don't honestly know what time zone Tim is in... he's on a farm in Saskachawan somewhere.

I had Starbucks with Ken this morning.  Nice guy...  I seem to get along well with Canadians. 

Damn, I don't have one single interesting thing to write about.

My leg is tapping...  it does that sometimes.  Annoys Kerri, I'm sure.

This whole sleep thing is kind of like how we need a leap year every four years.  Turns out it takes 365 and 1/4 days for the earth to go around the sun, so to catch up, we need to have this extra day in there.  Well, I guess I'm on some kind of weird 23 hour day thing where by the time the end of the month comes, I don't need a nights worth of sleep.

Why am I blogging?

This is lame.

Echo. Echo. Echo.

Alright...  I'm going to just lay in bed, even if I don't fall asleep.

You know, I didn't want to put up a Christmas tree this year, but my parents moved so they needed somewhere to put up theirs.  Admittedly, it kind of makes me feel warm and fuzzy when I see it.  Its the first thing I turn on when I get back home.  I may just keep it up all year.

There can be only one..., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

This is the coat that should have won. :)

Link: QDB: Top 100 Quotes.

<jeebus> the "bishop" came to our church today

<jeebus> he was a fucken impostor

<jeebus> never once moved diagonally

If the human race dies out, I think we are all pretty sure that it will somehow be the result of our own undoing.

Pollution?  Global warming?  Nuclear war?  Perhaps...  But so many of these issues come down to one fundamental flaw.

Deep down, we all think we are right.

Its just not true.  It can't be.  Some of us are wrong, just like we're all not above average, too.  Oh, and many of us aren't  special either.  Your mom lied to you.  Sorry. 

What's even worse, though, is that our righteousness is killing our connections to other people.  Sociologists have seen a prolonged and steady decline in group participation in all forms.  We don't truly seek out groups of others because we don't feel like other people can offer us anything we don't already have or tell us anything we don't already know. 

Even in the blog world...  This isn't about community.  We like to say it is, but if it was, egalitarian message boards would have worked just fine.  No, we needed a medium whereby our own thoughts were big and monopolized the screen, and anything anyone else had to say got marginalized down at the bottom, requiring a click to view.  Why do we think most of the blogging platforms haven't integrated the "publish a comment as a post" thing that elevates our readers on par with ourselves? 

Probably because not enough people are asking for it.

Surely if they can find ways to stream 30 MB podcasts into an RSS feed, reblogging a comment can't be a huge technological hurdle.

Its bad enough that this problem of being right prevents us from being good listeners.  It causes us to carry around a lot of spite and animosity, too... for people that we should really be better to.

When I was in college, I thought my girlfriend had a crush on this kid out in Ohio that she met on a community service trip.  Everyone seemed to like this kid and, man, whenever I heard his name, it drove me up a wall.  I just to just hate the sound of his name, let alone the thought of this girlfriend stealing do-good dick. 

So when her connection to Ohio wound up becoming a job opportunity, and she took, it, this became an even bigger obsession.  I went out there for her birthday once and decided I was going to throw her a surprise party with her coworkers.  I decided the best way to "combat" this Ohio kid was to be the better guy and actually invite him to it, since they were actually friends.

Of course, I dreaded meeting him, but you wanna know something?

He was harmless.

Totally harmless.

In fact, he was so harmless that the two of us actually wound up kind of hanging out that night and I have to say I actually liked the guy.  He was a pretty cool guy.

Big bad Colin.  Ha!

All those mental and emotional cycles wasted over something that was all perception, not reality.

The point?  The point is that we need to stop dropping stuff like this.  We need to figure out our visceral reactions, our unwarrented animosities and start trying to figure out why.  Chances are, its not even the other person's fault... its your own internal issue.  So, you keep trying to duke it out with them, but, in the end, the problem isn't with them, its with you.  Go sit in room alone for a while and work it out by yourself.  Come back to us when you're done.

"Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead ... only try to realize the truth."

"What truth?"

"There is no spoon."

"There is no spoon?"

"Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself."

Check out  these cool new features in Indeed.

You can save any job (without setting up an account... another reason cookies are good!) and write notes on it, as well as tag it.

Check out the screenshot below:

  Entering last night's games, we were a tie ahead of the team behind us for the last and final spot in our division for the playoffs.  We played at 6:30, which made it difficult for most of our team to show up, so we had to start off shorthanded, playing 5 on 6.  Backs against the wall, Dodge This! came out firing, wiping the floor with our first opponent despite being short, 14-5.  We wound up taking 3 our of the 4 games in our match, and the only way we could have missed the playoffs was if the team behind us went 4-0.  Well, we nearly did miss, since they went 3-1 in the late came, which we got word of this morning.  We play next Sunday night 3/13 at 7:50 at Martin Luther King on 65th and Amsterdam against Dodgy McShady, who we beat twice last night pretty handily and Get Outta Dodge.  If we win we might face the obnoxious purple team, Balls of Furry.  D-O-D... G-E...  Dodge This!!!  woooooooooo

1. You can drive down the block looking for a spot at 50 miles an hour, because the location of every fire hydrant and driveway in a 20 square block radius is hardwired into your brain.
2. You act like little nicks and dents in your bumper don't bother you, but they secretly tear at your soul.
3. You can hear the difference between the sound of a car door closing in an empty car versus one with people in it...from three blocks away.
4. Your car has an alarm, but you have no idea what it sounds like, because you are never parked on your own street.
5. You believe there are too many fire hydrants in your neighborhood, and you would gladly trade off the chance of getting out of your house alive in a fire for a few extra spots.
6. Empty parking spaces look suspicious to you, especially if you've been driving around for less than ten minutes.  You approach them with caution.
7. You tell out of town guests to stop at your house or apartment first, so you can come down and drive around with them looking for a spot.  After the third time they slow down for a hydrant, you reach across, open their door, push them out of the moving car, and take over.  You are parked 4 minutes and 3 miles later.
8. You look for jobs with hours that fit your alternate side of the street parking schedule.
9. You are not Jewish, but you know all the holidays.
10. You could park an Impala in a thimble if you really needed to.

Riffrolls on music and  linkrolls on kittens
Bright Flickr badges and warm wool on AdSense
Amazon book lists tied up with strings
These are the things of our blog sidebar bling

Vimeo ponies and current IM status
Mail me and Skype me and Word of Blog, too
Indeed jobs flying with the moon on their wings
These are the things of our blog sidebar bling

Well, you know, just a little something for the kids...    but there's a point here.

We've become very accustumed to thinking of "distribution" of web services as little sidebar widgets.  And the results are kind of underwhelming, to be honest.

People don't go to my page to actually consume any of these services.  Its more for me to display things that I'm interested in, almost like little pieces of flair.

That concept falls far short of the potential of the remix world we're building.  Too small.

And then we have APIs, too.  Nice if you're a programmer, but for the rest of us, too geeky.

But what if I could paste some code right in the middle of my page and get a fullblown service right here on my blog.

Or, what about a dating blog for single parents?  Wouldn't they be interested in a fully functioning rendition of Match or whatever services are out there that is limited to single parent listings?  So it would look entirely like Match and have all the same features, but be skinned under my banner.

I was thinking about local portals the other day and how complicated it would be to set something up, but what if I could just pull down some HTML and start pasting together services.  I could have a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn site that lists Bay Ridge personals, all the Bay Ridge MySpacers, Bay Ridge City Search results, Meetups in Bay Ridge, Bay Ridge jobs from Indeed, a full explorable rendition of Flickr just from people in the Bay Ridge Zip Code... etc, etc.

Someone else could do the same thing for some other locality, or even for something besides location.  Goth personals, Goth meetups, Goth jobs?, Goth reblogs.

The key is that it should all be completely self serve.  I shouldn't have to strike a business deal with Nerve.com to want to feature Brooklyn personals on my blog... it should just be completely self serve.  All I'd need to do is to create the banner, do my own marketing, etc... and boom, I've got my own instant portal.

Right now, you need to use stuff like Drupal to create a site, use APIs, etc... its not something the average person can do.

And Squidoo has mods, but the mods are mostly text links via on RSS.... no fully interactive services.

If you have any kind of a consumer facing service, I think its to your benefit to allow consumers to pull down and promote a limited version of your site tailored to their vertical.  Let your users aggregate enough long tail stuff to appeal to a market segment you'll never reach on your main site.  So, instead of making me pick out and paste all the individual Amazon books on Brooklyn, let me skin a version of Amazon with Brooklyn books only that I can use right here on my site.... a pasteable bookstore.

That's remixing and that's true distribution.

Link: CNN.com - Texas House�to cheerleaders: Don't shake it - May 5, 2005.

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) -- Texas lawmakers sent a message to the state's high school cheerleaders Wednesday: no more booty-shaking at the game.

U.F.R.   (First word utterly, last word ridiculous.)  Isn't this something that, um... the PARENTS should be monitoring?  If its such a big issue, why don't the parents talk with the coach?  Why doesn't the school talk to the coach?  The idea that elected politicians are censoring cheerleader dance routines in 2005 is just plain sad.  If I lived in Texas now, I'd throw myself in front of a bus.  Then, I'd move.

Time is money.
Events take place in time.
Broker/control events (i.e. time) and you're going to make a lot of money.

Only in the last week or so have I figured out what a juggernaut Gmail is for making Google a lot of money in the event space, but not without some help.

Matching an event to an audience is about finding a relevent event and a relevent audience.  Destinations like CitySearch have trouble finding either.  Not all the events are listed there, and they don't get the traffic they want.  That was Events 1.0.

Then you've got Events 1.5...   EVDb and Upcoming.org.  These sites allow you to share more with friends... they're more focused around user generated content, but they're still centralized depositories.  They lack the distribution of production.  You can create your own event rolls, but you don't really take advantage of the distributed event listing going on around the web... just the distributed communication.  Its one way and everyone's got to go to them to post for this to work.

Events 2.0 is vertical search.  Its Zvents and BusyTonight... coming at each other from opposite coasts.  They don't need to build a community to get their service going.  Vertical search works, to a greater or lesser degree, on day one.  If you've got an event, they'll find it (at least that's the promise anyway), no matter where you are.  All of the eventrolls, community features, events your friends are going to, etc. would naturally come after that.  (Events 2.1?)

But, this still doesn't quite do it.  I've got to sit down and search for events everytime I want to do something.  That's not quite discovery.  Its still search.  Its not the kind of serendipitious discovery I get from del.icio.us RSS feeds of random good stuff bubbled up from the community, like the tag combo of Mustang and cars.

So, how to solve the discovery issue?  Well, it just so happens that Google is sitting on a mountain of a lot of personal data on all of its Gmail users.  Now all they need to do is to use it as fuel for GCal, buy or make a vertical search tool, and they'll have the greatest calendar ever produced on the web--one that fills itself!!

They've already convinced Gmail users of how benign it is to let a computer search their e-mail to produce relevent ads in exchange for a killer service.  I'd bet a lot of those users would use a slick calendar app if, with one click, it filled itself with potential events for you based on all of your historical e-mail content. 

The missing link is the events themselves.  I hope Google doesn't buy EVDb, but goes all out and buys a vertical search tool--one that comprehensively indexes the web for every last event.

There's no reason why GCal shouldn't let me know when all of the next Mets related events are (hell, put the whole damned schedule on my calendar).  Kayaking?  It should see how many times I mention downtown boathouse in my e-mail, figure out what that is (b/c its the first thing that comes up in google, of course), go to our homepage and put all of our classes and schedule up there as well.  Same with concerts of bands I talk about.   That's Events 3.0.

On top of that, when it asks, "This looks like something you're into, are you going/interested?" and I click yes, it should notify (if I set it to) all of my other Gmail friends.  It shouldn't e-mail them, but it should have a "4 people you know are thinking of going to this" status area, and let the user click through to see who those people are (if they opt in to make themselves viewable.)

Something like this would make people who don't even use calendars start to use them.  It would also open up a whole new type of ad category:  Sponsored event listings.  It would allow advertisers to reach me with events on nights I'm not doing anything else... either to get me out of the house or to keep me in, since TV advertisers would probably pay to reach me on nights I appear to be free regularly.

The calendar, powered by e-mail, will prove to be a powerful attention broker, and right now I think Google has the best e-mail, the technology to search it, and the ability to buy or build the events. 

Events 3.0, here we come.  So long lonely Saturday nights.

I just handed over about an inch and a half of my screen to Google by downloading the new version of Google Desktop.  I really like it a lot.  Its not perfect, but its pretty useful.  It sits in a sidebar on the right side of my screen and has "panels" that you can swipe in and out, like RSS feeds, News, Weather, etc.  Its very fast, too... feels Ajax-y.

Here's what I like:

Fast E-mail - I've been asking for a fast frontend for Outlook at this is a great start.  Outlook is so heavy and slothlike on my computer.  This takes my incoming mail, displays it in a panel, and gives me a one click, full text preview.  For me, anything fast in e-mail is nice.  Its even going to index and display my Gmail.

RSS (Webclips) - I'm going to add the 10 feeds that I want to read immediately plus my del.icio.us/for tag so I can get the stuff I want to see right on my desktop.  This way, I can relegate FeedDemon to just once or twice a day use.

ToDo - Very simple to-do list sitting on my desktop...simple is good when you're trying to get stuff done.

Needs Improvement:

Outlook integration - The sidebar is display only for e-mail...  doesn't let me actually do anything.  Even when I remove an e-mail from the display, it doesn't actually delete it in Outlook. It would be nice if I could delete and move to folders from the sidebar.  Same with todo's.  In fact, this is a problem I have with a lot of the web-based GTD applications.   I use Good Software to tie my Treo to our exchange server, so Outlook is where all of my PIM info lives.  If something can't pull from that or put stuff into it, it isn't any good to me.  I wonder how many professionals have that problem. 

Inexplicably missing:

Calandering!! I'd install a panel that had my day's events immediately, but there wasn't a single tool on the sidebar that allowed me to do anything with calandering.  This is probably because Google is developing a calendar for sure.  Why build something that improves your Outlook functionality when you're going to kill Outlook in a few months anyway?  Still, would have been nice to see my cal on the sidebar.

So how far across the desktop do people think Google is trying to go and how successful will they be?  While those of us more web savvy may start downloading sidebars, toolbars, clients, etc. the average person might not?  Or will they?  Can Google essentially build an operating system on top of Windows and somehow overtake it?

Perhaps we should start worrying when Google buys Writely.

I've been thinking about this post from Blogspotting about whether or not the blind can use iPods.  Blogs are hard enough for them to read because of all these ridiculous columns and screwy formatting, but I figured that podcasts would really be the killer medium for the visual impared once iTunes included podcast support.

Turns out its anything but.  iTunes is nearly impossible to navigate if you're blind and, as I can attest to from listening to the iPod on my bike, the menus are really difficult if you're not looking at the screen.  I haven't spent the time to make a lot of playlists, so I generally just shuffle and skip past songs I don't like.  God forbid I accidently hit Menu, I'm totally lost and can't get back unless I stop the bike, pull over, and do it visually.  (BTW... I bought a helmet and use it all the time now.)

The sad thing is, since the iPod is programmable (you can even put Linux on it), it would take Apple all of about a week to develop an app that talks its way through the menus with basic text to voice.  No new hardware, just a software upgrade. 

So, how about it Apple?  Steve Jobs, are you listening?  How about an iPod software upgrade for the visually impaired?

Link: AFB's Blog Home.

Last week, the NYT published an article where a restaurant owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, interviews a blind man for a cooking position.  Now, I don't know if you've ever had any interaction with many blind people, but with the right tools around them, they can accomplish some pretty amazing stuff.  At GM Asset Management, there's a Canadian bond trader that is blind.  (Can you imagine all those quotes wizzing by on braille!  Amazing!) 

Anyway, so it seemed like this applicant had some trouble in these surroundings...  The article rips the guy apart with stuff like "His eyes wandered around in their sockets like tropical fish in the aquarium of a cheap hotel lobby..."?

I mean...   how do people get away with stuff like that?  The whole piece is basically making fun of this visually impaired job applicant.  How do you run a customer facing business with that kind of attitude?  I don't think would stand for an article like that if the owner was making fun of the applicant's race or even if the applicant was in a wheelchair.  How would Gabrielle feel if we made fun of a smaller female chef who couldn't carry a heavy item?

The article is here.

Gabrielle's restaurant is called Prune.  You know what's really ironic?  I checked out some reviews and I found these two:

From Dine.com...   "Prune Restaurant & Bar... opened it's doors to the discriminatingly hip east village crowd one year ago."   Yes...  definitely discriminating.

From Gayot.com...   "Prune may not be the most appealing name for a restaurant (it’s for the owner’s childhood nickname, not the fruit), but once inside any prejudice disappears."    Obviously hasn't been there lately...

If anyone knows Gabrielle Hamilton, I'd say they should urge her to write a public apology.

Link: Bokardo � Blog Archive � Learning More about Structured Blogging.

the “Del.icio.us Lesson”. This is the lesson that personal value precedes network value: that selfish use comes before shared use. We’re seeing it more and more everyday in services like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and is an interesting aspect of networked applications. Even though we’re definitely benefitting from the value of networked software, we’re still not doing so unless the software is valuable to us on a personal level first. And I wonder, how will Google Base fare in light of this? What personal value are people getting out of it? Is it enough to make the service successful?