Seth writes:

Link: Seth's Blog: Amazon's Time Machine.

The question here is: why don't online stores do stuff like this on purpose? Why don't they slip in ridiculous items or funny descriptions? It's not like they're going to run out of shelf space or have a problem with inventory.

They do, Seth.   Its called woot!

Woot! sells one item (many of that item, but just one type) a day and does a hilarious job with the descriptions, often throwing in stuff like "turns into a mind controlling robot" for blenders.  I don't think I've actually bought anything yet, but it keeps me subscribing for the humor.

You can't make this stuff up...   I snapped this pic with my phone yesterday:

1. One of your coworkers bet someone.  "Hey, I bet you $100 I can jab a huge safety pin in Bob's collar without him noticing."
2. One of your coworkers tried to jab a safety pin in your neck, but missed.  "Hey Bob, your tie is crooked.  Lemme fix it...  DAMMIT."
3. The guys from Myth Busters were debunking the theory that you could kill someone with a homemade giant safety pin launcher.
4. He's one of those old guys that wears his pants too high, and there's another safety pin on his belt that also broke.
5. For all you Matrix fans:   "There is no safety pin."
6. Its a Delicious/AARP joint venture to tag all the old guys.  His tag fell off, though.
7. He's The Fly's dad, and he accidently got into that big teleportation pod with a big safety pin.
8. He's trying to start a trend.  All the cool people are wearing big safety pins in their collar.
9. He's so cool that his collar naturally goes up, and he needs the safety pin to keep it down until after hours.
10. He's always forgetting his briefcase around, so he usually keeps it safety pinned to his collar.

Hi, Dave.

"By the time the election rolls around, people are going to know where Democrats stand," Reid said.  Link

This is why I don't like politicians.  They need to spend months, even years, trying to figure out what they think.

Why not just SurveyMonkey every Democrat in the country?  Isn't that what they think?

Kirk Rueter retired today.

Among his noted accomplishments, he had a .586 winning pct and is the winningest lefty in Giants history.

But he also accomplished a bizzare statistical feat.

He gave up more runs than he struck people out.

Now, if you're terrible, that's easy to do, but then you don't stay in the majors that long.

But that's really hard to do if you're actually good.... to have batters put that many balls in play and still succeed.  It certainly keeps your fielders on their toes.

In fact, I went and looked it up and I could only find one other pitcher with a career of any note who has also done that.

At first I thought it was about velocity.  So I thought about other junk ballers...  Moyer, Wakefield, Hough, nope, nope, nope.

Not even close.

Ground ball guys?  Quisenberry, Innis?   Quisenberry comes close, but no cigar.

Damn.

Well, I did find two more.  The first one is just amazing.

Cy Young.

Yup, that's right.  What are the odds that Kirk Rueter and Cy Young wind up in any kind of a trivia question answer together?

So, then I thought maybe it had something to do with that era.  So I checked out other notables...  Matthewson, Grove, Waddell, Brown, Ciccote.  Nope. 

Well, so for a moment there, I thought I had the best trivia question ever...  but then I found one more who just ruins it.

Another ground ball guy, and also a former Giant.

Billy Swift.

Fuck you, Billy Swift.  You ruined my trivia question.

This post brought to you by Baseball Reference.

The Mets have a kid who can play second, who is 5 for 7 this spring who has scored everytime he's been on base. 

Kaz Matsui is hitless in nine trips to the plate.

Well, I've seen enough.  Anderson, you've won the second base job. 

In fact, let's just cut Kaz now and let Willie Randolph be Anderson's backup.

Man, I am starving...and I had a smoothie before I left.  It didn't really take.

The subway is really crowded.  Hopefully it won't be too long before I can start biking again.  Seems that we're having our February weather in March, though.

Onlt five or six weeks until softball.  I went to the cage at Chelsea Piers yesterday.  This is going to be a breakout softball year I think.  This is probably the first year that I've fully embraced the idea that I'm not a hardball player anymore and that, from here on in, its softball.  I even bought a new glove, which needs some working in.

There's a couple in front of me chatting... This has to be one of the most irratating pair of individuals I've ever seen.  They're trying to talk in some kind of code so not everyone can hear them, because he's standing and she's sitting.  Obviously, they haven't really practiced their code, because they're not getting it.

"...Do you mean the first thing or the second thing?"

"What second thing?  The thing from the other person involved?"

"No, your second thing...from before....you know..."

*Smacks hand on head.*

I'll bet you they're not even talking about anything remotely interesting.

No one seems to notice that I'm wearing two different sneakers.

It was an accident.  I had two pairs at work and grabbed a mismatching pair...  I'm just lucky I didn't get two lefts, or, even worse, two rights.

Adrianna tells me that I can't understand the plight of the underprivilaged and that its not so easy to just pick oneself up from one's bootstraps and create success in your life.

That may be true.  Its not as if I have a lot of avenues of understanding in that area. 

I don't have any friends without some kind of support structure.  I mean...   even poor actors that I know still have families to go home to and even college degrees that would allow them access to other careers.

I couldn't believe Andrew Rasiej came in FOURTH in the NYC Public Advocate's race with 5.17% of the vote.  I didn't necessarily support him, but I felt like he was EVERYWHERE and EVERYONE was talking about him.

Turns out, only the bloggers and tech people were talking about him, and the numbers seem to prove out that those were the only people he was talking to as well...   now I'm surprised we number as high as we do...  5%...    woooooo.   A victory for geeks.  A failure for diverse communication.

We're talking to ourselves... highlighting ourselves... making ourselves smarter.  The problem is, "ourselves" is a really small community... smaller than we think.

Everyday, I take more and more advantage of the little platform I've created here.  I've sourced a few deals, connected to smart people, but more importantly, I use blogging in general to gather information and feedback.  I look at all of the people who aren't publicizing themselves by blogging, and who aren't listening to blogs and I see the information gap growing and growing.  I connected to people via LinkedIn.  I lookup information on Wikipedia.  I see the most popular things going on up to the minute on the del.icio.us popular list.  But that's only the beginning.  I see who links to me... I connect with them.  Others write lists of the technologies I should be looking at.  I know several standard dev's more than the avg Joe about my world  and what's going on around me.

But its not just about my job.  Its deeper than that.  When you have this much information and personal connection to people in your own industry, you "see the path."  You see clearly that, if you make the right, and sometimes tough, choices, you can be very successful on your own terms.  I can clearly see that when I don't drink, I can wake up early the next day, work out, logon, connect, etc. all by 9:30 and be fresh, thoughtful, and hopefully impressive to anyone I might meet.

So, where does that leave the average inner city high school kid?  It used to be about just getting him to finish high school.  Then, the bar for the same level of achievement probably became a college degree.  Now, the underrepresented, underreached and undereducated seem to be getting left further and further behind as our neat little peer production community bootstraps itself to the next level.  Everytime I learn some new way to leverage technology to move ahead, recently I can't help but think who I'm moving ahead or just further away from.

How do we fix this?

Ok, so I've been thinking about conferences.  We have conferences for everything... for RSS, for blogs, for Web 2.0, for blogs about business, for blogs about blogs, for women bloggers, for women bloggers who go to conferences about RSS and then podcast about them...   you get the point.  And, to some extent, its a lot of the same people that sits on a lot of these panels. 

What if we did a conference for (and perhaps by) the segment of the population that's getting left the furthest behind and we featured all of us talking heads that usually talks to ourselves?

Here's the idea:

In conjunction with public schools, non-profits, etc. we get a bunch of inner city kids to attend a conference loosely about the future... their future.... and additionally, our future, because they are a big part of the youth of America.  Think Larry and Sergey in a discussion group with some kids from Mott Haven in the Bronx.  Let's get them understanding what Google is as a business, but also have them understand who built it, why, how and what it took as people to get it off the ground.  At the same time, Larry and Sergey should learn about what the lives of these kids are like... hear the stories of friends lost to drugs or violence.  Let's get these kids blogging the conference... and boost some of them up the Feedster 500.  We'll put the smartest people we know together with the students who know the most about that world... because they live it everyday.  How about some collaborative panels?   Maybe Bill Gates could create a presentation together with a 15 year old single mom about...  I don't know...  maybe just parenting.  We could have workshops aimed at answers, roadmaps, how to's, etc.  Let's talk about how to get the underprivilaged youth of America back on track, but not just back on track, but winning the race.  What will it take for some kid to grow up coding in the projects and creating something that not only lifts him up, but lifts his peers as well.

And everyone donates their time and effort.  The venue donates the space.  The speakers donate their knowledge and time, etc.  Perhaps we do it with multiple industries over time.  We could do 6 conferences...  one on tech, one on media, one on education.....  who knows.

Here are some of my questions:

Does the idea hold water?   Is it too extreme and will their be too much culture clash to get anything done or any understanding?  Who best to speak?  Does it make sense to narrow it by industry? 

I write this post not because I think I have all the answers, but because I'm interested in the ideas of other people who take an interest in social software.

I've written a lot about LinkedIn, because I see a lot of potential in that service-or at least its potential to power and improve a lot of the other services I use.  At the same time, I've grown pretty frustrated with the service because I don't see it moving towards fulfilling that potential. 

The biggest problem with the closed social networks is that other than the actual exercise of connecting to people, there isn't  a lot to do on them.  There are two solutions around that.  First, you could build the entire suite of services that you thing people would like to do.  That's what I think MySpace is doing.  On MySpace, you don't just connect, you communicate, you consume media, you have the flexibility to express yourself...those three things right there are about 90% of what their demographic wants to do... And that's what makes it so popular.

The other alternative is to plugin and power everyone else's services.  That now seems to be the Plaxo model.  Every now and the Plaxo tells me someone I know has a new phone number...and that's useful to me.  Other than that, I have no idea what its doing.  Its just kind of sitting there somewhere, lurking in the background, making sure I have people's updated information.   Maybe I should be concerned.  I don't know what the business model there is either, but if you're not going to enable your community to consume your services, then I think that's your only option.  (BASF..we don't make any of this stuff...we make it better...)

LinkedIn seems to be caught in between.  They really haven't successfully built out a suite of services that people want to use on a regular basis, but they don't seem too interested in powering anyone else's either.  Hence the stagnation in their site traffic:

I don't even think they need to remake the whole service to significantly improve the usage.  Here are five lightweight features LinkedIn could implement to get themselves more usefully integrated into my life and maybe a decent percentage of their network:

1. Mimic the Plaxo update functionality with contacts.  Contact info on Linkedin is an "excuse me" feature.  You can input all your info, but they never remind you to, so, at best, most of the Vcards you can download only have a name and an e-mail.  On that note, it shouldn't even be a Vcard.  Automatic plugin.  If we connect on LinkedIn, your phone number should be in my Outlook. 
2. Recognize that people aren't just static contacts in the world of professional networking--they're continual reminders.  LinkedIn should integrate with my calendar, contacts, and tasks, and remind me to talk to particular people, and at the same time provide me with their one-click contact info.  Even if you're not trying to sell anything to anyone, the task of keeping your network fresh is still very task oriented.  You make phonecalls, you send emails, you do lunch.  One major problem I seem to have with a lot of the people I meet is that I get their contact info, but then I have no way to manage my desire to see them once a month, drop them a biweekly e-mail, or whatever. 
3. Allow me to write my own notes on people.  Do you know how many times random people IM me and I have no idea who they are.  It would be even cooler if they had a little popup that was reading my e-mail, IMs, etc, and would just do me the favor of telling me who people were with my own notes and an abridged version of their Linkedin profile.  I think this would be a killer applet, because, as of right now, I don't keep this stuff anywhere.  I know some people who make notes on their Palm Desktop.  That's archaic There's got to be a better way, no?  I keep people on Linkedin and if I interact with them, Linkedin should also allow me to track and annotate those interactions.  If anyone knows of any good people management solutions, I'd be interested in hearing them.
4. Let users customize their LinkedIn profiles enough to become landing pages--destinations.  I don't like the idea that I do all the work of inviting, connecting, writing my bio, etc., but the page only helps publicize me within the walled garden.  I should be able to put my company logo, plugin del.icio.us links, whitepapers, whatever.  Its funny, because I call Linkedin the Friendster for professional people, and that's what it is.  Unfortunately, Friendster is dying because their profiles are so rigid and dead.  LinkedIn should aspire to be MySpace for professional people... a vibrant social network of thoughtful communication and "professional expression"... not just connecting. 
5. Reed's Law tells us that a network is more valuable when each and every node on the network can become its own network.  In otherwords, a group of groups is more valuable than just one big group.  Therefore, any social network would have to be crazy to do anything to hinder any kind of group creation.  In fact, they should foster it as much as possible.  Yet, the "groups" feature on LinkedIn is very limited in scope.  In fact, its kind of an exclusive club for "established, real-world organizations (e.g. legally recognized entity, membership costs money, budget, members meet face-to-face)."  It is not designed for "cybercommunities (people who read a blog, members of a mailing list, etc."   Well, why the heck not?  To be honest, I'd be much more interested in connecting up to the 500+ people who read my blog then the hundreds of people who attended the WeMedia conference.  I mean, that was an interesting conference, but I don't really share anything in common with all those people... yet my blog audience I actually talk to all the time and we're probably a more lucrative connection than two people who just went to the same conference.  If I form a group of "people who like the same stuff as me" and people agree to be in it, why wouldn't LinkedIn desire to be the place where those people connect?  Seems a bit ironic that an online professional network isn't interested in connecting up other professionals networking with each other online.  If you really want to manage my professional network, you're going to have to let me group it... and not with an application form, an approval, etc., but in minutes like Meetup.

So, how about you guys?  Anyone out there with any ideas for what LinkedIn or some of these other social networks could do for you to get more integrated into your life?

Last summer, my friend Anna and I went for a drive...aimlessly.  We wound up heading in the direction of Greenwood Lake, which is where my grandmother (mom's mom) had a house for like 35 years.  That house used to be the center of all our family stuff over the summer, particularly when my brothers were younger.  Well, after my grandfather passed away, she sold the house--probably too quickly--and hasn't been up since.  Its been about 7 years or so.  I wound up taking pictures of the house and she got very upset, but in a good way.  She wanted to go up to see it and I promised I'd take her.

So, on Saturday, me and my 87 year old grandmother--my favorite person in the whole world--trekked up Route 17 and spent the afternoon in Greenwood Lake, NY.  We went back to the house, whose address has been changed to 22 Julie Lane (it used to just be on HR1) and stopped out front.  There wasn't anybody home, but either way, Nana felt a little embarrassed ringing the bell, so she just sat out front.  Its really well taken care of, which she was happy to see. 

What was kind of disappointing, and I wrote about this last year, was that the beach/dock area by our little community clubhouse was in total disarray.  It seems to have been abandoned.  The dock is falling into the water and the stairs, which were all broken up last year, have now totally disappeared.  All that's left are these rocks which seem to have slid onto the dock.  Its a real shame.

Afterwards,  we went to Le Bistro II.   This place needs some better advertising, because I had a hard time finding it on the web.  The food is pretty good and the portion sizes were even better.  I hope they do better business than when we were in there.  I'd definitely go back there again, and if you're in the Greenwood Lake, NY area, stop by.  Have the seafood Fra Diavlo plate with the clams and mussels.  The mussels were HUGE.  I've never seen mussels that big (except on myself, of course...  ba dump bump.)  Nana took me out for dinner.  I snapped off a few pics when she wasn't looking. 

It was a great day, but also a little sad.  Our family doesn't get together anymore the way we used to up at the Lake.  I'm debating getting all the cousins I don't see together for something.  I have about 25 cousins and second cousins that I have near zero interaction with.  I think a few of them are living in the city, too.  Perhaps I can get them on linkedin.com

Who is this lady?, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

So random...this is the third time I've seen this lady in the black dress and wacky black hat in the last two days.  Yesterday I saw her twice... Once on the street and then in the subway..and that was in the 30's.  Now I'm on 57th and 7th and she's back again.

A Woman's Body is a Beautiful Thing, but..., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

....this statue is ugly.

Link: ESPN.com - MLB - Soriano: Nationals have three weeks.

Hmm...   The Nationals have two secondbasemen, Soriano and Vidro.  The Mets have none.

They also have no starting pitching.

You know, when the Mets had like 7 starting pitchers, they could have traded Zambrano or Kris Benson to the Nationals for Jose Vidro or done something to try to get Soriano.

But now we have nothing to trade them but hard throwing bullpen scrubs and the Nats have a good bullpen.

I was having dinner with a friend of mine last night and she told me how a guy that she's dating has a scheduled appointment every Sunday afternoon to play one of these massively multiplayer online games with his college buddies.  They play every week, and they also meet in the game on Wednesdays to go over strategy.

I know that people really get into games, but this is different.

This is social.  Its enabling people to collaborate and place shift their entertainment in such a compelling way that they're making time for it on a weekly basis.

What other kinds of entertainment are you scheduling weekly?  How many TV shows do you still watch religiously compared to 5 years ago?  10 years ago?

This makes me want to go out, get an XBox, and call my brother in Tampa to get one, too, so we can to something together on a regular basis. 

That's a really big value proposition.  Really big.

Jerry Seinfeld has this great bit about cold medicines that he did on his Live on Broadway show. He picks on fast acting vs. long lasting ("Do I want to feel good now.. or later?") and  then he gets to "The Maximum."

Some people aren't satisfied with "extra", they want "maximum"! "Gimme the maximum strength ! Give the maximum allowable human dosage ! That's the kind of pain I'm in!

Figure out what will kill me, and then back it off a little bit".

I've been thinking lately about how to get the students I mentor to really dive head first into their interests.  Schools don't really teach students the degree to which they need to fully research and follow a topic enough to form opinions, discover opportunities, etc.  In other words...  how to throw gas on the fire in their bellies.   Here's a 12 step list that I think can be helpful to fill out and follow:

We'll use digital media as an example.

1. Define.  We're talking television, radio, music, movies, etc. and all of the screens and speakers it can wind up on.
2. Follow the money.  Creative people are paid to produce by publishers who pay distributors to send the content to consumers, who either pay directly for it or are subsidized by advertisers.  (Oversimplified and changing of course, but its a start...)
3. Stakeholders.  Who's involved?  Creatives, consumers, publishers, advertisers, distributors (channels, stations), big media, new media, investors, analysts, researchers, academics, the government.
4. Mainstream media.  Read the newspaper.  Watch the news.  Read books on this topic.  What's your digitial media reading list look like for MSM?
5. User generated content.  Read blogs: Paid Content, Rebuilding Media, etc.  Message boards, listservs.  Make a list of the places you can get insider and alternative info.
6. Participate.  Comment.  E-mail.  Share your thoughts with smart people and listen to them.  Go to conferences and speaking engagements.
7. Record. Keep a blog about following digital media, what you're learning and what you think about it.
8. Network.  Join LinkedIn.  Write a bio.  Invite people you know and search it.  Do some informational interviews and stay in touch with the people willing to share time with you.  Keep these people in a PDA, Outlook, wherever you keep contacts and a calendar to remind yourself how often you want to talk to people.
9. Visit.  Don't just sit at your computer.  Try to visit some companies in the space or other repositories of knowledge on the topic in person.
10. Associate.  Join a professional society or social networking group related to digital media.  (Like nextNY of course!)
11. Know the issues.  Look into DRM, privacy, the disaggregation and reaggregation of content.  New business models and Exploding TV.
12. Experience.  Seek out a job or project in this space.  Use Indeed!

Not how convertibles are supposed to be used, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Helping my friend move her mattress.

The other day, I noticed the following footer on someone's e-mail:

This email is: [ ] bloggable [ x ] ask first [ ] private

This is a smart move, especially since most bloggers seem to default to "everything is bloggable."  Will it stop someone who is absolutely determined to reblog an e-mail I send to them?  No. 

However, if it makes just one person think twice about feeding my butt to the Evil Meme God of Flame, its totally worth it.  Its on all my outgoing e-mail now.

I spent the past weekend in Vermont with Zog Sports--skiing mostly, but I did take a snowboarding lesson yestersday morning.  I didn't have much time to take any pictures or  videos.  Plus, my battery died out before my friend got a chance to get my mildly successful snowboard run down the bunny hill.  However, I was able to pull a still from the video of my attire:

I didn't yell, "Coooobraaa!" don't the hill, but I was tempted.

We skiied at Okemo and Killington.  I liked Okemo's trails much better.  It was quieter and I felt like the trails were better insulated from the winds.  Killington was like skiing in the artic.  Being at the top of the mountain with the winds sweeping up made me feel like I was on some ill fated expidition where I'd have to figure out which one of the Zoggers I'd have to eat first.

Okemo had great powder on Saturday and if you get a chance, do the Rum Run.  Its dinky on the map, but its longer than it appears and the scenery is really fantastic.  Its not a hard trail at all, but its probably one of the nicest winter scenes I've been in.

Snowboarding was alright, but I'm a skiier.  Legs need to be free, and so after my lesson, I switched and went right back to skiing.

It was a great trip and I'll definitely be going on the ZogSports ski trips in the future. Here's a pic of the Zoggers on the bus:

The Shake Shack has a countdown to opening clock that bloggers can post on their blogs.  This is brilliant marketing.  I've pasted mine on my sidebar.