Technology can be a very powerful thing.  A computer and an internet connection can give you the tools to create very positive change in the world around you...   right at your fingertips.

Or, in my case, they can be weapons of self destruction.

I have two traits that, when combined with the ease of publication and distribution afforded me by blogging and e-mail, have come back to bite me time and time again.  One day, I think I'll learn.

First is that I'm very "principled".  When stuff bothers me, I always say something about it and make an issue of it.  I think, more than anything else, its because I never think that the people around me make enough of an issue with things.  Sometimes, I've spoken out for people and defended them, or defended issues I believe in...and its a good thing.  Too often, I find myself wandering too far ahead of the crowd and putting myself out there alone without backup or a leg to stand on.

Second, my tone is... well... call it what you will...  abrasive, snarky, threatening...  I mean, it never seems that way to me, but it certainly comes off that way to others.  Sometimes, I'll read an e-mail twice, think its fine, and then wind up totally pissing someone off...  and somehow still not know why.  I've never really concerned myself with style.  Style is style, but content is what really matters to me, so I've never really had trouble dealing with difficult people.  I had a finance teacher that would routinely say obnoxious things, but at the end of the day, he was the best teacher I've ever had, hands down... and that's all I cared about.  However, not everyone works that way and I need to do a much better job of realizing that.

So today's lesson comes when I was supposed to play with a team of people in a big dodgeball tournament with a lot of tech firms tomorrow afternoon.  There was an entry fee, which is fine, but then I balked that non-members of this venue would have to pay $25 each for a "day pass" to use the "facilities" even though we were already paying to rent the space.  So, I went around the organizer, straight to the venue and e-mailed them.  I basically said, "Hey, we're not even going to use the other facilities, and you know what, you guys are getting a lot of publicity out of this because its going to be full of bloggers... so how about some free passes."

Well, that was the jist of what I was trying to say anyway.  I think the part about how my blog gets more traffic than the venue's website was probably overkill... definately.

The result?

The venue passed it back to the organizer, who then decided that, probably rightfully so, that I was more trouble than my participation was worth, and poof, we're out on our butts.   Booted from the tourney!

We were so excited... I had  a whole team together that was all pumped to play... I've been talking about it for days...   and now nobody on my team can play because of my own stupidity.

Sucks.

I suck.

Its amazing that any of you still read what I write...   

Liam Neeson has a great line in Batman Begins that didn't quite resonate with me until yesterday:

"You haven't beaten me.  You've sacrificed sure footing for a killing stroke."

I think this is a great lesson for anyone tempted to monetize a service too quickly and sacrifice adoption and uptake of a product... or to change the direction of your product to take advatage of short term revenue opportunities.  Its very easy to pick low hanging fruit, but you also need to "mind your surroundings" and think about whether or not quick payback sets you up to still take advantage of the larger market opportunity.

BTW...  I've heard about the possibilities of a sequal to this movie...   I'll cast my vote right now for Scarlett Johansson as Harley Quinn should they follow a Joker storyline.

Today's weather in NYC: 

Got this note from my high school's listserv of alumni in business...

"I am seeking information about entry into financial analysts programs and other areas of the finance market.  I am a recent college graduate and would appreciate any insight on how to get my resume to the right people.  Thank you for your time."

Here's my response:

     I think the best way to get the information and help you are looking for is to start with what you know and what you've done.  "information about entry into financial analysts programs and other areas of the finance market." is a book's worth (or several books worth) of information.  I think most professionals are more willing to help those who show ambition in some way... who give as much as they ask for.

     So, perhaps something along the lines of, "I graduated from X and took part in x activity in college, where I developed in interest in X part of the finance market.  I was reading X the other day and it said that there were going to be more opportunities in X part of the market versus X.  I would like to know if this is a generally accepted view of the market and would be very excited to speak with a professional about this who works in that area."

   So what does this approach accomplish?

1)  It shows you've been doing your homework and have a track record of taking an active interest in the subject.  Otherwise, you will give people the impression (which I'm sure is incorrect) that you haven't done anything in finance before and you're just realizing that you're graduating college in a month and need a job.  Obviously your interest in finance stems from somewhere... tell people about that in a way that reflects your own unique perspective and ambition.
2)  It doesn't mention anything about jobs.  Not every contact will be good for a job and not everyone wants to be made to feel like their time is only worthwhile if they can get you a job.  You should be focused on building relationships with people who know you and are impressed with you.  Jobs will flow from that whether or not you ever ask one one explicitly.
3) It leaves open the possibility that someone might respond to this even if they can't offer you a job, but they might be able to give you some useful insight.
4) It encourages more people to participate with less.  Instead of asking for one person to write a novel, the more you ask specific questions about certain areas, the more people you'll get to respond with "Yeah, that makes sense b/c X... check out this other resource for more information."

So I've been e-mailing with a Jesuit scholastic (someone who is studying to become a priest) about some family values issues and I wanted to blog my response to something he said about beliefs and how I arrive at them:

"Going to be tough to chat via phone...    have a very busy schedule over the next few days.  Plus, admittedly, I'm a writer.  I kind of hate the phone and do my best thinging when I can sit, go back to something, think about it...  I find the phone to be unecessarily syncronous when my brain doesn't work that way.

Plus, this is the way the Paul did it, right?  :)   He would have made a great blogger.

I'm sure we'll run into different definitions of the word faith, but here's one from the Catholic Encyclopedia that seems that you would go on that I have a lot of trouble with.

"...faith must necessarily result in a body of dogmatic beliefs....Objectively, it stands for the sum of truths revealed by God in Scripture and tradition and which the Church presents to us in a brief form in her creeds..."

"That such Divine faith is necessary, follows from the fact of Divine revelation. For revelation means that the Supreme Truth has spoken to man and revealed to him truths which are not in themselves evident to the human mind. We must, then, either reject revelation altogether, or accept it by faith; that is, we must submit our intellect to truths which we cannot understand, but which come to us on Divine authority."

The problem I have, where this breaks down for me and where it breaks down for a lot of Catholics, or people in general, is that once you get to the point where religion needs to be explained to you by someone with a lot more schooling that you, you don't trust it... because you know that no one is infallable and we are all subject to our own biases.  Religion has been used to exploit people, as an excuse to start wars (not talking about today), and as an instrument of fear.  (You should see V for Vendetta, btw...)  Individual faith doesn't have those negative charactoristics, or at least not to the same extent.  If I base my faith on what I believe in my heart and my innate sense of right and wrong, while it is no doubt subject to my own biases, I also don't get the sense that I am using religion to justify an end.  Whereas, when you have Divine Revelation explained to you by others that seems to contradict what's in your heart, people get a little suspicious.

So, you could tell me that there is Divine revelation that dictates what family means, but I say that, to me, family is love and support and I see the best kind of love and support in a multitude of different arrangements and architectures.  I believe that...   it is my own personal faith that it is acceptable to God.  Scholars and experts could point out otherwise, but then again, some Church scholars thought the world was flat at one point, too, and that notions of a round world were contrary to scripture.  Such is the result when imperfect people try and interpret the Divine."

New Chelsea Boathouse, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

This is up on 27th...wonder if they'll have it done by summer.

Its all clear to me now.

All the recent news about the dangers of MySpace?

Its all arch-conservative propoganda spread by the very company that owns it, News Corp.

Who better positioned to own a web property popular among kids than the very same media company that the most conservative parents get their news from?

Now every parent in America is telling their kids not to go on MySpace because its dangerous and full of sex.

Thanks mom... what was that site again?  My... Space...  dot... com.  Ok, got it.  I'll never go on it.  Never ever.   ;)

Clearly, the man has children.

Someone just sent me this:

On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in
the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.

There's an article in the WSJ today on how web ads are being placed next to "racy" or "inappropriate" content.

Racy?  Inappropriate?  On the internet???  Nooooo...

"Last month, Verizon Communications Inc. was surprised to find one of its Internet ads on a MySpace.com page with photos of scantily clad women."

"Scantily clad women", or as most cellphone companies refer to them, "paying customers who pay for Sean Paul ringtones." 

You know, that's funny... now that I think of it, I went to buy a ringtone the other day, and it asked me if I had sexy pictures of myself on the internet.   Since all my pictures are sexy, I clicked yes.  I got this bizzare message saying, "Sorry, we only sell ringtones to the Amish." 

Now I know its from this advertiser backlash against the sexy.

"Walt Disney Co. was unaware that its ad was next to an article about male sexual performance on About.com."

That's terrible, because there's no way that article was being read by 45 year old dads who have ever purchased Disney DVDs for their kids.

"Jobs Web site Monster.com didn't realize its spot was on a site that appeared to be offering unauthorized downloads of copyrighted music and videos."

Ok, I'll give you that one.  Illegal sites are another thing.  Just thank God sexy isn't illegal!

Here's another:

"...and the Christian Children's Fund ad ended up next to an article about a sexual position in the sex section of About.com, which is owned by New York Times Co."

So, here's a question...   What if that ad wound up generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for their cause?  Would they still have yanked it?

Good thing we'll never have to answer that question because people who read about sex never ever donate to charity, those heathens!  :\

Look, if its something illegal, like child porn, or illegal music, that's one thing, but not advertising next to MySpace's user generated content??  To me, that's kind of a slap in the face.  If a girl wants to show her thong on MySpace and Verizon doesn't want to advertise next to it, that's like Verizon saying, "We'd like you to buy our phones, but we don't want anyone who wants to see your slammin' booty to buy them." 

Frankly, I think MySpacers should boycott Verizon.  I wouldn't buy a product from any company that's embarrassed to be associated with my slammin' booty. 

Sweet...

The Mets win, and Xavier Nady chips in 4 hits to provide me with some great false hope about my fantasy baseball season, and then I get a great link from Oberkirch:

Ballbug! Memeorandum for baseball!

Cool!

So its Opening Day and the Daily News has a blogger liveblogging the rainy start to the season.

In honor of the season's start, I've updated my SitePal message with a message about the Mets' Kaz Matsui.

BTW...  Tonight is also opening night for my ZogSports softball team.  We're now called "Waiting for Turiansky" in honor of Eric Turiansky, who signed up to play with us last year, but never showed.  Before every game, he'd send us a message saying, "No, seriously, I'm really going to play this time!  Can't wait to meet all of you!"

Eric Turiansky.  Games: 0.   At-bats: 0.  Humor: Priceless.

Link: Micro Persuasion: Technorati Adds MySpace Blogs.

It was only a matter of time before someone went in there and started crawling around.  I'd love to see someone build some cool cross social network searching...

Final Four and Cupcakes, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

This is why its good to watch sports with girls...

Here's more fodder for Jeff Jarvis:

Fabrice pointed out Phanfare's new video support feature and I'm sold.   It took me about 10 minutes of use to decide I was going to become a paying customer and that this is where I'm going to store all my videos from now on.

Basically, you drop your videos into a downloaded client, and then phanfare uploads them in the backround, and then after another little while, converts them to Flash on the fly.  Its so mildlessly simple.  I can then play them on my blog... and they come out so much nicer than YouTube, that butchers my video quality.

I'm going to get all my videos up there as soon as I can.  The only issue is that it does not have Mpeg-4 support fully worked out yet, but I've been promised that its coming in the next few weeks.

I don't care if it takes an hour to get them all setup, because, that hour isn't spent waiting around, crashing, etc...  I just drag and drop and poof, they show up on the web.  In fact, the client works so well as a file management tool, which preview images of my videos, that there's really no reason to keep any of my videos on my computer.  The $6.95 is a no brainer!!

Can't wait until Mpeg-4 support is done...  so I can just go straight from my flash memory card to dragging and dropping, to the web in Flash.   

Thanks Phanfare, you just saved me like 8 steps and a lot of headache.

The interesting thing is that Phanfare isn't built to create an entertainment site, like YouTube.  Its not about having the most popular video... its about a better way to store your own videos.  I've said before that I think this is a much bigger market, especially once people start converting their old VHS tapes to digital via a Media Center PC. 

Its not often there's anything work related on our "reply all" e-mail chatter that is bloggable, but I'm pretty sure this is ok.

So Fred was responding to a comment someone left on his post about Second Life.

>>  From: Fred Wilson
>>  Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 12:48 PM
>>  To: Charles O'Donnell; Brad Burnham
>>  Subject: Fw: [A VC] Greg Deocampo submitted a comment to 'Avatars'
>>
>>  Mindblowing stuff
>>
>>  Hard to tell if this goes mainstream

_____________

> On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 1:52 pm, Charles O'Donnell wrote:
>>  Second Life is like NASA to me.
>>
>>  Not everyone will go into space anytime in the near future, but we
>> all  know what Velcro is.
>>
>>  The key is seeing where the Velcro is there and not winding up with 
>> astronaut ice cream.

_________________

> From: Fred Wilson
> Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 2:49 PM
> To: Charles O'Donnell; Brad Burnham
> Subject: Re: [A VC] Greg Deocampo submitted a comment to 'Avatars'
>
> What about tang?
_____________________

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 3:13 pm, Charles O'Donnell wrote:
> I thought about Tang, but I don't know if Tang was really successful
> or not.
>
> I was going for two extremes...
_______________________

I drank it religiously for several years in the late 60s/early 70s

Then I realized that it sucked

Fred

_________________

In case you're curious, there's a Wikipedia entry on Tang.

SANY0057, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Darren Herman is like 3 years younger than me and 8 startups ahead of me. He's an active member of nextNY and he and his colleague Christina (who is quite familiar with all of Darren's dietary requirements should you ever try to schedule lunch with him) got me into a little office poll about favorite cookies. Christina is a fan of the black and white cookie, so they sent some over today. Sweet!! Thanks guys!

nextNY: Building the digital community, one bag of cookies at a time.

Look to the cookie!

Anyone who feels like "There's too much going on...." should come to NYC.  Think of is like the Momma Bear.  We're not too big, not too small...  not too hot, not too cold...   we're just right.  It doesn't feel like a bubble in NYC, but it also feels like there's a lot going on. 

Caterina writes:

"There's too much going on. Every night there's a Mashup get together, or a TechCrunch party, or it's Tag Tuesday, or SuperHappyDevHouse or SXSW or this conference or that conference. And this stuff is fun. It's a real community. But all of these things are great by themselves, but terrible in combination. I see some entrepreneurs in photos from *every single event*. Who's talking to the users, writing the code, tweaking and retweaking the UI? It ain't the Chief Party Officer."