"Do you think you serve your country best by being a critic and using words that tend to enflame and overshadow any information?"

This one comes from YouTube (which, by the way, I find myself watching more and more lately).   

Well, actually, it comes from a Hardball interview with Ann Coulter , but I saw the clip on YouTube.  Chris Matthews went to the audience for a question and the first young woman with a question posed the question to Coulter.

I have to admit that I'm not a particularly political person and I certainly don't follow all the talking heads (at least the non-animated ones), so this may be the first time I've ever seen/noticed Ann Coulter speak.  Is she really this wretchedly awful all the time?  I really dislike anyone who just spews division and polarizes people wherever they go.  Like this young woman pointed out, Ann, you're just not helping.  This country needs more people who bridge gaps and bring people together... not make everything out to be black and white, right or wrong.  And the personal attacks? 

I mean, seriously, where does she come off saying that Bill Clinton is gay?  Is that relevent to any conversation whatsoever?  That would be like someone insinuating that Ms. Coulter is just bitter because she's undersexed... it's totally unrelated and drags someone's personal life into the conversation unecessarily.

Besides, its obvious that her statements and divisive and enflamatory behavior are likely traced to either one of two causes...    her own ignorance or her allegiance to the Almighty Dollar.  It might be both.  Ignorance sells a lot of books.                

Helping Dad put together a vanity for their bathroom, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

No instructions in the box... Wonder where these extra screws go...

From Jay Rand...

"When I'm playing on my own mental turf, my batting average at home is very high."

I guess you don't get booed at home, then, like the more neurotic among us do.

Getting feedback from your user community is really important, but, of course, your community isn't necessarily building your product.  There are lines to be drawn, right?  You can't have the inmates run the asylum...

...or can you?

That's a little bit how I feel now.  I feel like I'm the customer.  What would make my product fun for me and my friends?  What would make me want to use it?  What's in it for me?

I can't say enough about being a user when you're building, but not how you might think.  Like just the other day, I started a Photobucket account.  The things that I thought were important... like an uploader and tagging...   not in there at all.  But yet, its just as popular as Flickr.  I didn't find the UI intuitive at all, but then again, I'm not every user. 

Being a user means you see what's out there and play with it, and instead of passing judgement, you try and understand why something is popular.  You match feature sets to usage and popularity.  Its the difference between being a pet owner and a zooalogist.  You don't have to love the stuff... just understand it and learn from it.  Of course, you build up a passion for it, and that's important, but pet owners don't always know the most about their pets, because they don't study their pets.  They interact with them and build emotional relationships with them.  Zooalogists try not to start with that and try to keep it "professional" so that you can take a stop back now and then  I've had to remind myself to do that and to keep an open mind as to what works and what doesn't, lest I overdose on my own Kool Aid.

Every office I work at must have a bird, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Makiko saved this little guy from the street. He can't fly yet.

Mmm... Birthday sugar... rrrrggggggg, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

So far, this is the best present I got today. :)

Del Frisco's, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I think this is our favorite...

One thing I've noticed about myself...     within a given setting, whether it was school or a job or where I lived, I'm pretty resistant and uneffected by stress.  Nothing really bothers me much.

But that's when I'm pretty anchored into my surroundings--where I know the avenues for dealing with stress causes and can manage, avoid, reschedule, etc.  When I'm playing on my own mental turf, my batting average at home is very high.

Through me into a completely new surrounding and change the rules, and I have to say, I get a bit mentally unraveled.  I'm still able to complete all my tasks, but adjustment gives me quite a bit to deal with.  When I started working at my last two jobs, or when I moved, the same thing happened.  For a couple of weeks, I just tried to keep the deck chairs from sliding off the ship.

So if I'm a little slow with e-mail or on the blog, bear with me here.  I'm only on week two.

That being said, the people at Oddcast are great, and I can't wait for the momentum to build further on what we're working on, because then I'll be working directly with a lot more people within the organization.   We had a fun company outing on Friday and everyone was very warm and welcoming.   

Its very different working on independent projects when you're in a group of 10 or 4, but 38 people is the largest group I've worked with in quite a long time.  GM was 150, but I didn't work directly with most of those people.

In any case, I'm learning a lot about my own style of project work...    I really like the process of speccing something out.  Taking something enormous and breaking it down to its composite parts is something I'm good at and enjoy.  And, as it turns out, I'm not bad with designing screenshots either!

More details and observations to come...

I'm working on a project that will enable internet users to explore, express, and aggregate their identity on the web, and have fun doing it.

On the other side of the world, people are working on a project to blow up people who are trying to blow them up, because of religious, cultural, and national identity.  It is not fun for anyone.   

I have a friend who is struggling right now with her identity in terms of how she relates to others.  Who does she want to be with?  Who can she be herself with?  You can't tell someone how to be themselves.  They need to figure it out on their own.  The only thing you can do is remind them that they shouldn't be anyone to anybody but who they want to be, and focus on people who accept them for who they are.  Oh, and then, don't forget to accept them for who they are.

At Union Square, they're trying to identify a candidate that will be a good fit for the team...  On one side they're trying to figure out what the profile of that person is, and on the other, there are some young people out there thinking about whether they would be a fit for that position. 

But really, what does it all matter, unless you have a Facebook account.  And, today, through the magic of being a faculty member, you can finally Facebook me!  Fordham doesn't have alumni e-mail addresses (why, I have no idea... its just a simple forwarding thing)... so getting an account has proven difficult.  However, now that I actually teach there, I legitimately got a profile.  What amazes me is that its really a lot like Friendster, but what keeps it strong and useful is the offline relevency.  When you can write what dorm and room you're in, you can know who's in your hallway before you even move in.  I don't think any social network will ever get more relevent than that, unless someone builds Apartmentster for NYC and people agree to list where they live.  I'm not sure I see that happening.

MySpace is experiencing some... well...  technical difficulties.  (Like total loss of power at their only datacenter.)  The site was almost unusable all weekend and completely down yesterday.  So what are all these kids doing to do in the meantime?

1. Like, um, shop.

2. Watch videos of live action recreations of Goldeneye for Playstation.

3. Make friends with someone from the Philippines.... check out Friendster.

4. Go outside and play...   hahahahahahahaha    j/k!  Outside...ha! 

5. Write a letter of appreciation to Tom...  but write it using cut out letters from all different magazines.  Oh.. and maybe make it about something besides appreciation, too... 

6. Stand in the place where you are.  Think about direction.  Wonder why you haven't before.

7. Go see Clerks II!!   Seriously, it might even be funnier than the first one.

8. Ask your parents a really uncomfortable question about sex.  This works even better the older you are.

9. Break out into total chaos.  Create false idols of MySpace on hilltops...   like a giant golden thong.  Loot.

10.  Write some really profound messages on the sidewalk in chalk...  like...   "This is written in chalk."   Makes you think, doesn't it?

So, after a very busy week one at Oddcast, I've started thinking about how I'll be using everything I've learned about the web...    Because if I haven't actually learned anything in the past couple of years, then I've been wasting both our times.

So, here's what I think I've learned that I need to focus on applying:

1.  The three P's.  Product.  Product.  Product.   

2.  There is no "best" UI, there is only the "right" UI.  Example:  There is no AJAX in MySpace or Craigslist.

3. I will not stop thinking about new features, because nobody likes a dead product.

4. I will maintain and active and open dialogue with my userbase and potential userbase.

5.  I should listen to the people who aren't using my product maybe even more than the people who are using my product.

6.  The more tools in the hands of the user, the more they will build the experience themselves.

7.  Products need more offline relevence... a connection to someone I know... something I can do online that affects someone else in the real world... 

8. Give people more ways to communicate and they will communicate more, not just differently.

9. We have only touched the surface so far and most of the "rules" are unwritten, so I should not be afraid to do something completely new.

10. No one likes to be sold to.

After stopping at my parents on the way back from the Met game, I noticed the sky as I was parking, so I walked down to Shore Road today and snapped off a few pics... 

Thought I had more tomatoes..., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Oh well... I'll get a three or four meals out of this batch anyway.

Lee Semel has build a great open calendar for the NYC tech community.  We talked a lot about how there wasn't a central resource for this stuff and no good way to find NYC tech events.

We didn't like the calendars that required sign-ins or being a member, and so we went for something that was wiki-like in that anyone could just come and check it out.

It just got launched, so we'd love your feedback. 

We'd also like your events!

Tonight, at DeWitt Clinton Field, the Fordham Softball Rams take on the Fordham Softball Marroon in a crosstown, intra-alumni faceoff.

Roommates will face each other.

College drinking buddies.

Ex's.

Gametime is 7:30PM. 

Be there for the softball, stay for the discernment and Jesuit style introspection.

If there is a single softball game I want to win this whole season more than anything else, its this game.

There is ZERO chance it will not rain in NYC tonight.  It WILL happen.  Accuweather says there is 100% chance.

If I were the weathermen, given my track record, I think I'd couch that and just take it down to 90% just in case.  What do you gain by telling us its 100%?  Its just all downside.

Washington Post Reporter Frank Ahrens used Oddcast's Sitepal product as part of his news story.   

Cool!

Wait...  I was so captivated by the avatar, I forgot to read the article.  Damn!   Now I have to go back.

You know her.

Her name is cutiemonica or Krystal or xxxBabyxxx and she has one pic, 250 guy friends, and absolutely no profile bling whatsoever.

And she's the hottest girl you've ever seen.

Oh, and she's got a link to the site where she keeps all her "real pics" or her webcam or where she keeps all her spyware... umm... I mean...  *fun stuff*. 

The best thing about MySpace is that it lets users do pretty much whatever they want.  Paste 3rd party code?  Sure.  Link off the site?  Sure.  Auto redirects to porn?  Absolutely.

The worst thing about MySpace?  It lets users do pretty much whatever the want. 

MySpace has gotten so huge that it has spawned a whole community of bad guys that are trying to game the system.

And just like Friendster before it, MySpace seems to be having some trouble as of late keeping up.  I get bursts of friend requests in bunches of 20 from spam profiles, and keep waiting for the day the guy who hosts my free layout decides to switch it out for some animal porn. 

That's what is going to threaten MySpace, not the "MySpace isn't cool anymore" factor.  Because, MySpace is us...  it lets users express themselves however they want..   and more and more users are putting videos, pictures, and yes, even avatars, through other services, up on their page.  MySpace doesn't need to be "cool" because we're cool enough and it reflects us.  Combine that with a database of indy music events that aren't even located on venue music pages and from a content perspective, I'm not worried. 

I'm just worried about getting a virus from having unprotected layout swapping. 

As a company looking to enable our users to take our services with them to MySpace's open platform, we have a vested interest in doing whatever we can to differentiate ourselves from the bad guys.  On many other platforms, this means being a part of an authorized developer network.  I'd love to see a developer network for MySpace.  Why wouldn't we want that?  Check us out, make us sign stuff... tell us exactly what our code needs to look like and we'll comply in exchange for not having to play "catch up" when security fixes make our widgets do weird things and require code updates.  Heck, we'll even give you a blood sample...  but we swear, we didn't know that stuff Barry gave us was anything more than a vitamin supplement.

Right now, there's no page of updates for us... no resource to check to see if our stuff is "MySpace compliant."  Its just figure it out as we go, and to be honest, bad guys are always better at playing cat and mouse.  So let's smoke out the FraudRequest folks and band together to fight evil.

Click here to get Justice League HTML.  :)