Link: An Endorsement for Mayor - New York Times.

Mr. Bloomberg has not been nearly as exciting, or entertaining, as Edward I. Koch or Rudolph W. Giuliani. But he has been better at running the city. If he continues his record of accomplishment over the next four years, he may be remembered as one of the greatest mayors in New York history.

I'll just repeat for emphasis, "...one of the greatest mayors in New York history."

The bashed him for his outlandish campaign spending, but I don't really care about that.  He's a self made man and has all this money because he built something that works.

I look forward to the next four years.

Perhaps we should rethink the term limits on NYC Mayor.

What's next?  Senator Bloomberg?

Bloomberg for President?

Ouch... ankle swollen., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

We play hard on my Zog Sports softball team.

We take a lot of extra bases and lately, we hurt ourselves a lot.

Not only did Sandy have to go to the hospital last night, but I didn't fare too well either.

Plus, we lost.

But, we both scored on the plays we got hurt.

Note to self: Turf doesn't give when you slide on it.

Link: Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog.

Brian just started a blog about Slidell, Louisiana and the hurricane damage.  He'll be posting as much info as he can gather, which, at the moment, is pretty limited.

Its time for the All Star game--to figure out who's really the best of the best.  But, be careful, because if you're the best, a mysterious woman in black might come and shoot you with a silver bullet.  Vlad, do you hear that?  Derrick Lee are you paying attention? 

The Natural is not only one of, if not the best baseball movie of all time, but it definitely has the single greatest baseball moment of all time--Robert Redford's home run into the lights that sends glass and sparks shining down onto the field. 

The Natural is a fantasy... a dream.  Its the story of reclaiming lost youth and taking one last shot at winning something.  Its about wanting so hard to be the best at something, even if its only for a moment. 

Sometimes, I walk down the street and I feel like if I picked up a baseball, I could through it 100 miles an hour.  Seriously.  Unfortunately, I've never felt like that with a baseball in my hand.  I did have one great casual sports moment, though...  and it was a walkoff shot, too.  Playing intramural softball at Fordham in my Senior year.  We were down by two runs going into the bottom of the last inning.  Our team was half my roommates and half of the varsity basketball team.  Two guys got on and I parked an opposite field 3 run home run over the fence...   I knew it was gone as soon as I hit it, and I'm the last guy in the world that you'd expect to hit a home run, because I'm really just a contact hitter.  It was so cool to trot around the bases, and have all the guys from the basketball team like Jason Harris and TJ lineup between third and home waiting to give you a high five.  There was no broken glass, no sparks, but that was my casual sports moment.

I don't need to talk about the movie anymore.  Its a great baseball movie... what more is there to say?  No, instead, why don't you comment on this post and tell us your greatest casual sports moment.  No college or SEMI pro sports... its got to be beer league softball, little league, street football, or something equally unprofessional. 

Link: University identifies peer, aspirant institutions in Stragetic Plan - Fordham Observer - News.

"Intellectual hub":

-Fordham will be a "hub" for intellectual exchange and discussion in the metropolitan area

hmm...   Sounds like blogging to me.

This is a really good article, and more proof that the newspaper of Fordham's Lincoln Center campus is eating the lunch of the University's oldest paper, the Ram, up at Rose Hill.  I think they clearly recognize that the future of the school hinges on what gets built at Fordham's Manhattan campus over the next 20 years, and given that, they're already establishing a platform to handle that shift in focus.  They've got a really clean looking, functional website and good articles.  The Ram, on the other hand, isn't even available on line.  (If they are, I can't find it.... what year is this??)

I like that the University is being so transparent about its goals, even identifying the schools it wants to be like....  very college 2.0.  However, the one thing they could use a little work on is the peer production aspect of College 2.0.  They need to find ways to get wider participation of the alumni and create an outward message that is promoted by more of the students.  Ideally, I'd love to see a school blog with posts from the University President all the way down to a freshman on his first day... athletes, coaches, etc.   A blogging alum can dream...

By the way, I was flipping through the channels last night and caught a few minutes of the Lakers game...   they had a nice interview with Laker fan and Fordham Grad Denzel Washington, who was excited about the emergence of Fordham's own Smush Parker, who is playing for LA.  Go FU!

In New York City, I don't find too many people oppossing the idea that priests should get married.  Its not too often that someone takes the other side and is willing to tell me that we shouldn't allow any combination of two human beings in love to get married either.   

So, as someone who picks and chooses from both sides politically, I find myself arguing most often against liberals...  just because that's who is around me.  I'm quite sure that if I lived in a red state, I'd be on the other side of a lot of typically conservative arguments and get called a liberal.   Instead, I appear more conservative than I really am.

What I am is against politics.  I don't like the idea that all find into one side or the other.  Plus, I don't understand how some of this stuff fits together anyway.  What exactly is the reasoning behind feeling a certain way about capital punishment versus leaning a certain way on expanding social programs?  So, how's it supposed to go again?  Less welfare, more lethal injection, or did I get it wrong?   If I'm anti-war, remind me again how I'm supposed to feel about the privitization of social security. 

I ask a lot of these types of questions because I like to poke holes at things that don't make sense.  I'm an analyst.  I'm a cynic.

So when I get in a really good debate with someone, I love it.  It makes me think.  The tough part is that I think I come off as difficult or dismissive when in reality, I'm challenged and inspired.  Its two in the morning now and I just got off the phone with someone who brings a truly unique perspective to the table and a sincere and respectable conviction to the table on what she believes.  Instead of focusing on our differences, I left the call feeling lucky... lucky that I know such an intelligent and thoughtful person...  someone tenacious enough to come back at me.

Debates make me think.  They make me question.  People don't do that enough when they encounter something different then themselves.  They immediately try and change it or erase it rather than learn from it.  I love learning from other people.  Its an important part of my education and I need to be challenged to sure up my own beliefs.

The best part about the conversation, though, was that we could put it down at the end... that it wasn't personal and that we appreciated each other for our differences.  That means a lot to me as well.  I'm never going to have all the answers, but if I can get someone thinking differently about something, I've done my job.  I also expect that someone will challence me enough to get me thinking differently, and I'll always credit them for that going forward.    I just hope that tonight's debating partner felt as enriched as I did and not just tired and frustrated.

Admittedly, I'm getting a little bored of my "50 Favorite Movies" posts. 

I might still contribute once in a while, but I've got 28 of them up now and I'm kind of running out of gas.  (Not running out of movies, though... )

And maybe this says something about intential content production vs. production as a byproduct of consumption.

If I could publish my viewing habits via a link to my DVD player, I would.  That would be a lot easier... and then perhaps a preconfigured post could be waiting for me to just give a review when I watch a movie.

What I'm not getting as much is a conversation about movies, which would be much more valuable.  So, I'm going to try something different. 

Instead of posting what I like, I'm going to post question to the audience about movies to get a little conversation going.

So, this week's movie question is:

"What movie are you most embarrassed to admit that you shed a tear to?"   Guy answers particularly interesting...

My answer?

Blow.

That movie is pretty intense and, at the end, when he just wants to do one last deal so he can make enough money to have a life for his daughter... and then he gets busted... they show him in the prison yard and they just pull the rug out from under you in that scene...   I wasn't really prepared for that.  Admittedly, there was some leakage there.  I think I brushed it off as having something in my eye, but, I admit it, Blow made me cry.

On Thursday, we had an open softball practice for our Fordham team and conveniently enough, it was the 3rd Thursday of the month, so we followed it up with a Young Alumni Happy Hour as well.  (If you haven't been to one yet, its a lot of fun.  Make sure you go to the Fordham website to update your contact info if you haven't already done so to get on the mailing list.  We're working on an RSS feed for event news, but that's down the line.)   We practiced with some people from the GM team and played an exhibition team.  The all-Fordham team won 9-6 versus a mix of GM and Fordham players.  Kevin and Larry both went yard.  Antoinette grounded out, which is major progress! There are lots more pictures online at my Flickr site.  Here are pics from Third Thursday and here is the growing collection of Fordham Softball '05 pics.  If you're using Flickr and you have softball or Third Thursday pictures, tag them "FUSoftball05" and "ThirdThursday" respectively. 

I just added a nifty piece of code to each of my blog posts.  It makes it easy for readers to send blog posts to their friends.

Here's what it looks like in Typepad or Moveable type:

| <a href="mailto:?subject=Check out this blog post from Charlie&body=<$MTEntryPermalink$>">E-mail this post to a friend</a>

I found the "mailto" commands here. 

Everyone wants "viral."  Its all the rage now.  What is viral?  Well, its a lot of people choosing to see something and passing it on to their friends.  Viral is the Star Wars kid and the George Bush Bloody Sunday Song.

Sometimes, you get someone at an agency who has such a pulse on the human condition that you can create viral.  But most times, viral bubbles up.  Viral isn't intended to be viral necessarily... and the best viral comes when it is created by the audience. 

Its not because there aren't agency folks who can do this... its just that individuals are so fickle that its incredibly hard to figure out what will strike them.  So,  viral becomes a statistics game...   one agency creating one video...   tough to get right..maybe impossible.   A million users creating a million videos...  one of them will go viral.  Its just stats and dumb luck sometimes.

So when Agency.com set out to create a viral video for a client, and they decided to make the viral video about making a viral video, they had a very difficult task ahead of them. 

So here's the result:

What do you think?   So, first off, I have to congratulate them for thinking outside of the box.  They obviously get that consumers don't like to be sold to, and posting this to YouTube was a sign that they understand that if you want to reach consumers, you have to come into our neighborhood.

So, no question, A for effort.  Maybe A+.

The numbers so far... 40,000 plays.  That's enough to get it in the Top 100 most viewed for the week on YouTube.   Not sure what their goal was.

And rather than tell you what I thought...  I'll link to the community's comments.  Kind of a mixed bag to put it lightly.

But, here's the thing about doing innovative advertising and branding.  There were already a bunch of videos that the community had created about Subway.  Many of them were unquestionably good.

Like this guy doing his own 4 part harmony.  (Its the same guy, right?)

Or this girl who probably loves working at Subway more than anyone else loves working at their job.

Or this cute little champion... (A shameless ploy to get her on real commercials, but that's ok... )

Hey Jarrod, we need more water.

This one is just random and disturbing...

This is so gross... and so funny.. all at the same time...   the mustard part was the best.

These two are just goofing off....

Ok, so the quality is really trailing off a bit now....

Anyway... the point is, I wonder if coming up with any content or copy for a consumer facing message is worth it anymore.   Users want to hear themselves, not the company.  They want to hear from each other why a brand or product is worth spending money on.  Is this the moment that ad copy "jumps the virus" in the workds of one YouTube commenter? 

I think everyone in the ad community should wave the white flag and just say,

"The hell with it.  We give up.  You tell us what you think of the brands, and we'll just give you some cool ways to say it, and promote you. We're out of the business of coming up with messaging or content.  Its just too hard... and then when we try to reach out to you in on your own terms, you make a Brokeback parody of us."   

That's what Firefox did.

Robert Young explains this the best:

"...follow the audience into the development of this new market by re-focusing core assets that have the capability to deepen the level, and heighten the production value, of self-expression.

Think of this way… what if “American Idol” had been produced solely by the capabilities of the contestants themselves, without the expertise and talent of the show’s producers, directors, writers, etc. As talented and entertaining as the contestants are, the resulting production quality, the level of emotional engagement, viewership/ratings and monetization potential of the full package would likely be far inferior to what we all see on the air today. Well, social networks should be seen in a similar way… people want to express themselves and the platforms that allow them to do so with the most creativity and production value, are the ones that people will flock to."

In short, don't make a commercial with monkeys.  Give monkeys to the people.  (Full disclosure, my company, Oddcast, built the Careerbuilder Monk-e-mail.)

Leaving on a jet plane..., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Going to a very exciting business development meeting... Our first flight got cancelled... Lets see what the trip home is like. United: You stink. Plus, me and my bag, empty save for my laptop and biz cards, got searched.

If Billy Wagner doesn't start shutting hitters down 1-2-3, they're going to start playing "Johnny B. Goode" instead of Metallica.

So it looks like Pelfrey is the odd man out of the rotation for now...  He was impressive, but still pretty young.  We'll probably see him again in a few weeks.

Oh, and instead of losing Nady, wouldn't it have just been easier to resign Roberto Hernandez last season?  What we gave up to get what we have in all these trades hasn't impressed me at all.  I hope Chad Bradford emerges as the #1 righty out of the pen, just because I have a soft spot for submarine pitchers.  Combining him with Hernandez reminds me of the '91 Mets combo of Innis and "Senior Smoke" Alejandro Pena.

Cha-ra

1.    Noun. Means ‘shit’.
2.    Use in sentence: “Man, I feel like chara because I didn’t give Charlie a big good morning hello. I will try not to act like such a little chara in the future.”

Obviously, I called someone out on walking around the office with work blinders on...   :)

UPDATE: Before you embarrass yourself, I just found out that the "ch" sound in this is not like the "ch" in Charlie or cheer... its the flemy gurglely noise that you make when you want to hock something out.  I'm sure that's not a politically correct way of explaining that, but if you can come up with a better way to type out that noise, I'm all ears.

UPDATE: “The eight letter of the Hebrew alphabet is called “chet” (rhymes with mate) and has the (light scraping) sound ‘ch” as in “Bach”.   "Light scraping"...  ok, I guess that's a nicer way of putting it.   (From Hebrew4christians.com)

“The eight letter of the Hebrew alphabet is called “chet” (rhymes with mate) and has the (light scraping) sound ‘ch” as in “Bach”

Matt Sanchez of VideoEgg came and spoke this morning to the SEMI program--a group of young college students interested in finance and business that I run.

He said something that stuck with me... that there are two types of knowledge:  experiential knowledge and intuitive knowledge, and that entreprenuers are successful when they have the latter.  Basically, those who can only see and understand something if they've seen it before are going to struggle in a startup, whereas those who can hypothesis and logic out systems of behavior that are completely new will achieve much. 

I think often times, people take a very passive approach to intuition--imagining that you either have it or you don't, but I don't think that's true.  "Gut feelings" often come quicker to some people than others, but a lot of times, putting in some solid effort into thinking from the other side of the table or in someone else's shoes has the same effect.  Sometimes, you get good enough at that where it seems to come automatically, but that takes time.   A good "gut feeling" can come from a well thought out attept to figure out what you would do if you were someone else.   Intuition isn't a gift of luck... it is the result of mental training... a mode of thought.

Yeah, so we definitely had a blip on the grid just now.  91 degrees a few minutes before midnight and poof... my computer restarted and the streetlight went out.

Astoria II?   Damn... I better start eating the cheese in my fridge now.

Then how do I know you're a real person?

Funny how the internet changes our perception about who we are and what makes us real.  If I can't find "bits", I don't always trust that there is flesh to match. 

When you work for an internet company that is mostly staffed with Israelis, you wind up with stuff like this in your inbox:


Hebrew Word of the Day - Mur'al

Mur·al (pronounced as written)

1. slang
2. deriving from the word “poison”
3. Used to describe someone who identifies with and who is deeply associated with a certain goal or mission; for example, many time used to describe a young soldier in the IDF J.
4. Use in sentence: “Wow, that Charlie sure is mur’al. He keeps coming to work with avatar t-shirts.”    

I noticed an interesting phenomenon the other day.  The amount you communicate is
proportionate to the number of different avenues you have for communication.  Right now, I can:

-email
-IM
-Skype
-blog
-text
-phone
-MySpace mail
-MySpace comment
-tag something in del.icio.us for: someone
-poke in the Facebook
-write on a Facebook wall
-email in Facebook
-Flickr mail
-Flickr comment
-Gchat in Gmail

...and I'm sure I'm forgetting some...  Oh yeah..talk in person.

The interesting thing to me is that new forms of communication don't necessarily replace the other.  I comment on Flickr to people whose email addresses I have.  Its not just getting the message across from point a to point b..its the way in which it was sent...the packaging.  Packaging allows expression through an infinately more diverse set of variables, like context, media, volume (degree of publicness).  An avatar message to someone on a blog post is a very different message than a text from one person to another, even if the worlds are the same.

Having all of these means of communication available allows for very nuanced interaction with the world.  Some people I will never get on the phone with...others I only talk on the phone to.  When I got texts, I didn't call less...  I called differently.  Less short phone calls....but then I had more longer ones because texting kept more relationships fresher in a more efficient way...  So I just had exposure to more stuff that warrented a call because I had a little bit of texting
to fill the quiet times.

Hopefully, social networks, wireless carriers, Web 2.0 companies realize that and keep their communication as open as possible.  The model for many web applications, like dating, used to be "pay to contact this person".  Instead of standing on the way of communication, I think the best strategy is to encourage as much commuication as possible.  These services don't own my ability to communicate, and there's lots of competition.  Keeping the room silient isn't  the best way to create a party.

Sometimes, we feel like we have more control over the past than the future.

Weird, no?  Because its already happened.

But the past is somewhat maliable...   its all about perception.

"No, I didn't really mean it that way."

"That's not what I said."

"But you never saw the other thing that happened right before that..."

"You must be mistaken."

In a culture of stories--our own recollections of the past versus hardcoded truth, sweeping over tracks in the sand seems so easy.  Memories are so tenuous and open to interpretation, that we seem to spend more of our time trying to change the past or imagine what would happen if we did (because we know exactly what we things we need to change to make our lives better) than we actually spend trying to change our future.  And yet, the fact of the matter is that the future is unwritten--completely wide open--and the past can't changed.

We could all use a little more work on the future.  Where are you going versus where you think you could have been...   

Yesterday's trip to Skirmish with ZogSports was a blast, and I have the markings to prove it: