“Isabell damnit! I am not cheating on you… I am with my father paying my respects to James Brown!”

Overheard by my friend while waiting in line to pay her respects to… James Brown

“After you wake up, what do you do with your dreams?”

- Scribble on the outside of 11 Spring

I am actually going to get out of the office in time to go to the opening of The Girl’s Room tonight at the Jen Bekman Gallery.

According to the Dreier Project:

“The Girl’s Room” is an art show featuring work done by an international group of female artists. Each artist submitted several small pieces, each which will be framed with an 8.5×11 frame. By keeping all the work at a consistent size, we can more clearly and objectively compare the respective works, without the the messages being obscured by irrelevancies such as size and prominence on the wall. The artwork itself will be the message and perhaps it will answer some questions about the place of women’s artwork in the artworld. Questions such as: What sort of work are women artists creating? How does it differ from men’s art? Are there particular subjects, methods and materials women artists are working with? What role does gender play in artwork? And regardless of any “political” agenda, sometimes its fun to get the girls together and see what’s on our minds.

If you can’t make the opening, the show will be running through January 13, 2007 with a closing reception on the final day of the show.

As you likley know, I am a fan of Swoon who has a piece in the show. I have been lucky enough to see her work on the street. I am also excited to see work by Youngna Park whose blog I enjoy immensely, but whose work I have never seen in person.

Photo by Youngna Park

Last night I was in a nearly empty lounge. As the DJ switched records I could make out the first faint hint of a piano riff I know only too well. I confidently belted out the chorus, knowing that the few people in the lounge would soon follow suit. And they did, at the top of their lungs.

Oh baby yoooooou… you got what I neeeeeeeed. But you say he’s just a friend. You say he’s just a friend OH BAY-BEEEE YOOOOU…

It’s at about that moment that I realized that the song being played was not by the Diabolical. Rather, it was the song by Freddie Scott that Biz Markie sampled to produce his break away hit, Just a Friend.

The DJ looked at me and slowly shook his head just so, as if to say, “That’s a damn shame. You should know better.”

At least I didn’t look at the DJ and say “I can’t believe someone stole this hook from The Biz!”

File this one under obsessive. Brian Jones recently bought the house used for the exterior shots in “A Christmas Story” in Cleveland for $150,000.

How did he get the $150,000? By manufacturing and selling the “leg lamp” depicted in the movie.

Leg Lamp

He then went frame by frame and transformed the interior of the house to match the set of the movie (at a cost of $240,000). He now offers guided tours of the house and transformed a house across the street into a gift shop. 4,300 people came out for the opening day. Jones expects 50,000 people per year to visit the house.

Only in Cleveland.

I was thrilled to see Andy Monfried and his new venture, Lotame, getting pub as I made my way around the Internet today. First, Seth Godin gave a nod to Andy’s recent piece on creating value in startup. And then GigaOm wrote a piece on the Company.

I had the pleasure of working with Andy briefly at Advertising.com while he was at headquarters preparing to open the New York office. He was remarkable in his role at Advertising.com and overall is just a fun guy to be around.

Good luck Andy. I know you will find success.

Guy Kawasaki has an interesting post on money as a social barrier.

According to Guy, participants in a study that were cued to think of money spent 70% more time before asking for help and 50% lesss time assisting others.

Guy concludes:

This may be my own twisted logic… , but this study has important—and perhaps counter-intuitive and even puzzling—implications vis-a-vis the evangelism of products and services. That is, if a company brings money into an evangelistic relationship with its customers, it could create barriers and instead of incentives—for example, if Apple, Harley-Davidson, and Tivo paid their customers to spread the word. After all, evangelism is the process of selling dreams, and selling dreams doesn’t necessarily require monetization.

I do think that introducing money would have a dampening effect on evangelism. But the study struck me as particularly apt in relation to Google Answers being taken to the woodshed to be put out of its misery this week.

According to Google’s Blog, only 800 or so people answered questions over the life of the product. Alternatively, Yahoo Answers is thriving with with over 60 million unique worldwide monthly visitors, who have written 160 million answers to questions.

So whats the difference between the two services?

Google used a pay for answers model. Yahoo opted for a free model.

Of course, there are good reasons for why Google went with that model (Michael Arrington does a good job of laying them out), but the fact of the matter is, money likely depresses not only the number of people that will ask questions, but the number of people who will answer them.

I don’t know if there is anything too it, but the study that Kawasaki references just might hold a key to why Google’s model ultimately failed.

My traffic on this site doubled a few days ago. I hadn’t had a chance to dive into the stats to see what was amiss. Turns out a ton of people were searching for “mike oliver” + nypd or “mike oliver” and “police officer.”

After poking a round for a sec, I realized that this all has to do with the groom who got shot by the police in Queens several hours before his wedding. Apparently the officer who shot 31 of the 50 bullets and I share the same name.

I noted my love for Mitch Hedberg when he died a year and a half ago. I was pleasantly surprised to see this Mitch Hedberg random quote generator among Charlie’s del.icio.us links.

Sshhh… you hear that? That was my productivity walking out the door.

Despite being an English literature major, I have always had a hard time reading novels. Unless I can devote a solid amount of time to becoming invested in a story, I find myself starting over at the beginning every time I sit down to read a book until I give up (and inevitably blame the book for being of a caliber incapable of winning over my attention).

Since I am back to the 9-5 (who are we kidding? 11 - 9) after graduating, I have fallen into a nightime routine that gives me enough time to get invested (turns out it wasn’t the books after all).

I just finished A Very Long Engagement last night. I hate reviews for lots of reasons. I fear I might say something about the book that is imprecise. I often can’t wrap my mind around precisely why I liked or didn’t like a particular work. In some instances I simply don’t want to deny others the exciting process of discovery that I had.

So this is my review:

The book contained two lines that caused me to stop reading dead in my tracks, filled with a jealousy I can’t remember ever having felt before. And this is officially the first and only book to make me consider learning French so that I could capture any hint of additional beauty that may have been lost in translation.

I thought this article about email sign-offs was a bit of a filler piece for the Post Thanksgiving Monday until it happened to me today.

This morning, after exchanging a string of one-line question and response emails with a colleague (I would also like to blame it on my head cold), I simply forgot to add the niceties that typically go along with an email to anyone outside of the office.

In response to a very helpful email I received from a professional contact outside of the office, I wrote:

“i’ll look there. thanks.”

I did not greet the recipient by name. I did not sign off with a traditional “Best”, “Kind Regards”, or even “Sincerely”. Hell… I didn’t even give my fragments (let’s face it they weren’t sentences) the proper capitalization.

I didn’t even notice my mistake until the recipient replied and nearly apologized for his previous email. It was clear, though he didn’t say it outright, that he thought that I had taken offense to his prior note. Why else would I have been so terse?

It’s at times like these that I am reminded that, while digital modes of communication (email, IM, blogs, etc) make it so much easier to connect, they require much more care and attention than we typically give them. We have only begun to develop nascent tools in the digital realm (think and LOL) to solve the problems which non-verbal cues, tone and timbre have been smoothing over for generations in our face to face (and voice to voice) interactions.

The Goonies is on. I saw this movie in the theater 3 times in 1985. Still a record.

There was a good profile of the poet Paul Muldoon in yesterday’s Sunday Magazine.

Muldoon shot straight into the top ranks of my personal canon back in college when I was assigned his peom “Incantata” from his book of poems entitled The Annals of Chile.

Apparently this Nobel Laureate to be has a band.

Damn that was too close for comfort…

I watched my first game on a HD flatscreen today. I was skeptical until I actually could see a defensive lineman’s face so clearly that I could tell how badly he fell for a fake by Smith.

Going to have to get one of those sooner or later.

A friend of mine talking to his wife on the phone:

Wife: How is your day?

Husband: This certainly won’t be an Angel From Montgomery evening.

I love when I find out that words exist to express concepts or experiences that I have had.

I recently learned from an article on the OED in the New York Times that a misheard lyric is called a mondegreen. According to the New York Times:

It is named after Lady Mondegreen. There was no Lady Mondegreen. The lines of a ballad, ”They hae slain the Earl of Murray,/And laid him on the green” are misheard as ”They have slain the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen.”

For the record, I have always been curious to know who this “Sweet Saranda” was in the song Bitter Sweet by Big Head Todd and the Monsters?

And today, I learned from Jason Kottke about the Cupertino Effect, or incorrect spellcheck suggestions that make it into finalized documents. The word comes from a spellchecking error in the various European Union Documents where the term cooperation was mistakenly replaced by Cupertino.

I wonder what other wonderful words exist for those experiences that I have had but never been able to explain without using several sentences? I wonder if, in fact, this very concept has a word to express it?

Turning on the television and trying to choose between the good the bad and the ugly, rocky IV (the one where Apollo creed is killed by drago), Friday, cool hand luke, o brother where art thou, grave of the fireflies, and raging bull.

I have been having a ton of fun over at Long Bets. The purpose of Long Bets is to improve long-term thinking.

Someone makes a prediction. Once the prediction is on the website someone can make a wager that the prediction will not come true. The subject of the prediction or bet must be societally or scientifically important. Predictors and bettors must provide an argument explaining why the subject of their prediction is important and why they think they will be proved right. The wagers are held in an escrow account and are payable to the a charity of the winner’s choice. The list of predictors and bettors is a who’s who of big brains.

For instance, one of my favorite bets is between Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) and Craig Mundie (CTO of Microsoft).

Craig believes that by 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes. Eric decidely disagrees. You can read their arguments here.

Long Bets is a project of the Long Now Foundation which was founded by, among others, Brian Eno (who coined the term).

The Long Now Foundation was established in 1996 and hopes to “provide counterpoint to today’s ‘faster/cheaper’ mind set and promote ’slower/better’ thinking. [They] hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.”

I read a fantastic article by Eno wherein he came up with the idea of the Long Now. I can’t put my finger on it now. Here it is.

A wonderful description of the writing process:

Writing is a job, like plumbing is a job. There are days when all you do is screw words together like pipes, make the joints as tight as you can, and then flush shit through it to see if it leaks.

I think this quote struck particularly close to home because I have been spending quite a bit of time drafting agreements, and this describes that process to a tee.

Read the rest of Derek’s post entitled How to Write a Book in Three Easy Steps.

On a recommendation from Sheila, I recently read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It really captured my imagination. Much of the book is told from the perspective of a 9 year-old New Yorker with an over active imagination:

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone’s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone’s hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don’t really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn’t have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”

I absolutely love those last two lines.

Email from a friend who will remain unnamed:

The house goes dem (and maybe the senate - George Allen? Really?), Rummy resigns. What’s next? Do I get my 40 acres?

Gmail recently launched a Gmail mobile application (not to be confused with the mobile browser version located at http://m.gmail.com). This app is super fast and has most of the features you have come to love in Gmail (e.g. converstions, auto address complete, etc.). I am using it on a BlackBerry Pearl. A full list of supported devices is here.

This is a time lapse flash animation of who has controlled the Middle East over the last 5000 years.

If you are in Los Angeles this weekend get over to see British street artist Banksy’s newest gallery show entitled Barely Legal. The New York Times published a piece on the show yesterday.

It comes complete with a live elephant painted red and decorated with gold fleurs-de-lis that matches the wallpaper. As Edward Wyatt of the New York Times notes:

As a metaphor for problems that people are uncomfortable talking about, “the elephant in the room” is not the most original. But then, few people actually put the elephant in the room, paint it red and adorn it with gold fleurs-de-lis to match the brocade wallpaper, and then dare viewers not to talk about it.

Banksy’s other stunts include installing four of his works into the the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History in broad daylight.

Interestingly, this is not Banksy’s first foray into art involving an elephant. He once snuck into an elephant pen in the London Zoo and bombed the pen from the point of view of the elephant: “I want out. This place is too cold. Keeper smells. Boring, boring, boring.”

I have been silent here for the last week or so because I was running the gauntlet that is the apartment hunt in New York City.

I started my search in the West Village where I have lived for the last three years with a roommate. I wanted a one bedroom. I quickly came to learn that brokers in the West Village use the term “bedroom” loosely, referring to any nook or cranny that isn’t a bathroom, living room, or kitchen. I saw a “one bedroom” on my favorite block in Manhattan (Leroy Street and 7th Avenue) that literally didn’t have room for my bed (I have a full size mattress).

“Was it too much,” I thought, “to be able to live in a place where one could actually wake up on the wrong side of the bed?” There was no such thing, it seemed, as a “side of the bed” (at least in my price range). In Manhattan there were only feet. Every apartment I saw in the Village required a running start and ended with a vault onto the mattress. There was no other way to enter the bedroom. I don’t know how one makes a bed in Manhattan. It must be difficult to pull off without being able to stand next to the bed.

I decided that, perhaps, I could get a large studio in my price range. Sure I would have no living room, but at least I could get out of my bed on either side. I was presented with “steals” for $1600 - $1800 dollars where I could indeed get out of bed on either side. But I would rarely be getting out of bed since there was no room for any other furniture. In these studios, the bed would become my couch, my kitchen table.

At night I drempt of my life after starting work. In my dream I would enter the apartment, loosen my tie, grab a beer from the fridge, and with a sigh, sink into a plush couch and put my feet up. I woke up feeling relaxed. Then it dawned on me that, in the real world, I wasn’t looking at anything even approximating my dream.

That day, I got up and headed for Brooklyn.

I went to Cobble Hill, I suppose, because it was the only neighborhood I really knew in Brooklyn. I felt comfortable the moment I stepped of the train. There were coffee shops everywhere. There were two movie theaters within walking distance, and there were families walking around everywhere. I dropped in on 6 brokers in my first day. Most of the brokers had little or nothing to show. I saw an apartment I would have been glad to take, but I was scooped by a woman who surely holds the world record in paperwork gathering. I thought I was prepared, but was no match for my foe who produced the laundry list below seemingly out of the ether:

1. copy of social security card
2. 2004 and 2005 W2s
3. 2004 and 2005 1040s
4. Last three cancelled rent checks
5. Last Verizon bill
6. Last ConEd Bill
7. Letter of employment

Three days, ten apartments, and some tired feet later, I found myself first in line to apply for an apartment that met what I had originally thought were my reasonable expectations. As I was filling out the paperwork (and paying an application fee to ensure that no one else would be shown the apartment) a young man entered the broker’s office to inquire about an incredibly inexpensive one bedroom he heard was available in the eneighborhood (his friend lived in the building). She smiled, said sorry, and pointed toward me.

He looked dejected. I wanted to put my arm around him like the 6 year old chess prodigy did in Searching for Bobby Fisher and say, “don’t worry, you are a much stronger player than I was at your age.”

Yesterday, I got the apartment.

Brooklyn, here I come.

I attempted to fly from Cleveland to New York out of Cleveland’s lesser airport. Having never been to this airport, I got lost and missed my flight. I am glad I did because I got to experience the wonder that is the Akron-Canton airport.

A few highlights:

No line at the check in counter.

No line at the security check point.

Free (and fast) wireless throughout the entire airport (and lots of electrical sockets!)

Arby’s is opening a location next to my gate.

I will be flying out of here from here on out (assuming I can find my way here again).

“Do you want me to go in and order while you wait with Cosmo?” the teenager asked her friend who had already sat down at an outdoor table. She was fidgeting with the dog’s collar and cooing in baby talk.

No response.

The girl rolls her eyes and enters the coffee shop.

After a few minutes she reemerges, straddling the doorway.

“Do they still take two-dollar bills?”

Her friend isn’t paying attention.

“Amy!” she barks. “Do they still take two-dollar bills?”

Amy looks up, exasperated.

“Duh Katie… like… they HAVE to.”

Katie rolls her eyes again, and enters the store to make her purchase.

Came across this site which has a wonderful collection of images of posters from live music events. I think it’s cool that one of their submission guidelines is that they won’t accept posters for events that, for whatever reason, didn’t actually occur.

Michael Arrington points an article in Business Week that claims that Apple will begin selling movies for download this month. According to Business Week, Walmart is up in arms because Apple is getting a better wholesale price.

I was surprised by Arrington’s closing remarks:

“Given that it will be trivial for iTunes users to simply burn a DVD of these movie downloads, Walmart has good reason to be worried. Netflix should be nervous, too.”

When the stars align and bandwith providers, movie studios, consumer elctronics makers, and digital distribution partners like Apple, Amazon, Walmart, AOL and Netflix get digital distribution right some old business models will certainly be eclipsed. But I think it’s a little early for Netflix to worry.

As Mark Cuban notes, download times are still abysmal:

“Easier to download a movie? Maybe. Easier to download 2 or 3 movies than going to the store to buy or rent ? Never. Never, ever, ever. (Which means not in the next 5 years).”

You think going to the movie store is a pain in the arse? How many of our average citizens will be able to endure the download time, much less figure out how to burn a dvd of the movie? That’s assuming, of course, that all of the aforementioned players above allow one to freely do so.

I am sure the Netflix never saw delivery by the mails as a permanent solution to the “watching movies at home and on the go” industry. As I mentioned before, their relatively luddite service was possible because Blockbuster sucked and digital delivery hadn’t (and even with Apple’s entrance, still has not) been perfected. Like Apple, Amazon, Walmart, and a host of other companies, Netflix always planned to offer a digital service when it becomes feasible.

No doubt, Apple launching any service should make its competitors nervous. But in this case, I don’t think Netflix has anything to worry about for quite sometime.

As I mentioned in the ephemera, Met life is selling Stuy Town and Peter Cooper Village for a proposed $5 billion dollars. That price tag would make it the largest real estate deal involving the purchase of a single property in America in modern times.

Nearly two-thirds of the apartments currently have regulated rents at half the market rate. This will be a definite blow to advocates of affordable housing in New York.

Amy Fox, my next door neighbor senior year of college, wrote a wonderful article for the New York Times on the battle her grandparents and other residents fought to integrate Stuy Town in the 1950s. The article is behind the TimesSelect wall, but a slide show of wonderful photos is still available with Amy narrating.

My friend Molly, one of the best writers I know who refuses to blog, (you listening Luke?) snapped these photos of Streetart while in Rome.

This post and the one before it stem from a post I read this morning by Charlie O’Donnell about the future of the calendaring industry. While Charlie raised many important points, I was struck by the quote below:

I hardly know anyone who uses any calendar other than one their job forced them to… and less than half of the Outlook users I know put personal items on their work calendar. (italics mine)

We have different identities based on the various relationships we have. And software isn’t designed to help us easily maintain these identities. It is painfully evident in the calendaring space but is a problem in many areas of digital life.

I have a Google calendar that tracks my birthdays, social engagements, doctors appointments, Browns games, and other goings ons about town. I will have a work calendar when I start my new job in a few weeks that will be dominated by meetings (and my secretary). And never the twain shall meet. This is primarily due to the fact that the existing software can’t easily handle the problems of trust levels and interoperabilty. It can be done, but not seamlessly.

I face the same bifurcation issue with email. In a few weeks I will have a new work email address to add to the host of personal addresses I maintain. Again, the software isn’t up to the challenge of easily handling correspondance with various constituencies from one interface. I want the work address and boilerplate to be used when I contact a client or a colleague. I want my personal address to be used when I contact a friend. And I don’t want to have to manually adjust these settings with each message.

When it comes to this blog, I feel the push and pull of these competing parts of my life. There are stories I would tell, thoughts I would share, if not for the fact that this blog is in the words of Stephen Dunn, “open on all sides, in cahoots with thin air.” Setting up a second blog would only make thebifurcation more permanent. I want to present a public blog and filter certain posts for friends and family. I am sure I can set up some sort of pass protected site, but no blog software has made it easy as far as I can tell.

I guess in the end, I want technology that works the way I do (and, I surmise, we all do). I may be asking too much, but any company that can create software that changes identities - seamlessly - depending on the relationship involved, will come out on top.

I customize my ringtones based on the relationship I have with the caller. Family gets one ring. Friends get another. Everyone else gets a third, more garrish, ring (I may have to add a fourth distinction when I start my new job in a few weeks). I do this for two reasons. First, I can make a snap judgement without looking at my phone as to whether the call must be answered or can safely go to voicemail. Secondly, I like to think that my brain gets a crucial headstart in preparing me for the the ensuing phone interaction. Like an early warning system, the different ringtones send a nearly sub-conscious signal to my brain that I need to cheer up, relax, or otherwise modify my demeanor to address the incoming party. This is purley conjecture, but I like the notion.

These classifications closely mirror three of my most central identities: that of son/brother, friend, and stranger)

Why doesn’t my phone allow me to have different voicemail greetings based on these identities? I have had the same bland professional voicemail greeting since I was 22. I have done this because my mom, best friend, and boss always end up with my new cell phone number. And would you rather get laughed at by your friend for your long, boring, professional message or have an uncomfortable chat with your boss about how “yo” is probably not an acceptable greeting for clients?

My phone already allows me to make these distinctions between my various relationships when it comes to ringtones. I don’t need separate messages for individuals (but how cool would that be!). I just want different messages for a few of the distinct relationships that we all have.

That way, I could say “love you” to my mom, “peace” to my friends and “thank you for your call” to the masses.

I switched from to del.icio.us to Yahoo’s MyWeb awhile back because MyWeb saves cached versions of each page I bookmark. I recently decided to switch back to del.icio.us (I wasn’t using the cached versions enough to sacrifice the ease of use of del.icio.us). However, when I imported my bookmarks they all defaulted to private. I was told by del.icio.us support team that I would have to share each link individually (the reason, which is fair, is that if the import tool, as it currently stands, allowed bulk sharing it would be abused by link spammers).

I have over 1700 links currently bookmarked.

Has anyone “found” a faster way to do this?

Update: According to del.icio.us support (who, I might add, are really quick to answer emails!) they are working on a solution to this problem.

The print version of Brenda Ann Kenneally’s photo essay in today’s NYTimes was spectacular. The online version is even more powerful and includes narration by the subjects of the photos.

Two quotes from Paul Graham’s essential essay What You Can’t Say.

One:

“In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. “Blasphemy”, “sacrilege”, and “heresy” were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times “indecent”, “improper”, and “unamerican” have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they’re mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force… In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that’s a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as “divisive” or “racially insensitive” instead of arguing that it’s false, we should start paying attention.” (emphasis mine)

Two:

“How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment. Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don’t matter– just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what’s inside this guy’s head with what’s inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can’t say.”

Update: Graham has a follow up to this piece.

I recently experienced Julian Montague’s Stray Shopping Cart Project at a gallery in Chelsea (the name of said gallery escapes me). Montague’s project is both beautiful and hilarious. Montague has developed a sophisticated classification system for identifying shopping carts in the environments in which they are found. There are eleven types of Class A: False Strays, including the A/2 Plaza Drift and the A/3 Bus Stop Discard. There are twenty-two Class B: True Strays including the B/7 Transient Imposter, the B/21 Naturalization (a cart resituated by natural forces), and the B/10 Plow Crush.

My personal favorite is the B/13 Complex Vandalism, which can be differentiated from Simple Vandalism by the degree of complexity and effort required to resituate the cart (in his example you can see a shopping cart inside an empty pool that is enclosed within a fence).

In addition to the entire classification system, Montague includes photographs of 160 specimens on the project website. Each is, of course, properly classified.

I am not sure which part of Montague’s project was more enjoyable - the informational graphics and photographs or the accompanying text. Something tells me it is the perfect balance of the two that made this work so memorable.

Update: Montague has a special Site Study: Cleveland and Environs Winter 2005 section. Yeah, I know. That is only of interest to me.

The BBC has an article on the Starbuck’s short cappucino. It’s not on the menu, but you can order it. They have the cups and an appropriate button on the register. I mention this because I was thrilled when I learned about the short cup last summer. It brought me peace of mind.

Prior to learning about the “short” I railed against the Starbucks naming conventions. I purposefully ordered larges instead of Ventis.

“I’d like a large coffee please. Thank You.”

“One Venti?” the barista replied.

“Yes. One large.”

I can handle pretentiousness, but it was really the fact that they deemed their small coffee a “Tall” that really got my goat.

I wonder if Tall feels vindication now that his little brother has been outed. Does he want to scream out at the top of his lungs “See I AM tall! And I DO have a girlfriend… she’s just… well… she lives in Canada.”

Yesterday I commented on a post by Seth Godin here on this blog. I did this because Seth chooses not to enable comments (which is totally cool by me). He has enabled trackbacks however. I drafted my thoughts and published the post. In Wordpress this is all one has to do to join a conversation. But when I returned this morning to see how the conversation had progressed over night, my post was nowhere to be found.

It took me several minutes to realize that my post hadn’t registered as a trackback because Seth uses Moveable Type (MT). Why is this significant? Wordpress (the platform that powers this blog) automatically handles trackbacks. When I publish a post, Wordpress attempts to notify the blogs I have linked to. If it is successful, then my post is registered as a trackback and the author I have linked to is notified. Similarly, whenever someone links to a post of mine, Wordpress notes this and includes the trackback along with any other comments that have been left on my blog. In short, whenever I want to join a conversation, all I have to do is post my thoughts. Like the good wingman that he is, Wordpress magically handles the introductions.

The same is not true for Moveable Type. Each post on an MT blog has a trackback url that is different from the permanent link of the post. Before I could join the conversation on Seth’s blog, I had to locate the trackback link of his post. Then I drafted my post - linking to the permanent link of the post for human readers - and then had to add the trackback link (the computer readable reference). The trackback link has to be entered into an obscure field in the Worpress Admin screen which, presumably, exists solely to trackback to posts on MT blogs.

It’s not a huge deal, but little platform quirks like this inhibit the natural flow of conversation. When I link to another blog, in my mind, the gesture has been made. Moveable Type’s trackback process is like telling a woman you like her shoes and then, upon returning home, drafting a handwritten letter to the same effect.

Update: And sure enough, I forgot to add the trackback to for this post!

I am in the process of integrating a few thousand photographs from Flickr into this blog. You can view my photos by most recent, tag, and by photo sets. I am porting my photos over from one Flickr account to another so it may be several days before they are all available on the site.

Go ahead, check it out.

I am joking, but I enjoyed reading that Seth Godin had come to the realization this morning that products - of all stripes - are too complicated these days (Seth tried washing his clothes in a washing machine with 125 different settings).

Seth ponders whether “good enough” might be the next big idea.

The team over at 37signals would certainly agree. They have staked their future on the notion. And it seems to be working.

One note though, “good enough” will smack of mediocrity to some. Perhaps “simplicity” gets to the heart of it. Very few would demand a complicated product. But every one thinks they deserve great (which is the perceived as the opposite of “good enough”).

Two guys at the coffee shop, laptops open, looking for jobs.

Guy One: Oh… here’s one. “Do you enjoy dining on haute cuisine?”

Guy Two: What’s that mean?

Guy One: I dunno. If I knew words like that I’d have a job already!