A Look Inside

iPod + iTunes + iPhone = iCuffs

2007-01-25T22:29:00.000-05:00

They may be good at design, but Apple could certainly use a lesson in customer service: Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs - New York Times. They might be well served to take a page from the Southwest Airlines book of customer service before someone comes along who can compete on the design level and has the customer care mentality to boot. Of course, lucky for apple, in some, if not most, pockets of society appearances rule and in that corner of the marketplace they are the champ. Hey all you anti-Microsoft folks who are patrons at the Church of the Mac (and I'm not putting a vote in for Microsoft here, but it's gotta be said), Apple ain't exactly gettin' it right either. Their commercials are pretty funny though.

technorati tags:apple, iphone, customerService

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File Replication

2006-11-02T15:38:00.000-05:00

I'm in the market for file replication software. We will have two remote customers who will be scanning in documents. Each document scan creates database records of the document types and the file locations. I need software that gives me the ability to replicate those images and databases in real-time across a WAN. I need it to be secure and dependable, or stable. Does anyone have any suggestions from experience?

While I'm here, I'm also in the market for an experienced PHP developer who is able to read classic ASP and has done, hopefully, extensive work with SQL Server. The position is with a company in the health insurance industry in the Detroit metro area. If you are interested, please email a current version of your resume to turbo.brown (at) gmail (dot) com. All qualified candidates will be considered.

Apple Design

2006-09-21T11:13:00.000-04:00

There's an article in BusinessWeek called Who Is Jonathan Ive? about Apple's Senior VP for Industrial Design and their design process.In my opinion there are some very valuable nuggets in the article.

For starters, Apple keeps their focus on a few products and intends to provide excellence, instead of having a wide array of average offerings.

Second, they put value in differentation and design where their competitors cut costs, but the result is some fiercly loyal customers. According to the article, "Apple spends as much as $65 per PC casing, vs. an industry average of maybe $20." That means that fans of their design are going to keep coming back, whereas competitors are forced to find ways to cut costs and improve performance to keep customers. I would guess that among computer manufacturers brand loyalty is significantly higher with Apple because of their intense focus on the quality of their products' designs.

And lastly, they are willing to pay for talent. The article claims that the average salary for folks in their industrial design department is $200,000. Their department is significantly smaller than the industry averages among their competitors (also related to the diversity of product offerings), but their results speak for themselves. When you buy the talent you experience the benefit.

A lot can be taken away from this article for companies in any industry. There's some other excellent points on the content of the article over at the 37Signals blog which is where I came across the article.

Flock Memory Leak

2006-08-14T21:22:00.000-04:00

I'm bloggin with Flock about a memory leak in Flock. My computer slowed to a crawl for no apparent reason...all I had open were browser windows. I though maybe it was the java applet that I was running in IE (why IE? because of course it doesn't work in Flock). But when I pulled up task manager I was shocked to see that Flock was sucking down more than 500 MB of memory. Ridiculous! Hey Will Pate, Will Tschumy or Daryl L. L. Houston, I love Flock, we need a fix!

(Tip to novice bloggers: Using people's names in your blog posts often helps draw their attention to them.)

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Confirmation Bias

2006-08-08T23:31:00.000-04:00

Confirmation bias is something that I first heard about at The Dilbert Blog of all places. Basically the idea is that when you believe something to be true your brain shuts down from hearing logical arguments against it and you stick to your beliefs even if the evidence presented clearly proves that they are illogical.

Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, explained it in a great, and funny, way, and apparently was doing an experiment on his blog related to confirmation bias recently.

There's also additional information on confirmation bias at wikipedia.

The areas of cognitive science have become increasingly interesting to me and may become an area of future professional study, ideally at an accredited university in the local area whose colors are Maize and Blue.

PLEASE NOTE: Many viewpoints expressed by Scott Adams are contrary to viewpoints that I hold. The reference is intended for the specific topic and content mentioned and not an endorsement of his viewpoints.

That being said I find his writing to be thought provoking, well done and often extremely entertaining.

meebo me

2006-08-08T17:43:00.000-04:00

Meebo is an online chat client that combines the likes of AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN and other instant messaging clients in one site. It's really quite convenient.

Well, meebo has come out with a chat tool that you can embed in your blog. You may have noticed it on the right hand side there. I haven't had a chance to play with it much, and I may not use if very much, but it seems like a great idea and is very cool. Anyone on your blog can look at your meebo me widget and see if you are logged in to meebo. If you are, they can chat with you then and there. Pretty cool stuff from the folks at meebo. They even let you pick the size and the widget name.

You can read more about it, and the other cool things they are doing, at the meeblog.

(Hat tip to Mark Jen.)

Google Adds Saved Locations

2006-08-05T22:35:00.000-04:00

Google has added the ability to save locations in Google Maps. This is one of the features that many have suggested holds Google Maps back from being the top choice for the average user when it comes to mapping websites. As far as I'm concerned Google Maps is definitely the best around, and this only solidifies that for them. You can read more at the Official Google Blog: Saved locations on Google Maps

technorati tags:google, maps

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Providing Valuable Content

2006-07-14T23:53:00.000-04:00

In a post yesterday one of the things I talked about was joining the conversation and doing so with valuable content. You draw people to your blog by providing value to them for nothing. That value may get paid back to you in the form of donations or new customers.

I ran across a great example of this today. AccuQuote, an insurance company from what I gather from their site, started a blog. Their blog provides specific information on the insurance industry. They are using their expertise to provide content that provides value to a large marketplace. They can then turn some of the viewers of that content into customers.

Don't just take my word for it. Jason Calacanis' company Weblogs, Inc (purchased of course by AOL), probably the best case of turning blogging into a profitable business, is the company that designed AccuQuote's blog.

I only have a couple problems with the AccuQuote blog:

1. It's not clear how to get to their homepage. Right now it's a link at the bottom right of every post title "Read". I'm not sure how that makes any sense. They should make it very easy to get to their business site, it'd probably help people make the transition from reader to customer.

2. I hate "the jump". Blogs should always display an entire post instead of just a partial post and then a link to read the rest of the content. I fail to see any value in doing that.

Besides those two things this a great model of a business adding value to the marketplace as a whole.

Advertising For A Cause

2006-07-14T23:42:00.000-04:00

I caught a post by Fred Wilson that I had missed from late last month about how his blog ad revenue goes to charity. I'm pretty sure that I had read it on his blog in the past, but it's just cool to hear about. It's a great twist to the web advertising model, ad clicks for a good cause.

Way to go Fred!

technorati tags:advertising, charity, avc, fredwilson

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Development Process

2006-07-14T13:31:00.000-04:00

I put together a development plan for my company. Essentially we wanted to document the process we are going to follow from the point that an idea for a system, or enhanced system functionality, enters someone's head to the point that we have finished product.

The contruction phase is meant to follow Agile and Extreme Programming methodologies. It may be written a little bit differently, but that's so that any business member who's not familiar with those processes can look at it and understand.

I'm open to feedback so anyone who stumbles across this and has any thoughts, they are more than welcome.

Development Process

technorati tags:development, process, plan

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Creating A Web Presence

2006-07-13T22:57:00.000-04:00

I had a meeting with the director of an adoption and counseling agency today. He's a great guy who wants to use the internet to cultivate his business. He recognizes that he needs a web presence and he wanted to talk about strategies for updating the company's site and driving traffic to it.
I had the privilege to explain to him what a blog is and talk about how starting a blog enhances your exposure. I briefly explained the concepts of feeds and feed aggregators and the opportunity that gives people to hear from you, and interact with you, on their terms and at their chosen time.
We talked about some of the reasons the blog is such a great medium. None of these points originates with me, but here they are:

1. Writing a blog makes you part of the conversation - When you add valuable content to the larger conversation about whatever topic pertains to you, you provide value to your prospective audience and gain exposure. The key here is to make sure to be providing quality content, and doing it on a regular basis. Another important part is to engage people who are talking about you to make sure that they know their opinion is valuable. A great example of this is dell contacting a blogger who had trouble with one of their computers and posted about it. There are quite a few similar stories out their about things like this, and it's a credit to those companies who connect with the people who are talking about them.

2. Using feeds allows people to catch up with you on their time - In today's world attention is a scarce resource. People have so many things vying for their attention, and your website, or newsletter, is just another thing they have to remember to read. Setting up a blog with a feed allows people to capture your latest posts and catch up on them when they have the time to focus. One of the strongest features of allowing people to subscribe to your feed is that you don't require them to visit your site to get updates along with all the other sites they would want to visit in a day or week.

3. Email newsletters are going the way of the fax machine - Email newsletters are hardly much different from magazines. Most of us get more magazines than we actually read and they end up getting stacked up to read later (it goes back to the whole attention thing). When we never get around to reading them they just get thrown out, or in the case of email, get deleted. Combine that with the fact that if the content that may connect with a specific user is buried deeper than they end up looking you lose them. On blogs menus and tags allow you to provide people quick access to the content that is valuable to them. Content people with that and you are more likely to turn them into a customer, or in the case of a non-profit, a potential donor.

4. Passionate people are more valuable than paid advertising - If you are able to connect with people via the blogosphere, even if they aren't in your target market, they have the ability to draw more attention to you than even an expansive marketing budget could. Let's say in this particular example you were to provide valuable content on adoption: common misconceptions, what to expect, etc. People across the country can benefit from that information and you have the potential to make yourself the defacto online presence for that kind of information.

The beauty of today's internet world is that you have the ability to control your own web presence by the content and value you provide to the connections and conversations that are already going on in ways that never existed before. It's just up to you to take advantage of it.

New Car

2006-07-06T22:57:00.000-04:00

I've been driving an F-150 for almost two years and loving it, for the most part anyway. The gas mileage is not something to enjoy. It came advertised at 14 mpg city, 18 mpg highway, but I would guess in reality that it's probably more like 12 mpg city and 15 mpg highway. Other than that it's an amazingly smooth ride for a truck and having a four door was great. Plus there's nothing like the utility of a truck, it was very convenient when we moved, did our landscaping and so many other times and it wasn't just for us, other people were able to use it as well.

It was a lease, and I've been putting more miles than we paid for on it. As many of you know that's a costly proposition so it came time to investigate our alternatives. Nothing was really looking good as far as we were concerned. We talked to a Ford Dealer, we looked at VW's, we visited a Chevy dealership and we searched around at used car lots and on the web. Nothing was particularly good as far as deals or vehicles, and we were looking to cut our costs which wasn't working out either.

Then we heard about GM's zero percent financing for 72 months. Yeah it's a long time to pay for a car, but you can't beat borrowing money for free. We decided to head out to a Pontiac/Buick dealership in Brighton to take a look at the Grand Prix and the Rendezvous. When we first started talking prices with the salesman nothing was sounding right, the prices were still higher than what we were looking for. As we were walking back into the building to talk about more prices after looking at a Rendezvous a vehicle drove in front of us that we both had to admire.

We connected right away visually with what would soon become our new car. We immediately asked our salesman, who turned out to be great to deal with overall, what we were looking at. Apparently it was the Pontiac Torrent, not something either of us have seen on the road, or advertised even though it's a 2006 model year car, so it's been out for at least a little while. Tom showed us the car in the showroom and we were even further convinced. The price tag looked right, it's fairly close to a crossover and it has a surprising amount of interior space.

We took one for a test drive and decided then that if the numbers were right this was the vehicle for us. Tom needed to make some calls to get the color we wanted in the package we were looking for, and we needed to make some calls to get a GM employee discount. We signed the credit application Saturday to lock in the zero percent no matter when we actually made the purchase and we were on our way. Not two hours later we had a GM employee discount code, and we were going to be paying less to buy the Torrent than we were to lease the F-150. The deal we got couldn't be beat.

So our new car is the Pontiac Torrent and we're pumped about it. If you want to deal with a salesman who is just an all around good guy visit Tom at the Pontiac Buick in Brighton. Check out this sharp ride:

Nursery Stage 2

2006-07-05T22:51:00.000-04:00

Well, it was certainly a busy holiday weekend. I got to (as in: had the privilege to) work on Monday, although we did get out at 2:30. So it wasn't the full 4-day weekend that many enjoyed.

Work continued in full swing on the nursery Tuesday, which was supposed to be my day off. You'll only see a slight bit of difference in the pictures this time around. We peeled off the tape, did some touch-up work along the base molding and installed the chair rail. It certainly wasn't as difficult to do as I expected, or as I've heard, but it was still definitely time consuming. My dad came to help which was awesome, so we scratched our heads and worked on our geometry and got it done. It's actually looking really sharp. What you can't see is that the top edge still needs to be caulked, and the nail holes need to be plugged and touched up, but other than that preparations on the nursery are almost complete. Besides those two things I need to hang the ceiling fan and then my work there is done.

Looks good from where you're standing doesn't it!

Nursery Stage 1

2006-07-03T23:14:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been a few months since I did my last post. Nice. Not that there's anyone out there who reads this that doesn't know already: but our first born is due in just under 3 months.

Our yet-to-be-named little baby boy is due September 26th and needless to say we are very excited. Today preparations went into full swing.

We've had a couple furniture ordeals, we returned a full set due to various problems and have been mostly unsuccessful at finding alternatives. Well today that selection was made and we also started painting.

Below you can see pictures of the paint job. Stage 2 of the project is to peel off the tape, clean up the plastic and put in a chair rail tomorrow. Should be fun.

Oh yeah...I tried to talk Shannon into letting me paint the door tan and the squares green to match the walls...she wouldn't let me. Some people have no sense adventure.

Knowledge & Decision Making

2006-03-03T16:28:00.000-05:00

"The point is that knowledge and the ability to make a good decision correlate only sporadically, and there are plenty of times when knowledge gets in the way of judgement." - Malcolm Gladwell

It's a great quote from an interview with The Sports Guy. It comes from talking about why Isaiah Thomas is so ineffective as an NBA GM.

Inspirational and Incredible

2006-02-27T13:03:00.000-05:00

I don't need to say anything else, this video speaks for itself.

Here's a great local news piece on it.

Just for the heck of it, and because you can't watch it too many times, here's a CNN piece.

Coincidence

2006-02-24T17:02:00.000-05:00

I was just looking through my old posts to find a link and realized that I started blogging in February of last year. I've known many a blogger to mention their "blogging anniversary", so I decided to dig a little deeper to figure out exactly what day I started.

Totally coincidentally, I swear, it was February 24, 2005, one year ago today. How great is that? Happy Blogging Anniversary to me!

In retrospect how do I think I've done (or better yet, how have I done at adding to the conversation as Seth Godin would say)? Well, "less than average" is probably generous and "poor" probably comes a little closer to describing it.

So here's to some better efforts, and content, in my next blogging year. Thanks to the 5 people who read.

Wasting Time

2006-02-24T16:45:00.000-05:00

No, this post is not what you think. Many of you that have read this blog....er all 5 of you...will know that I've talked about how I struggle with whether or not I waste too much time watching TV. It turns out, participating in pop culture (movies, tv and video games) may not be the waste of time than I thought it was. In fact, it may be actually be making me smarter.

Don't take my word for it, check out this great article by Malcolm Gladwell. Apparently the involved and interwoven plot lines of my new delight, 24, are potentially more practically educational that reading a book.

(For those of you who don't know who Malcolm Gladwell is, he's a writer for The New Yorker and I highly recommend his books The Tipping Point and Blink.)

And Another Thing

2006-02-05T23:42:00.000-05:00

(On the Superbowl.)

On the platform at the end of the game: the owner, the coach, the wide receiver (and MVP!) and the running back (the "great story"). The person who was missing: the quarterback.

The guy who last year set the record for the most consecutive wins for a rookie quarterback. The guy who made the game saving tackle in the Steelers - Colts game that allowed this team to continue on in the playoffs. Now he's the guy who is the youngest Superbowl winning quarterback.

It seems to me it would have been appropriate to have Big Ben on the platform at the end of the game and at least take a moment to recognize him.

Just seems strange.

It's Only Speculation

2006-02-05T23:16:00.000-05:00

Or is it?

The NFL has been accused of various levels of conspiracy before. It has been said that they conspired to help the Colts win a championship by giving them a cake 2005 regular season schedule. Handing them home field advantage could make for an easy walk through the playoffs and a Superbowl victory. Their schedule was incredibly easy despite the fact that they had made the playoffs the year before and generally speaking the better the team, the harder the schedule. A Colts Superbowl victory could have made such a great story.

The Houston Texans lost some close games on some very badly missed field goals. So badly missed in fact that one is lead to ask if the kicker was even trying to make it. It is not to far of a deviation to suggest that he was instructed to miss those kicks. The reason was to lock up the number one pick in the 2006 draft and guarantee them the opportunity to draft a player who some are calling the next great back, Reggie Bush.

I've been able to overlook these so called issues. I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, so those kinds of things don't pique my interest. However, after tonight I'm starting to wonder.

During this year's Superbowl broadcast they had some special featurettes of players competing in the game holding the Lombardi Trophy and talking about winning the championship. Problem is only Pittsburgh players were featured. There was that halftime montage that included both Steeler and Seahawk players and coaches, but other than that all individual featurettes that played were of Steelers. As a matter of fact, the only one of the 2nd half of the game was of Jerome Bettis.

I find this extremely interesting. Why was it that the broadcast so strongly featured the Steelers players, and their pursuit of the championship? One has to wonder if the NFL is working to orchestrate the story line. This story line: An owner faithful to his coach despite his ups and downs, a running back in his home town at the end of his career possibly ready to retire and a stadium full of their fans. There could have been a more appropriate [arranged?] ending.

Personal Responsibility

2006-02-01T23:02:00.000-05:00

I'm all for some level of corporate accountability so that corporations can't run wild putting people at risk and taking advantage of them.

We've all heard stories of lawsuits that just throw personal responsibility out the window, but this one has to be up there.

I mean, c'mon.

Charlie Rose Got It Right

2006-01-07T00:05:00.000-05:00

I don't know who Charlie Rose is specifically, I hadn't heard of him until today. I've learned, though, that he is a "public television staple". So why do I care and what has he gotten right?

Well apparently copies of Charlie's show are going to be available online through Google's new video offering. Google makes a couple good decisions. The first is to enter in to the video market. I talked in my last post about the possibility of Google hitting $600/share. This would be unlikely with their heavy dependence on advertising for the main source of profit. With their video offering Google gets 30 percent of the revenue. Just like any other market, as the online advertising market matures it becomes cheaper for competitors to enter the market, so profit margins go down and competition intensifies. The second good decision was to let content suppliers set their own price. This allows the marketplace to determine the value of these videos: if a supplier set the value to high the video won't get purchased.

Where Google made their mistake was inventing their own copy protection technology adding another format to an already saturated market. There's now four major copy protection technologies: Microsoft, Apple, Sony (stay away from this one) and Google. What does this do? It prevents any but the most loyal and trusting from immediately adopting this service. When will these companies learn that success is going to be found in a universal format? Because of Apple's ease of use, and cultural icon status, I think Google made a mistake doing this. With iTunes, you download a video and it puts it right on your iPod for you, no work on your part. Google's got a huge hill to climb to compete there, especially if only unrestricted content can be placed on media players since Google currently doesn't offer one.

So getting back to Charlie Rose, he got it right because his videos will be offered through Google's service unrestricted, meaning they can be put on various media devices, and won't require an internet connection to verify the right to play them. If only all the other content providers would be so smart and follow suit. If I purchase it from, let me own it and do with it what I will. Until then all you do is give people a reason to pirate it in order to have the right to do that.

Six Hundred A Share

2006-01-04T23:02:00.000-05:00

A lot has been made about Google making, or not making, $600/share sometime this year. MSNBC.com, for example, had an article about it today.

I'd say if they venture into the consumer PC market, with a multimedia PC running their own operating system for somewhere around $200 available at Walmart they've got a pretty good chance.

(Thanks to TS for the link.)

Yahoo Wins

2005-12-10T20:12:00.000-05:00

Well, they win a battle anyway, but a big one in my opinion. Not too long ago I wrote a post about delicious. One of the things I mentioned was that based on how their tagging works, delicious would change the foundation of search and the big search engines (Yahoo!, Google and M$N) would end up paying for access to their databases of tagged links. Well, Yahoo decided not only did they want access to that information, but that they wanted to own it exclusively. It was announced on Friday that delicious was purchased by Yahoo!. It'll be very interesting to see how this relationship evolves and how Yahoo! uses delicious and all those socially tagged links to their advantage.

Congrats to Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures (both are blogs I love to read and learn a ton from) on a great investment in delicious, and to the whole delicious team on such a great product.

Where Good Ideas Go To Die

2005-12-01T20:46:00.000-05:00

It amazes me at how successful a business can be at turning a profit and how unsuccessful it can be at harvesting ideas. I'm not talking about any particular business here, I'm talking about a lot of them. You know them well, you worked (or work there) or know someone close to you who has. They are small business and large business, privately owned or publicly traded. Every year the business posts a profit. Sometimes more, sometimes less usually depending on the economy within their marketplace and/or the economy as a whole. But when you talk to the people inside these organizations they see areas where their companies could do so much more. I'm not talking about executive staff or high-level managers here, not PhD's or MBA's, I'm talking about middle-managers and the folks they work hand-in-hand with who actually do the work that makes the money on a daily basis. They often see things the people at the top never see. They see how the company could do things more efficiently, how they could trim off some fat, how they could bring in more staff in certain areas and the list of ideas goes on and on. Sometimes, if a business is lucky to have extremely intelligent individuals, they get great ideas about new markets to venture into, new policies to develop, new products to manufacture or departmental restructuring that would increase productivity. The unfortunate truth is most of these ideas go unheard, unrecognized and unused. Either that or they get shared and then someone in management takes credit for the idea if it turns out to be a success. The sad reality is that some of the most successful companies in our country are places where good ideas go to die.

Here's how to tell if your organization is a place, or is on its way to becoming a place, where good ideas go to die:

5. The staff works 9-5 with no passion about the work that they do.

4. Ideas from executives and upper-level managers are the only ideas heard and acted on because that's what they get paid for.

3. Executives and upper-level management spend their time meddling in how people do their every day jobs.

2. Customer service people have been noticing that even the best customers have been complaining more and more about the service they've been getting or the quality of the products they've been buying.

1. The best (hardest) workers never seem stick around for long.

There is hope though. If you aren't headed there yet and want to make sure you never do, if you see some of the signs and want to address it now or even if you've been there for so long you're not sure you can turn it around it can be done, here's what you should do:

Find someone among the ranks of your employees that most everyone trusts and respects. Have them meet with people and find out where changes need to be made. Then commit yourself, and your management team, to making those changes and report back to your staff on specifically how and when you intend to see those changes through.
Buy everyone lunch. Have pizza and salad brought in to the office. Then go hang out with them. Ask them about their significant others, their kids and their hobbies. Spend time getting to know your staff and actually show that you care by spending time with them and remembering the things that they tell you.
Have a place where employees can submit their ideas. Spend time investigating and collaborating on those ideas and determine if anything of value can be accomplished. If an idea translates into some level of success for the company publicly recognize and reward the employee for their contribution.

There are so many other things that can be done, but those are just a handful and they're not that hard to do. The important thing is to find value at every level of the organization. It might take some hard work to do that, but any company can be a place where good ideas thrive.

Do You Del.icio.us?

2005-11-30T13:51:00.000-05:00

It's kind of like "Do you Google?" but better.

Google search, as I've been lead to understand it, essentially uses a page rank algorithm that decides how high a page should display in their search results based on how many times other people link to it. Del.icio.us on the other hand is essentially a repository of links that have been collected and tagged by people, including me.

Del.icio.us is better than Google because people have decided that there's value in these links. Let's say for example that I want to find information on, by and from venture capitalists. I could search Google for "venture capital" and then I'd probably end up having to slog through about 10 pages of links to find maybe a handful of valuable ones. If I want to check out what other people are finding on the web on venture capital that they've deemed valuable, I can just type http://del.icio.us/tags/venturecapital into my address bar. The result is all the links that people have tagged "venturecapital" via del.icio.us that they've found useful or interesting. It's almost as though people have gone through the Google links before me and filtered through all the muck to glean out the best of the web.

Because of this I find that when I want immediate, useful information my first reaction is to check del.icio.us for it. As more and more people begin to use it, and as del.icio.us continues to find ways to build on the social tagging phenomenon I truly believe that Google will find their very foundation of search shaken, and they'll be too far behind del.icio.us' database of tagged links to ever catch up. The result will either be that Google (and Yahoo! and M$N) will end up having to pay some sort of royalty to access del.icio.us' databases for search purposes, or del.icio.us will replace Google as the search engine of tomorrow.

Well I'm on the topic, there are a couple of other things about del.icio.us that make it so great. Now, when you want to search for a topic, you can save for yourself all the links you found on that topic that were useful to you. So if you were to want to learn about the programming language Ruby, you could first search del.icio.us, then tag any of the links yourself that were useful to you with "ruby" and you can now reference those tags from your own del.icio.us page anytime. Another great feature is if you find something that would interest someone else that you know, you can tag that page for:turbobrown, and then I can go to a page that shows all the links people have tagged for me. In this way if you are trying to collaborate on something, or you are having people help you to collect useful links, they have a place they can store them to. It's really an amazing feature.

So back to my original question...do you del.icio.us? You should! (Don't worry, it gets easier to type the more you do it, I promise.)

Oakland County Wireless

2005-11-29T11:42:00.000-05:00

Looks like Oakland County is getting ready to start their wireless project. We'll see how well this works, but it seems to me this is big time bad news for cable and dsl providers in these areas. Good thing I just moved from Wixom and now they decide to introduce county provided wireless there. It will be interesting to see how long it takes to get to me now on the Western-most edge of Oakland County in New Hudson.

FedEx Has Bad Policies

2005-11-28T19:01:00.000-05:00

I was just in FedEx to pick up some concert tickets that they had attempted to deliver to my old address. While I was waiting in the ever growing line I observed an interaction that left me baffled.

A gentleman was attempting to ship two packages on behalf of his company. How this unlucky guy had gotten picked to do this job none of us will ever know. It was clear to me, however, that this was not something he had done before. He handed the FedEx employee his company's two packages and said he wanted to send them on the corporate account. The employee asked for the corporate account number and when the gentleman indicated that he didn't have it the employee asked for his ID and a business card. The gentleman had his ID but no business card. Apparently, according to this gentleman, his company doesn't issue business cards to people in his position. (This makes sense from any company's point of view of course; if a person doesn't need to hand out business cards why pay to have them made?) The FedEx employee indicated that he couldn't ship the packages on a corporate account without a business card, but if he would like the gentleman could pay by credit card. Of course I'm sure this guy knows he can pay with a credit card to ship packages via FedEx, but why pay with your personal credit card and go through the hassle of getting reimbursed when the company has a corporate FedEx account. The gentleman indicated that he didn't wish to pay for the shipping charges on his personal credit card and he wanted to know what his options were. The FedEx guy essentially told him that he has no other options and is ready to move on to the next customer.

Now here's where my story gets good. The gentleman then told the FedEx employee that he had his badge and asked if that would suffice. At this point, throughly enjoying myself, I expected the FedEx employee to say "Of course, that will work just fine." His response? Nope, it has to be a business card.

Now let's think through this and hopefully someone can help me make sense of it. We've all gotten those offers for free business cards, right? I know I have. What is to prevent me from getting a business card that looks very professional that indicates that I work for some company that I don't actually work for. Well, if they had a FedEx account, with my ID and that business card I could ship whatever packages I wanted at their expense. (My, that's not such a bad.....nevermind.) On the other hand, what better way to prove that I work for a company than to show my badge with a photo on it. It has the company name and a picture of yours truly, or in this case the gentleman trying to ship the package. This proof of employment seems much harder to me to fake, and should be an acceptable method of proving you work for a company.

Well, needless to say it's not acceptable to FedEx and the gentleman, left with no other choice, paid for the packages with his own money and collected every shred of evidence to prove that he had done so for future reimbursement purposes I'm sure.

Now I'm not sure if this employee is being overly difficult, or if he is so constricted by FedEx rules that he is not allowed to step out on such a solid limb and accept a company badge as proof of employment. My guess though is it's the rules and employees are forced to abide by them.

If I was that gentleman I would recommend to that company that we take our business to UPS, and I intend to do the same. Why unnecessarily create hassle for a perfectly legitimate customer. There is just no excuse.
For more on the awesome things FedEx does, visit FedEx Furniture and read about how they've hassled that poor guy.

[Update]: Immediately after posting this I tried the link and discovered that it appears the FedEx successful brought the site down. So you can read all about the situation and see some pictures at Wired.

Nieces

2005-11-25T18:01:00.000-05:00

Our nieces spent the night last night, and they're with their grandmas over the next couple of nights so that their parents can have a much deserved weekend away. They are so cute and such a joy to be around.

Playing with the balloon

Pretending not to notice the camera

How cute

What a smile

Playing the computer

Dinner Time

Obviously the red-eye reduction on our camera doesn't work very well. Anyone know of any programs that do red-eye reduction that I could use?

Thanksgiving

2005-11-25T16:40:00.000-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I hope yours was as wonderful as mine. My in-laws all came over and Shannon, her Mom and her sister combined to provide us with an amazing meal. Before dinner her dad and brother hung the mirrors in our upstairs bathrooms. They look great. The countertop to ceiling mirror makes our master bath look larger. I guess it pays to know the right people *grin*.

The day after Thanksgiving is one of the few days I look forward to leftovers. Day-old turkey and mashed potatoes....yum!

We just set up the Christmas tree. My rule is no Christmas music or decorations until after Thanksgiving. Suprisingly enough it's one of the few "rules" that I have that Shannon is willing to abide by, 100.3 WNIC on the other hand refuses to abide by that rule. There was no shopping by the Brown family today. Our nieces spent the night last night so Shannon has been playing mom all day. It's a practice she's been relatively used to since marrying me a little bit over a year ago.

I have a lot to be thankful for! I'm so thankful for my wife Shannon. She is so much my opposite that as a team we make a complete person. Where I falter (spending too much, being organized, etc.) she steps right in and carries us along. She's such an amazing woman and wife, and I never could have believed I would be so blessed in marriage to have a friend and partner as wonderful as her. I can't say enough about how much she means to me.

I'm thankful for my dad who sacrificed so much of himself to work two jobs during my childhood so that we could have not just what we needed, but a lot of what we wanted. It's amazing as an adult to look at what kind of personal sacrifice working two jobs is. It also allowed me to get a great education which, combined with his setting an example of a solid work ethic, helped get me to where I am now.

I'm thankful for my mom, who is absolutely the best. She is so soft-hearted and other people's feelings are always more important to her than her own. She taught me to have compassion for people, including the forty some-odd foster children my parents welcomed in our home over the years. And I'm thankful that my mom is such an amazing cook, blessing me over and over again.

I'm thankful for my sister who I've continued to develop a stronger friendship with over the last few years more so than ever. I love to talk to her about her life experiences and her perspectives about human resources and business, even if we don't agree during every discussion. She is such a wealth of knowledge and she shares some of the best information I can gather. She's also a great example to me of what hard work and dedication along with a heck of a lot of smarts can do for someone.

I'm thankful for my brother Josh who brings a unique perspective and definitely lots of humor to every situation.

And I'm thankful for my brother Seth. He's such a blessing to me. It's interesting to talk to him and figure out if I was like that at his age. We have such a great time hanging out together, and it's amazing to watch him grow and imagine all the great things he will do with his life.

I am truly blessed, and I thank God that he saw fit to bless me so abundantly.

What are you thankful for?

Where were you?

2005-11-22T11:56:00.000-05:00

I was there and it was crazy. It was an experience like one I've never been a part of before, and one I hope to never experience again. I'm a huge sports fan and last night I was given the opportunity to go to the Detroit Red Wings game. I, of course, bit at the chance to go immediately, calling my wife and leaving her a message letting her know I'd be home late. It had been at least a couple years since I last went to a game, and just last week I was talking with a friend about how sorely I had missed it.

The Predators had the Wings on their heels for most of what was played of the first period. Multiple quality scoring chances were theirs one of which lead to a goal. The Wings had a couple chances of their own, but they weren't passing well and if the game continued to play out how it was going it wasn't going to be good.

And then it happened. Our seats were across from the benches and the puck was in the corner to our left at the Nashville end. The Wings were fighting for the puck hoping to create a scoring chance. It was then that a murmur ran through the crowd and I noticed a commotion at the bench. Players were hopping onto the ice, Babcock was jumping up and down to get the officials attention to have them stop play. Staff, medical and otherwise, were rushing to the aide of some person, unseen by us, right by the door closest to the Red Wing goal.

At first it all seemed to happen so fast. "Someone fell from the stands," I heard one person ignorantly speculate. "No, it's a player," came a rebuttall from someone else near them. None of us really knew, and no one official was saying anything. The Red Wings bench cleared and both teams headed to the locker room with the exception of a few players including Yzerman and Shanahan. That's when time started to slow.

As the players cleared out of the way it was then we could see something was dramatically wrong. Medical personnel were giving someone CPR. We could see one them repeatedly doing chest compressions. "They took off a jersey," someone said, "it's a player". "Lots of fans are wearing jersey's," someone else replied, still leaving us with plenty of doubt and certainly fear for the condition of whomever it was. People around me were frantically trying to make cell phone calls, mostly to no avail due to either bad signals or overloaded circuits, no one is quite sure which. The rumor that it was a player was confirmed when one member of personnel cast aside a set of shoulder pads.

Bits of news rolled in as calls started connecting, but we were still getting mixed messages. It was definitely Jiri Fischer, but there was debate as to whether he was hit by a stick or the puck, or if he had experienced a stroke. The ambulance rolled up to the zamboni entrance and medical staff and a woman emerged (we later learned that woman was Jiri's fiance). We watched as Wings players skated across the ice, grabbed the stretcher and skated it hurredly over to the bench. At that point we saw the IV and felt as though that was a good sign: the heart was pumping and blood was flowing. After getting Jiri on the stretcher they took him down the locker room hallway and the ambulance pulled away to meet them there. That's when they finally broke the silence over the PA saying essentially that the ice would be resurfaced and play would be resumed after a between period-like break. "They're not playing this game," someone near me said. Still, we waited, mostly for official news about what was going on.

The clock started and we watched it tick down, and still we waited. Time ran out, play should be resuming, nothing was happening, and still we waited. Then, probably seven minutes or so after the clock had first shown zeros, the announcement came across the PA the Jiri Fischer had suffered a seizure, but he was stable, responsive and on his way to Detroit Receiving hospital. Not two minutes later they announced that the NHL, Management and players had decided to cancel the game.

We walked out amazed at the events of the evening, everyone mildly disappointed at the cancellation, but certainly completely understanding. I don't know how you respond, but it's always events like this that make me realize how fragile life and health are. Jiri is a 25 year-old athlete fit and toned and in pristine physical condition. I am a 25 year-old professional who sits at a desk all day and in poor physical condition. It definitely makes you think, and it's a sporting experience I won't forget for a long time.

You can read more about last nights events on the Detroit Red Wings website, at ESPN.com, in the Detroit Free Press here and here and in the Detroit News.

The TV Plan

2005-10-19T23:22:00.000-04:00

I bought a nice TV a while ago. I still struggle with whether it was a wise purchase or not. Not because any kind of impact the purchase had on our pocket books, but rather the reflection it has on me as to what I put value in. Regardless, I spend some time watching that TV, and when I spend time watching it, I'm not doing other more valuable or constructive things. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think TV is bad; I enjoy CSI, House and Threshold just as much as the next guy, but my downfall is sports. And I'm starting to wonder if I spend too much time watching that TV. So I've come up with a new plan: I'm going to attempt to not watch TV by myself. Now, I've already talked myself in to making exceptions for football and major events from other sports, such as the world series, but I'm going for the general idea of spending more time doing other more constructive things. So I'm hoping to be doing more blogging, reading and working from home (you can never get away, especially not if you want to be in charge somewhere someday). So far tonight I'm doing great, but it's also the first day executing my new plan. But I have to take a little credit, the Astro's and Card's are (or is it were already...what time is it?) playing a crucial game 6 tonight. Time to go check ESPN.com.

Thought Lines

2005-10-19T23:08:00.000-04:00

I've got a couple things on my mind lately and they're totally unrelated, or maybe they're mildly related....I'll let you decide.

The first and most important to me, is spiritual. If your not into that kinda thing scroll down to the 2nd item. If you're intrigued read on. I consider myself I pretty spiritual guy. I hold to my Christian faith pretty strongly. I might work it a little differently than a lot of Christians or church-goers the average person has met. I'm not a brow-beater, I don't take it over the top, that kind of thing. So here's my dilemma: I'm a business man by trade. It's someone else's business (right now), but I consider myself business minded and do what I can within the constraints of the current system. So the problem I run in to is how do I negotiate my job with my faith. At my job, the god is the almighty dollar, and it's so easy to get sucked in to that. At the workplace everyone looks out for themselves instead of others. As a man of faith, I care about others, and lives being changed by the name of Jesus Christ is what's valuable to me. So how do I negotiate the two together? Am I doing a good job? How do I tell? I've been wrestling with this question for the last six years (the extent of my professional life). I'm competitive in business, but I want to make sure I am competitive for the glory of God. I want to be successful in business, but I want to make sure I am succeeding for the glory of God. I question the value of what I do everyday, and I know I'm really bad at not getting caught up in the culture I work in. It's a constant battle.

The other thing on my mind is business related. My primary task right now is to determine user needs and outline and oversee design of systems that are put in place to meet those users needs. The problem is getting users to communicate what they need in a visionary way. They are tied so closely to what they know and can't visualize what might be that they are sometimes unable to provide insight as to what my be helpful. The problem is they are fantastic at the jobs they do on a daily basis, and I need those skills to translate into a working system that helps with those jobs. The next attempt, and it's the first time ever with this method at my current place of business, is to do some job observation. I sit with someone and just watch what they do and how they work for a couple three hours. (Yes, I see what I did just there grammatically and I do it all the time, so deal with it). Then I have to become the visualizer translating the efforts that I see to design and create a system that supports those efforts. I guess only time will tell how well I can do at that.

Google Reader Verdict

2005-10-12T23:32:00.000-04:00

I'm sticking with Newsgator. I don't like the way Google Reader is organized. On the left hand column of Newsgator are any feeds I've subscribed to with unread posts followed by the number of unread posts in parenthesis. You can tell which feeds I check on a daily basis 'cause you'll see them pop in with 1 or 2 new feeds whereas the ones I like to occasionally keep tabs on may have more than 10 - 15. With the Google reader, though, the left hand column is a list of each individual unread item. So if I have 15 unread items from a single feed, all fifteen are listed one by one.

I do love the keyboard shortcuts and the interface as always is impressive, but I'm not making the switch. For me right now Newsgator is where it's at.

Squidoo Revisited

2005-10-12T23:22:00.000-04:00

I talked about Squidoo in a previous post. But don't take my word for it. Check out what A VC has to say about. While your at it, add him to your blog roll. He's one of my everyday reads, and there's always good stuff coming from his blog. Then check out what Jeff Jarvis has to say about it.

I still haven't heard anything about how or when beta testers are being brought on board, but my fingers are crossed. (It's hard to type with crossed fingers, maybe I should hold my breath instead.)

Google Reader Beta

2005-10-08T11:08:00.000-04:00

Google has now entered the feed reader foray. Check out the official announcement here.

I can't tell you what I think of it yet. I imported my opml file from Newsgator my current feed reader that I really like. There's no feeds in there yet, so I guess it will pull them from now moving forward. I'll play around for it for a couple days and post my thoughts.

The thing I found most interesting right off the bat was that the url for the reader home, or main, page when you're logged in is "/reader/lens". Maybe I haven't been reading enough Web 2.0 stuff, but it sure seems like "lens" is going to be a new buzz word.

Condo Update #2

2005-10-08T00:16:00.000-04:00

Still no tenants. The place is starting to look very empty. The walls are bare, the window dressings have come down, and we're pretty much to the point where if we don't need it now, it goes into a box now.

The newspaper listing was a total waste of money, and I'm not surprised. Well, I take that back, I can't be sure it was a total waste of money. I got 3 calls. Two were for a condo in Warren that wasn't mine (Wixom, Warren, Wixom, Warren). They must have been listed right by eachother. The other call I received was from a rental placement company. They charge potential tenants to help the locate a place to rent that meets their needs. I haven't received a call from anyone as a result of that conversation, but I still may. That's why I can't say the add was a total waste of money.

The signs are back out for the weekend. They got picked up again Monday morning because we forgot to grab them Sunday night. I'm thinking my next step is to list it on forrent.com. We'll see what happens.

Squidoo

2005-10-07T23:41:00.000-04:00

I think Seth Godin has the start of something big, or at the very least an idea that's worth reading about. I could try to translate and explain, but why do that when he wrote an ebook that explains it, read it here.

Why do I think this is so big? Well, the start of his ebook tells a story of shopping for an espresso machine via google that could easily be a methaphor for my experience this week of trying to figure out how to install PHP on a Windows XP machine running IIS. I started by searching google for PHP, which took me to PHP.net. Of course there's a whole host of options for downloading, and how am I supposed to know, with my complete lack of experience with PHP, which package I want. I mean c'mon, I'm used to pre-packaged installers fed to me on a platter as a Windows user (now if only everything worked well, and was secure...a rant for another time). So I do what any other web developer would do, I go back to the google search results and click link after link for some useful information. Two days later I'm still getting errors trying to run PHP, and I'm tired of searching.

All this trouble from someone who feels like he speaks "search" pretty well. There's gotta be a more effective way to get this information, right? Well, I could check delicious. But there's no way to sort the list, or tell which links are actually going to help me get solutions to my problems. What I would give for a lens that pulls in all the useful information for me: all the files I need, recommended or required confirgurations and best of all instructions collected from various sources to help me resolve any and every problem I might face working with PHP in my environment.

The best part of the whole idea, in my opinion, is that charities can benefit. How that works doesn't appear clearly spelled out to me, but if it happens, I'm all for it.

I signed up to be a Squidoo beta tester. I'm hoping to be able to test my hand at lensmaking sooner than later. There's no indication of what the criteria is, so I'm hoping my name is one of the few pulled out of the hat. I strongly recommend you check this out, and subscribe to Seth's feed while you're at it.

I want meaning not clues. Read the ebook!

Condo Update

2005-09-28T23:03:00.000-04:00

Well, I had to do it. I paid for an advertisemnt with the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press. It's a 7-day ad that will run starting Friday. Supposedly that gets me posted on the affiliated website, miHomehunt, but I'm not exactly clear how that works. I'm not sure if the terms are the same as the print ad, i.e. 7 days starting Friday. I guess we'll see. I'll be posting how many phone calls I get as a result.

Oh, and we'll also be putting the signs back out Friday after 5:00 pm and we'll pick them up sometime Sunday evening. That way when City of Wixom employee Andy goes back to work on Monday morning he won't have to pick them up for us.

Linux Stupid

2005-09-28T22:50:00.000-04:00

I've been a Windows user for my entire life...er, since the age of 8. As a professional, I'm a Windows developer. Facing a potential move into management, some day, I have to take into account cost, versatility and security among other things. That translates into looking at open-source licensed software including Linux. And when it comes to Linux I have no idea what I'm doing. A co-worker gave me a copy of Fedora Core 3 that I installed on a crappy system I've had sitting around. (Yes, I've since discovered that Fedora Core 4 is available, but I'll stick with 3 for now). The installation was simple, although a bit slow (probably as more the machine constraints as the software). All was fine until I became aware that the Belkin Wireless G network card I had put in isn't recognized. I scoured the internet (translation: Googled) for an install file to no avail. Then, I came across this site which walked me through installing the NDIS wrapper, which I downloaded here. Then it walked me through installing the drivers and bingo-bango it worked.

Coming soon: Actually getting the system to connect to my network so I can browse the internet. Keep your fingers crossed...or give me some helpful links.

Album Only

2005-09-28T22:44:00.000-04:00

I frequently purchase music from Apple's iTunes. However, any time the listing for an album I was looking at had a song marked as "Album Only" I've been going to the store to buy the disc. See, I assumed that "Album Only" meant you can only get it on the CD. Well, you know what they say about assuming things. Sometimes I think I was put on this planet to exemplify the truth of that saying. Anyhow, I purchased an album off iTunes today that had a digital booklet and video that I didn't care whether or not I received, so I proceeded with purchasing the entire album. Sure enough, as most of you I'm sure know, I received both the digital booklet and the video. Why? Because I purchased the album and those items are available not for individual downloads, but only with the album.

"The lesson as usual, I'm an idiot." - The Sports Guy

Condo For Rent

2005-09-27T12:46:00.000-04:00

We're moving and we're hoping to hold on to our Condo as an investment property. We started by listing on Craigslist and putting out signs outside our subdivision and at some major crossroads. Our original signs were taken down sometime last week, after having been up for a little while (at least a couple weeks). We figured they had been taken down because they had to mow the lawns. So we purchased some new ones, actually bigger ones too, hoping for more attention, and I put them out last night. Shannon was on her way out to work this morning and the sign out in front of our sub was already gone. We had put the other one at Wixom Rd (& Potter) instead of Beck & Maple, hoping to catch some new attention, so she went that way and sure enough that one was gone too. She called the city and it turns out there's some sort of city ordinance that doesn't allow signs on city property, and part of some guy's job is to enforce that rule. Apparently on his way to work this morning, he saw one of our new signs, so he went and took both of them down again. (His name is Andy and he's a nice guy according to Shannon. He went and fished our signs out of the dumpster and let her pick them up. Go figure.)

Now I am going to have to find a new way to list the condo as Craigslist has produced no results for me, I don't want to pay real estate to list it (they charge 1 month of the lease price) and I can't have signs on city property. Time to turn to the old-fashioned newspaper?

Sports Broadcast the Way They Should Be

2005-09-01T10:30:00.000-04:00

Due to a lockout of their on-air personalities and camera-people, among others, the CBC television network is broadcasting Canadian Footbal League (CFL) games the way they should be. What happens when games are broadcast in this format? Ratings go up...dramatically. Now I'm not one to put a lot of value in ratings, they're just based on a general survey of viewership (that's a whole other rant), but you just can't argue with the rating differences mentioned in the article.

Will this catch on with Fox and the MLB playoffs, probably not. How about TNT with the NBA playoffs? Wait, you mean no more announcers shoving "The Closer" down my throat 85 times per game? What a dream. The OLN should try this with regular season NHL games. What do they have to lose? Certainly not viewership. Among other things it would definitely draw them some major press, and people tuning in to check out the experience. It would be good for hockey and good for OLN all at the same time. I'll be waiting for their phone call to bring me on as an advisor (although I won't be holding my breath).

Mobile Again

2005-06-13T23:28:00.000-04:00

I wouldn't wish hard drive failure on anyone. The hard disc in my laptop failed, so I had to get a new one. The worst loss was digital pictures, a lot of them. Thankfully we still print all our pictures (there's still a little bit of old school around here), so it wasn't a totally loss. However, the down time was frustrating, as is having to reconfigure the machine. The worst part: having to install windows twice. That's right. The machine originally came with XP Home, but for remote access purposes I needed XP Pro. Of course Pro is only the upgrade so I had to install Home first. To be fair, the recovery discs from HP work exceptionally well. I just put them in the drive, selected all the drivers to load, and didn't have to anything else. The biggest problem came when I tried to activate Pro. It wouldn't let me. So, in order to register it you have to call Microsoft. First, you speak with a interactive recording where you have to recite a 54-digit (at least) installation id. Of course that didn't work, so I was transferred to a technician at one of their overseas support plants. Thankfully there was no hold time. After reading only the first six digits of the installation id (thankfully I didn't have to read it twice) I was asked a couple questions about why I was installing it, and if it was installed anywhere else. She then read a 42 digit code 3 digits at a time, and I'm finally up and ready to try and recreate all my custom settings. The whole thing took around two hours, and The Order from Comcast onDemand just isn't that good.

I've learned a couple things from the hard drive failure experience. First of all, backup policies aren't just for the office. Time to figure out how I'm going to back stuff up at home. Second, know what your warranty covers. I got a one-year warranty on the laptop, an HP Pavilion zd7000. The hard drive is a Toshiba, that if purchased separate from a system comes with a 3-year warranty. But here's how it works: if you purchase the equipment as part of the system, the warranty policy of the system manufacturer trumps the policy of the part manufacturer. So the 1-year HP warranty overrides the 3-year Toshiba warranty and I'm left having to buy the new drive myself. It certainly doesn't make sense from an HP perspective since all they have to do is handle the drive replacement, and all it costs them is time. They send Toshiba the bad drive, and Toshiba sends them the replacement which they forward on to me. That makes sense. What they're left with instead is a former customer (although I'm not ready to give up their printing products yet). I don't know if other system manufacturer's work the same way, and hopefully I'll never have to find out.

Checking Out Ann Arbor

2005-06-10T23:40:00.000-04:00

No, not me. I haven't been there since the Wolverines made a huge comeback to defeat MSU. Probably one of the best football games I've ever seen, and I was there live and in person. But I digress, it's Google who's checking out Ann Arbor.

It Really Works

2005-06-10T23:27:00.000-04:00

I joined Blingo a couple months ago after reading about it on a blog somewhere. (I'd credit the source, but I can't be sure who it was.) Anyhow, I try to use it as my primary search site since it uses Google's engine, only you have the chance to win prizes such as a PSP, an iPod or movie tickets.
Well, I'm here to tell you that it appears that what they say is true. Today, one of the people I signed up won movie tickets. Since I signed them up, I did too! How can you join, just click the blue "Blingo" button on the right hand column of my blog and join. Soon you'll be searching for prizes too, and just maybe you'll be a lucky winner.

Community Failure

2005-05-06T00:39:00.000-04:00

I've recently been turned on to the idea of businesses developing communities around their products or services. When companies are open with their customers, and communicate with them, they develop a strong community of faithful consumers.
Today I felt like a community I've been a part of for quite some time failed me. See, I'm a huge sports fan, and I've counted myself as a member among the probably millions of the community of The Worldwide Leader in Sports. It all started when I came across an article about the impact of the NBA in Turkey by Chad Ford (we'll see how long the link works, it appears it may end up in their members only section). My wife's cousin is married to a current NBA player who got into the league by playing overseas, including Turkey. His success there lead him to where he is now in the NBA. I thought this might be a neat angle for Chad's story, so I wanted to send him an email. I searched all over the page for his email address, and was unable to find it. I poked around the website until I came to this.
Needless to say this is not a good way to develop community, and I was highly disappointed. I don't know how it's going to affect my loyalty to ESPN, and to many it won't seem like a big deal, but I wanted to contribute to the community today, and my effort was blocked. Maybe I'll poke around SI.com tomorrow or FoxSports.com and see if either of them are interested in hearing my two cents because that's the kind of community I want to be a part of.

An unusual statement

2005-03-03T23:03:00.000-05:00

The mayor of Las Vegas speaking to a group of 4th graders talked about his love of gin. Apparently he is well known for his affinity for gin, so much so that he was paid $100,000 to be a spokesman for a gin company.

Now comes the refreshing part, yes, you read that right: He donated half the money to a shelter and substance abuse agency and the other half to a private school. That, and when interviewed by the media about his statements, he stood by them. Very different from the denials, or excuses of the listeners misunderstandings that have become the norm for today's public figures when they are told by others that they spoke out of line.

Time To Join In

2005-02-24T23:08:00.000-05:00

Up until this point I've only read news articles about blogs, or blogs on the websites where I read the news. Then it was like all of the sudden I found this unexplored world (unexplored by me of course, many others have made it a well traveled road): a guy who got fired from Google for writing too much on his blog, an exec at GM writing about the Detroit auto scene and so much more. So after browsing around and checking out some pretty neat blogs I decided it was time to make my own contribution.

Please note: this is a work in progress. The appearance may change and things of that nature. There is no topic that is off the subject, it's whatever happens to be on my mind at the moment. It goes where I want it to go and you are just along for the ride. The one thing I can promise, I won't make things up. Beyond that there are no guarantees.