On Saturday I will be running the Race for the Cure here in Boston. It’s a huge event with thousands of runners and a flat course around the Seaport district. I’ve offered to pay registration fees for any regular readers that want to run.
After that it’s over to Microsoft NERD for Podcamp Boston 5, I’ll be doing a session at 11am with Christopher S. Penn. If you are hitting any of these events please say hello!
Longtime readers know of my love for music and audio, and regardless of the quality of my marketing thoughts here the linkbait of my headphone review trumps everything else at this site.
The original review was in 2007 and is posted here covering Shure, Sony and Bose. I also get a lot of traffic on how to get better sound out of your iPod if you are willing to cough up another $50.
So what’s new? I also mentioned the Nike earphones that I use for running, they died a couple of weeks ago at the Falmouth Road Race. After at least 3 years of sweating and pouring water over my head in hot weather I can say they are a superior product and served me well at the price.
I have replaced them with the Sennheiser PMX80 running earphones, which I had considered when I bought the Nike set. They are also great but it comes down to sound quality vs. comfort and isolation. The Sennheisers sound much better but they are a tiny bit heavier and they fight much tighter in my ear, this results in a much better sound, but I’m not able to hear what is going on around me as well. It comes down to much better music, or hearing what’s going on around you with out as much in your ear. For now, I’m liking the music, we’ll see how the hold up.
Shure Update – I got an email notice that Shure is refreshing the line of products. The big thing I noticed is that the cables are now removable. After a couple of years of heavy use the cord on mine broke because of the way they twist over my ear (and it should be mentioned that they repaired them for free). These are still getting heavy use and sounding great, although I haven’t tried anything new lately.
In other gear updates I got a Sony NEX-5 and will be posting some pics on Flickr soon.
Thanks to everyone that got in touch with me after the last post, your concern is truly appreciated. I had written that at a point where I was tired and waiting for things to move. This is why I know I am better than marketing than sales, I like the long term view, and the quick hit of response rates. The sales guys that grind out the large deals one at a time deserve to get the best cash comp in the organization.
Part of writing that was the fact that I know that when it was all done, I wouldn’t really feel like writing, but I wanted to have something in the pipeline for when it was done. The weekend is finally here and I have a chance to clean up a bit. I just finished my first week at Boston Software Systems, a company that takes the paperwork and data entry out of healthcare. Hospitals often have multiple IS systems (and worse yet there are many groups of hospitals that share data between the multiple hospitals with multiple IS systems), and Boston Workstation can automate the data entry across systems. It’s simple to use and powerful because it is flexible enough to automate almost any task.
I’m excited to be working with a couple of guys that I have worked with before, Mark mentioned I was like the Blues Brothers getting the band together again. Now that my evenings are mine again I’ll be able to get back to more reading, which will result in more to talk about. Thanks for checking in with me here, I’m off to enjoy the weekend.
For me, this is a sad post to write, but the good news is that if I ever hit the publish button, then I am probably enjoying an adult beverage and watching the sunset with a smile on my face.
How did I get to this point? Writing a post as digital therapy in July, knowing that it will sit in the draft bin for who knows how long. There have been two things this month that led me to this confession: I had touched base with Greg Verdino about his new book and he said “Man, where have you been?”. The other was Chris Brogan saying he was glad to see some blog posts out of me. Seth Godin said something to the effect that a good measure of your work is if people notice if you are missing. Given the busy schedules of Greg and Chris, that makes me feel pretty good.
So, where the hell have I been? Let’s rewind the clock to October 2009 for half the story – at Newton Wellesley after being awake for more hours in a row than I ever have before, our son arrived. That has been a wonderful adventure, taking up most of our lives but worth every minute. But the other half… that’s why this sits in the draft bin.
In December 2009 I did my annual review of how the year went. The dead week between Christmas and New Year’s is the perfect time to take a look at the bigger picture. The elephant in the back of my mind was that it would be my 5th anniversary at work. In June I vested in the last of my options, and in the startup world this makes you start thinking about the next big thing. If everything goes perfectly (I know maybe 4 people that have scored that lottery ticket), the startup you are at goes public or gets acquired and you tough out the days until you get all your shares. There are many tales of people throwing the vesting day party and then riding off into the sunset for a tour of Europe, writing a book, start a Daddyblog, taking up Yak farming, whatever…
Although we haven’t hit an event, everything is going very well. The company has grown 6x in my time there and it’s been great to watch the business grow and see customers like the Auto company that Monty hangs with arrive, and the first monster deal (and the monsters got bigger every other year or so).
After many discussions, coffees, lunches with friends asking about what I should be looking at next, the nuclear winter of the current economy was confirmed. In April I decided that there was no point in starting search with the summer coming on, and decided to stick with working only one job (a job search is always a full time job), and setting up the summer vacation.
This was the impetus for the end of the M Show, giving it a proper finish, silencing the nagging voice in the background that asked when the next show would go out. This freed time up for Marketing Over Coffee, which has continued it’s run this year and has been a fantastic source of networking for me.
As usual, the universe has no regard for my plans and has its way of telling me so. From the silence of the summer I was contacted by some folks that I used to work with and started talking to them.
And here I sit in a random coffee shop. As I write this draft, I really can’t talk to anybody about anything. I’m not writing anything, not getting myself into situations where I have to talk about anything on the horizon. I’m all set with phone calls at weird hours so that I can respect the day with my co-workers. The only laugh I had was from John T., we were talking about catching up over lunch so I could give him his Marketing Over Coffee Award, and he joked that we could try to eat lunch at the Newton Marriott but that they probably wouldn’t let us in since it wasn’t a job interview (sorry for the local 128 humor).
One day I soon will hit the publish button. I’ll have plenty of stories in the backlog, but I’m sure that by then I’m going to be spending all my time on the next big thing, and will be more than ready to stop staring at the horizon and itching to get down to work.
So after this gets posted I’ll be pretty busy with other stuff, but at least you’ll know where I’ve been.