Category: Daily Life

Categories
Daily Life

Living on the Bleeding Edge

I haven’t blogged that much about it (except for bitching about my bill that has been messed up for two months in a row), but I upgraded to a Palm Centro back in December. This was a big improvement over my Treo 600 (I know… a dinosaur bone).

There are two reasons I’ve stuck with the Treo:

  1. I’m not going to move my phones to AT&T just for an iPhone
  2. I use the phone as a wireless modem and it does a fantastic job when I have no access to wireless.

There is a downside to playing with new technology. I was disappointed at how my phone only seemed to connect to the web on the second try. It wasn’t able to stream audio or video very well. I wrote it off at first, but after 2 months I decided to check out the support forums.

A wise an knowledgeable person on the boards told me to call in and have my network service re-provisioned. I figured it was worth a try, and Lo! and Behold! my phone is totally smoking now.

This is my greatest technology fear, that there’s a pebble in my shoe and nobody has told me that they’re not supposed to hurt.

Now if Sprint can get my bill right this month, they’ll have made it back to the A-List.

Categories
Brain Buster Podcasting

Newspapers Have Less than 5 Years to Live

I had a great listen on the ride to work this morning – Eric Schwartzman of the On The Record Online’s latest interview with Duncan Wardle, Vice President of Walt Disney World and Global PR for Disney Parks.

If you have an iPod you should really go over to my Gigadial channel now and subscribe, that way when I find cool stuff, it gets loaded right to your iPod. How cool is that?

Mr. Wardle had some points that stuck with me:

  • Newspapers will die soon
  • The 6pm News will die before newspapers
  • Within the next 4-5 years any consumer will be able to block your organization if they determine you are not relevant.

So, are you ready to switch gears or are you going to ride the boat to Davey Jones’ Locker?

Categories
Brain Buster

Causation vs. Correlation

I am going to an event called Blogger Social in New York in April. One of the attendees, Steve Woodruff has pulled off the ultimate link bait and is doing profiles of the attendees so that you can learn about who is going to be there, before you get to the event. As a person with a last name that starts with “W” this is one of the few times I am getting lucky, I should be up there close to the event date and after the whole world is checking his site (assuming of course he makes it through the list before dying from exhaustion). This is a great example of social media in action, it’s quite possible that the 70 attendees at the event can get to know each other to some degree, even before attending the event.

Today featured Matthew Bailey, who has done a great piece of research on red shirted crewmen in Star Trek, and uses it as an example of  analytics in action. He also cites Edward Tufte, probably the closest thing to a rock star that you can find in the world of graphing (and by extension, economics).

There were two things the red shirt analysis brought to light for me. One is the recurring theme in marketing of testing raising more questions than answers. I find it very common to set up a test and have it raise additional questions that weren’t even considered in the first round. The other is “causation vs. correlation”, I think the last discussion I read on that was in Freakonomics, the fact that characteristics that a group of individuals have in common is not necessarily the reason they are grouped together. For example: yes, there were many red shirted crewmen that died, but that’s because the red shirt signifies the security team, people put in dangerous situations. There’s nothing inherently dangerous about a red shirt versus a blue one.

When causation is confused with correlation, this can lead to problems. In the past I have worked at organizations that would look at this data, ship some blue shirts to the security team, and declare victory.

Categories
Brain Buster

Mind Bending Use of Twitter

Twitter invites keep coming in. I have a normal routine, I click through and see who the person is. Anybody with more followers than they are following is fine with me. If you are equal or have 100+ more, it depends on if I know or like you, a highly subjective test.

Then there are the Spitters (Spam Twitters) who are following 2,000 people and have 3 followers. Those go to the junk bin.

Until today.

I got an invite from 5min_tech,  and they follow 2,000 more than follow them. I was about to relegate them to the clearing at the end of the path, until I read the tweets:

How to boost firefox speed? How to buy a computer? How to make flaming logos in Photoshop?

All things that, when flowing through my river of tweets, I might be interested in. Or at least more interesting than “Watch a sock puppet endorse ooVoo. Seriously!”

They got by the rules and defenses by giving some value to the customer – let that marinate for a while (a la Clarence).

Categories
Daily Life

Taxes

I hope you are enjoying your weekend. The time I would normally be writing today is going to be dedicated to preparing the documents I need to file my taxes. The fun never stops.

Categories
Daily Life Gaming

Valentine’s Day Card

A youtube vid… Thanks to Alec for the pointer.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA[/youtube]

Categories
Daily Life

More Mandolin

Many months ago Christopher Penn posted on his choice of music. I made a note to do a similar post, and on a Sunday I can indulge in a frivolous post.

I’ve heard it said that our minds are clay and that the things we read and listen to make a lasting impression. This is why I have cut back on the Fiction that I read and the amount of TV that I watch. I’ve also heard it said that TV is like having an open cesspool in your home.

Music greatly affects mood and you can move your emotional state by listening to the appropriate music.

My Mom and her family are from Detroit, and that side of the family gave me an appreciation for Motown, and I have always listened to R&B. My Dad is a drummer and a Jazz fan, which we share in common. Attending the Tanglewood Jazz Festival I was introduced to Jazziz Magazine, which is an excellent source of new jazz to check out, although it’s only available on a CD with the magazine. I’m surprised they haven’t made the jump to iTunes affiliate, and it’s amazing how hard it can be sometimes to find the tracks on their CD (I had to mail order a CD from Italy once that invalidated my credit card).

Add to that my formative years of the 80’s when I could afford to buy music and that covers about 90% of my library.

So, what’s on the playlist?

80’s Remixes and Mashups – from Retro Remixes

Jazz – Which has a lot of Diana Krall in it right now.

Hair Bands – Sammy Hagar, Waltham, Journey

R&B – Luther Vandross, anything from the Prince or Babyface extended families

Country (yes, I do listen to country sometimes) – Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith

Pop – My pop stuck in the 80’s, I check out the top hits on iTunes but don’t follow anybody

Ballads – James Taylor, Matthew Ebel, Billy Joel

Instrumental – John Williams, Yo-Yo Ma, Morricone, Enya

I also like the Mandolin, and we really don’t hear enough of that. My top 3 Mandolin Songs (please add any if you have any)

  1. Mandolin Rain – Bruce Hornsby and the Range
  2. Dance Tonight – Paul McCartney
  3. So Close – Daryl Hall and John Oates
Categories
Brain Buster

Sufficient

One of the more boring parts of adulthood is getting to make decision about what will suffice. For example, I was looking at TV’s right around the Superbowl. There’s a Sony Bravia flat panel with 20,000:1 contrast ratio that looks incredible, but the sad truth is: am I willing to cough up a huge pile of cash for a TV with less than 100 square inches more viewing area?

Sadly, no.

I got a offer for a new thermostat with a rebate from the gas company. Is it worth it to upgrade so I can now program every day as opposed to 2 modes (weekday/weekend). No.

The XBox has the dreaded Red Ring of Death, should I take this opportunity to upgrade the hard drive? It’s not worth the work to transfer the data to a new drive.

Our 2nd car has over 175,000 miles on it and has a repair every 6 months, but with my wife taking the train to work the car gets less than 2,000 miles put on it in those 6 months. It’s not worth taking on a new car payment to upgrade.

Remember this sorry message when marketing. It’s not enough to be (a little bit) better than your competition, you’ve got to overcome the switching cost too.

Categories
Daily Life

Home Sick

I’ve either got the flu or food poisioning. I was fine until around 9pm last night and then my digestive system decided to launch a full scale revolt. You know it’s bad when I’m lying on the couch and knowing that playing a video game is too much exertion for me to handle.

So I can check email and then sleep for a couple of hours. And repeat.

Categories
Daily Life

$uperB0wl Musical Mashup

I don’t talk much about it here, but I have a fairly large (over 10,000 track) music collection. In fact, my love of music got me into iPods, which got me into podcasting, which inspired me to blog. And that’s…. the rest of the story.

The first podcast I listened to, Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, used to feature Mashups on a regular basis – where two popular music tracks are mixed together.

I tend to not talk much about this because there are all kinds of copyright issues that come in to play, but it is impossible to ignore the “hidden tidal wave” of remixed content out there.

The best source for mashups is Mashuptown.com and today they have a mashup for the Big Game (you need to have approval to call it the $uper b0wl)

And it’s also a chance for me to test out the new audio player!

Warning: For any haters out there, it’s Rap, save yourself the aggravation
Direct Link to File