No Soap, Radio!

I have been hooked on Lost for quite a while.  For the first two seasons I enjoyed the ensemble cast, the flash backs, the puzzles, and the inexplicable.  I forgave some of the aimlessness that crept in for a while.  Season 3 things started to slide into a nagging doubt that the writers were just making stuff up.  Now, part way through Season 4, I am pretty much done.  The show has turned into a soap opera with inferior writing and storylines.

During the writer’s strike, I discovered the Wire which I had somehow missed.  That show is arguable one of the best ever and it may have raised the bar so much that Lost was doomed this season anyhow.

The final straw is ABC’s new promotion for the upcoming show.

“week to week lost only gets better and better”

“thursday an all new Lost is one of the most unforgettable hours of television you’ll experience this season”

Really? I am pretty sure I am not alone in watching and thinking lost is only getting crappier and crappier.

Honestly, this type of faux testimonial should not be allowed by the FCC.

Tags: tv, lost, abc, fcc

Twenty-four hours before the SxSWi keynote with Mark Zuckerberg descended into chaos, Ballroom A was full with an audience too busy taking notes and paying attention to become unruly.Who was speaking? Jason Fried of 37Signals.

The reverence was punctuated with a single point of tension when Anil Dash of SixApart asked a very pointed question about limiting the ultimate size of a company by having people pay for web services. In what amounted to a Jedi mind trick, Fried side-stepped and moved on and it felt as if the audience was almost miffed at the silver-forked tongue of Anil for trying to get him off his game.

Know the audience. Unless you are talking about design, SxSW is not about sexy. Heck, Newsweek cover boy Kevin Rose was spotted vaulting over a wooden fence to get into the dive bar 16bit party that his own company was co-sponsoring!

It certainly isn’t about the money as Sarah Lacy learned when folks browned out with references to Zuckerberg’s net worth. In contrast, Jason Fried has mastered the art of wowing folks with stuff that is practical and useful. SxSW is all about knowledge and sharing; it is not about the news cycle.

Anil may have chosen the wrong moment, but he certainly has a point. 37Signals was born in a down market and one would think it difficult for them to accept valuations that have recently surfaced (Slide, Mahalo, et. al.), let alone the number Facebook has put up on the board. By all indications Fried isn’t budging. At a time when Jason Calacanis is crafting ways to keep people in the office, Fried is now trying out a 4-day work week because he has a hunch it will increase productivity. While others are looking for rock stars, 37Signals eschews resumes for folks who exhibit curiosity.

Clearly Fried knows his audience. I’d hazard a guess that were he to advise Mark Zuckerberg on speaking before folks in Austin, he’d have Mark sporting a t-shirt with Facebook’s PR message (”communicate efficiently”). That way Mark could focus on something the geek crowd could sink their teeth into like what inspired the original Facebook design or his thoughts on PHP. And with a small frost hitting the tech startup world, expect 37signals to remain as influential and relevant as ever.

I need to get this off my mind and then move on.  Clemens and his lawyers make up a vile trinity (photo) of some of the worst qualities in our culture: greed, manipulation, and a complete lack of accountability.

Between Barry and Roger, baseball has been pretty much destroyed for me.  The arrogance of these guys is mind numbing.

Performance enhancing drugs will be a major part of every single sport that has a potential pay off.  It is all about the money and until there is a penalty system that makes the reward not worth the risk, all sports will be affected.  For baseball, there are two options: fine players enormous sums retroactively (full salaries or more) and hold teams accountable.  If a starting player on a team fails a drug test then the team forfeits the next game or possibly loses eligibility for the post-season.   There needs to be a culture of enforcement, not silence.   Until then, just look around at sports with smaller payouts (e.g. cycling) — drugs are everywhere.

The show that the republicans put on during the hearing was so egregious that for the first time in my life I thought about becoming a politician.  These people are an embarrassment.  Ignorance + partisanship is horrifying.

After years of doing the remote control shuffle including some failed attempts at having one remote dominate the other, I picked up a Harmony 880.

To my astonishment, this thing actually works and I have put my tv remote, av remote, dvd remote, comcast remote, and apple tv remote all in a box on a shelf.

In my hand is one remote to rule them all.

Harmony has created an excellent web application to help you build up your remote around activites (e.g. watch tv, listen to the radio) and it has the nuance to handle even tricky stuff like getting apple tv on board and even including the 30 second skip for a comcast dvr.

It has been a while. There is nothing like the end of the year to start the wheels spinning!

Here is my best attempt at a brief recap.

The Web continues to grow and reinvent (ok, sometimes just duplicate!) and the biggest buzz of the year has clearly been Facebook. My fav (and office host), twitter, had a nice run after SxSW. Both companies have big challenges ahead. Twitter must get past niche status among tech folks. It may ultimately be restricted by the very limitations (140 characters) that helped it stand out. Facebook may fall well short of the amazing expectations it has conjured. Unfortunately, communication/community apps now have a long history online and they generally fall 1-3 orders of magnitude behind the cash cow that is search.

30 Boxes continued to quietly grow though we generally restrict it from getting too big (counter intuitive?). We were proud to stand out among a select few as nominees for both a Webby and SxSW.

This summer we got sidetracked with the Facebook hype and created a second company around a product called fbExchange — an ad and link trade network for Facebook. That business is making money!

We are also flattered to have seen many companies copy and improve upon concepts that were first presented within (and outside of) 30 Boxes like our Buddy Updates (e.g. Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, et. al.)

What else? iPhone is the first step toward the next 10 years of computing. Keep buying Apple stock, it will go up 5-fold or more. They are the only company with a clear vision and a commitment to products that make sense for a digital lifestyle.

I completed some adventure races and some ultramarathons. On a sad note, my teacher in life and spirituality, passed on in his 77th year. As a humanitarian, peace advocate, and creative spirit, Sri Chinmoy will be sorely missed by many and in many countries.

2008 seems to me full of promise despite the gloomsayers. I hope that you have the courage and determination to attain your goals. I will be searching for that balance that sparks ideas and innovation but affords an appreciation of all the good stuff and people I am fortunate to interact with on a daily basis.

I found this in my moderation queue.

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Blogs are going to have to adapt or fade away because of this garbage.

A while back I griped about Yahoo! Mail beta. It was nice but oh so slow. It also didn’t handle multiple accounts. With the recent global release, I gave it another shot, and I pleased to say that this is the finest web mail app I have used (caveat: I have not tried the new upgrade to .Mac).

Better than Gmail? Yep. It has a much cleaner UI, nicer integration with chat/messenger, rss feeds and a notification of new feeds (could do better here — like bold instead of the wimpy explosion graphic). Gmail’s performance gains originally outweighed their design risks and clutter. Not anymore.

Yahoo! Mail represents forward progress. I’ll be honest though; email needs to be totally reinvented from interface to feature set. It has served its time and someone needs to take it up a whole new level. Business idea, hmm…

Tags: yahoomail, gmail, email, web2.0

With all the absurd mergers and rebranding of the telephone companies, I can finally articulate how bad this is for business and the consumer. My wife and I have a new place and I have to set up phone service.

I have absolutely no idea who to call.

Last year I decided to buy a UK mobile phone while traveling in London. I can recall the trepidation as I entered the Vodafone shop expecting to be sucked into a 2-hour black hole. To my astonishment, I emerged 10 minutes later with a $30 phone and pay-as-you-go service.

Everything worked well until I left for France where I discovered that I couldn’t add credits with vouchers in France because they weren’t available. No problem, I decided to go online where after 30 minutes of navigation, account creation, and forms I learned that you can’t buy credits unless you have a UK-based credit card. The phone was thus rendered useless save for the incessant Vodafone SMS spam promoting their stuff.

In the Fall, I was able to use the phone in Italy after several scavenger hunts to find places that sold the obscure credit vouchers which it turns out you can NOT stockpile because they can only be applied while you are in Italy.

That proved to be only a glimmer of hope as I have returned to France to discover that they now sell vouchers here but my phone refuses to connect to Vodafone in any fashion. It connects to all the French networks but refuses to access Vodafone services leading me to a dreaded customer service call via my US-based mobile with that $1.50/minute ticking by. Fortunately, the Vodafone service rep was in such a hurry to get me off the phone it was hard to do too much damage!

“Right, OK, then, thanks for calling.”

Except he didn’t offer me a solution or even a hope of solution. He told me to keep turning my phone on and off to see if I could suddenly use the network! All this leads back to retail I am guessing as I’ll have to venture back into a Vodafone shop in the UK.

On a lighter note, I recently called up my US service from ATT which was originally ATT Wireless and then became Cingular Wireless only to be shunted back to ATT. The service rep answered:

“Hi, thanks for calling Cingular, uh, ATT.”

Priceless.

Tags: vodafone, ukvodafone, cingular, att

For those of you who know my Mom, she is rarely at a lack for words.

Well, she has managed to corral many thousands of them into an extraordinary book about life, love, business, and art. I have watched in awe as she has refined her story over the past several years, undaunted by the process and steadfastly determined.

Indefatigable.

Together with her friend and talented collaborator/editor (Lavanya), she has produced something truly memorable and moving. I encourage you to pick up a copy. It is a story about relationships and perseverance, and about a singular garden with exquisite photos in accompaniment.

Available at Amazon (your reviews are encouraged)

Some local recent newspaper coverage

and, here we have a bit of the surreal — my Dad on the Martha Stewart Show!

Martha Stewart Show (turn your volume way up!)