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.

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.

Normally, I blur out on Microsoft Updates, but this one is excellent. I only wish I could have been included on the meeting that devised the name for this update.

My Cingular 2125 has fried two SIM cards and I am waiting on a replacement that I ordered online.  I am stepping up to the Nokia N73 per Om‘s recommendation.

It has been a full week since I have had use of a mobile and I have to say, it really isn’t terrible.  Sometimes when coordinating you need to think a bit but it is generally quite nice not to have an information gateway on you at all times!

In our incredibly shrinking universe, I have found iChat Video to be an indispensible communication tool. I use it to work on 30 Boxes product design and engineering with Nick in Colorado and I use it to enable a more vibrant experience with friends and family.

For the most part it works flawlessly–fantastic audio as well as video that is quite good even when expanded to fill my 17 inch monitor.

There are can be hiccups. Often after your Mac sleeps or is idle for a while you need to exit and restart iChat to get a connection. Sometimes you need to “brute force” it and restart your router. I have even experienced an odd bug where iChat suddenly starts kicking you out of the service and after some hair pulling I discovered that changing the Preferences > Account > Server Settings > Port from 5190 to 5191 fixed it (odd I know!)

Be aware that because Apple goes for quality, iChat likes to fail (not connect) instead of delivering a subpar experience and this can be a drag. I have a friend living near Mulege, Mexico who is developing baja real estate and has a satellite dish but we have never been able to video conference until today.

Enter Skype Video. Since being acquired by eBay, Skype has been quietly improving and to my surprise we got quite a decent video chat going. There was some latency from the satellite but that was to be expected. It was exciting though, maybe akin to what NASA felt like in the lunar landing days, having the video appear after nothing but static.

Tags: ichat, ichatav, skype, skypevideo, ebay, mulege, bajarealesate, mace, macepicken

Before you mistake this for a fit of self-promotion, I’ll preface by saying that I began reading Wired Magazine shortly after its inception way back in 1992. During the last 13 years, I have submitted query letters, letters to the editor, jargon, comments, and yes, a job application! Never heard a thing from them.

Imagine my surprise when I got an email out of the blue from someone at Wired asking if they could excerpt a blog post. My first thought was: cruel hoax. But it is true, my little trifle about Twitter which Om Malik was kind enough to include on gigaom has actually made it to print.

If I had any doubts about the impact of blogging, they are a faint memory.

Of course, as fate would have it, my wife was quoted in Time Magazine last week, go figure.

Tags: wired, wiredmag, twitter, evanwilliams, gigaom, narendra

Recently, I have found myself wanting to share reviews of different things like movies, books, restaurants here on No Soap but I realized that I need a consistent ratings system and one that would apply accross categories. Obviously there are lots of ways that people have devised scales but under my jurisdiction here his how I do it!

4 STARS – a classic that requires multiple viewings (etc.) to merit such a rating.

3 STARS – good to great. Something very enjoyable that stays with you and you would happily repeat. It may have some minor flaws.

2 STARS – entertainment, or a way to pass the time. It could be outstandingly bad but have some odd redeeming quality. You wouldn’t necessarily repeat the experience.

1 STAR – not worth your time.

That’s it. I felt that any more granularity (e.g. out of 10) would be hard for me to keep straight. There is one other RULE. If you have any doubt about which category something belongs, you must choose the lower one.

Smell Me Thin

per InStyle Mag

Certain smells can alter a person’s perception of your body size. “When a spicy floral fragrance was worn by a woman in a trial I conducted, men perceived the woman to weight 12 pounds less than her actual weight.” Dr. Alan Hirsch (Director of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation smellandtaste.org

Tags: amusing, instyle

I stumbled across this gem that I shared before I started posting online. It is an actual excerpt from a lease that we had:

Two Fold Photos acknowledges and understands that the term “Prime Lease� referred to in the Master Sublease is the “Master Lease� as defined in this Sub-Sublease, and that, for the purposes of this Sub-Sublease, the term “Prime Lease� as defined in this Sub-Sublease includes the Master Sublease, Master Lease, and any exhibit thereto, except as excluded under paragraph 4 of this Sub-Sublease.

I can’t help but smile every time I read it.

Per year. In this month’s Fortune Magazine which features “The 50 Most Powerful Women in Business”, Prudential is running an ad that is a marvel of insensitivity, the least of which is feeding one’s fears of losing a loved one!


How do you insult women and men in 3 sentences?

The copy for this ad reads:

What would you do? How would you manage? Caring for a child or elderly parent, cleaning the house, driving the kids to soccer practice, cooking meals.

A recent study concluded that the value of the things she does can be as much as $43, 461 per year, not including overtime…

Great job marketing team, hope that ad pulls huge in your target demo.