Category: General

I left a meeting this afternoon and as I walked through unfamiliar parking garage nothing looked familiar. The number 722 directing the way. After the first lap and not seeing 700s, I realized I didn’t understand how the different levels were laid out. I got back in the elevator and picked a different level. Found spot 722 right away.

Empty. No car.

Huh.

Guess it wasn’t 722. Keep walking, it must be close.

I walked between 3 different levels for 20 minutes, and ran into someone else with the same, ‘where did I park’ look on their face.

Sounded like we parked in the same section – some elusive section now disconnected from our current position. After a couple more increasingly frustrated laps, I worked my way towards the exit.

Found the car half a section from the exit.

Wow, it wasn’t this hard getting into the building.

I pull the sole $5 bill out of my wallet and head to the cashier.

$4/hour and $1 for each 30 minutes after.

“$6 please”, they request.

Nice. Real nice.

Reminder to Self: When I park at the airport, I take a picture of the parking spot and any distinct landmarks with my camera phone. Do the same for shorter parks as well.

“So, not surprisingly, [China] seeks to resurrect old oil-field deals it had with Saddam in Iraq.

Did I not say this would happen? Our blood, their oil. When I was in Beijing in 2004, I told everyone I met with that China should have 50k peacekeepers in Iraq, because in the end, it would mostly be their oil.” – Thomas P.M. Barnett

Where was I last week? I don’t know either.

Doesn’t matter, I’m back. Let’s rock.

Over at MNteractive.com, we’ve been talking about how to close your MySpace account. Leaving sites like MySpace and Friendster should be straight forward – simply delete me. Disconnecting me from all my ‘friends’. No biggy. Not letting me do that is both a privacy issue and a Google juice problem.

Sites like YouTube and Flicker are slightly different – I put stuff I find valuable there, but I’ve got a local copy of all that. No biggy.

The biggy is with sites like Amazon, eBay, BaseCamp, Stikipad, browser-only email, and other collaborative sites where the assets only exist on the service’s servers. What happens to my assets when I want to leave?

I see that there was export functionality, but ‘this feature is currently unavailable’ – Darren Barefoot

Ouch.

In addition to regularly backing up the important information on your local machines – the same goes for all the web-only services, what do we call this…a ‘back-down’?

More:

“…I’m not spending lots of my time building anything in a system where it is locked up, I can’t take it out, and am at their mercy on rate hikes and such.” – Dave Slusher

Steve is wondering how to break through the din of our post-scarcity world.

I see the lowering of the barriers to publishing very much an opportunity. An opportunity to move faster, publish faster, and continue to lower the barriers for getting interesting applications out to the world. Evan says this is Obvious.

The photo Steve used reminded me that Babe Ruth struck out nearly twice as many times as he hit a home run.

Thing is, getting a hit (being Dugg, Slashdotted, etc) actually hurts. It can take down your server and give you crazy bandwidth bills. The long tail doesn’t accommodate spikes very well.

I’m good with consistently getting on base. Keeps the game moving.

UPDATE 3 Nov 2006:

“The mistake bloggers often make (actually, all marketers make sooner or later) is the believe that being popular is its own reward.” – Seth Godin

After being in Thailand for only a few days I was shocked to read that I had 15 new messages. “Are you okay?” was the common headline. I was eating yogurt with bananas and felt quite fine. I was puzzled by the sudden dramatic concern for my well being. – Brenda

File under Things You Already Knew:

“The costs of longer commutes are so high that they can outweigh the cheaper mortgage payments [of suburban living].” – Washington Post

(Thanks to GroovyGreen.com for the pointer)

The office I’m spending the day in has motion detectors on the lights. I sat too perfectly still for too long and the room went black.

Hey. I’m still in here.

Monday night, I stopped by the Target cold and flu aisle on the way home from the Emerging Digerati presentation.

I’m thankful that cold remedy makers put they symptoms on the box front; body ache, sore throat, fever, headache.

Tuesday, all the symptoms were turned up to 11. The few conversations I had, were hastily rescheduled between my few awake moments.

If I missed you, I’m sorry. It’s better I wasn’t there.

Things are improving. I just might be back to normal tomorrow.

“slow marketing is a focus on human, one-on-one connections” – Evelyn Rodriguez

The great thing about technologies like RSS, is their low-committment persistence, their bias for – as Evelyn calls it – ‘slow marketing’.

For example, take real estate. It’s a big purchase occurring infrequently. Most of the time, I’m not looking for or buying a house. Having an RSS feed in my subscriptions continually reminds me of the voices and people I trust – continually in a very non-distractive manner.

The longer term horizon on this is refreshing.