Cars Shouldn’t Smoke. I’m Sure of That.

Last Thursday, as I come to the end of the exit ramp off Hwy 100, the Neon started smoking.

Knowing this is generally a bad sign, I called up Stinson Auto and they sent over a tow truck. The tow truck driver took one whiff of the car and frantically disconnected the battery.

“I don’t want it bursting into flame on me.”

Guess I should grab my laptop from the passenger seat then.

Early Friday morning, Matt from Stinson Auto calls – says the driver’s side front brake line collapsed. End result – brakes could be applied, just not released. The smoke was the wheel fighting with the brake when I hit the accelerator.

On the plus side – the Neon and it’s lack of hauling capacity was out of the way during the move.

American Children Helping Uganda’s Invisible Children

Jen found out about the horrid plight of Uganda’s night walking children via Daily Candy featuring The Name Campaign.

Hell yea we supported the effort – and got the dog tags to prove it. Mine reads:

Yakobo Atidi
Age 12

To raise more aid money and expose this global atrocity to more Americans, our own children will become night walkers this Saturday, April 29th.

Tim Stay’s 12 year-old son gets it. That’s important.

Might be the most effective use of MySpace I’ve seen.

First Crack 78. The Trouble with Business Models

As I promised, here’s the second half of my conversation with J Wynia on geeky stuff. (The first half is at GlassTooBig.com)

Here, we talk about making money, keeping overhead low, income diversification, and making sure an idea needs a business model.

Listen to the Trouble with Business Models [39 min]

Duh. Advertisers are the Customers, not Viewers.

Listening to Tod Maffin’s latest Todbits (made my Podcast Picks as well) and pondering his bit about American Idol running 3 minutes after the hour to thwart PVR-watchers and encourage live-TV-watchers.

Honestly, I feel a little silly. All this time I was wondering why it felt like broadcast media outlets despised their customers. Switching up schedules, starting programs late, splicing them into a million pieces between commercial breaks. Follow the money. It stops long before it gets to the viewer or listener or reader.

I still don’t get why newspapers, radio, and television aren’t 100% ads. The honesty would be easier on everyone.

Wanted: Recommendations on 32″ LCD HDTV

We’re moving into a new house this weekend and we’re pondering an upgrade to a wall-mountable, LCD, HDTV, 16:9, something reasonable like 32″, and somewhere south of $1500.

If possible, I’d like something with an HD-tuner already built-in.

Any thoughts?

Here’s what I’ve found thus far that looks promising:

Jen and I stopped by the Roseville Circuit City to take a look at some of these. Justin (Senior Sales Something) walked us through HDTV technology, wall-mounting techniques, over-the-air antennas, even how to connect our Tivo. Rock on.

Even showed us this Magnavox 32″ HDTV that we quite liked. Though it’s his least favorite.

UPDATE 02 May 2006:
We picked up the Magnavox last night. We’ve very happy with it. Though, I’m far less happy with Tivo right now for two reasons:

  1. Tivo freaked out because it couldn’t call home and I’m pretty sure we lost everything in our queue. Though, we won’t find out until we get DSL installed later in the week.
  2. Tivo doesn’t see the .# channels (i.e. 11.1, 17.5) that our HDTV can receive. Meaning, we’re stuck with the standard definition resolution for Tivo recordings. So, Tivo went from very useful to nearly useless in 48 hrs.

UPDATE 12 May 2006:
The Digital Tuner on the Magnavox died after just a couple days. We brought it back to Circuit City and swapped it out for another one. Fantastic experience. When I mentioned the problem to the sales guy, he replied, “That’s not uncommon.”

Podcasting is Still Underestimated.

Jim Cuene asks:

[Is podcasting the] Next shiny new object or real game changer?

It all depends on the game in question – and how long the game is (the future takes a while).

For existing ad-supported broadcast radio – yes. The game is over.

Case in point – this weekend we drove 6 hrs listening to podcasts through the car stereo. Some Croncast, some BBC Naked Scientist, some Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, some On The Media.

A year ago, we may have been lucky to listen to 2 of those programs during that drive. Today, these are the most “main stream programming” in my podcast backlog.

For the geographically-specific radio broadcaster to survive – they need to offer something the portable mp3 players can’t: Hyper-local and hyper-timely programming.

In addition, I don’t envy the marketing and customer acquisition teams for HD Radio, XM or Sirius satellite radio. Their job will only get more difficult as podcasting gets easier.

If the game is internet publishing – eh. Podcasting rounds out the capabilities. It’s now as easy to deliver audio, video, documents, and other files, as easy as it is to deliver text to a passionate, niche group of individual customers.